She made a quick check on her bearings, the data bits glowing and swirling around the nondescript child that was her persona in the Matrix. This was no more than a routine job, really; checking the datastores of a very minor research group stuck away in Kent would take no more than half an hour, after which she could copy and decrypt anything interesting at her leisure. The job didn’t really justify the fee, but they were paying for her reputation. Besides, she needed extra for Rutger, the barman at the Lounging Lizard, where she often had her meets. Keeping him on a hefty retainer greased the wheels of her style, making her negotiations generally swifter and more professional. That also helped guarantee more work to follow. This was just a preliminary snoop, after all.
As she entered the system access node of Howarth Associates’ system, a feeble access program tried to check her ID. The sleaze program got her past the barrier so effortlessly that she was actually looking forward to something more challenging further into the heart of the system. Meanwhile she used the analyze program to check the sub-processing unit ahead, identifying it as the SPU controlling the flow of data to other SPUs within the system. Super! No need to get to the central processor, where she’d surely encounter more severe countermeasures and checks. She could work from this basic point.
The SPU had one nice touch in defense: a tar baby trap that would have crashed and dumped her sleaze program without ceremony had her sleaze not been able to fool it. It looked like that sleaze had been worth every nuyen she’d paid for it because the tar baby let her pass easily. Speeding further along the cluster of SPUs and into the datastores, she ran her analysis and data-checking programs while also keeping tabs on the alarm seed monitors. No reaction from the system, no alerts. It was like stealing candy from a sleeping baby.