A Stranger's Offer

"Not from this world, are we?" said Aldrich. He stared into the unblinking green dot of the spherical helper bot. He wondered what was behind it.

An impossibly alien face too inhuman to comprehend?

Some kind of alternate reality human?

Maybe a living machine?

No way to really tell.

What Aldrich did know was that the Stranger was no pushover.

The fact that the dot did not turn from green to red meant that whoever was hacking into this was good enough not to trigger the many security measures that the Panopticon's security networks built up.

Aldrich had mentioned it in his head before, but he had to remind himself again that that was no walk in the park. If he had to give a letter rank to it in terms of pure hacking skill, then it was without a doubt S-class. Top of the S-class, even, considering the Panopticon's reputation of having an iron solid cyberspace defense.

If he made an enemy out of the Stranger, then he was making a tough one.