by Travis Knoll
"Do you know exactly where to place the code?" Alex asked.
"I'm looking for it now, and I am almost to the second barrier," I said.
"Whoa, whoa, pally," Talks said. Signs pointed at the screen at the influx of ominous traffic coming in our direction.
"We're getting a rapid increase in traffic that appears like they're tracking our location," Talks said.
"OK, I believe that I am through and to the area where the algorithm needs to be placed for the backdoor to work," I said.
"I think I'm almost complete. That wasn't that bad," I stated. All of our screens paused and flickered at the same time and our attention was drawn to each other.
"What the hell was that?" Alex asked.
"The server is heating up. They’re onto us," Talks stated.
"What are you looking at?" Alex asked as she turned and watched me.
I was in a daze, and everything moved in slow motion like I was walking through the city fog back in San Francisco before the curfew was up. I found where the new algorithm needed to be placed and whoever, or whatever was in charge of the operation, their stamp was in the code and it read “Property of the CIA” with an U.S.A stamp next to it. I built a lot of applications like this to collect user information without the user knowing. This happened a lot in government-contracted work to monitor their employees’ time and where they were spending resources.
"Hurry up, pal," Talks said.
I quickly took a screenshot, and made it route to my cell phone. I pulled from the recesses of my mind Detective Slate’s email, and forwarded it to him. The subject of the message was from Tax: “click here to find your truth,” I wrote, and quickly wrote in the body of the email. I placed a copy of the screenshot and coded evidence on the flash drive.
"The system isn't going to hold much longer. They’re onto us, you need to hurry," Alex yelled.
"They've almost located us," Talks said as Signs pointed at a GPS signal on the computer that was being routed through different servers as a dummy location to keep them away from us.
"Who is?" I asked. I placed a piece of code onto it with the information to route to an offshore account that I'd already set up.
"Everyone, you need to hurry," Talks said. Odysseus moaned and got closer to Signs.
"OK, I am transferring the algorithm from the flash drive now. Just hang on, everything is almost complete." I pushed Enter on the computer and the data transfer brought up the percentage that needed to be transferred to show 70% complete. The green bars lethargically moved on the screen’s window, like a snail, fading in and out ever so slowly.
I tapped my foot on the ground with a raised sense of anxiety, like a drummer hitting a base drum, that rang into and through everyone’s face as worry set in.
"You need to hurry!" Alex yelled.
"It's at eighty-two percent. If it's not complete, we lose everything," I said as everyone looked at my screen. Time seemed to stop.
"They made us, location compromised," Talks said.
"We can't divert them anymore," Alex yelled.
The red lights in the cold, dimly lit room flickered, and Odysseus put his head between Signs’s legs as Signs consoled his friend.
"We're almost there, it says ninety-five percent complete," I said.
"They're in, they passed all the routed bots that I placed," Alex yelled.
"They've made our location and tracked us. They'll be here any second," Talks stated vehemently.
The transfer said 99% complete. The lights flickered...
"We're screwed unless we get one hundred percent. It’s all or nothing!" I said, as they all turned and looked at the last percentage point that was needed. "Come on, come on..."
The power shut off and everything was pitch black. Odysseus got under Signs’s chair for safety.
March 11, 2035
Kiev, Ukraine
Deluxe Nightclub Basement
22:32
A glass was never half full or half empty to me. It was the process—there was no stillness—and I think that was what we all loved. I could hear my own heart beat, coupled with the gentle sliding movement of the chairs’ plastic rollers on the basement floor. We could all hear the faint footsteps of some sort of heeled shoe hitting the club floor directly above us. The steps grew louder and started to approach the door that hid us.
"Well, did you get it?" Alex asked.
I could literally feel their eyeballs staring at me, penetrating my soul. I tried to quiet them down as the footsteps from above grew louder. I pulled the flash drive from the computer.
"I have no idea, the power went out," I said.
A sliver of light peered through the cold basement, and Rocko opened the steel door. He pointed his monolithic arm to a dark corner of the basement.
"You must go now," Rocko said in his deep baritone voice.
We all ran to the corner and Alex gave the large and kind-hearted man a kiss on the cheek. His warrior spirit rang true with his eyes conveying his thoughts. Alex quickly opened a steel passageway that was covered by a single rug and entrenched into the floor.
I could hear above us the increase of footsteps that approached the basement. Rocko looked at me in the eyes and grabbed me with his colossal hand.
"Make it worth it," Rocko said.
I was silent and merely tipped my head as we walked down the hidden sewer system. He covered the drain to conceal us.
Rocko locked the door and pulled the rubber band from his head, making his hair flow past his shoulders in all directions. He grabbed a large mallet and stood at the ready by the door with a smile, not letting the presumed suits in the place. The sound of a magazine loading into a German submachine gun and the pin being thrust forward on the weapon echoed through the door.
Armor-piercing bullets penetrated holes in the metal door, making it look like Swiss cheese around the doorknob. The door was kicked open. Rocko swung the mallet at all of the suits, hitting one, as the other suits sprayed bullets across his body. Rocko screamed, "Uprising!"
We stopped, honoring his sacrifice with a moment of silence, as we knew Rocko was dead when the bullets stopped. The suits entered the room. They examined the place only to find the dense coldness of computers that lay dormant in the dark room from the power outage. They reloaded their submachine guns and unloaded on the computers in the room, making sparks fly and destroying everything in the basement.
March 11, 2035
San Francisco, CA
FBI Office
10:47
In a busy boardroom area in the FBI building in San Francisco, belonging to the cyber-crime division, Detective Slate pointed at the continual cyber strikes from various countries around the globe being tracked. They were currently being alerted in the Ukrainian area, and suddenly everything stopped. This was coupled with a power outage in the centralized area around the Dnieper River of Kiev.
Detective Slate put up the pictures of the assailants and asked if this was a coincidence that these men had fled the country and they couldn’t find them.
A secretary walked up to Detective Slate with a file of papers and handed them to him. His phone vibrated an incoming email notification. He peered at the email of the subject that read: From Tax, click here for your truth.” The body of the message stated that the following message was for his eyes only and not to trust anyone, but this proved Taxman’s innocence and helped Slate solve a bigger problem.
"Please excuse me, I have to step into my office for a moment," Detective Slate said. He walked through the boardroom toward his office, apprehensively smiling at the other officers and detectives.
In his office he peered around the room, first turned the security camera off in the corner, and looked out the window at the Lifers walking on Market Street. He opened the email from TaxMan to further examine it, and the screenshot that showed the CIA was behind the secret covert software that was stealing money from people, and they were trying to pin
everything on TaxMan. The rest of the message was the word Tax circled with a smiley face. Detective Slate peered at the attachment of the screenshot of the code that revealed that it was property of the CIA and embedded into the aforementioned code.
"What the hell?"
Detective Slate emailed back that he could provide security, but how did he know that he could trust Taxman? He looked around the office at the people working, and thought to himself, how could he trust anyone?
March 12, 2035
Kiev, Ukraine
Underground system
00:47
The cold air resonated with our breath as we ran through the storm drain of what appeared to be an old abandoned subway car tunnel. It was condemned during the time when Russian separatists entered the region. A lot of Ukrainians sought homes in the underground, and carved their own house out of the cavernous system.
There were scattered marks of Cave Adsum to communicate that some were a part of the Uprising and they were waiting. On the walls were graffitied different Russian and Ukrainian phrases that seemed to blend together. It was almost reminiscent of a National Geographic episode of the dawn of man in the caves, or the Egyptians using hieroglyphics to communicate pictures to tell their story of history, but they told it with graffiti.
The Ukrainians created an underground village, like many places during the fall of the Uprising. They would take the funding from the underground and place it toward the fight, storing weapons and healing the wounded to continue back to the front lines in the battle.
Alex grabbed me and peered deep into my eyes. It wasn't a seductive look, however, but a look of derision.
"Was the transfer complete?" Alex asked very seriously.
"I don't know. The power went out and I can't get a Wi-Fi connection on my phone. There is no service and the power is almost dead," I said.
I glanced at my phone that had the last bar beeping ubiquitously in my eye. We needed to check the status of the transfer, and there was no Wi-Fi. I wondered how people lived without Internet. This seemed like we were back to the prehistoric ages.
"We need to find a power source," Alex said.
Signs pointed up ahead and signaled at a light that was glowing from the end of the tunnel. We ran and turned to follow the light and found multitudes of people living in an underground erected city environment. The light flickered to reveal habitants scattered in handmade nice cardboard and wood homes. The homes were aligned like communities and part of them were built into the concrete. A church and a hospital built with their hearts were surrounded by the underground city's residents. A church was paramount for these Lifes, as organized religion had been banned in the Lifer day walking world. It was a sanctuary for them not to study their religion, but to gain great spiritual freedoms. The name of the church was Truth, and it was adorned with a cross at the center point of the roof.
We walked through the area and Alex narrated us a sobering story after the tax rates soared to astronomical heights. This forced the people to make the choice of food or housing cost, it was at this same time when Russian separatists entered the country taking what resources that they had to the fight. At this point for many years here in the underground, the Lifes lived on potatoes grown from LED lights. They made potatoes a million different ways, from soups, to raw, fried—if they could imagine it, they were either adding potatoes to it, or making potatoes because of it. The assortment of different breads was also rather extensive. They found a way to make bread in dozens of ways, adding different vegetables to it during the day for nutritional support, and jams at night for the healthy digestive aspect that it added to their lives. The whole area smelled like a large warm bread oven.
We just listened, and they weren't poor Lifes—they had heart, their minds were strong and the thoughts that they possessed were rich. The food that they ate was predominately grown underground from a lighting source, or from the sun’s rays glistening through cracks in the underground. They would collectively scavenge from the Lifer world that procured each inhabitant enough vitamins and minerals to sustain their healthy lives. It was Dostoevsky that wrote that society should be judged not on the top of existence, but on the bottom, and how they're being treated, and for this everyone in the world is poor, if judged as a whole.
The Lifes in the underground were all dressed like colorful gypsies. They made their own clothes, trying to patch new ones with old garments, or hand-me-downs. We drew their attention as they turned their heads as we walked through the archaic-looking city. A light flickered in the distance and the engine of an older-model military generator started, lighting the cross around the church. It changed the tonality to an ambient feel, and our focus was drawn to a young boy that was using an older-model laptop that had run short on battery life, and was charging it with the generator.
"Can we borrow this, young man?" Alex asked as we all peered at the computer like it was gold.
The boy was silent and only furrowed his brow, hiding his computer tightly as his mother and father came from behind the church.
"Can we help you?" the father asked. The mother pulled her son by her side. They knew that we were foreigners to their land.
March 12, 2035
Kiev, Ukraine
Underground system
01:27
On April 26, 1986, a sudden surge of power during a reactor systems test destroyed Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. The accident and fire that ensued released massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. The lethal ash that was expelled from the release was 30-40 times that of Hiroshima.
We stopped at the generator as the boy wrapped his arms around that computer that had a hardline connection, hugging it like a Teddy bear. It made me think of myself a bit; as a child, we didn't have any money, so I collected parts from the city's electronics stores’ trash that were going out of business and built my first laptop computer.
"Why are you here and what do you want?" Mishkin, the boy’s father, demanded.
"We are a part of the Uprising, it's OK. We just need to look at something on your son’s computer. To check something that my friend here has, and it’s rather important," Alex said.
"You're a part of the Uprising?" Mishkin asked.
"Yes, and this information could change everything as we know it today," Alex continued.
Odysseus walked next to the little boy and licked him in the face. They both shared a smiled as the boy petted him on the head. I thought to myself that Odysseus was smarter then the rest of us.
"It's OK, Papa. They can borrow it for a moment," the boy said as he played with Odysseus.
"Do you have Internet?" I asked.
"We share it with a hotel," Mishkin said with a smile. He pointed to a Wi-Fi extender that was connected to the USB port of the computer, and routed through to a small hole in the underground system, giving them a connection from the hotel above them. We both shared a look, knowing that he wasn't really sharing, but more like borrowing without asking.
I grabbed the computer and brought up the Tor browser and input my data to check everything. I opened the application that was running with the new algorithm that was placed there from the flash drive.
"Did you get it?" Talks asked as Signs peered over my shoulder.
Instantly my face radiated joy as the numbers started to climb, tracking transactions from the new algorithm that was placed in the application to take the money from the taxable transactions and place it into my offshore account.
"We got it and it's golden. I'm still going to need to check the offshore account to make sure everything is working and things are being transferred," I said.
I charged my cell phone on the side of the generator as I listened to the others talk to the family of the boy with the computer. The father, Mishkin, worked at the Duga Radar system by Chernobyl during the disaster in the area. I plugged my phone into the side panel of the generato
r that gave it a blinking status of the battery with 1% left. I opened my email on the laptop.
Detective Slate's email came in and it read that he was interested in more information, and he could provide security if I divulged the rest of the information that I had. At the bottom of the email was his phone number, and instructions to give him a call at my earliest convenience, only myself, to ensure security.
I put in my offshore bank’s security information to check if the algorithm was working properly.
"The application is working and is already peeling back money into the offshore account," I said.
The account was getting transfers of thousands of dollars every second for a current total of around one million dollars to date. I showed it to the others as they all peered at the account totals continually going up.
"We got it!" I said with enthusiasm.
I closed the computer and pulled the flash drive out. I held it, looking at them in the face.
My attention was drawn to the dark hollow path that was the rest of the underground tunnel that seemed to go on forever.
"Where does this go?" I asked.
"It goes on for miles, to Poland in one direction and Belarus in the other. It was a fallout shelter used as a safety net when people lost their jobs after Chernobyl," Mishkin said.
"I brought our family down here for a safe haven from the radiation. I knew the effects, as I worked in the area and I knew these tunnels better then anyone."
March 12, 2035
Kiev, Ukraine
Underground system
01:48
Mishkin was a strong man, you could tell it by looking into his eyes. He was an engineer at the Duga Radar facility that was used as a missile defense system during the Cold War, and some speculated to be a mind-control device as well. He became a valued part of the Uprising with his level of intelligence, and they helped to support his family. He lifted his shirt sleeve on his right arm to reveal a tattoo that was graffiti inked like the walls with a hollow skull that stated Cave Adsum across its forehead. He was a proud man.
