Devious Origins

by Thad Phetteplace

CHAPTER 24

  As usual, thoughts of my impending meeting with Dee proved to be a distraction as I attended my morning classes. I thought about blowing off my last class of the day, Philosophy 102, but class participation was a not insignificant part of the grade, so I decided against it. This left me a two hour break between my last morning class and Philosophy. I grabbed a sandwich from the cafeteria and spent most of those two hours trying to finish up the electronics project I had abandoned the previous night. I barely finished soldering the last connections when the alarm on my phone urged me to class. No time for a circuit test. I wrapped the components in bubble wrap, carefully slid them into my backpack, and ran out the door.

  To be honest, Philosophy is not my favorite class. The unit on logic and reason was interesting, but otherwise I often found the topics too abstract, the arguments to fuzzy and impractical. It was so unlike math and engineering in that respect. Nevertheless, the discussions were often fun, and today was no exception. We discussed René Descartes' evil demon thought experiment from his Meditations on First Philosophy and compared it to The Matrix movies. We discussed solipsism, the nature of reality, and the definition of knowledge. The hour flew past, and suddenly class was over. If I hurried, I could catch the 76 bus in time to make it to the factory by 2pm.

  I ran to the bus stop, barely beating the bus there. It was 2:02 when I reached the door of Dee's lair. The main door was locked, so I got out my phone to call Dee, but then the door opened before I finished dialing. Brian Claremont, one half of DualCore, greeted me.

  “Hey Barry, thought that might be you at the door. Come in. We started without you, but you haven't missed much.”

  I followed Brian to the makeshift coffee tables where Liz Claremont and Dee were pouring over a variety of documents. They had arrayed various photographs and printouts over nearly every surface, the only exception being a space occupied by DualCore's tablet computers.

  Dee looked up as I approached. “Barry, you made it. You never let me down.” She nearly glowed with happiness. I thought for a moment she was just happy to see me, but then I recognized it for what it was. It was the joy of doing. Of problem solving. It was like the rush I get when solving a complex software problem or designing a clever hardware hack. I recognized it, and it was infectious. I wanted to be part of it. Some part of me wondered if this was her superpower at work. Maybe her I-Belong-Here field creates a general sense of inclusiveness.

  Or maybe I'm just going crazy.

  “The day is young,” I answered, “and my capacity to disappoint is limitless.”

  Dee laughed and said, “self deprecating humor is a defense mechanism. You don't need it here.” She turned back to Liz and pointed at one of the printouts. “I still think this is our best option. Anything else will take longer and has less chance of success.”

  “I still say it's too risky,” Liz countered, “let us work it from the outside. It's what we do.”

  Dee shook her head, “This is what I do, Elizabeth. You've got your skills. I've got mine. Trust that I can do this.”

  “Is she still pushing for a frontal assault?” Brian asked. Liz nodded yes.

  “Someone bring me up to speed, please,” I requested. The words frontal assault had warning bells going off in my brain.

  “We've found ourselves a hard target,” Dee offered, “now we're looking for a way to crack it.”

  “It's the Freedom Birthright Foundation,” Brian explained, “We've discovered they have an office right here in the city. Liz and I dug into that email hack that the professor talked about. Not many bread crumbs left to follow after all this time, but we found a few.” Brian looked very self satisfied as he said it.

  “We couldn't track it back to the Foundation directly,” Liz continued, “but we poked around some of the darker parts of the net on the hunch that the work had been farmed out, and we got a hit. Called in a few favors and got a list of IP addresses used to communicate with the black hat they hired for the actual hack. Most were anonymized, but they got sloppy. A couple of addresses traced back to the Foundation's own network at an office building less than half a mile from here.”

  “Our target,” Dee enthused.

  Brian nodded in agreement. “Yes, and Dee's right, it's a hard target. We tried penetrating their network from the outside, and the security is surprisingly good. Nothing we can't deal with eventually, but it might take some time. We might have to go social on it.”

  “Sure,” Dee replied, “and social engineering is basically what I do. I'll walk in there and punch a hole through their firewall from the inside. Then you two can go medieval on their servers and look for anything incriminating.”

  Brian looked at his sister. “She makes a compelling argument,” he said.

  Liz sighed. “I suppose we could send her in with the skeleton key.”

  “Yes, send me in with that,” Dee replied. “Um, what is it?”

  Liz reached into a pocket and came out with an innocuous looking USB thumb drive. It was connected to a short gold chain with a small plastic skull on the other end. She tossed it to Dee.

  “Cool,” Dee exclaimed as she caught it, “super hacking tools. Just tell me what to run, what to type, where to click... I learn fast. We can do this.”

  Liz snorted. “Please don't insult me. I made that so it's fire and forget. It uses a zero day exploit on the USB firmware to auto-run as soon as you plug it in. Installs a rootkit that works on Windows, Mac, Linux... even some network routers and hubs. Just plug it in and wait for the LED to stop blinking, unplug and walk away. Done. It will open a stealth VPN out through their firewall to one of our command and control servers. We take it from there.”

  Dee's eyes widened. She dangled the USB drive from its chain and stared at it. “Wow. I knew you were good, but that is some freaky James Bond level stuff.”

  I had to agree. I consider myself a pretty sharp coder, but this was an epic hack. Using it would be criminal, however, so my gut was twisted in a mix of awe and worry. Dee was going to get herself arrested or worse. With some trepidation I asked, “So what's my part in all this?”

  “We need you to be the man in the van,” Dee responded.

  I glanced around the factory, “We have a van?”

  “It's a figure of speech,” she assured me, “DualCore will be busy working the Internet side of things, so I need you working comms. I'll wear a Bluetooth headset for my phone. You wait a couple blocks away with Martin. When I signal that I'm leaving, you swing round to pick me up.”

  Well, at least she didn't want me inside the building with her. I was basically just the getaway driver. Some part of me wondered why I had so thoroughly accepted my role in this madness, but I knew there was no turning back. Dee was going to do this with or without me, and I needed to make sure her chance of success was maximized.

  “OK, got it,” I said.

  “You ever drive a scooter?,” she thought to ask, “Martin is pretty forgiving. He's got a really low center of gravity, so it's even easier than a bike. Just go light on the throttle; he's not the typical Vespa.”

  I assured her I could handle it but resolved to take a few practice spins around the factory just to be sure.

  “We'll go in around 9am, height of the morning rush. I'll blend in with all the office drones on their way to their cubicles.”

  “They have key card access to the building,” Brian advised, “You can't get past the reception area without an ID badge.”

  “That's why I cased the place earlier today,” Dee handed her iPhone to Brian, “I got a few decent pictures of people with their badges out, good enough that we should be able to dummy up a reasonable facsimile. No need for an RFID chip, I'll just tailgate my way in behind someone else.”

  “Oh give me that,” exclaimed Liz as she took the phone from her brother, “you know I'm the forger in the family.” She flipped through the pictures, expanding some of them with
a two finger gesture. “Yeah, these will work. You got in real close. You didn't make anyone suspicious, did you? Snapping all these pictures?”

  “No, I was disguised as a courier, asked the guard at reception for an office number that wasn't in the building. Then I pretended to look up the address on my phone while I was actually taking pictures.”

  Seeing Dee's phone reminded me of something. I dug in my backpack and brought out my recent electronics project and began carefully unwrapping it from its bubble wrap. “Um, Dee, can I see your riding goggles for a minute?”

  “Sure, just a sec.” She dug in her own backpack and handed them over, then noticing the package I was unwrapping. “So what's the gadget?”

  “Upgrades,” was all I said. It would be easier to show them than try to explain. I adjusted one of the pico projectors in its plastic housing and then carefully slid it into the right eyepiece of the goggles.

  Liz leaned over to Brian and said, “He brought toys.”

  “Shush,” Brian answered, “we shouldn't disturb him. That looks like delicate work.”

  “But he's not sharing,” she whispered back.

  I became very conscious that I had derailed the planning session and become the center of attention. “Just give me a minute,” I said, “and all will become clear.” I positioned the second pico projector in the left eyepiece, finished attaching the wires to the processor block, then pinned the processor to the strap that holds the goggles in place.

  “Here, try it,” I said to Dee as I handed the goggles back. I started the companion app on my phone and verified that it was synchronizing with the goggles via Bluetooth.

  “I don't see anything,” Dee said, “I mean, I can see a bit of wiring or something in my peripheral vision, but otherwise everything looks normal.”

  “Give it a few seconds, it's probably not done booting up.” I really hoped that was the case. I hadn't really had time to properly test everything before bringing it over. Mostly I had just taken an earlier project and altered it to fit Dee's goggles instead of a normal pair of glasses, so it should work, but it would be embarrassing if it didn't.

  “Whoa... I see something now. Its like there's a big, wire frame cube spinning in the air in front of me.”

  I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “That's the calibration test screen. How does it look? Blurry at all? Can you still see stuff beyond the cube?”

  “I feel a little cross eyed when I'm looking at it,” she answered, “otherwise it looks good.”

  I brought up the video settings screen and began tweaking the lateral fine tuning. “How's that?” I asked.

  “Better... better... yeah, that's got it. Leave it there.”

  “OK, lets try something else.” I hit a button on the companion app.

  “Ah, there's text now. Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Ooh... Lewis Carroll. Good choice.”

  “You had no problem reading that?”

  “No, it's totally clear. It's like it's just hanging there in mid air, like I should be able to reach out and touch it.”

  “Me me me I get to try it next,” Liz insisted. Dee peeled off the goggles and handed them over.

  “We'll need to recalibrate again after you've adjusted the goggles,” I said. I handed her my phone so she could make the adjustments herself.

  Brian turned to me and said, “so I'm guessing dual near field projectors working with polarized overlays, is that right?”

  “Yes, exactly,” I admitted, “it's like Google Glass, but with two screens to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. I did an internship with a company that developed wearable computing. I ended up with some leftover parts when they went bankrupt. Turns out the principal owner was siphoning off most of the venture capital funding. I didn't get my last paycheck. They let me keep some hardware instead.”

  “Lucky for us,” Liz offered, “because this is way cool. I can think of all sorts of applications. Add a camera, and you could do augmented reality... overlay the world with all sorts of useful info.”

  I carefully extracted the miniature cameras from the bubble wrap and held them up. “That is definitely the plan. Two cameras actually, to allow depth calculations based on parallax image comparison. I just have to figure out how best to mount them.”

  “Can I see one those?” Dee asked.

  I carefully handed her one of the tiny cylinders. It was no bigger than a pencil eraser.

  “Wow, that really is small,” she remarked, “I'd love to use this on the mission tomorrow, record everything we see, but I don't think my goggles will fit in with the typical office dress code.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Well, I haven't mounted them yet. It would be easy enough just to clip one of these on your outfit somewhere, disguise it as a piece of jewelry maybe. Heck, the processor unit handles two video inputs. We could aim a second one backwards, make sure nobody sneaks up on you.”

  This steered the conversation back in the direction of the impending mission, and we spent the rest of the afternoon planning the details, including how we would adapt my gadget to provide covert real time video. At some point we realized we were all hungry, and Brian volunteered to fetch carry out. He came back with more than food, however.

  “I found something on the door,” he said as he deposited the pizza boxes, “someone must have posted it while we were talking.” He held up a large yellow sheet of paper with the words Notice of Condemnation emblazoned across the top.

  “No!” Dee yelled as she jumped up and snatched the paper from his hand. She spent some time reading, then said, “those lying, corrupt BASTARDS. This has been backdated nearly 60 days. We've only got a week to remedy a huge list of supposed code violations, then they seize the building.”

  We all sat silently for a minute while Dee continued reading the paperwork, her hands shaking.

  “Maybe its not too late,” I finally said, “We have a week, maybe we can fix things. Maybe we can talk to an alderman, to the planning board, someone... get an extension to the deadline.”

  “It doesn't matter,” Dee said, “I couldn't afford to do all this crap even if they postponed until the heat death of the universe.”

  I looked around the factory. Dee's lair. We hadn't yet had the opportunity to do much with the space. It was still mostly empty, and yet it was so full of potential. It was almost heartbreaking, realizing none of those dreams would be realized. I looked at Dee.

  “I'm sorry,” was all I could think to say.

  “This isn't the end,” she said. Her hands stopped shaking. She let go of the yellow paper and let it drift to the ground. “They say they're going to tear down this building?” She looked at me. Her eyes held a cold determination I hadn't seen before. “I'm going to tear down their world.”

  CHAPTER 25