by E. C. Myers
He started recording.
“Hello, I’m Dramatis Personai. Life is theater. Watch. Laugh. Weep. The curtain is rising.” Max pulled off his mask.
“I’m 503-ERROR.” He paused. “My name is Max Stein. I’m here to answer a question: What is the silence of six?
“This is Ariel Miller. She was a twenty-three-year-old system administrator, but she was also a hacker—for Panjea. You know Panjea, right?”
Risse would edit in a picture of Ariel from Evan’s file. Max introduced the rest of those who had been killed: Geordie, Sayid, Ty, and Kyle. He ended with Evan.
Since L0NELYB0Y wasn’t actually dead, Evan had become the sixth who was silenced—but he had given his life while speaking out. He would not be silenced any longer.
“We have hundreds of e-mails proving that Panjea was created by the government, as a way of getting people to offer their personal information up willingly. Victor Ignacio, the hacker known as 0MN1, and Kevin Sharpe are using that data and Panjea to manipulate the elections in favor of Democratic nominee Governor Lovett. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Read all about it in the attached files.
“Finally, I have a question for you. Now that you know about the silence of six, what are you going to do about it?”
Max let the question hang for a moment. “You’re welcome.”
He stopped the recording and output it, then uploaded it to Risse.
It was time to end this, one way or another.
Just after eight a.m., Max walked up to the two-story redbrick building at 715 Morse Street in San Jose. He wasn’t wearing a mask, not even Risse’s glasses. All he carried was his phone, a USB drive, and a keycard.
Though the building looked abandoned, the front entrance had a very new-looking security camera pointed at it, and another was set up down the short walkway from the street. Max was sure whoever was monitoring it had gotten a good look at him, and security people were probably scrambling inside to intercept him.
Max slapped the keycard against the reader. The light flashed green and the door unlatched. He walked inside.
He had studied pictures of Synthwerks online, but the layout had completely changed. The counters once loaded with PCs had been ripped out and replaced by five long rows of shoulder-high network servers.
Max headed down one aisle to the far end of the room, wondering which of these servers was the best one to plug the worm into.
“Hold it,” a voice said on his left.
Max turned.
“503-ERROR?” the boy said.
Max searched his memory for the name that matched the long-haired kid in front of him. “Edifice.” Max raised his hands non-threateningly.
Strong arms clamped around Max from behind, pinning his arms to his sides. He struggled and broke free, darting around a server and racing down the aisle. Another guard appeared ahead of him, dressed in a black sweater and black jeans. Max cut to the right and slid between two humming servers. He reached the aisle, pivoted right, and ran for the opposite end. He made it halfway across the room before another guard jumped in front of him.
This time, Max kept going. He threw all his weight at the guard, knocking him down. Max kicked his gun away and turned to run, but the man grabbed Max’s foot. He fell—hard. The floor was cement. His shoulder felt like it had been dislocated.
The guard pulled Max up and patted him down. He came up with his cell phone, the USB drive, and his keycard.
“Take him to the room.” Edifice gave Max a curious look. “I’m calling Vic.”
The room turned out to be the size of Max’s bedroom at home, outfitted with a computer terminal, a large screen on the wall, and a telephone. A wide window in the wall provided a view of the larger server room outside it. This must be the supervisor’s office.
The guard stayed inside with Max, one hand on the gun holstered at his hip. Edifice watched them from outside, and others gradually joined him. Max recognized PHYREWALL and GroundSloth—who actually waved. He saw a few other faces from Evan’s files: ZeroKal, Kill_Screen, Plan(et)9. This was a who’s who of Dramatis Personai.
The door opened and Vic entered with another guard. Were these Panjea’s hired assassins? “Max. I hope this means you’ve decided to help.”
Max looked at the hackers lined up outside the window. He grimaced with pain from his shoulder.
“Do you know that Vic helped murder your friends?” Max looked at each of the other members of Dramatis Personai. “@sskicker and Infiltraitor died to expose what Panjea is doing.”
The hackers exchanged uncomfortable looks. Max didn’t know which of them had known and sided with Vic anyway. There had probably been rumors though. Some of them had to care.
PHYREWALL met his eyes.
Vic put Max’s phone down next to the keycard and held up the USB drive by its chain, watching it spin around. “Is this what I think it is?”
“I return SH1FT, you leave my friends and family alone,” Max said. “That was the deal?”
“That’s the deal. Obviously that doesn’t apply to you, or your girlfriend,” Vic said.
“You have Courtney?” Max asked in alarm.
Vic blinked. “I was referring to DoubleThink.”
“Where is she?” Max asked.
Vic gestured to the hackers. PHYREWALL walked in. Vic handed him the USB drive. “Check it out. Make sure it has what we need.”
PHYREWALL sat down at the terminal and plugged the drive into the computer tower.
“What are you going to do with us?” Max asked. “Are we just going to disappear? Or maybe you’ll let us go, and one day I’ll get hit by a car, like Ariel Miller, the hacker who tipped Evan off about Panjea. Or my house will burn down, like what happened to Kyle Marks, the journalist who was going to report on Panjea. Weird. Seems like there’s a pattern here,” Max said. He looked at the hackers. “Panjea’s about collecting data, analyzing it, looking at patterns. Information is useless if you never act on it. Are you programmers, or just part of the programming?”
Max heard the hackers outside muttering to each other. Vic shot them a cool look that quieted them down.
“You don’t have any idea what’s going on, Max,” Vic said.
“Maybe I don’t understand some things,” Max said. “But how much does Kevin Sharpe keep you in the loop, Vic?”
“I’m Panjea,” Vic said. “This is all my vision. We’re demonstrating that technology is the most powerful force for good there is. We’re bringing the planet together.”
“And all you had to do was sell it out first,” Max said.
“How are we doing with that drive, PHYRE?” Vic asked.
“It’s encrypted,” PHYREWALL said.
“What’s the password, Max?” Vic asked.
Max smiled. “I’ll only tell your boss.”
“I’m the boss here,” Vic said.
“You have some of the best hackers in the world working for you.” Max glanced at the observation window. “See if they can crack it. Better yet, show us what you’ve got, 0MN1.”
Vic glanced behind him. “Max, you aren’t holding up your end of our deal.”
Max turned to the members of Dramatis Personai. “Did you know Vic asked Evan to dox all of you?”
“Is that true?” Edifice asked.
Max looked at each of the Personai members in turn. “Nat, Oliver, Leroy, Edward, Timothy, Yanni, Alex.”
“How does he know our real names?” Kill_Screen—Leroy—demanded.
“Calm down,” Vic said. “Why would I have you doxxed when you already work for me? You don’t need to share your identities to do great work. He’s lying to confuse you.”
“Someone’s lying.” PHYREWALL folded his arms. “I’m not sure it’s him. You made me distract the FBI agents the other day so Five-Oh-Three and DoubleThink could escape. I
had a long time alone in their interrogation room to wonder why.”
“You’re free now, and they didn’t press any charges,” Vic said. “We protect our own. I’m watching out for you.”
“Thanks, but that’s the other thing I’ve been thinking about: Why did the FBI let me go? They know who I am, too—my real name, not my company identity. I’ve seen you meeting with that Kevin Sharpe guy. Given the government’s feelings about hackers, you must have pulled some important strings to get me out.”
“Explain that, Vic,” Kill_Screen said.
“All right, all right. I will, but first give us some space, will you?” Vic said.
The hackers didn’t move. Vic lowered the blinds on the window. “Now it’s just us. Max, let’s talk about this, okay?”
“Depends. Are you ready to make a deal or not?” Max asked.
“We already have an agreement.”
“I’m renegotiating.”
“What do you want?”
“You have SH1FT. I’ll give you the password to unlock it if you let DoubleThink go in addition to leaving my friends and family alone.”
Vic moved to look over PHYREWALL’s shoulder. “Once we verify that SH1FT is on this drive, I’ll consider it.”
“Fair.” Max looked straight at PHYREWALL. “The password is: ‘This means something. This is important.’” He enunciated every word carefully, willing PHYREWALL to understand him.
PHYREWALL exchanged a look with Vic.
“Go ahead,” Vic said.
“Full sentences, with regular capitalization and punctuation: ‘This means something. This is important,’” Max said.
He hoped PHYREWALL would notice the executable he’d buried on the drive: L0NELYB0Y.exe, and its explanatory text file. If he ran it, he would run the script Jem had worked out that would spread the worm to Panjea’s servers and prime them to be distributed to all users worldwide.
“It’s, uh, more complete than the older build we’ve been working on. Why did STOP steal it if he was just going to finish coding it?” PHYREWALL asked. He clicked on a couple of other files. “The save date is October twenty-first,” PHYREWALL said.
“The day Evan died.” Vic shook his head. “That was a real shame.”
To Max’s surprise, he sounded sincere.
“We have e-mails that you sent to Sharpe asking people to be taken care of, including Evan,” Max said. “When all this gets out, who do you think is going to take the fall? The guy who’s the public face of Panjea, who’s been lying to everyone who uses it? Or the shadowy government operative who can count on plausible deniability and his friends in Congress? Maybe even the new president, thanks to you.”
Vic lowered his voice. “I didn’t know how far they were willing to go until it was too late.”
PHYREWALL glanced at Vic in shock. Then he turned back to his screen, stared at it for a moment, then clicked on a file. He looked at Max.
“Uh. I think I accidentally launched SH1FT,” PHYREWALL said.
Vic spun around. “What? I didn’t tell you to do that,” he snapped.
“Sorry? I was just trying to pull up the code to study it, and it started running on its own.” PHYREWALL said.
Vic shoved him aside to get at the keyboard. “That’s fine. Then we’re just a little ahead of schedule. Sharpe will be thrilled,” he muttered. Panic was creeping into his voice—a contrast to his usually smooth air of charm and control.
“So you do work for Kevin Sharpe,” Max said. “The question is: Who does Sharpe work for?”
“This isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do,” Vic said. “PHYREWALL?”
“Oh, I may have neglected to mention: Evan made a few tweaks to SH1FT. He was never able to stop himself from tinkering with code,” Max said.
Vic frowned. “What have you done?”
What hath God wrought? Max thought.
“The worm is going to infiltrate the entire Panjea network and reverse the damage it’s done. It’ll shut down the SH1FT surveillance and, eventually, it’s going to brick your servers.” Max looked around at the computers networked around them. “In fact, the program is so fundamentally different, we’re calling it by a new name. ST0P. That’s spelled with a zero.”
Vic’s left eye twitched. “I can still purge it from the servers before it gets out. It won’t activate until after a maintenance cycle.” He opened a web browser and typed in panjea.co. It loaded on the giant monitor mounted on the wall.
The browser circle spun and spun and spun, trying to load the page. Finally it displayed a message: HTTP ERROR 503: SERVICE UNAVAILABLE.
Vic groaned and started typing furiously. “What do I do?” he asked PHYREWALL. “Help me.”
“Learn to code,” PHYREWALL said. He walked over to the observation window, and while Vic was preoccupied, he opened the blinds. The members of Dramatis Personai were watching the proceedings silently and solemnly.
“I didn’t earn my handle for nothing. Enough of my old botnets are still running to take down a site the size of Panjea,” Max said.
Risse had helped him coordinate the DDoS attack on Panjea, and she had reached out to other hackers she trusted outside of Dramatis Personai to launch the biggest takedown ever in the history of the internet.
“We have failovers for that.” Vic’s voice betrayed his stress.
“The CDN? I’m counting on it. Your backups have been rerouted to these servers,” Max said.
“Impossible.”
“They call Kevin Sharpe the Architect? Well I know the guy who designed your network in the first place.”
“Infiltraitor? He’s dead,” Vic said.
The phone on the desk rang. Vic stared at it for a long moment before answering. “Yes, sir. I’m aware. I’m on it.”
Vic hung up. His face was pale.
“You didn’t tell him about the worm,” Max said.
“He’ll figure it out soon enough, and I’m not going to be here when he does.” Vic glanced at his screen. “The server’s rebooting now. Sharpe isn’t going to get a chance to silence me.” Vic glanced at the guards. “Keep an eye on him. Both of them. Everyone.” He opened the door and walked out, right past his hacker team. They all watched him go with expressions of disgust.
“Shouldn’t we stop him?” PHYREWALL asked.
“Once we expose Sharpe and Panjea, he won’t have anywhere to go,” Max said.
Edifice poked his head inside the room. One of the guards swiveled and pulled a gun on him.
“Easy there, hoss. I just wanted to tell you there seems to be a large situation outside.”
PHYREWALL pressed a button on a remote and the screen switched to a view from a security camera outside. About two hundred people in masks were protesting in front of Synthwerks. They were carrying signs that said “Panjea: Everyone is Collected.” A Channel 7 news van was parked on the street behind them.
The guards glanced at each other.
Max grinned. In his video, he had appealed to the attendees of Haxx0rade to protest Panjea’s shady practices at Synthwerks. Apparently the small excerpt he’d provided from Evan’s files had been enough to convince them to mobilize, and they had come through just in time. He doubted Vic would be able to get around that crowd without attracting their attention and anger.
The guards rushed out of the office.
Max switched the monitor back to the browser. The other hackers filtered into the room and watched with them as Panjea came back online.
They were still logged in to Vic’s account. His Panjea Peers were all posting confused and annoyed comments about the site being down for so long. As far as Max knew, it was the first time it had ever been down for more than thirty seconds. But a few minutes was pretty good for it to turn into an all-new, truly transparent Panjea.
“They have no idea anything is different,�
� Max said.
The first news report about it would be going online now at Full Cort Press. Max had given Courtney a great story, along with Evan’s video, Max’s video, all the files, and an exclusive interview with Jem.
The desk phone rang again.
“Should we answer that?” PHYREWALL raised his eyebrows.
Max switched on the speaker.
“Hello,” Max said.
“Who is this? What’s going on over there?” a man barked.
“This is 503-ERROR,” Max said. “My friends and I just took down Panjea. You’re welcome.”
The other members of Dramatis Personai snickered.
“I assume this is Kevin Sharpe?” Max asked.
A short silence. “Where’s Vic?”
“He seemed to be in a hurry to leave,” Max said. “You wanted SH1FT, you got it. We were just returning stolen property, in better shape than we found it in, like good citizens.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself involved in.” Did Sharpe actually sound worried?
“You’re the one who had Ariel, Geordie, Sayid, Kyle, and Ty killed. And now it’s time to answer for your crimes.” Max swallowed. His blood pounded in his ears and he felt his muscles tighten with tension.
“I know who you are,” Sharpe said.
“Tell Governor Lovett she doesn’t have my support anymore.”
Sharpe hung up.
“Five-Oh-Three, what’s going on with Panjea?” GroundSloth nodded at the screen.
A new note had appeared on Vic’s feed—from Evan Baxter:
“When you buy the silence of six, everyone pays the price. For shame, Kevin Sharpe. http://small.panjea.truth.”
“What the hell?” PHYREWALL said.
L0NELYB0Y had made a little tweak to the code for ST0P that would post a message like that to every Panjea user’s page. When they clicked on it, it would run the ST0P worm and take them to a site Courtney had set up to publish the e-mail archives Evan had collected. It also included a link to Evan’s full video on Fawkes Rising.
“Oh, it just made another update,” Edifice said.
Ariel Miller says, “I was murdered by Kevin Sharpe and Panjea. http://small.panjea.truth.”
