by CD Reiss
@hackerbitch
@anon_00110001
Careful – your douche is showing.
# QI4choked
@anon_00110001
@hackerbitch
Temporary setback. Your most useful skill is
tweeting with your legs in the air.
#QI4rulz #stackslut
@shelly-code
@beezleboy363636
That, my friend, is the taste of crow.
@hackeropz
Rumored QI4 hack may be part of a
bigger stunt. Don’t write off @beezleboy363636
& Alpha Wolf yet.
@hackerbitch
@anon_00110001
080 114 111 110 032 104 097 115
032 114 117 105 110 101 100 032
121 111 117 013 010
@anon_00110001
@hackerbitch
Not impressed by ASCII. Pron is nectar. You
can’t even get a job that doesn’t require
kneepads #QI4rulz
@DeadBeefCafe
Anybody seen @beezleboy363636?
Tor’s quiet. His account’s dead. Is he
hanging from his belt in the closet?
VI
This is how a guy ends up in a windowless room full of computers, wearing nothing but his jockeys. He kicks everyone out. He locks the doors. He looks for code fingerprinting. He spends a long time—the lighting change he programmed tells him it’s just about twenty-eight hours—finding nothing. He takes a shower to clear his head. In the middle of it, with soap in his hair, he realizes he could check the core dump for clear text. Rinsing his hair doesn’t even occur, and drying off will take too long, so he puts his underwear on while he’s walking back to the cage. It sticks to him like a wet T-shirt sticks to tits. He sits down and searches everything.
There isn’t much to see until there’s a squeak of the door opening behind him, and he spins his chair to see who it is.
* * *
“How did you end up…?” Deepak held out his hands, incredulous over how I looked.
The full-speed-ahead train of my thoughts runs through how I ended up in a windowless room full of shattered computers, sitting in front of my laptop, wearing nothing but my jockeys.
“Your dick hard?” I spun back to my screen.
“Yeah. I’m going to fuck you in the ass if you don’t let everyone back in here.”
“No one’s getting in until we know who did this, or they’re going to do it again.”
“What the fuck, Taylor?” He pushed a smashed computer with his toe.
I’d trashed four in a deliberate, organized way and couldn’t find a chip out of place. Then I lost my shit and smashed monitors against whatever edge I could find. Then I found it. A dongled chip with a quarter inch antenna right in the board.
“The poison pill was in the monitors. Five of them.” I pushed the one nearest my foot toward him. A 27-inch screen with a lightning fast GPU. We didn’t have the facilities to make our own monitors, so we bought them like normal people.
Deepak saw it right away and picked up the green board. “Motherfucker.”
“Said that right.”
“What was it talking to?”
“It had to be transmitted to something coming in and out of the cage. I found a power strip in reception with a receiver in it. Another fucking mail order. Never again.”
Deepak spread the monitor guts on the table next to me and examined them closely. “We’re a young office. We had to buy shit to set up. We had to buy a coffeemaker too. We can’t open up everything and check for receivers.”
“We do now.”
“Did they come from the same place? The monitors and the power strip?”
“No. It’s a fucking mess. I can’t make a connection. Monitors through TechWorld. The power strip was Amazon. The coffee maker was some artisanal company in Seattle.”
“You checked the coffee maker?” He stood up from his inspection of the monitor.
“It was clean. Look at this. I’m in the poison pill now.” I pointed at a little chip in the GPU I’d hooked up to my laptop, then at the screen.
“Anything?”
“The complete Sherlock Holmes.”
“Really?”
“Really. He’s fucking taunting me with it.”
Deepak looked over my shoulder. My hacker had pasted the entire library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the comments, and I had to go through every word.
“Have you considered it could be one of our guys?”
“No.”
That was out of the question. I paid them well and treated them like princes. They each had a stake in making this work, and they each cared about what we were doing. Whatever it was—worm, virus, hack from God—it had locked me out. I could see the size of the box my life was in, but I couldn’t open it. I hadn’t connected offsite backups because we were off the grid.
It wasn’t anyone on the team. I trusted them, and not a line of code got pushed to the source without me looking at it.
It was me. I’d been complacent. I’d let all their work get destroyed. I’d failed them. They relied on me to lead them, and I’d let them down.
“You all right?” Deepak asked.
Fuck it. Guilt was taking up time and energy. I was running low on both.
By accident, I laid too much weight on the page down key and forwarded to the middle of a completely different section. I was about to go back when I saw slashes. I hadn’t seen slashes anywhere else, then I noticed the digit at the beginning.
9 I beg* that y*ou will look upon it
not as a battered billycock but as
an in*te/ll/ectua/l/ q*roblem*.
“Look at this.” I pulled the paragraph onto the big screen in front of the room.
Deepak stood before it with his arms crossed. He was best when he had a problem to solve or a journalist to charm.
“Isolate the odd ones,” he said.
I’d already done it.
9gtyue/ll/tn/l/qm
“He needed the q,” I said. “So he misspelled problem.”
“What if the slashes aren’t for the letters?”
“Other options? Numbers?”
“Three Ls?”
“Or ones. Leet style.”
9gtyue3tnqm OR 9gtyuetn3qm
We stood in front of the green letters on the black background, arms crossed.
He tilted his head a little.
I paced away and looked quickly.
He looked at it from the side.
I squinted.
As if we had the same neurons, Deepak and I always thought with one mind. This time was no different.
“Eleven digits. Geohash coordinates,” I said. Geohash was a newer version of latitude and longitude that split the world into a grid and gave each box a code.
“God, please let it be Tahiti. I want to go to Tahiti.”
We didn’t have internet in the cage, but I had a geohash database inside it. I called it up, and the cached satellite picture came on the big screen. All grey. The coordinates were inside a water mass.
“Lake Superior,” I said. “Change the three in the second string.”
“Done.” It came on the screen in a split second, and it was land.
“No white sand beaches.” I folded my arms over my bare chest, looking at the pin. The coordinates fell on a big building in a little town in the middle of nowhere. “Where are we?”
Instead of answering, Deepak contracted the map until the surrounding area was in the frame.
Nothing.
Freeway.
Train tracks.
Farms.
An interstate.
A nameless tributary.
Nowheresville in The Great State of Nowhere, USA.
“Do you think…?” Deepak said.
“Yeah. I think he left it so I’d come looking for him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go looking for him.”
“Put on some pa
nts first.”
I was already out the door.
VII
Fucksville, Nowhere—aka Barrington—didn’t have an airport in a one-hundred-forty-mile radius.
That wasn’t true. They had a dirt landing strip for crop dusters. I’d passed it on the way. What a shit hole. If I’d chartered something to land there, I would have announced my presence before I even took off.
I wasn’t a big fan of Caddys. I drove a Tesla. Caddys weren’t a thing in San Jose, but it was the best car they’d had at the airport rental terminal. The girl behind the desk swore by it, hand on heart, eyes rolling with remembered pleasure, and I had to say, though it handled like a cruise liner, it drove like a spaceship.
As I passed into town, the sign said the population was 1,209, but there was a fifth space before the one, as if there used to be ten thousand more people.
The terrain was pre-winter blight. Post exploding fall colors and pre winter sting. Brown, leafless, scrubby. The sky was overhung with grey, but with no discernible clouds, as if a screen of dullness hung between the earth and the heavens.
No way the dude who hacked QI4 was in this town. This was a pitstop on the way to some big reveal that would either be humiliating or expensive.
I was a target. A betrayer. I’d gone from black hat to white hat. I’d created a system to thwart them and bragged about it. I was the Everest of the hacker world. They wanted to get me because I was big, I was a challenge, and I was there.
I pulled into a little parking lot in front of two stores. A restaurant and a grocery store. It was the first commercial zoning I’d seen since passing into town.
When I got out, I had a weird feeling I only got when I went to Scott’s Seafood with Fitz. Everyone looked and pretended not to. The room got one eighth quieter. They nudged each other, looked halfway around, pretended to take selfies so they could see over their shoulders.
This was the same—but different. Obviously. Because Fitz and I going to Scott’s was normal. My being in flyover central to find a hacker was crazy.
I went up the wooden steps to a restaurant called Barrington Burgers. It was closed. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock on a Saturday. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the glass door, angling to see through a slit in the blinds.
Looked all right at first glance. Homey little place. Chairs were pushed in but weren’t upside down on the tables. Maybe it was dinner only?
Then I noticed the alcohol was gone from behind the bar. The plants were dead. Sugar packets were strewn across the wood floor, shredded and balled in a light dusting in the floorboard slats. Only the white packets were ripped. The blue and pink packets were untouched.
Mice. Rats, maybe. Smart fuckers. I wouldn’t have touched that other shit either.
“You looking for someone, mister?”
I turned toward the voice behind me and my god. The prettiest things hid in the most unlikely places. Long, wavy blond hair that reached breasts hidden under a flannel plaid car coat that was cut for men. Jeans. Cowboy boots. No makeup. Wide, full lips with a crease in the bottom one. Angular nose. Freckles. Eyes that went from brown in the center to blue at the outer ring.
She looked away, a little pink in the cheek. Tucked her hair behind her ear. The diamond in her lobe had to be a carat and a half. It looked as real as she did.
“No one in particular,” I said. “I was thinking of staying the night around here.”
I actually hoped I wouldn’t have to, but no one who could hack me lived here, and I needed a place to drop my stuff.
“Oh, uh. There’s a hotel on Oakwood.” She pointed in a general direction. Her hand was fine, delicate, with white tape around three finger joints.
I took out my phone. She stared at it. Were they still using flip phones in Nowhereville or something?
“Do you know what it’s called? I can look it up.”
“The connection isn’t great around here. You just go right out of the lot. Go for about a mile and a half, and you’ll see a gate onto Oakwood. Take that until you see it.”
“What’s it called?” I could GPS the name more easily than stare at my odometer.
“Bedtimey Inn? But like I said, the connection’s pretty spotty around here.” She jerked her thumb behind her toward the little convenience store. “I’m helping out at the grocery. Want to call from there and see if they have any room?”
“I’ll just drive over.”
She barely moved, but I could tell I’d snubbed her by refusing her offer.
“I’m sure you know what you want.” Her eyelids fluttered. Her lashes were blond at the tips and darker at the roots.
Strange looking girl. Beautiful and exotic. Just a touch younger than me. Her nipples were probably the palest pink fading into bronze at the center. Or the other way around. I wanted to know.
It was the wanting that tweaked a thought, a memory, a flash of déjà vu. It tapped a turtle’s shell, and though the animal heard the tap, it didn’t come out.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“Um, did you go to Montgomery High?”
“No.”
“Do you work at the distro center off the interstate? I sub there sometimes.”
“No.” I couldn’t help smirking. The notion that I was from here, working at the distribution center off the interstate, was ridiculous, and I couldn’t hide it. “You just look familiar. But I’ve never been around here before.”
I almost asked her if she’d ever been to Silicon Valley or suggested we’d met at MIT, but why push it? If someone that beautiful had ever left Barrington, she never would have come back.
“Okay.” She folded her bottom lip in thought, and I knew where the crease had come from. It was so much sexier as the result of a habit than a genetic detail. “You sure you don’t want to call first?” Another thumb jerk toward the little grocery store.
“I’m good.”
A shiny blue pickup pulled up in front of the store. She waved at it. A guy in a baseball cap rolled the window down to give us a short wave and a dirty look that may have all been in my head. He looked to be in his late twenties, but hard twenties, with skin the product of sun and tobacco. A hound leaned over his lap and stuck his head out, giving a bark when he saw us.
The girl turned back to me. “Bye, then.”
“Bye.”
She took two steps down to the lot, blond waves flapping like Old Glory on a fall day.
“Do you have a name?” I called to her.
She turned and walked backward. “Harper.”
“Harper.” I said it more to myself than her.
She didn’t ask me my name but went to the truck, gave the dog a pat, the guy a couple of words, then bounced up to the store. I flipped the key to the Caddy around my finger, watching her. When she disappeared, Baseball Cap opened the car door, watching me. The dog poured out and ran up the steps to the girl.
Harper.
I waved to the guy in the cap. He went toward the grocery store after his dog without waving back. I got in the Caddy and turned the key, but though I laid my hand on the gearshift, I couldn’t move until I said in the car what I couldn’t say outside.
“Wow.”
VIII
Reception was worse than spotty. No hotspot. Data didn’t work until it did for five seconds, then my phone would buzz so hard with back notifications I thought the casing would break.
I pulled into the motel parking lot. Two long stories. No cars. Unlit soda vending machine and a snack machine with nothing in the spirals. The office door had a coded realtor’s key box on it.
So much for the locals knowing where to find a hotel. I plucked up my phone. No signal, but I could see what had come in. I ignored everything but Deepak on our cloaked and encrypted message stream.
in the Barrington Bottling Plant.>
“Don’t tell me.” I scrolled down. “It’s—”
&
nbsp;
spot. Oracle wants a meeting. We’re
going to have to resell the whole thing
to them.>
“We have to close the hole first. Then GreyHatC0n.” I was talking to myself in the front seat of the car. I never talked to myself. I was too secretive for that.
fix it and prove it at GHC0N.>
wasteland. Set up Oracle meeting. Call
Dan at Walmart. Tap me if anything.>
The crunch of tires on gravel made me look up from my phone and roll down my window. A claptrap Chevy with a rusted-out bottom pulled up alongside the Caddy. At some distant point in the 1990s, it had been either dark blue, forest green, or some shade of grey. The hand-tinting on the windows was buckling and cracking, leaving clouds of transparency on the glass.
The passenger window rolled down slowly, with an uncomfortable grinding noise, revealing the blonde from the grocery store.
Harper.
“Hey,” she said. “I called, and it turns out they closed.”
“Apparently.”
“Sorry. I don’t stay in the hotels.”
“Not your fault. I should have listened.”
She acknowledged my apology with a smile. “I can take you somewhere else.”
“Actually.” I ended the sentence. I didn’t want to ask this across car windows. I opened the Caddy door as much as I could without denting the Chevy and slid out.
She took the cue and got out of her car. We met by the taillights.
“Actually?” The wind caught the edges of her hair, sending blades out in a corona around her face. I gripped my thumbs in my fists. She folded her hands in front of her.
“Do you know anything about the Barrington Bottling Plant?”
