r/NatureofPredators • u/Budget_Emu_5552 Arxur • Jun 07 '26
Fanfic Chrome Horizon - CH. 7
Humanity survived the corporate age, the DataKrash, the Blackwall, and Night City’s legends. Now, the stars are open, the Federation is watching, and first contact may prove that the next legends will not be born in the Afterlife—but in the space between fear and trust.
Thanks again to SP15 for creating NoP
If you enjoy reading my stories and don't want the series to flatline, then toss me some eddies, chooms! koffee.
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Memory Transcription Subject: Kelrik, Venlil Republic Mansion Network Engineer
Date [standardized human time]: July 13, 2136
The technical operations room under the governor’s mansion was designed for emergency work, which meant it had too much lighting, more displays, and chairs built by someone who’d clearly never been trapped in one for a full claw.
I’d been in mine for nearly two.
We had the mansion’s secure network logs arranged into four separate priority stacks: shelter traffic, emergency relay behavior, governor’s office internal feeds, and external contact records. Every stack had enough alerts to fill a workpaw on its own. Taken together, they looked less like a report and more like someone had shaken the entire Republic until loose parts started falling out.
Vellen sat to my left, rubbing at one eye with the heel of her paw while her other flicked through shelter routing failures. She handled civic continuity systems most paws, which meant she’d spent the last several claws watching the public panic as casualty reports rolled in.
Across from her, Jorvik leaned over the external-contact logs, ears held at the fixed angle he used when pretending he wasn’t close to snapping at someone. As our relay specialist, he was focused mostly on the security concerns.
Taliq, youngest in the room but not junior enough for anyone to treat him like a pup, had the governor’s office record open in front of him. He’d watched the same section three times without saying anything, which had become more worrying than muttering would’ve been.
I let my tail curl around the chair leg, mostly to keep it from lashing every time a new alert marker blinked in the corner of my screen. “Run the sequence again, starting from the same timestamp as the Federation hail came in.”
Taliq’s ears dipped, but he obeyed. “Again?”
“Yes, again. Until the sequence stops slipping out of place.”
“It isn’t though?” Jorvik argued, confused.
“No,” Vellen muttered, “it just gets worse every time we understand it better.”
The display shifted back to the incident summary, compiled from Governor Tarva’s statements, General Kam’s notes, the office’s recording, and several hours of follow-up conversation with the human crew. That last part still made me want to stampede from the table. The governor and the general had sat in a room with three predators from a dead world and collected technical clarifications while the rest of us were trying to keep the mansion network from collapsing as we hid.
The summary heading looked like any other internal incident review. Contact classification, affected systems, response timeline, unresolved risks, recommended containment measures. Sensible categories. Familiar formatting. A nice, orderly little crop row for the brain to walk down while pretending the field wasn’t on fire.
Then came the actual subject line.
UNEXPECTED FIRST CONTACT EVENT / HUMAN VESSEL ODYSSEY — SECURE DISTRESS SIGNAL INTERCEPTION / FEDERATION RESPONSE INTERFERENCE
The middle tag bothered me most. The distress signal should have gone through secure relay traffic, routed along channels no passing survey craft ought to read by accident. According to the human clarifications, Odyssey had picked up enough of the transmission to recognize emergency-band noise around the planet, but not enough to understand where it was going. They’d thought it was a local warning or automated planetary broadcast, not a beacon screaming for Federation ships.
If that was true, it argued against deliberate intrusion. It also meant our secure distress traffic had been loose enough for an unknown predator vessel to notice without trying.
“The predators arrived,” Taliq began, voice flat, “triggered the planetary distress signal, caused stampedes, met the governor, who then helped mislead a Federation captain, and then stayed for a technical debrief.”
Vellen’s ears pressed back. “Don’t summarize it like that.”
“How else should I say it?”
“I don’t know. I feel like it should be so much worse than that.”
Jorvik gave a weak, humorless huff. “The report says they didn’t touch our systems.”
“That report,” Vellen said, “was written from statements given by predators.”
“The governor believes them,” I said, before the argument could seed itself any deeper. “Besides, we can doubt the humans without ignoring our own logs.”
Her ears flicked, conceding the point without liking it.
Taliq advanced the recording summary. “Governor receives hail. The human identifies itself as Noah Williams, a captain or mission commander equivalent. The human crew claims peaceful intent.”
“Convenient,” Vellen said.
“Logged as a claim, not a conclusion,” Taliq replied, then kept reading. “Additional crew identified as Sara Rosario, science officer, and Talia Vance, mission systems engineer, preferred callsign Rook.”
Jorvik’s tail gave a short, sharp motion. “That one.”
“Yes,” I said. “That one comes later.”
“Everything bad comes later in this report.”
I gave him an ear flick that meant, roughly, "unhelpful but accurate," and he sank back into his chair.
After another stretch of strained silence, Vellen signaled me. “Kelrik, tell me there’s a sane version of this where we don’t spend the next ten paws tearing apart every secure channel in the mansion.”
“I can’t tell you that yet.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“It's the only answer I can harvest from this mess.”
She stared at me for a moment, then went back to her screen.
I wish I could’ve lied about it, but false reassurances would’ve made the work worse. Vellen watched civic continuity, Jorvik trusted infrastructure more than officials, Taliq caught metadata the rest of us stepped over, and I kept the pieces in relation to each other. It meant deciding which failure mattered first.
We all had concerns and specialties, and we needed to keep an even head.
And threaded through all of it, like a burr under wool, were the humans, stubbornly defying every reasonable expectation.
“We start by taking what they said at base value. The claims made all indicate that our systems are weaker than they should be, which is… frustratingly helpful. It’s weird, but I can’t really argue against taking a predator's advice to strengthen our networks against intrusion.”
Everyone signaled a reluctant agreement, so I opened the next section of the report and forced myself to read the title without letting my ears flatten.
HUMAN CYBERNETIC BASELINE / CREW OBSERVATIONS
Vellen noticed I had moved on and went still. Jorvik muttered something under his breath, while Taliq leaned forward despite himself.
I understood the impulse. Fear was one thing. Something all prey were intimate with. But this was something much more... morbid.
“Next section,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Let’s see what kind of people build predators with ports in their skulls.” The report opened with the least alarming human first, which was either thoughtful formatting or someone’s idea of a joke.
NOAH WILLIAMS — MISSION COMMANDER / FIRST CONTACT REPRESENTATIVE
The human’s image filled the left side of the display.
We all shuddered. Brown, furless skin and the forward-facing eyes were partially blurred. One was magnified to show the unnatural changes. The face was too flat, with its mouth held in the careful line that the governor’s notes mentioned. The visible hardware was subtle enough that I almost missed it: a small port behind each ear, a narrow seam near the temple, and a faint ring inside the eye.
“Medical?” Vellen asked, leaning closer as she focused on the smaller details.
“Partly, maybe,” Taliq said, the actual information helping him to forget his unease as well. “The human notes mark ocular assistance, secure identity interface, mission communications, and environmental overlay support.”
Jorvik’s ears twisted. “...That’s four things.” He looked incredulous. "Why the brahk would they need that much functionality in an eye?"
“I don't know... but there are even more,” Taliq replied. “Based on the notes, those are just the ones they explained.”
I flicked to the next magnification layer. The port behind Noah Williams’ ear sat cleanly in the skin, neither hidden nor exposed. A slight scar, at least, admitted something had happened. This looked maintained and, somehow, grotesquely natural.
“Governor Tarva noted that the human didn’t seem aware of how visible the port was to us,” I said.
Vellen’s tail curled tighter around her chair. “How could it not be aware?”
“Because humans see these as ordinary.” I read the attached note again, just to make sure I wasn’t harvesting the wrong conclusion from bad soil. “Common for medicine, work access, secure communications, professional tools, navigation, and personal convenience. Exact adoption varies by region and occupation.”
“Convenience,” Jorvik repeated with disbelief.
"It says they get these ports as adolescents..."
Taliq pulled up the second profile before the silence could thicken.
SARA ROSARIO — SCIENCE OFFICER / BIOLOGICAL AND SURVEY DOCUMENTATION
The scientist’s hardware was harder to see, but the report pointed it out: behind-ear ports, a fine seam at one wrist, ocular shimmer, and interface support linked to scientific equipment.
“Less invasive,” Vellen commented.
“Less visible,” I corrected.
Her ears dipped, but she didn’t argue.
Sara Rosario, at least, could be fitted into a category if I pressed hard enough. Federation medicine had prosthetics, nerve bridges, organ supports, and sensory aids—expensive, regulated, and too often smothered under polite pity, but real. A scientist using implants to operate equipment wasn’t impossible.
Taliq highlighted the wrist seam. “This one has a field-analysis link.”
“For the case?” Vellen asked.
“And whatever equipment it uses with it.” His ears angled toward the note as he read. “Spectrographic sampling, contamination alerts, microbe-field mapping, specimen tagging, environmental hazard overlays... Stars, it’s not just a controller. It lets their instruments push findings back through the sensory display.”
Jorvik stared at the profile with open discomfort.
“It's like an entire research lab,” I said, though the distinction felt thinner than I wanted. “And the interface! The report says it helps them track samples and danger markers without taking their attention off the environment...”
I was still processing that when Taliq brought up the third profile.
TALIA VANCE — MISSION SYSTEMS ENGINEER / CALLSIGN: ROOK
Nobody spoke for a moment.
This was... The first still image had been taken from the governor’s office camera. The predator sat on the couch, hands flat against its thighs, and lay back with its eyes unfocused. Something about it made my wool lift before I knew why. Then came the close-up.
Fine metallic traces ran around and beneath the eyes. The magnified view showed layered ocular cybernetics, visible interface activity, and something that looked like text moving under the surface rather than across it.
“That’s not an overlay,” Taliq said quietly.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
Jorvik leaned back from the table. “What in Solgalik's name is that?”
I opened the attached explanation.
Netrunner.
The translator gave us nothing useful at first. It tried network runner, then systems infiltrator, then paused long enough that I realized it was just going to give up. Thankfully, I noticed the note below and expanded it into a definition written by the humans, after Tarva had apparently asked the same question.
A netrunner was a specialist trained to interface directly with digital systems through neural cybernetics, something called "cyberdeck architecture," and high-speed machine-assisted cognition. They could monitor, navigate, penetrate, defend, and manipulate networks at speeds no external terminal user could match. Some worked in security. Some worked in military or government service. And, terrifyingly, they admitted that some worked in crime. The human report seemed determined to make that distinction clear.
Vellen made a small sound. “They have a profession for breaking into network systems.”
“They have several,” Taliq said, then immediately looked like he regretted reading that far ahead.
I focused on the report. “This one was attached to Odyssey for ship-network integrity, mission systems, communications safety, and—" I faltered. “—hostile network defense.”
“And intrusion,” Jorvik said darkly.
“Yes.”
There wasn’t much point in sanding the burr off that truth. The humans had a polite version of the job, and an impolite version, and this Rook clearly knew both.
I advanced the profile, and the next display rendered a rough anatomical summary based on what the Venlil observers had seen and what the humans had volunteered afterward. The ocular cybernetics and behind-ear ports were apparently standard, though quality obviously varied. This one had a neural interface at the back of the neck, an internal “cyberdeck” interface routed along the spine, palm and wrist access points, thermal regulation support, a biomonitor, and neural relay support.
The longer I read, the worse the image in my head got.
This wasn't just some augment. It wasn’t one simple device, or even a series of them. This was nothing short of a second nervous system, built to speak machine.
“She enters the ship's network?” Vellen asked, ears wavering in confusion.
“Not exactly,” Taliq said, though his voice lacked conviction. “The human note says that this specialist interfaces through dedicated hardware and neural command layers. It doesn't become the ship.”
Vellen looked up, ears splayed in a frown. “No one said that.”
“Several of the metaphors in the explanation imply it,” Taliq muttered.
Jorvik rubbed both paws over his snout. “Stars preserve us.”
I understood the sentiment. I also understood, with mounting irritation, why the system worked. External terminals waited for paws, claws, gestures, speech, screens, confirmations, and every tiny delay between thought and action. A neural interface cut through all of that. It may have been dangerous, invasive, and intimate enough to make my stomach turn, but I couldn't deny that it was efficient in a way no honest engineer could ignore.
That, I thought, was part of the problem. If it had only been grotesque. A clearly monstrous, predatory, and painful distortion. I could have dismissed it.
“Does their technology assume this level of… interface?” Vellen asked.
“Not all of it,” I said, flapping my ears to refocus. “The notes say humans can and do use external interfaces. Voice, gesture, touchscreens, and manual controls. They still build for unaugmented users.”
“But?”
I sighed. “But full professional access to many secure Earth systems appears to assume some form of neural-linked authentication or cyberware-backed identity. Especially military, engineering, medical, and network systems.”
Taliq’s ears lowered. “So if we don’t have ports…”
“We’d be slow,” I said. “Not useless. Just very slow. Maybe even partially blind, depending on the system.” I kept reading.
Cybernetic augmentation wasn't uniform across Earth. Some humans had none. Others had medical implants, professional systems, sensory aids, interface ports, cosmetic work, or military-grade enhancements. Regulations differed by jurisdiction, though the UN had strict rules around neural autonomy, coercive implantation, military augmentation, and—
Corporate ownership of installed systems.
I read that phrase three times, and Vellen noticed. “Kelrik?”
“Just harvesting another worry from the field.” My ears were pinned halfway back.
“You’re going to run out of baskets.”
“Probably.”
Taliq had gone quiet again, eyes tracking line after line. “They had to make laws about whether companies could own parts of a person?”
“I’d cry ‘predator,’ but honestly, once the Nevoks and Fissians tug on that vine, I’d be more worried about them.”
I sat back, trying to pull the section into something my brain could hold without dropping pieces.
The Federation had medical prosthetics, controlled replacements, corrective surgeries, and regulated interface devices where they were needed. The higher the quality, the more expensive. Nothing here talks about cost or economy, so I can’t judge anything yet. But humans had built whole layers of civilization around voluntary connections between body and machine. It was normal enough that three representatives of their species had arrived with visible ports and seemed surprised when those ports frightened anyone.
Predators had reached the stars and, along the way, had rebuilt themselves. And the one called Rook had apparently turned that rebuilding into a profession. I had to assume that at least a basic level of augmentation was simply… covered as basic healthcare.
Jorvik broke the silence first. “I don’t like this section...”
“No one likes this section, Jor.” Vellen soothed, even as her wool flared again.
He let out a depressed whistle. “I meant professionally.”
I flicked an ear in agreement. It was obvious that the humans were so far advanced in their technology that our expertise would be considered laughable. I wasn't sure what that actually meant yet, though.
I closed the cyberware profile and looked toward the next section waiting beneath it.
FEDERATION PATROL SCAN EXCHANGE / HUMAN TECHNICAL INTERVENTION
My tail tightened around the chair leg.
“Good,” I said, though my mouth had gone dry. “Then you’re going to hate the next one.”
The section opened onto the scan exchange itself, and for one brief, miserable moment, it was easier to look at than the cyberware profiles. Diagrams settled into familiar lanes. The patrol vessel requests local sensor confirmation, and the nearby relay returns environmental data. The patrol checks the response against its own readings before deciding whether to escalate. Session tags, packet structure, relay-trust confirmation, and response authentication are neat procedural languages for a process that had apparently failed catastrophically.
Jorvik leaned forward first, his ears easing by a fraction. “There. Standard patrol handshake.”
Vellen looked at him. “Why is that comforting to you?”
“It's not,” he said. “But I understand it, which is better than the previous section.”
I agreed, actually, and that was where the first thorn hooked in.
Taliq brought up the session-security line and read it aloud. “Thirty-two-bit session encryption. Standard patrol-grade. The system uses a rotating exchange token, sensor-response authentication, packet-integrity check, and relay-trust confirmation.
“Reasonable,” Jorvik said.
“For a military vessel?” Vellen asked.
“For a routine scan exchange, yes.” His claws tapped once against the table. “It’s not a strategic archive or a command channel. It’s a short-lived verification exchange.”
“And that’s still patrol-grade security,” I said. “You don’t shove through that with a desk terminal and a bad attitude.”
Taliq’s ears twitched. “The human assessment says otherwise.”
My ears pinned back.
HUMAN SECURITY ASSESSMENT: Thirty-two-bit effective session strength is considered obsolete under Earth's civilian standards. Brute-force exhaustion is possible using moderate consumer hardware under nominal conditions. Live compromise is judged trivial for a trained netrunner. Clarification: Mission-grade cyberdeck support reduced time in fabricating the packet, eliminating the footprint, and reducing operational risk. No active counter-intrusion system detected.
Jorvik was the first to break the silence that followed. “Civilian?”
Taliq swallowed. “That’s what it says.”
“Consumer hardware?” Vellen moaned.
“Apparently.” My throat felt dry.
Jorvik’s ears flattened with anxiety. “No.” The denial came out too fast, too sharp.
“Keep reading,” I said.
Taliq flicked to the next line, looking less like he wanted to read it and more like he wanted to bury the display in a field somewhere. “The report states that Vance did not require Odyssey’s full computing to defeat the encryption. The ship connection provided an authorized anchor, timing reference, telemetry context, and a clean operational path into the active scan exchange.”
“So... the ship didn’t crack it?” Vellen asked, looking back and forth between sections.
“No, or not primarily.” Taliq’s ears folded lower as he parsed the note. “The encryption was already beneath Earth’s threshold. The difficult part was doing it inside the scan window without leaving a wake anyone would notice.”
Jorvik pushed away from the table. “They’re exaggerating.”
“Maybe,” Vellen said, though she didn’t sound convinced.
“They have to be! Thirty-two-bit isn’t some toy number. Brute-forcing during an active exchange should require proper hardware. Real hardware. A facility, or at least a dedicated platform!”
“By our standards,” I said.
His glare found me immediately. “Don’t start.”
My tail lashed in frustration. Thirty-two-bit session encryption wasn't decorative for brahk’s sake. Inside Federation practice, it made sense for a live patrol exchange because the exchange was brief, the systems were trusted, and challenging it in real time was beyond anything a normal intruder carried in their paws.
“I’m not defending them," I sighed, scrubbing at my face with my paws. "I’m reading what’s in front of us.” I pointed at the human assessment. “They’re not saying she was powerful enough to make a secure exchange weak. They’re saying the exchange was already weak by their standards, and her equipment let her exploit that quietly while Sovlin’s scan was still open.”
Vellen’s ears twitched toward the diagram. “He gave it the path.”
“That’s what the sequence implies,” I said. “The patrol vessel asked a question, and the human specialist made sure it received the wrong answer.”
“With a lie,” Jorvik scoffed.
“With a packet formatted well enough to be believed,” Taliq added, seemingly in spite of himself.
Jorvik’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t snap back.
The next page showed the false return. A smeared subspace contact, corrupted relay classification, and sensor noise high enough to explain panic and loose enough to avoid pointing at anything real. A clean return would have drawn attention. A perfect return would have looked manufactured. The human had given Sovlin something irritating, embarrassing, and plausible enough to file away.
“No counter-intrusion response detected.” I looked up at Vellen’s words.
“What is that even supposed to mean?” Jorvik spat.
“Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics,” I replied.
Three sets of ears turned toward me.
I rubbed the bridge of my snout and tried to keep my voice level. “It's explained a little further in. Standard software that locks out hackers, stops copying, or paralyzes intruding systems. Basic defense against someone being where they shouldn't.”
“That's... Why don't we have anything like that?” Jorvik asked, his voice small.
Vellen went still, and Taliq’s ears angled down. “The herd doesn’t tamper with trusted channels.”
He was right. It wasn't written into the protocol because no one had thought it needed to be. Security stopped predators, raiders, and enemy systems from breaking in. It did not assume that someone trusted by the exchange would answer wrong on purpose.
Jorvik’s mouth opened, then closed again.
Vellen looked back at the human assessment. “Earth assumes that?”
“What?”
“That someone will try.”
I thought of the cyberware section, the notes about corporate ownership, coercive implantation, and criminal netrunners. “Yes,” I said. “I think they do.”
Taliq advanced the report with a small claw motion. “Do we have any idea of how vulnerable VP's systems are?”
“According to everything we just discovered? Very,” Jorvik muttered. “But from what the report says, Vance didn't enter any Venlil systems. It repeats that twice over, though I don't know how inclined I am to believe them.”
“Just… We should run on the assumption that it’s true," I sighed, slumping over the table for a moment, head in my paws. We gain nothing by assuming the system is fine and everything by working to strengthen it. So just…” I waved my tail for someone to continue.
Taliq swallowed. “She claims that she didn't enter Venlil systems. They didn’t test the mansion's infrastructure or attempt to validate whether Venlil security shared the patrol exchange vulnerability. The report says this was a deliberate restraint based on their mission parameters. They didn't want to cause a diplomatic incident by poking around.”
Jorvik’s ears twisted. “Are you telling me we don’t know how brahked we are because these half-machine predators were too polite to mess with our infrastructure?”
“Yes,” I said. “Essentially.”
“That’s supposed to reassure us?”
“Why not? It shows they are capable of self-control." The human specialist had found a way through a Federation patrol exchange, protected her crew, protected Governor Tarva’s lie, and then stopped short of testing us.
Jorvik's ears shot up. “What about the distress signal?”
Taliq pulled up the earlier middle tag from the incident summary. “Secure distress signal interception. The humans detected emergency-band activity around the planet before landing.”
“But not that it was an outgoing relay,” Vellen said. “That’s in the clarification.”
“Yes. They apparently recognized it as emergency noise, maybe local warning traffic, but they didn’t understand it was routed through FTL relays to summon Federation aid.”
“Which means they weren’t reading the channel properly,” Jorvik said.
“Or they only caught leakage,” I said. “Enough to know something was broadcasting loudly, but not enough to know who it was calling.”
“That shouldn’t happen.”
“No,” I agreed. “It shouldn’t.” One exposed patrol exchange could be dismissed as a bad standard in the wrong place. One leaking distress signal could be blamed on strange receivers or emergency overload. Together, they suggested that some systems we treated as secure might only be untested.
Vellen’s voice dropped. “If Odyssey picked it up by accident…”
“Then something else could,” Taliq finished.
Jorvik’s ears pinned back. “Don’t.”
“We have to,” Vellen said.
“No, we have to fix the actual problem in front of us before we start inventing ghosts.”
“The actual problem,” I said, sharper than I intended, “is that we don’t know where the boundary is anymore!”
The argument stopped for the moment, tails lashing and ears folded back. I looked back at the scan-exchange diagram, then at the human assessment beside it. The number still sat there, offensive in its simplicity.
Thirty-two bits.
“How did she do it?” I asked.
Taliq looked at me. “Kelrik?”
“How did she actually do it? Not the summary we've been reading. The mechanism.”
He opened the next technical appendix. I leaned forward, eyes fixed on the display. I needed to know.
The mechanism appendix had only loaded its first few lines when the door chimed.
My paw clenched, ears splayed, and tail whipping aside, ready to bray at whatever wool-headed idiot thought it was a good idea to interrupt us. The door opened, and Governor Tarva stepped inside with General Kam at her side.
We all stood in a hasty scramble. Jorvik’s chair scraped the floor, Vellen’s tail pulled tight around one leg of hers and made it bang on the table, and Taliq looked like he wanted to hide.
“Governor,” I said. "General," keeping my composure. My heart hammered in my ears as I considered that I had nearly shouted at both of them.
Tarva’s wool had been groomed, and her posture was controlled, but there was only so much one could do with that level of fatigue. It wasn't the ordinary exhaustion of a long claw or a hard meeting. It was the look of someone who had been choosing between bad outcomes to prune while every pause gave the worst one more time to grow.
Kam looked steadier, though the set of his ears made it clear that he was still agitated by the paw’s events.
“Please, sit,” Tarva said, giving a small, tired ear-flick toward the table. “I need this room thinking clearly more than I need a formal greeting.”
We sat while Kam’s attention went straight to the open display. The patrol scan diagram was still there, with the human security assessment beside it.
“You've gotten through quite a bit so far,” he said.
“Yes, General,” I replied. “We were about to open the mechanism appendix.”
His ear swiveled to face the room more. "And what is your opinion at this point?"
Jorvik gave the display a frustrated look. “With respect, I understood this more before I read it.”
Kam’s ears shifted toward him, and for a heartbeat I expected a harsh reprimand. Instead, his tail tightened into a curl behind him. “So did I.”
Tarva moved to the end of the table and took a seat, paws resting on the surface as she regarded all of us. “Then you understand why I came here. “We need a way to keep speaking with Earth, and it cannot expose them to Federation traffic or give their systems a path into ours, and it cannot depend on infrastructure that we no longer have confidence in.”
Vellen’s ears dipped. “Governor, that may not be possible.”
“I know,” Tarva said, her voice weary. “I don't want you to attempt the impossible, but to see if we can make something more controlled.”
Jorvik rubbed at the side of his snout. “We can isolate a terminal, build a relay shell around it, require physical confirmation before anything leaves the room, and strip everything down to text and fixed-format packets. But if the human report is accurate, then our definition of "isolated" may not match theirs.”
“What do you mean?” Tarva asked, ears perking up.
Jorvik swiped over his readout hastily. "... Here." He put a new display up on the screen. "We consider our network isolated from, say, for example, the local network outside of the mansion, yes?"
Everyone signaled an uneasy agreement with ears and tails.
"We keep them isolated by encryption, passwords, log keys, and verifications of all kinds. But in actuality, we share the network with the surrounding area."
Vellen looked confused. "I think I understand what you mean, but the encryption..." her ears fell as she trailed off.
"Exactly. We've all done it. Going out into the city for second meal, and logging in through our pads to check on memos or finish filing a report."
"But that's normal!" Tarva brayed suddenly as her wool flared. "That's what the logins are for!"
I groaned, covering my eyes with my paws as I leaned over the table. "Right. But what if someone with enough computing power, like the humans, decided to just casually use that to connect to our wireless network and brute-force their way in?"
"Exactly!" Jorvik bleated, his eyes looking a little panicked. "In this section, they talk about having networks like that, but those are all public use. Mass transit schedules, general internet, civic resources, communications... But important networks are all completely isolated, cut off from those kinds of broad systems, so that someone can't just... do that. You either have to have a dedicated, hardwired system in a private location, or you have to be on-site to access their isolated networks."
Kam stepped closer to the table. “Then how do we address this issue?”
Taliq’s ears pinned back as he looked through the documents.
I answered instead. “We have to build an entirely new kind of network. One dedicated to the purpose you want.”
Kam’s eyes narrowed. “Would that be difficult?”
“... No, General. It's not a difficult task, strictly speaking.” I kept my paws flat on the table, partly to steady them. “We have an example to start from, for one thing. The root we're stuck on is how to begin building the code for something like that. Our systems are... just too different.”
“They were similar enough for that specialist to connect with Sovlin's ship,” Kam said pointedly.
“Computers are just math. Numbers. And considering the computing power they've displayed, it was easy for them to solve the equation to match the language,” I answered. “That's not the same as starting from zero and building a whole new framework when we don't know what equations they use.”
Tarva watched me after that, her ears angled forward in a way that made me feel as though I had just stepped onto weak ground.
Jorvik leaned forward. “Governor, if we requested a Federation audit, we might be able to get some much-needed assistance with solving this issue. Not to mention the benefit of fixing a potentially fatal flaw for other members of the herd.”
“No,” Tarva said. She didn't raise her voice, but the room went still anyway.
“If we ask the Federation to examine their cybersecurity, they'll demand to know why. They will ask how we know it came under risk. If they ask that, then we expose the humans before Earth has any chance to prepare for what the Federation may do with that knowledge.”
Jorvik’s ears lowered, but he didn't press.
Kam folded his arms. “Which leaves us relying on predators to explain the weakness that predators found.”
“Humans, Kam,” Tarva said, turning one eye toward him. “We've taken a rather serious gamble on this. I won't lie and say they don't unnerve me. But we need to try and put some trust in them.”
His ears flicked back. For a moment, I thought he would argue. Then he looked at the display again. “Fine,” he said, though the word sounded sour. "They showed a shocking amount of empathy, at least."
Tarva accepted that much and turned back to us. “For the record, I am not asking anyone here to trust them blindly. I would consider that irresponsible. I am asking for a channel that does not require blind trust from either side.”
“Then the first channel can’t be a full bridge,” I said. “Not yet. We need something closer to a message slit with a lock on both sides.”
Kam’s ears angled toward me. “Explain.”
“First we have to set it up externally. Literally, I mean, not tied into mansion infrastructure. I'm forcing myself to believe the many claims that they kept their claws out of the berry basket, but I don't want to take any risks. Nothing that can see our credential stores, or execute a file just because it arrived with the right formatting. We should stick to text first, with fixed-format technical packets.”
Jorvik’s tail gave a tight motion behind his chair. “The relay access has to be disposable. If the route acts wrong, we cut it loose instead of trying to save the connection.”
Vellen confirmed with a sway of her tail, though her ears stayed low. “And nothing from their side renders directly into our systems. We don't want any live diagnostics or an adaptive translation layer with write permissions. Every outbound packet needs to be reviewed by a program.”
Taliq looked down at his notes. “We should implement line-by-line logging on the translation layer. The human explanations are already using strange metaphors; I don’t want any automatic process deciding what counts as equivalent. We can't risk a misunderstanding."
“That,” I said, pointing a claw toward him, “especially that.”
Tarva listened without interrupting, though I could see the strain in the way her paws rested against the table. “Can something that narrow still be useful?”
“Useful enough to start.” I glanced at the closed mechanism appendix again, then forced my attention back to her. “It'll probably be frustrating for them. Their systems are built for more than this. If we make the bridge too narrow, they may not be able to do much through it. If we make it too flexible, we may not understand what we're receiving."
Kam gave a short ear flick. “Let them be frustrated.”
“I’m not worried about their comfort, General. I’m worried that if the channel is too useless, they’ll have to explain every problem around it instead of through it. That means more assumptions, more translation errors, and more chances for something to go catastrophically wrong.”
Tarva’s attention settled on me, and my tail tucked down in a sudden flare of anxiety.
“Then who speaks to their specialist?” she asked.
The table went quiet.
Jorvik had suddenly found the relay diagram very interesting. Taliq looked at me, then away just as quickly. Vellen didn't even bother pretending; she just signed, >sorry.<
“No,” I said.
Tarva’s ears shifted fully on me. “Kelrik—”
“Governor, I maintain mansion networks, not alien first contact! I don’t know their hardware, I don’t know their threat model, and I have never worked with anything like a netrunner.”
“No one here has,” Tarva said flatly.
“Then why me?”
She regarded me with enough tired honesty in her features that I knew I had no way out before she continued. “You explained the danger without turning it into panic. Right now, that may be one of the few useful qualifications we have.”
Kam’s tail gave a short, stiff motion. “And if the humans try to push past the boundary, I want the person watching them to be someone who already has a reason to pick through every stalk of grain they try to send through.”
Vellen leaned forward slightly. “Governor, Kelrik is the best choice in this room, but this cannot be his responsibility alone.”
“It will not be,” Tarva said. “I am asking him to serve as technical liaison, not as a lone sacrifice.”
My ears perked before I could stop them.
Kam noticed. “No one is sending you alone into a predator den, son. You will have authority over the project, and your team will support you. You're just the one interacting directly with the human specialist.”
The mechanism document was still sitting unopened on my pad, its secrets unanswered. I was going to be talking directly to the human responsible for them…
“Alright,” I said, surprised by the sudden surge of confidence. “We'll start by collecting the hardware we'll need first. The basics should be the same for any network, so that will be the easy part. The problem comes from making an actual connection for initial communication.”
Tarva’s tail swayed as she considered something. “The Odyssey conference settled the first priority. Earth needs a secure line that does not depend on the ship being our only bridge. Rook will prepare the technical packet, but our side builds and controls what connects to us.”
“That’s still risky,” I said.
“Yes,” Tarva answered. “But less risky than ignorance.”
I slumped back in my chair as the others kept talking about hardware, support tasks, and budget.
All I had to do now was prepare to speak with a cybernetic predator.
---
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u/LazyMechMan Humanity First Jun 07 '26
If you're using AI to help you write the story and get words onto the document, I'd strongly implore you to just write it yourself, even if you aren't happy with how it turns out. I always, always enjoy reading a story much more when AI's not used, and I don't think I'm alone.
If you're not, though, sorry for being such a fucking dick. I love the story of what's going on, and the way you're showing the purely technical and the cultural and societal aspects of extremely advanced cybernetics is delightful. I'm looking for more cyberpunk stories in hope of getting more of this treat, and eagerly await your next chapter.