Ghost in the shell: Equestrian architecture

Time to get to work. Fluttershy thought after plugging herself out of the meeting with the rest of section twelve. She gave Angel a stroke with her palm, bending his soft ears over the back of his head. Once her hands passed over them his ears jumped back to pointing up at the roof.

She took a bag of blueberry tea, put it in her white mug and poured steaming water into it. The clear liquid took on a dark blue shade as it filled the deep mug. Fluttershy taking a quick sniff of the rising steam, the warm moist air carried the sweet scent of wild blueberries before it gave her a small prick in the back of her throat. With a small smile on her lips she let a stream of creamy milk into the mug. The milk looked like a cloud of thick white smoke before it spread out over the rest of the tee.

Steam rose from the mug like soft, transparent, dancing pieces of silk. Fluttershy put a plastic spoon into the mug and stirred around before blowing the steam away and taking a sip. She held the liquid in her mouth and let the warmth spread before she swallowed. After taking another sniff of the soft steam she put the mug down on her desktop. In front of her sat the black monitor with a glowing keyboard beneath it.

Fluttershy pressed down three of the keys and said; “Entropy.”

The monitor started with a thin white line in the center that quickly grew to fill the entire screen. A black window with one blinking white square opened. Fluttershy´s fingers folded outwards with thin mechanical joints, effectively tripling her fingertips. They dashed over the keyboard and within a moment the window was filled with numbers and letters arranged in short paragraphs. She pressed the “enter” key, her fingers folded back together and she took another sip of the tea while waiting for the program to load.

She found herself nibbling on the tip of her thump. “I hope there is nothing here.” She though out loud while giving Angel another stroke. The little bunny was chewing on piece of salad in between scratching the back of his ears with his back paws.

“Scan complete.” The monitor announced with a dull voice.

Fluttershy clicked through a few menus to reach to the data. She scrolled through over fifty thousand lines of data in a few minutes. The data unsettled her. “There is something here.” She took a wire from her chair and plugged it into the socket on her neck. Through the wire she went into the network.

Numbers and letters floated and hovered around her in here. They traveled in pathways and lines. Over and under each other, crisscrossing and intersecting in different clusters of rushing lines. Fluttershy floated amidst it all and traveled quickly to the suspected intersect. The lines traveled into and out of the sphere through controlled, artificial openings. Fluttershy put her hand on to it and read through the lines. At the moment there was nothing out of protocol so she read through the history and cross referenced it leading up to and surrounding the assassination.

“Mission started…” She said in her head. “Strike performed… Mission compromised…” She found nothing on the events surrounding the mission. Acting almost on instinct she switched to the history and tried to find any sings of hacking.

We received the order three weeks ago so the hack must have been performed sometime after that. Numerous lines flashed before her eyes has she entered the activity history, everything from exact time the order came in to every conversation they had surrounding the mission. It didn´t matter whether they were meeting on the net or at the office, everything was there. Some sixty thousand lines of code and lines hovered before her eyes. She scanned and searched them, looking for any changes or entrances that didn´t match up with the logs she had on file.

“Got it.” Fluttershy found an entrance performed two weeks and three days ago. There was no entrance in the log matching the date or time of day that it was performed. She swept away the other data away and to get a closer look at it.

It consisted of six letters and four numbers. All of them shifted and changed. Fluttershy activated the firewall and locked the anomaly down. She sent it to her station´s external hard drive. Before she exited the network she took one more glance over the sphere once more but found no other anomalies.

When she came back Angel had leapt of her lap and was sitting in his basket next to her chair. Fluttershy took the cords out of her neck before taking the external hard drive out of the monitor. She took a sip of the tea; it had turned lukewarm but it didn´t bother her. She petted Angel and plugged the hard drive into a holographic pad. The anomaly appeared hovering above the pad. It had the same number of changing letters and numbers.

“Celestia.” Fluttershy called the chief.

“Yes?” Celestias face appeared in the corner of her vision. Her sparkling hair was in much better condition in the picture.

“I can confirm that we had a hack being performed into our network about four days after we received the order.”

“Can you identify the source?” Celestia asked. Her face was stiff and only her lips moved has she spoke, but Fluttershy could tell by the tone of her voice that she was hopeful.

“Not currently.” Fluttershy was surprised how easy the words came out of her. “It appears to be a shifting anomaly that performed the hack.”

“Is it a worm?” Celestias tone was heavier now.

“I can´t rule that out at this stage.” The words were harder to say this time.

“Okay.” Celestia said. “Since you aren´t certain I´m going to have to request a search of our network. In the mean time I would like you avoid going into the network for risk of having your cyber brain infected.”

“Alright.”

“I will send the same request to the rest of section twelve.”

“Affirmative.” The picture of Celestia closed down.

“Now what is this?” Fluttershy asked herself while staring at the shifting line. With some gestures she turned the line around and looked at from different angels. She stared at it somewhat unsure of what to make of it or what to do about it.