Ex Machina; Infiltration

[animusmods]

Characters: Riki and the infiltration team
Setting: administrative levels
Format: any
Summary: Riki's efforts must be sabotaged. Stealth is the name of the game and time is of the essence.
Warnings: psychological horror

Though the chipped unit does not follow, he sees to it that the team advances the rest of the way. At the end of the lit corridor is a set of double doors, heavy-duty polished metal with small windows set into each one.

Through the windows, a massive machine is visible, connected to thousands of holographic screens that are hard to make out at the speed at which they're being manipulated. The machine sits in the center of the room and is networked to four elaborate terminals stationed along the walls via a complex tangle of panels, wires, and towers. Each of these terminals controls its own set of floating screens; the sheer amount of holographic monitors in the room is disorienting, and really, it's hard to tell what's connected to what.

In the chair in the middle of the enormous set-up is Riki, maneuvering all of the screens with the same ease with which most people breathe. His back is to the doors that lead into the room, and for the moment, he is utterly engrossed in his work.

Comments

[animusnpcs]

[While some of the symbols on the screen do seem to be used more often than others, there is no truly discernible pattern.

David's inspection of the hardware and cabling doesn't tell him much. It isn't labeled, if only because the primary user doesn't need labels to know what it does. The terminal itself will be able to give them more answers, once they get it to respond.]

[greyerrant]

[ Loken will reach out to touch the terminal screen with an immense finger, then, trying to determine if it has a touch interface.]

[animusnpcs]

[The screen itself is not a touch interface; the terminal is very much like the standard network terminals in the upper levels of the tower, with a keyboard and tablet-like touchpad embedded below the screen. While touching the monitor does nothing, selecting the symbols onscreen will pull up what appears to be a command prompt.]

[megazero_to_superhero]

[By this point, David finally gives up on trying to locate another way to disable the terminal, and carefully makes his way back over to where Garviel is.]

[He glances back to the terminal in time to see the Astartes' experimentation with the monitor, then looks up to the man proper—way up, given their difference in height. David speaks to Garviel in a hushed tone ... just loud enough to hear over whatever ambient din may be present in the machine room.]

Didja find anything yet?

[greyerrant]

[ Loken shakes his head, and will reach out, touching any key that looks like an input function, like an enter key in shape, rather than a key that more clearly delineates a letter. ]

[animusnpcs]

[When the key that looks to be the closest to an enter key is pressed, the command screen prompt blinks, but doesn't change aside from that. It seems like that is indeed the return key.]

[megazero_to_superhero]

[After watching how the terminal reacts to Garviel's input, David takes a moment to assess this—he'd been spending most of this time not looking at the monitor, after all.]

[Okay, it looks like that was some sort of enter or return key ... but other than that nothing on the monitor jumps out at him as making any sort of sense. It reminds him of a popular sci-fi movie he vaguely recalls from a decade ago, or the Arc Server at Architect Entertainment ...]

[Unable to sort anything out from the monitor, David instead examines the keyboard. The admins have to be some sort of humans given Ruana's true form, so—the keyboard layout has to be something that's logical to humans, right? Maybe even a QWERTY layout, even though the symbols don't look anything like a Latin alphabet ... but having messed with Rikti computers before, David doubts they'd be that lucky. But maybe the keys are laid out in a way that might be easy to guess their input ...]

[animusnpcs]

[The keyboard is like the terminals in the upper levels, changing to match its user.]

[megazero_to_superhero]

[David stares a few moments longer, frowning—with Garviel presently using the terminal he can't quite understand the layout. Low/High Gothic and tens of thousands of years of linguistic evolution and all that.]

[Still ... Even without being aware that the terminals change to match their present user, something has a shred of familiarity about the keyboard—enough for David to look up at the Astartes, motioning at the keyboard to get his attention.]

Dis layout look familiar to you?

[greyerrant]

[ Loken shakes his head. }

No, you?

[megazero_to_superhero]

Some of da keys look like dey might be in da same spot, like in da terminals downstairs—

[David's pointing to the key Garviel used to bring up the command console.]

—but it don't look like keyboards from home to me.

[David's a little hesitant to just start experimenting based on that observation alone. He takes a closer look at the keyboard to see if, maybe, there might be other keys that look familiar based on their location on the keyboard layout.]