God Mode - Part 3

You are not where you believe yourself to be.

This third installment of God Mode finds Brate investigating the mysterious node where he’s stumbled on to a dark and powerful secret. There’s danger here, and he has to play things very careful. But a surprise opportunity arises, and it changes everything.

If you haven’t already read the first two installments, start here.

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Brate figured he could bounce between Levelate’s safe houses for about five days. After that, Levelate would start demanding results, and would likely shut Brate out of the rental accounts.

To play it safe, Brate would only count on two days. And he’d use that time to set up his own rentals. To do that, he was going to have to break his own rules.

The patch he’d built was definitely working better than expected, but one thing he’d always known it could do was mimic other psyche profiles. That was a tempting ability to play with. If you could pose as someone else, it meant you effectively were someone else, at least in the eyes of Stack.

This was nothing like sneaking in and posing as someone else. People who did that got busted immediately, because the psyche profiles had no chance of matching up. But the patch Brate had designed didn’t try to co-op someone’s ID. It was grabbing their psyche profile, and broadcasting that to Stack in an exact overlay of whatever Brate was doing. It was challenging to do, and it wasn’t perfect—it could be detected. Which was why Brate coded in a rapid switch. The profiles were picked and swapped so rapidly, there wasn’t any time for the system to detect that something was off.

But technically, the patch could hold on to an ID for as long as Brate wanted. For at least long enough to give him access to someone else’s resources.

Brate had decided from the start, though, that Rule Number One had to be, Don’t spend other people’s crypto.

This wasn’t about some qualm of morals or ethics. It was about not crapping where you eat.

Spending crypto meant exposure. Stack logged every purchase with the ID of the one spending. And every week, every user got an accounting of what they’d spent.

For people like Rich Dad, some small spending here and there would go virtually unnoticed, most of the time. People who spent millions of crypto on lunches wouldn’t notice hundreds or even thousands spent on groceries.

But Brate didn’t have fine control over who he was imitating. The patch was a net, casting around for loose and active IDs, mimicking them in the gaps of their own Stack usage. It cycled through them pretty quick, too, so moment by moment Stack would identify him as someone else.

Most users of Stack weren’t as wealthy as Rich Dad. None were as poor as the Stats, of course. But most users fell toward the bottom of the crypto spectrum, close to the line just before falling off into Stat poverty. If someone like Brate came along and spent all their crypto, they could be Stats in an afternoon.

He didn’t like that. He had a lot of moral flexibility, but he knew what it was like to be poor. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Almost anyone. But definitely not people just trying to get by in the world.

But there was another, more practical reason for his rule. If he started spending crypto from people who would notice, then they’d start reporting it. And that was bound to bring Agents sniffing around. It wouldn’t take much for an Agent to figure out there was a ghost in the machine and turn the full power of Stack toward hunting him.

Brate wasn’t sure how safe he could be if Stack got on to his tricks. Right now he was in a twilight area, able to hide in the shadows or out in plain sight. If Agents started hunting, all the lights would come on, the shadows would vanish, and there’d be nowhere to hide.

Breaking his rule was going to put him in jeopardy. But maybe there was a way to hedge his bets.