The lab welcomes Abby Stone with cool blue light and a wash of sterilized air. Glass walls frame rows of sealed workstations, holographic readouts, and a central analysis table already powered up.
Arthur Blues hustles in beside her, clutching the recovered signal tag data on a slim drive. Victoria stands at the table, green accents pulsing across her synthetic frame as she slots the device into a decrypt cradle.
Victoria
I’m in. The outer shell is noisy, but the deeper layers are still carrying a live relay path.
A lattice of mirrored addresses blooms above the table, then folds and reorders itself in sharp geometric bursts. One node keeps returning, hidden behind rotating decoys and a chain of disposable proxies.
Arthur Blues
That is not standard contractor infrastructure. Someone built this to vanish on purpose.
Abby Stone
The relay is deeper than the Expo attack. Someone inside the network is protecting it.
Victoria narrows the projection with a flick of her hand, isolating a single corridor of data. The route points away from the Expo and into a private industrial campus on the city’s edge, locked behind elite credentials and a rotating biometric gate.
Victoria
We have a destination. If Abby wants the source, this is where the trail goes next.
✓ Quest Accepted
Uncover the hidden backdoor in the relay
+ New Item Acquired
signal tag data
“I ask Victoria to bypass the biometric gate using the decrypted data.”
SUCCESS (Superb Hacking, rolled +0)
Abby Stone
Victoria, use the decrypted path and get past the biometric gate.
Victoria
That signature is the key. I can spoof the gate off this relay thread.
Victoria’s fingers move in a precise blur over the analysis table. The relay lattice folds inward, then snaps open into a cleaner access spine, with the coordinator’s authorization tag buried inside its handshake.
Arthur Blues
That is a hidden backdoor. Not just access, a second layer of control.
The industrial campus resolves into a secure floor plan, then a deeper vault route underneath it. What looks like sabotage was only a dry run, a test against a larger corporate theft already in motion.
Victoria
Gate bypass is live. Abby can read the full path now, and the theft target is already mapped.
The hologram brightens, waiting on a choice of where to strike first.
Quest Complete
Uncover the hidden backdoor in the relay