Hacked

by Tracy Alexander

  Dad was eating a packet of Bourbons, watching a box set of some crime drama. We could torrent it for free but he’s old-fashioned like that. It was Wednesday so Mum had gone to choir.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Dan, nice to see you out of your den. What’s wrong? Internet down?’

  What is it about parents? They say teenagers can’t communicate but when you try, they wind you up.

  ‘I do leave my room, Dad. But there’s this thing called homework.’ I used a sarcastic tone, always goes down well.

  ‘Stea-dy.’

  I hate it when he says that, like he’s a horse whisperer and I’m about to bolt.

  ‘Can’t I have a joke?’ he said, eating another biscuit to maintain his XL waist measurement.

  ‘A joke would be fine, Dad. But by definition they have to be funny.’

  I changed my mind about telling him and went into the kitchen instead, where El was playing Club Penguin on Mum’s computer.

  ‘Can you buy me a new igloo with a pink bed?’ she said.

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’ she said.

  ‘On whether you want to make me a hot chocolate?’

  ‘Deal,’ she said. I went back to my room and topped up her Icelandic bank account.

  But she didn’t honour her side, because Dad did.

  ‘Ty’s dad just rang,’ he said, putting down the mug. ‘He’s been in an accident.’

  I didn’t say anything, suddenly afraid that he might be dead and I might blub. Not something I’d done since Grandad died.

  The last time I saw Grandad he told Gran he wanted ‘An oak coffin with brass handles’. And when she went to get a cup of tea he said, ‘Pop my tobacco in, Dan, just in case I fancy a smoke.’ I laughed, which was what he wanted me to do. And when they buried him I made sure there was some Old Holborn in his jacket pocket.

  Dad pushed aside some dirty clothes, loads of chocolate wrappers and a magazine, so he could sit down on the edge of my bed, feet between a pile of plates covered with toast crumbs and a Star Wars poster that fell down when I was about ten. Credit where it’s due, he managed not to rant about the mess.

  ‘Ty hasn’t come round yet,’ he said. ‘But that’s common, they say. Your brain shuts down to get on with mending itself.’

  In biology, Mrs Dean said the brain is like soft tofu. To get that image out of my head, I decided to risk speaking.

  ‘I can’t believe it. He was on his way home from helping at Scouts, you know … it’s part of his Duke of Edinburgh.’

  ‘They should put cameras in their vans,’ said Dad, ‘to record the bloody awful driving. That would sort them out.’

  We carried on talking about how unfair it was, until the million-dollar question found its way out of my mouth.

  ‘Do you think he’s going to be all right?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dad.

  I’d have been better asking El – she’s the one who watches Casualty and checks everyone’s symptoms in the Family Medical Encyclopedia.

  ‘I’ll call round theirs tomorrow, after work,’ he said, ruffling my hair, which is about as affectionate as it gets. ‘Positive thinking, eh?’

  I nodded. Dad disappeared, fatherly duty done.

  It’s clear to me what goes on in his head, even though he has no clue what goes on in my mine. He feels guilty because he lets me spend so much time in my ‘den’ but he can’t be bothered to do anything about it. He thinks we should be up on the Downs kicking a ball, or watching classic films from the 80s or fishing on a river bank like Mole and Ratty, but we’d both rather be on our own than together. Every so often he has a go about me lazing about in the pit that’s my room, as well as my general lack of application. I look as though I’m listening, and we carry on like nothing’s been said. Works for us.

  I went online, keen to think about anything but Ty. And there was Angel, somewhere in the cloud.

  We were already friends by then. It’s strange the way you can work out who you get on with without eye contact, body language, piercings or a voice to help. It’s better in a way – no prejudice about being fat, old, ugly, Vietnamese, blue-tinged, speaking like Sean Connery or Stephen Hawking, or mute. I had no idea whether Angel was fifty, or sixteen like me, whether he had a faith, or if he played polo for England, but I liked him. He was smart, cocky, and the only person, apart from Soraya and Mia, that I didn’t charge for credit when I was running the phone scam. It wasn’t generosity – I didn’t want a money trail over the internet. And I suppose I was showing off. He was stoked:

  sweet – good job KP

  I actually sent him the lines of code for him to help himself. Kind of me, and it made a sort of bond. After all, I was on the wrong side of the law, and I trusted him not to tell.

  Angel was gutted when I told him about Ty’s accident:

  bad job

  I told him I was already dreading going to school and hearing all the girls going over the top, weeping and wailing – omg! omg!

  dont go – he said.

  6

  I got dressed in uniform and went downstairs at the normal time, Mum took El to breakfast club on her way to work, Dad took himself, and I went back to my room. Peasy.

  I met Angel online and we spent ages baiting other ships in EVE with small cruisers, hacked so they could deal out insane damage – it was hilarious. We moved onto Starcraft ll, and with a little mod of the code to give us unlimited resources, built hundreds of siege tanks and annihilated everyone. That was a good day. In between we chatted about random stuff … and less random:

  hack the council security cameras – get the reg of the van

  You’d have thought I could have come up with that idea myself.

  might just do that – I typed.

  Knowing I could have a crack at finding the idiot who hit and ran made me feel entirely different. Who doesn’t like the idea of revenge?

  I went out well before the time El comes back from school, and got back home as usual, about four o’clock.

  ‘How was your day, Dan?’ asked Mum. She smiled. As mums go, she’s up there – cooks nice food, sorts out my clothes and leaves them in a pile outside my room, leaves the inside of my room well alone, leaves me alone.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘I made banana muffins at school,’ said El, pointing at the plate.

  ‘They look great.’ I took one and made this-is-delicious noises to please her.

  ‘I’m working tonight,’ said Mum. ‘So are you all right to take El in the morning?’

  She’s ten, but hasn’t worked out roads at all.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Thanks, Dan.’ Mum put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Have you heard anything more about Ty?’

  I shook my head. No point sharing the crap everyone was posting.

  ‘Dad’s going to pop round there later.’

  I nodded, drank a glass of blackcurrant and went up to my room.

  I prepared for the task by tidying a rectangle of my desk, loading a random episode of QI on my fixed computer, and positioning the laptop bang in the middle. Good to go!

  I wasn’t expecting the local council’s traffic department to be much of an obstacle. And I was right. Two episodes, one loo stop and a Diet Coke later, I’d got inside the system, and found the right camera – by the traffic lights on Westbury Road. But there was a problem I hadn’t predicted. I could see the live feed, but not the history. For a while I watched the traffic – it’s more interesting than you’d imagine. Drivers on the phone, swerving, arguing, last-minute braking, eating – if what I saw was typical, there should be more accidents.

  A bad mood was descending. I don’t like not being able to figure things out. And this was important. There was a man sitting at home somewhere enjoying a can of beer, while Ty was in a hospital bed attached to pipes and tubes. The CCTV had to be archived somewhere … I trawled through, getting nowhere, confounded by two common problems – people aren’t logical, and systems get added to
. (Ironically the same problems that baffle you, sometimes let you in.)

  Here’s an example of source code:

  import socket sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) sock.connect((“irc.freenode.com”, 6697)) nickname = “NICK Eschatonrn” encoded_nick = bytes(nickname, ‘utf-8’) sock.send(encoded_nick) request username = “USER Neo {0} Neo :m4tr1c3srn”.format(server) encoded_user = bytes(username, ‘utf-8’) sock.send(encoded_user)

  They’re a set of orders, like a flow chart, that you can manipulate, or add your own commands to. It’s like telling a story … no, more like telling lots of stories at once. I showed Joe back in the Club Penguin days but he couldn’t grasp what I was on about. It’s funny because he’s clever enough, but there are different types of clever. There’s the man in the veg shop who can add the prices of the carrots and sweet potatoes Mum buys in his head, and there’s Derren Brown who totally gets how people think, and Joe who can scale a wall like a gecko, and then there’s geeks like me – code just makes sense.

  Except the archive of the council CCTV didn’t make sense. I got the feeling no one ever needed access to footage from the past and it was dumped somewhere offline, never to be seen again. Maybe they erased it …

  Dad came home at about seven-thirty and called me down. El came too, presumably for medical research purposes. Dad had chatted to Ty’s mum and then stayed to look after Ty’s twin brothers while his mum and dad swapped roles. They were taking it in turns to keep a bedside vigil because Ty hadn’t woken up. He was conscious immediately after the collision but then his brain had shut down because of a bleed.

  ‘Haematoma,’ said El.

  ‘It’s a matter of time,’ said Dad.

  Not what I wanted to hear.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Piece of string, I’m afraid,’ said Dad.

  ‘Better shut down than dead,’ said El, cheerily. Please let her not qualify as a doctor.

  ‘I said you’d visit,’ said Dad.

  Instant panic. I wanted him to get better obviously, but the idea of talking to an unconscious Ty freaked me out. You must have seen it on telly – playing their favourite songs, holding hands, chatting as though there was someone listening. No way could I do that.

  ‘OK,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Tomorrow all right with you … after tea?’

  I nodded, hoping I’d get a contagious disease overnight …

  Back in my room, I decided to check through the council’s system once more and, like in all good stories, just when I was about to give up and make some toast, I stumbled upon the right server and found the video records. All I had to do was specify the exact co-ordinates, date and time of the accident. Piece of cake. I braced myself, knowing I was about to watch my friend be flattened by a lunatic driver … but the camera was pointing the wrong way. I could see Westbury Road, the lights and the bus stop, but all the action was past the place where Ty was knocked off.

  Total waste of time. The adrenalin that had built up – seeing myself presenting the identity of the criminal to the police and being thanked by Ty’s family (ignoring the illegality of hacking for now) – disappeared, and left me feeling pretty flat. To forget about it all I went in search of my elite friends in the virtual playground and offloaded. It was great being able to admit to hacking something without anyone judging:

  got the camera but not the crash

  was it a long job? – Angel asked.

  took 2 episodes QI – Pretty cool response, though I say so myself.

  maybe try the spy satellite network

  I thought Angel was joking. Reconnaissance satellites are controlled by governments. We’re talking the Pentagon!

  Funny how an idea takes hold …

  7

  As I walked El to school she filled me in on Ty’s condition, based on Googling ‘head injury’.

  ‘Memory problems, headaches, and sometimes vision is affected – that’s seeing. If he gets epilepsy they operate. I watched one on YouTube.’

  ‘Bye, El. Have a good day.’

  It occurred to me that putting some brotherly controls on her login might be an idea.

  ‘Do you have a note, Dan?’ asked Mr Richards as I strolled in, a couple of minutes late. I’d totally forgotten that I’d bunked school so didn’t have an excuse ready.

  ‘No. Forgot, sorry.’

  ‘But you’re better today?’

  ‘Yes. Twenty-four-hour thing,’ I said, head deep in my locker.

  ‘Don’t worry this time,’ he said.

  He obviously thought I’d stayed off because of Ty, who was the subject of all the talk. I didn’t join in. Half the people that were going on didn’t even like him. In popularity terms Ty was about as in demand as I was since Pay As You Go folded.

  ‘You all right?’ said Soraya. It was the first time she’d spoken to me since the ‘you’re dumped’ text (this isnt working for me … im breaking up with u sorry).

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. I wanted to ask her if she was still seeing the boy-band clone but …

  ‘I’m sure he’ll get better.’ She flashed me a celebrity smile complete with glossy lips, before catching up with the other girls. I walked from English to chemistry on my own. Without Ty, who I have most of my classes with, there wasn’t anyone obvious to talk to. The nice kids – the ones that wouldn’t dream of buying stolen credit – tended to keep away from me. The cool ones, ditto, but for different reasons.

  I spent the lesson immersed in a textbook, where my cleverly concealed laptop taught me everything there is to know about satellites, most of it wrong. Here’s a selection:

  – they’re cameras in the sky

  – there are loads of different types – weather, search and rescue, navigation, reconnaissance (spying), communications (telly, phone, radio) and military (more spying)

  – the Russian Sputnik was first, scared the ‘pants’ off the Americans

  – some of them sweep round the earth once a day (some don’t)

  – they can identify the make and model of a car from hundreds of miles high

  – they’re controlled from base stations on the ground

  – there are thousands, mostly used for broadcasting

  – exact numbers and nature of military satellites is a secret

  – exact numbers of non-military is anything from 2,000 to 16,000, but if you include space junk it’s more

  – a satellite is actually an object that moves round a larger object e.g. the moon

  Conclusions:

  – there’s loads of rubbish on the internet

  – I like lists.

  By the time I got home I knew enough to get started. It was crazy to even consider it, but in your room, on your own, playing with IP connections, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything wrong. In fact, you could call hacking a public service. Admittedly, black hats are either out to cause chaos or filch thousands, but there are white hats working hard to make things better simply because they can. And if it weren’t for people like me (in the middle – more of a grey hat) governments and big business (like mobile phone operators) wouldn’t know how fragile their systems are. And the man in the street wouldn’t know that the Americans and the British are listening in to his private conversations.

  Spooooky!

  Anyway, what were the chances of me cracking it?

  8

  ‘Dinner’s on the table,’ shouted Mum. Her third attempt to get us downstairs.

  El came to the door of my room and hovered, one foot in front, invading my air space.

  ‘Watch it!’ I said.

  She wiggled her foot.

  ‘Out!’

  Not letting my sister in my room might seem mean, but …

  Before I learnt to logout whenever I was more than an arm’s length away from my devices, she regularly wrote things on my Facebook page that little girls think are funny like:

  Dan Langley loves the Ninky Nonk

  Dan Langley farted
/>   She also regularly raided my stash of Lindor chocolate truffles and left only wrappers. A double crime because she denied it every time until I presented her with evidence from my phone, cable-tied in position to capture anyone approaching my desk.

  As if I needed any more ammunition, this time she reached for a discarded sock and blew her nose on it.

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘It’s washing,’ she said.

  ‘Washing powder isn’t as powerful as your snot, El.’

  In one seamless move I leapt out of my computer chair, dived like the England goalie (whoever he is) across my rug and landed at her feet. She squealed, and stepped back over the threshold.

  I think she likes being banned. It gives her kudos. She tells everyone and then grins like she’s won a rosette for best pony.

  I followed her downstairs.

  ‘It’s stir fry,’ said Mum.

  During dinner Dad had a rant about the proposed changes to the benefit system. ‘Every time some Eton toff says “hard-working families”, the people that rely on the state to see them through get another kick in the teeth.’

  Mum shared her latest birthing drama from the hospital. ‘Honestly, if I get another shoulder dystocia this week I’m going to have a breakdown.’ Dystocia means stuck – it’s an emergency but usually turns out all right. Mum’s the most experienced midwife there so she gets the tricky cases. If ever she has a baby that doesn’t make it, she doesn’t make it to the tea table.

  The next topic was El’s homework – draw a balanced meal. I helped out by building a food tower – an apple on top of a fruit scone on top of malt loaf on top of an orange juice carton. Ta-da!

  ‘No one likes a smart arse, Dan,’ said Dad.

  He was too late, El was sold on the idea.

  What we didn’t discuss was the visit. I was playing the verbal version of if-I-can’t-see-you-you’re-not-there. Unfortunately Dad wasn’t. He was just waiting for the right moment. Never.