Fuck it, he thinks. When did he ever get anywhere interesting by playing it safe?
He tells himself he has perhaps overestimated the risk here. Maybe the fact that the danger is unquantifiable is what makes it disproportionately worrying. With other people, you’re scared because of what you know they might do to you. With someone like Buzzkill, the scariest thing is what you don’t know (and can’t imagine) they might do to you. In fact, the whole issue with Buzzkill is that Parlabane has no idea who or what he’s dealing with.
Buzzkill is a cypher. A ghost. His identity is so fiercely protected that Parlabane has never even heard his voice. Most contact between them is carried out by text or instant messaging, and on the occasions vocal communication has proven necessary, Buzzkill has used a modified sat-nav voice system to ventriloquise himself. It’s not even a voice-disguiser, but a text-to-speech program, indicating that Buzzkill doesn’t even want to give away the patterns and cadences of his delivery.
He has predictably been described as a cyber-terrorist by the tears-and-snotters tendency among the right-wing commentariat, and once as ‘the cyber-Banksy’ in a typically over-intellectualising piece in the Guardian. Parlabane used to think that ‘cyber-vandal’ was a more accurate description of someone who got their rocks off by imaginatively defacing websites: not a threat, only a nuisance. But that was before Buzzkill paralysed Parlabane’s own computer, ransacked what he thought were his most carefully protected files and essentially blackmailed him into helping with a hack into the editorial and archive systems of the Clarion newspaper, where he was working at the time.
If it had merely been blackmail, however, he could have made his peace with it. Instead, Buzzkill offered to reciprocate. That was where the trouble really began. Buzzkill helped him hack into an MoD laptop – a stolen MoD laptop – in what turned out to be the biggest disaster of his career.
But while Parlabane thought he was cashing in his quid pro quo, Buzzkill refused to see it like that.
‘Friends don’t keep score,’ was how the hacker put it.
On the surface it sounded generous, but Parlabane couldn’t help feeling menaced by the implications for it being a two-way street.
He quickly decided that he never wanted to find himself owing Buzzkill favours, given that the guy had already coerced him into hacking his erstwhile employer and risking jail as a consequence. However, having such a skillset to draw upon had proven way too tempting an option when other avenues were closed, and his credit line at the Bank of Buzzkill kept growing longer and longer.
He presses Send, effectively lighting up the Buzzkill bat signal. He knows he is going to the well one more time, but in his twisted half-drunk logic he tells himself he might actually be able to sell this as doing Buzzkill a favour.
There is no response for ten, then twenty minutes. Gradually sobering, Parlabane sees it as a blessing. He’d be far wiser to take stock and see how this looks in the morning. But right when he is thinking of folding the laptop shut and heading for the unaccustomed comfort of Mairi’s bed (his previous stays always involving the sofa), there is a chime.
An icon appears: a goofy-looking fish superimposed over a biohazard symbol. It is Buzzkill’s secret token: an icon that guarantees it’s him on the other end.
‘You rang,’ states the sat-nav voice.
It is frustratingly devoid of emotion; no nuance to be read, no clue as to the speaker’s state of mind. There are only words.
Parlabane enjoys no such protection. He long ago taped over his laptop’s webcam due to his awareness of how Buzzkill might be remotely controlling it, but as he speaks into the inbuilt microphone he hopes he doesn’t sound tipsy. Nothing he can do about it, though: the only thing more conspicuous than slurred speech is over-precision.
‘I was wondering if you might know anything about the reality fairy and her wand of truth.’
‘How do you know it’s her wand? You know the rules: there are no women on the internet.’
‘Don’t change the subject. I think your prints are all over that wand. Are you in Uninvited?’
‘The first rule of Uninvited is we do not talk about Uninvited.’
That’s a yes.
‘Well, that would put you in a minority tonight. There are a lot of people talking about Uninvited right now.’
Parlabane waits for a response, considering his next gambit if nothing is forthcoming.
Buzzkill proves that he is already a move or two ahead, able as always to read where Parlabane is going.
‘You looking for a scoop, Jack?’
Parlabane takes a breath.
‘It’s more about what I can offer you for a change. If you give me some quotes, I can help people understand your motivations. Show your side of the story before the authorities and their media mouthpieces start filling in the blanks with whatever shit suits their own agendas: saying you’re working for the Chinese, the Russians, Islamic State or whoever.
There is a pause, a very long pause. Parlabane is reassured by the sight of the icon that Buzzkill is still there, but he is on tenterhooks expecting the goofy fish to vanish at any second.
‘One condition.’
Get in.
‘Sure.’
‘Direct quotes. Absolutely no paraphrasing.’
‘You got it.’
‘Cool. We on the record now?’
Parlabane is frantically fidgeting with an app, trying to get the laptop to record the audio. He’s pretty sure he’s made an arse of it, so he sits his phone next to the computer instead and uses that. He now feels 100 per cent sober: heart thumping, brain alert. He already knows he’s not sleeping for about four more hours.
‘As of now, yes.’
‘We’re hackers on steroids. Our motivation is twofold. We do it because we can. We do it for the lulz. That is a corruption of lol.’
‘I know what it is.’
‘Direct quotes, Jack.’
He’s being trolled here, he knows. Hackers love their memes and they love their pranks. Buzzkill wants to get certain phrases into his media statement purely for the juvenile amusement of himself and his comrades-in-code, but Parlabane is happy to play along on this occasion. It’s the price of doing business, and it’s cheaper than usual today.
‘How many of you are there in Uninvited?’
‘I literally can’t answer that. The figure is growing all the time. It’s over nine thousand.’
‘Lulz aside, you had to have your reasons for what you did today. There were some strong points being made. You’ve caused the RSGN massive embarrassment.’
‘If the RSGN are embarrassed, then it will be a first. Nothing else appears to have shamed them.’
‘The financial implications are bound to be enormous, the fall-out considerable. Do you have any thoughts for the money this is going to cost?’
‘Yes. They should tote it up and take it out of next year’s executive bonuses. That way nobody loses a penny except the people who deserve to.’
‘They’re going to come after you with everything they’ve got.’
‘The harder they try, the harder they’ll fail.’
‘The CEO is calling for sentences commensurate with an act of terrorism. This is chiming well with the government’s new cybercrime czar who is already ramping up the rhetoric for using this as the perfect excuse to drive through more digital-surveillance legislation.’
‘Just proves the more you hate it, the stronger it gets.’
‘Are you talking about them or you?’
‘Both. But they should dial down on the anger. They’re not the only ones who can escalate things. We don’t forgive, we don’t forget.’
‘You’re not going to catch them with their pants down a second time.’
‘That’s what they think. Even if they tighten up their security tonight, it’s already too late. We plan ahead. We didn’t hack RSGN tonight. We did it ages ago: we simply chose tonight as our moment to reveal it. We’ve hacked into a lot of things but
we don’t always go on the offensive. We don’t come after you unless you give us a reason.’
Parlabane silently clenches his fist and allows a smile to play across his face. He has an inside angle on the hottest story in the country right now, maybe the world.
Even in that sterile sat-nav voice, these words are incendiary. Buzzkill delivers again. Buzzkill always delivers.
Nobody at Broadwave is going to say this isn’t their speed.
ONE MAN’S TRASH
I check my phone and see that there’s time enough for a trip to the recycling centre before I have to be at the Loxford. It’s not so far out of my way and I’m a fast walker, always. Nobody bothers you if you’re walking at pace. Even chuggers know to go after the low-hanging fruit, unless the street is really quiet.
When I get there, old Jaffer greets me. ‘Hey, Sam. Not seen you in a little while. You keeping busy?’
I have come today because he’s usually in the cabin on a Wednesday. He’s got a son, Ahmed, at Loxford in the year below Lilly. Ahmed’s got some severe form of autism that means the part of his brain that’s supposed to process relationships and emotional interaction isn’t wired right. I always feel sorry for Jaffer and his wife when I watch them collecting him from school, because whereas Lilly lights up at seeing me, Ahmed’s whole thing is that he’s completely indifferent.
Jaffer once said that if he dropped dead on the kitchen floor, Ahmed would walk over him to get to the fridge. Doesn’t stop him loving Ahmed, though. Him and Karima dote on the kid, but it must be tough when there’s no signal coming back the other way.
‘You got anything for me?’ I say.
‘Yes. Been saving these. You can take your pick. Or take the lot.’
I smile when I see the haul he’s unearthed for me, two laptops in equal states of disrepair. Treasure. People simply chuck them away these days, sometimes when they’re not even knackered. They want the newest, fastest, slimmest, shiniest, and often they can’t even be bothered with the hassle of selling the old one. They reckon if they can’t use it anymore, who the hell is going to pay money for it?
Even the supposedly broken ones don’t always take much to restore to a bootable condition, and if they can’t be saved, they can always be raided for their RAM or other components.
The ones that are in the best nick I give a bit of a digital MoT, and then Jaffer’s cousin sells them on from his shop up in Barnet. I get a bung for those, but that’s quite rare. Mostly I’m taking home machines that are just about salvageable, and I don’t always need them to run. They’re useful as decoys, you see. Laptops have a habit of disappearing from the Morpeth household. If it’s not my mum’s drug-dealer leeches lifting them to cover unpaid debts, it’s her waster drug buddies stealing them when I’m not home.
See, I’ve told you about how pathetic I am. A victim. A doormat. But I need you to understand that there’s another side to me, a person nobody gets to walk all over. Samantha Morpeth is merely my crappy avatar for playing in the world’s biggest and shittest role-playing game: Real LifeTM.
Who I really am is the person that exists online. To me, that’s the world that matters. And in that world, I’m not pathetic, I’m not a victim and I’m not a doormat. I’m a fucking supervillain.
ONLINE PREDATOR
The smaller machine has a cracked screen and a broken hinge, but it will serve its function fine. After I get home with Lilly I take it to my room and sit on my bed, giving the exterior a brush-up. The spare cable I have doesn’t fit it, but that doesn’t matter: it only has to trail from a nearby socket. Once I’m happy that it looks the part, I place it on the desk, closed, waiting for the next thieving cockroach to fuck off with it, while leaving my real laptop undisturbed.
The older and larger of Jaffer’s finds has got a DVD drive. Result. The operating system is corrupted and the wireless is fried, but the machine itself is still functional, so once I’ve cooked dinner and filled in a bunch of forms the Social have sent me, I gently coax the thing back into life. It’s not going to run the latest Sacred Reign RPG, but it will do for Lilly to watch her shows on, since there’s no TV and no DVD player any more.
I reflect that it’s a good job they didn’t realise her comics might be worth something, but these moronic gangsta-bots are too ignorant to read anything other than what appears on their social media feeds.
I tell Lilly the TV had to go for repair. She is delighted by the idea of having her own private and portable DVD setup, which she can take to her room if she wants.
We watch a couple of episodes of Teen Titans together. I let her stay up later than usual because she’s excited over the novelty, then I tuck her up and make sure she’s not going to be upset again about Mum not being here. She seems settled tonight, though. Her new personal TV has proven a good distraction. I make a mental note to find a decoy for that too.
I go back to the kitchen and do the washing up that’s been left from dinner, postponed because fixing the DVD laptop was a priority. Once it’s dried and put away, I hang up the laundry that’s been sitting in the drum since the cycle ended an hour ago, before ironing Lilly’s clothes for the next day: uniform and sports kit, as it’s a Thursday.
I go back down the hall and turn the light off so that it doesn’t spill inside when I stick my head around the door to Lilly’s room. I can’t see her face because she is lying with her back to me, but I can hear the steady and comforting rhythm of her breathing.
She’s asleep.
It’s time for me to suit up.
I slide my bed away from the wall, then I lean over it and roll back the carpet from the edge. It reveals an access hatch for getting into the space beneath the floorboards. I discovered this when we once had a problem with the lights and I watched the electrician remove this pre-cut section of floorboards before crawling out of sight.
I reach down and haul out the neoprene bag containing my real laptop, booting it up from a tiny memory card I keep in the lining of my bra. Then I check which of my neighbours’ Wi-Fi signals is strongest tonight and quietly connect.
None of the Uninvited crew is in our chat channel yet, so I check out a few of the message boards I like to use. Hacktivism started on sites like these. It’s like the opposite of social media. You don’t have an avatar or a screen name: all posters are listed as Anonymous, which is where the name came from.
I must have been nine or ten years old when Anonymous first really saddled up, going after the Church of Scientology, but it has never troubled me to be turning up late to the party. I’m familiar with the Rules of the Internet, but I’ve got a few of my own, and one is that: ‘Whenever you show up somewhere online, you always just missed the golden age.’
Besides, I’m only here for the lulz.
I scroll a few threads, a familiar mix of silly images and even sillier arguments. Then I see that somebody has posted a Facebook headshot of a girl and is asking for help hacking into her online photo storage. That spurs me into action.
I screenshot the page and fire up Photoshop.
I log on to Facebook as Jools: she is one of sixteen fake profiles I’ve currently got running, all but three of them girls. I usually get the headshots from Eastern European accounts, girls in Slovenia being unlikely to happen across their own photo on an English-language profile. I friend all my own accounts to get the ball running, and my fellow hackers can be relied upon to provide a boost, because we all friend each other’s fake profiles. Then I populate the feeds with photos and status updates copy-pasted from real accounts for added authenticity. Facebook is more active these days about closing down dormant or suspected false accounts, so I have to put a lot of time and imagination into keeping my fake profiles convincing.
It’s amazing how deep you can get sucked into spectating upon other people’s lives. I spend hours cherry-picking images and postings from individuals I’ve never met, weaving them into a made-up background for girls who don’t exist.
I search Keisha Deacon and find four re
sults. In descending order I see two white girls and a Hunger Games logo, the girls both pictured in classic selfie pose: arm out holding the phone so that it shoots from a flattering downward angle. Beneath these three is the Keisha I’m looking for. She’s gone for the mirror shot, head tilted and lips pouty. I’m not sure whether she’s trying to look sultry or bad-ass, but mainly the effect is that she looks pissed off and unwelcoming, so in that respect it’s a good likeness.
I copy-paste her picture into Photoshop and get to work.
Keisha is going to need to see a face she can believe in. I change my Jools profile’s manga avatar to a studious-looking white girl with a hint of emo about her. She looks friendly but not too pretty, smart but not trendy, a geek but not a nerd. Her timeline is full of gaming references and superhero memes. She’s someone Keisha would never friend, for the same reasons that Keisha is going to trust her implicitly a few minutes from now.
I send Keisha a private message.
Attached to the private message is the screenshot I took from the hacker forum, amended so that it is Keisha’s Facebook avatar that appears in the post asking for help in hacking her photo accounts.
I wait, and less than a minute later there is a reply.
I nod to myself. Keisha wouldn’t be worried if all she had in her photo account was a few selfies and two dozen pictures of her dinner. She’s got n00dz.
Want You Gone Page 7