Agent Asha: Mission Shark Bytes

by Sophie Deen

  “Sweet!” said Tumble.

  Drone sighed. “Not sweet. We don’t have eyeballs, Tumble. We’re robots.”

  As the pair began arguing about eyeballs and retinal scanning, Asha began to make a plan for getting past the guards. She ran through all of the possible options and some impossible ones too.

  Then she thought about the spy shows she’d watched on HypePipe. “I bet there’s more than one entrance. There must be a back way for delivery lorries. If we could hide inside a lorry, we might be able to sneak past security. Let’s go check it out.”

  They crept around the edge of the fence but they didn’t get far. A slick black quadcopter with a red warning light immediately flew up to them. “STEP AWAY FROM THE PERIMETER,” it ordered.

  Drone hovered steadily in the air. She wasn’t worried by a poor quality, low-spec security drone. Tumble, on the other hand, was far less relaxed. He froze and tried to look as much like a toy as possible. Asha picked Tumble up and cuddled him close.

  “He’s gone into panic mode,” Drone buzzed.

  Asha was busy thinking. She had fooled plenty of grown-ups by pretending to be stupid and cute. Maybe the same tactic would work on robots. “Sorry,” she said to the security drone in her most babyish voice. “We’re lost.”

  The drone paused in mid-air and scanned her. “Situation normal,” it whirred and hovered away.

  Tumble checked that the drone was safely out of sight again before springing back to life in Asha’s arms. “Good thing I was here to scare that copter off,” he announced, planting himself on Asha’s shoulder and pointing forward. “Now let’s go and break in!”

  They carried on walking round the fence, ducking whenever they saw a CCTV camera, until Asha found what she’d been looking for: the back entrance. Like the front gate, security guards sat in two little booths on either side of the gleaming silver bars.

  Asha watched as an orange lorry with the Shelly Inc logo drove towards the gates. As the lorry approached, it slowed down to pass under a metal arch. A robotic arm moved slowly above the lorry, bathing it in a red light. “NO THREAT DETECTED,” boomed an electronic voice. A green light flashed in the security guard’s booth, and he waved the lorry through.

  “It’s a scanner,” said Drone. “It shares many characteristics with those commonly found in airports. If we hide in a lorry, they’ll catch us immediately.”

  Asha had a determined look in her eye. “Not if I can connect to the scanner and hack it. I just need to get close.”

  Before Drone could protest, Asha had dropped to her hands and knees, and was crawling through the mud and bushes towards the scanner. The plastic box containing the machine’s circuits was hidden within reach of the bush. Asha pulled out her new What-A-Bottle with the hidden screwdrivers. Within seconds, she had opened the scanner’s plastic casing.

  “Aha! The serial port. Nice.” Asha tapped a little trapezium-shaped socket that had nine gold pins. Then she connected her tablet to it and loaded up a terminal emulator. This program would allow her to give the scanner new instructions. As she scanned each line of code, all the noise around her disappeared. It was just Asha and her screen.

  “I’ll reprogram the scanner,” she whispered to herself. “At the moment, the alarms are programmed to sound if there’s anything suspicious in the back of the lorry.” Within minutes, she’d found the bit of code that she wanted to tweak, rewritten it, and rebooted the system. “Now none of the alarms will go off, even if there’s something highly suspicious in the back of the lorry, like me, my nannybot and robot hamster!”

  “Tumble, Drone, we need to be ready.” Asha beckoned them over. “The next time a lorry stops, we’re jumping in the back and staying very quiet!”

  “The radiation from the scanner is at acceptable levels so long as we don’t spend more than 24 hours in it,” Drone replied, scanning the equipment. “In fact, we will be exposed to less radiation than eating a hundred—”

  The low hum of an engine interrupted Drone. Another lorry was approaching the scanner. Perfect. Asha ran out of the bushes, opened the doors and scrambled into the back. Tumble clung to her jumpsuit and Drone followed on silent mode. Apart from a slither of light creeping in under the door and the glow of Asha’s tablet, it was very dark inside.

  The lorry moved into the scanner.

  “NO THREAT DETECTED,” the voice boomed. Asha breathed a sigh of relief.

  And then, suddenly:

  “INTRUDERS DETECTED!”

  “JOURNALISTS DETECTED!”

  “OFF-GRID HUMAN DETECTED!”

  “PIRANHAS DETECTED!”

  “What’s happening?” Asha began to panic as the voice kept going. She scrolled frantically through the code. “Oh no, there’s a bug!”

  “OMG! Where?” Tumble jumped onto Asha’s shoulder. “Not another one!”

  “No, Tumble. A computer bug. Remember? Jam sandwiches?” Tumble’s face was blank. “I’ve accidentally programmed it to play all of the possible alarms, instead of playing nothing at all.”

  “STINK BOMB DETECTED!”

  From the back of the lorry, Asha heard shouts, as the security guard came running. Asha needed to fix this before they were caught. Time seemed to slow down as she ran through the code.

  “You seriously think I’ve got piranhas and a stink bomb in here?” the lorry driver shouted. “Ridiculous. Your scanner’s broken, pal.”

  “MARTIANS DETEC—!”

  The message cut off, mid-word, as Asha finished debugging.

  “Right,” said the lorry driver in the sudden silence. “Let’s try this again.”

  Asha heard her climb back into the cab, and felt the lorry reversing out of the scanner. When it moved forward again, the voice announced “NO THREAT DETECTED,” and then fell silent.

  “I should still check in there,” protested the guard.

  Asha’s eyes widened. She glanced around the lorry. There were tubes of waterproof sealant and bundles of colourful cables, but there was nowhere for them to hide. Tumble was on the floor in panic mode again, and Drone’s warning lights were flashing red. Asha held her breath. How could she have made such a simple mistake?

  The lorry driver spoke again. “No way. You’re wasting my time. Or do you want to explain to Shelly B why her delivery is behind schedule?”

  “Uh … mmmm… Well … the thing is… No.” The guard sounded uncomfortable.

  The truck lurched forwards as the driver started it up again. Asha heard the gate slide open, and then the lorry trundled into Shelly Inc.

  “WE’RE IN! WE’VE DONE IT.” Asha whisper-shouted the words. She felt a strange mixture of adrenaline, adventure and something else… Guilt? Fear? She’d never broken the law before. At least, never knowingly. Even though Hedy had said that the CSA worked with governments all over the world, Asha wondered if she was making a mistake. This was different from skipping assembly. She closed her eyes, and imagined a warm cup of chai and a head rub from Dad…

  “How are you feeling, Asha?” asked Drone. “You have not eaten in 2 hours and 19 minutes. My facial scans suggest that—”

  “I’m fine,” Asha snapped, opening her eyes, and pulling a banana out of her backpack. It was too late to turn back now. And besides, they were following Hedy’s instructions and breaking the law for a very good reason.

  They were saving the Internet.

  Chapter 10

  12:49

  In the darkness of the lorry, a warning flashed up on Drone’s display. It was an alert to join ShellyNet WiFi, if they agreed to the terms and conditions.

  Asha narrowed her eyes, remembering what Hedy had told her about Shelly Inc. “Let’s not join the WiFi. I don’t think we should agree to these.”

  Drone was silent but her loading wheel was working overtime. Usually she was reluctant to let Asha sign up for anything unless she was at least 75 per cent in agreement with the terms and conditions. But there was no CSA backup satellite connection for Drone in Shelly Inc. Without WiFi
, Drone wouldn’t be able to access half her functions, including location services.

  “On this one occasion, I calculate that it is safer to break the rules,” she said eventually. Robot-sighing, Drone signed up with a fake email account.

  Asha and Tumble looked at each other in amazement.

  “We’re stopping!” said Tumble, clenching his tiny paws into fists. “Let’s roll. Time to show Shelly what we’re made of.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Drone. “It’s much more logical to wait and listen, to see if—”

  Tumble jumped back onto Asha’s shoulder and the two leapt out of the back of the lorry before Drone could finish her sentence. They were in a huge underground loading bay with orange Shelly Inc lorries parked everywhere. Robotic arms on giant wheels were loading crates into the back of the empty lorries. Asha and Tumble dived behind the first crate they could see. Drone’s display dimmed unhappily, but there was no way she was going to let Asha go into Shelly Inc on her own.

  Asha looked around. On one wall a large screen displayed a map of Shelly Inc. Hedy had said that the ShellyServer was located in Shelly’s office. That was at the other end of the building, on the floor above them, only two corridors away from the world-famous and much FaceSpaced ShellySlide. Asha felt excitement bubble inside.

  She pointed at some metal doors at the far side of the car park. “There’s the lift. Chalo!”

  “Too dangerous,” beeped Drone. “The floor numbers are changing so there must be people using it.”

  “Don’t be such a scaredycopter, Drone! We’re not going to get caught.” Tumble waved his tiny paws. “Not with my mad skills!” He kicked at the air and slipped off Asha’s shoulder, landing with a crash beside a crate. Luckily, the noise was covered up by the robots loading the lorries.

  Drone was right. It wasn’t safe to use the lift. Asha scanned the car park. They needed another way to get into Shelly’s office.

  “Look!” She pointed to the base of a wall. “That’s an air vent.” She ran over to it, hoping her new CSA bodysuit would help her blend into her surroundings. She opened her backpack, flipped the cap of her What-A-Bottle and within seconds was using her screwdriver to unscrew the cover panel. She stuck her head inside the vent and found a maintenance map stuck to the inside. It looked as though one of the vents led up to the floor above and then all the way across to Shelly’s office. So far so good.

  Asha looked around then squeezed inside. The vent was designed for maintenance bots and was only just large enough for her. It was hard to get a grip on the metal surface, so she pressed her back against one side and started edging upwards with her feet. Drone hovered behind with Tumble balanced on her wing.

  Five stomach-pinching minutes later, a new air-vent path opened on their right. Breathing a sigh of relief, Asha stopped climbing and started crawling forwards, stopping at each junction to make sure she had remembered the route correctly.

  Every few metres, a ventilation grille would give them a glimpse of what was happening below inside Shelly Inc. They passed over a huge workshop where engineers were building rows of dark objects that looked like small aeroplanes.

  Then they crawled over a gym, where sweating employees were pedalling on exercise bikes, while typing on laptops at the same time. Electronic music pumped through the wall-speakers. “Bliss! Unity! Big! Motivate! Reach! The! Sales! Sky!” yelled the instructor.

  There were endless yoga studios and smoothie stations. As Asha stopped and took a sip of water she listened in on one of the meetings. “Hey, teamies! Hold up!” The speaker was pointing at a smart board. “We need to complete our KPIs and OKRs and FYIs and IDKs before 1 p.m. remember? Or we won’t get our Daily Poo Bonus Break. TEAMWORK IS … monitored heavily and assessed every minute. You wouldn’t want to let the whole team down by wasting time farting, would you?”

  “Let’s keep going,” said Asha, crawling a little bit faster. Shelly Inc wasn’t quite how she had imagined.

  Meanwhile, Tumble was swinging off the pipes and jumping from grille to grille. “Ouch!” muttered Asha, as he kicked her in the head for the third time. She looked down and stopped suddenly. “Drone, look at this!”

  Below was another room full of computer screens. But what had caught Asha’s attention was a beautiful butterfly fluttering through the air. Only the flashing blue lights on its antennae gave it away as a robot. A woman was controlling it using a device, while two people scribbled notes on a smart board.

  “Bluetooth test 3006 has been successful,” announced one.

  Asha narrowed her eyes. “Wow, 3,006 tests is a lot – even for me. What are they testing for? And why is Shelly interested in Bluetooth?”

  “Bluetooth doesn’t require the Internet,” replied Drone. “So it’s unlikely to be linked to ShellyNet. It’s too short-range.” She sounded nervous. “But what if it’s spyware and that bot has a camera? Let’s keep going.”

  Asha was grateful now for the knee-padding in her bodysuit. They kept crawling until they found themselves looking down on a room that made Asha stop and blink. It was one of the workspaces where Shelly often filmed her FaceSpace videos. The floor was covered in grass, and plants tumbled down the walls. A rainbow-striped slide spiralled down through the floor.

  “Can we go on the ShellySlide?” asked Tumble, bouncing up and down. “I’ve always wanted to. Come on Ashaface, please times a thousand million zillion!”

  “Nope,” said Asha. “But I reckon the slide is near to Shelly’s office. I think we’re really close!”

  She was fascinated by the room. There were no desks. Instead, people sat in egg-shaped pods, which dangled from the ceiling like gigantic neon insect cocoons. Everyone was tapping away on at least one laptop. No one was talking. Bots zipped around with trays of smoothies and snacks.

  “Amateurs,” muttered Drone at Asha’s heels. Drone was always disdainful of delivery bots. Maybe she was secretly scared of becoming one.

  Asha wondered what it would be like to work at Shelly Inc. Even though everyone was smiling, something felt funny. They looked the same, walked the same and talked the same. Dad had always told her to trust her gut – and her gut was telling her to get out of here. Despite the bright colours and adventure-playground furniture, Shelly Inc didn’t seem to be any fun at all.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” she said to Drone and Tumble, as she started to move through the vent again. “Let’s find the file and get out of here.”

  Just as Asha was thinking her knees couldn’t possibly crawl any further, she looked down through the grille and saw a room where almost everything was made out of glass.

  There were no slides or cocoons. A painting of what looked like a rectangle trying to eat two triangles hung above a desk that was bigger than Asha’s bed. A flat-screen monitor glinted on the desk. Underneath the desk was a large, black box, with a line of flashing lights down one side. SHELLYSERVER was printed across it in bright orange.

  They’d found it.

  Chapter 11

  13:11

  Asha started feeling around the vent, searching for a way to open the grille. Drone’s torch revealed a small rectangle of metal rising up from the smooth ceiling. Asha saw it was a digital lock, with the numbers one to ten neatly displayed in a grid. This server was the heart of the organization, the jewel in the crown, the cheese on the pizza, so it made sense that Shelly had used her tightest security and a complex encryption to stop anyone from accessing it.

  Or so she thought.

  She hadn’t planned for secret agents like Asha. Asha had spent the last eleven years making (and breaking) gadgets, apps and locks. And perfecting the tiniest lines of code had given Asha an amazing attention to detail. The first thing she spotted on the lock? Dirty smears. Someone had recently opened it. When she tilted her head to the side and Drone shone the torch at just the right angle, it was easy to tell which keys had been pressed.

  “Drone?” whispered Asha. “Can you run the Number Generation Program and try e
very combination of 1, 4, 6, 7 and 9?”

  Steadied by Tumble, Drone was able to extend a metal arm all the way through the grille. Moving with the kind of speed and precision only achieved by robots, she tapped through the 3,125 possible combinations of the dirty numbers. After thirteen seconds, the lock display flashed green and the grille slowly opened.

  Without thinking about the distance from the ceiling to the floor, Asha jumped into the room below. She landed on a carpet so soft and thick that it reminded her of a marshmallow. Tumble followed, bouncing a few times, before lying on his back and spreading his arms like he was making a snow angel. Drone glided down and hovered above Shelly’s desk.

  Asha went over to Drone and ran her fingers over the surface of the desk. A glass of water sat on a glass coaster. She sat down on the glass chair and the screen in front of her flashed into life. Was it activated by pressure on the seat? A user called Ricardo Kon Carney was still logged in.

  “It’s #TimeForT from the office today,” Tumble interrupted Asha’s thoughts. He had pulled his phone out of his pouch and was happily vlogging away. “Welcome to my workspace. Today’s hot project: a carpet angel. Kind of a snow angel, but on a carpet. Next big thing? Like if you agree. Admiring the painting on the wall? Tumble original, do not steal.”

  Drone snatched the phone. “Tumble, we are here undercover. If you post you will give away our location!” she snapped.

  Asha was struggling to gather her thoughts. She pulled out her tablet and plugged it into a port on the side of the ShellyServer. A message flashed up on her screen: THIS IS A PRIVATE SERVER. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. PLEASE SELECT YOUR USERNAME.