>'Course.
Jack let out the breath she didn't realized she'd been holding. She wasn't so sure you could know a person from daily reports and shift change banter. He could have just as easily laughed her off as offered to help. She drank a little water and forced her heart to slow down.
>>I'll set up a secure voice line between us. What's your handle?
>aces04
>>aces04?
>I play cards.
>>OK whatever. You'll know me as jackalantrn.
>Cool. Later, dude.
Jack disconnected and on her display saw herself walk over to the main entrance to the museum. There was a wall of archaic telephones with seats in front of them. She sat at one and lifted the receiver. "jackalantrn to aces04, secure," she said into the mouthpiece and almost immediately heard Gilles' voice as if he were in the room with her.
"Hey, J," he said, "what's your plan?"
"I'm going to break in to Buyside's system and find out who or what was connecting to our Eastern system," she said matter of factly.
"Okay," he answered, "I figured that. But I was wondering more specifically how you were going to accomplish that."
"Leave the details to me," Jack said, "but I'll need you to monitor the nets to see if I'm leaving any traces and let me know what their security are up to."
"Can do," Gilles said, "keep me posted and let me know if there's anything else I can do. We can't be letting them catch you, now. I don't want to have to put in the overtime."
Jack laughed and started heading toward Buyside's system. Her three dimensional interface was theoretically good enough to render anything on the nets, but she had never tried anything as complex as a major corporate system. Her program automatically looked up architectural plans for Buyside's buildings and rendered them as the embodiment of the system. It would never be a perfect representation - extra rooms would have to be created or corridors filled in, but it beat WIMP or even a command line by a country mile.
The rendering engine was pretty fast, and as Jack felt herself walking toward the horizon, she saw the building grow in front of her. There were guards patrolling the perimeter, representations of the firewall that protected the system. "There should be a break around the 357th node," Gilles said.
"How do you know?" Jack asked, staying out of the guards' field of vision.
"You're not the only one with mad skills, you know," he said, chuckling. "Most of us security old timers got our start hacking." Jack had forgotten that Gilles was significantly older than she was, a fact easy to forget in this era of wrinkle resistant skin and de rigeur body modification.
"Sorry, man," she said, "I'll head for the three five seven." She snuck around the side of the building, and was beginning to wonder if Gilles was as competent as he claimed to be when she saw it. A tiny area unpatrolled by guards, where if she approached it just right, they wouldn't be able to see her for the shrubbery and shadows. She crawled over to the break, and when she got to the building she found a small grating in the side of the wall.
"Crap," she said, "I need tools. I'll have to go back. Hang on."
"No, don't," Gilles said, "what do you need?" Jack rattled off a list of well known cracker scripts and a few utilities that just happened to be very useful. In a couple of seconds, Jack felt the unmistakable heaviness of a download. "That should do," Gilles said, "I just dumped my toolbox on you."
Jack looked down, and saw a small brown sack materialize at her feet. She opened it and smiled at the contents - programs rendered as physical tools. The sack included a few lengths of pipe, some bits of wire, boltcutters, putty, dog biscuits, wire cutters, one of those reinforced paper biohazard suits, a couple of knives and even a handgun. Jack wondered what types of shenanigans Gilles got up to with this toolbox.
She pulled out the wire cutters and got to work on the grate. The blades were sharp and well oiled and she was through in a few seconds. She stuffed the cutters back in the bag which she strapped to her belt. "I'm in," she said as she crawled into the duct, pulling the remains of the grate behind her to cover her tracks.
"All quiet on the Eastern front," Gilles said, softly. Jack grunted her understanding and continued crawling into the building. She was using dual imaging, a technique that most people had become accustomed to, and people in her line of work found to be like a second nature. Technically, one image was projected on one eye while simultaneously a second completely different image was projected on the other. After some practice, a person could get pretty good at watching two different things at the same time, with almost one hundred percent attention on both. Jack was seeing the graphical representation of herself cracking Buyside's system while simultaneously paging through a spec document she'd unearthed some time ago detailing the creation of a standard corporate system.
She knew that this system would be slightly different, and could theoretically even have been designed from scratch, but she was banking on the general lack of innovation in the corporate world preventing any radical modifications on the usual design. If she were lucky, and the original Buyside designers were typical, there should be a grating to her left in about a metre, which should open into a cache that was on the other side of the authentication barrier.
It looked like the Buyside designers were true to form as she reached the grating. She whispered, "Here goes nothing," and clipped away with the wire cutters. The grating fell to a clang a story below her. Jack held her breath, then whispered to Gilles, "Anything on the radar?"
"Nope," he said, "it's like there's nothing there."
"Good," she said. "I think I'll be okay." She dropped into the cache, and found herself in a cavernous warehouse space, filled with books in shelves, filing cabinets stuffed with documents, old monitors hanging on the walls showing scrolling logs, and boxes and boxes of who knows what. Small boxes and documents continually fell out of a small hole in the ceiling into a pile that was sorted and filed by small drones. They paid no attention to Jack.
She found the door and listened for footsteps from the other side. She knew that the imaging construct didn't represent activity audibly unless there were also visuals, but natural habits are hard to break. She put on the light gloves from Gilles' toolbox and pushed the door open. The hallway was empty and she stepped into it, almost expecting klaxons to go off and emergency lights to illuminate the hall with pointers to her location. But the door merely swished shut behind her and the hallway remained dark.
According to her spec document, the hallway she was in was an admin area that branched into the area of the system from which the strange login had originated. It was a low security area, which was helpful for Jack, but was curious. Jack followed the spec as if it were a map, turning right and left according to its directions.
Things were going smoothly, maybe a little too smoothly, she thought. All of a sudden she saw something approach her from around the next corner. It wasn't a person, which made sense. There would be no reason for an admin to the poking around in here. It looked sort of like an android and sort of like a drone. It was about half Jack's height and one and half times her width, with arms and legs like a humanoid machine but it nowhere near as elegant as an android. But more importantly, it was followed by several others just like it.
"Gilles," she whispered urgently.
"Yeah, I see it," he answered, "don't worry. It's just the cron jobs running. They won't notice you."
Jack knew intellectually that this was true, but she still held her breath as the first robot went past her. It didn't even slow down, but made a bee line for one of the corridors. Its compatriots followed suit, heading in their own preprogrammed directions. When the last one had passed, Jack let out her breath and continued following her route. After a few minutes more of twists and turns, she found herself at a door which read Client Service Delivery System. "That's odd," Jack said.
"What?" asked Gilles.
"It looks like the login came from the Client Service Delivery System," she answered, "that sounds like it should
be an input only area."
"Hmm… " Gilles said, "I'll see if I can track anything down about it. I'll get back to you." Jack double checked her spec and her notes on the logs from the Bellis Eastern system. This was the place all right. Jack walked up to the door, drew her breath, and pushed it open.
On the other side was a circular room with what looked like racks and racks of disk. There was clearly a lot of data being stored here, but the buckets of data were hardly the most interesting part of the room. It was all the doors. There were doors all the way around the wall, door after door after door. As Jack thought about it, it made sense. Client systems usually had to accommodate a large number of connections simultaneously, so this room needed a lot of entrances to let the clients in.
Fair enough, she thought, and started to look around. At first everything seemed normal, but then she noticed a few things out of place, items that shouldn't be there. There were a few items on the floor that looked suspiciously like the tools she herself was carrying. There was a part of what may have been a glass cutter over by one of the racks. Jack picked it up carefully, wrapped it in a tissue and slipped it into her bag. Looking further, she found a rectangle of wood, which she popped into her bag as well. She thought she had found everything when she spotted what appeared to be a piece of paper stuck under one of the doors on the other side of the room. She pulled it out and saw that it was a map, similar to the spec document that she herself was using.
The partial map gave Jack an idea. "Gilles," she said.
"I'm here," came the reply.
"Can you get a hold of an accurate spec of the BS CDS?"
"Should be able to," he answered, "those things are usually semi-public. Just sit tight and I'll get it for you." Jack looked around the room. Who are you, she wondered. How did you get here, and what did you want? "Got it," Gilles said, "it should be coming down now." Jack's head felt a little heavier then became normal again. She called up Gilles' download and pulled a blueprint of the room she was in out of her bag. Unlike the spec she had been using, which showed this area as simply a room, Gilles' map was accurate down the the number of disks on each rack.
Jack held the map up before her eyes, then removed it from her field of vision, and compared the two images. Identical. She turned around slowly, comparing what she saw. Same, same, same, different, same… wait. Something was different, but what was it? The doors. The doors were wrong somehow, but how. There were doors all the way around the room and it was the same in the map.
Jack looked down then up, then it dawned on her. Too many doors. There were too many doors in the room. She counted the doors and the map, then counted the doors in the room, and that confirmed it. There was an extra door in here. She compared the map and the room again, this time specifically looking at the doors, and she found it. The extra door. "Gilles," she said.
"I'm here," he answered, "what's up?"
"Things might get weird in a second."
"What are you doing," he asked, sounding concerned. Jack didn't answer, but just opened the extra door. She stepped across the threshold, and the moment when she knew there was nothing beneath her feet and that she was going to fall seemed to last forever. There was nothing on the other side.
"Oh, shit."
Chapter 6
"Well, that was fucking unnerving," Jack said, sitting at her table in her apartment, nursing a growing headache and a slight case of nausea.
"What happened," Gilles asked, "are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Jack replied, having a sip of water, "I just felt what it was like to be, I don't know, deleted, I guess. Weird. Did anything show up at your end?"
"Not really," he said, "I caught a strange blip on the log but it didn't get flagged or anything so you're probably okay."
"Cool," Jack said, rolling her neck and working out the kinks of being essentially away from her body for a couple of hours.
"Did you find anything," Gilles asked.
"Yeah," Jack said, "there were some artifacts left behind from what look like cracking tools, and then there's the extra door."
"Door?" Gilles asked, "what do you mean, door?" Jack hadn't told him about her representational interface system and now didn't seem to be the time to explain it.
"Node, I mean," she said, "there were too many connection nodes. Well, just the one too many. I tried to access the extra one and got booted off the system. That's how I ended up back here."
"That explains what I saw," Gilles said. "So what's the plan now?"
"I'm going to sift through the stuff I found and see what comes up," Jack said, "You don't have to stay on with me; go home or whatever."
There was a slight pause. "I am home," Gilles said, "the shift ended almost an hour ago."
"Oh, crap, I'm sorry," Jack said, "I didn't mean to pull you into this on your own time."
"It's okay," Gilles said, "it was fun. Let me know if you need any help with the stuff you found. Otherwise, I'll catch you next week."
"Thanks, Gilles," Jack said, "I should be okay. Have a good weekend."
"You, too," he answered, "Later, dude." He disconnected and Jack went offline. She was sweating and her mouth tasted like something died in it. She drank some water and stripped off her soaked clothes, stuffing them in the autoclave. She went into the bathroom, closed the door and turned the shower on. She stood under the misting water for longer than the suggested maximum, making a mental note to skip a shower tomorrow so she wouldn't reach her water quota before the end of the month.
When she finally felt refreshed, she dried off and stepped back into her room. She threw on some fresh clothes and got a piece of toast. She sat at her table, still offline, and thought. There were crackers in that system and they were almost surely the ones connecting to the Bellis system. But why?
She opened up the logs from the Bellis system, and looked at the outgoing connections. There it was - a connection to another system, this one somewhere in Benelux. Jack couldn't get a fix on what system it was exactly; it didn't look corporate, which was even stranger. But it certainly indicated that Bellis wasn't the final target.
She finished her toast, drank some more water and got another carafe of coffee going. When it was ready, she poured a cup and reconnected. She opened up Gilles' tool bag and picked out the items she had found on the scene in Buyside's Client Delivery System. She looked at the scrap of map, and recognized it as a part of the same spec that Gilles had found for her. She made a note to ask him where he got it. She carefully put it aside, and pulled out the other items.
Now, these were more interesting. There was a two by four beam, an odd representation, really, but Jack got it in one - jam it in the door, and it's a tool to keep the connection open. She ran it through her command line editor and confirmed that it was a script to stop a connection from closing. She then turned her attention to the fragment of a blade.
She guessed it was a kind of glass cutter, but that was mainly from context. She had seen something similar in a first aid kit once, used to cut off clothes, presumably. She ran it through the command line and opened it up. It was a fragment of code, and reading it through she could guess that it was a kind of high-end break and enter tool. She searched the nets for the snippet, but got back no results. Not surprising, since it was obviously a serious cracker's piece of code, maybe even written just for this job.
But why break into a Client Delivery System, when the content in there is available for a fee in a second and for free with a little digging on the nets? And why log in to the Bellis system once inside? As she was pondering this, Jack was distracted by the Escher print's flashing. She answered, expecting Gilles, and instead saw:
Incoming realtime secure message from ADRIAN
>Hey, J.
>>A., hi, how's it going?
>Not bad. How are the micros?
Jack had completely forgotten about her new toys in the last day's excitement. She started to talk about her recent activities, but at the last minute stopped herself.
>Damn, I'm disappointed. I was hoping for some juicy amateur porn from the break room.
>>Eww. Don't even say that. The horrible images. I'm not going to be able to use that place for a week now.
>(laughter) Well, just don't forget to fill in your old buddy when you do test drive those things, okay.
>>No problem, pal. You'll be the first.
>Cool. Later.
>>Later.
Jack disconnected. She felt a little guilty about keeping her excitement from Adrian, but she knew that she may have just stumbled upon something no one had seen for years, not since the days before the everywherenet. Someone had used the BS CDS as a screen, a diversion. They had logged in to the Buyside system as a way of covering their tracks. Jack figured that the connection to the Bellis system was the same thing - the crackers were just making a long trail of logins to make it harder to trace back to their real origin. It was weird, buy until she knew more she wanted to keep it all for herself.
Jack was certain she had heard of this before somewhere, so quickly searched the nets. Sure enough, back in the days before the everywherenet, when IP addresses were assigned to machines not places, you had this kind of thing all the time. But now that the wireless net was, well, everywhere, you didn't need to hide your tracks. All you had to do was physically move. Though, of course, your own personal log would show where you had been, both physically and on the nets, so the point was really moot.
So, if you couldn't ever really hide, what would be the point of this exercise? Jack rubbed her face, got up and tried to pace across her tiny floor. Every time she figured something out, a new problem would crop up. It was maddening. And more interesting than anything she had done in years.
She needed to take a break, though. She was just going around and around in circles coming up with more questions than answers, so she had to stop. She called up her news aggregator and started idly paging through the various things around the world that people had flagged as interesting.
Beautiful Red Page 4