by E. C. Myers
“I think you were right, Penny,” Max said. He’d been going through the chat logs Evan had collected from Dramatis Personai. “Infiltraitor generally logged in from around five p.m. to seven p.m.”
“After school,” Penny said.
“Then L0NELYB0Y would log in from nine at night until one or two in the morning. After Infiltraitor disappeared, guess when L0NELY B0Y logged in?”
“Five in the evening to one or two in the morning,” she said.
Max tapped his nose. “Bingo! With a break for dinner. They were only both logged in once, way back when L0NELYB0Y first joined the group, and there was one short, but weird, exchange.” He read it aloud:
0MN1: Anyone have twitter’s new api? They changed it again!
L0NELYB0Y: but good luck cracking *their* servers
Edifice: Earn something for yourself for a change, 0MN1
Infiltraitor: I bet someone at panjea can get it
Penny laughed. “L0NELYB0Y responded to Infiltraitor’s comment before he posted it.”
“It’s easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it,” Max said.
“Risse or I would have noticed it if we’d been logged in at the time. It’s sloppy. We had to watch for that kind of thing all the time.”
“You were two hackers posing as one, and Jem was one hacker posing as two,” Max said.
“Not a bad idea to keep a backup handle in case you have to scrap one identity, instead of starting a new one from scratch. Jem had built-in history, so he was able to pick up where Infiltraitor left off,” she said.
“His biggest mistake was planting clues that Ty Andrews was Infiltraitor’s real life identity. He probably thought it would be harmless; if the Feds ever came after him, they would realize he’d been framed and wasn’t a hacker. Who would have imagined Ty would be killed?” Max said.
“Dick move, Jem,” Penny said.
“Even Evan was fooled. Jem’s apparent death might have been what tipped him over the edge.”
“And he just let Evan think he was dead? If I ever meet him, I’ll kill him myself, “ Penny said.
“I would love to find this guy. Maybe he knows something about all this,” Max said.
“Good luck tracking down a ghost,” Risse said.
“He could still be online, wherever he is. Maybe he has another handle. Has anyone new joined Dramatis Personai recently?”
“No, the group’s gotten a little suspicious with all the disappearances. That’s why we were so curious about you returning, though I knew why you were there,” Penny said.
“He might still be checking some of his old accounts. What’s your public encryption key?” Risse said.
Max told her.
She typed for a moment then hit Enter with a sense of finality. “I just sent a private message from DoubleThink to all Jem’s known addresses, asking him to contact you. If he’s alive and goes online, hopefully he’ll get in touch.”
“Okay, Max. We just crossed over into Granville. Time to lay low and stay low,” Penny said.
Max peeked out the window before lying down in the backseat. After spending years wondering what it would be like to get away from Granville, it was still his home, and he’d feared he would never see it or his dad again.
“Go straight on State Route 4 for a while. Take the exit for Lone Tree Way then drive east. Look for a big parking lot on the right and pull in there,” Max said.
He closed his laptop and held it to his chest. It might be dangerous for him to be here, but it felt right. Things were coming full circle, bringing him closer to Evan and to what had set everything in motion. He just hoped the answer was worth the risk.
20
Penny parked behind a one-story brick building on Lone Tree Way. In the display window, a female mannequin dressed as a sexy Ninja Turtle posed with a male mannequin dressed as Gandalf the Grey.
“Halloween City?” Risse said. “Is now the time to be thinking about your costume?”
Max sat up in the back seat and reached for his laptop bag. “It’s only Halloween City in September and October. The rest of the time it’s either a discount furniture store or a used book warehouse. Sometimes it sells wine. But five years ago, it was my favorite comic book store. It was called Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind.”
Penny groaned. “No wonder you guys loved it so much.”
They climbed out of the car.
“I’ll go inside and keep an eye out for trouble. Let’s keep a channel open.” Penny popped her Bluetooth earpiece in and turned it on.
“Good idea.” Risse used her burner phone to call Penny’s and turned on the speaker.
Penny tapped her earpiece. “Hello?”
They heard her through the speaker on Risse’s phone.
“We’re good to go,” Risse said.
Max led them around the side of the building into the alley that separated Halloween City from the neighboring Bean Up—the same alley he’d used to escape from the his first pursuers five nights before. Penny kept going and turned the corner.
“I bet you take all the ladies here,” Risse said.
Max laughed.
“So this is what Evan’s musical clue was leading us to?” she asked.
Max dragged a dumpster away from the wall, giving him about two feet of clearance to scoot behind it. He gestured Risse closer.
“Remember those USB dead drops I told you about? Evan and I placed four of them around Granville, one at each of our favorite places. The first was at The Hidden Word. This is where we installed the last one.”
He gestured toward the wall. Risse studied it for a moment.
“Aha!” She crouched and pointed to the tip of a USB stick protruding from a brick low on the wall. “Neat. I never would have seen that if I hadn’t been looking for it. Think it’s still working after all this time?”
Max pointed up. “The overhang protects it from the rain. And it’s just a chip, no moving parts. I think this one was thirty-two gigabytes.”
“Pricey a few years ago, for something you just left out in the open,” she said.
“You know how some families have a bowl of candy in the house? We have a bowl full of flash drives.”
Max slid his laptop out of his bag and opened it. He knelt next to the wall and carefully lined up the USB connector with the port of his computer.
“How’s it looking, Penny?” Risse asked.
“They have a sale on Halloween masks. Two for one!” Penny said.
“You aren’t supposed to be shopping,” Max said.
“It’s part of my cover.”
Risse put a hand on Max’s shoulder and leaned over to get a better look at the screen. The drive mounted and Max clicked on it to see the file contents.
“So?” she asked.
“It’s blank,” he said.
“Look for hidden folders,” Penny said.
“Duh.” Max changed the setting to display hidden folders and found one named SH1FTv3.1.
“SH1FT!” Max said.
“Open it,” Risse said.
“I know. Jeez. Don’t be a backseat driver.”
Risse reached down and clicked on it. A password dialog box opened.
“Argh!” Risse said.
“What is it?” Penny asked.
“Another password,” Risse said.
“Oh, come on,” Penny said.
Max grinned. “I think I know this one,” he said.
He slowly quoted Evan’s favorite line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as he typed it: “This . . . means . . . something. This . . . is . . . important.” Evan couldn’t have been clearer this time.
The folder opened, filled with dozens of file names.
“Now let’s see . . . .” Risse grabbed for Max’s computer.
“Easy! The fil
es are still copying over.” He held his computer in place against the wall. He grimaced when the corner of the MacBook scraped against brick.
“Oh-em-gee. Do you know what this thing is?” Risse asked.
“Not a clue.” There were hundreds of files, but they only added up to around twenty-five megabytes of data—a drop in the bucket in a thirty-two gigabyte drive.
Risse ran her finger down the screen, pointing out the file extensions. “Look at all these OCX files. I think this is a worm.”
A worm is like a computer virus, but much worse. Worms also spread from computer to computer, but they’re programmed to adapt over time, and can even behave differently according to the system they’re infecting.
“What’s it doing here?” Max asked.
“Evan obviously put it here. The question is: How did he get it?”
“He wrote it,” Max said. “Or helped write it. These files . . . . Only Evan would name a text file ‘gocappies.’”
At Risse’s confused expression, he explained. “Our school mascot is a capybara.”
“Oh. Capybaras are so cute,” Risse said.
Max kept his computer plugged in to the USB port while he made another copy of the files on a portable USB drive. “I’m going to keep all the copies encrypted with the same password. Remember: ‘This means something. This is important.’ Including spaces, capitalization, and punctuation.”
“I see Evan was a Blade Runner fan. pris.txt, batty.txt, deckard.txt,” Risse said.
“Isn’t everyone?” Penny asked.
Max’s USB drive managed the files more quickly than the three-year-old one in the wall. He plucked it out of his computer and handed it to Risse.
“Okay, here you go. I’m gonna nuke the source. Encrypted or not, I don’t want this thing out there where we can’t control it,” he said.
“Don’t forget to zero fill it,” Penny said.
“Already in progress,” Max said.
Risse sat on an upended milk crate in the alley and popped the USB drive in to her laptop. “This is beautiful. It looks like he used Lua and C++. Probably inspired by the Flame worm.”
“Can you tell what it does?” Max asked.
“Not without rolling up my sleeves and digging into the source code.”
“Isn’t there a faster way?”
“I could run it, see what it does.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Penny said. “That would be like a scientist in some movie injecting herself with an antivirus. Illogical and irresponsible.”
“We don’t have any time to mess around and make sure it’s safe. We’ll make sure whatever it is can’t spread to any other computers. Do it, Risse. Use my laptop.”
“Are you sure?” Risse asked.
“Everything important is on that USB, and the two of you have copies of it all too.”
She handed the USB drive back to Max. He slipped its chain over his head and tucked the drive into the collar of his shirt.
“That’s not the point. The files and operating system are just the brain. This is your computer. It has a personality.”
“It’s a machine,” Max said.
“Shh.” She covered the microphone of the laptop. “What do you want to call it?”
“I stole it five days ago. The FBI could steal it from me at any moment. I’m not that into it. I don’t know. MaxBook?”
“That’s stupid. You aren’t taking this seriously.” Risse stroked the top of Max’s computer. “Her name is Mayfly. Thank you for your sacrifice, Mayfly.”
“I’m coming out,” Penny said. “I want to watch this.”
A few minutes later, Penny showed up with a shopping bag.
“You actually bought something?” Max asked.
“We’re in Dramatis Personai. We love masks.”
“I hope you used cash at least.”
“Nope. Stolen credit card. Can’t be traced to me.”
“Penny!” Max said.
“I’m a hacker. I’m on the run. They’ll get the charges reverted. It’s no big.”
“Bad news,” Risse said. “I can’t run this. Some of the code is missing.”
Max headed for the car. “Then we have three other stops to make. I bet the code is distributed across the other dead drops.”
“Clever. Even if someone else figured out the clue in Evan’s video, only you know about the other dead drops.” Risse folded her laptop and stood, brushing off the back of her jeans.
“Let’s just make it quick and get out of Dodge,” Penny said.
Risse waited in the car poring over the SH1FT code while Penny and Max collected the rest of it from USB drives around Granville. Neither of them spoke when they visited The Hidden Word, the first dead drop Max and Evan had made together. The back door was crisscrossed with yellow police tape.
The third dead drop was a tree in the yard at the middle school, and the last USB drive was inside one of the men’s rooms at the Cineplex, hidden behind a loose tile in a toilet stall.
Risse copied the last of the files over, her face showing how excited she was. They were in an abandoned lot on the edge of town that was far away from any surveillance cameras, was out of range of any Wi-Fi signals, and gave them a good view of all the roads. The sun was setting, and they sat on a low concrete wall together with Risse in the middle, balancing Max’s computer on her knees.
“I’m running every diagnostic test I know to monitor what SH1FT does to your computer,” she said.
“Hit it,” Max said.
Code ran down the screen. “Okay, so far the worm is just scanning the system to see what’s installed. Pretty standard.”
A light blinked on the front of the laptop.
“The worm just turned on the wireless radio, but of course there’s no network. I’m capturing all the data packets though. Guess what it’s trying to access?”
“Panjea,” Max said.
“Panjea! I don’t know what it would do if it could get into your account. Oh, now it’s looking for some folders on your system. Hey, someone installed Panjea on Mayfly.”
“The owner, probably. But that’s under a different profile.”
“Doesn’t matter. It found them. Oh, hey, it’s deleting a bunch of things. I think . . . it’s purging your system of the code Panjea uses to track users.” Risse looked up.
“It’s making it safer?” Penny asked. “That doesn’t seem right.”
“Evan clearly made some changes to it. Some drastic changes,” Risse said. “Now it’s a helper worm.”
“What was it designed to do originally?” Max asked.
“I don’t know. But this is probably what they’re chasing you for, Max,” Risse said.
Penny walked back and forth in front of them. “Okay, so people inside Panjea realize that they’re evil and using the service to actually track users and share private data with the government. But Panjea can’t access every computer, so they make this worm that can spread itself over time, giving them the same access to any computer that’s connected to the internet.”
“And they work to make sure that any computer that can go online has access to the internet, so they can take in more data,” Max said. “But this goes way beyond predicting U.S. election results and influencing votes. This could go global.”
“It would infect any computer it came into contact with, so it’s a safe bet they want it to spread around the world. Which means the original version of SH1FT could spy on users anywhere, including foreign governments,” Risse said.
“The U.S. government would certainly be interested in that,” Max said. “But if Senator Tooms is elected, he would shut it down. He supports cyber espionage on other nations, but not at the expense of Americans. Or so he says.”
“So someone wants Governor Lovett in office. And Sharpe is working to make tha
t happen, no matter what,” Penny said.
“Has to be. Sharpe’s already linked to Panjea and to Lovett. If she’s elected, he also stands to gain a lot. She’d probably give him a pretty cushy job,” Max said. “But if word got out that Panjea was working with the government, the backlash might cause Lovett to lose the election.”
Risse smiled. “If they’re after you, Max, this could be the only copy. Evan might have stolen it and then wiped their files to buy himself some time.”
“Time for what?” Max asked.
“To rewrite it.”
“Well, if they want it so bad, why don’t we give it to them?” Max asked.
“Like,” Penny said.
“Only trouble is, they would check it out thoroughly before implementing it. They would be more equipped than I am to realize that Evan modified it.” Risse closed the laptop. “They might even be able to revert his changes.”
“What if we infected a computer at Panjea with it?” Max asked.
“It would have to be a production server,” Penny said. “They would be well protected against worms otherwise. They do have a bunch of hackers working for them.”
“How do we get in there?” Max asked.
“We don’t have time to apply for a job, and it’s not easy to get hired there,” Penny said.
Risse held up her phone. “Haxx0rade is tomorrow.”
“Of course!” Penny said.
Max read from Risse’s phone. “‘Come to Haxx0rade. Join us in hacking the world.’ At least they’re honest about it.”
“Panjea is even offering bounties for hackers who discover flaws in their security, starting at a million dollars for anything discovered in the first hour and going down every hour until the end of the event,” Penny said. Max could practically see the dollar signs reflected in her glasses.
“That’s perfect,” Max said. “We’ll have direct access to their servers for twenty-four hours, and we’ll just be a few people out of hundreds attempting to hack them.”
“Getting into Haxx0rade will be tricky. Registration is closed,” Risse said.
“It also could be dangerous,” Penny said. “They’re certainly looking for Max, and we know they’ve killed people trying to keep this secret.”
