ACCESS DENIED
In our terrible, inevitable future we will move beyond primitive tumbler locks and into a world of nightmarish, Gordian cryptography. After all, as the walls between those with and those without grow ever-more unscalable, they’ll need a good door to keep us out. But nobody makes a lock without a key. Here’s 18 locks and keys to keep your players on their toes.
1 Jagged, thrumming data blades encased in brightly-coloured plastic housing.
2 Fist-sized drives with stacked, spinning platters, factory-paired with their matching lock.
3 A severed hand, stitched together with optical-fibres and ceramic plates, still twitching.
4 The memory of the smell of the grass in Golden Gate Park, 1996, the last time they were truly happy.
5 A deep-path retinal scan twinned with a blinked morse passcode.
6 A skin sample, cut swiftly with a cauterising laser.
7 An endless corridor of numbered doors, all but one leading back to the same corridor.
8 An echo sieve, inserted nasally to extract a painful memory in exchange for entry.
9 A voice-authenticated lock provides security and ease for the user. Unfortunately, it is fooled by even a dreadful impression. 10 A holographic facsimile of the vault owner, whom you must dine with and sufficiently impress.
11 Sixteen lines of cryptopoetical verse, sung in perfect key. 12 An antique, Old-Earth revolver of brass and teak. Insert, rotate and fire.
13 A porcelain mask, laced with a maze of copper terminals. Wear it for the biometric assessment to begin.
14 A pinprick blood sample, rapidly analysed for DNA profiling. 15 Volumetric sensors studded with electro-auric probes, providing a complete physical and mental profile.
16 A terminal demands that you subscribe to at least three of its paid newsletters before you can proceed. They are impossible to cancel.
17 A snow-white lab rat, one of thirteen identical siblings, genetically imprinted to navigate a complex maze of triggers. 18 Personality evaluation metrics, collected by a brittle AI with one giant eyeball and a plastic clipboard.