dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  There, on her desk, was her moving-in gift: a top-of-the-line computer that had made her feel like swooning the first time she’d seen it.

  She switched it on and booted into Tails from a flash drive, clicked YES to use its Persistence volume and opened up the TOR browser. It was a basic anonymity approach to computing. Tails was an open source Linux flavor that ran from the flash drive and left no trace on the computer’s hard drive. Any data was saved back to the flash drive, hence the name: Persistence volume. The TOR browser was modified, but only slightly, and allowed one of the safest secure browsing experiences.

  With the machine fired up, she settled in to hack victorious.

  Their network was intricately protected, with layers of encryption that seemed unsurmountable, but she opened up a couple of bits of software and started studying the answers the server was throwing back to the questions she was posing. It took an hour or so of trial and error and blunt force attacking before she noticed anything even resembling a pattern. She looked back over the entire log of her actions to see if she was correct.

  It seemed she was.

  Each layer of victorious’s encryption protection contained the key to the next layer, except in anagram or palindrome form. All Ani needed to do was reply to each security layer with the same key, just with the alphanumeric code either mixed up, or reading back to front. Of course, that still made a heck of a lot of possible keys, but knowing the characters it contained meant her computer generated and tested them a lot faster than random guesses. She didn’t know whether to be embarrassed for the person who thought that was a good security feature, or to be scared she was walking into a trap.

  Still, she was hidden well enough to risk it, so she pressed on into the network. Unfortunately, after hours of work, she ended up looking at a protected file called GAIA, which was impossible to open through any method she threw at it.

  All she had to show for her efforts was that she’d revealed the file extension of the GAIA file.

  GAIA.meme.

  She couldn’t view it or download it. She could only see it there sitting on the server.

  She gave up.

  But it did remind her of something.

  She opened her browser and pulled up the dot2me site, scrolling down the front page until she found the archive for victorious memes. She opened the link and put the images in date order, newest to oldest.

  Presumably, at least some of those displayed were products of the victorious “meme factory,” but if she’d been expecting anything that was going to crack the investigation wide open, she was sorely disappointed. Just a bunch of stupid captions in Impact font overlaying equally stupid images.

  A picture of an armed uprising, caption: WHEN I WUZ A KID AN ARAB SPRING WUZ DONE IN AN GYMNASIAM.

  A picture of a bee on a flower: NECTAR? AGAIN? THIS SUXX.

  A waterfall, complete with lens flare spectra: NOW DAT’S WHAT I CALL STREEMING.

  Just utter nonsense. Not even sort of funny. Or, at all. If this was what victorious was creating, then it really was wasting people’s time.

  Deliberately.

  She was about to close the window and turn in for the night when she remembered something her new friend, Brian, had said about how there might be hidden messages within the images, so she dragged a half dozen onto her desktop and opened them up in Photoshop. She tried adjusting balances and color codes, but it just made them look worse and threw up nothing, so she closed the programs and then, almost as an afterthought, opened up a bot program and set it to attack GAIA.meme.

  Then she went to bed.

  She’d been asleep for a couple of hours when her phone started ringing. She tried to ignore it, failed, and picked it up from the bedside table.

  The caller ID said: Touchshriek.

  She pressed ACCEPT.

  “Ani?” Brian’s voice sounded unsure, maybe about the lateness of the call, maybe about the reason he was calling.

  “Brian? What’s up?”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “Yeah. No. A little.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  There were a few moments of silence before Brian spoke again. “Meeting up with you, finding an ally, it kind of made me braver,” he said. “So I thought I’d try to break into the victorious network.”

  Ani laughed.

  “Me, too,” she confessed.

  “Great minds think alike. Anyway, I got to a single file …”

  “GAIA.meme?”

  “Color me impressed. So, you opened the file?”

  Ani sat up in bed.

  “You got it open?”

  “Yeah, I just clicked on it.”

  “I tried that. Nothing.”

  “That’s weird. Anyway, I got a bunch of random data, but none of it makes any sense.”

  “That is weird. You want to send a link, and share it with me?”

  “I would, but …”

  “But?”

  “It deleted itself.”

  “You get any screen grabs?”

  “Nah, it all happened too fast. By the time I worked out what it was doing …”

  “… it was already done.” Ani finished. “It hasn’t called home, has it?”

  “What do you think I am, RedQueen Ani, a newb? It’s not that … I don’t even know how to explain this.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s doing something. To my computer. I think it’s changing my browser history. Bookmarking sites I’ve never visited. Can … can you come over?”

  “Sure.”

  “And bring a laptop. I need to check a few things.”

  “Tell me where, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Brian gave her his address and she told him to sit tight.

  “I will. Oh, and Ani?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful.”

  She took a cab from Islington to Globe Town, Bethnal Green, and it dropped her right outside Brian’s flat. She got a receipt from the cabbie who made far more of a performance of it than was necessary, but she needed the receipt to put in for a reimbursement from YETI.

  She rang the buzzer for Flat 4, and Brian buzzed her in.

  At one point, the rooms in this house must have been quite generous, but a landlord had seen the potential for easy money and had divided them up to maximize his rent revenue. Brian’s flat was tiny, little more than a studio, really, and it was obvious it wasn’t built for company. What with the bed and the desk, it must feel crowded with just one person in it; two of them in the space just made it awkwardly intimate.

  Brian seemed relieved to see her, though, and she sacrificed personal space for practicality, opening up her laptop next to Brian’s computer. There was only one chair in the place, and Brian offered it to her, but she shook her head.

  “Show me what’s got you worried,” she said.

  Brian sat down and started by opening his Chrome browser, Instagram, his Twitter feed, and his Facebook timeline.

  “First,” he said, drawing her attention to Chrome, “these bookmarks.” He pointed to a row of tagged sites at the top of the browser. “They’re not mine. They just appeared.”

  He clicked the bookmarks, and they all opened onto empty pages.

  Ani squinted at the addresses, and plugged them into her own browser. Same result. Blank. They looked like holding pages. She ran the domain names through WhoIs and saw that they had all been purchased, but there was no information about who had done the purchasing.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say that victorious bought the domains, but haven’t gotten around to putting anything on them yet,” she said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Brian said, turning to his Twitter feed.

  He showed her his post history.

  There were three blank tweets, and they’d all been made in the last hour.

  “I didn’t send them,” Brian said. “My computer did. And it’s the same on Facebook.”

>   “You have Facebook?” Ani said, arching an eyebrow. “How about MySpace?”

  “It’s just for family and friends,” Brian said, going red. “I only opened it because the meme file seemed to crashing through all my social media …”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.” Ani said, studying the blank posts on his timeline.

  “Strange,” she said. “And this happened after opening the meme file?”

  “I think so. It all happened so fast.”

  “What was in the meme file?”

  “Random junk. It was gone so quickly there was hardly time to take any of it in.”

  “Try to remember,” Ani coaxed.

  Brian rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. Ani had no idea if that particular combination actually aided memory-retrieval or if it just showed people watching that you were trying.

  “There was a kind of compressed archive of website pages,” he said after a moment. “Thousands of them: national, international, web news feeds. But once I opened it, they flashed by so quickly there was no way I could read any them. And there was a ton of social networking data, and huge number of photographs and video files.”

  “I don’t understand any of this. Why would victorious be hiding a bunch of news pages behind so much security? You don’t think this was a trap, do you?”

  “It won’t lead back to me,” Brian said, but his voice wasn’t quite as confident as his words.

  “You don’t sound one hundred percent certain.”

  “I’m not. I’ve never seen a file do what that one did. I’ve no idea if my security is good enough.”

  “Let me have a look.”

  She took a flash drive out of her pocket, inserted into one of Brian’s USB ports, and opened up LogJump.

  “What’s that?” Brian asked.

  “Just a little shortcut I made a few years back,” Ani explained. “I had to scroll through a log file earlier and it took forever. Then I remembered this. After I needed it, of course.” She typed a few commands into LogJump’s window, then winked at him. “Still, my loss is your gain.”

  It took seconds to do its work, showing only the log parameters she wanted to see, screening out everything else. As a result, it didn’t take long to study the information.

  “You’re okay,” she said. “It didn’t even try to squeal on you.”

  “That’s a relief. I wouldn’t want my cover blown.”

  “Oh, so now you’re undercover, are you?”

  “We are,” Brian said.

  “Oh, yeah. I just haven’t received my decoder ring yet. So you really can’t remember anything you saw in the .meme file?”

  “Like I said, it just scrolled by so quickly.”

  “But you saw it all. I’ve been working on improving my memory recently, and it’s surprising how much information goes in without us realizing it.”

  Brian looked at her, slightly disbelievingly.

  “You’re saying I might be able to remember what I saw?” The disbelief had leached its way into his voice, too. “It all went by really fast.”

  “Maybe.” Ani said. “I think we’ll need a bit of help.”

  Before Brian could object, she took out her phone and dialed Abernathy.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HORROR MOVIE LOGIC

  Joe’s first thought was: I’ve lost my mind.

  His second was: I’m dreaming.

  Closely followed by: RUN!

  He was hemmed in on all sides, but the factory staff were moving slowly, so there were still a few gaps to slip through.

  But only if he moved now.

  He chose the closest gap and headed through it, bouncing off a workbench and bumping his hip. A spark of pain hit him and he used his chip to increase the level of endocannabinoids in his amygdala or, in non-Shuttleworthspeak, by suppressing the pain by chemical trickery in a part of his brain. Whichever way he phrased it, the relief was immediate and, while he was using his chip, he thought he may as well increase his escape abilities, too. He accessed the parkour routines programmed into the hardware and felt his body respond.

  He hurdled onto a desk and slid down its length, hitting the floor on the other side and turning about ninety degrees so he was facing back toward the loading bay. Three workers lurched toward him, arms open but clutching at the air where he would have been if he hadn’t slid under them and away.

  Joe had always thought zombies in movies were a lot less trouble than people seemed to make them. They were slow, stupid, shambling creatures, and all you had to do to get away from them was walk a little faster. Sure, they could be dangerous in large numbers, but that meant you just needed to avoid crowds of them.

  But zombies were exactly what he was thinking of now, because that was how the factory workers were behaving. Not the biting-at-flesh, groaning type of zombie, but the slave-type zombies of Haitian folklore—workers drugged into unquestioning service.

  Slow, yes, but it seemed that what they lacked in speed they made up for in persistence. Ducking away from them didn’t appear to enrage or frustrate them; it just made them pursue him.

  Calmly.

  He ducked and vaulted and slid past the closest workers, still heading for the rear of the building, but it was almost as if the workers weren’t just randomly chasing him. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have said that they were playing with him, blocking him from reaching his goal, delaying him.

  Delaying him?

  There was a table in his way, so he vaulted onto it, but instead of sliding across its surface, he flipped onto his feet and stood up. From a higher vantage point it was easy to see what he had missed on the ground. The workers engaging him—his immediate threat—were decoys. Time wasters. It was out beyond them that another far more insidious and dangerous threat was appearing.

  Organization.

  The rest of the workforce were arranging themselves into two concentric circles, with Joe and the few spare workers at their center. They had done it wordlessly, indeed soundlessly, and they had done it precisely. There were, in effect, two walls of people to be crossed if he was to reach his goal. But looking around, he could see that there was little chance of making it through that way without shifting from parkour to physical violence.

  There was, however, another non-violent option. It wouldn’t take him back the way he knew led outside, but it would get him away from the factory floor, and maybe get him a look around some more revealing areas of the factory.

  Beyond and above the warehouse shelves was a walkway that seemed to lead along the wall, past a couple of doors. Joe couldn’t see the stairs that led up there, but he knew it for what it was.

  Another floor.

  Just why there was a walkway up there he didn’t know. Maybe management liked to stand there and look down on their minions. It didn’t matter. Its existence was enough.

  Which meant parkour it was.

  He mapped the route in his head, knowing that it would look different when he hit the ground, and he was desperate not to waste time by taking even the slightest detour. This way, his chip could process the route, and all he needed to do was make sure that his body achieved the moves that the chip dictated.

  A pair of hands reached for him and he launched himself forward.

  He took three big strides when he hit the floor, dodged left, and then started his run up. His route took him awfully close to the inner ring of the human walls, but just as they moved to intercept him, he leapt up and planted one foot on a low shelf on the warehouse stack. Using his weight and momentum to push off with his right foot, and brought his left down on the shelf above it. He fought for balance and purchase with his hands, then repeated the process, leaving the clutching arms of his pursuers behind him as he scaled the shelving unit.

  There was a moment when he stepped onto the top of the shelving that he thought he might have made a miscalculation. The walkway, surrounded with yellow safety bars and mesh, looked just a little bit farther away than it had from the ground. But the
re was no other option, really. Joe took a breath, steeled himself, then ran across the top of the shelves. The path was only a foot-and-a-half wide. On the ground, it would have been a simple action, but fifteen feet off the ground, he started to become aware of how precarious this plan was. Still, overthinking it was the surest way to have him plunging to the floor, so he just did it, reached the end of the shelving and leapt the gap to the walkway, arms outstretched to grab ahold of the railing.

  He made it, but only just, and his hands weren’t best-placed to get a decent grip. One missed entirely, but the other just managed to find a hold, and he tightened his grip while working his other hand into the mesh. His fingers hurt, but he held on, feet scrabbling for purchase. They found the lip of the walkway and he planted them hard, stiffening his entire body to keep him in place. He was hanging well over the heads of the workers whose faces were upturned, staring, unblinkingly at him.

  Joe reached up, grabbed the top rail, and pulled himself up and over the walkway safety guard, onto the walkway itself. He looked back down at the factory floor, but the people there seemed uncertain how to respond to this latest development. And that was putting it mildly. They seemed frozen, staring straight at him, two hundred or so faces upturned and utterly blank.

  The phrase that occurred to Joe was, awaiting instructions.

  And that stopped him in his tracks.

  No one here had spoken, called out, or made a noise of any kind. They looked similar. They worked as a group, silently strategizing. They had organized themselves into rings to keep him enclosed, but as soon as he was out of their reach they froze. As if they had no idea of how to continue their pursuit.

  It gave him a bad feeling.

  A really bad one.

  They were behaving like robots whose programming had just failed. Or like ants, controlled by the directives of a queen who was busy figuring out their next move. Whatever this was—whatever was going on here in this Romanian factory—it was far more serious, and far, far stranger than he or Abernathy had considered.

  He had come here to find out how Dorian’s top secret chips had disappeared from the factory’s shelves, but to Joe, it looked like it wasn’t just the chips that had been stolen.