"And these augments won't be traceable, right?"
Jess fidgeted with one of her keychains as she stood near the operating chair, looking at Val and the desk covered in random electronics next to her.
"Yep. You know as well as I do the journey it's been to get our hands on these things."
"Yeah, just... nervous. Understandably, I think. Set up regular orders of generic parts a few months in advance, always paid for with washed crypto and transported through a network of people who don't know what they're transporting," Jess held up a finger for each step, talking herself through it. "All completely normal, if a bit overly covert for normal parts. Then set up a deal for these modules, using the same people, same method of transport. Nothing looks out of the ordinary unless someone was checking the contents of every shipment, which nobody did - they all got here unopened and in the same condition the seller shipped them."
Val nodded and tapped her cigarette into an ash tray. "Seller doesn't know who they sold to, transporters don't know what they were transporting, took the liberty of removing the serial numbers myself. No payment that's traceable to us, obviously."
"Completely reset them, never let them get anywhere close to connecting to internet. Set them up to give fake data to anyone accessing my system so they show up as a boring optical implant."
Val nodded along. She was pretty used to hearing Jess work through every step of a plan out loud. It was kind of comforting, in a way. Feels like nothing can go wrong when someone as focused on details as Jess is plans everything.
"They spoof their address as that same boring optical implant. Everything that could remotely be used to track them has been removed."
"And I'm installing some normal cyberwear upgrades for you as well, so this looks like a typical visit." Val finished.
They looked at each other and Jess allowed herself a smile. She chuckled a bit nervously.
"Okay. Let's do this, I guess."
Val smiled back at her. "Let's fuckin' do this."
Jess woke up groggily, blinking to clear her blurry vision. She had been through this enough times to know to give herself a moment before moving around - fresh optics usually took very slightly longer to adjust when you have more than the typical number of eyes.
"Feel alright?" Jess heard Val from the other side of the room.
Jess just groaned in response, taking another moment before stretching, sitting up on the chair, and looking around the room. "Yeah, just... Groggy, is all."
"Surprised you're not already taking down the whole internet or something!" Val grinned at her as she blinked more, still adjusting.
"Ha ha, very funny. I'll do it in a minute."
Val laughed and turned back to her desk. "Well, you know where everything is if you need anything. Take all the time you need."
"Thanks," Jess grunted and stood up off the chair, wobbling for a moment before regaining her balance. She walked over to the kitchen and filled up a glass of water. "Why does this always make me so dehydrated?? Do you get anyone else who has that happen?"
"Eh, everyone has different responses to it. Some people don't feel anything, but you're definitely not the only person I've seen who gets hungry or thirsty. Just be glad you're not one of the people that gets itchy, or super nauseous."
"Ouch," Jess muttered as she went and sat down. She drank for a moment and then laid her head back, staring at the ceiling a little wide-eyed. "Oh, my god. I knew what I was getting with these augments, but it's a whole different thing to actually have them in your system."
"It's that noticable?" Val turned to look curiously at Jess.
"No locks on anything whatsoever. No only accessing things some company or politician approves of." She paused for a moment, still staring at the ceiling, and the microwave started beeping. "Val, why does your fucking microwave connect to the internet."
Val looked wide eyed from Jess to the microwave. "You just- Holy shit, you really are gonna take down the whole internet or something. Figured it out that fuckin' fast?"
The microwave stopped beeping and Jess raised her head to grin at Val. "Duh," Jess looked around the room at all the electronics. "But first I'm going to go home and triple-check the security and encryption on everything." Jess stood up, heading towards the door.
Val chuckled, grinning back. "Yeah, probably good." She turned back to her desk. "As always, if you get arrested, I don't know you."
"Same as always, they wish they could catch me."
Jess couldn't resist scanning everything as she walked home. The new cyberwear meant she could see every single internet-connected device around her, something manufacturers would usually prevent for obvious security reasons. The second part, though, was the real treat - and the real reason she'd probably never be heard from again if anyone figured out what she had.
Most devices that are worth anything are pretty secure. There's plenty you can do with just a little bit of network skills, but it's never anything too far out. Devices that are actually important are almost always manufactured with hardware-based encryption, and thus will only listen to network packets from devices that are from the same manufacturer, since they have the same encryption. And of course, manufacturers make it very hard to use their hardware to do much of anything that it wasn't designed to do, so the scope of what you could manage was pretty small.
This is mostly a way to keep the average person or script kiddy from doing anything that might actually cause damage - tampering with the hardware of cyberwear is already something not many people know how to do, and messing with the hardware encryption is a whole extra beast on top of that. Most people who could are dissuaded by the fact that trying to sell them, or custom augments with them included, is much easier said than done, and if you mess it up then you end up charged with a felony.
But, if you know the right people, and get all the details right...
Jess's new toy was not only completely unrestricted in what you do with it, but had the hardware encryption of pretty much all major manufacturers built into it. With something like this, she could do pretty much anything she wanted, and interact with any other device she wanted.
Which was also a great way to get arrested, of course. So her and Val had made some modifications of their own, removing any serial numbers and making it spoof any information about itself to anything it connected to. She would try to use it as a tool for information gathering more than anything else, so nothing looked out of the ordinary if someone was monitoring the network.
And so, she didn't let herself use it for anything but scanning as she made her way home. However small it may be, it was too much of a risk for her to use it before verifying all her cyberwear was completely safe and as untraceable as she could get it, and even then, sending loads of atypical hardware-encrypted messages would just get her caught immediately.
There was one other augment she had installed that would make things easier - an identity spoofer. Typically, cyberwear was pretty tied to you as a person, and it was easy to get the name of someone connecting to networks or sending information. So, anyone who cared remotely about privacy had a way to fake their identity via cyberwear.
That's all well and good, but Jess's face and loads of data about her was almost certainly stored in multiple different servers around the world.
Well, if she was careful about keeping identities separate, and managed not to be seen on cameras, that wouldn't be an issue. She had even been working on a mask that would use facial obfuscation (as well as just cover her face, being a mask and all) to hopefully prevent her face from being anywhere near intelligible if she did show up on a camera feed.
She had been thinking about this for a while, at this point. All of these thoughts were ones she had been thinking about for multiple years, all of these plans used to be daydreams. It felt weird how within reach they were. Exciting, but weird.
She made her way home and breathed a sigh of relief as she closed the door - even though she was confident in her plans, it was tough to shake the anxiety of it all.
Any anxiety was quickly forgotten as she sat at her computer, though. It wasn't hard for her to get lost in software and networks, and now, every single network was available to her.