by Ray Daniel
“So what do you want?” asked Dorothy.
What I wanted was to find the HackMaster. What I wanted was to clear my name. What I wanted was to get my life with Maria back to normal. What I wanted didn’t seem to matter.
Still, I could use some help with all of that. I looked around at my ragtag group of hackers. Could I get four kids who lacked an instinct for teamwork and basic trust to help me catch a killer? Maybe, but what a shitty plan.
“We work together,” I said. “We catch a killer.”
Forty-Four
Russell laughed, a high-pitched braying that made me want to slap him again. Instead, I asked, “What’s so funny?”
“That’s fucking stupid!” he said.
“Thank you for sharing.”
Dorothy said, “What do you mean we help you catch a killer? How would we know how to catch a killer?”
“This all started with Peter phishing the senator.”
“I keep telling you that we had nothing to do with it.”
“And I keep telling you—”
My phone rang. Mel. I told the group, “This is Special Agent Hunter from the FBI.” I put her on speaker. “Special Agent Hunter, I’m here with PwnSec.”
Mel said, “You mean Dorothy Flores, Russell Nguyen, and Earl Clary?”
Dorothy looked at me, wide-eyed with alarm. “You doxed us to the FBI!”
“You hit me with a baseball bat,” I said.
“I’m glad I hit you with a baseball bat, you son of a bitch!”
“As you can hear, Agent Hunter, PwnSec and I are bonding.”
“People just love you.”
“It’s a gift, really.”
“Did you tell them about the malware?”
“What malware?” asked Earl.
I said, “The malware that somebody used to take over Peter’s computer and phish the senator.”
Mel said, “It came in a photo on Peter’s computer. A photo of the Asian girl with the shoe on her head.”
Earl had been one of several anons carrying a backpack. He dropped the backpack to the floor now and started rooting around in it.
“What picture of a girl with a shoe on her head?” asked Dorothy.
I said, “We don’t know who she is. She’s just topless with a shoe on her head.”
“We think Peter got the picture doing a life ruin,” said Mel.
Earl had opened his laptop. He tapped his fingers waiting for it to come up. “What does the malware do?”
“That’s what Mel is going to tell us.”
Mel said, “It took a while. The thing was pretty well hidden.”
“What does it do?” Dorothy repeated.
“Like Tucker said, it takes over the computer,” Mel said.
“You mean it makes it a zombie?”
“Not really,” said Mel. “A zombie usually just runs some command that the zombie master sends. In this case the screen, keyboard, and mouse control all go to the computer running the malware.”
“So they can control your computer?”
Earl had his laptop running and had pulled up a picture of a topless Asian girl with a shoe on her head.
“Earl’s got the picture of the shoe-head girl,” I told Mel.
“Where did you get that?” Dorothy asked him.
“Um,” he said pointing at the phone. “The FBI’s on the phone.”
“Don’t screw with me, Earl,” said Mel. “You were doing a life ruin, weren’t you?”
“Um.”
“Dammit, Earl,” said Dorothy. “We talked about this.”
“Peter was doing it too. And Russell.”
“None of you should have been doing it.”
Earl sulked. “It was just for lulz.”
“So Russell writes these manifestos about fighting the Patriarchy.”
“That was your idea,” said Russell.
“You went along, Eliza,” said Dorothy. “And after all that bullshit you jokers go out and torment women.”
“To be fair, this one’s a bitch,” said Earl.
“Yeah?” asked Dorothy. “How do you know?”
Earl said nothing.
“Let me guess. Some troll on 4chan told you that she wouldn’t sleep with him.”
“She led him on!” said Earl. “He had the e-mails.”
Dorothy went over and looked at the picture. “Oh, and that’s not creepy.”
“C’mon—”
“Stalker!”
“Earl,” said Mel through the phone.
“Yeah?”
“She isn’t a real girl.”
“Yeah she is!”
“Then why did Peter have the same picture?”
“We both life ruined her?”
“When you e-mailed with her, did she sound like someone else was life ruining her?”
“No, but—”
“Exactly,” said Mel. “One other question. Do you have a camera on your computer?”
“Yeah,” said Earl.
“Is the little green light next to the camera turned on?”
We all looked. The little green light glowed green.
I peered at the light, pointed. “Earl, look here.”
Earl looked closely at the green LED. “What am I looking for?”
“Tucker, that was mean,” said Mel.
“I think Earl deserved it.”
“What am I looking for?”
“You’re not looking for anything, Earl,” said Mel. “The person who took over your computer is using the camera.”
Earl slammed the laptop shut. “He can see me?”
“Yup,” I said.
“And you got me to look into the camera!”
“You had been sitting in front of that camera for a while. I just provided a close-up.”
“What about me?” asked Dorothy. “I looked at the picture.”
“I think he’s pretty much seen all of us,” I said.
Earl shoved the laptop into his backpack. “It’s the HackMaster. He’s going to kill us!”
I said, “That’s why you need to work with me to catch him.”
“We can’t do that,” said Russell. “It will ruin our brand.”
“Your brand?”
“People will say we’re FBI stooges,” said Dorothy.
Mel said, “It might be a little late for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you seen Twitter?”
I pulled up Twitter on my phone. #TuckerGate had exploded. The first tweets were links to multiple videos of me in my Guy Fawkes face paint beating up on Russell in his Guy Fawkes mask. I smacked Russell across his face, he screamed a whiny scream and beat his hands on my chest.
E said, “You’ve got pretty good form there, Russell. Ever consider a career in MMA?”
“Shut up,” said Russell.
“What’s that move? Screeching Fist of Death?”
“Ha!” said Earl. “You fight like a girl.”
“Shut up!”
We moved on from the fight videos to videos showing the PwnSec trio entering my apartment with an associated tweet.
@BruinFan3324: I knew @PwnSec was working with @TuckerInBoston! #TuckerGate
“Shit,” said Russell. “We’re screwed.”
Russell was right. The conspiracy theorists got themselves into full throat, explaining how PwnSec had been the perfect undercover operation.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Dorothy.
“You’ve got to explain to them,” said Earl to Russell.
“Explain what?”
E smirked, “Explain how you pwned yourselves.”
The PwnSec trio grabbed up their stuff, headed for my front door with E in tow.
&nbs
p; Dorothy said, “We are not helping you!”
“We’re going to get you, man!” said Earl.
Earl opened the door, and the four of them left with E pausing to give me a wink before she shut the door behind her.
Mel said from the speakerphone, “What just happened?”
I picked up the phone, put it to my ear. “You cleared the room.”
“I’m watching the YouTube videos of your fight again, and I have some advice for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Wash the face paint off before you leave the house. You look like hacker Braveheart.”
Forty-Five
I sat in my apartment, rubbing at my face paint and watching Twitter and the IRC.
It was a disaster.
Russell had already jumped back into the fray as Eliza, swearing up and down that PwnSec had been coerced into my apartment as part of an FBI plot to discredit them. Meanwhile Earl was on the IRC as Tron claiming the same thing. It was clearly a hastily conceived cover story, and the conspiracy theorists on Twitter and IRC recognized it as such immediately.
Still, I had to admit that they had some success. People who had been watching the tirade against PwnSec came to their defense right after Eliza and Tron gave them something to say. Each side was now proceeding to hammer home their talking points in a crescendo of ire. They could both agree on only one thing: that I was a menace, that I needed to be stopped, and that the Anonymous collective was just the collective to do it.
Of course, that raised the question about what “stopped” meant. I’d known people—Xiong Shoushan, for example—who equated “stopped” with “killed.” I was pretty sure that Anonymous had never killed anybody, despite the constant death threats. Still, we lived in a time where boundaries were being broken every day.
I looked at my phone, considered calling Jael. Decided to respect her Sabbath. I should be able to go one day without someone killing me. I could just stay in the house, let things calm down, and think things through.
I went to the fridge, grabbed another beer. Sat at my kitchen counter. Looked at Click and Clack.
“Well, boys, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Click and Clack disavowed all responsibility by scuttling onto their sponge. We’re going to eat our dinner and ignore you.
“Question is, how are you guys going to get me out of it?”
I grabbed my laptop, watched the #TuckerGate Twitter feed splash vitriol for a bit, then closed the laptop. Time to think. Peter’s computer had been taken over by someone else, probably someone else who used it when Peter wasn’t looking to set up a phishing attack on the senator. It was perfect. You take over someone else’s computer, run the attack as if you were that person, and intentionally leave breadcrumbs for the FBI to follow. While the FBI thinks they are cleverly outsmarting a hacker, they’re really heading down a blind alley.
The video had downloaded onto Peter’s laptop, but then the person must have moved it somewhere else, probably using anonymizing routers to block any pursuit. So Peter was a dead end, but another end had opened up.
Someone with Chinese interests at heart had threatened the senator and tried to influence his vote, and Xiong Shoushan and his dashboard Jesi company had surely been at the center of some sort of work in that direction. The right thing to do now was to pick up the trail with Xiong Distribution and Xiong himself and find out if he had the video and what it would take to keep it secret.
I yawned. The fight with Russell, the arguments in my house, the realization that we were being watched had all kept my adrenal glands pumping their magic juice into my bloodstream. Now it was just me, Click and Clack, and a beer. The adrenaline flow had stopped and the crash had begun.
I rubbed my face. Felt face paint. Needed a shower.
I stood in my bathroom, staring at my Guy Fawkes face paint in the mirror. I had to admit that it must have been terrifying for Russell to have this coming at him. Mel was right: I did look like hacker Braveheart.
The shower steamed as I stripped. I climbed in and washed my face until paint stopped running down the drain, then I washed the rest of me. Finally I stopped moving and just stood under the water, realizing that I—
The bathroom door jiggled. Somebody had bumped it.
“Hello?”
The door’s simple push-button lock rattled. It wasn’t a real lock; it was only meant to protect from an oh Jesus I’m sorry moment. The lock clicked as something scratched at its mechanism. Steam filled the tub, sliding down my lungs, producing a cough. I looked down at my pale postwinter skin, glanced around for a weapon. A bar of soap maybe. No. A plastic bottle of shampoo?
“Hello?”
The clacking at the door stopped. The knob creaked. The door swung open, steam swirled as a shadow appeared at the curtain, arm raised, the shower curtain flung back. I flinched and cowered.
“REET! REET! REET!” said a naked E, pantomiming a stabbing motion.
“Jesus, E! How did you get into my apartment?”
“I picked the lock. It’s not very good.”
“I’ve been told.”
E laughed and hopped into the shower.
I said, “You scared the crap out of me.”
E wrapped her arms around me and pulled herself close, rubbing her breasts against my wet belly. “You should have seen your face.”
I placed my hands on her slick skin, slid them down to the small of her back. “That was mean.”
E kissed me on the nipple, slipped down, water splashing her hair. Kissed me again next to my navel. Lower.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Let me make it up to you.”
Forty-Six
E disappeared later as mysteriously as she had arrived, giving me a peck on the cheek and promising to call. I sat at my kitchenette counter as the door snicked shut and the silence closed in. Clack ate from his sponge, his carapace scratching the sand, creating a racket in my quiet apartment. I breathed in, breathed out, relaxed in my solitude.
The relaxation fled as the hamster wheel in my head started up, revolving around thoughts of Twitter. I reviewed the things that had already been said about me online, and wondered what was being said right now. I glanced at my closed laptop, battling the need to know how I was being maligned.
After a brief struggle, I lost the battle. I flipped open my laptop, started to click on my browser icon and stopped, looking at the little camera lens at the top of the screen. The light next to the lens was off, but it got me wondering. What had Earl’s computer shown? What had Peter’s?
Taking over Peter’s computer was genius, and using the lens to see when it was safe to type commands was double genius. Whoever had done that had almost unlimited ways to dox Peter Olinsky. It hadn’t been my fault. Peter would have been killed regardless of whether I got into a shouting match with him on the IRC.
At least that’s what I chose to believe.
It was possible that the hacking and the murder weren’t connected, that the hacker and killer were separate people. The hacker had inhabited Peter’s computer only to use it as a front for phishing the senator and the killer had gotten Peter’s information from my infantile flaming. That was the worst of all worlds: no connection, no way to pull on one thread to find the other.
Of course, this brought up the question of Earl. Peter’s computer had been taken over so the hacker could phish the senator and get Peter blamed for it. If Earl had been hacked the same way, one had to wonder what plan the hacker had for his computer. For Earl’s sake, I hoped that there was no connection between the hacking and—
My phone dinged with a message, a photo of a Guy Fawkes mask that had been modified to create a meme. Text in Impact font shouted from the bottom center of the photo:
Fuck you Tucker.
An unpleasant jolt of violation rippled through my stomach. The doxing
was complete. Someone had my cell phone number. I grabbed the phone, opened the message app, and swiped to delete the pic—
Another ding.
Another Guy Fawkes:
Fuck you Tucker.
You missed a comma there, Meme Master.
This was not good. I waited a moment before trying to delete this picture. Sure enough, another ding, another picture.
Fuck you Tucker.
Someone was running a program sending the same message to my phone over and over. This could go on forever.
Another ding.
I silenced the message app on my phone. I wouldn’t be getting any text messages until I got a new phone number. Someone had initiated a denial-of-service attack on my texting.
The phone rang, an unknown caller. I silenced it.
Phone rang again, unknown caller.
Silenced it.
Rang again.
I opened the call and listened. Cesar Romero as the 1960s Joker laughed at me.
Hung up.
It rang again.
My phone was useless. I silenced it. Left it to fend for itself.
Rage tickled my gut. These fuckers would pay.
Time to go to the mall. I grabbed my coat, ran down the stairs, out the front door, and almost into the arms of the senator’s hook-nosed lackey, Pat Turner, who had been about to ring the bell.
“Hey! Whoa!” said Pat.
I stepped around Pat.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” he asked.
I turned. “How is that any of your business?”
“Look, we got off on the wrong foot.”
“You think?”
“I’m sorry I scared you.”
“You didn’t scare me.”
“And that’s why you ran?”
Touché.
Pat continued, “I’m just here to get a status report on the video.”
“No status.”
“What about Dorothy Flores?”
I started walking. “I need to go buy a new phone.”
Pat followed. “Why?”
“Anonymous.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t worry about it.”