Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel

by Suastegui, Eduardo

  The phone rang as they were getting ready to lie down for the night.

  Robert Odehl’s voice came from the other end. “We need you guys to check into something.”

  “Something?” Martin said.

  “Our guys here think the hacker left a calling card. But they can’t get at it. The code keeps…” A pause to confer. “It keeps morphing, blocking them. They think you might stand a better chance of breaking through.”

  Martin sighed. He wasn’t hungry, but he was tired, and he knew what he would find. His own calling card. His own code morphing to fend off tracking attempt. Still, he went over to the fridge and took out two tall cans of Jolt Cola.

  Dreading what he would find, he made quick work of it nonetheless. He saw no sense in delaying the inevitable. Besides, anyone could stuff his calling card inside a piece of code. He’d once graced all the cool black net sites. They knew him well enough, right down to his signature.

  But not his code. Not the code he’d found. Not the code he’d designed to morph upon detection of a back-trace attempt. He sure would like to know who pulled that off. And just as he was thinking that, it all came to him: the crack to get the calling card, and who would stash it there. The latter he set aside, again, because Martin never made an assertion he couldn’t back up with data. Facts, data, logic. All three had to line up without equivocation before he shouted Eureka.

  But he didn’t find what he expected. His code, yes, he found that. The calling card, on the other hand…

  “Feral,” he said.

  “What?” Stan said over his shoulder.

  “Come by again?” Odehl’s voice asked over the phone.

  “Feral. The call sign is Feral.” Martin breathed out. So Feral or whoever lurked behind this code did not want to frame him after all. They’d left their own call sign.

  “The Cat,” Stan whispered, alluding to the SES prediction.

  “Cute,” Odehl agreed. “The Cat is Feral.”

  Along with the call sign, Martin saw something else: an encoded IP address. He didn’t mention it. Instead, he memorized it.

  “We’re running the name on our end,” Odehl said. “Should take a second if this Feral is anybody of consequence.”

  Martin didn’t wait for them to tell him. He ran a cross-check of his own. Apparently Feral could indeed lay claim to consequence. The black net scan came back with results within a minute.

  Over the phone one voice announced, “This handle popped up within the last six months. Earliest confirmed hit is five and a half months ago, with some secondhand mentions a couple of weeks before that.”

  Another male voice added, “And look at this. The dude’s claiming he set up a charitable Bitcoin fund.”

  “That matches what Martin found earlier,” Stan noted.

  “Claims the hack is taking from the rich and redistributing to the poor,” another voice said over the phone. “Make Wall Street cheaters pay. And I quote, ‘funds have been appropriated from individuals and companies that cheat individual investors in the stock market.’”

  “A Robin Hood hacker,” Odehl said.

  “I think we got us a codename for our op, boss,” Stan said.

  “Operation Robin Hood,” Odehl agreed. “Somebody write it down, quick, before some hacker steals it from us.”

  Laughter came over the phone. Stan and the young kid joined in. Martin shook his head, right before he got up to go sit on his couch.

  “Looks like Martin’s in the clear,” Odehl said. “Still, let’s have him stay there for the night. In case we need dual assets on this. You guys go home and rest there. After you shut down and lock up.”

  Fifteen minutes later, with all computer systems in lockdown and outbound ports shut down, Martin Spencer lay on the couch. They’d locked him down, too, inside the vault. They’d cut him off from the outside world. Except they hadn’t.

  An hour after they left, Martin walked out of the computer room and headed down a short hallway to an adjacent office. There, he unlocked a metal file cabinet and pulled its bottom drawer. Reaching all the way behind the back of the drawer he felt around until he located the Velcro strapping. He thought about it for a second, and plied it apart.

  The ripping sound echoed off the metal. It felt good to hear it, and to feel the thin tablet between his thumb and index finger. With it in hand, he walked to another office—a closet, really. In there, he accessed the service panel where the vault’s alarm system connected to the outside world.

  Yes, they’d shut down all the outbound ports, except for this one. Doing so would disable the alarm. And who’d want to do something that… insecure?

  He wired the tablet’s USB port to the alarm’s panel service port. In a few seconds he had a slow but serviceable Internet connection. Not fit for streaming of high definition video or playing online games, but he didn’t need that much bandwidth.

  He thought about it for a few more seconds, then typed in the IP address Feral had left along with her calling card.

  07» Face Time

  That was some good CGI, even if Martin had to view it through a sputtering, low bandwidth feed. Good enough he kept wondering whether a real person stared back at him from the other side. But the background—the colors, the way it waved like a choppy psychedelic dream—was decidedly cartoonish. And the woman’s face floated along with a neck that lacked a torso. It looked real, but it had to be computer generated. Especially given the cat’s eye, the one she used to wink at him.

  “Feral,” he said.

  “That’s me.”

  He tried to sound nonchalant. “Cute.”

  “Yeah. Like a feral cat. You know. Untamed. Independent. A little dangerous. Careful, don’t get too close.”

  He allowed himself a smile, remembering his experience as a kid with a neighborhood feral cat. SK, he had called it, for “scaredy kitty,” because the little guy would scamper off at the first sight of a person. He’d tried and tried to coax it. He fed it, watered it, talked to it in a high pitch voice. SK had never come within ten feet of him. He would only eat when Martin walked a good distance away.

  He kept smiling, anticipating his experience with Feral might fall along the same lines. As if in response, the human features spun and swirled into a rainbow-colored vortex, only to resolve into a feline face.

  Martin shook his head and allowed himself a faint smile. “With tricks like that, you’re going to rock YouTube.”

  “You think that’s what I’m out to do? Going viral? Pun intended?”

  He shrugged. “Everyone wants their fifteen these days.”

  “You certainly got yours. Cover of Black Hatter magazine and all.”

  He allowed himself another smile while he measured his response. “What’s with spoofing my code?”

  “Spoofing? My, you have gotten rusty.”

  “Couldn’t come up with any of your own?"

  “Well, for one thing, it’s perfectly good code,” said the sultry voice hiding behind a hairy cat’s face. “Going to waste for going on a year now, too.”

  “Don’t make me cry.”

  “For another thing, it’s not all your code, now is it?” She let her question dwell between them for a moment. “It coming out of retirement got you in hot water, I take it?”

  “For long enough.”

  “But not hot enough water for you to cough up the IP address.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh, but I think I do.” The cat’s face morphed back into a human one.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Should you?”

  “Let’s not play games.”

  “What? You. Mr. Master Hacker Spencer? Let’s not play games? That seems a little out of character.”

  “What do you want?”

  Martin had to admit whatever flavor of CGI she coded did a rather competent job of rendering an attractive, come hither smile.

  “Truth, justice, equality, and a chicken in every pot. What else?” she says.


  “The Bitcoin account.”

  “Yes, the people’s Bitcoin account.”

  “Why did you set me up?”

  “I don’t see it as a setup. More like reaching out and touching. Beckoning. And look. Didn’t it work?”

  “Why me?”

  “Because in my heart of hearts I know you want to join my cause.” She winked at Martin, first with the feline eye, then with the human one.

  That gave him another data point right there. First the code, next the way she didn’t conceal her female identity. OK, so her voice sounded different, probably pumped through a frequency-shifter voice module. But the double-wink? Who else did that? Or more to the point, who else would know to tease him with it?

  Martin felt something well up within him. Hope? Anger? Maybe a little of both. Maybe a lot. He couldn’t tell.

  “So what do you think?” she asked.

  The question. Yes, what did he think? Well, for one thing, he shouldn’t run headlong thinking it was her. Maybe someone else had picked up on their double-wink thing. They did it in public, didn’t they? As for the code? Maybe someone swiped it from her. Didn’t take much imagination to picture that.

  No, he shouldn’t see her inside a CGI projection. He shouldn’t conjure her up. If he wanted to spoof Martin Spencer, that’s how he’d do it. Roll up some fancy video feed, and tug away at that painful incident—the one that landed him in modified Federal custody inside a virtual indentured servitude arrangement. He’d go at that for sure. He’d want to remind Martin how pissed off he should be at finding himself in such a predicament while she walked free. Yeah, that’s all this could be: one sick spoof of a joke.

  But what upset him most? He hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t expected it. Or maybe he had, all along, but had pressed ahead in denial, not wanting to contemplate it, to consider the obvious. He’d avoided the simplest and most logical possibility: that she had done it. She had appropriated and planted his code.

  Then again, maybe he was getting a little ahead of himself. He needed facts coupled with data and logic to know for sure.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I think you know that.”

  “Then what’s with all the secrecy? Why not show yourself in living color.”

  She sighed. She shook her head. Her half feline, half human eye pair shot him a look of disapproval. “For plausible deniability. Yours, mainly.”

  “Right. Mine. Except my plausible deniability got me nice and snagged last time, didn’t it?”

  She shook her head again. “Nah-ah. Don’t go putting that on me. You made that call all on your own. All you had to do was plead the fifth, and they would’ve had nothing on you.”

  He knew exactly how to rebut her naïve argument. He could have told her right there and then that unless he went down, they would’ve snagged her. He did it for her. He had to cut the deal and conceal evidence of her involvement in hopes that would keep the feds from digging any further. His best play had him leading the feds to the easy way out, the one where he turned over his stuff and pretended to show them all he knew. And it worked. He’d mesmerized them enough to keep her out of it.

  Didn’t she know that? Didn’t she have the slightest clue? The tiniest appreciation for what he’d done for her? What he’d endured all these months for her? He wanted to shout all that. But he didn’t.

  That wouldn’t be terribly swift of him, anyway. Aside from losing his cool and spewing a bunch of drama with no point to it, he had no idea who he was talking to. For all he knew, his fed buddies had set this up to pump him for additional information. Out to ensnare him again. Ready to clamp down harder on those virtual shackles of theirs.

  That last thought made him swallow. His saliva tasted bitter going down. The air around him seemed to grow hot and heavy.

  “I’m done with this conversation,” he said.

  Her eyes, the human one, especially, seemed to fill with regret. “Will you think about it?”

  “Think about what?”

  “About what I’m doing, Martin. What it represents.”

  “If you want me to believe you’re out to help the needy with some steal from the rich scheme, well… Good luck with that.”

  “I hope it’s not too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “Remember how we used to talk about wealth? The mirage of it?”

  OK, he told himself. So she, or whoever sat on the other side of this feed knew about that, too. His conversations with her about the ephemeral, illusory, unreliable nature of wealth. He didn’t want to conclude too quickly here either. But they hadn’t carried those conversations in public. Not that he recalled, anyway. Who else would know about it, then?

  “I think we’re done here,” he said.

  “Do they even know, Martin? How many billions have disappeared?”

  He went to say something, something got caught in mid-breath. He cleared his throat.

  “How many billions have vanished into who knows where or what? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? Or maybe they’re trying to figure out whether any of it was real in the first place.”

  “We need to kill this feed,” he said.

  “Why? Because you think someone’s playing you? Or because you no longer want to deal with—”

  “Because I don’t know who you are.”

  Before she could reply, he shut down the connection. But he knew, not only from all that she’d said, but the way she said it. The inflection in her voice, the manner of speaking. It confirmed it. It shouted at him.

  It was her. Sasha Javan.

  08» House Calls

  Though Sasha could’ve sworn she’d left one lamp on, she found her apartment in complete darkness. The light from the external hallway broke in for only a few feet before it died off into shadows.

  Had the circuit breaker tripped again? She’d had the apartment manager fix it several times. The last time she’d raised quite the stink. That seemed to work. She’d experienced no more interruptions of electrical service since then. Until tonight.

  Sasha stepped in while her hand fumbled along the wall to locate the light switch. She flipped it, but the lamp it connected to didn’t come on. Someone had flipped it off. The smell of lavender and another scent she could never decipher confirmed it.

  Sasha reached into her purse. Her hand came out with a handgun and a small flashlight. She dropped the purse, fell to one knee, and aimed both down the short hallway into her living room.

  “Almost good,” Chana Bauman’s familiar voice said with an unveiled Hebrew accent. “The intruder only had fifteen seconds to kill you. In the meantime, she found the hand flailing for the light switch satisfactorily amusing.”

  A few steps into the hallway, Sasha located the other light switch. Overhead lamps flared on.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You seem so surprised,” Chana said. “People who care always make house calls.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What I wanted yesterday, and the day before that, and the week before that, and so on.”

  Sasha flipped on another light and went to sit at the counter that separated her small kitchen from her not much larger dining area. She sat at one of two stools, with her back to Chana. The older woman said nothing. She let Sasha sit alone for a few moments, eventually breaking the silence with heeled boots on tiled floor as she approached Sasha to take the other stool. Then she sat there, elbows on the counter, much as Sasha was doing, and remained in that pose for a minute or so.

  “How are we coming along on reigniting that old flame?” Chana said.

  “Almost there.”

  “Good. Wouldn’t want to conclude that all you care about these days is altruism.”

  “It’s good to help others while we help ourselves, no?”

  “Oh, yes. But it’s good not to get the two things confused, don’t you think?” She held out two fingers, like a peace sign, and waved them in front of Sasha’s face.

  “
Thank you for trusting me.”

  Chana patted Sasha on the forearm. “I know you’re with us.”

  “You’ve never told me about next steps.”

  “Once you make contact, you mean?”

  “Yes. Do I become his sex toy then? Whatever it takes to get him on our side?”

  Another pat on the forearm. “You’re a clever girl. I’m sure the best course of action will come to you.”

  “I’m not a prostitute.”

  “Nor do I want you to become one. By now you should know me well enough to have learned I care for you. As a daughter.”

  Sasha fought back the urge to spit at her, like she had last time. Instead she got up, went around the counter and opened the refrigerator. She bent at the waist and stuck her head halfway into the largest compartment. There she stayed, eyes closed, letting the cool air waft over her in hopes it would cool her on the inside.

  “I will have a water,” she heard Chana say.

  Sasha straightened up. “Sparkling?”

  “Sure. Good for the digestive system, isn’t it?”

  Sasha came up with two green glass bottles. She slid them on the counter and went back to retrieve two glasses from a cabinet.

  “Such a gracious host,” Chana said.

  Sasha didn’t respond. Instead she stood with her back propped against the refrigerator, unscrewing the cap off her bottle, reaching to grab her glass, and taking her time to pour her drink.

  “He contacted you tonight, didn’t he?” Chana asked.

  “How would you know?”

  “Because you’re going to tell me.”

  Sasha raised her glass in a mock toast. She even forced herself to raise an eyebrow. “Like you need me to.”

  “Fair enough.” Chana took a sip from her glass through smiling lips. “How did he sound?”

  “Ticked off.”

  “Ah.”

  “I made it look like he did it.”