The control room of the offshore rig hummed with the sound of a thousand cooling fans spinning up to maximum RPM. The air was electric, thick with the invisible data streams that Rick was pulling from the ether and weaving into a weapon.
Rick sat in the command chair, his eyes glowing with a steady, rhythmic blue pulse. He wasn't typing. He didn't need to. His hands rested on the console, his mind interfaced directly with the rig's mainframe, and through it, the global network.
He was a spider in the center of a digital web that spanned the planet.
[System Status: Overclocked.] [Bandwidth: Unlimited.] [Target: Corporate Oversight Financial Division.]
Rick wasn't just hacking; he was looting. He bypassed firewalls like they were wet tissue paper. He slid past quantum encryptions that would take a supercomputer a thousand years to crack, simply by asking the code to open the door.
"Transfer," Rick commanded mentally.
