I’d just hooked up with Angel online, when Dad appeared at the door again and even earlier than usual.
‘As El’s sleeping over at Gran’s, how about a grown-ups’ cinema trip?’
‘I’ve got work to do,’ I said, lying in bed with my laptop – no textbook, no exercise book, no calculator, no pen.
‘Come on, Dan. Thursday’s a great night to go out. Early start to the weekend,’ said Dad.
Nothing I said made any difference to my cheery parents so I dragged myself downstairs and we trotted off to see a film about all the rich people living in a space station and all the poor people left behind dying of disease and dirt. They’d used that plot device where a computer deciphers the combination of a locked door in no time at all. I could point out the rest of the film’s flaws, but won’t – only the popcorn and bucket-size Coke were any good.
On Friday I skipped school. A reward. What for?
– for Ty finally coming home on Thursday afternoon. He kept being sick whenever he ate anything so had to stay in despite the successful peeing
– for three nights of behaving like the parents’ idea of a ‘normal’ teenager
– and because I was determined to find the right historical recordings and see where the van went even though navigating the inter-satellite handover wasn’t easy. The data files were huge and I was worried they might be erased at any moment.
I was deep in code when Angel appeared, and lured me away.
We chatted while we played GTA V. Thanks to our aimbots, we couldn’t miss. The other players got more and more frustrated, which upped the enjoyment level.
Angel was impressed with a capital I at what I’d done:
great job KP
And chuffed that it was his comment that had made me have a go at the reconnaissance satellites in the first place:
id better watch what i say – jump in a lake – funny me!
And ‘amazed’ when I said I had the controls on my iPhone so I could manipulate the live feed. I don’t know why – that was the easy bit.
I told him about Ty’s recovery too:
he was lucky – he said.
he was unlucky actually – I replied.
true
And I explained the running water trick to help him pee.
LTS – he replied. (Laughing to self, for recluses living in igloos.)
I went out before Mum and El came home, same routine as before.
‘How was your day, Dan?’ asked Mum as I wandered back in fifteen minutes later.
‘Good. But I’ve got coursework to do.’ The magic word. And a lie.
‘That’s a bit much when they know you’re off on the geography trip on Sunday.’
I’d repressed all knowledge of the impending trip, even though I’d heard it mentioned around school. Some kids were actually excited!
‘I’ll get it done,’ I said, ‘but don’t expect to see me apart from meals. Too much to do.’
Mum nodded, pleased with my mature attitude to work.
‘I’ll do your packing,’ she said. ‘They sent the kit list with the letter.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, already picturing the tidy layers, including waterproof trousers that would never get worn. I’m a jeans and hoodie sort. Blue or black. Trainers – white. Full stop. Don’t care what other people wear. (Soraya’s boy-band boy wears falling-down rust chinos, T-shirts with collars and Vans. It’s like his sister’s dressed him.)
As I was going to be out of my den for two whole days on the trip and had schoolwork to do, the parents relaxed the routine and left me alone. Perfect. More time to play with the network of American spy satellites. Knowing I’d be offline from Sunday helped me concentrate. Plotting the van’s route by joining the feeds using GMT and GPS co-ordinates was fiddly, and took ages, but gradually I pieced it all together. When I finally saw the guilty van park, the disappointment was difficult to deal with. The driver reversed the van into a space between two other vans, in a row of fifteen identical (from above) vans, and a column of six. He got out and walked to a warehouse building near Avonmouth docks. I Googled it – a van rental place. My hopes that he’d parked on his own drive, I’d call the police anonymously from a pay phone, and he’d be arrested, were dashed. I was gutted. He’d ended his journey in just about the most anonymous spot in the South West. I hated him even more, if that was possible.
For no reason I watched the rest of the recording, and saw men walk to and from vans, and a woman park and enter the building, and more vans and drivers come in and go out. And as watching people was weirdly compelling, I went back into the live feed and tried to track Soraya – see if she was with the ‘boy’. (To be clear, I wasn’t obsessed with her, but the task. I could have tracked our neighbour’s Labrador just as happily.)
My phone was a bit small for fine control so I transferred the functions to my laptop and used the keyboard. Soraya wasn’t anywhere to be seen but I had a good nose around Bishopston. Some hours went by, with a short break for chilli con carne, and another one for teeth-cleaning – dupes the parents into thinking I’m going to bed.
I was reading a thread about the developers slowing down time on EVE during its ‘largest ever battle’ when Angel joined in. I’d been thinking about hacking the website for the residential centre in the unpronounceable place in West Wales where we were going to stay and declaring it closed, or attacking the school email and cancelling the trip, so I shared my ideas with him. His reply came hurtling back:
morons like you are the reason society wants to control us, you should drown in a bog in Wales
It was clearly the wrong Angel. It’s funny how complete strangers can say what the hell they like online but wouldn’t do it to your face. I replied:
I have reported you to the moderator as you have explicitly threatened me with bog-drowning
I left and went in search of the right Angel, wondering why he’d chosen one of the most common handles, excluding DarkStar and Joker.
When I found him, he had another idea that could scupper my trip.
damage the power supply – he typed.
easier said than done – I replied.
are you saying KP isnt as skilled as he thinks he is
this King Penguin can’t be bothered – why are you Angel?
got wings – he typed.
can you fly?
duh
The chat had hardly got going when Angel suggested we meet at IRC channel #angeldust. I was going to query it but he’d gone. Two seconds later I’d found it. Twenty minutes later I got past the virtual locked door (via a virtual window of course) and entered his private club. It was, if I’m truthful, thrilling. I was in the equivalent of a gangsters’ den. (A virtual one.) (I repeat – online in your bedroom it’s hard to believe you’re affecting things in the real world.) They were elite hackers, doing stuff. Premiership level. I was careful not to act like a script kiddie. Avoided using acronyms or lame ‘l33t sp3ak’. They made it clear – the ten other members of the closed group – that I was a visitor. Angel clarified the situation.
unless you pass a test
You’d think initiations would be too much of a cliché but clearly hackers share a mindset with street gangs. I had no idea what the geek equivalent of demanding you murder a rival gang member was …
like what? – I wrote.
we’ll have to come up with something LTS
End of subject, because they had something else to talk about. Angel’s group was building a botnet.
I’ve got 3832 bots and counting – that was Expendable.
It takes time to get enough bots to launch a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). It’s a hacker’s brute force way of paralysing a site. Anything can be taken down, from Vodafone – no top-ups, no phone buying, to Man United – no ticket sales, no new, shiny strip for your football-crazy son’s birthday. Basically you get Mrs Naïve Computer User to open an attachment, like a YouTube video with the title ‘The Dramatic Moment When …’ but there’s a vi
rus in the link, or you get them to visit an infected website. Either way, hey presto, their computer is part of the botnet. Repeat this twenty thousand times and you’ve got yourself a decent size botnet. When the botmaster activates the virus, whatever site he’s targeted goes kaput! It’s the virtual equivalent of trying to get all the passengers on the Titanic into the lifeboats.
You need to bring 5000 – Angel.
I have over 5000 – Anaconda.
good job – Angel.
do I get my points? – Anaconda.
yep – Angel.
Anaconda disappeared at that point.
Seemed like collecting 5,000 bots might be my ‘initiation’.
who’s the target? – I typed.
wait and see – Angel liked to be in control.
It didn’t stop the others discussing who deserved a DDoS. I wasn’t that interested so while they dissed eBay, Facebook, Amazon, Ask.fm … I played a few rounds of Counter Strike on my computer – they’ve got an anti-cheat system that’s fun to dodge.
When Angel left the channel, I did too. I had a poke around GCHQ, ‘Government Communications Headquarters – keeping our society safe and successful in the internet age’, wondering how easy it might be to find my way inside.
I’ve got no idea when I went to bed but I remember thinking, maybe for the first time, that a group of hackers could cripple anything – the National Grid, the cooling towers in a nuclear plant, air-traffic control. I should have been terrified by the prospect, but I think, if I felt anything, it was probably excitement.
12
By ten o’clock Sunday morning I was on a coach heading for a foreign country where every sentence goes up at the end. I sat on my own near the front. The back was noisy, and I wanted to sleep. It was a three-hour journey with one loo stop in the middle – that was when my peace was interrupted.
‘Can I sit here?’ said Ruby – a girl from the other class that I had never looked at, spoken to or sold stolen credit to.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘I feel a bit sick.’
I budged right over and pressed myself against the window. Just kidding!
‘Don’t worry, I’ll aim for the aisle,’ she said.
‘Make sure you do.’
We sat in silence.
‘Look! A red kite,’ she said, leaning across me and pointing.
‘Sure it’s not a blackbird?’ I said, squinting. That was all it took to get us chatting.
‘I’m going to work outside – something to do with wildlife, and never ever wear a suit. What about you?’
I shrugged. But as her face seemed to want an answer I said, ‘Game developer, maybe.’
‘You mean computer games?’
‘Well, I don’t mean Monopoly.’
‘I like Monopoly,’ she said.
We really had nothing in common. That didn’t stop us talking all the way to Cardigan Bay. We covered immigration, Britain’s Got Talent, coursework versus exams and favourite sandwich. (Me – bacon and cheese on white. Her – cheese, jam and lettuce. Yuck!)
Ruby was a good name for her because her hair was red, not post-box red obviously, but the colour they call red which is actually copper or maple or marmalade.
‘I heard about the phone thing,’ she said.
I blushed. Not because I cared, but because she obviously did.
‘I did it to be kind,’ I said, wondering why I was justifying myself. ‘To start with, at any rate.’
She made a disbelieving face.
I carried on, pathetically trying to convince her that I wasn’t the gangster she thought I was. (Forget Angel’s den for now.)
‘If you did it to be kind, why did you take a cut?’
‘I had to charge for my time,’ I said. I sounded vile even to myself.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me what you do,’ she said.
I hoped that wasn’t true because in the hour it took to get from Llllwyngogogcanwyn services, or whatever it was called, to the Riverside Centre, I’d fallen for her. I had two days to change her mind about me.
13
The gods were in my corner. Straight after lunch we were put into groups and yes, I was with Ruby. Even better, I had no rivals for her attention because we were with Aiden, Harry, Scarlett and Shula. Teachers are so predictable – sprinkle the idiots and terrorists in with the dull and the diligent and every group will get some sort of results and there won’t be any incidents. (Bear in mind, the teachers didn’t know about my extra-curricular talent – I scraped in as diligent.)
Ruby and I sorted out the work between us, and to be fair, the others were willing enough helpers, happy to not have to think. Scarlett produced the neatest table of results of all the groups although if you’d asked her she couldn’t have told you what any of it meant. I tried to win Ruby over by being polite, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, funny etc. By teatime she was sick of me.
‘Are you trying to impress me?’ she asked as I walked with her to the girls’ block.
‘No,’ I said, too quickly.
‘Only I’d prefer it if you were normal,’ she said.
‘I can be that,’ I said, smiling like a bad salesman.
‘And not a hacker.’ I didn’t like the face she made. Like I was a cheese and onion burp.
‘Hacker’s just a word,’ I said, not really knowing what I meant.
‘See you.’ She opened the door to her building and disappeared.
She sat at a different table from me for tea, was put in a different team for charades, and the next day all the groups had to split in two, one to experiment and the other to record observations. Some bright spark in our group decided to divide by gender. The boys got the job of wading around in the water, the girls did the timing and the distance. By lunch, Aiden, who is small and insignificant, was freezing.
‘I’ve got another fleece if you want it.’
‘Thanks, Dan,’ he said.
I was going to go and get it but he tagged along.
‘Do you think the results we’re getting are all right?’ he asked.
If I’d been with anyone else I’d have laughed. Who cares? But there was something about him shivering that brought out my previously unseen compassionate side.
‘Yes, they’re fine. The flow is bound to be faster …’ I reeled off the basics.
He had more questions – they lasted us all the way back to the canteen so I ended up sitting on my own with him, talking geography. Yippee! Two saddos together.
‘I really get it now,’ he said. ‘Thanks, and for this.’ He looked down at his own body, swamped by my black fleece.
‘It’s fine, Aiden.’ It wasn’t like people were queuing up to sit by me.
He was like a different person in the afternoon. Not only did he actually speak and laugh, but he volunteered for all the tasks.
‘What did you do to him at lunch?’ said Ruby while I was packing up the equipment.
I was going to say, ‘Gave him a legal high’ but managed to divert my tongue halfway through and say, ‘a little help.’
Mr Richards came over and interrupted us. Damn!
‘Dan, I noticed you giving Aiden a hand. Really good to see.’
He walked back to the block with me.
For the teambuilding quiz in the evening they picked the names out of a hat (except it was a bucket) – no luck there. Shame, I was hoping to build on the tiny bit of goodwill I’d detected from Ruby. Instead I concentrated on winning, which we did.
The coach ride home was my last chance. I got on early and chose a seat near the front but Ruby sat with Amelia, two seats ahead on the opposite side. I studied her (while talking to Aiden – my new BFF). It’s weird what attracts you to one person and not another. She kept tucking her hair (which, unlike all the other girls’, stopped at her shoulder, not her bum) behind her ear and letting it slip through her fingers, and tilting her head a lot. Her sleeves were too long – that looked cute, even though she picked her nails.
It wo
uld have been over before it had begun, but the bus arrived back as school was chucking out so I confided in Joe and Ty (who’d come in for a half day).
‘No chance,’ said Ty. ‘She’s not the sort to go out with someone like you.’
The head injury hadn’t made him any nicer.
‘Meaning?’
‘You’re bad news, Dan.’
‘You could ask her to go for hot chocolate and explain,’ said Joe.
‘Explain that I stole lots of dosh by hacking?’
‘Explain that you don’t do it any more, because it was wrong. You’ve seen the error of your ways. You’re a new, and better, version.’
As if that was going to work …
The next day, when I spotted Ruby in the corridor outside her classroom, I gave it a go anyway.
‘Come with me for a hot chocolate after school … or a milkshake. I want to explain about the phone thing. Please.’
‘Get lost,’ said Amelia.
‘I will, if Ruby tells me too.’
I wanted to make my eyes huge and sad like the cat in Shrek but she’d said she liked me normal so I didn’t.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘To shut you up.’
Now I wanted to make my eyes mean and squinty to frighten Amelia, but I didn’t do that either. I did, however, do an involuntary skip after I turned the corner. I was turning into someone from Mary Poppins.
The thing with Ruby could have saved me. I wanted to be with her. She didn’t want me to be involved with anything illegal. Ergo, stop the hacking, get the girl. And that was how it was for a while. (Almost.)
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