dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  Ian gestured around the room.

  None of the keyboard jockeys even looked her way.

  “Welcome to the bear pit,” he said. “Everyone here is a bona fide legend of the keyboard, and it’s rare, indeed, that someone impresses us enough to get a seat here.” He looked Ani in the eye for the longest time he’d managed so far: a full three seconds. “Good to have you aboard,” he said.

  Ani nodded. “It’s good to be here.” She ignored the mixed metaphors of animal cruelty and boats. “Wherever and whatever ‘here’ is.”

  Ian Black gave her a lopsided grin. “This is the headquarters of London’s first Dead Cell.”

  “Dead Cell as in what makes up dust?” Ani asked. “Or as in characters in a video game by Hideo Kojima?”

  Black looked surprised, and maybe a little impressed. It was hard to tell because he never looked her way long enough for her to get a proper read on him. If it was the latter, then he was a little too easily impressed. Kojima was a legend, and she’d played every game in the Metal Gear series. Most of them, more than once. Dead Cell were an anti-terrorist strike team in Metal Gear Solid 2 but, Ani thought, it seemed a telling detail that Dead Cell were the bad guys, or at least the tools of the bad guys, in the game.

  Was that deliberate? Or just not thought through?

  “The latter,” Black said. “You see, victorious is organized into cells that we call Dead Cells, with each Dead Cell acting with little or no knowledge of the activities or personnel of any of the others. That way, if one cell is compromised, it’s only one cell that’s compromised. Like a Hydra, we have many heads. Cut one off, another will grow in its place. Welcome to the dawn of a new era in hacktivism: the good guys win.”

  Ani nodded, but wondered if Black had noticed he’d just invoked the name of another fictional bunch of bad guys—Hydra, from Marvel Comics—or that his bragging about the way that victorious’s cells were organized was exactly the same way a lot of terrorist groups acted.

  Abernathy had warned her that they were encountering a new kind of hacktivism, but Ani had doubted that they were anything more than a bunch of disenfranchised kids with a little too much time on their hands and a sparkly new banner to parade their skillz under.

  Seeing this number of hackers working together in an office—hackers were by pretty much self-definition, loners—made her wonder if Abernathy hadn’t been on to something.

  “We’re going to be having a strategy meeting soon,” Black told her, “and you’ll get your first task assigned to you then, so how about I get you set up at a workstation and you can familiarize yourself with our system here? Maybe meet some of your partners in crime?”

  He smiled to show that his last remark had been a joke, but Ani couldn’t help but think it might also be entirely accurate.

  Black led her to an unused desk pretty much in the center of the room, and gestured toward the scuzzy office chair in front of it.

  “Your place in history awaits,” he told her, obviously overdoing it with the macho crap. “It’s all set up and ready to go. Your new screen name is RedQueen, capital R, capital Q, and your password is cedar, all lowercase. I suggest you change it now. Strat-meet in about twenty. See you in the conference room.”

  He turned and walked away, back to a desk on the far side of the room where he started punching the keyboard.

  Induction over, then, Ani thought. Strat-meet? What about ‘egy’ and ‘ing’ is so difficult to say that you have to drop them from the ends of words?

  She sat down, pulled the keyboard closer, and looked at the screen.

  The computer was a ho-hum, generic PC running a version of Kali Linux, designed for security testing of networks through an arsenal of penetration tools, among them, some pretty sophisticated password crackers, packet analyzers, and port scanners. YETI’s hacking kit was largely made of the same stuff, and she clicked through the system trying to note the differences, just to kill time.

  It was a workhorse computer, nothing special, but it seemed capable of doing all of the things she’d be asking of it. She was, truthfully, a little disappointed by it, but maybe she was just spoiled for tech now.

  She changed her password, yawned, and looked around her. An eager pair of eyes magnified by thick lenses in black frames, met hers from the desk to her right.

  “New, huh?” the guy said, a short and squat teenager with a complexion that said too much junk food, not enough daylight: a pallid monitor tan shaded in with blackheads.

  “Yeah,” Ani said. “First day.”

  “It’s like being at work.” The guy winked, and then extended a pudgy hand. “I’m the Count of Ten.”

  “RedQueen,” Ani said, taking the hand and shaking it, making a point of not wrinkling her nose when she felt how clammy it was.

  “Excited?” the Count asked.

  “Not yet. I’ll save that for the briefing.”

  “El Capitan Black loves his briefings,” the Count told her. “Still, this one should be good.”

  “Oh?”

  “Phase Two.” the Count explained. “When we start taking this whole enterprise a little further, a little more publicly.”

  “How was Phase One?”

  “DDoS attacks on a bunch of heavy hitters’ servers. Worms, viruses, and Trojans injected into the body politic. The groundwork.”

  “For?”

  “I, for one, am looking forward to finding out. Phase One was a limbering up exercise, apparently. Checking our tools against the enemy. Phase Two is where it all starts to make sense. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Guess that’s why they brought you on board. You must have some pretty mad skillz.”

  “I try.”

  “Just make sure you bring your A game”—the Count turned back to his screen—“or they’ll be looking for someone else to fill that desk. Just like the guy before you.”

  Ani gave him a quizzical glance, but the Count didn’t turn back. Ani thought about what he’d said—It’s like being at work—and decided that was a pretty accurate assessment of the operation here. Which was, it had to be said, pretty damn weird. Sure, you could treat people like staff if they were getting paid for it because … well, because that was the very definition of staff, but hiring and, apparently, firing people, cramming them into an office, that didn’t sound like a hacker paradise. It sounded … wrong.

  She didn’t deal in stereotypes, but some of them came about for a reason. One of the most prevalent stereotypes of hackers was that they were loners, spending all their time in their rooms because of social inadequacies. Ani knew this to be false. Lots of the hackers she knew were outgoing, with lively social lives, lots of friends, and were actually pretty socially adept. In truth, good hackers had to be socially adept. A significant weapon in a hacker’s arsenal wasn’t her computer, or her software, but rather her ability to make people trust her. Social engineering got around many computer security systems. A firm could have all the security in the world plastered onto their network, but a phone call to an employee that got him to divulge his username and password could circumvent all of it.

  Hacking, itself, was a solitary act. Pretty much by necessity, it was perpetrated by individuals sitting alone at their computers. The concentration needed could be intense, but so was the purpose behind it. Curiosity. The search for information that no one else had seen, for digital forbidden fruit. It wasn’t really a team sport.

  But hacking wasn’t this. It wasn’t a room packed with people, organized to appear like a workplace. This went against her every instinct.

  She didn’t like it.

  She didn’t like it at all.

  The briefing was about an hour later. Everyone got up from their workstations and filed through a door on the left beyond which was a meeting room with a table and chairs at the front and a bunch more chairs arranged audience-style to face them. Three people sat behind the table and Ani was surprised to see that none of them were Ian Black; he was squashed into a plastic seat like everyone else from th
e office.

  The guy on the left was wearing a Metallica T-shirt and looked … well, pretty much as you’d expect from the T-shirt: long hair, tattoos, plug earring in an overstretched hole, ripped jeans, and bullet belt. Probably about eighteen years old. In the middle was someone who looked more like an accountant than a hacker: male, mid-to-late twenties, sharp suit, expensive accessories, preppy flick in the hair, and cold, calculating eyes. Rounding out the trio was a girl, probably about the same age as Ani, wearing army surplus camo, a leather jacket over an ALL CAPS, ALL RAGE, ALL THE TIME T-shirt, sporting a blonde Mohawk.

  They waited until everyone was seated and had quieted down, and then the guy in the middle stood up. All eyes were on him. The room was deathly silent. Unnaturally silent, Ani thought. No coughing, chattering, or whispering.

  “Today is a good day,” the man said, in a mellifluous voice, not loud but somehow still commanding, with the hint of an Eastern European or Scandinavian accent. “It is the day that we begin our journey out of the shadows and into the light. Up until now, victorious has just been chatter on the web, vague hints and allusions, but nothing concrete, with no visible members. To most, it is nothing more than a digital urban legend.

  “All movements start small. One or two people banding together over a shared vision, dream, or ideology. In time, the movement grows. A tiny branch falls from a tree on a mountain slope, it makes a snowball, a snowfall, then an avalanche. The avalanche is only the first visible sign of the chain of causality that came before. And our movement has followed that exponential growth. From one to few to many. We are almost ready to earn the label ‘movement.’”

  He turned to the girl, who reached down beneath the table and retrieved the flight case she’d obviously stowed there. She opened it, took out a piece of tech and, with some effort, placed it on the table: a large rectangle of plastic that Ani sort of recognized as a 3-D printer, but it was sleeker, and more compact than the ones she’d seen before. The woman plugged the unit in, inserted a memory stick into a port on the side of the printer, pressed a few buttons and the machine started doing its thing.

  Whatever its thing might be.

  Ani hoped it wasn’t a My Little Pony, or a bust of Yoda, which seemed to be the most popular things on her quick scans through 3-D printing videos on YouTube. Whatever it was, it was going to take a long time, that much Ani knew.

  When the printer was underway, remarkably quietly, the woman sat back down.

  Mr. Metallica stood up.

  “So, I say ‘Anonymous’ and you know exactly who I mean,” he said, in an oddly high-pitched voice that didn’t fit with the rest of his image. “Of course, we all know them through their work, but the general public is aware of them, too. Tell me why?”

  There was a self-conscious silence in the room, with no one wanting to answer a question obviously directed at them. It was like being in school. After ten seconds of uncomfortable silence, Ani thought it was time to put them all out of their misery.

  “The V for Vendetta masks,” she offered. “They backed up their attacks on The Church of Scientology—Project Chanology—by appearing in public, in their thousands, hiding their faces behind Guy Fawkes masks. It gave the movement a single face: and it gave Anonymous something they hadn’t had before: a brand.”

  A few of the people in the audience nodded as if it was exactly what they were about to say themselves.

  Mr. Metallica nodded, too.

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said. “Thank you. Anonymous branded themselves, and hid their identities at the same time. It’s tremendously economic. They burned themselves onto the cultural landscape and gained true anonymity at the same time.”

  He looked at Ms. Hacker at the other end of the table. She shook her head, checked the printer, and held up two fingers.

  Ani was puzzled. It looked like Mr. Metallica was waiting for whatever the 3-D printer was generating, but Ani knew that couldn’t be the case as those things took ages to print anything.

  “It may not be original,” Mr. Metallica said, “but we are entering Phase Two of our endeavors, and that means it’s time that we, too, did something to brand ourselves. To project ourselves onto the cultural landscape. With an image that will confuse, anger, provoke, but that we can all hide our faces behind.

  “If you think about the Guy Fawkes mask that has become ubiquitous, you can see that it both serves and undermines its own purposes. For a group with an anti-capitalist agenda to use masks that make money for a large corporation, Time Warner, seems a little self-defeating. But we can see the reason: Guy Fawkes is a potent image of anti-government action, and the fact that he didn’t succeed in blowing up the Houses of Parliament is neither here nor there. The message is clear. The status cannot remain quo. It must be brought down, and society made fairer. Just because we use computer keyboards instead of explosives merely demonstrates the dramatic way the battlefield has changed.”

  He looked over at Ms. Hacker and she nodded.

  “So,” he said, somewhat overdramatically, “a symbol. A brand. Something to hide our faces and convey a message that cannot be ignored.

  “But we will not be rallying behind Guy Fawkes. Rather, his modern counterpart. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you our new symbol. Our brand. Our disguise.”

  Ms. Hacker opened the printer and put her hand inside. Again, Ani couldn’t believe that the printer had completed its task so quickly. Especially for something the size of a human face mask. It gave her a strange feeling in her stomach, a knot of concern.

  The knot cinched tighter, however, when the hacker girl pulled the completed mask from the printer.

  Ani felt appalled, angry, sick and more than a little afraid.

  The mask was a 3-D-printed replica of a face she knew all too well.

  It kind of explained the name victorious, too.

  It was the face of Victor Palgrave.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED

  Joe had never been to LA before, but there was no time for any sightseeing that couldn’t be accomplished from the window of the limo as they drove from LAX. A place that Joe had always wanted to visit flashed by so fast, it might as well have been anywhere.

  Even Luton.

  Or Des Moines.

  Abernathy was unusually quiet, just as he had been for the twelve-hour flight. Joe didn’t know if it was just that he didn’t have anything to say, or if travel always had this effect on him. He knew so little about Abernathy outside of his role as the head of YETI, and had hoped that maybe traveling together would allow him a deeper insight into just what made the man tick. So much for that. Abernathy read books on a YETI tablet like Ani’s, slept sitting bolt upright, and occasionally looked out the window, but apart from that was an island unto himself.

  Joe read, too. He played games on his PS Vita, then read some more. He tried to sleep and failed miserably: it was hard to relax in a tin can hurtling over the Atlantic. Flights were like being stuck in limbo.

  So, too, was a limo drive from the airport.

  They were both so passive: put your trust in the guy in control and the rest was simply a matter of waiting to reach a destination.

  World Way had led onto Sepulveda Boulevard, then the One-Ten.

  Joe sat back and let it all blur by his windows. It was a procession of flat, near-featureless hardtop cars, electricity pylons, and palm trees. The intermittent buildings on both sides of the Harbor Freeway were squat and similar. It was like those backgrounds in cartoons that are looped to save on drawings.

  The limo stopped in West Hollywood, across the street from the LA office of BuzzFeed and next to a high-end yoga studio. The bright black on red Dorian logo was hardly subtle, stretching across the whole front wall.

  Abernathy pushed open the doors and they walked into a reception area that was a lot smaller than the size, and ostentatious logo, of the exterior had suggested it would be. A waiting room that looked designed to discourage wai
ting. Bare. Minimalist. The only furniture was two wooden benches that looked more like pieces of corporate sculpture than anything you were actually supposed to sit on. A woman sat behind a glass screen, a corporate smile plastered across her face. Joe wondered if it was hard to show real emotions when you faked it all day, then realized that that was pretty much the description of an undercover agent and made a note to stop being so judgmental all the time.

  “How can I help you today?” the woman asked with the sort of enthusiasm that comes from training seminars and regular reviews.

  “We are here to see Mr. Curtiz,” Abernathy told her in his most aristocratically-inflected voice, even fleshing out the contraction “we’re” to add gravitas. “I believe we are early.”

  The woman checked one of three screens, then nodded.

  “I have you booked in for three,” she confirmed. “So yes, you’re early. I’ll see if he’s free.”

  She picked up a phone and spoke quietly into the mouthpiece. She listened for a moment and her corporate mask slipped a little, revealing the human being that lived behind the façade. She’d recovered her mask before she hung up, but Joe guessed she’d just received a dressing down from someone with direct influence over her future with the company.

  “He will be free in a moment,” she told them. “We seem to have misplaced the … er, someone forgot to enter the reason for your visit into the system.”

  Abernathy did an excellent impression of someone insulted by this admission. It was all in the arch of an eyebrow and the downward turn of the mouth. Anyone would have thought that he’d really had an appointment before Ani surreptitiously entered one onto the company’s server just before they’d left YETI HQ for the airport.

  “Still, it’s not a problem …” the woman added hurriedly. “And I really must apologize.”

  “No need,” Abernathy said in a voice that suggested precisely the opposite. “Do we wait here?” He pointed at the medieval torture seating. The woman nodded.