I know, I know: early! Had a thought about it early, and I got to it. I even found a place to insert one of the orphan passages that I write first, and try to make fit later. Go me!
After all of that, finding Adam’s server was almost anticlimactic. He had plugged in an Amalgamation data cube to store his (presumed) ill-gotten pirate booty, and it looked… like an Amalgamation data cube. “Hey, Prospect!” I rasped. “This thing encrypted?”
“I do not know, Wind-Walker Tanaka. Please do not touch the data cube until I have scanned it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s delicate.” The Amalgamation used a weird encryption method for its data storage units, at least when it came to us half-uplifted types. The Process says that it’s to keep us from knowledge we can’t be expected to safely use, and we’ve learned by now to take that warning seriously. There’s plenty of stories about what happened to people who didn’t
Now, I was assuming that Adam already had whatever puzzle-lock on it disabled, but why take chances? So I just stared at the cube’s shifting, and admittedly-pretty yellow and black design, until The Process spoke up again. “There was no Amalgamation encryption on the data. I am also not detecting any kind of poisonous or psychoactive substances on the surface You can safely retrieve it.”
I popped it out of its holder. “Awesome.” I still wore gloves while grabbing it, though, and carefully put it in a guaranteed-shielded sample bag. It’s not that I didn’t trust The Process, but I knew where this thing had been.