It didn’t make sense. I backed off a moment, then took another look and saw things from a new perspective. What I had taken to be just one box was a whole network. I was in one of the nodes on it, the ub3rl33t-firewall was at the center—but there were all these poorly-protected nodes on the edges that I hadn’t checked out yet. I started diving in.

Most of it was rubbish—but in one of the nodes, I hit the jackpot: the automech’s on-board computer.

Automech?

I found files downloaded from the sites I’d hacked. There were these two factions of robots, Aegis and Marauder, fighting it out in secret—and one of the things they could do was copy human minds.

I began to understand. The super-firewalled node had to be this robot’s personality core. It stood to reason that would be well-guarded. But the rest—if they were just cranking these bots out off an assembly line, sure, security would be off-the-shelf to begin with. Apparently this n00b had never bothered to upgrade.

Now how could I take advantage of that?