3

It surprises you how much Lucinda knows about computers, but she's always used them in her work. The artist introduces you to the early '90s demoscene and how they did what they did, and from there—aware of why you need to hone these skills—expands her lessons to cover all the old parts of computer networks that someone should have secured years ago, except no one ever did. You're no computer expert, and those illicit skills you've read about are mostly for modern tech: spoofed WiFi, that sort of thing. Lucinda offers backdoors that have, in some cases, been around since mainframe times, and that you can still use. Only once you understand the old-school tricks does she expand into the latest operations.

Your reward for passing her final test (which involves a desktop PC from 1991, a modern laptop, an Android phone, and a WiFi-enabled printer) is a nylon bag full of techno-goodies. Now you have extra SIM cards, a Baofeng walkie-talkie, a garage door opener, a shiny new GPU for your laptop (for rapid password cracking), a LAN tap, a keygrabber, a wireless adaptor, and a USB loaded with the worst digital poison Lucinda knows how to find. You already have plans to adapt that USB.

As you clean up, you see Lucinda reading Metamorphosis and Rule, by Harmonie Palys.

"The great shock of mechanical computation as such during the 1940s, a shock hinted at by von Neumann and Turing, but never fully articulated except in suppressed manuscripts, was that ideas previously considered only that—such as 'subtraction' or 'ten'—suddenly gained physical reality in space and matter as a result of constructing analytical engines. It was suddenly imperative to decide in what way numbers were 'real,' because they had abruptly become real in a new way, and had begun to infiltrate and propagate within the chaos of matter-in-motion we ordinarily call reality. Certain delineations of definition had to be established with great haste, lest math (whatever it is, whatever it wants) overwrite our physical reality, spreading from the first computers to devour everything."

Your head buzzes.

"You shouldn't read this," Lucinda says.

Free Days: 0

Dexterity: ●●○○○

Intelligence: ●○○○○

Composure: ●○○○○

Athletics: ●○○

Persuasion: ●○○

Academics: ●●○

Computer: ●○○

Mechanics: ●○○

Dexterity: 6 days

Intelligence: 4 days

Composure: 4 days

Athletics: 2 days

Persuasion: 2 days

Academics: 3 days

Computer: 2 days

Mechanics: 1 day

I leave Lucinda's studio.

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