Arriving at the home she now owned but had never seen before, Lana walked up to the door and pressed her finger against the lock. The house was small and wooden, its aging white paint starting to flake along the edges of its slats from too many seasons spent untended. Inside it was little more than a living room and kitchen downstairs and a small single bedroom upstairs, but despite this it had all the things Lana and her colleagues sought.

There were, apparently, keys in the apartment, and in the future she would probably use them. For now, however, she would use the tool that had been built into her middle finger to allow her to open this, or any other lock with ease. Inside her finger ran four fibers that now started to snake through slits in the skin of the end of the finger pressed against the keyhole. They slid into the lock, seeking and finding the interior contours of the barrel and automatically forming themselves to the required shape.

With four independent fibers she could break even the most advanced multi-dimensional locks, but this was a simple deadbolt, and she opened it effortlessly. It would not be so easy for anyone else to get into the house once she left it.

Closing and bolting the door, she went straight to work, unsheathing the black bag and taking it upstairs to place it in an unimportant looking cupboard in the bedroom. The house had been left in a bad state, but she could clean it tomorrow. As the bag was placed on the floor of the cupboard, its own wires started snaking out of its casing. The layout and wiring of the house had already been downloaded from the easily hacked cable company’s database.

Within minutes the wires found their way through gaps in the floorboards to the junction boxes it needed. The black cables latched onto the sockets like vampires on our information network’s proverbial neck, and instantly began to suck. Easily bypassing the simple blocks erected by the cable company to stop illegal usage, the surge of data began to flow through the machine and via its subspace tweeter to eager machine minds above.