Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel

by Suastegui, Eduardo

  “It’s just that… I picture CFOs with a lot more gray hair and wrinkles.”

  “I’ll ignore all hints of sexism and ageism, and say to myself: ‘my, what a nice way to put it. He is appealing to my vanity.’”

  He regarded her for a second, trying to parse her true intentions. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “I never joke at a job interview.”

  “Wouldn’t this… position be a little… boring for you? Seeing all the other exciting things you can do and are doing with your life?”

  “Hair on fire isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.” She leaned in, with a coy, flirtatious smile, and lowered her voice. “Neither is dodging bullets.”

  “I see.”

  She straightened out. “A girl wants stability. Safety. Come on, you’ve read all the psycho-babble books on the subject, I’m sure. Or at least an article or two on Cosmopolitan.”

  “Can’t say that I read Cosmopolitan.”

  “Rolling Stone or Playboy, then.”

  He forced a chuckle, then leaned in and dropped his voice a notch. “So, besides hair on fire and bullet-dodging, what are your qualifications for the job?”

  “Qualifications? Are you serious? You think this is about qualifications?”

  “Doesn’t quite sound like I have a choice.”

  Her face turned serious. Not an angry or upset serious. Rather, her eyes clouded with a soft sadness.

  “Of course you have a choice, Mr. CEO. You have real power to make a decision. Especially right now that you don’t have a board of directors to answer to. It’s your call entirely.”

  Something had turned into full-on, all-in heavy, like he’d hurt her feelings, and Martin didn’t like that. Now in that sadness he started seeing glimpses of pain. Or maybe he was imagining it. Maybe she was making him imagine it.

  “Well,” he added with as much of a smile as he could manage. “I guess those acting skills you learned in your Theater Arts minor might come in handy when dealing with investors and auditors.”

  He expected her mood to lighten at least in acknowledgement of his attempt at humor. Instead, she turned her head and regarded him with a sideways look.

  “Sorry.” He tried to wave it off. “Bad joke.”

  Now and only now her lips broke into a grin. “So, when can I hope to hear an answer?”

  He smiled and nodded. “Not tonight. I’ll definitely need to take it under advisement.” He raised his glass. “But I can say that right now you’re at the top of the list.”

  The waiter came to ask if they wanted desert. Cynthia said she had to watch her figure, and Martin didn’t see the point of ordering for himself. Did they want coffee, then? Nah, just the bill. Between the two of them, after the waiter stepped away, Cynthia suggested coffee back at his place—or her hotel room. Either way, his call, though she knew what a great coffee machine he had.

  “And how would you know that?” he asked her.

  “A good CFO always knows.”

  Ample coffee mugs in hand, they settled on Martin’s couch half an hour later. Cynthia sipped from her mug, apparently content to remain in silence. Martin decided not to let that bother him, not to read too much into it. She wanted to probe him? Maybe go further to gain his trust and allegiance? Fine. He could work with that.

  “Earlier you said I’d have power. Real power.”

  “I said you have it. Present tense.”

  “Nothing’s final.”

  She smirked. “I’m surprised. You can visualize technical things so well, surely you can project forward a bit and see that barring an earthquake swallowing you whole, you’re there already. Mr. CEO.”

  “Done deal, then. This will happen. And I’ll have real say. Real control.”

  Cynthia nodded. “Of course, you will. This isn’t about setting you up as a puppet, Martin. They… we want you to create. That means autonomy. That means liberty to see what you want to do, and the power to accomplish it.”

  “Within limits.”

  “No one is God.”

  “Would you count this as a divine act?”

  She tilted her head to the side. “I’m sorry. This?”

  “You know she has to come.”

  “Sasha.”

  “Who else?”

  She turned on the couch to face him more squarely. “You really don’t trust yourself, do you? You’ve bought into her being as responsible for that hacker glorious code of yours, haven’t you? It’s shaken you.”

  “We need her. She’s sharp. She has a lot of good ideas.”

  “Think beyond that. Can’t you conceive of code you can create all on your own? Inventions and innovations you can give birth to of your own accord?”

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “What are we talking about here, Martin? It wouldn’t be the same technically? Or it wouldn’t be the same personally?”

  “She is a person, and she’s sharp technically. You can’t exactly take your pick.”

  “Next you’ll tell me how she’s turning her life around.”

  “Look at me. A great success story. Enough to let me step up to the next big thing and throw lots of cash into my sails.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe some still wonder. Maybe some of us can only take so many hacker redemption stories.”

  The acidic residue of wine mixed with a sip of coffee and turned sour on his tongue. “It’s my call, right?”

  She withdrew her legs to sit normally. After setting her mug on the coffee table, she brought hands onto her lap. She sighed. “It’s your call.”

  Cynthia stood up and recovered her purse from the chair where she’d deposited it on the way in. He stood up as well, but didn’t follow her.

  “It’s so totally your call, Martin.”

  She walked toward the front door without giving him as much as a second glance.

  “Wait,” he said, not knowing what he’d do if she stopped.

  And she did. Without turning around, she stood there, holding the door knob, as if frozen, waiting for him to release her. He didn’t know how it happened or what route he’d taken—around the coffee table, or behind the couch—but he stood by her now, his hand on her shoulder. She turned her head, and her auburn-brown hair brushed against his hand. It made him shiver.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not sure what rational explanation he could attach to such a statement. But there, he’d said it. Because he felt it. No, he felt her, wanting to protect him, hurt at his insistence to cling on to Sasha.

  And what had he ever felt for Sasha? Not much more than nothing, really. She’d come back to rekindle something, whatever her imagination said they’d once had. What, he couldn’t much remember beyond, oh, yeah, they’d spent a couple of hot months together during which they’d worked out a clever hack. And gotten him arrested in the process.

  “Don’t go,” he added.

  “I probably should.” Her face remained in profile. She closed her eyes. “Yeah, it would be best that way.”

  “At least finish your coffee.”

  “I don’t want to be up all night.” She wanted to say more. He could tell she did. But she stopped there, even if he wanted her to add, “unless I’m with you.”

  He withdrew his hand and inched away from her. “Yeah, long day tomorrow.”

  “Aren’t they all?” She smiled and opened her eyes. Not quite turning around all the way, she leaned back into him and gave him a soft peck on the cheek. “Thank you for a nice evening.”

  Before he could object that it had been her that had taken him out to dinner, she opened the door and stepped out. Without looking back at him, she gave him an over the shoulder wave.

  Martin stepped back into his flat and closed the door. He returned to the couch and dropped onto it. He sat there. After a few minutes, he kicked off his shoes and lay down. No matter how hard he tried, he could not let go of the regret he felt for letting Cynthia walk out. Was he developing feelings for her? In place of whatever he fe
lt for Sasha? Different, deeper feelings, perhaps?

  But one question troubled him most. What did he see in Cynthia? That she understood him, in that creepy profiler way of hers? That she stood for the opportunity of making it big, and the stability and normality that came with it? That last point hung him most. He knew by now he wanted this. He no longer wanted to play life the clever and rebellious way. Not the way Sasha wanted him to.

  And there he had it, his choice: go rogue with Sasha or go square and stable with Cynthia.

  Whichever way he went, he couldn’t fool himself, much less anyone else, that he would do it for love of anyone but himself. He’d learned that much about himself well enough. He didn’t have it him to care for someone else the way people deserved or demanded it. He didn’t have it in him to love, and yet he wanted to. If he could only set aside the practical and calculated for a moment and do something out of love. For Sasha. For Cynthia. For someone.

  A wave of confusion came over him. Heavy and unrelenting, it pressed down on him and kept him there until exhausted, he fell into uneasy asleep.

  20» No Fingerprints

  Cynthia did her best to keep her eyes from glazing over. Her ability to comprehend was dropping off by the second, in equal parts from a sleepless night and the subject matter Dennis, the hacker, kept spewing at her.

  “You get it now?” he asked.

  “If I had to defend your case, you’d go to the chair. But I hear the gist of it. It wasn’t the Ukrainians.”

  “Right. But do you get why?”

  “She doctored the whole thing.”

  “She spoofed it.”

  “Right. Spoofing.”

  “She went in, hacked one of their servers, planted some code, and made it look like it all originated there.”

  “Exactly. Thanks.” She started to get up.

  “But that’s not all of it. You have to really get how she spoofed the attack. Post facto.”

  She sat down again. “Right, post facto.”

  “She made the code go back in time.”

  That was the part Cynthia didn’t get. Going back in time. No, he wasn’t talking about a time machine. That much he’d made clear. And he dove headlong into it again, with more hand waving to highlight his most salient points. On and on he went once more about file stamp times, computer clock changes, and a few other things she didn’t grasp. At the very moment her eyes started to glaze over again, she latched onto a question that hadn’t occurred to her the first time through.

  “So if the files tied to the Chinese hack have old time stamps, how do you know they were not deposited at the time of the hack, as opposed to later, as you claim?”

  He aimed an index finger at the ceiling. “Ah, because a change of system clock leaves a register entry in each machine’s firmware. She was able to avoid it for all but one of the machines, the newest one they have, which has a safety feature that lets you think you’ve prevented it from registering the event, but—”

  “All right.” Cynthia raised her hands. “I think I get it. Our proof comes down to that one machine, not the others.”

  “Right. She probably didn’t know that one machine had the safety, or she hoped we wouldn’t—”

  “For the other machines, we have no proof their files don’t in fact belong to the actual hack.”

  “Yeah, but that one machine—”

  “The one machine shows the clock was modified, and the resultant files have time stamps to the modified time. Prior to its clock being restored.”

  “Right. And we have a registry entry for that, too.”

  “For the restored time.”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes, of course.” Cynthia looked away.

  Her eyes weren’t glazing over any more. They were burning with exhaustion. Inside her something else burned, too: the confirmation that Sasha had deceived them with deliberate intent, and the realization the evidence to prove it came in the form of hand waving about ephemeral, shifting digital traces that might or might not mean a thing. The hallmark of this Cyber-criminal world: no fingerprints, or more to the point, fingerprints any could fabricate.

  She closed her eyes, tight, to squeeze out whatever moisture they held. But that made them burn more, the dry way. She sighed and faced Dennis.

  Cynthia stood again, this time for good. “You can write this up, succinctly, in a way any idiot can understand?”

  Dennis shrugged. “I’m not a writer.”

  No, of course he wasn’t. Cynthia dropped back into her chair. Gesturing toward the projector screen at the front of the conference room, she asked him to bring a word processor screen. She would dictate. He would type.

  “Let’s do it in Powerpoint,” he replied with a grin. “It’s the coin of the realm.”

  Cynthia took a deep breath as the projector screen lit up with Dennis’s application of choice.

  “Bullet one,” she said. “Evidence: data files feature time stamps resulting from altered computer clock times.”

  “Wow. That’s good, to the point.” Dennis rattled off a sequence of keystrokes, and the text materialized on the screen.

  “Bullet two…”

  “OK, I think I got it,” Martin said.

  He stared at the projector screen while he thumbed at the edges of the single chart Dennis had printed for him.

  “She did it,” Dennis said.

  “Someone did it,” Martin replied.

  “What do you mean someone?” Cynthia said.

  Martin eyed Stan, who, sitting next to Cynthia, kept squinting at the screen.

  “Martin’s right,” Stan said. “No fingerprints.”

  “She pointed us to these guys,” Dennis noted. “She told us it was them. Which means only she would have a reason to set them up.”

  Cynthia straightened up in her seat. “You’re not thinking that because only one computer shows—”

  “It’s not about the one computer,” Martin said. “We could have a hundred computers with the registered clock entry, and we still wouldn’t know for sure who did it.”

  Stan turned away from the screen. “Still, Dennis is right. She pointed us in that direction.” He thumbed toward Cynthia. “And she’s right. If Sasha did this, it nulls-and-voids her immunity agreement. She goes sleep on the wrong side of thick bars.”

  Martin shrugged. “Bring her in. I’ll talk to her.”

  Cynthia frowned. “You?”

  “And me alone.”

  “We can’t allow this to—”

  “Cynthia. Who in this room stands to lose the most personally if this goes south?”

  She nodded. After holding Martin’s gaze for a few seconds, she stood. Stan and Dennis followed her out of the room.

  Sasha kept wondering when Martin would get to the data display on the projector screen. So far, he’d avoided looking her in the eye while he stared at the screen and discussed everything else. How she was doing in general. How she was doing with the ankle bracelet. What she thought of her living quarters.

  “Better than jail, I suppose. The bed’s softer, and the shower safer.”

  Still staring at the screen, he smiled. Then he went on to ask what she thought about the tech team, and the facilities, and the computers. Whether she liked the type of work she’d been doing so far.

  “As much as you can enjoy taking a hammer to a beautiful vase that you spun and fired up?” she said.

  “Nice word picture. I didn’t know you did pottery.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Speaking of jails, some might offer pottery classes.”

  Sasha halted for a second before saying, “I doubt that. Too many sharp edges, and too many mini infernos into which you can toss fellow inmates you dislike.”

  Martin smiled again. It struck her as a tentative, even mournful smile.

  “Why are we here, Martin?”

  “You. Why else.”

  “Am I causing you problems?”

  That made him face her for the first time since
she’d come in. “What do you think.”

  “Perhaps I am. Even if I solved the whole mess in record time.”

  “You can be honest with me. There are no recording devices or cameras in here.”

  “Right. Because the honest folks out there promised you so.”

  “Because such devices are illegal in a facility like this.”

  “You mean they’re illegal for you to bring in and use.” She pointed at the door. “But not for Cynthia and company.”

  He straightened in his seat and frowned. After a quick glance at the door, as if that would tell him whether she’d hit on a valid point, he turned back to the projector screen.

  “Those guys that T-boned us. Who were they working for?”

  She shrugged, feeling silly for doing so since he wasn’t looking at her. “What’s this, Martin? The way Cynthia taught you to conduct the investigation. Keep staring at the screen, don’t look at her, that will unsettle her?”

  His chest swelled and released a long sigh. “Who were they?”

  “Why isn’t Cynthia in here to ask me that? Conducting investigations is a little outside your wheel house, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I insisted on it.”

  “Because you wanted them off my back.”

  “Just level with me, Sasha. If nothing else, out of courtesy. Friend to friend.”

  “Friends? Are we that, Martin?”

  “I’ve been trying to save your hide ever since I knew it was you.” He turned to her. “Maybe if you stop to think about it, you’ll recall I’ve been saving your hide long before that.”

  “Good, Martin. Let’s get to what this really is.”

  “What this really is? How about you making a mess of things, with my code—”

  “Our code. Our code!”

  “Fine. Whatever puffs you up.” He aimed an index finger at her. “I’ve been covering for you all these years, ruining my life, precisely to cover up that it’s our code.” The index finger shot to the screen. “And now you don’t have the decency of telling me who those guys were? Who you got into a messy bed with?”

  “Is this about jealousy?”

  “This is about my neck.” With his index finger, he stabbed his forehead. “Or me trying to stop getting a bullet between the eyes, like Jason.”