I don’t imagine they’ve truly thought through what might happen to them if their test subjects were really able to manifest their will with the Chair 
Augustus has a really good question, actually. Hopefully… Portencia knows we are coming for her now.
It may be wise to ask Whistler how closely they were watching him in there, or if he became part of the background once the experiment started. To see how much wiggle room he has.
Holy crap!.. @Marty.60 please reiterate that we are all here for him and with him…I can only imagine the toll this knowledge is taking on him…he’s probably beypnd beating himself up as well as wondering what all he’s witnessed and how he “helped” them that he simply doesn’t remember…poor Whistler! And the girl!! She’s still fighting! I can’t even imagine going through what she has and what she is and still being able to fight. We have to save them…now more then ever…We’ve got to shut down KS…
I think what @Mr.Fern said was a good plan. If Aether can get into their systems through Whistler making a breach, then he may be able to aid them both in escaping. The only thing I’m worried about is that Aether is already so weak, would he even be able to do anything like that? And how would they get Aether out again, if at all?
Might be a silly question… If Portencia has put parts of her mind in other people, does that mean there’s room for Aether inside her?
Anyone checked Portencia’s drawing recently?
Yes it looks the same to me
From Whistler this morning:
I think I have an idea. Will follow up tonight.
Gulp
Well then, it seems Whistler is more bold than we thought. I didn’t think we’d be moving so quickly.
I’m scared for them.
This girl is strong !
We will get her and everyone else out… lets not be rash. My inner Weatherwatch wants us to straight up storm this place but Whistler is right… we must wait…
I really hope Whistler knows what he’s doing with this. >_>
Stay positive and keep happy thoughts about, Whistler will need it. Thanks everyone.
-Hohenheim
Things get interesting as I’m about to head off up the country house hunting! I’ll check in again in about 12 hours and then when it’s feasible.
Hope the data connection up there isn’t dire.
My thoughts would be that while Fallon is distracted with this maqic book of his (anyone started looking into other incidences/known similar items yet?) Whistler can quietly break something without being noticed. That’s the fun thing with computers, once you know what you’re doing and looking for, all it needs is a leeetle nudge in the right place and BEWM blue screens and spinning beachballs everywhere.
Okay. Here we go…
Had to sit in the session again today. It’s unbearable to watch what they’re doing. At one point they brought in a woman to sit with the girl in the room with the chair, to console her because she was so upset. That must be your Climber. He asked the girl the same questions, said the same things, over and over. For hours. Someone thought they saw flashes of light in the arch but on playback there was nothing.
We have to do something. This can’t go on.
So I have a plan, which is barely a plan and still has one or two very big flaws, but here it is.
Follow me.
Every Wednesday afternoon at 5pm the major security systems (which are on their own servers) purge cache, update if needed, and reboot. Takes about ten minutes, fifteen if there’s a big update. But there’s a redundant system that picks up the slack for those ten minutes so there’s never downtime. This place is always secured.
I started thinking yesterday, what if I just disabled the redundant system? Not disable actually, they would know, but what if I changed the schedule of the redundant system to cache purge at the same time as the primary? To cycle together. They’d both be down at the same time.
For those ten minutes the automated security at the main doors of the company would be disabled. No foreign object detection, no facial scanning, no surveillance alerts, no door access logging. We’d have ten minutes for one of us to somehow get into medical, find the boy, save Kendrick if we can, and get out, and for the other to use my access to the sublevel and get Climber and the girl. If we got out, and got them out, in time, we’d have a chance to escape before anybody knew something had happened.
The first major flaw is the people. We’d be invisible to security, but not to the staff and security personnel. Not to Fallon or his team. Odds are good that somebody would notice us. Maybe not going in, but carrying people out. And for all we know the girl could still be in the chair at 5pm. Was thinking a fire alarm but that would probably make things worse, not better. Fire and safety teams would respond, not evacuate.
One crazy idea is that there’s a critical alert system that can show a message on every screen in the building and an audible prompt that directs people to the nearest screen. I’ve never seen it used, but if I could figure out how they control us, how they manipulate us, maybe I could put something on the screen to sort of… freeze them? I know you said you’d been able to manipulate somebody’s memory and make your presence online invisible… I know I’m grasping at straws right now, but given our options, is there something you and your team could do remotely, or maybe set up and I could implement here? Something to give us a chance?
The other major flaw is none of this brings down the company. I could have a drive set up to offload some kind of incriminating information during the security blackout, if I can find any. It’s just a lot to do in ten minutes and I couldn’t touch the servers until security was down, so no offloading prep. And I can’t tunnel it out because the purge cache will only affect physical building security, not the firewalls. Anything getting in or out will have to be on foot.
It all seems crazy right?
Well, thing is… I already tried it today. And it worked. Everything I do during the chair examination is monitored and logged, but I was able to pull up a building-wide maintenance terminal in the background and figured if I got caught I could say I was checking to make sure the reboot went off without a hitch since the company’s been attacked in the past couple months. They probably wouldn’t believe me but at this point I don’t care.
I aligned the two cache purges. And it worked. No alarms, no alarmed people. Most nerve-wracking ten minutes of my life. But from what I could tell nobody realized that security was black for ten minutes. Then I copied the log for last week and pasted it in the hole I left to cover my ass. The other problem, I watched the little red light on the monitoring room door’s lock. It stayed red, never turned green. So the sublevel is on its own security. We still need my badge to get on those elevators and we need to hope and pray that they continue this insane experiment long enough for me to retain access. The weird thing, I think the girl knows that we need to keep this going to save them. I wonder if that’s what the flashing in the arch was. You probably think I’m nuts but I’m not, and I’ll tell you why…
She got in my head again today. She showed me all kinds of things. Crazy stuff. My past. My future. People dying. The boy running and me following.
And then she showed the two of us acting on the plan I just thought up the night before. You. Here. With the boy’s “mind” on your phone. I can’t see past us meeting in the lobby and then splitting up, you going to the sublevel and me taking your phone, with the boy, to medical. She showed me that we try, but what happens after, I don’t know.
I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it’s magic or science or me losing my mind. All I know is something has to give and this little girl has told me that come hell or high water the dam is giving out next Wednesday. 5pm on May 31st. That’s the day we try to break them out.
Holy deal, holy crap, this guy might be a genius.
Or just truly desperate, but he may have found our way. We have a week to get ready for this.
We have to tell Aether. He needs to use that window to get in and fill in the gaps that Whistler can’t do alone, and then he needs to be ready to make the jump back into his body so he can help guide the group and assist if necessary.
So what are our steps? Backwards planning.
Edit: Marty, this plan requires, it seems, asking you to assume the greater part of the personal risk. Again.
I’ve been thinking, and it looks like Whistler and the girl may be thinking what I’ve been thinking. Since Aether is in the network, couldn’t they upload him into a phone or usb stick and plug it into the system when this goes down? I think that’s what the girl means with the phone. Aether could also possibly cause more havoc in the system along with getting his body back.
-Hohenheim
I think you’re exactly on the nose with this one.
Okay, so I just recently joined yesterday, and in between then and now, I have read all twelve threads on the fragments (and all related sub threads), puzzled through puzzles, passed the magimystic assessments, read ALL the blogs, and now I am here. Looking at what is happening now, I think that the best thing to do is to see if there are any previous connections throughout the fragments that we can use now (maybe Cagliostro?). Is there anything that we need puzzled out or solved atm?
@Aether , if you’re reading this, is there anything on any of the Low sites that could help us?