‘Really?’ I said
‘Even half an hour would be stupid,’ said Toby.
‘I could write you a sniffer program in ten minutes flat,’ said Miranda, moving out of the Swooping Goose and into the Squatting Panda.
Problem was, I couldn’t get her to write a sniffer program in ten minutes flat, even if I wanted to. The Debt, and its rules: no help allowed.
‘Maybe they expect you to keep the shells on,’ said Toby. ‘But then they should say that – prawns with shells on!’
‘For chrissakes, Toby, can you stop talking about prawns for five seconds?’ I said.
‘Look who’s talking,’ said Toby. ‘The cross-dresser.’
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘Mom said I could borrow some of your socks, and I found your little number hidden away in your bottom drawer.’
‘My socks are in the top drawer!’
I looked over at Miranda; did she have any idea what he was talking about? No, she was too busy concentrating on the tricky opening to the Irate Macaque.
‘Whatever!’ I said to Toby.
‘Whatever!’ repeated my little brother, and I have to admit he could out-whatever me any day he liked.
He closed the book, got up clumsily from the lounge.
‘Oh yeah, big brother. With your colouring, I’d steer well clear of tartan,’ he said, before he waddled off.
‘Whose network do you want to break into, anyway?’ said Miranda.
‘Nobody’s; it was just a, you know, theoretical question,’ I said.
Miranda smiled a knowing smile. ‘Well, theoretically, there’s a heap of stuff on the net,’ she said, giving me the name of a website.
As I walked back across the lawn, I asked myself if I’d already told Miranda too much. I even took a quick look around, made sure there was no punishment on its way. Then I realised how crazy that was, how I was becoming as paranoid as Gus and Dad. As silly as Gus and Dad. How would they, The Debt, know what I said to Miranda? They weren’t godlike, they weren’t omniscient, able to see everything, hear everything.
‘You good?’ came a voice from behind me.
I spun around. It was Roberto, the non-gardening gardener. It was the first time I’d seen him, up close anyway, since he’d returned the ClamTop.
Unusually he was holding a tool, a pitchfork, its surprisingly sharp prongs glinting in the sun. I stood there, transfixed by them, imagining what damage they could do. To muscle. To tendon. To cartilage. To sinew. To me.
I forced my eyes away and said, ‘I’m good, Roberto,’ before I hurried inside.
Back in my room, I powered up my iMac and went straight to the website that Miranda mentioned. She was right about there being a heap of stuff available. It was like the outraged hackers of the world had risen up and united against the common scourge of the secure wi-fi network. I downloaded a PDF entitled ‘The Secrets of Wi-Fi Hacking’ and began reading.
It started off with a quote: ‘Every matter requires prior knowledge’, attributed to To Fu, a fourteenth-century Chinese warrior king.
Yeah, right on, To Fu!
The opening chapter was all about WLAN and WPAN and WWAN networks, 802.11 and 802.15 protocols, and it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I persevered, though – just as I’m sure To Fu would’ve persevered seven hundred years ago in his quest for prior knowledge – rereading the chapter several times until I thought I knew what it was about.
As soon as I read – or tried to read –the first sentence of the second chapter I knew I was in trouble.
Now you have discovered the closed ESSID, bypassed MAC address filtering, cracked WEP, perhaps circumvented higher-layer defences such as the deployed VPN …
Trouble that even a fourteenth-century Chinese warrior king couldn’t get me out of. I kept reading, though. Kept trying to understand. But the words were no longer making sense, the letters that comprised them squirming like worms. The more I looked, the more I tried to concentrate, the more vigorously they squirmed. Until the whole screen was just compost, a mass of squirming worms.
Who was I kidding?
Me, a hacker? Yeah, sure.
‘Stuff you, To Fu!’ I yelled, and other less polite things.
I slammed the iMac shut. As I did, ClamTop cracked open. The screen flickered into life and the words LOCAL WI-FI NETWORKS appeared at the top of it.
Below it was a list of names, network names.
Some of these I recognised because they were the same local networks that came up on my computer. There were more of them, however, indicating that the ClamTop had a much greater range than it did.
But when I had a closer look at them, it seemed that all the networks belonged to people in Halcyon Grove, so my guess was the range was about two kilometres.
The top one, SILVAGNINET, was our network at home. I could log into that one, because I knew the password, but most of the other networks were locked.
Still, using the tip of my finger I scrolled down the list, highlighting each network in turn, until I came to HAVILLAND, the network in Imogen’s house. There was a little padlock symbol next to it, which meant it was secure. So even if I wanted to join HAVILLAND, I couldn’t, because I didn’t know the password.
‘You’re not so smart after all, are you?’ I told ClamTop.
Immediately, a red cartoon devil appeared in the middle of the screen, clutching a trident. Below it flashed the words cracking password … The devil began dancing, hopping from one cloven foot to the other, thrusting its trident into the air. After about twenty seconds cracking password … became password cracked and the devil had a devilish smile on its devilish face.
Now I could see that there were two computers connected to the HAVILLAND network: MOTHERSHIP and SYLVIA. I knew SYLVIA was Imogen’s laptop because SYLVIA was what she called all her computers. I tapped SYLVIA with my finger. It highlighted. I tapped it again. The screen went black before suddenly coming to life again.
It took me a while to understand what I was looking at. And when I did, I almost had to look away. Because it was a clone of Imogen’s computer, of her desktop!
Photoshop was open, in it a photo taken at what looked like some sort of political rally. People with arms linked, people holding placards. About half of them, starting from the left-hand side of the photo, had coloured faces. I watched as the cursor hovered over another person’s face, watched as this face suddenly turned light blue.
Now I got it: it was the same thing Imogen did with the photos in the newspaper; she was looking for her dad. I continued watching, mesmerised, as the cursor moved on. When she’d finished, when all the faces were different colours, I could feel the tears swimming in my eyes. The photo was so sad, all these people who weren’t her dad, who would never be her dad, no matter how long and how hard she looked, but it was also beautiful, in a weird sort of way.
Imogen closed Photoshop and brought up Windows Mail. Again, I looked away. You have no right to be here, I told myself. You’re a dirty hacker. You’re a perve. But my eyes were drawn back to the screen.
Imogen started typing a new message.
Ruby, I have decided that this email petition I’ve attached is the best way to get them to turn off the lights in Halcyon Grove for Earth Hour, she wrote.
I picked up my phone, scrolled through ‘Contacts’ until I came to Imogen’s number.
My thumb hovered over the dial button.
Should I?
Shouldn’t I?
Should I?
Shouldn’t I?
There was no way I could make a decision, not for something as important as this, so I decided to let somebody else make it for me.
In this case, the fly that was perched on the window ledge.
If that fly moves within the next ten seconds, I’m going to call her.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. The fly lifted its wings.
And flew off, making several buzzing loops before it disappeared outside.
The fly had spoken.
I hit dial.
I imagined Imogen’s phone, on Imogen’s desk, playing Imogen’s favourite ringtone.
And playing.
And playing.
And playing.
The fly had spoken, but the fly was a moron – this was humiliating.
Because I couldn’t say, well, she’s not answering because she’s having a shower, or because she’s having a swim. I knew she was there, checking her emails. No, she wasn’t answering because it was me calling.
The kid who had put Tristan in a coma.
Who hadn’t told her that we’d been shot at.
And then she answered.
‘Hi,’ she said.
Okay, it may not have not been the most enthusiastic ‘Hi’ in the history of ‘Hi’, but it was a ‘Hi’ nonetheless.
And it was an Imogen ‘Hi’, the first one I’d heard in weeks.
‘Hi,’ I said, trying to inject a bit more pep into my ‘Hi’, but that wasn’t easy – it’s always the first ‘Hi’ that sets the tone. ‘It’s great about Tristan, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it’s great,’ she said.
And then there was silence, so I said, ‘I’m thinking of getting a petition up this year about Earth Hour. It was disgraceful what happened in Halcyon Grove last year.’
More silence at the other end, and I wondered if I’d gone in too hard.
But eventually Imogen said, ‘Dom, that is totally freaky! That’s exactly what I was just doing.’
‘No way.’
‘Way,’ she said, and now she sounded like the old Imogen.
‘In that case, can you send the email to me?’
I said. ‘I’m sure it’s better than mine.’
‘Of course.’
When she hung up, I turned my attention back to the screen, to Imogen’s cloned desktop.
The ‘Forward’ button lit up.
I turned to my iMac. Opened Thunderbird, my email client.
Downloading 1 message of 1, it said.
Imogen’s message appeared in the inbox.
I leant back in my seat, arms crossed across my chest. It was starting to dawn on me exactly what I had here, how powerful it was. It was like a Dummy’s Guide to Hacking, except it went out and actually did it for you.
But is that all it can do? Is that all I can do?
I went back to ClamTop, to Imogen’s desktop.
She’d minimised Windows Mail and was now starting on another photo in Photoshop.
Using my finger, I double-tapped the Windows Mail icon. It worked, Windows Mail opened! I maximised it so that it took up the whole desktop. I picked up my phone, rang Imogen again.
She answered with, ‘You again.’
‘Is your computer okay?’ I said.
‘Sure, it’s fine.’
‘And you’re looking at it now?’
‘Dom, I’m looking right at it and it’s totally fine.’
I double-tapped on ‘Compose New Message’.
A virtual keypad popped up on the screen.
‘So it’s not doing weird stuff?’ I said as I tapped my address into the recipient field.
‘The only one doing weird stuff is you,’ said Imogen.
For the message itself, I just tapped in some random stuff.
‘You’re sure?’ I said.
‘Are you okay?’ said Imogen. ‘Has some alien life form taken over your brain or something?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, as I tapped send. ‘Hey, your email petition looks pretty cool.’
I turned my attention to my iMac. Clicked on the ‘Get Mail’. The message from Imogen appeared in my inbox, the random stuff I’d written. It said, Dom I love you.
I felt sort of intoxicated, giddy with the power I knew I now had.
‘So can you sign the petition tonight?’ said Imogen. ‘And then forward it to everybody you know?’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ said Imogen, sounding annoyed. ‘I thought you were going to help me with this.’
‘The lights will go off,’ I said.
‘You should hear yourself, you sound like somebody from a Harry Potter movie.’
‘Trust me, Imogen. They’re going to go off.’
‘Not unless we do something about it, they won’t, Lord Voldemort. And do you know what’s even weirder? You’re the second person today who’s told me not to worry about it, that the lights are going to go off anyway.’
‘Really?’ I said ‘Who was the first?’
‘A man from Fiends of the Earth.’
‘Who the hell are they?’
‘They’re this greenie organisation. I guess you could say they’re pretty radical. They’re the ones that liberated twenty thousand battery hens last year. I rang them up because I thought they’d have experience with setting up email petitions. Anyway, the person on the phone told me not to worry because the lights were going to go out anyway.’
Just then, Imogen’s desktop played a tune. She had mail.
Again, I couldn’t help looking.
I sort of wished I hadn’t.
[email protected] had to be Tristan.
‘So has Tristan signed your petition?’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Tristan?’
‘What made you say that?’
‘Well, he lives in Halcyon Grove, doesn’t he?
I was just wondering if he’d already signed your petition.’
There was silence at the other end, a lot of silence, until Imogen said, ‘Tristan’s just woken up from a coma.’
I looked at the screen, at Windows Mail, at Tristan’s unopened message.
Don’t do it, I told myself.
You’ll regret it, I told myself.
I did it, and I immediately regretted it.
cant stp thnking of u, said the message.
‘Hey, I’ve got to go,’ I said to Imogen.
I hung up. I threw my phone on my bed. Then I threw myself on my bed. And I started crying.
Which seemed pretty ridiculous to me. A tanker had almost turned me into sashimi and I hadn’t even come close to losing a tear.
Yet here I was, a human sprinkler.
There was a knock on my door, but before I could say anything like, ‘Go away!’ or ‘Rack off!’ Miranda entered.
‘How’d you go with that wi-fi thing?’ she said, but as she came closer, she must’ve seen my tear-irrigated face, because she said, ‘Dom, what’s wrong?’
I couldn’t talk to her about The Debt, but this wasn’t The Debt, so it was almost a relief to be able to say, ‘It’s Imogen. Her and Tristan are going out together.’
‘How do you know that?’ she said, kneeling by the side of my bed, putting her hand on my shoulder. ‘Did she tell you?’
‘Not exactly, but I know, okay.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Miranda, and she was quiet.
The slight pressure of her hand felt good, it felt reassuring, and my sprinkler stopped sprinkling.
Eventually Miranda said, ‘I guess the problem with you guys is that you’ve been friends for such a long time and that’s how you think of each other: as friends, not boyfriend and girlfriend.’
‘Then why was I crying?’ I said.
‘Because what you think and what you feel aren’t always the same thing,’ said Miranda.
‘Wow!’ I said. ‘How do you know about this stuff?’
‘Hey, I’m a girl,’ said Miranda. ‘Plus I watch a lot of movies.’
‘So what should I do?’
Again Miranda seemed to take ages to answer. ‘It’s a tough one. Tristan’s a bit of a tool, but Imogen’s got the right to hang with him if she likes. And she probably feels sorry for him, after what he went through.’
You traitor, I thought. This was not what I wanted to hear.
Miranda continued. ‘As far as you and Imogen go, maybe you’ll have to stop being her friend before you can become her boyfriend.’
Again I couldn’t he
lp saying, ‘Wow!’
‘Girl, remember,’ said Miranda. ‘Plus movies.’
THURSDAY
BREAKTHROUGH PIZZA
‘Dom!’ yelled Coach Sheeds through the loudhailer. ‘What the blazes are you doing out there?’
Thinking, that’s what I was doing. ClamTop, for all its extraordinary power, had one major limitation: range.
I’d worked out that the furthest away it could pick up a network was about two kilometres. However, the security fence around the Diablo Bay Power Station was at least five kilometres from the transformer itself. I had to get inside that fence. But how in the blazes – thanks, Coach – was I going to do this? Tunnel under the fence? Parachute over the fence?
‘Dom, pick up the pace!’ loudhailed Coach Sheeds. ‘You’re on sixty-fives!’
We were doing what Coach called ‘anaerobic training’.
Four hundred metres at sixty-five seconds, then two hundred metres of jogging, then four hundred metres at sixty-five seconds again, and so on.
Unfortunately, if you’re training anaerobically, your brain isn’t getting its fair share of oxygen, and you can’t think properly.
So I was taking it easy, running aerobically, diverting oxygen from oxygen-hungry muscles to oxygen-hungry brain.
And Coach Sheeds wasn’t happy.
‘Dom, I said pick it up!’
I did as she asked, I picked it up, lengthening my stride.
Which meant no more thinking.
As I passed Rashid on the bend he said, ‘Pizza!’
And Rashid said ‘Pizza’ in the same way that I imagine a vampire would say ‘Blood’.
‘Pizza!’ I replied, trying to emulate Rashid’s passion, but it was no good. I liked pizza, but I didn’t love pizza, and it showed, because my ‘Pizza’ was nowhere as vampiric as Rashid’s.
We showered and got changed and moved up to the Doug Bonthron Room, named after Charles’s grand-uncle, the one who’d won bronze in the mile at the Auckland Commonwealth Games. The walls were covered in honour boards; there were cabinets full of trophies. Again, the Bonthron name dominated. I wondered if Charles ever felt this pressure, the need to make sure the engraver never forgot how to spell ‘Bonthron’.
Mr Cranbrook, the principal, was already there. Shiny suit. Shiny face. He gave an overenunciated speech in which he talked about the great tradition of distance running at our school. He talked about our achievements. The achievements we were yet to achieve.
Turn off the Lights Page 9