Mask of Humanity

There was a level beyond simply reading others Intent, and altering your own to mislead them.

The next stage was what that Tier 2 Cultivator, Hao, had used on Nicolai outside the Inheritance. Using Intent in that way required a shift in mindset, and significant utilisation of one's Soul.

It was performed by moving, mentally, into the Aura. The Aura was kind of like a gigantic, dispersed spirit. That was why it rippled and rang in response to Symbiotic or spiritually actions, why it could carry thoughts and feelings.

By mentally entering that Aura you could gain a different view, though it was difficult. According to the Memory Disc, many people were completely incapable of the mental state necessary to enter into it.

Nicolai and the Modules were fortunate. They found it surprisingly easy to enter that mental state. Perhaps because he was used to being more fluid, mentally, than most. His mind had long been something apt to shift and change, ever unpredictable, twisted like a cloth into different roles and configurations.

In the Aura-mind, everything was rendered strange and confusing. People and things didn't exist, only emanations, concepts, thoughts, sensations.

Back then, the Cultivator had entered the Aura-mind and used it against Nicolai. He had used it to twist the sensations and sights Nicolai experienced, by having the Aura brushing against him shift slightly. Nicolai didn't understand exactly how it worked, but work it did.

The counter to this was simply moving into the Aura space and perceiving the individual doing this to you. In fact, just being aware that someone was doing such trickery to you, even without accessing the Aura-mind, would significantly limit the effect of it.

Thus subtlety was key. You wanted to start altering someone's perceptions with a very light, and gradually increase it as you gained more influence. Or keep it subtle the whole way. The moment someone bothered to check—or, if they were simply paranoid by nature and always checking—your odds of success would fall dramatically.

Nicolai enjoyed the idea of this. He liked that it was a skill which could be learned that just required a Soul. You needed no Symbiotes to perform it, though there were some that aided or counteracted it.

Like a normal person learning unarmed combat, it was something that could give one Cultivator an edge over another, whether otherwise they would be evenly matched. He was interested in furthering his skill with Soul based attacks and Soul Sense for similar reasons.

Cyberwarfare was even more obsessed with the whole of Intent than he was. The Module saw a parallel between the Local and the Aura-mind, between hacking and Intent reading, between altering transmitted signals and twisting the Aura to confuse an opponent.

This became their new game, once they were skilled enough with basic Intent trickery. And for this, Simulations too became involved.

Cyberwarfare would work on defence, as before. It scanned the Aura, watching for Nicolai's attempt to spin a delusion. Simultaneously, Psychology and Simulations both would work to craft a delusion. Those two, together, were very effective at doing so.

Nicolai found the whole area trickier and more confusing than simple Intent, but it was enjoyable to learn nonetheless. He would practise against the Infiltrator while all three of them were within it, attempting to spot the delusions they aimed at him, and attempting to create his own to catch them.

It became clear that the best time to launch an Intent delusion was when the target wasn't expecting it. But in spite of this, Nicolai and the Modules, much of the time, performed the attacks on one another in turn. They were thus ready and waiting for the attack.

It was easy to start shifting someone's senses via Aura if they weren't expecting it, though ensuring they remained unaware was tricky. But Nicolai wasn't interested in being good at doing something just when it was easy. He wanted to be good at it when it was difficult. He wanted to master it. That meant doing it by surprise, and seeing how long he could maintain it before the Modules noticed, as well as doing it straight up, when the Modules were expecting it. And it meant taking both kinds of attacks himself, too.

He cycled the Modules out at times, too, having one of them with him while they worked against the other two.

Cyberwarfare rapidly became more adept than any of them at recognising a sneaky delusion, and the delusions Simulations plus Psychology designed were extremely detailed and convincing.

However, Nicolai found that there was something lacking about these delusions. He came to the conclusion that this was because the Modules had only second-hand experience as living, breathing, biological beings. They didn't have that same total and implicit understanding as a human would, of what it felt like to hold a cool stone, to feel the strain of your muscles as you lifted a heavy object, and so on.

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But this only meant that when he merged with them, they would be more effective than ever. Over time, they also learned more strategies, preparing themselves to match real opponents.

In the Aura-mind, you moved with the ripples. You blended and hid yourself within them. Every living body released ripples, especially those with a Soul, but the vast, vast majority of these Souls were not present and peering into the Aura-mind.

Because of this, you could use the ripples given off by your own form to hide the fact that you were operating in the Aura-mind.

You would try and keep these ripples between you and someone else who was in the Aura-mind, hiding from them.

You didn't exactly see, in the Aura-mind. You felt. You experienced. But it was possible to perceive others. It was even possible to know when another was perceiving you, if you held more skill in the realm than them. It was possible for them to know that you had perceived them perceiving you. It was possible for you to know they had perceived you, perceiving them, perceiving you, perceiving them. An endless rabbit hole.

Operating in the Aura-mind was confusing and disorientating. This, he knew from the Discs he'd been reading, was why few possessed the correct mental state to be good at utilising it.

But if one had that skill, they could use it whenever they liked. During combat, during conversation, at any time. It was simply difficult to do as it required focus and a splitting of concentration. It was an art based on deception and misdirection, a way to craft illusions of a sort. The main problem for any practitioner was that if the enemy knew to expect it, it was always quite easy to break.

Even someone with practically no understanding of it could learn to dip momentarily into the Aura mind, perceive the one working on them, or if not the exact source then certainly perceive that someone was working on them, and from there seek out the manipulator and break the delusion. It was heavily weighted in favour of the defender. The true skill, then, was crafting a delusion so subtle that they would never suspect, would never even bother to drop into the Aura mind and look around.

While the others focused on Intent and Delusions, Threat Analysis, with some aid from Simulations, focused on ripples. It had begun a study of these some time ago, and had gained a vast amount of data first from his travels through the jungle, and then from Phantom City. Both places had been full of ripples. With its outcropping on Nicolai's Soul, it was able to filter through the Aura ripples that arrived, and told him it would now be able to more accurately work out precisely what they meant and where they had come from.

This was a difficult business, because ripples weren't simple. They would combine, they would bounce, they changed when moving through different materials. Sometimes ripples could cancel out, appearing to disappear entirely, but Threat Analysis now knew that even then, the cancellation would leave something like a sub-ripple, which could be traced and understood.

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Walking around the cave, controlled remotely by the Modules, was a droid. Its name was Proof Of Concept. It was very simple. Kind of a metal stick-figure in a humanoid shape, skinny arms and legs, a small head dotted with sensors, and a square torso where the battery and processors were held.

Nicolai and the Modules had finished some experimentation, seeing what the Assembler could be used to make beyond the Assembler bot templates it came preloaded with.

This one was the latest and greatest of the droids they'd been working on. It was modelled on GRECKON's own LDI, or Light Droid Infantry, which were used by military, police, and corporations worldwide.

Nicolai had been thinking. He didn't want to start selling proper combat bots like those he'd make with the Assembler. At least not anytime soon. For starters, people would naturally regard those with some suspicion, as he wouldn't be able to make anything comparable to proper combat bots—thus they could easily tell these were Assembler make.

That was something he had to avoid. For the anti-materiel rifles and other weapons he would sell, he intended to make them match as closely to possible to models people were already familiar with. The goal was that they should assume he had something special going on with his Trade Link, allowing him reduced prices and access to things not available to most others.

If he tried to sell them what was obviously Assembler bots, they would realise that he had an Assembler—and would also anticipate the things to be full of backdoors and spyware. The other issue was the expense of making them, and how straight up dangerous one would be.

But droids were simpler to make. In fact, he and the Modules had proven with Proof Of Concept that the the Assembler could create very serviceable copies of the standard GRECKON LDI model.

It came to stand before him, and he looked it over carefully. There was the familiar logo, a large gear-wheel with a G in the centre. The overall shape of it was identical, the only issues were some unavoidable changes to its outer coating, and some of the materials used. Minor, and difficult for anyone who wasn't an expert to notice.

People would recognise droids that looked like this. With the branding properly applied and the software closely matching the real deal—something the Modules were capable of—they would view such droids with much less suspicion. Unfortunately for his customers, the Modules were also capable of installing backdoors that would be all-but impossible to find within this software. He anticipated they would be very popular. The main benefit of droids, was that they could use tools and equipment made for humans. Thus, easily armed by the people he'd sell them to, easily turned to whatever purpose they had in mind.

The idea of not only making good money from selling droids, but also knowing that if he encountered people out in the wild using droids he'd sold, he'd be able to seize control of them, was very appealing.

Not to mention the personal benefits of having himself a team of droids. The Modules could directly control them in a much more intelligent manner than the norm for a droid. He would be able to quite quickly and cheaply make a team that could fight alongside him.

Best of all, droids could pack up small. He should be able to fit quite a few in the Big Mouth, to deploy as needed.

The next robots he had in mind were gundrones, though that was still in-progress.

In his mind, a tide of machines poured over everything in his way.