Part 7: Democracy simply does not work

Democracy simply does not work

I said to vote for a skill, so I took only the first options mentioned. It came up with a tie between Stealth and Programming at 3, with Analysis and Chip Design at 1 each. That was, in fact, two ties, and there was no way I was going to satisfy anyone with that result.

So I decided to count all the votes, because voter fraud something something. While it made for a three-way tie for second place, at least there was a clear winner.



Analysis gets a skill point. Yay? A good compromise pleases no one, after all.



Meanwhile, let's look at the last thing we can do to a file: erase it! Fight the power! Frag the corps and their obsessive need to, um, record the results of tests! I'd like to believe that Johnson is getting us to erase the poor performances of his own employees from the records. Seriously guys, you build digital systems and your system is only rating 1!



Anyway remember that back door I demonstrated for no reason? Here is a demonstration of using it! You just get this popup when you hit 'Enter the Matrix'. Then you click yes. Then you arrive at the CPU. It's so simple, I didn't want to insult your bandwidth with a screenshot of me being in the CPU.



So anyway we just access the Datastore and... what? It's actually encrypted? Maybe they tried to hide their poor results this way, but Mr. Johnson knows that their crappy encryption is bound to get broken with ease, so a more permanent solution is called for.



I don't actually have Decrypt loaded, for Load purposes. So I unloaded Analyze (after analyzing, of course) using the button in the bottom left that looks like an old-fashioned wastepaper basket. Then, I just clicked the... I guess it looks like a box with an arrow, but that button, to load up Decrypt.



And voila! The Tapeworm is gone, leaving the file free to be erased! So, congratulations on the foresight to everyone saying Analysis should be raised.



After perusing for paydata, I jacked out and bagged a skill point and a few pittances. (For the record, 'a pittance' in Decker is a pay of less than 100 nuyen.)

That makes for a short and unsatisfying update, however, so let's do another thing!



This job, to be specific. Poor Digital Systems. I'm not intentionally trying to pick on them or anything, they're just an easy target! That happened to have a more difficult/lucrative job option!



While doing the boring part of the job, I actually came across something new: a Slow program, rating 1 in this case. Slow is an attack program that affects all IC in a node. Rather than dealing damage, however, it makes the IC, uh, slow. Meaning they only act every other turn. It's a handy thing to have, assuming you're planning to murder everything anyway. To us, it's useless (for now).

Anyway I complete the job and get paid, and get two skill points out of the contract. Which, come to think of it...



...is enough to raise all the other skills you wanted raised, too! Now would be a great time to get some rating 2 hardware to shore up our numbers (and support rating 2 programs under Light load).



Unfortunately, holy fuck that's an expensive special order! Maybe we'll luck out and see it in the store soon, but for now it's back to the grind.