He inserted the opposite end to a wireless hub in his arm and initiated a very tight search for nearby signals. Immediately the search picked up the signal of the camera, lightly encrypted, transmitting its findings to some nearby relay. He hacked the signal easily and checked first the view: he saw himself, but just a shadow; a dim blur on the margin of the image. A ghost on the margins of the perceptible world.
He locked that image in place and placed the transmission to loop it indefinitely. That blur would be the only thing an observer would notice until the image was rebooted. He retracted the wire and moved in front of the door. It was nondescript, dark-stained wood, but the lock’s hardware, like the camera, was more sophisticated than its surroundings warranted.
When he hacked in, however, the encryption barrier was surprisingly minimal. He deployed a quick executable to penetrate the outer shell of the program and breach the barrier from within. He watched the visualization via his HUD. The program easily eluded the lock’s clumsy security measures. But something was wrong. Lux realized, too late, as the barrier opened, that this was too easy. That it was a snare within a trap. Bait disguised as an obstacle. An ambush within the lock.
A flash of light erupted before him, and then two concussive bursts of sounds in the artificial environment of the operating system. Lux was only lightly tethered to the bot he’d just sent behind the lock’s security measures, but it now pulled him in, toward an impossible black void beyond, to an expanse of empty virtual space. He switched off the bot, the bit of code that had switched from tool to tractor beam in a nanosecond, but too late.