A week after the deal with Facebook.
In Bluffdale, Utah.
The NSA's Data Center is located here, which was also one of the agency's newest and largest data centres.
In the Meeting room.
"So, what is the meeting about? It better be important, because I was preparing for another meeting with Mr. President to explain in more detail about what sort of harm that traitor Snowden did. This better be important, or else I'm sending you to the Office of the Inspector General," said the head of the Special Source Operations Directorate Teresa H. Shea in frustration.
She was still stressed regarding the betrayal of the former government contractor, Edward Snowden.
She had to visit the White House for like three times in this week just to explain the FUCKING SAME THING, AGAIN AND AGAIN, for fucksake.
"Ma'am, there seems to be a great decrease in the amount of data that is being received from the social media site," replied the presenter hastily, not to make her angrier.
"What? Explain in detail, what is the problem this time?" Teresa asked, she had almost given up and wanted to resign, just as she was dealing with their biggest threat so far, she had already got another one coming.
"The data we were collecting from Facebook servers has decreased by about 95%," the employee started to explain in haste.
"This started occurring around 3 days ago. When we investigated, we found out that Facebook overhauled their entire app security and the data we managed to intercept is still heavily encrypted"
"So, you are saying that one of our largest sources of collecting intelligence has changed their security system to the one which we can't crack?" asked Teresa, disbelief was written on her face.
"Yes Ma'am, usually we would know of it beforehand if they would be updating their security system and we still get time to prepare for it, but this time, they did it suddenly, as if they somehow knew all of their vulnerabilities and the solutions to them at once," the employee explained.
"So, what is your response plan?" asked Teresa after pondering the situation for a moment.
"Ma'am, I suggest we should investigate the reasons behind it and how they were able to upgrade their security in such a less amount of time, so that we can manage to circumvent it and be prepared for it when other companies that we collect data from do the same," replied the head of the Intelligence Collection Department.
"Okay, we will go ahead with your plan and also find out who found those breaches and arrange a meeting with him. But prioritize the cracking of the firewall ahead of the other things, understood?" Teresa instructed, after providing them with a direction of actions to follow.
The meeting was dismissed but they didn't fully understand the gravity of this current situation, assuming that it was a passing phenomenon. Also, because they were still in deep trouble from the court of public opinion after Snowden blew the whistle along with his subsequent asylum in Russia and even getting it.
Putin's acceptance of Snowden's asylum request was seen as a giant middle finger for Obama's administration.
...
Meanwhile, Aron continued his speed run of earning points until he completed his 17th app and finally managed to reach the required amount of points.
[ 170,600 SP ]
With that done, he forwarded the app's issue data to Felix, who jokingly replied by complaining that Aron continued to increase his job.
Currently, Aron had become their firm's biggest customer, because they were the ones negotiating the compensations with the companies on his behalf.
Right now, they were negotiating as his proxy with Google, Apple and a few other companies which he had completed finding vulnerabilities from.
They were at the last step of their negotiation with the first companies he had informed them of, but after he kept sending them more and more work, they decided to create a team that would be dedicated to only dealing with his work.
The team would continue focusing on handling Aron's job until they had completed all of the work that Aron had sent to them, which now consisted of the vulnerability data from a total of 21 different apps.
Since he already had a solution to these problems, this meant that they aimed to be negotiating for double the amount if the companies wanted to obtain the solution to the vulnerabilities, in order to be able to solve the multitudes of problems right away, without wasting too much time on solving the vast number of issues by themselves.
With the required points earned, Aron immediately entered the shop and pressed the buy button for the programming language Prometheus++ .
However, the moment he pressed on the buy, a notification he didn't expect appeared in front of him.
DING!!!
SINCE THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION TO BE UPLOADED IN YOUR BRAIN IS TOO MUCH, IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT THE USER BE IN A LYING POSITION, AS THE PROBABILITY OF YOU FAINTING IS 100%.
COMMENCE WITH THE UPLOAD?
YES | NO
After reading this notification from the system, Aron immediately headed to his room after informing his mother that he would be going to sleep and not wait for him for dinner as he will be skipping it.
.....
When he entered his room, he found Henry, his younger brother playing PS3.
"Oh, why aren't you in your workroom?" Henry asked in surprise since he didn't expect Aron to be out now.
"Don't you have yours in your room?" asked Aron instead of answering him while pointing at the console.
"Mom said I'm using it too much, so she took it," Henry said in a complaining tone but also showing fear since he was afraid his brother might also forbid him from using his console.
"Just make sure she doesn't catch you, also, use headphones. I need to sleep, okay?" Aron instructed, shaking his head for a moment.
"Yes brother, I LOVE YOU!" Henry hugged him with joy and jumped with happiness.
After their brief brotherly moment, Aron went to his bed, lay down and pressed the YES button on the notification.
The moment he pressed it, he immediately fainted and the system began downloading and assimilating the knowledge into his brain slowly so that it wouldn't cause him any harm.
Also, since the system had managed to make Aron fall into a short comatose state to prevent him from being harmed, it also decided to make use of this opportunity by recalibrating and upgrading all the parts of the systems that were in every part of his body and at the same time, complete the implementation that would finally grant Aron access to runes.
You can think of it as the system finishing the homework which it couldn't finish before, during the time when the system entered Aron's body, it didn't have enough information of about what it had entered into, so the system chose the option of only copying the function of the location they were located, as they were getting dispersed into every part of his body and if they chose to randomly do so, they would have done him an irrecoverable damage.
The main part of the system that was located in Aron's brain started sending a request for information to its other parts in his body. When each of those parts received the request, they immediately responded to it and started sending the recorded information of their respective locations, which they had started the collection from the day they were assimilated to their specific locations.
With that, the main system started receiving information it requested from every part of Aron's body. After it had completely received the information, it started processing and analyzing it to the last of its details. And after that was done, it started simulating what would be the effect of the changes it was planning to implement on Aron's body.
After the simulation, it analyzed the results and studied what harms and benefits it would cause to Aron's simulated body. Then, based on the results and reports, changed the plans to be implemented a little and repeated the simulation again and again.
The simulation process was repeated for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times until each simulation was used as a lesson to perfect and remove any negative effects that could cause harm to Aron's body if it was to be implemented.
After a few million quintillion simulations and making many minor changes to the plan, the system finally found the perfect way to implement the changes to Aron's body without causing any harm to him.
It then started to implement the changes by sending instructions as to what changes a part of the body had to change, by how much and in what ways. When those parts received the information, they immediately started following the instructions meticulously, with each of the changes underway without bringing any harm to Aron.
If anyone was capable of observing what was really going on in Aron's body, they would notice that structures that appeared similar to blood vessels were being formed, however, the strange thing about them was that they were golden in color and they were also empty 'devoid of anything in them'.
These golden vessels continued to be formed all over his body, yet at the same time, following a part that was parallel to all of the blood vessels, as it was using the blood vessels as a guiding map to reach and cover every inch of Aron's body.
As the changes reached to his heart, it started beating faster than usual while it was being covered by a shimmering golden light. The golden light gradually started getting dimmer as it served as ink for the writing of runic letters which were even smaller than atoms. These minuscule letters started forming runic sentences and started to cover the entirety of his heart.
(Though I don't take you guys as stupid people, but you have to imagine the number of runic lines that needed to be written in order to cover his whole heart while the runic letters were the size of an atom. So let's put it this way.)
[
An adult heart measures about 12 cm in length and 8 to 9 cm in width at the broadest part. Assuming that your heart is a sphere with a diameter of 9 cm, then its circumference would be about 28.27 cm.
Atoms are extremely small, typically around 100 picometers across. A picometer is one trillionth of a meter. That means one atom is about 0.0000000001 meters wide.
To calculate how many atoms could fit around a heart, we need to divide the circumference of the heart by the width of one atom. That would give:
28.27 / 0.0000000001 = 282700000000
This means you can write about 282 billion runic letters around a heart if they were the size of atoms.
] Sun Tzu
The system continued with the writing of the runic sentences all around Aron's heart until his whole heart started to glow golden. However, that lasted only for a short period of time, before it returned to its normal color.
After that, it stopped beating for about ten seconds, before the runic lines which covered all of his heart lit up and the heart started beating once again, however, this time it was not only pumping blood but along with it a golden liquid which started coursing through the newly constructed golden vessels.
The liquid continued to pour out of the heart and continued filling the golden vessels until they were full. Then the heart stopped generating this liquid, returning to its regular function of pumping blood. However, this time the golden liquid was also being pumped just like how normal blood was being pumped by the heart.
These 282 billion runic letters that were forming complex equations and runic sentences around Aron's heart were acting as the heart for this golden liquid. Doing everything from generating any lost golden liquid to regulating its amount and much more that Aron would only be able to discover in the future after he manages to buy this knowledge from the system and learns how to use them to its highest potential.
Currently, we don't even know the name of the golden liquid. We can only consider it as a fancy but useless golden liquid until the system decides to reveal its true nature.