Since that was the case, I was not expecting to get much from this. "I... I wanna go home. Please!" he begged. I felt for him. I really did. I wanted to end this once and for all. Pushing Paul out of the way, I looked at the screen. I was blown away. It was a massive labyrinthine puzzle. "Let me try it. I'm getting sad looking at his puppy eyes as he begs." Paul grumbled "Fine. Let's try to put him down now! You can try." I rolled my eyes as he pat me on the head. I maxed out my hacking skills. Now that it was at the easiest possible variation of the game, I could see what I was dealing with. There were multiple games that had to be won in sequence: Sinuous, Color Pipes and then Entanglement. In Sinuous, you are your mouse cursor. You avoid the endless torrent of red dots, touch the green dots for invulnerability, and see how long you can last. The game is highly replayable for short 5 to 10 minute bursts. For Color Pipes, you must pair colors together by drawing lines between them. You also need to have the entire board covered. The problem is, if any of the lines cross, the move is invalid.
The game of Entanglement is perfect when you're stressed. The goal is to create the longest path through tiles you place down. These tiles are randomly generated, but offer enough options that it isn't frustrating. At least, until a guy like Paul came along to rage out. Because this was a challenge for details, you had to survive 5 minutes in Sinuous to get through that stage. It was easy because of our level. We were both getting green dots every 3 seconds or so. Still, that was 5 minutes of focus that was unavoidable. I did not want to imagine what it would look like at level 1 in Hacking. It probably would be nightmarish if not impossible. Now I was playing Color Pipes. 5 colors were spread on a big 8 by 8 grid. It certainly was not easy by any means. "It used to be a 6 by 6 grid." Paul said. It took me a good 9 minutes to get through using trial and error. There were now a 100 piece hexagonal comb tessellation segments. I had to find a path to get certain information out of him by rotating the center piece to get the path outlined. There were 5 things at random points I had to connect here.
Under the circumstances of never playing this game before, 3 out of 5 was not so bad. The laptop instantly started digging deep to pull out all the data it could. The AEP unit tried everything it could to stop it, but it was no use. It could not longer maintain human form at all. The armor plating was only covering up half its body at random points. I could feel the heat from standing behind him. There was a loud whir of fans coming from inside as his body tried to cool itself down some. The laptop had a bar for extracting data. Once it was at 100% we looked at it. It was encrypted. Paul then hit a few keys and then it became human language. We were able to make hacking programs for all AEP units, find the exact location of the toxic transmission hub and control his organ and blade. What I was not able to get was his ability to shapeshift or change his personality and brainwash him. That would take another go at the minigames. We definitely shut down his toxic organ, which was his whole outer layer and forced the blade to recede into his arm. We then took the coordinated of the hub down.
