There were multiple games that had to be won in sequence: Sinuous, Color Pipes and then Entanglement. I knew this from hacking into 10-001. Paul was there with me at the time, so he made sure to put the app that we had created on it when he generated the laptop. That was great for me. It only took a minute for me to upload the full program into him. He reeled back like he had been punched. When I executed the program, the laptop instantly started digging deep to pull out all the data it could. 03 tried everything it could to stop it, but it was no use. I was already fully inside of him now. He was blind-sighted by this. The laptop had a bar for extracting data. Once it was at 100% I looked at it. It it became human language soon after. We were able to make hacking programs for all AEP units, find the exact location of his transmission hub and control his organs and internal weapons. What I was not able to get last time was their ability to shapeshift using nanites or the power to change an AEP unit's personality and brainwash them all. That would take another go at all the minigames.
It would take me some time. Time I was not sure that I had. You had to survive 5 minutes in Sinuous to get through that stage. There was no choice other than to do it. If any time was wasted whining, I would not be able to get to his core and force him to join our clan. After locking in my focus, I now was able to play Color Pipes. 5 colors were spread on a big 7 by 7 grid. When I played it last it was a 8 by 8 grid. That meant that 03 was trying to resist me. It was not easy by any means of the imagination either way. He was clenching his fists and focusing. Probably trying hard to throw up more emergency firewalls to stop me and get me out of his systems. I just rolled my shoulders as I got ready to challenge the game. It took me a good 4 minutes to get through now that I had some experience and made some progress from last time. It was not looking good for me. There were now a 120-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 that I had to connect here.
Luckily for me, I had done this before on 10-003. The 3 nodes that I had captured before were dull. The 2 that I still needed to get were shinning bright red. He was a big and powerful Conqueror after all. Red suited him very well. "You have less than a minute left. You can't win." he hissed. I could see fluid drip from him as he tried to cool down from the strain. That was true. However, I could see a path before me. I was able to get to one just before time elapsed. "Time is up! Stop moving around inside my programming. It's time for me to lock you out." he gasped. I lifted my hands from the keyboard. There was no need to anger him. The laptop still needed time to extract the data from the new node and integrate it to the app. The bar on the laptop was filling up as he was trying to lock me out. "Stop... stop it!" he hissed as he flinched. The bar was indeed slowing down, but it was still going. "Why can't I...?" was all he got out before his whole body twitched. That was when the bar got to 100%. I saw all the encrypted data. It did not take too long for it to be translated into something readable.
