dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

The journey from the road to Joe’s room was a blur, and although he meant to find something to eat before turning in, that plan was sabotaged when a quick lie down—to take a load off—turned into a long and dreamless sleep.

  He slept for fifteen hours straight, fully-clothed, on top of the bed. For the first thirty seconds or so after he awoke, he genuinely had no idea where he was.

  Then his memory kicked in, a flipbook-style procession of images and impressions of his journey. His body no longer just ached where he’d been punched, it now ached where it hadn’t, too. He groaned, stripped, took a hot shower, and started to feel human again.

  Just.

  He checked his phone, which needed charging, but the room had some two prong adapters, and it wasn’t a problem. He had a few texts from Ellie, a couple from Abernathy telling him to be careful on his visit to Dorian’s European plant in case the chip thieves were there and didn’t take kindly to his nosing around, and a bunch of emails that were hardly worth the energy of opening them.

  He replied to Ellie and acknowledged Abernathy’s communications, then went downstairs to find some food and the envelope that would be waiting for him at the reception desk.

  Dorian Europe was some ten miles outside of Braşov, and the cab driver seemed delighted that Joe had never visited the area before. As they followed a narrow road leading up a mountain through dense forest, the man asked, “You like Dracula?”

  “I don’t know about like,” Joe replied, “but I’m certainly aware of him.”

  “These are the Carpathian Mountains,” the man said, pointing out the window at the spine of rocks looming across the horizon. “And you are traveling through Transylvania. Of course, the real Dracula was nothing like the one you see in the films.”

  “The real Dracula?” Joe asked. “You mean Vlad the Impaler? The guy Bram Stoker allegedly used as a template for Dracula?”

  The cab driver shook his head.

  “Vlad Tepes—you call him ‘The Impaler’—is still celebrated as a hero by most here. He fought the Ottomans to keep the homeland free of Turkish rule. The real Dracula, to us, was Ceausescu. It was only with his fall that we even discovered the existence of the book, Dracula. For us, Ceausescu was the real vampire, sucking the lifeblood from our country. And vampires aren’t even a big part of our folklore. We have strigoi and moroi, but they are more related to ghosts and witches than they are to vampires. We’re more a werewolf kind of people.”

  “But I saw a poster for Dracula’s Castle back at the hotel.”

  “Ach, that’s for tourists,” the cabbie said. “Bran Castle: it looks creepy, but probably has no actual connection to Vlad Tepes, unless you count him being a prisoner there for a very short while. Certainly, no connection to vampires.”

  “Oh.”

  “We have bears and wolves though,” the man said brightly.

  “Where?”

  The man indicated the woods on either side of the road.

  “Oh,” Joe said again.

  The building that housed Dorian Europe was the kind of structure that arose when function dictated form. The only vision for the place was the enclosure of the space needed to do … well, whatever Dorian did inside.

  The factory was located at the end of a long private road that cut through the forest into a clearing—a vast, featureless collection of white boxes, with the only concession to aesthetics being a slightly fluted roof. A twelve-foot fence, crowned with barbed wire surrounded the property, with a security office at the end of the road.

  The cabbie became less and less talkative as they approached their destination, commenting once that there were no locals employed at the factory. It all sounded a bit Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory to Joe, but he sympathized about the local economy, and the man seemed to welcome the comment.

  He dropped Joe off, took the cash, and drove away.

  Quickly.

  Joe approached the gates with a lot less urgency.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?

  Day 2 at victorious HQ dawned, and Ani made her way to Tottenham Court Road on the Tube, feeling too much like a city commuter for comfort, while her mind was a blizzard of creeping apprehensions and terrifying doubts.

  The ftp server had coughed up its digital payload, providing her with just enough information for her to be worried. On the phone, Minaxi Desai had, likewise, been somewhat unsettled by its contents.

  Victor Palgrave’s investigation into the hacking collective had been far more successful than YETI’s, and it had uncovered some potentially alarming facts: that victorious was remarkably well funded, with a war chest running into the millions of pounds; that it was global, well organized, and decentralized; and that it had masqueraded under a few other names before finally settling on victorious—first Gaia and then golem.

  She’d heard both of those words, but it had been Gretchen who had provided the useful capsule definitions of them.

  “Gaia is the original earth mother,” she’d said. “By which, I mean she was the goddess from which the earth, itself, sprang. The universe, too. In Greek mythology, she was the personification of the planet earth, itself. Although, for all that, she is now consigned to the discard pile of ‘gods that failed,’ the ones no longer worshipped, along with Odin, Zeus, Osiris, Baal, and Jupiter.

  “But the idea of Gaia was given new meaning in the 1970s, when James Lovelock, a chemist and inventor, whose instruments can detect CFCs and look for life on other planets, formulated what he called the Gaia Hypothesis. The simple version is that the earth, itself, is a self-regulating system that responds to feedback from the creatures inhabiting it in order to maintain an environment in which they can survive.”

  “It does what now?” Ani asked.

  “Basically, the idea is that there is a constant series of complex interactions taking place between all living creatures and their non-living surroundings and, indeed, the planet itself. Earth becomes a kind of living organism, or as close to one that there’s no real difference; it nurtures life, maintaining the perfect ecologic balance for creatures to exist.”

  “Are you saying the planet is a lifeform?” Ani asked. “But that’s just silly.”

  “And that was pretty much the view taken by a lot of eminent scientists when the hypothesis first saw the light of day. The problem is, the theory captured a kind of post-hippy strand of the zeitgeist. It was new age-y, but with a suggestion of a scientific basis. And it is a pretty comforting thought that the earth is a living life-support system. So Lovelock’s idea took off. His book sits on an awful lot of shelves. It became part of the New-Age, pagan, pseudoscientific paradigm, where ideas don’t have to be true to be believed.”

  “Down on the hippies much?” Ani laughed. “Next, you’ll be telling me you don’t like homeopathy …”

  “Do not get me started on that.” Gretchen said. “It’ll get very loud for a very long time.”

  Ani grinned. Gretchen was pretty easy to bait if you knew the right targets to aim for.

  “So Gaia is a way of viewing our planet as a living organism?” Ani asked. “Why would victorious ever have thought that was a good idea for a name? Sure, it’s a bit hippy, but it sounds pretty harmless. What about Golem? Wasn’t he in Lord of the Rings?”

  “You’re thinking of Gollum,” Gretchen said. “Although, I’m sure Tolkien was, at least subliminally, thinking about the mythological golem when he named the character. The golem was a creature made of mud and powered by magic and—at least in the version of the story I’m most familiar with—it was a defender of the Jewish people in the city of Prague in the sixteenth century. Legend has it that there were a series of pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks in Prague, and a rabbi called Judah Loew ben Bezalel built a golem out of river mud to help put a stop to them. Of course, like in all good monster stories, the golem ended up going on a rampage and had to be stopped.”

  “So the group was going to name themselves after a living planet, then a monster made out o
f mud, but decided to honor a racist lunatic instead? I guess the mask must be better.”

  “Palgrave is a symbol,” Gretchen mused. “It’s probably not his right-wing views, but rather the idea that he is kind of a modern analogue for Guy Fawkes. I guess that Gaia and the golem were symbols, too. But where Palgrave is more about destruction, perhaps the other two were more to do with the idea of protection. A nurturing planet, a defense against violence …”

  “Although the golem did go postal …”

  “There is that. But maybe we can track a group’s ideology through the images it chooses to represent itself, even the ones it discards along the way. Perhaps the destruction implied by the Palgrave mask is donned in defense of something important to the group. The planet. A persecuted minority. These are certainly causes that people might fight for. Maybe we need to be looking at an environmental agenda or—”

  “Wait. The golem was made of mud, right? And what is mud but wet earth? What if the golem symbolizes the earth, itself, getting its own back? It could be wholly environmental. Greenpeace gone cyber.”

  Gretchen had just nodded.

  Sure, it was possible.

  But Ani knew that she needed evidence to back it all up.

  Back at her desk, she found a Victor Palgrave mask waiting for her on her chair. Around the office, people were actually wearing the bloody things. Ani put hers on the floor beneath her desk and settled in front of her computer. There was a list of tasks on a Post-it note attached to the monitor—a few networks to probe for vulnerabilities to exploit—and it got Ani thinking about how to use victorious’s computers as a weapon against them. She needed to scope out how closely the network was monitored without raising suspicion. Would ‘I’m a hacker, what did you expect?’ cut any ice if they were scrutinizing network activity, or key-logging, or screen capping the terminals? If it was just a bunch of similarly-minded individuals, it probably would, but she wasn’t so sure that that was what they’d collected here.

  Palgrave’s ftp site had shown her that there was a significant financial investment in this project, and that it was being run along the lines of a corporation or business. Cells in different locations, rather like branches in business terms, Ani had no idea why the people behind victorious felt they even needed offices.

  It was one of the weirder things about this outfit. She still thought hackers were better at home, in their bedrooms.

  They didn’t tend to flock.

  Most of them had jobs and perfectly ordinary home lives. Hacking was just something they did in their spare time.

  Bringing them into an office, where the benefits of working together were, as far as she’d seen, utterly negligible, seemed bizarre and unnatural. It was like forcing square pegs into round holes not because you needed them there, but simply because you could.

  Or because, for some as yet undiscovered reason, you felt that was where they should be.

  As she worked through the first task on her list, she realized that her computer was more powerful than she’d first thought. And more powerful than it had looked from its system profile. She opened up a console window and was even more surprised. If the computer was struggling with CPU load then it simply took more processing power from the other computers in the room that weren’t using it. Distributed processing. A nice touch, and really well-implemented. She made a mental note to get more info and, maybe, the specs for the boards the victorious computers were using.

  As the novelty started to wear off, she started thinking about how this whole office set-up was the way most companies worked. They provided a workplace and the work that was to be done there. It was as if victorious was not only modeled on the way corporations behaved, but a slave to it. The people behind victorious clearly thought it was the way to get things done, but that surely showed that they were more familiar with the characteristics of the business world than they were with those of the hacking community.

  So why were all these hackers here? That was the question she still couldn’t answer. Sure, they probably jumped through similar—or the same—hoops she had to earn her place, but was that really enough to keep them engaged? Were their egos being fed by the fact that the people in this room were the London cell? That out of all of the people in the city, only they were the chosen ones? The reasoning seemed thin, but then wasn’t hacking as much about ego as ideology or adrenaline?

  Ani knew that she hacked networks for the same reasons other people climbed mountains, sailed solo across oceans, or walked in space. They relished the challenge despite the difficulty, the fear, and the fact that maybe small, evolved hominids weren’t even meant to do such things. It was about overcoming big obstacles, about coming out on top. About knowing that you were the first to achieve something, and the bragging rights that inevitably sprung from that.

  Which was all possible, but the people here seemed so … joyless. There was no bragging, no displays of ego of any sort. This was like work. Work that they weren’t even getting paid for …

  She stopped.

  Assumptions.

  Why did she keep making them?

  If her experiences with YETI so far had told her anything, it was to question the kind of assumptions that people made every day as a matter of course.

  The assumption here was simple: that no one here was getting paid.

  What if that wasn’t true?

  Hackers had jobs to hold their lives together, to keep their families fed and clothed and housed, to buy the tech they needed. victorious was bankrolled by some pretty hefty financial backers. Put those two facts together. If you want a random bunch of outsiders to suddenly play nice with one another in an office that looked more like a job than a cause, then maybe you just needed to pay them.

  And pay them well.

  Never mind that she hadn’t been offered money: that was the thing that had made the assumption possible. She was here because she’d passed the victorious test and because she’d showed up when they told her to …

  Wait a minute, she thought. Hold the phone.

  Was what she was thinking possible?

  There were a lot of people in this room, but were they even all top hackers? It seemed statistically unlikely. Even more so when you considered that they sat here compliantly, largely in silence. Could victorious really be paying people to make up the numbers? That didn’t sound likely either. The details were running around in her head, and she couldn’t make sense of it all. But there really was something off about this whole thing.

  She turned to the guy she’d met yesterday, the one who had been rechristened the Count of Ten.

  “Hey!” she said. “How’s it going?”

  The Count looked up from his screen and then looked around the room, warily. What, was the guy scared to be talking to someone else? Or just scared to be talking to a girl? Ani gave him her most disarming smile and leaned in toward him.

  “Weird briefing yesterday, huh?” she said. Start with small-talk.

  “W-weird?” the Count stammered. “What do you mean?”

  “There was a lot about the masks, but Phase 2? Not so much.”

  “I guess it’s still filed under ‘need to know,’ or something.” The Count looked like he really wanted to return to his computer screen, but didn’t know how. Ani couldn’t tell if it was how he always behaved or how he behaved when talking to a girl or how he behaved when talking to this particular girl.

  “I guess,” she said. “It’s probably that I’m new here …” She raised the pitch upward at the end of her sentence, just like Joe had taught her in training, to leave the impression of a question dotted through her conversation. So what if it made her sound like an Aussie surfer? It also provided a subtle conditioning for the listener to answer. “… but I’m struggling to understand why we need to do this … well, here, I guess. I mean, surely we could do the same stuff better at home?”

  The Count looked puzzled, as if he’d never questioned such a thing before.

  “They need to ke
ep eyes on our work,” he finally said. “You know, make sure that everything’s coordinated for when we go after the big fish …”

  “That’s what I’m itching to get to,” Ani said. “These systems they have us probing, they’re not exactly exciting targets now, are they?”

  “You’re lucky,” the Count said. “At least you get to probe networks. A lot of the other guys here, they just work all day on memes.”

  “Memes?” Ani thought she’d misheard him.

  “Well, if we’re being precise, we should probably call them image macros. You know the difference?”

  Ani nodded. Of course she did. A meme was an image, phrase, or idea that spread across the web, from person to person. An image macro was a kind of meme—a subset—that had a picture or photograph overlaid with text. Often deliberately misspelled in LOLspeak.

  Memes could be funny, but Ani could see no reason why victorious would bother taking up office space to make them.

  Then she remembered the web address that had led her here: www.victorious.meme. That, in itself, was interesting, but now that her mind was focused on the word meme, she recalled something more—the message board that had given rise to victorious in the first place. The knock-off of 4chan called dot2me.

  dot 2 me.

  dot 2 x me.

  dot and then two mes.

  dotmeme.

  What was it with victorious and the word meme?

  She hid her excitement by asking the Count in an almost disinterested tone, “So people here produce memes … sorry, macros?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of us, actually.” The Count managed half a smile. “So count yourself lucky that you’re doing any hacking at all.”

  “I love a good meme,” Ani said. Sometimes a person had to say the exact opposite of how they felt to get where they wanted to go. “Do we produce those ‘WHEN YOU SEE IT’ ones here?”

  The Count’s half smile turned into a full-fledged grin.

  “Did you see the one where there’s a messy flat, with rubbish strewn all over the place, and when you look closely, you can see a face between all the tissues and pizza boxes?” he asked.