by CD Reiss
IV
Wired had brought seven people. Four women and three men. By the time I was out in the lobby, they’d surrendered their cell phones, Fitbits, and smart watches. They’d submitted to a pat down from security and gone through a scanner we’d bought from the same supplier the TSA used. They’d agreed to use our recording equipment and had already familiarized themselves with it.
Mona Rickard scribbled in her little pad. She’d brought her own pencil. It was thicker than the ones we provided. I let it slide when I saw her grip was tangled and unusual. She needed it, and getting a transmitter into solid wood was a project a Boy Scout would have had trouble with.
“Five million,” she said, a brown curl bouncing and swaying as she wrote. “For anyone or only people registered at GreyHatC0n?”
“Anyone,” I replied. “Worldwide. We’ll accept a remote hack. Welcome the attempt, actually. I hear that on the big day, teams are logging in from Râmnicu Vâlcea. That’s in Romania.”
“Yeah. Thanks. I know. I wrote a piece on Hackerville.”
So they’d sent me a girl who at least knew something. Chalk one up for Wired.
“The Quantum Four code isn’t even based in binary,” I continued. “The circuits are built on three-dimensional thinking.”
“QuBit. One, zero, random.”
“Exactly. When the machines are released to Oracle next year, they can open them up and try to reverse engineer, but they won’t. Even the client can’t breach it.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to make that claim.”
“If the casing is cracked, the boards self-destruct. They sink and melt.”
“And production is here, in California?”
“The machines are made here, on site. We have a plan to scale when we can guarantee security.”
The team followed Raven and me to the double doors leading to the Faraday cage. I stopped in front of them and faced the Wired team.
“Do you have way to ID the winner?” Mona asked, her diamond engagement ring jogging back and forth as she wrote.
The team got into the elevator as I answered.
“We do,” I said. “A masked audit of all compliant commands. Non-compliant are going to look like shitstain on a wedding gown.”
I explained nothing. If Wired sent anything less than their most technical writer they could fuck themselves. I wasn’t wasting my time teaching her how to read metadata. She was going to have to ask one of the guys in IT.
“You have a protocol. And metaphor noted.” She looked up and flipped her brown curl away from her eyes. “You’re pretty sure of yourself.”
“I’m sure about these guys on the other side of the door.”
“I hear it’s all men.”
“I hire the best regardless of gender.”
“And all the best had dicks?”
Someone on her team snorted with laughter. The elevator doors opened, and I led the group to the cage doors.
“Google hires all the girls,” I said.
“I’m sure.” She folded her pad and pencil against her chest and smiled. We saw right through each other, but she couldn’t print what I wouldn’t say.
“We’ll be going into a foyer between the world of Wi-Fi signals and EMPs. Kind of like a lock room in the space station.”
“I’m ready if you are,” Mona said.
I tapped the panel outside the cage.
“Name.”
“I don’t give a fuck, chuckin’ my deuces up.” I chanted the song lyrics flatly.
The door unlocked with a clack.
“Suck on my balls, please,” a pipsqueak with the notepad said from behind Mona.
She spun on him like a schoolteacher. “What?”
“I had enough,” I added, and Mona gave me a wide-eyed stare. “I ain’t thinkin’ about you.”
Pipsqueak tipped his pencil to me. “Beyoncé”
I winked at him and opened the door. I didn’t look back at Mona to see if she’d gotten over it. They piled in. I closed the exit behind them.
“We’re ready. Behind these doors is a room sealed against Wi-Fi. There’s no internet connectivity. All the electrical outlets route through a secure panel. Quantum Intelligence Four is pure virgin code.”
It bleeds when breached.
We said that a lot around the conference room table, but not in front of Mona Rickard.
I opened the doors. My coders stood. On the screen I’d just stood in front of, and on the walls that usually displayed nature scenes, were the scrolls of masked code as it would appear on the Tor site. They were the only light in the room. I laid my hand on the one machine we’d left on. It was in a mini-Faraday and was responsible for the screens.
“What you see here”—I indicated the men in the room—“are the best coders alive today. And on the walls is QI4’s code. It looks like nothing because it’s masked, and it’s going to continue to look like nothing unless someone gets in.”
“Which won’t happen.” Deeprak came from behind his desk with a big white smile. Charming fucker. He’d have no trouble getting laid once he had a minute to wink at a girl.
He held his hand out to Mona, and she was about to shake it when his smile melted like solder on a hot iron. His hand froze between them. I followed his gaze to one of the projections.
The code wasn’t masked.
ASCII flew down the roll. Then—
“Binary?” I whispered and stepped toward the wall. There was no binary. QI4 circuits didn’t work that way. “Shut it down!”
Scrambling. Clicking. Keys unlocking drawers where safepasses were stored. My glands opened like circuits for sweat, hormones, fight or flight, firing neurons in the face of a breach I didn’t have an algorithm to process.
“Shut it down!” The scream rattled the top of my throat.
Jack was the first to have his passkey out, but before he could type in a command, the entire system went dark with a sigh of hard drives winding down.
We all stood in the dim, windowless room.
The air crackled with silence broken only by the sound of Mona’s pencil looping over paper, like someone woken in the darkness, writing down the details of a nightmare.
V
TWITTER
@Wired
Ex Black Hat hacker Beezleboy creates
the unhackable system. Until it’s hacked.
@gizmodo
That time you bragged about the
unhackable system and someone…
@nytimes
Oracle Inc. may delay system
upgrades in the face of QI4 breach.
@hackerbitch
Beezleboy got pwnd. Always a
fucking pussy. #QI4choked
@git-up
Finally. Someone he couldn’t screw
by snapping his bitch fingers.
#tool #douche # QI4choked
* * *
@anon_00110001
@hackerbitch
He’s the fucking King. What did he
make you choke on?
@engadget
Did someone just climb the
Everest of exploits?
@hackerbitch
@anon_00110001
Careful – your douche is showing.
# QI4choked
@anon_00110001
@hackerbitch
Temporary setback. Your most useful skill is
tweeting with your legs in the air.
#QI4rulz #stackslut
@shelly-code
@beezleboy363636
That, my friend, is the taste of crow.
@hackeropz
Rumored QI4 hack may be part of a
bigger stunt. Don’t write off @beezleboy363636
& Alpha Wolf yet.
@hackerbitch
@anon_00110001
080 114 111 110 032 104 097 115
032 114 117 105 110 101 100 032
121 111 117 013 010
@anon_00110001
@hackerbitch
No
t impressed by ASCII. Pron is nectar. You
can’t even get a job that doesn’t require
kneepads #QI4rulz
@DeadBeefCafe
Anybody seen @beezleboy363636?
Tor’s quiet. His account’s dead. Is he
hanging from his belt in the closet?
VI
This is how a guy ends up in a windowless room full of computers, wearing nothing but his jockeys. He kicks everyone out. He locks the doors. He looks for code fingerprinting. He spends a long time—the lighting change he programmed tells him it’s just about twenty-eight hours—finding nothing. He takes a shower to clear his head. In the middle of it, with soap in his hair, he realizes he could check the core dump for clear text. Rinsing his hair doesn’t even occur, and drying off will take too long, so he puts his underwear on while he’s walking back to the cage. It sticks to him like a wet T-shirt sticks to tits. He sits down and searches everything.
There isn’t much to see until there’s a squeak of the door opening behind him, and he spins his chair to see who it is.
* * *
“How did you end up…?” Deeprak held out his hands, incredulous over how I looked.
The full-speed-ahead train of my thoughts runs through how I ended up in a windowless room full of shattered computers, sitting in front of my laptop, wearing nothing but my jockeys.
“Your dick hard?” I spun back to my screen.
“Yeah. I’m going to fuck you in the ass if you don’t let everyone back in here.”
“No one’s getting in until we know who did this, or they’re going to do it again.”
“What the fuck, Taylor?” He pushed a smashed computer with his toe.
I’d trashed four in a deliberate, organized way and couldn’t find a chip out of place. Then I lost my shit and smashed monitors against whatever edge I could find. Then I found it. A dongled chip with a quarter inch antenna right in the board.
“The poison pill was in the monitors. Five of them.” I pushed the one nearest my foot toward him. A 27-inch screen with a lightning fast GPU. We didn’t have the facilities to make our own monitors, so we bought them like normal people.
Deeprak saw it right away and picked up the green board. “Motherfucker.”
“Said that right.”
“What was it talking to?”
“It had to be transmitted to something coming in and out of the cage. I found a power strip in reception with a receiver in it. Another fucking mail order. Never again.”
Deeprak spread the monitor guts on the table next to me and examined them closely. “We’re a young office. We had to buy shit to set up. We had to buy a coffeemaker too. We can’t open up everything and check for receivers.”
“We do now.”
“Did they come from the same place? The monitors and the power strip?”
“No. It’s a fucking mess. I can’t make a connection. Monitors through TechWorld. The power strip was Amazon. The coffee maker was some artisanal company in Seattle.”
“You checked the coffee maker?” He stood up from his inspection of the monitor.
“It was clean. Look at this. I’m in the poison pill now.” I pointed at a little chip in the GPU I’d hooked up to my laptop, then at the screen.
“Anything?”
“The complete Sherlock Holmes.”
“Really?”
“Really. He’s fucking taunting me with it.”
Deeprak looked over my shoulder. My hacker had pasted the entire library of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the comments, and I had to go through every word.
“Have you considered it could be one of our guys?”
“No.”
That was out of the question. I paid them well and treated them like princes. They each had a stake in making this work, and they each cared about what we were doing. Whatever it was—worm, virus, hack from God—it had locked me out. I could see the size of the box my life was in, but I couldn’t open it. I hadn’t connected offsite backups because we were off the grid.
It wasn’t anyone on the team. I trusted them, and not a line of code got pushed to the source without me looking at it.
It was me. I’d been complacent. I’d let all their work get destroyed. I’d failed them. They relied on me to lead them, and I’d let them down.
“You all right?” Deeprak asked.
Fuck it. Guilt was taking up time and energy. I was running low on both.
By accident, I laid too much weight on the page down key and forwarded to the middle of a completely different section. I was about to go back when I saw slashes. I hadn’t seen slashes anywhere else, then I noticed the digit at the beginning.
9 I beg* that y*ou will look upon it
not as a battered billycock but as
an in*te/ll/ectua/l/ q*roblem*.
“Look at this.” I pulled the paragraph onto the big screen in front of the room.
Deeprak stood before it with his arms crossed. He was best when he had a problem to solve or a journalist to charm.
“Isolate the odd ones,” he said.
I’d already done it.
9gtyue/ll/tn/l/qm
“He needed the q,” I said. “So he misspelled problem.”
“What if the slashes aren’t for the letters?”
“Other options? Numbers?”
“Three Ls?”
“Or ones. Leet style.”
9gtyue3tnqm OR 9gtyuetn3qm
We stood in front of the green letters on the black background, arms crossed.
He tilted his head a little.
I paced away and looked quickly.
He looked at it from the side.
I squinted.
As if we had the same neurons, Deeprak and I always thought with one mind. This time was no different.
“Eleven digits. Geohash coordinates,” I said. Geohash was a newer version of latitude and longitude that split the world into a grid and gave each box a code.
“God, please let it be Tahiti. I want to go to Tahiti.”
We didn’t have internet in the cage, but I had a geohash database inside it. I called it up, and the cached satellite picture came on the big screen. All grey. The coordinates were inside a water mass.
“Lake Superior,” I said. “Change the three in the second string.”
“Done.” It came on the screen in a split second, and it was land.
“No white sand beaches.” I folded my arms over my bare chest, looking at the pin. The coordinates fell on a big building in a little town in the middle of nowhere. “Where are we?”
Instead of answering, Deeprak contracted the map until the surrounding area was in the frame.
Nothing.
Freeway.
Train tracks.
Farms.
An interstate.
A nameless tributary.
Nowheresville in The Great State of Nowhere, USA.
“Do you think…?” Deeprak said.
“Yeah. I think he left it so I’d come looking for him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go looking for him.”
“Put on some pants first.”
I was already out the door.
VII
Fucksville, Nowhere—aka Barrington—didn’t have an airport in a one-hundred-forty-mile radius.
That wasn’t true. They had a dirt landing strip for crop dusters. I’d passed it on the way. What a shit hole. If I’d chartered something to land there, I would have announced my presence before I even took off.
I wasn’t a big fan of Caddys. I drove a Tesla. Caddys weren’t a thing in San Jose, but it was the best car they’d had at the airport rental terminal. The girl behind the desk swore by it, hand on heart, eyes rolling with remembered pleasure, and I had to say, though it handled like a cruise liner, it drove like a spaceship.
As I passed into town, the sign said the population was 1,209, but there was a fifth space before the one, as if there used to be ten thousand more people.
The terrain was pre-winter blight. Post exploding fall colors and pre winter sting. Brown, leafless, scrubby. The sky was overhung with grey, but with no discernible clouds, as if a screen of dullness hung between the earth and the heavens.
No way the dude who hacked QI4 was in this town. This was a pitstop on the way to some big reveal that would either be humiliating or expensive.
I was a target. A betrayer. I’d gone from black hat to white hat. I’d created a system to thwart them and bragged about it. I was the Everest of the hacker world. They wanted to get me because I was big, I was a challenge, and I was there.
I pulled into a little parking lot in front of two stores. A restaurant and a grocery store. It was the first commercial zoning I’d seen since passing into town.
When I got out, I had a weird feeling I only got when I went to Scott’s Seafood with Fitz. Everyone looked and pretended not to. The room got one eighth quieter. They nudged each other, looked halfway around, pretended to take selfies so they could see over their shoulders.
This was the same—but different. Obviously. Because Fitz and I going to Scott’s was normal. My being in flyover central to find a hacker was crazy.
I went up the wooden steps to a restaurant called Barrington Burgers. It was closed. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock on a Saturday. I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked in the glass door, angling to see through a slit in the blinds.
Looked all right at first glance. Homey little place. Chairs were pushed in but weren’t upside down on the tables. Maybe it was dinner only?
Then I noticed the alcohol was gone from behind the bar. The plants were dead. Sugar packets were strewn across the wood floor, shredded and balled in a light dusting in the floorboard slats. Only the white packets were ripped. The blue and pink packets were untouched.
Mice. Rats, maybe. Smart fuckers. I wouldn’t have touched that other shit either.
“You looking for someone, mister?”
I turned toward the voice behind me and my god. The prettiest things hid in the most unlikely places. Long, wavy blond hair that reached breasts hidden under a flannel plaid car coat that was cut for men. Jeans. Cowboy boots. No makeup. Wide, full lips with a crease in the bottom one. Angular nose. Freckles. Eyes that went from brown in the center to blue at the outer ring.