The Myth of the Maker

by Bruce R Cordell

  Some days, the idea of renting a desk at one of those trendy shared office co-locations seemed like the way to go. Today especially; big-sunglasses guy was giving her the creeps.

  No. She was just off-balance. Most of her clients were more comfortable meeting in a crowded cafe. Maybe because it provided anonymity, or because it made them less conscious that they were seeking the services of a private investigator in the first place. Meeting over coffee just seemed so normal.

  More than anything, she craved normal after what had happened.

  Kate rubbed her forehead. Trying to think of something other than two nights ago at BDR wasn’t working. Why should it, when the world had shown her it was a far stranger place than she’d ever suspected? She’d found herself reeling like a drunk a few times, but sans the alcohol. Reality had crumbled before her. She kept seeing that man appearing a layer at a time, his desperate eyes, and finally, the pool he’d become.

  Her phone chimed with the Los Lobos ringtone she’d selected for Raul. She snatched it, relieved at the interruption.

  “Hello?” she said into the handset. “Raul, where the fuck are you? I’ve been here for twenty minutes.”

  “Katherine Janeway Manners?” came Raul’s voice, his slight Mexican accent softening the consonants.

  She sighed, and said, “I knew telling you my middle name was a mistake.” Her parents had been fans of the Federation.

  “What’s the passphrase?” came Raul’s voice again, now tinged with a trace of anxiety. Raul was a security researcher who sometimes did odd jobs on the side when he wasn’t collecting bug bounties on enterprise-level software packages. Odd jobs such as working with her.

  Kate suppressed a second sigh, instead reciting into the phone, “Tiny purple fishes.”

  “Ah. Thank you, Kate. You can never be too sure.”

  He always said that. “Yeah, right. I’m glad I can help out with your issues. I hate to think what your monthly psychiatrist bill must be. Where are you?”

  A few seconds ticked by, then someone tapped her shoulder. She didn’t spill her coffee, but only because the top was secured.

  “Raul,” she said, keeping her voice level, “I’d worry less about hidden enemies, and more about pissing off your friends. Some of them have guns.”

  Raul took the seat across from her, smirking. He set a cup of tea on the table and slid his computer bag to the floor at his feet. “You don’t need a gun,” he said.

  He’d said the same before. And as before, she pretended not to hear it. She replied, “Thanks for showing up.”

  “It’s Sunday. Don’t tell me you didn’t expect me. So what have you got for me, mi chula?” He sipped his tea.

  She wrestled her irritation into submission so her voice wouldn’t be tight or rushed. Raul was sensitive to those sorts of things, and she didn’t want to spook him. Nor did she want to give him any reason to suspect she was about to lie, if only by omission. For someone good with computers, Raul was surprisingly good at reading people.

  “I’m on another case. Like the one you helped me out with last time.”

  Raul pursed his lips. “Another forged ID?”

  “No. I’ve already infiltrated the target. What I need is for you to break the encryption on a flash drive and tell me what’s on it.”

  “I might be able to help,” said Raul. “Depends on how they implemented their crypto. See, if–”

  She stopped him with a hand on his wrist. “Yeah, yeah. I just need you to take a look.” Raul knew her background, but he couldn’t help lecture her anyway. Probably one of the reasons they’d never hit it off was because she was afraid she’d eventually take his infuriating habit of explaining everything personally.

  He furrowed his brow. “I assume you want the information for a client. Why not just give him the flash drive?”

  She just looked at him, wondering how to explain what she’d found.

  “Him, or her,” Raul amended.

  She grinned. “No. I mean, yeah, my client is male. But I can’t get in touch. Not that Bradley probably has anything to do with the flash drive. He had me looking for exploits on a server, but, um… I found the flash drive instead.”

  “What’s it to you, if your client doesn’t want it?”

  “Something weird happened, and the USB might help explain.”

  “You sound upset. Is everything all right?”

  Shit. So much for your plan not to spook the paranoid. Plus she’d told Raul Bradley’s name. Not professional.

  Kate said, “I’m upset because there was a, um, a third party. And I have his flash drive.” That explanation approached the truth.

  Raul’s brows furrowed. “A third party? You mean, like a foreign national? Or someone closer to home? CIA? Or NSA, maybe?”

  “Definitely not local.” She couldn’t imagine anything more foreign than a melting man. “He said his name was Jason. I found him in the server room, hurt. He asked for my help. Then he died. It was… terrible.”

  “He died?” Raul’s eyes widened and he unconsciously pushed back a few inches from the table.

  Kate put a hand to her mouth. Damn it, she hadn’t meant to admit that. She was more shaken then she’d realized. Now Raul would pack up and leave.

  Except he didn’t. Instead he said, “I’m sorry. It must have been awful.”

  He wasn’t going to bolt, at least not immediately. Maybe she’d underestimated him.

  He continued, “You’d never seen him before? And he had no ID?”

  She said, “The only thing he had on him was this custom USB stick.”

  “Where did this go down?”

  “BDR,” said Kate. “Banks Digital Realty. It’s a commercial server farm.”

  “Any police involvement?”

  “No,” Kate said, “But I have no idea what happened after I left.”

  Raul pulled his laptop from its bag and fired it up as if it was the most normal response in the world.

  She grabbed his hand and squeezed. “Thank you, Raul.”

  A smile lit his face. He said, “I’m happy to help, mi chula. Now, then… I haven’t heard of BDR, but let’s see what the internets have to say. And can I see this mysterious drive?”

  “What, you want to check it here?”

  “Where else? I’m not going to pop an unidentified USB stick into a device connected to my home network. Public Wi-Fi is the only way to go. If the drive is loaded with malware, and tries to phone home when we plug it in, I don’t want to be pinged by them.”

  Like good paranoids everywhere, she reflected, Raul referred to all the various government and corporate organizations he feared were after him as “them.”

  “Wait,” Raul said, meeting her gaze with eyes wider than when she’d told him about the stranger dying. “You didn’t plug it into your home network did you?”

  “Raul, what kind of idiot do you take me for? Why do you think I called you?”

  “Right, right. Sorry.” His eyes returned to his screen, fingers tapping the keyboard.

  “Banks Digital Realty,” he read from the screen. “Twenty-four hour support, unlimited bandwidth, server hosting, and… other stuff. These guys offer everything.” Raul settled back in his chair. “I hope whatever’s encrypted on that drive is more interesting than this web site.”

  “Me too.” She handed him the ring. “Be careful.”

  “Don’t teach a dog to fetch, Kate,” he said as he examined the large costume jewel on the ring, and after a little fiddling, exposed the USB end as she had. “Custom case, eh?”

  “Yeah. Ever seen anything like it?”

  He shrugged. “No. But some people are into mods. I’ve seen USB drives that look like dolls, cigarette lighters, car keys, and toys.”

  “I don’t think it’s a toy.”

  “Yeah. It’s too dramatic,” said Raul, “It looks more like a movie prop.”

  Kate sucked in a breath. Could it be? Had she crashed some sort of special effects demonstration? If so, ma
ybe she hadn’t actually seen a man melt. Except, there’d been no “Lights, Camera, Action!”

  “This Jason,” said Raul. “You never saw him before?”

  She shook her head. Nor would she see him again, given what’d happened. She said, “Just tell me what I’ve got here.”

  Raul did something to his keyboard, and restarted his laptop. Then he plugged the business end of the ring into a port on the side.

  “It’s mounting,” he noted.

  Kate studied Raul’s screen. She didn’t recognize the diagnostics program he was running. Not a huge surprise. She knew a lot about computers, alternate operating systems, and was a fair coder in more than one programing language. But Raul was in a league all his own. A few years back, he’d won a cash prize at a hacker conference for being the first to find a critical bug in a popular laptop model. A year later, he won another prize for demonstrating how the leading browser could be “pwned” simply by directing it to a web page loaded with malware.

  Making a living by publicly demonstrating how other peoples’ top selling products were actually piles of dog shit was a great way to make enemies. Raul had received more than one anonymous threat. As their volume and vehemence grew, his peace of mind disintegrated. He’d finally gone into hiding, certain his name was on some secret NSA file or corporate hit list, targeted for elimination… or something. Kate doubted that men in dark glasses would ever show up to haul Raul away.

  Then again, after what she’d witnessed two nights ago, her confidence in the definition of “realistic” was shaken. Maybe she’d been wrong to doubt the man’s convictions. Maybe he knew deeper truths about the way things worked that she needed to discover.

  Raul tapped more keys. Data streamed across the screen.

  They’d met before she’d left Microsoft at a tech conference. Raul might’ve had romantic intentions, but nothing ever came of it. After she’d started her own business, and Raul had “gone to ground,” they’d kept in touch. She received an email with a coded phrase letting her know who it was every time he moved into new digs, which was at least twice a year.

  “Anything?” she said. She could see the screen as well as Raul, but she must have been reading it wrong, because–

  “Yes and no. There’s a lot of data here. Terabytes, which is unheard of for such a small package.”

  “Whoa.” She hadn’t been reading the screen wrong. “How many terabytes?”

  “That’s another thing. I can’t actually tell. The profiler is still estimating the drive size.”

  She studied the end protruding from Raul’s computer. Plugged in, it looked out of place. Alien. She crossed her arms. “Are you sure it’s safe?” she said.

  “So far. It’s still encrypted.”

  “Can you break it?”

  “We’ll see. I’ve started running dictionaries against it.”

  She cocked her head. “That could take a while. Have you tried ‘monkey’?” Monkey was the most used password, statistics showed. People who chose it thought they were being clever. They weren’t, just predictable.

  “Of course,” said Raul. He grinned, probably at the foolishness of noobs everywhere.

  But his smile faded. After a few minutes he said, “This isn’t working. If the password was easily guessable, we would’ve had something by now. Which means it’s probably secure.”

  “I was afraid of that,” said Kate. In time, any password could be cracked. But the more complex the password, the longer the search. Throw in an upper case letter or some punctuation, and most importantly, increase the encryption key’s size, and even a massive cracking array making billions of guesses a second would take centuries. She summed it up, “Well, then we’re probably screwed.”

  He shrugged. “Give me a little credit, mi chula. I’ve got more tricks up my sleeve.”

  Every so often, Kate wondered what mi chula meant. It was a pet name of course, but she hadn’t given Raul the satisfaction of asking for its definition or checking the internet herself. Instead, she said, “Those tricks are why I called you.”

  “See that?” Raul pointed to one of the open windows on his screen. Data from captured traffic filled it.

  She said, “I’ve seen a few of those terms, but I’m not sure what this means.”

  Raul tapped the flash drive, then raised his eyebrows expectantly, as if waiting for her to get the punch line.

  “Wait,” Kate said. “Is the flash drive doing that?”

  “Yes. As soon as it mounted, it began requesting network access. I’ve blocked it.”

  “Who’s it trying to call?” She thought of Jason, then imagined cold-war bunkers filled with flesh melting chemicals.

  “I don’t know,” said Raul. “Yet. But if we let it try to make the connection, I may capture enough data to break the encryption.”

  “That sounds stupidly dangerous. Do you remember when I said the man I met died? It wasn’t normal! I think he might’ve been murdered.”

  “I remember. I was worried that was exactly what you meant.”

  She sighed. “I haven’t told you everything, Raul. And I don’t intend to, for your own peace of mind. This little USB drive scares me.”

  “I can reformat it, wipe it clean. Then it won’t be anyone’s problem anymore. Want me to take it off your hands?”

  Kate considered his offer. Part of her wanted to tell Raul to do it. Quickly, before she thought better of it.

  “No. It’s important, I just don’t know why. As much as I’d rather just trash it and walk away, I need to know what’s on it, where it came from, and why that man died.”

  “Then we have to accept some risk.”

  “Hearing you say that is sort of funny.”

  Raul chuckled, obviously appreciating her point. Kate liked a man who was able to laugh at his own foibles.

  “The process won’t have free rein. I’ll keep it sandboxed. But it needs enough leeway so that the process believes it’s actually making a connection.”

  Kate felt like she was on a rollercoaster cresting a steep rise, getting her first view of the screaming drop ahead.

  “All right,” she said. “Do it.”

  Raul tapped a key.

  7: Sovereign

  Elandine, Queen of Hazurrium

  Sword in hand, Elandine walked the borders of the Strange under a red sun. So close to the edge, the light seemed old and used up. Beneath her boots, the land was convulsed. Long ruts dragged scars down to the west as if made by the monstrous talons of a colossal Stranger unable to retain its grip on Ardeyn. The occasional cactus and thorny tree drooped, wilted with pestilence.

  The splintered landscape was Ardeyn’s boundary, where only the insane or suicidal trespassed. Beyond it drifted a sporadic scatter of free-floating skerries like barnacles on reality’s border. And beyond them lay the Strange. She rarely glanced that way.

  Elandine traveled a path parallel to the chaos that spurned all rules, not into it. The Strange would not try her strength, not today.

  The Maker willing, it never would.

  Her sword was potent enough – it held an enchantment for slaying, and had a secret name only she knew. Rendswandir. But Rendswandir was nothing compared to the chaos beyond the world. Not even her Ring, which outclassed her sword by no small margin, would avail her there. The Ring had seen better days, but it was still equal to most trials contained in Ardeyn.

  It had another name once, when it was mighty. Now it was called Peace. Elandine had Peace from her mother, who’d got it from her mother before her, and so on all the way back. The Ring was a relic of the Founding. Without it, the queendom of Hazurrium would’ve crumbled ages ago, as opposed to merely sliding into senility over generations.

  Perhaps it was finally happening, and the queendom would fall. After all, how else could she explain her sister Flora’s death?

  “Elandine?” said Navar.

  The queen glanced around, blinking away nascent tears.

  Navar’s jackal-visage was fixed o
n a nearby cave, tall ears forward. Navar sat on a silver-maned Lorn Charger, the giant breed famously foaled in the easternmost fiefdom of Hazurrium. Navar’s kind were sometimes feared for the exploits of her shadow-kin, the sark. Sark were qephilim who’d rebelled against the Seven Rules. But as the First Protector, Navar had shown herself to be a more loyal defender than any other, including even Elandine’s own mother. The First Protector was also something of a friend.

  Seeing she had Elandine’s attention, Navar gestured to the right of their path. A cavern gaped there.

  The queen glanced at the dripping cave mouth, partly hidden in the folds of earth and foliage, no more than a stone’s throw away. She’d been paying too much attention to the regrets lined up inside her skull to notice the cavity.

  Where there’s a cave, there’s almost certain a creature’s lair. That wasn’t one of the vaunted Seven Rules, but it might as well have been.

  “You’ve got a keen eye, Protector,” Elandine said.

  “I’ll call for your mount.” The knight raised a hand to signal the courtiers and guards making up the queen’s detail following behind. She said, “Let’s move away from here.”

  “No,” said Elandine. “We should search the cave. Brandalun’s trail led here.”

  Navar snorted. “Trust me, Your Majesty. Brandalun detests caves. I served as her Protector for twelve good years before you. She wouldn’t enter a place like that.”

  Elandine recalled growing up in the vaulted halls of Citadel Hazurrium, and how her mother couldn’t abide a dark room. Every chamber had at least four lamps for light, and most far more.

  The queen loved her mother, but Brandalun had made a shambles of an already bad situation. She had ignored her duties too long, in favor of the increasingly single-minded pursuits contrived by what some claimed – in whispers – to be a doddering imagination.

  After her mother’s abdication, Elandine took the vows of rulership. She became the ruler of Hazurrium. She’d inherited a queendom under threat of an alliance of shadow qephilim, the kray, and the Betrayer. That eel-cuddling Betrayer was probably behind the whole thing. If Elandine the Young didn’t prove more apt at her duties than Brandalun the Distracted, it would be under her watch that every human still alive in the refuge of Ardeyn would become extinct. The Seven Rules codified by the Maker would finally break, and the endless chaos outside the world would wash it all away.