ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Today, though, that pleasure of kicking over rocks and seeing what squirms underneath will be one that has to wait. This has to be fast. They got their “evaluation scores” from yesterday—Hollis read them out as he walked them to the pods. Letter grades, like they’re in fucking high school or something. A for Aleena (barf), B+ for DeAndre (she’d do him), C+ for her (not bad for not trying; also her grade average in high school, so), C– for Wade (not bad for an old man), and Hollis declined to name a grade for Chance (unsurprising). Today, all Reagan has to do is maintain the same mediocre average.

  She moves fast through the penetration (insert joke here, she thinks, or maybe, insert wang here), and it’s breezily easy. Problem with most public cloud computing solutions is that, first, they often use client-side software to access them, and apps are notoriously weak—it’s like hiding all your gold in Fort Knox but then making the entryway a squeaky screen door. But the larger problem is that cloud computing must first pass through that hive of scum and villainy: the Internet. The Internet is a place of glorious rot: everything that passes through it, or even touches it, is subject to decay. It’s too big, too sprawly, to be well protected—anything that uses Internet protocol to parlay its information and access is the equivalent of a person traveling through a bad part of town just to get to work. You open yourself to intrusion.

  So, intruding on Thunderhead’s cloud services is no big thing. Reagan’s documenting everything as she goes through it, hastily noting weaknesses—it’s simple, she notes, to download the client and hack the client, thus kicking open that screen door and finding her way into a wealth of personal storage. Tens of thousands of accounts. Client names. Usernames. Passwords. Plus, drumroll please, home addresses, phone numbers, and the pièce de résistance: bank data. Places like this are the cause of many a hacker’s nocturnal emissions.

  Still, the usernames and passwords are all encrypted. Passwords are stored as these gibberish algorithms—hashes, or “hashies,” in the parlance. Problem is, you can’t translate them backward because of the algorithm. So your best bet is picking some plaintext passwords (“plains”) and trying to run them through the same algorithm to see what patterns start to emerge in the encryption hashes. It’s like a souped-up hacker version of a New York Times puzzle.

  Reagan pretends to everyone else that she’s just some dopey troll, but she likes to think of herself as a jack-of-all-trades. But that also means master of none. Encryption is not her specialty. Thankfully, hackers are a mix of loners and pack animals, and even lone wolves leave behind food for the other hunters. All she has to do is download a toolkit. Automated, hit one button, and it starts to scroll through names, passwords, looking for patterns, solving for x (or, rather, solving for XI}EWR!(TUH2782#34, but whatever).

  That’ll get her somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the total. The rest she’ll have to figure out by hand, which requires Googling names and seeing if she can find pet names or maiden names or hobbies or anything else that might give a clue as to a person’s plaintext password.

  Still, for now, let the cracker run its course. Names and passwords pop up like badminton birdies and are swatted down.

  Reagan brews coffee. Sips at it. It’s flavored—caramel vanilla. Tastes a little like chemicals, but she likes chemicals, so whatever.

  Then one name pops up and is gone again. Except it pings her radar. She stops the cracker. Goes back, searches for the name.

  There. Philo Kallimakos. Greek guy (she assumes). Name is familiar because she saw it just yesterday. He’s one of the big investors behind Arcus Land Development: same a-holes she “penetrated” just yesterday. Can’t just be a coinky-dink. They’re giving her companies that are connected, however loosely.

  Reagan thinks: Okay, let’s crack this nut. Password cracker bypassed him, which means he won’t be one of the 30 to 50 percent in the first pass—which means she’s gotta do this by hand. So she pulls up Google, which of course is blocked, which of course makes her job all the harder.

  Except. Except. Yesterday she found a host of usernames and passwords allowing her into Arcus’s infrastructure, so she starts trying those. Fifth try: Bingo, bango, bongos in the Congo. The username-password combo from the Arcus FTP site lets her into Mr. Kallimakos’s cloud computing folder.

  She scrolls through hundreds of folders, all of them named like gibberish. Strings of gobbledygook characters. She pops open a random one. Inside: thousands of files. Most of them encrypted. Some of them, though, aren’t: she opens a few graphic files, sees images of what looks like—Greek pottery? Each image a broken shard, showing parts of what look like some kind of monster—a few shards show parts of a black snake with red scales, others offer up wings of black and red feathers. A different graphic file shows a scan of some kind of . . . woodcut? Words in Latin. IMAGO TYPHONUS, IVXTA APOLLODORVM. Something that looks like something out of Lovecraft rising up out of the ground—snake fingers, tentacle legs, mouth vomiting lightning.

  She opens up one more image. It’s the same freaky Lovecraft thing, except it’s stomping forth; men and women are running from it and appear to be changing into rabbits, dogs, birds. Some of them half changed, others changed all the way. All of them fleeing.

  And the gods did turn to common beasts.

  AND THE GODS DID FLEE.

  She feels suddenly dizzy. Arcus to Thunderhead. Gods and monsters. The person who hacked her tied somehow to Philo Kallimakos? How? How is that even—

  Her thigh vibrates. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She looks up—sees the camera light has gone from green to red on both. Which means she’s taken too long.

  She pops the fly on her jeans, reaches down her pants. There’s a cryptophone duct-taped to her inner thigh: matte black, small screen, fairly concealable. This one’s a Floydphone—aka a “Fromitz Board”—made by some text-adventure-game fan and sold as a crowdsourced device. It needs an access code to connect, a code that Shane gave her (because Shane also gave her the phone). She punches in the ten-digit code and instantly a text pops up:

  Stop dicking around.

  She gives the phone the finger. She’d give it to the cameras, too, but nobody’s watching those. Right now, the eyes on the other end—guards, she’s guessing—are seeing a loop of her working from earlier. First half an hour or so, roughly mixed up and replayed back. Someone paying careful attention might notice, but at a casual glance? Not so much.

  She texts back: Soon.

  When she looks up at the screen, the folders—the hundreds belonging to Kallimakos, with thousands of files—are disappearing. Files flying to the trash one by one. Zipping quickly. She tries to take control, tries to save them, but the delete command has already been issued. Thirty seconds later, the folders are gone and the main page is empty. “God damn it!” she says. Suddenly she’s contemplating doing exactly what Dalton did—picking up the whole computer and chucking it on the ground. She shoves her hand in her mouth, bites down on the soft pad of flesh between her thumb and her wrist. Not enough to draw blood. But almost.

  The Floydphone vibrates again with a new text:

  NOW

  She’s about to text him back, tell him what happened. But her thumbs pause. What if he already knows? What if he’s the one who did this? Deleting this stuff just to mess with her.

  Maybe Shane is the one who hacked her.

  That’s the thing about being a troll—you’re suddenly pretty sure that while you’re trolling the world, the world is trolling you right back. Normally she likes that feeling—it lends everything a sense of parity, of insane quid pro quo, but suddenly now she’s feeling incensed, disturbed, and downright paranoid.

  She sucks it up. Deep breath.

  Fine, she types.

  Then she takes a few moments to compose herself before she goes back to hacking that poor, dumb Chance Dalton.

  DeAndre’s got a new task—pen-test some start-up search engine called Glassboat out of the Bay Area—but he just can’t quit the German geothermal company.

/>   Right now, the network folder he’s trying to crack on their end doesn’t even allow for the entry of a password or anything. It’s user based, and it knows he’s not the user. He throws everything he has at it—or, at least, everything he can manage to scrounge together here in this data prison pod—but he can’t trick it into thinking he’s the one who set the permissions on the file.

  He scours around, looking for any other clue inside their systems. He finds some shit about something called “Sandhogs”—a little research shows they’re some kind of union out of New York City, Local 147. The ones responsible for digging subway tunnels, bridge footers, things like that. That doesn’t help him.

  An hour in, he’s sweating like an addict who sees his fix but can’t get a taste. He’s anxious, grabby, eager. He knows they’re watching them, and he hasn’t bothered to change that. Let ’em wonder what he’s up to. He can’t help it. He has to know.

  He has to.

  The trick for Aleena is this:

  To hack Reagan, she first needs to get out there. She needs to leave the path they have made for her. She needs to disappear into the woods.

  But they’re filming her. And keylogging the computer.

  Somehow, Reagan did it. Aleena doesn’t know how, but if that bridge troll can manage, so can Aleena.

  She goes about her business first, knowing they’re going to expect her to get another good score on the testing—today, it’s a company called Infinitest. A cursory search shows it’s a nanotechnology company, specifically geared toward solving the post-antibiotic crisis.

  Thing is, she doesn’t know how long Reagan’s going to take jumping in. Which means: no time to dally.

  She has a plan. Two stages.

  First stage: kill the keylogger. This part’s risky because they’re going to keylog her downloading anti-keylogger software. But here, she has an excuse: she needs—er, “needs”—a logger killer for her penetration testing. So she grabs a piece of software called KeyBreaker, then runs it in the background of the nanotech company, and then, ohh, accidentally runs it on her own side, too—

  Ping. Ping.

  Two detections. Like little ships appearing on radar.

  One she knows: when KeyBreaker identifies and shuts down the keylogger tracking her every key tap and mouse click, it’s no surprise to her.

  But the second one is a surprise. Someone was keylogging Infinitest.

  That deserves a deeper look. But later, not now. For now, stage two—

  Aleena leans forward, blocking the monitor with her body. She has to move fast so this doesn’t look too obvious.

  She pulls up the monitor settings. LCD and LED monitors film easily. Old boxy CRT monitors—the kinds that looked like old televisions, the kinds you could use as a boat anchor if you really wanted to—didn’t film well because they flickered. People think LCDs don’t flicker—and mostly they don’t, at least not noticeably.

  But you can make it noticeable. Mess with the backlighting. Apply pulse-width modulation—easily done in the monitor settings—to dim the backlight, and voilà: higher flicker. Then: add a little judder (easy to set on most HDTVs) and reduce the refresh rate and now the cameras behind her won’t be able to see what’s on the screen. What should show up is a pulsing, flashing light—nearly impossible to make anything out.

  She cracks her knuckles. Now it’s time to hack that bitch.

  Chance gets a new pod for the day, and with it comes some softball job—he’s pen-testing some self-help guru’s website. The website shows a big banner: Renowned Psychologist and Self-Enlightenment Specialist: Alan Sarno. Chance feels dumb, but he’s not that dumb. He knows he’s been Nerfed. Part of him appreciates it. Another part of him just feels like a dope.

  He’s cooking along pretty well—the site is updated, in part, using WordPress blogging software, and that means he already knows the username. Nobody changes their username, because it’s too hard or they don’t care or they don’t think it matters.

  Username: admin.

  The password is trickier. He tries the standards: password, password123, and so on. None of them click. Worse, he can’t get on Facebook, can’t Google search the guy, so he’s stuck with what he can find on Sarno’s own site.

  Which, it turns out, is just enough. Sarno’s bio lists his family and their first names: wife Sara, daughters Hayley and Katey. Chance tries all of those, and it’s a no-go—but then he sees that Sarno’s got a poodle, too. Big white fuzzy thing—less a dog and more a series of snowball-colored Afro-puffs connected by hairless pink bits. The dog’s name is Knishie.

  And boom: there’s the password.

  A chat window pops up.

  DUTCH JELLYFART: HEYYYYYY

  Chance looks up. Of course, the camera lights have gone red. He pulls the keyboard close, jaw tight at the hinge. He types:

  GUEST: Reagan, you’re an asshole.

  DUTCH JELLYFART: There is no Reagan. There is only ZUUL. And I am an asshole! I know. I can’t help it. It’s pathological, I swear.

  Chance thinks, Where’s Aleena? She was supposed to be helping him. Maybe she pulled a Reagan and is abandoning him here in the abyss. Or worse, maybe she’s helping twist the knife. His underarms start to sweat.

  GUEST: Why can’t you just leave me alone?

  DUTCH JELLYFART: Because of the lulz. And because this is part of a larger game. And because I screwed you once before we even got here and because I liked it.

  GUEST: What the hell are you talking about?

  DUTCH JELLYFART: Shhh. SHHH. Just lie back and think of England, luv.

  And then a third account pops in:

  ZENOBIA: Sorry, troll, the third billy goat’s here to kick you off the bridge.

  The chat window closes.

  Chance sits there for a while, waiting for something, anything. Like—maybe the computer will suddenly start to smoke and spit sparks. Maybe it’ll grow legs like a Transformer and kick him in the teeth. Maybe Reagan will come out of the monitor like the girl from The Ring. But nope, nothing.

  He pokes a few keys. Clicks the mouse. He still has control.

  Aleena did it. Aleena saved his ass.

  He whoops with laughter.

  Ding, dong, the bitch is dead, Aleena thinks.

  Now, to find out who put that keylogger on the nanotech company.

  They’ve given Wade another unhackable, uncrackable company. AeroCore. Maker of drones and other airborne robotic devices. AeroCore has on its board a number of politicians and politicians’ children, and like with Blackwater in Iraq was allowed to preemptively bid on jobs with the military (air force, mostly) before anyone else had a chance. Prebids were preaccepted and every other company got prefucked. Not that Wade cares much for those other companies, either—but this is a symptom of a scrape that’s long gone septic.

  He goes through the motions, enough to get him a pass, not enough to make any real difference—these young hackers all are eager to please their new masters, but he knows the deal. Shut up. Do the bare minimum. Then get the hell out.

  That assumes, of course, that they’ll let him and the others out alive. But that’s a problem for another day.

  For now, he sits back and does little.

  Though something keeps itching at the back of his brain stem. He senses connections here that he doesn’t fully see and can’t begin to understand.

  AeroCore. Palisade. Both companies he knows. Maybe they’re fucking with him. Maybe this is all one big psych experiment.

  DeAndre can’t get in.

  It keeps changing. The algorithm keeps changing. He hacks one level and then another comes up and boots him back to the beginning. Almost like it’s taunting him. All for a single file. Every delay, every defense, makes it exponentially more tantalizing. He bites his lip. Rubs his eyes, thumbs his temples, presses in so hard on the bridge of his nose it almost brings tears to his eyes.

  Reagan is locked out.

  Aleena Kattan slammed the door in her face. That little Kardash
ian.

  Well, good for her, Reagan thinks, trying like hell not to be mad. The little raw, red half moons in her palms from where her nails have dug in tell a different story.

  Fine, she thinks. She totally doesn’t mind when someone gets the best of her.

  Shane, though. He’ll mind. He’ll definitely mind.

  Aleena’s feeling pretty good about herself. She knew Reagan was more than just some 4chan troll—that one’s got cred. Using it for, or with, Shane Graves. So cutting both of those bullies off at the knees is a win.

  Chance can die another day. But maybe he won’t. Not if she helps him, like she said she would.

  Thinking about him gives her this little tickle, like soap bubbles popping inside her stomach. She doesn’t like it. The reason she doesn’t like it is because . . . well, she kinda likes it.

  She tells herself it’s because they’re here. In this place. Away from life, away from all the burdens of her purpose. This place is a kind of prison, but in a small way it’s also a vacation from a wealth of obligation. It’s like being in college. You leave home, you change yourself. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big ones. You forget who you are and remember who you want to become. If only temporarily.

  This is that. A temporary blip. A hiccup in who she is.

  Besides, she thinks, this isn’t who you are. He and you won’t understand each other, not when you leave this place. It’s not just that they come from different worlds. Her parents wouldn’t care that he’s a white boy from—well, she doesn’t even know where he’s from. Down South, given his accent. It’s that she’s a city rat, he’s a country mouse. He’s a script kiddie and she’s the real deal.

  So forget him. She’ll help him as far as she can, not because she likes him, but because it hurts Reagan. Plain and simple.