Sleep State Interrupt

by Ted Weber

  Waylee had forgotten all about the band. It seemed so irrelevant now. “Maybe there’s ways you could help. We don’t all have to enter the campus.”

  Across the table, Charles nodded. “Yeah, she’s good crew, you’ll see.”

  Kiyoko smiled. She plopped down at the small table across from Shakti. “We’ve got the moving truck, but we’ll need at least one other vehicle…”

  At the computer-covered table, Pel looked at Charles, then Waylee. “Let’s get back to our engineer friend. Hubert Stebbens. I’m 99% sure he’s our guy.”

  “Can we trust him?” Waylee asked.

  Charles jumped in. “I trust him. He helped me before.”

  Pel’s eyes narrowed. “That was three million dollars ago.”

  “But we don’t have any reason not to trust him, do we?” Waylee said. It was fine to be cautious, but if no one saw her video, what was the point of all they went through?

  “You saw his personnel file,” Pel said. “Doesn’t work well with others.”

  “I’m sure my supervisor at the paper wrote similar things,” she said. “Shall we move forward with the plan, but move carefully?”

  His face tightened. “We should pay him a visit.”

  Waylee heard chopping noises coming from the kitchenette behind her. She decided to change the subject. “As far as getting in, can we masquerade as employees?”

  “And then what? Even if we figure out what equipment to use and how to use it, what do we do about all the real employees who’ll stick their nose in our business?”

  “Gas the building?” Charles said. “Use knockout gas?”

  Pel scoffed. “That only works in comic books.”

  “Pel’s right,” Waylee said. “Sleeping gas isn’t instantaneous. They’d call for help and reroute the broadcast.”

  Charles hung his head.

  “It was worth considering.” She looked at Pel. “Can you show me the broadcast diagram again?”

  “Sure.” Pel brought up a simplified version on his screen.

  The signal from the stadium in Atlanta traveled to the central control studio in Virginia by optic cable. The broadcast director inserted commercials and other content, and the final feed went to the servers and packet switches in the data center, housed in the building’s basement. From there, it proceeded to the uplink station and satellite dishes and also to a second data center on campus, where it was routed to the Comnet.

  She pointed a finger. “What are those dashed lines?”

  “Verifications that the signal’s propagating without errors,” Pel said. “If anything goes wrong, they know it immediately in control.”

  “Could we fake the verifications?”

  Pel glanced at Charles, who looked back at Waylee.

  “Everything passes through the first data center,” she said. Her skin tingled. “That’s the weak link. I don’t think Disgruntled Hubert gave us very good advice. We don’t have to infiltrate four or five buildings, only one.”

  Pel nodded. “So we have to reprogram the data servers to pretend the Super Bowl transmission is going out okay, but actually send out our own video.”

  “Yes!”

  “Eventually an affiliate or someone will call in and ask what’s going on, but if the control monitors show the game going out as normal, they won’t think it’s a problem on their end. The affiliates could show them our video broadcast, though, and say that’s what’s coming from the studio.”

  Waylee smelled cabbage boiling. Yuck. She squeezed Pel’s arm. “How long do you think it’ll take MediaCorp to figure all that out and stop our transmission?”

  He shrugged.

  Staring at his computer screen across the table, Charles made a “hah!” sound and swiped fingers along his touch pad.

  “What?” Waylee asked.

  He looked up. “One of my schemes to shut down kiddie cops in Better-World was to grief ’em with Word of God attacks.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t want people calling the control room, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Same principle. Bandwidth overload. We’ll clog their lines—the whole campus—with a DDoS attack.”

  “DDoS?”

  Pel glanced over. “Distributed denial of service. We’d use botnets - networks of infected computers with spoofed IDs - to make so many calls to the MediaCorp lines that no one could get through.”

  Charles pointed at him. “Perfect project for the Collective. We don’t have to say what we’re up to, just that it’s a Super Bowl prank. We’ll attack all their lines and ports, clog everything up.”

  Waylee slapped the table. “I love you, Charles!”

  He flinched away.

  “How long can you—the Collective I mean—keep anyone from getting through?”

  He squinted. “Hmm, I know the Collective does this all the time against gov’ments or companies they got a thing ’gainst. Usually it holds several hours or such.”

  Pel raised an eyebrow.

  Charles nodded. “But MediaCorp, they own the Comnet. Ten minutes probably the best we can do.”

  “I’ll take ten minutes,” Waylee said.

  Pel drummed fingers against the plastic tabletop. “All that aside, what about MediaCorp security? We can’t just fiddle with their computers without being noticed.”

  “I know just the person who can help with that,” she said.

  35

  January 23

  M’patanishi

  M-pat had never been to southern Maryland before. Next to him in the “requisitioned” cargo van, though, Dingo spoke directions from his new comlink. “Keep following Maryland 5 for three more miles, then turn left onto Cedarville Road.”

  Trees and subdivision turnoffs flew by in the dark. Damn Waylee. Sister could talk him into anything. But wait ‘til he told Latisha about their new house.

  Waylee had contacted him two days ago via Francis. They’d chatted on one of those anonymous video connections normally used by porn addicts. She played the video she wanted to broadcast, then clips showing President Rand and the MediaCorp CEO bragging about turning the world into a 21st century slave plantation.

  He thought about Latisha and Baraka. What kind of future did his son have? As Waylee put it, the world was sliding to hell with a banana peel on its ass. You could see that shit everywhere you looked, especially in B’more.

  Still, life in prison was life in prison. That’s when Waylee offered up the band house in return. Six bedrooms, big yard, all kinds of electronics and security. “We’ll work out the details when you come,” she said.

  So he had agreed, with conditions. And Waylee promised they would follow his advice when he arrived.

  Following Dingo’s directions, M-pat turned at a faded wooden sign marked “Cedarville State Forest.” He drove past dense trees until they reached a campsite with a repainted school bus, lights on behind closed blinds. An old white man with a long white beard stood out front.

  M-pat parked on the loop road and got out. Dingo hopped out the passenger door.

  The old man held out a hand. “Peter. You must be Mahpotonashee.”

  “M’patanishi.” He shook Peter’s hand - the vanilla handshake that county types preferred. “Most folks just say M-pat.” He waved Dingo over. “This here’s Dingo.”

  “What Waylee’s planning is way too bad ass for me to miss out on,” he said. “I can use my Krav Maga.” He threw a couple of fast punches to the air.

  Peter flinched.

  Waylee, Shakti, and Kiyoko sprinted toward them from the back of the campsite. Pel and Charles strolled behind them.

  Shakti passed the others and leapt into Dingo’s arms. “M-pat said he was bringing someone,” she said. “But he didn’t say it would be you.”

  “Missed you, babe.” They locked mouths.

  Waylee wrapped her arms around M-pat and squeezed. Kiyoko followed.

  Pel smacked fists with him. “I feel a lot more
confident now you’re here.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Be assured we do this, we do it right.”

  Waylee’s smile disappeared. “We can’t kill anyone, though. Otherwise, that’ll be the whole story.”

  “Not to mention the death penalty,” Pel said.

  M-pat nodded, then pointed a thumb toward the van. “Got a whole lot o’ shit in there. We owe Paulo and a bunch of other people. But there’s still more we gotta get.”

  Pel stared at the van. “You took the GPS out, right?”

  Dumb ass question. “What do you think?”

  “What’d you tell your wife?” Kiyoko said, her exotic eyes warming his skin.

  “That I was going camping with some fine ass bitches.”

  Dingo pulled his tongue out of Shakti’s mouth. “He wishes he could strut like that.”

  “’Kay, said I gotta go to DC to teach a Krav Maga course. Said it’ll pay well.”

  Waylee’s eyes shone. “We succeed, payoff’ll be incredible.” Heads turned her way. “Not in dollar terms, maybe. But we’ll set the elites’ whole narrative on fire, set history on a new course.”

  “Shit, in dollar terms too,” M-pat said. “Never thought I’d have a real house.”

  Waylee looked at Pel. “Someone’s gotta live there, or it’ll just turn into a drug squat. Obviously we can’t move back.”

  Pel nodded. “Like I said, though, my parents will want a profit.”

  M-pat felt played. “How the fuck am I gonna do that?”

  Waylee moved her hands in circles. “Easy. It was a fixer-upper when they bought it.”

  “Sell your townhouse and rent rooms,” Pel said. “You can rent out the attic and basement and pay your whole mortgage that way.”

  It would mean less space, but still a lot more than the row house. And with no mortgage, they could support more kids.

  Kiyoko’s mouth opened. “How come no one told me about this? My friends are staying there.”

  Pel turned. “Who’s staying there?”

  “They can stay if they pay,” M-pat said. “As long as Latisha’s okay with them.”

  Waylee motioned everyone inside the school bus. “Let’s talk inside.”

  True, they shouldn’t be talking out in the open. And this abandoned campground, all them leafless trees in the dead of night, gave M-pat the creeps. He patted the Glock in its shoulder holster, hoping it could take out any machete-wielding maniac with a hockey mask out there.

  36

  January 24

  Pelopidas

  In the stuffy, cluttered bunk room, Pel packed up Big Red and some of his other gear, arranging it in his big duffel bag and padding it with dirty clothes. He heard Waylee near the front of the bus, thanking Peter for all his help.

  M-pat had insisted they change locations, saying they’d stayed too long in one place and were too far from the MediaCorp campus. As soon as it got dark again, they would drive his van and Kiyoko’s moving truck across the Potomac into Virginia.

  Assuming they didn’t get caught, M-pat would return home after the Super Bowl, but Pel might be leaving Maryland forever. Sure, Baltimore was falling apart, but it had been his family’s home for three generations.

  On the other hand, it was like going to war for a just cause. Like fighting fascists in World War II or the Spanish Civil War. And who knows, maybe they could settle in Greece and his family could visit. One thing for sure, he wouldn’t miss being shut in this smelly camper with all the blinds drawn.

  When he finished packing, Pel settled at the forward table with the computer Waylee had been using. As usual, Charles was hard at work on the other one.

  “We have to wipe the farm’s computers before we leave,” Pel said.

  Charles looked up. “We should just buy ’em new ones.”

  “Yeah, that would be better, but we don’t have any money yet.” Pel had to see how their Collectivista comrades had fared with the comlinks.

  * * *

  Charles

  Charles had never organized a denial of service attack before. But it wasn’t as challenging as owning BetterWorld admins or hacking comlinks. Mostly it was a lot of looking up data ports and phone lines, setting up botnets, and coordinating a big Collective crew.

  Hubert and a Collectivista called Hopper were a big help hacking data glasses. And of course Hubert had his own. Charles forwarded Pel a link to the first video dump.

  Across the table, Pel actually smiled. “Thanks, Charles.”

  Charles returned to his screen. MediaCorp had tremendous bandwidth, and their switches, even the voice lines, had all kinds of traffic defenses. Might need a million computers or more to overwhelm them, and some amplification routines. They should attack the local cell networks too. MediaCorp didn’t use cells, but some of the employees might.

  Pel rose and pumped a fist. “Our Collectivista comrades really came through.” He waved Waylee over. “You’ll like this.”

  Waylee was slim when Charles first met her, but now she needed a belt to keep her jeans up, and it seemed like her breasts had shrunk. No one had been eating much since they left the farm, and before that she was sick. She grinned at Pel like there were no worries in the world, though.

  “We got a lot of good stuff from those comlinks,” Pel said. “Petabytes of files and emails. Enough to keep a journalist busy for decades.”

  “I love you guys!” Waylee kissed the top of Pel’s head, then rubbed Charles’s shoulder.

  “Any money?” Charles asked Pel.

  “Well, you know banks are pretty distrustful these days. They ask all sorts of security questions that have to be researched—”

  Waylee traced circles with her index finger, too impatient for details. “Did they get anything or not?”

  Pel’s smile disappeared. “Low success rate, but we had a lot of comlinks to work with, and recordings to fake the voice verifications, so still enough to be worth the trouble.”

  “How much is our share?” Charles asked.

  “Enough for data glasses and masks, and whatever else we need, and enough to cover M-pat’s expenses and make our engineer happy.”

  Charles leaned toward him. “My gramma’s got all them kids to take care of, and no money. Gov’ment keeps cutting back assistance.”

  Pel sighed. “I see what you’re saying. We could move something from Hubert’s cut. Nowhere else to take from. Waylee and I don’t get anything out of this.”

  “Sorry, I won’t either, y’know. And it might not be a good idea to give Hubert money. He might think it’s FBI entrapment. I know his type, he dogs for the lulz and glory.”

  Pel nodded. “You might be right. I don’t know how we’d get your grandma the money, though. The feds are gonna watch her forever.”

  “I’ll talk to M-pat,” Waylee said. “We’ll figure something out.”

  Charles locked eyes with her. She’s got an answer for everything.

  “Thanks.”

  On reflection, he added, “I appreciate it.”

  Waylee nodded. “We’re all family here.”

  He pointed at Pel. “Yo, we should check out the spy vids.”

  Pel brought up Hubert’s video first, and moved his screen so everyone could see. He smiled at Waylee. “Per your suggestion, Hubert’s been wearing his data glasses in the broadcast studio building, recording video and audio with position and time tags. He only has access to a few areas, though.”

  On the screen, Hubert got out of a car and entered a huge building with no windows.

  “We need him to wear his glasses at the gate,” Waylee said, “or at least put them on the dashboard.”

  Hubert walked down a hallway and got in a big elevator full of dressed up people, mostly white. They got out and entered a giant circular room full of interface units with see-through popup screens. All along the curving wall, video skins played news, sports, sitcoms, all the MediaCorp dreck. Hubert sat at a console and didn’t do much of interest.

  “We gotta check out the other vid.�
�� Charles looked up at Waylee. “I asked Hubert to install spyware on guards’ glasses, but he said no way. So I did it myself, with a few tips from Hubert and Hopper. Pel helped me pick out the target.”

  Pel brought up a picture of Clint Pickens, a white 22-year-old wearing a MediaCorp Security hat. “This guy’s a newbie on campus,” he said, “fresh out of the Marines. Infantry, never advanced past E-3, grew up near the broadcast campus. Dumb as a post as far as I can tell.”

  “I sent Clint a fake software update for his data glasses,” Charles said. “All the guards wear them on patrol. He accepted it.”

  Pel smirked. “Typical musclehead.”

  “And we can see through them now?” Waylee asked.

  “Not real time.” Pel brought up the Clint video. “It uploads the data when he’s at home asleep.”

  In stop-motion frames, the guard crossed a parking lot and entered a low concrete building marked ‘Security.’ “It only takes a still every three seconds when he’s moving and every minute when he’s not,” Pel explained. “Otherwise we’d eat up too much memory.”

  Waylee fixed her eyes on the screen. “Let’s hope he goes inside the broadcast building.”

  Pel fast forwarded through the video. Clint patrolled the entire campus with another guard, sometimes in a police-type car packed with electronics, and sometimes on foot. He didn’t enter any buildings other than security headquarters.

  “It’s a start,” Waylee said. “We can watch their security procedures, and also figure out who patrols the broadcast building and find another target.”

  “A lot of guards to choose from,” Charles said. “Campus operates 24/7.”

  Waylee smirked. “MediaCorp’s bullshit never rests.”

  Pel rubbed fingers through his beard. “So are you ready for the bad news?”

  Her face fell. “What bad news?”

  Pel brought up an email sent by the White House Department of Scheduling and Advance to all attendees of the fundraiser.

  Subject: Important Information: Your Comlink May Be Compromised

  It appears that cybercriminals infiltrated the New Year’s gala at the Smithsonian and gained illegal access to many of the guests’ comlinks. They are using this access to commit further crimes, including theft from bank accounts and credit cards. You may or may not be affected, but we strongly urge you to replace your comlink, immediately change all your passwords, and contact your banks. Any computer that syncs with your comlink might also be infected. A cybersecurity specialist will personally be in touch with you to assess and repair any potential damage.