Table of Contents
Book Description
Hacker | A Sulan Story
Free Excerpt
1 | Application
2 | Logan
3 | Promotion
4 | Erase
5 | Lydia
6 | Hunted
7 | Hiding
8 | Hunters
9 | Wings
10 | Acceptance
Acknowledgements
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About the Author
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Also By Camille Picott
About the Author
Book Description
Hank is a teenage hacker. Forced to barter her computer skills for a meager wage, she knows the work she does isn’t exactly legal, but Hank needs the money to support her family. When a colleague is murdered before her eyes, she is forced to question what she does. Confronted with a chance to save a girl’s life, Hank must choose between doing what’s right or protecting those she loves. Hacker is the novella prequel to Sulan, a fast-action YA dystopian series.
Hacker
A Sulan Story
By Camille Picott
www.camillepicott.com
Published by Pixiu Press
Windsor, CA
Copyright 2018 Camille Picott
Free Excerpt
The story is just beginning!
Get a free excerpt of the next installment
Sulan, Episode 1: The League
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Sixteen-year-old Sulan Hom can’t remember life before the Default, the day the United States government declared bankruptcy. As a math prodigy, she leads a protected life, kept safe from the hunger and crime plaguing the streets. She attends Virtual High School, an academy in Vex (Virtual Experience) for gifted children.
Beyond the security of Sulan’s high-tech world, the Anti-American League wages a guerrilla war against the United States. When their leader, Imugi, publicly executes a teenage student, Sulan vows to learn self-defense. She acquires Touch, an illegal Vex technology that allows her to share the physical experience of her avatar. She then joins a Vex mercenary club and convinces a stoic teenage boy named Gun to teach her to fight.
Soon, Imugi turns his attention to the kids of Virtual High. Will Sulan’s Vex training be enough to help her survive his attack?
Click here for your free download!
1
Application
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“Are you going to eat those?” Timmy points to the small pile of beans Hank purposely left in her bowl.
She glances up from the tablet in her hand, pretending to be as surprised by the question as by the beans themselves. “What? Oh, no, I’m full.” Hank pushes the bowl toward her little brother. “You can have them if you want.” She keeps her voice casual so Timmy doesn’t guess how much she really wants to eat those last few bites.
Hunger is something Hank is used to. She can cope, even if it means she resembles a bony beanpole. At nearly five feet, ten inches tall, she would look too skinny no matter how much she ate. Better for her six-year-old brother to have the extra food. His little body needs it.
She pretends not to notice the way he wolfs down the beans. What she wouldn’t give to figure out a way to get him three meals a day. They wouldn’t have to be square meals. She’d settle for rectangle meals. Even circular ones. Anything remotely edible, really.
Conversations from other families living in the old high school gym fill the air with constant murmur. With nothing more than cubicle walls for privacy, Hank is used to the background noise. The ten-by-fifteen cube she shares with her little brother and parents isn’t much, but at least they have a roof over their head. Even running water, most of the time.
When Timmy finishes eating, he snuggles up next to her on the bunk bed they share. “What are you doing?”
“Filling out an application.” She turns the tablet so he can see it.
Application
Virtual High School
a Global Arms School for the Gifted
“An application for school?” Timmy asks. “Mom and Dad say we can’t afford school.”
“I’m hoping to get a scholarship.”
He pulls away, eyes widening with alarm. “Does that mean you’ll move away?”
“No, buddy. This is a Vex school. I’ll go to school in Virtual Experience. I’ll be able to attend from here.” She gestures to their cubicle.
It might be small, but at least their cube has character. Her parents, who make a living scavenging at the local dump, always bring home cute trinkets to decorate their space. Hank never ceases to marvel at the things people used to throw away. Just yesterday her mother brought home a mirror shaped like a sun. A tip of the sunbeam had broken off and the mirror was cracked, but it was still perfectly usable. Not to mention pretty.
“Oh, okay.” Timmy relaxes back against the pillows, cuddling against her.
Hank resumes typing.
“Where did you get the tablet?”
“I borrowed it from Jasper.” Jasper, a man three cubes to their left, has a custodial job at Global Arms. The company gave every employee a tablet as a signing bonus. Landing a job at Global Arms made him the envy of just about everyone in this place. Everyone knew it was the best place to work in the California East Bay, even if Jasper still couldn’t afford to move out of McClymonds High. It was no secret he was on the waiting list for one of the apartments in the Global Arms compound, another perk for employees: free room and board once you earned enough seniority.
“Can I use the tablet when you’re finished?”
Hank suppresses a sigh. She’s never going to get the application completed if Timmy keeps talking to her. “Munchkin, can you see if Chase or Anthony want to play? I need to concentrate on my work.”
“Chase is grounded. Anthony went off with Gabe to play with the big kids.”
“Okay. I have to focus on this application. It’s very important.” That’s an understatement. This application, if accepted, could change their lives. “If you’re going to sit here, I need you to be quiet. Can you do that for me?”
“Okay,” he says with a nod.
She enters her address—McClymonds High School, 2607 Myrtle Street, Oakland, California—and moves onto the next section. The essay portion.
What makes you an exceptional candidate for Virtual High School?
Hank stares at the question, tapping her index finger on the side of the tablet.
I’m the Assistant Executive Money Launderer for a local courier company.
Obviously that little tidbit won’t get her in.
I can hack any bank account, in any country, in under five minutes.
Nope, that won’t do it, either.
She rests the tablet on her knees, rubbing at her temples. God, she’s hungry. Maybe she needs to break into her emergency food stash to clear her head.
No, she promised herself she would only do that in a real emergency. They had to go without food for at least three days before she breaks into that stash.
“Sissy, I want to draw.”
“Get that old box of crayons Mom found last week.”
“But I don’t know what to draw.”
“How about a car?”
Timmy makes a face. “Cars are for stupid rich people who don’t care about helping the unfortunate.”
That was their father talking. “How about a baseball?”
“There’s no white in the crayon box.”
Hank takes a deep breath to keep from snapping at her baby brother. It isn’t his fault he lives in this hellhole with nothing to do. If only she could figure o
ut a way to afford school tuition for him. Negotiating a raise was out of the question. She’d tried that once. Logan, his eyes hard and calculating, told her she could have a raise if she agreed to go on a date with Jacob.
Hank would sit naked on a high rise for a week before going out with Jacob.
“Sissy, can I—”
“Why don’t you go wash the spoons and cans?” She puts an arm around his shoulders and squeezes to take the sting out of her curt words. “Mom and Dad will be home soon. It would be nice if things were clean for them.”
“Okay,” he says, reluctance clear in his voice. He scoops up their empty cans and dirty spoons, heading to the gym locker room to clean them.
“Why don’t you go to the bus stop and check the bins?” she calls after him. “See if you can find some recycling.” That should keep him busy long enough so she could finish her application.
As Timmy exits their cubicle, it comes to her.
I use my computer skills to support a local business entrepreneur.
There. That sounded better. Better, and even sophisticated for a teenager—if a little boring. But at least boring was legal.
Hank ponders her sentence, trying to come up with a way to provide more detail without revealing the extent of Logan’s laundering.
My employer services local areas in Global’s surveillance sector that were hit hard by the Default thirty years ago.
What area of the country wasn’t hit hard by the Default?
Most residents in this area still struggle to eke out a living.
That was certainly true. Her family was one of the many barely surviving.
My work enables my employer to build better lives for those in our community.
If by “community” one means Hank’s jerk co-workers, that sentence is entirely true.
It’s a woefully inadequate paragraph. Hank can’t help but think that if she were on the Virtual High School selection committee, she wouldn’t give herself a scholarship.
Writing the truth won’t earn her any points either, even if laundering and stealing millions of dollars was impressive. Global Arms doesn’t want an elite—albeit reluctant—criminal in their midst.
She decides to add one more paragraph.
I am the reigning champion of the International Hackers Convention.
That sounded snobby, but if there was one thing Hank had learned, it was that blowing one’s own horn was often necessary for survival. Modesty didn’t serve any purpose. And bragging about her accomplishment helps soothe her resentment toward Logan for only giving her ten percent of the tournament winnings.
That was more than the normal flat-rate “service fee” he paid her. He kept the rest of the money for himself, calling it a “user-fee,” since he let her use his Vex set to enter the contest. A least the money had paid their cubicle rent for ten months.
The tournament is a Vex cybersecurity competition, she types, hoping details in this paragraph would detract from their glaring absence in the previous one. The International Hackers Convention has over three thousand contestants every year. By using my skills in Malware Analysis, Digital Forensics, Web Application Exploitation, Reverse Engineering, System Exploitation, and Cryptography, I secured victory at the tournament. I have successfully compromised the Cyclone, Dirigible, and Medusa constructs. I am a self-taught computer geek who would love an opportunity to expand my skill set with a scholarship to Virtual High.
Hank leans back, surveying the paragraph and feeling much better about the application as a whole. In truth, she has Logan to thank for her hacking. Or, to be more precise, Logan’s Chief Data Enforcer, Mr. Thames. Mr. Thames is the one bright factor of her job.
“Ah-hem.”
She looks up as someone ruffles the curtain on the cubicle doorway. It’s an equivalent to a polite knock, since they didn’t have a real door.
“Who is it?”
“Jasper.”
“Come on in.”
The twenty-something man pushes aside the curtain, which is printed with multi-colored fish. Jasper has close-cropped brown hair and stubble that never makes the leap to a legitimate beard. Like everyone who lives in McClymonds High, Jasper has skinny refined to a science.
“You need your tablet back?” Hank sits up on her bed.
Jasper smiles, scratching the back of his neck. She hopes he doesn’t have lice.
“Sorry, yeah, I need it back,” he says. “I have to leave for work.” He sits across from her in one of the fold-up chairs her parents found at the dump. “How’s the application coming?”
She puts on her best fake smile. “Really good! I still have some work to do, but it’s coming along really well.”
“They’d be idiots not to accept a smart girl like you.”
They’d be idiots not to accept a smart girl like you. His words take her back in time to a conversation they’d had just a few years ago . . .
*
Jasper is one of the few who knows about her computer skills. When he landed the Global job and got the tablet as a signing bonus, he let Hank use the tablet for a few hours in exchange for doing his laundry twice a week. It was their secret arrangement; since no one else in the McClymonds High gym could afford a tablet, Jasper was always getting offers of trade. He usually only traded tablet time for food, but he made an exception for Hank. She reminded him of his little sister, who died when he was a teenager.
Hank spent most of her days hungry and intensely curious about money—the two things of which her family had so little. As soon as she had her hands on the tablet, she didn’t watch a movie or play a game like everyone else did. She wanted to learn more about money, how it worked, and how she could get some. So she started visiting bank websites, picking apart their code, studying the underlying technologies, fuzzing inputs, and then researching how to bypass or break them.
When Jasper saw what she was doing, he recognized her skill. Hank didn’t exactly know how illegal her work was, but she’d been smart enough to know adults would not be pleased if they knew.
He surprised Hank by saying, “Remember how I used to work as a courier before I got my job at Global?”
She nodded
“My old boss there might be able to put your coding skills to work. Would you like me to introduce you to him?”
Hank sat up straight. “Will I earn some money?”
“Yeah. Let me talk to Logan. He’d be an idiot not to hire a smart girl like you.”
She’d made the mistake of assuming that just because Jasper was nice, Logan would be too. She had never been so wrong in her life.
*
Jasper takes the tablet from her. “You can borrow the tablet tomorrow if you need it. Catch you later, kid.”
It’s just as well that Jasper came for the tablet. It’s time for her to get ready for work.
Hank combs out her red hair. It hangs past her waist, thick and lush. Her hair is Hank’s only vanity. She might be too tall, and she might be too skinny, but her hair is gorgeous. She takes meticulous care of it, combing it several times a day. She and Timmy inherited the same red locks from their father.
Once combed, she pulls it into a ponytail before heading outside to check on Timmy. She finds him playing basketball with some of the other kids. Did he even make it to the bus stop to look for recycling? Probably not.
She stops on the edge of the court, watching him run from one end to the other. A kid four inches shorter and undoubtedly younger steals the ball from Timmy. Timmy, unfazed, turns and races after the smaller boy.
Watching the scene makes Hank ache in a secret place. She can’t ever let on how much she worries about her baby brother. The bigger kids knock him around and usually make him sit on the sideline during their games, a punishment for his lack of athletic ability. At least kids his own age let him play.
Even worse are the worries that scurry through her mind. Worries that scream to be voiced, but she forces herself to choke back.
Don’t run too much, Timmy. It wi
ll burn up your lunch and we don’t have any other food for you to eat today. Or, Don’t play too long, Timmy. Playing will just make you hungry.
She thinks all these things, but she doesn’t say them. What kind of person doesn’t want a kid to play? She feels bad for having such thoughts, even though they’re true.
Hank calls Timmy away from the game. He peels away from the other kids.
“I’m headed to work,” she tells him. “I left some worksheets on the bed for you. Make sure you do them before you go to bed.”
“When are you coming home?” he asks, wiping sweat from his forehead with a grime-smudged hand.
“I’ll be back by morning. Tell Mom and Dad not to wait up.”
Timmy glances away from her as the pack of kids hurtles by with the ball. “When are they coming home?”
“Soon.” They were late, but she doesn’t point this out since there’s nothing either of them can do about it. “See you later, okay, buddy?”
“Yeah, okay.” Timmy sprints away without a backward glance, rejoining the kids on the court.
2
Logan
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There are thousands of schools like McClymonds High across America, all of them shut down on the day of the Default thirty years ago. Most have been converted into quasi apartments. The accommodations might not be posh, but it’s better than living in a refugee camp. Those great sprawling masses of impoverished humanity that are thickest in the large cities. Hank is well aware the situation of her family could be much worse than it is.
She keeps an old bicycle stashed in a storage closet outside what was once a teacher’s lounge at McClymonds High. She wears the key on a chain around her neck at all times. She pays extra to rent this closet, but it’s cheaper than having her bicycle stolen. It took her six months of working for Logan to save up enough money for this bike.
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