<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/thumb/0/0f/Benedictcasual.jpg/400px-Benedictcasual.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>Eric Cavendish</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Behind a large rock</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td> Zhùhǎo </td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td> Securing the area, electronically</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>Magnessen's implant was a notch above consumer grade. It would take Eric several seconds to hack through the encryption surrounding it in order to shut down her access, and in that time a distress call could certainly escape. It was a far simpler matter, though, to throw an isolation shield over her general area. In cyberspace the shield manifesting as a staticky gray dome that captured all outgoing traffic and reflected it back at the source. Autonomic routines within Magnessen's implant noted the incomplete calls and reissued them. Warning messages were duly displayed to the scientist, but Eric suspected that reading her e-message transmission log was not her top priority at the time, what with having her face being turned into hamburger.<br/><br/>How long had it been since he'd had a good hamburger, he mused? With fresh raw onions. Grilled onions were a travesty.<br/><br/>The signal from the police car was more of a challenge. Though neither of the occupants were in any state to initiate a transmission, the hardened 'black box' in the chassis of the vehicle was screaming on eleven different channels, sending a full report of the incident and requesting backup most strenuously. If only one of the transmissions made contact with the greater network, then this operation might be over before it started.<br/><br/>Six were easy to cancel as Eric sent the idiot savant vehicle AI a notice that faulty sensors were responsible for the errant damage reports. Three more messages were tagged with 'time to die' expiration counters and then sent into a local loop between his own implant and the origin point until, 257 cycles later, they dissipated. The tenth was cagier, painted with chameleon code to deliberately evade standard capture techniques. He coded and sent a virus after it, which caught up with the call for help at the first satellite transponder and killed it before it could replicate.<br/><br/>The eleventh, though, was a problem. Eric wasted thirty-five milliseconds wrestling with it, and then another five wrestling with his ego, before he called for help. "IFFY: I have a distress signal issued by the police black box using an Interpol encryption scheme, tagged with priority transfer codes to skip through the network. I'm transmitting the profile now. IFFY, I need a hand killing this one."<br/><br/>Damn it. Unless IFFY kept her lips locked, he was going to hear from Franny about that one. Or even... the Major. Damn it.<br/><br/>