Scene #3159: How u mine for data?

Owner	Pose
Rory White	Ever since its complete redesign by George and the other Core Flotilla members, the Cognizant Odyssey is no longer a standard transport from a society that obeys REAL SPACE PHYSICS. No more central cylinder with four rotating boom arms with Mars-level gravity simulation. Instead it is one single cruiser, far more robust and sleek. Numerous decks are arranged vertically with Artificial Gravity in mind... and it's there that people beaming aboard will show up, in the main laboratory behind the bridge. But nobody's aboard the bridge. Nobody's walking around. Rory White is not walking around, but several holoprojectors are heavily active. One shows a map of the entire Earth below, criss-crossed with glowing multi-colored lines and points that seems to be updating and changing constantly... perhaps searching for something. The lines are shipping lanes across the oceans?! Then points are presumably anomalies... Other monitors are busy with countless other tasks. Downloading data, analyzing something or another. Who knows just how many AIs are at work here, doing god knows what. One one side of the deck is the body bank. Several bodies - some nude but featureless until someone decides their gender pre-sleeving in - are in hibernation within cylinders. Several robot bodies are also clamped to the wall. Rory's own body is among them, currently lifeless... probably an eerie sight. Like nothing more than a doll. On the other side of the deck there's desks covered in tools and projects, including an extremely intricate robot leg that's not attached to anything. Several dog-sized drones wheel around the floor with appendages aflutter. Sweeping, dusting, inspecting.
Zwei	Starships in general are still something relatively new to Zwei. Not so much the concept, but the kind that actual people inhabit and walk around in, rather than gigantic, semi-autonous weapons platforms without so much as internal atmosphere. For that reason, the Cognizant Odyssey is not especially stranger by Zwei's standards than many others. Not even the body bank is especially unusual, aside from the fact that it appears to be growing biological samples rather than machining proper -droids. Having spent a millenia as a glorified doll itself, Zwei is in no place to judge. Obviously, since Asche won't actually fit on these decks, and is needed in Shiva anyways, Weiss is the one who makes the rounds, growing increasingly common with Flotilla operations. She takes her time trundling around the decks, leaning this way and that to peer at the individual projects going on, nosily poking through Rory's business like a gossipy houseguest, before she actually arrives at where Kotone appears to have the mystery girl jacked in. "So this is her?" she finally asks noncommitally.
Rory White	Where is Rory in all of this? <<Nobody does.>> Everywhere. A state that's at least maybe a bit more familiar to Zwei's concept of what a starship should be, oddly enough. Currently, Rory White is in INFOMORPH state, the entire ship essentially hers to command through thought. It's far better to get work like this done without the DISTRACTION of having to worry about walking around and moving fingers and not tripping over something or giving a bad impression! Hopefully. With the full processing power of the Cognizant Odyssey's computers available to her, Rory's set a hundred processes to work trying to crack the codes. It's work more suited for an AI than an AGI, and she has plenty of those to assign. So her job is less about code cracking and more about analyzing what gets cracked. "These data structures and the operating system scheme is definitely based on Planetary Consortium technology. My guess is someone is giving them bits and pieces of technology like... bait. whoever's behind this would crumble if they knew much of it was already available free. But decrypting some of the data's going to take time. I might have to send it back to Mitre." Hopefully they won't need to involve others in this though... right? As for where her voice is coming from? The speakers. And it's the same as her usual voice. No doubt synthesized carefully. "Welcome aboard, Zwei! I see you've been looking around." Most of Rory's projects are tinkering with drones and bits of machines and computers salvaged from all around the Multiverse. There are also numerous monitors showing the reports of data being pulled in from communications satellites in orbit around unusual stars and planets. She definitely has some interest in astronomy!
Zwei	"I have!" Weiss replies shamelessly. "It's my first time aboard! Of course I'd want to take a peek!" Her attitude becomes more serious as she more closely approaches Kotone and her charge, bending over at the waist to inspect the girl's info jacks as if visual confirmation would yield any kind of useful information. "Looks like it." is her oh-so-helpful answer. "Off planet interference huh? That always makes it more complicated. Much more complicated. There are only so many people to narrow don to on a single planet after all, especially such a well researched place, period and species." She doesn't seem terribly perturbed however. "Code restraints? Or literally?" It's a valid question! "Even if they knew, I'm sure our phantom player could probably find something else to dole out. They probably chose this format because it cost nothing to get their hands on. Something non-proprietary also makes good chaff for investigation, since almost anyone could have access to it. What a pain." She glances up at the screen as if she actually needs to look at it to read it. Those little mannerisms are what make people comfortable, and allow Zwei to maintain an image of a human-relatable intelligence after all. "You want me to take a swing at it? I'm not optimistic enough to assume it's still a paradigm based on factoring keys, since I've seen the beginnings of quantum technology from that particular world, but I guess at the very least it should be a lot faster than having poor Rory doing all the gruntwork."
Rory White	"Even if they gave it, it's only part of a ploy to expand their powerbase. The Planetary Consortium is not generous unless it's in their best interests to be so. Though it is possible this might be a rare incident otherwise, perhaps someone acting individually..." "Any extra help with the grunt work would be great, Zwei! I'd need something like a Quantum Computer to do this quickly. Brute force really is the only way to deal with a properly done encryption key... but what we do have a lot of are shipping records. I don't understand some of the tags and phrases they're using." Rory provides local network transfers of the files in no time at all to both, showing what she's looking at!
Zwei	"That's pretty sketchy." Weiss admits, though not much reflects on her face. It's kind of remarkable how easy it is to get used to that clearly artificial appearance as long as the expression is believable, highlighted only when it isn't. "I think it's actually quite likely that it's an individual, or at least a splinter group. I can't see an actual, organized effort by a majority of the Consortium being involved in this, or at least I'd be very surprised if there was." She accesses and downloads the code copy almost instantaneously, but unfortunately she can't really work it in a virtual sandbox, seeing as it involves someone's actual brain. "Mmmm, this shouldn't be too difficult at first glance. Keep in mind that I'll be limited by the cyclical input speed of this hardware, but it should probably be sufficient. Rory, mind clearing a little space?"
Rory White	"'Clear a little space?'" The notion confuses Rory when it's brought up. The Cognizant Odyssey's computers are far heavier-duty than any standard transport would be! She cannot grok just what in the world Zwei is asking about! "Do you need a Cyberbrain?"
Zwei	"Well I'm not about to just start using your virtual memory without permission!" Weiss says exasperatedly. Not that it's ever stopped her from doing the equivalent before. "Designate a partition you'd like me to keep everything to, since I can't promise I won't fry anything."
Rory White	"--OH! Right. Certainly!" In about ten seconds, a sizable amount of sandboxed processing power and memory's allocated.
Zwei	"Thanks~" Weiss chirps as she settles into the nearest chair she can find, or failing that, fabricates one straight from her matter manipulator core, having integrated it straight into her transience drive. She pops her nonexistent knuckles entirely for effect, before outstretching her arms and laying her hands on the console, affecting an expression of focus as the tsunami that is Zwei's virtual presence immediately submerges the entire partition. Rory's computational assets, both hardware and software, are pretty top class, which is a pleasant surprise. It won't be as fast as interfacing with quantum architecture like Weiss is more natively designed for, but it should do nicely. The main form of security before the quantum computing paradigm is in the form of mathematical formula that are specifically incredibly difficult for computers to crunch, requiring them to be factored over and over again in such a fashion that would take binary transistor architecture forever. These keys rapidly become obsolete as any society switches over to multiple state bits, and so are sort of a freebie for Zwei most of the time. "Hmmm, this is kinda weird. I don't think they're just squirreling info in a cyberbrain as a human hard disk."
Rory White	"My current theory is full of assumptions, but none without enough evidence to suspect highly unethical activities. When you say Cyberbrain, do you mean the augmentations available to Kotone's society, or the ones used in Synth morphs? Because the former is a cybernetic interface while the latter is a completely synthetic device that provides a virutalized neural network substrat for a brainmap to run in!" Rory's crunching her own set of data, but those are the problems yes. math is goign to take a long time and she's only succeeding at pullign apart stuff that was encrypted badly or using algorithms with known exploits. Which frankly speaking is ridiculous. Encryption is the one thing that almost nobody can hack, no matter how good at security they are. "I did merge some extra patches into the kernel updates a worker in the base was doing and signed them. I don't believe it was noticed. It won't activate for a while longer but should hopefully provide a backdoor. Maybe."
Rory White	"no doubt this is about AI research. Their project name is Golem." Rory announces to Kotone. "Not very inspiring. Aren't golems... basically meant for very menial tasks? This is not what you would you use human neural research to accomplish!" As usual, Rory is unhappy with this state of affairs. "I'm trying to backtrack the shipping history... chances are it came from their secret facilities."
Rory White	"all of the shipping's done out in the open ocean. Where, if I understand it, only international law applies and almost nobody can investigate it anyways. But these points are worth investigation!" And at the same time as she's saying that, tiny ionic thrusters on satellites in orbit above GITS Earth fire, slightly altering their orientations to focus passive sensor scanning on these areas over others... but they remain passive only, to avoid sending up any alarms down on the planet below. and at this range, that basically means insane telescope action. "... all of which seem empty, so it was likely a rendezvous point or the destinations are UNDERWATER..." Instead of wasting time with that, she starts correlating data between the rendezvous points to try and narrow down a range where operations might stem from.