by James Hunter
“Don’t try anything stupid,” he said and waved the pistol’s muzzle toward the door.
I followed his directions and kept my hands well away from my sides as I left my bedroom. I didn’t have a weapon, but I didn’t want the orc lookalike behind me to think that I did and get antsy.
Besides, there was an upside to all this. If I pulled off the job they’d kidnapped me for, I’d be a billionaire.
I kept that thought locked firmly at the front of my mind as we left my apartment. The orc steered me toward the elevator and made his gun vanish as soon as we entered the car. He didn’t so much as glance in my direction for the rest of the trip.
“Can I at least know what corp wanted me so bad they sent you to shanghai me?” I asked between floors twelve and eleven. “I don’t usually go on a first date without knowing a name.”
He mulled the question over until we hit the eighth floor and then said something that scared me even more than his ugly mug.
“Inkolana Syndicate,” he said, as if deciding it didn’t matter whether I knew who’d hired me.
Well, that explained the guns and money. The Inkolana Syndicate had more of both than they knew what to do with, and they weren’t afraid to use either of them to get what they wanted. And what they wanted was usually a bigger slice of the drug business and for their enemies in various world governments to disappear into deep, dark holes.
But what the hell would the world’s scariest cartel need with a hacker?
I asked that question when we hit the ground floor, but the orc just grunted and clapped an oversized hand on my shoulder. He steered me through the lobby and out to the sidewalk where a black sedan waited for us. My kidnapper shoved me into the back seat, then slid in next to me without another word.
I scrambled to the other side of the car before he could smash me under his bulk. The dude didn’t have much respect for personal space.
The sedan’s suspension groaned in protest as the monster settled into position beside me, and the engine protested mightily as the driver slammed it into drive and punched the accelerator. We glided through the streets of downtown Dallas, and the lack of foot traffic and Uber drivers told me I’d been taken in the dead hours of the night between the time when the barflies buzzed away from their booze halls and when the early risers dragged their sorry asses off to their slavery in corporate hellholes.
“Put this on,” the cartel thug said. He slapped a burlap sack against my gut, and I grunted in surprise. My blood ran cold as I raised the hood to get a better look at it. The coarse brown cloth was exactly the sort of thing you’d put over someone’s head before you put a bullet through the back of their skull.
“I never touched an Inkolana system,” I argued in a desperate effort to save my life. Maybe they thought I’d hacked them and they were taking me somewhere to torture me for a few days before they shot me. A vivid image of my naked, mutilated corpse lying in a ditch with the bloody bag over my shattered head bullied its way into my thoughts.
“It’s for your safety,” the orc said. “You don’t need to know where we’re going to do your damned job.”
The argument made enough sense to put my paranoid dread at ease, and I yanked the bag down over my head. The loose weave of the burlap made it possible to see light and shadow, but I couldn’t make out any details.
We cruised along for a while longer but never hit highway speeds. That told me we’d never left downtown, but not much else. Dallas had exploded in size over the past couple of decades, and its downtown was littered with massive skyscrapers. There was no way for me to tell which underground parking garage we pulled into, and I hoped the cartel would feel the same way.
The car stopped, my kidnapper dragged me out of it, and a few seconds later we were inside an elevator. A few seconds after that we were zipping up so fast my stomach tried to convince me we were on a roller coaster. It was hard to smell anything but the rich, musty scent of the burlap in front of my nose, but I picked up a harsh antiseptic smell that only got stronger as the elevator went higher. It reminded me of a hospital or a doctor’s office. Something medicinal.
Why would they bring me to a hospital? Did they want me to hack into its systems and assassinate someone during an operation? I’d seen a movie with that plot once, and the whole thing had seemed stupid to me. There was almost no reason for a hacker to come on site to do a job like that.
The elevator’s doors dinged open after several minutes, and the orc muscled me out of the elevator. He waited for a few seconds, then yanked the hood off my head and shoved it into one of his jacket’s pockets.
I blinked and struggled to adjust my eyes to the harsh light. Everything around me was polished white that gleamed with a sterile perfection. There were no pictures on the walls, no carpet on the floor, not even the thin black grid of tiles. It looked as if the whole place had been molded from a single block of white acrylic.
The orc snatched my right arm in his iron grip and almost yanked me off my feet as he hauled me forward. I took a deep, surprised breath, and my nose burned from the chemical reek of cleaning agents and raw alcohol in the air. A faint bubbling noise grew louder over the slap of my soles against the smooth floor. It reminded me of an aquarium’s oxygenating pump.
Where the fuck was I?
We rounded a corner and came into a square white room about thirty feet on a side. The only furniture was a simple black desk with a fancy office chair made of so much chrome and leather it looked like it belonged in the private room of a strip club. My babysitter hauled me over to the chair and tossed me into it. He spun my seat around to face the desk with a hearty shove and slapped his hands down on the chair’s back.
“This is your workstation,” he said. “We need you to stop an attack on our system.”
“What system?” I asked. The more information I had, the better equipped I’d be to deal with whatever enemy they’d put me up against. “And what kind of attack?”
“This is the system,” the big boy said, and the white wall in front of me vanished to reveal an enormous aquarium that looked like it was at least as big as the room that held my workstation.
A sinister black manifold hovered above the surface of the yellowish fluid that filled the tank, and thick, wire-wrapped cables descended from the multitude of bulbous nodules that dotted its surface. Those artificial umbilical cords drooped into the thick fluid, where they were each connected to a brain.
A whole bunch of brains.
The lumps of gray matter were surrounded by status lights that mostly glowed amber. Whatever the cartel had to deal with, it looked like it had already taken a toll on their vat of brains.
“I’m a coder, not a biologist,” I said. Something about this place creeped me out, and I did not want to get stuck messing around with a swimming pool filled with dead heads. “And I don’t think anyone can fix brains after they’ve been scooped out of their skulls, so I’ll just mosey on back home—”
I didn’t get halfway out of the chair before the orc slapped his enormous hands onto my shoulders like a raptor putting the death grip on a rabbit. He pressed me back into my seat so hard its springs squealed, and I was sure a couple of my vertebrae had been crushed to powder. The cartel freak shoved my chair forward to pin my legs under the desk so I couldn’t try that little stunt again.
“This is a coding problem,” the enormous monster declared. He reached past me to tap the mirror-smooth surface of the white desk he’d trapped me against. His cologne, a surprisingly delicate but somehow musky scent, flooded my nostrils.
“Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?” I asked. “It reminds me of my grandma’s bathroom—”
The cartel’s muscle squeezed my right shoulder so hard I was sure he’d crippled me for life.
“Shut. Up,” he said in a voice like a concrete mixer’s growl.
I recognized a network diagram before the holographic display the hit man had triggered could fully render. Pulses of red light swarmed through the digit
al schematic and collected at critical junctures like widowmaker blood clots headed for a soon-to-be-dead-man’s heart. If those red blips broke through whatever defenses had held them back so far, the network’s central cores would be shredded into packets and downloaded in the blink of an eye.
“Wow, someone really, really does not like you guys,” I said as I leaned in for a better look at the mess I’d been kidnapped to fix. It was a truly impressive clusterfuck, of the kind I’d never seen in the wild. “This is a DDOS, but not the script kiddie variety. They’re flooding your ports, but I’ve never seen a traffic pattern like this. Looks like a pair of adversarial AIs are running the actual attack. Could be Russian, most definitely military grade. This might be too big of a job for one hacker to handle. I need to call in a few allies to help me lock this down.”
“You will stop the attack,” the orc thug said and gave me a firm pat on my bruised shoulder. “And we will give you one billion dollars. You. Alone.”
“Sounds good,” I said, frustrated by his response. People with money always thought more money could solve any problem the universe laid in their path. Sometimes that was true, but sometimes even the best hackers needed some help. I knew just the right folks to carve this problem up and serve it to the cartel on a platter, but I also knew Mr. Orc Face wouldn’t let me invite my friends over to play ball. Frustrated, I lashed out. “Can I get a pony, too? I’ve never been to Disneyland. Throw in a chartered flight to the happiest place on earth and hire some strippers to give me a concierge tour of Mickey’s Secret Playground while you’re at it.”
The orc cleared his throat and doors opened at the corners of the room. Four more heavies who’d all come from the same factory as my kidnapper entered, and the doors slid closed behind them. They watched me like a pack of ravenous wolves ready to rip into their prey the moment their alpha gave the word.
Maybe if I survived this, I’d remember not to run my mouth around people who could kill me without losing a wink of sleep.
Oh, who am I kidding? I hated getting pushed around, and I doubted I’d ever sit still while a pack of steroid junkies yanked my chain.
“Mr. Clay Knight,” the big man said from behind me. His voice was as tight as a choke chain around a lunging pit bull’s throat. “This is not a joke or a hoax. We brought you here because our people have heard you are the best when it comes to defending against attacks such as the one we are experiencing. When you stop the attack on my employer’s network, I will give you the access code to a numbered offshore account that contains one billion dollars. With that amount of money, you can purchase your own herd of pony-riding strippers.”
“What if I can’t do it?” I asked. “Whoever’s behind this came loaded for bear. They aren’t just hammering your network; they’re flattening a whole chunk of the internet to get you. It’s the digital equivalent of carpet bombing, and even someone as good as I am can’t just make that go away.”
“If you cannot resolve this issue in a timely fashion, I am authorized to terminate your employment,” the orc boy said in a tone tinged with dark glee. “Believe me when I say that termination will be an extremely painful process for you.”
That threat did wonders to clarify my thoughts.
“How long do I have before you start hacking pieces off my body?” I asked. My eyes had already roamed across the schematic to identify the most endangered parts of the network and the attack vectors aimed at their digital skulls.
The incoming hack was impressive, but I spied a glimmer of hope. It would be hard as hell, but I could isolate the weakened nodes and rebuild their defenses in an hour or two. That would hold off the bulk of the attacks that converged on a set of storage and processing nodes at the center of the network. Then another two, maybe three, hours, and I’d turn the denial of service right back on the assholes behind it.
“You must stop the attack before the raiders can reach the secured storage nodes,” he said. “Our IT staff believe that will happen within the next thirty minutes.”
“That’s not enough time,” I said after I’d caught my breath from that gut punch of a deadline. My thoughts raced as I analyzed the hack again and tried to come up with a defense I could implement in the very narrow window I’d been given.
The bad guys had gone all brute force and launched the internet equivalent of a nuclear strike at the cartel’s brain machine. I could build a bunker inside the network that would protect the critical nodes while I looked for a solution. “I’ll have to take part of your network down and redirect all the attack traffic to a honeypot to figure out a defense.”
“No,” the thug said. “The system must remain operational. Our investors have entrusted us with critical functions for their businesses. We cannot restrict access to our system for any reason.”
I blew out an exasperated sigh and hoped it would take the tension building in my chest with it. The cartel had hired the best defensive hacker money could buy, but it was going to be hard as hell to fix their problem if they tied my hands behind my back with their ridiculous conditions. Thirty minutes to stop an all-out AI attack with no backup, and I had to leave the system online?
I was in hacker hell.
I debated making a run for it, but the bad men positioned at strategic points around the room made that a loser’s bet. Their scarred and tattooed hands rested on the butts of enormous firearms strapped to their hips or chests, and they kept their dead shark’s eyes locked on me at all times. If I so much as farted too loudly, I’d catch a bullet.
My only option was to get to work.
I focused my mind on the quiet burble of the brain tank’s filtration pump, and my meditation practice kicked in. My thoughts slowed, my muscles loosened, and my pulse pushed blood into every nook and cranny of my overtaxed brain. The problem-solving skills that had attracted the cartel’s interest and put me in this do-or-die situation burst to life.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s make a billion dollars.”
I cracked my knuckles and raised my hands over the white surface of the desk. Illuminated keys rose through the mirror-smooth surface and adjusted their spacing and slope to the positions of my fingers. I’d never touched a keyboard like this one, but the instant my fingertips brushed the grippy, concave keys, my geek obsession with keyboards reared its ugly head.
“This thing custom?” I asked as I tapped in a command to pull up the traffic log files. “I want one. Where’d you get it?”
The thug behind me grunted but said nothing.
“Fine, be that way,” I snorted. “I’ll check Amazon after I finish cleaning up your mess for you.”
Before I could issue any commands, a terminal window flashed to life and a brief message scrolled up to greet me.
****WELCOME TO DECS 2033
****ELEVATED ACCESS TERMINAL
****>>>
I poked around to see just how highly elevated this terminal’s access was. I tried to switch to the root directory, but it was locked down. A quick search did turn up an admin directory, however, and that opened up to me almost as fast as my prom date had. It only took me a few seconds to find the traffic logs that I needed.
I extracted the logs from the network’s storage drive, encrypted them into a tidy package, and opened a terminal window to shoot it off to my tools server. I could have analyzed the traffic in the clean room, but the sophisticated analysis package ready and waiting on my remote system could crunch through it in a fraction of the time it would take me to do it manually. I could have done it even faster if they’d let me bring my laptop, but I’d just have to make do.
My shoulders tensed when I started the transfer from DECS to my remote server, but none of the thugs reacted to my breach of security protocol. Either they had no idea what I was up to or they had orders to let me do whatever I deemed necessary to clean up their shitstorm. I hoped it was the former, because I really, really wanted to leave myself a backdoor on this system. I’d never seen anything like it, and there was no way I would leave i
t alone until I’d pried out every one of its secrets from the safety of the island volcano lair I would build with my billion dollars.
That is how supervillains come to be, folks.
While my analysis package did its work, I ran a “who” command to find any rogue operators rampaging through the system. The massive denial of service attack had created such havoc with the DECS network’s firewalls that a whole army of hackers could be balls deep in it by now.
“Do you have a list of users you expect to be using your network tonight?” I asked the orc. When he didn’t respond immediately, I turned in my chair and stared at him. “Do. You. Have. A—”
“Who do you think you are?” the monster snarled at me.
The big boy looked pissed enough to chew out my throat and keep my skull for his new cereal bowl. He obviously wasn’t used to being talked to like this, but I was fresh out of polite. I had a job to do, and the minutes I had left before my fatal deadline ticked away much too fast for comfort. If I was going to succeed, these assholes needed to work with me.
“I’m the billion-dollar boy, tubby,” I said. “I know you want to kill me, but you know you can’t. When I ask a question, I expect an answer. If you don’t have an answer, you better fucking get one. The fact that you only gave me thirty minutes to solve this means there’s a deadline over your head as much as mine. Do you have the user list?”
My kidnapper ground his teeth in frustration and turned away from me with one hand pressed to his left ear. He mumbled something to someone and tapped his toe as he waited for a response.
I turned back to my terminal and examined the list of logged-in users. Some of the names were garbled strings of nonsense characters. Those most likely belonged to bots who’d used brute force algorithms to pound their way through the network’s login screens and make themselves at home inside the DECS network. I scraped all those user IDs into a text file and sent it off to the pattern-matching AI on my server. Once the analysis found the common pattern the bad guys had used to create those IDs, we could blast all of them off the network in one swift stroke.
