Hacked

by Tracy Alexander

  14

  For our first proper date we went out with the Wildlife Trust. (Yes, I became a ‘friend of the planet’.)

  Sunday mornings in Ruby’s world meant volunteering. I wanted to see her and that was what she was doing so I went too. We all met at a courtyard on Jacobs Wells Road. It was an odd group, about twenty people, of which we were the youngest and the oldest was as old as Gandalf.

  ‘Who’s this you’ve brought with you, Ruby?’ said an old man, who turned out to be called Ted.

  ‘It’s’er fella,’ said an old woman, name of Dot.

  ‘Has he got a name?’ said Ted.

  ‘He’s called Fella,’ said Ruby.

  They all laughed, and called me ‘Fella’ all that day (and forever after).

  ‘When we get there, look out for the snipe and redshank,’ said Ted’s pal, Isaac, tapping my shoulder on the bus.

  ‘Will do,’ I said, with no idea what either of them looked like.

  ‘Fella’s got his own bird to gawp at,’ said Ted, starting a laugh that turned into a cough.

  Ruby winked at me.

  That day’s job was on the moor, patching up the bird hide and clearing the access. I worked beside Ruby, who’d brought some gloves for both of us. She was cutting back the overgrowth and I was tidying the edge of the track.

  ‘I like these long-handled sideways scissors,’ I said.

  ‘They’re called lawn shears, Fella,’ said Ted. His role seemed to be onlooker.

  ‘We could do with one of those petrol-driven strimmers,’ said Isaac.

  ‘Don’t need petrol when you’ve got a young ’un like that,’ said Dot with a big belly laugh.

  ‘Actually, he’s solar powered,’ said Ruby. ‘Works fine as long as I keep him outside.’

  ‘I thought he was a wind-up,’ said Ted.

  Everyone laughed again.

  ‘Leave the lad alone,’ said Isaac. ‘The poor boy’s not a radio, he’s —’

  Ruby interrupted. ‘Nothing like as useful as that.’

  I’m not saying it was the wittiest banter, but it was nice. They really liked her, and she liked them.

  Ruby had made us a picnic – peanut butter sandwiches, salt and vinegar crisps, apples and Ribena. It was like days out with my gran and grandad, sitting in the fresh air, wrapped up warm, fiddling with sticks and chatting.

  ‘What is it this week, then, Ruby? Black Forest gateau?’ asked Ted.

  ‘You’re the wind-up merchant,’ said Dot. ‘You shouldn’t take things for granted. She might not bring one, one day.’

  Ruby had already reached into her rucksack and brought out a tupperware.

  ‘She’s a wonderful girl,’ whispered Isaac. ‘Always brings a cake.’

  ‘Always a Victoria sponge,’ said Ruby. ‘I don’t know how to make anything else.’

  ‘You can’t beat jam and cream,’ said Dot.

  ‘I didn’t know you could bake,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing our Ruby can’t do,’ said Ted, taking a huge bite and losing most of it.

  It tasted delicious. Everything did that day.

  In the afternoon I helped Isaac cut back some of the trees and bushes while Ruby did some bramble bashing. She was wearing a faded grey fleece and old jeans and walking boots, but she didn’t look drab because her cheeks were pink and her freckles orange and her hair shining, and her smile …

  ‘We’re very fond of Ruby,’ said Isaac.

  I felt like I was talking to her dad, asking for her hand in marriage.

  ‘I am too.’

  He nodded – I think I’d passed the first test.

  On the way home, listening to them all going on, I was a tiny bit flummoxed by how much I’d enjoyed the day, and how much I really did like her and how much I wanted all the oldies to like me. It wasn’t a typical date, but that was the thing with Ruby. It wasn’t like being with anyone else.

  The first week we hung out between lessons, went to the café and ate cake after school, and, on Friday, went to the cinema. In the dark I finally got round to kissing her – it was so different from Soraya’s sticky pink lips. Ruby’s mouth was simply a better fit all round. She came over to my house the second week and stayed to eat, and as that went surprisingly well, she came a lot more. I went to hers once, straight from school. Never again.

  Her mum came into the hall to say hello.

  ‘You must be Dan,’ she said. No handshake. No smile.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. And then, because it was a bit awkward, ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘And you,’ she said. Tight lips. Nasty blue dress.

  She managed to look only at Ruby, which was clever given how close to each other we were standing, and say, ‘Supper’s at six-thirty so …’

  ‘Dan’ll be gone by then.’

  Ruby turned to go up the stairs.

  ‘Stay downstairs, please, Ruby,’ she said.

  Did I look like a rabid animal about to attack her daughter?

  ‘Mum!’

  Ruby’s mum made a face that looked like constipation to me but presumably meant something to Ruby, who took my hand and led me into the room with the funny frosted glass door.

  ‘Am I the first boy you’ve brought home?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, and I won’t be tempted again,’ she said.

  We watched telly, with Ruby’s mum popping her head in every few minutes.

  ‘Is she always like this?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean like a guard dog?’ said Ruby, making her hands pretend to be cocked ears. That made me laugh. A lot of things she did made me laugh.

  ‘Overprotective,’ I said, trying to be diplomatic.

  ‘Only child in a single-parent family, what hope is there?’ said Ruby.

  She gave me the shorthand version of how her dad ended up living in Scotland.

  ‘… Dad couldn’t breathe without asking Mum first, and she’s a bit the same with me.’ Ruby shrugged. ‘She’s basically not that happy about me seeing you.’

  My mum and dad were the opposite – delighted to see me in a relationship because it meant I wasn’t spending all my time in my room on my own. (Yippee – sixteen, not medicated and not a recluse.) (It also meant Dad gave up on our nine o’clock bonding sessions – more yippees.) The fact that Ruby had no piercings and wanted to work with nature was the chocolate topping on the parents’ cupcake. El was pleased too, because after years of gymnastic failure, Ruby managed to teach her how to do a cartwheel. All good.

  Now for the not so good.

  * * *

  Backtrack to the café, me trying to drink the cream-topped hot chocolate without looking silly (she had no issues with her cocoa moustache), while explaining the rise and fall of my Pay As You Go scheme. On that day, I pledged to never do it again, insisting I was only really interested in gaming. She seemed to believe me, and there hadn’t been any cause to mention it since.

  However, my online life carried on. The hours I put in were drastically reduced, but most nights I joined in the live messaging on IRC with Angel’s mob. Later on, when men in suits asked me why, I didn’t have a good reason. But they pressed me, so I said I was interested in what they were up to – that was my best answer.

  Ruby didn’t know and didn’t ask.

  All this waffle is to explain that there were a few weeks of calm before the storm. A few weeks where I was still ordinary, happy, in fact. The only incident of any relevance, that happened somewhere in the middle, was a night-time chat with Angel’s crew. We were talking about my spying activity, which had included:

  – people leaving the Kremlin in big coats

  – drunks leaving The Cambridge Arms

  – watching the queue outside the Kellaway chip shop

  – Tokyo rush hour

  – Arizona (the land of nothing)

  – tourists at the Great Wall of China

  and loads of other random locations.

  Angel typed:

  do something with it – don’t just watch

 
like what? – that was me.

  track a celebrity and sell the photo

  catch a royal having an affair

  spy on the US forces with their own cameras

  hack a drone and fly it

  could you do that KP? – that was Angel.

  if I wanted to be blacklisted by the most powerful country on the planet I could – me.

  China is most powerful

  They went off in another direction, arguing about wealth, population, and the fact that all the clever kids are Chinese. I followed the chat while playing Counter Strike on my laptop. It took an unexpected turn.

  thats your challenge KP – hack a drone – typed Angel.

  He went offline, and so did I. But his words stayed on my mind.

  15

  Ruby had Duke of Edinburgh expedition training, leaving Saturday morning and getting back late Sunday. (I wished I’d signed up. Knowing she’d be with Ty made me feel left out – very childish.) She couldn’t even come over on Friday night because she was having a takeaway with her mum, so after school I sat in the kitchen for a bit, eating Wagon Wheels – El’s favourite – a bit aimless.

  ‘Will you help me build a Tudor house?’ she said to Mum.

  ‘I’m on lates tonight and tomorrow, and look at all this.’ Mum spread her arms out to imply mess. ‘Maybe Dan could help?’

  Out of character, but I said, ‘All right.’

  I made El sketch her ideal Tudor residence while I rummaged through the recycling. An hour later we had a house-shaped black and grey model made from inside-out cereal boxes, electrical tape, kindling and toothpicks.

  It was 5.32 p.m. and I had nothing to do all weekend, unless I went volunteering without Ruby on Sunday, which I thought I might. Could talk about her even if I couldn’t talk to her. (Meet Dan, the lovesick puppy.)

  I don’t do boredom, so no surprise that my thoughts wandered in a particular direction.

  Hacking a drone – was it possible?

  I tidied the crap off my desk, in preparation.

  As I’d already breached the US Military’s network to hack the spy satellite, an American drone was the obvious target. I had the first, and maybe most difficult, step in my pocket. The question was whether a camera with wings was any more complicated to access and hijack than a satellite camera?

  I settled down to some research.

  Drones (flying robots, pilotless planes, UAVs) are everywhere. The army has them, Japanese farmers have them (for crop-spraying) and so do wildlife enthusiasts (to track endangered species like cheetahs). They’re used to hunt hurricanes and to find people that have fallen off mountains in the Rockies. Drones are cool. Low-level flying, eyes, ears, weapons – what’s not to like? The US has Predator drones that fly over Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia – places like that – looking for terrorists they can lob a missile at. They get it wrong quite a lot of the time and kill random locals, but as the controllers flying the drones are safely on US soil, in the desert in Nevada, nothing happens. The UK has Reapers doing something similar but evidently we only hit terrorists (either that or we’re better at lying).

  I got inside the US Military network through the base station in Afghanistan, like before, and poked around. You’ll probably be able to sleep easier at night when I tell you that, despite my expertise, accessing a drone wasn’t as simple as finding the video feeds. I couldn’t tell which servers might be responsible, and there were plenty of them. All very time-consuming. There was nothing to report for thirty-six hours except that I ate spaghetti Bolognese, Shreddies, a ham sandwich, fish pie and chocolate fudge cake and slept twice for short periods. At various times I tracked Ruby. Before you jump to conclusions, not by hacking, but by using Find My Friends on my iPhone – a clever little app that she had accepted my request to join.

  Early Sunday morning, Reuters reported that the Americans were flying surveillance drones out of a base in Djibouti to spy on the Somalis. I found a busy server with lots of repeats of activity where the drones were supposed to be in operation. It felt right, and was begging to be breached. I got inside, tried a few things and, without too much trouble, took charge of a surveillance drone. My screen showed a head-up display – data superimposed on a grainy aerial image of a building, co-ordinates, headers, stuff – not wildly different from the screens you get on Xbox, which seemed wrong on some level. I checked to see if my controls worked – they did … and gave the drone straight back, but for those few seconds the pilot on the ground lost the upper hand. It was a rush. You don’t need to take drugs to get one. Hijacking part of the world’s greatest power’s defence system works just as well.

  16

  I woke up way too late (noon) to go volunteering. Not that it mattered. I was more interested in hooking up with Angel and ‘mentioning’ the fact that KP had successfully hacked a drone. It was funny how he was as much one of my friends as Joe and Ty, even though we’d never eyeballed each other.

  Sadly, the cheery parents upset my plan.

  ‘Up you get, Dan. We’re going out for Sunday lunch.’

  Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and other occasions are celebrated in The Cambridge Arms – end of our road, turn right, which is handy if the parents have one too many!

  I dragged myself out of bed, showered (which was overdue – there’s something about the adrenalin involved in coding that makes you smell bad), ate a banana, found time (before the hollering started) to locate Angel in the worldwide wilderness and send him the lines of code to prove my superiority. I was already looking forward to being a fully qualified member of whatever ‘gang’ it was he was head of.

  Off we went.

  It was quite bright outside and I made the mistake of squinting to limit the amount of Vitamin D I got in one shot.

  ‘You need to get out at least once a day, Dan,’ said Dad, helpfully.

  I nodded. Usual strategy.

  ‘Have you started revising yet?’ asked Mum, a little wary. She tries not to put any pressure on. Children are sensitive souls, evidently.

  ‘They’ve said Easter will be soon enough.’

  ‘That’s only two weeks away,’ said Dad, King of the Calendar. I resisted the urge to clarify that the Easter holidays were two weeks away but the Christian festival known as Easter was four weeks away.

  ‘What are you going to have?’ said El.

  ‘Gammon, egg and chips,’ I said. ‘And I’m not sharing.’

  El always has a roast but her greed for chips overcomes her.

  ‘Ten is a lot of subjects to get through,’ said Mum. ‘Maybe you should start doing a bit after school …’

  I went along with the parents’ advice and pretended to be considering which AS-levels to take. At some point in the meal they dared to say the word ‘university’ – hoping I was going to be the first one in the family to go.

  ‘That’s the plan,’ I said.

  ‘You come out with a big loan, so it’s best to choose a subject with a chance of a job,’ said Dad.

  ‘Or I could never work and never pay it back,’ I said.

  I scraped the last bit of sticky toffee pudding off my plate, took a tiny bit of El’s and told them I was off to see Joe, leaving her with her tongue stuck out and Dad telling her to behave.

  Joe was in, which was good. Joe’s parents were out – even better. Joe was playing a shoot-’em-up I didn’t recognise – interesting. On his ceiling – awesome.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Set it up yesterday. It’s heaven.’

  The room was dark but Joe’s smile beamed through regardless, powered by happiness. He was reclining on a beanbag, using the whole ceiling as his screen. Further inspection revealed a projector balancing on its end, supported by cushions.

  ‘Where did this come from?’

  ‘School. I borrowed it for the weekend.’

  I didn’t interrogate the legitimacy of the ‘borrowing’.

  ‘Brilliant idea.’

  ‘Not mine. I saw it on YouTube.’
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br />   I took up my position on the second beanbag and started annihilating anything that moved. In between the sort of shouting you can only enjoy when you have the house – and ideally street – to yourself, we talked about Ty’s occasional memory problems (that seemed to occur at handy moments), and the climbing centre (Joe had entered a bouldering competition), and exams (Joe said his parents hadn’t realised when they were yet), and Ruby (not a patch on Soraya to look at, according to Joe). And then the conversation turned again.

  ‘Did you ever manage to see what happened to that van that hit Ty?’

  I told him about the graveyard of white vans.

  ‘Took me ages,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t believe it when I saw him park …’ I shook my head, still angry that I’d wasted so much time chasing a loser that randomly ran over cyclists.

  ‘I can’t believe you know how to do that stuff,’ said Joe.

  ‘I don’t “know”, I work it out. Like you work out how to scramble up a wall defying gravity, gecko-boy.’

  He put his legs in the air, which looked pretty funny, like a baby having its nappy changed.

  ‘Hacked anything else, then?’

  I should have kept schtum. But how was I to know that the friend who had bought stolen credit and applauded my attempt to track the van would freak out at a drone?

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ He put his legs down and sat up, missed three easy targets that I got in three shots. Then got himself killed.

  While I waited for him to respawn, he said it again.

  ‘You’re kidding, Dan?’

  ‘No,’ I said, concentrating on the action. ‘It was a bet, that’s all.’

  Next thing I knew he’d grabbed my controller but I didn’t let go, so we had a kind of scuffle. Dim I might be, but I really thought we were messing, till he put his foot on where my six-pack would be if I had one.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Look at me,’ he said, which immediately tripled my annoyance because when I was in my ADHD period Mum and Dad were forever taking my face in their hands to make sure I was listening.