#Lore 24 – Entry #104 – Sci-Fi Month II #13 – h@cKiNg == M@g1k
From the Personal Journal of Chiasa Charity Chiasakaniki, Systems Analyst and Programmer, IT Division, assigned UEF-04, Maharani Morgiana.
It’s a question I’ve been asked before, but not one I’ve ever really took time to think about. I mean, how does one breathe? You just do, right? It’s basically the same with my magic. Basically. More or less. Kind of?
I know that’s not really a good answer, but my boss keeps hounding me about it, so I guess I should come up with some kind of answer that he’ll accept. When that ticket came in for a printer issue today when he showed up asking, I was super stoked to go and deal with it, even if it was just a cable that came unplugged; shame it took me like two hours to make sure the department was in no danger of a similar issue happening again! Safe now, not sorry later!
Still, my magic…I’m not the only kitsune I know who does this kind of thing, I guess it’s become something of a thing with those of us who prefer to live amongst the big cities these days. It’s not really techomancy as the term is usually used, cause I’m not really repairing or enhancing or controlling machinery with it. I guess…it’s like…more like, anyway…the enchantments and illusions we kitsune are known for, just in digital form?
Ugh, this is hard to put into words.
It’s second nature to me, so it’s more instinctive, I think is the way to put it. When I concentrate on a given task inside a computer system or network and then reach out with my magic as I work, I can somehow make it work on the code. Like…let’s see…take a simple function to have the coffee machine brew up a cup of coffee every five minutes for an hour. If I wanted to hack the coffee pot to say, double that rate for two hours, I just find my way inside and will it to happen. If you were to ask an arcanist, I guess they’d say I “charmed” it into doing something it wouldn’t normally do.
Same way with ICE and security daemons. If I encounter that kind of thing, I just “throw up an illusion” and hopefully it’ll believe it and go running off after it instead of coming at me, leaving me to slip in behind it and access the juicy bits and bytes. Doesn’t always work, but most of the time it does; just depends on the system I’m trying to get into or the program I’m trying to modify. And yeah…I have taken over a system or two before, just to see if I could, not that I was doing anything that illegal or anything. “Domination” I guess is what an arcanist would call it. Well, not the same kind of “domination” you’d find the clergy of Erisaya or Yurisaya practicing, but you know, the “mental” kind.
How do I know which code to target, how do I see these “daemons” inside a system? Well…I just do? Guess that wouldn’t be good enough. Okay, so…it’s like this, once I get into the zone after initially hacking in the traditional way, I just sort of…see it? It’s like a VR interface I guess, but on a much smoother and less disorienting level, like pure mental imagery that overlays with the code and meshes with it. I guess it IS kind of like my own personal VR system, just powered by kitsune illusion magic. And when I look through these “goggles”, I see safe areas, danger zones, and active threats, like a targeting HUD in a starfighter, kind of, so I just know what to do and where to go. It’s like jacking in directly for a cyborg with the right implants, just without any of the nasty hardware requirements.
Kind of. I think.
Is this making any sense at all? Maybe not. I dunno, I’ve never had to describe how my magic works before. It just works. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
Guess I need to explain my tails too…he’s asked about them about as much as the rest of it. It’s a thing with kitsune; we don’t all have multiple tails, a tiny fraction of us have all nine, but everyone I know who can do what I do has at least three, like me. Maybe I should refer him to the mythology on some world or another instead of trying to explain it myself? I mean, it’s just how this is for me, like, completely a natural thing, so I just don’t know what to say. My tails are part of me, they indicate a certain magical potency, and they get animated when I’m in the zone. I just don’t really think about them that much when it comes to what I do.