Dark Days of the After Special Edition | Prequel & Book 1

by Schow, Ryan

  To Logan, it was as though the dead rose right into the rejections of God, only to drift back down to earth where they became one with the tainted land—their names, their history and their memories at risk of being lost, stamped into the ground and forever forgotten.

  It was the same thing again.

  The bodies were burning, their remains feathering off his head, settling onto his shoulders, becoming the very ground he walked upon. It sickened him to know the air was full of people who once had names, a purpose for existing, freedom.

  Releasing the tethers on his mind, he let himself drift back to last night’s affair, to the blissful event that still felt impossible, surreal. God, what a night! He kept his smile in check. His eyes, however, softened to the memories. These were memories that would remain with him his entire life. Memories that might even serve as a flame to ward off the darkness.

  He thought of her hair, her skin, the way her bruised, scarred body felt against his. The smile got away from him. But only for a moment. Realizing where he was, he tempered his emotions and made sure he hid most of his face from the street cameras, lest the Chicoms find a way to criminalize the masses for their happiness.

  The smile he had—for the brief moment it existed—was something exceptional. He tried to hold on to that emotion, even as he suppressed it for his own safety.

  Such were the contradictions of life.

  Perhaps his luck was changing, for in the midst of so much ugliness and animosity, he’d managed to grab onto a few precious moments. Moments like these were in short supply. Yet thankfully, he found his.

  Chapter Thirty

  Work was work, except that the body count he was responsible for was nearing serial killer levels. All’s fair in love and war, he told himself.

  Inside the dark, closet-sized office, with the brilliant glow of two monitors taxing his retinas, he watched the split screens intently. There were four different viewing feeds. Two on each monitor. He was now the one watching the watchers. He was the necessary evil.

  There was a lot of sabotage going on in the world today. More than the Chicoms wanted to deal with. Before SocioSphere’s new servers came online, hackers were able to physically attack the system from the inside, burning out so much of the original infrastructure, half the business nearly burnt down.

  That’s why they brought in Ming Yeung. She controlled the watchers, and people like him—the overseers.

  He’d always wondered how many watchers there were. He still didn’t know. Now that he was an overseer, he wondered how many overseers there were.

  Was he the only one? Were there more?

  If he did something out of the ordinary, would Ms. Yeung have something to compare to? Another overseer? Ten more overseers?

  Thinking of Skylar’s message, understanding what he had to do for her, and for the Resistance, he knew there would be considerable risks. He prayed they were worth it. On the upside, at least he had a place in Oregon to bug out to if things went sideways.

  There was just the matter of avoiding custody, or summary execution.

  When it came to SocioSphere and other Chinese tech firms, if you were found working against the state, you were shot dead at your desk. No questions, no warnings. Just a single bullet to the back of the head.

  “You can do this,” he told himself.

  After lunch, mustering up his courage, he went to Ms. Yeung’s office. She looked up, surprised. He rarely set foot in her office. She never asked him there. This was her sanctuary, her way of insulating herself from people like him—white slaves of the corporate and Communist variety.

  “What are you doing away from your monitors?” she asked, peeved.

  “I think I found something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I would’ve called you,” he said to her, conspiratorially, “but this is a…sensitive matter. One best discussed in person.”

  “Time is money,” she said, snapping her fingers.

  “First, no it isn’t. Not now. Second, I think one of the servers has been compromised.”

  “Compromised, how?”

  “How much do you know about the dark web?” he asked.

  “As much as anyone, I suppose,” she said, hinting about how little she knew of it. “I didn’t think it was still active.”

  Now he knew she was clueless.

  “The thing you need to know about the dark web is that if the entire indexed internet burns to the ground, the dark web will survive. That’s how the internet started and that’s how it will forever remain.”

  “Unless the servers are compromised,” she said.

  “No, not the servers,” he said dramatically. “All servers. For the internet you see and know about, the one where each website has a clear, indexed address, there is a single, corresponding server that acts as that website’s home address. This is where all the operational files are stored. All of our files are stored on our main servers downstairs, but also on our backup server location across the city.”

  “So what’s the problem?” she asked, making the “hurry up and tell me” motion with her hands and eyes.

  “To put it as plainly as possible, the dark web uses all available servers as their data points. They aren’t indexed. That means they can hop from server to server using them as they see fit with almost no trace.”

  “Almost?” she said.

  He nodded, then he smiled. “One of my watchers is actually using one of our servers—at least that’s what I suspect based on the data I’m reading—for one of those spots. It’s called an exit relay.”

  This wasn’t one hundred percent accurate, but he didn’t need to go into specifics with Ms. Yeung because she wouldn’t know the difference anyway.

  “So how can you find out?” she said, now interested. “We need to find out.”

  “You need to do a physical inspection at the server.”

  “No way,” she said.

  “Okay,” he replied, acting put out. He looked at her. Eyes flat with a heavy frown. “Whatever happens from this point on is your responsibility.”

  “I know that!” she snapped.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he added.

  “There has to be something else,” she said. “Figure it out.”

  “What suggestion do you have?” he asked, almost thoughtfully, like he’d appreciate her help and guidance.

  “We pay you a lot of money to do this,” she said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “You have better title,” she said, getting frustrated, as evidenced by the degradation of her English.

  “My title doesn’t mean squat if we’ve been penetrated internally.”

  “Your title means you have better ideas,” she said, reaching for something, anything.

  “Ms. Yeung?” he asked, deadpan. “When was the last time you were penetrated? Internally?”

  She looked at him with a dumb look. Almost like she wasn’t sure how to interpret the question.

  “Because last time this happened,” he said, “we almost lost SocioSphere. It was an eighteen year old software engineer who did that. He was brilliant. His hack is the reason you have a job in the first place. It’s how I have a job. We can’t be too hasty or too dismissive…”

  “I’m not hasty,” she said, looking at her computer, arranging a pencil, straightening a stack of papers.

  “With all due respect,” he said, pushing it, “you’re not being hasty enough.”

  Now she leveled him with narrowed eyes, her chin lifting ever so slightly as she studied his features for signs of deception.

  “You want to go to the server room?” she said.

  “I don’t have clearance,” he told her. “That’s why you need to accompany me.”

  “I give you lots of other privileges,” she said. “I tell you that you can surveil their house, their block, you can track their cars, their cell phones…”

  “And I may still need to do this,” he said, gently, “but first I must b
e sure that what we’re looking at is not an anomaly. Can you imagine the embarrassment?”

  She seemed to think about this the way someone who was scared of being wrong thought about things. If she was wrong, if he did what he was planning to do while she was in charge, and that proved treasonous, they’d both be executed.

  Knowing she’d need another nudge, he lowered his voice a touch, softened his eyes and said, “You trusted me to do this job. I need you to trust me now.”

  “I trusted you not to make my life complicated,” she said.

  “No, you trusted me to do my job.”

  “Fine, okay.”

  “This is my job. This is what I need from you. If I get this wrong because you didn’t want to help me do my job, then an innocent watcher could die.”

  “We get another,” she said in poor English.

  “No,” he replied, firm. “Watchers are hard to come by. Harder than finding a software engineer. These people are not replaceable.”

  He couldn’t help thinking how incredibly ugly she was when she made tough decisions. She looked like someone trapped in a room filled with smoke who was both constipated and ready to give birth at the same time.

  “I have to get clearance, it could take days,” she said.

  “We don’t have that,” he told her. “Besides, Ms. Yeung…you’re powerful, in charge of so much around here. If you stopped someone like this, if you saved the company from irreparable harm, this would put you in the favor of your bosses, would it not?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  “It would.”

  “Okay, yes, it would,” she relented.

  “Good, then get your keys, I’m ready now.”

  “What about the entrance log?”

  “For the server room?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He didn’t know there was one, but it made perfect sense. It was a secure room. Not just someplace anyone could enter.

  “If it needed to be erased, and someone did it for you without anyone’s authorization but yours, would that be a problem?”

  He was now tap dancing on thin ice. He was telling her she could be a hero, but she had to trust him and that meant breaking the rules not once but twice.

  “You can do that?” she asked.

  “I am an overseer because I have keys to all the doors in all the digital rooms this company has. When you gave me an updated security clearance, you also authorized me to go where the trail leads.”

  “It lead you here,” she said.

  “Physically,” he replied. “Get your keys, Ms. Yeung. We need to go right now.”

  Reluctantly, she did just that.

  They walked to the elevator bank. He was cool under pressure, but she was sweating bullets. None of this would be necessary if there were a real hack on the servers, but this was for dramatic effect. To see what Skylar needed him to see, Logan had to get access to the server room. This was what Skylar might have died getting to him. The elevator arrived. He let her go inside first.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said.

  They traveled down to the second floor where she accessed the server room, then made a motion for him to enter first. He walked into what looked like some future tech dream land. The sparsely lit room was cool in temperature, and all the servers were putting off a glowing, electric blue hue.

  “This is incredible,” he said in awe.

  “Hurry up.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Having memorized the message under the 9s, the one Skylar left for him under the wallpaper, he went to the server hall’s monitor, accessed the location Skylar provided him and tried to gain entry.

  It asked for a Username.

  From memory, he typed in the one Skylar provided: 27F3Chiquita_272.

  But then it asked for a Password.

  He had not been provided with one. He searched his memory banks trying to remember if there was one on the wall.

  There wasn’t. He typed in Chiquita, but was denied access. After that he used a variation of different passwords. Finally he gave a little laugh and said, “Of course.”

  He typed in Banana, but was then told he had two tries left. His smile became a frown real fast. Wiping sweat from the back of his neck, and from his brow, he started to worry.

  If he failed to get around the ten entry lock down, he would trigger an alarm that the actual IT administrator would need to unlock.

  The next entry, he typed Cheshire.

  That failed, too.

  This had to have been orchestrated by Tristan, otherwise Chiquita wouldn’t be in the password. Tristan was nearly synonymous with banana.

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. If this didn’t work, if he had to run, he could knock out Ms. Yeung then exit the building fast. If he needed to kill the two guards, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d been wanting to do that from day one anyway.

  He typed in DickShapedFruit, and suddenly he gained entry. He blew out his breath, then said, “Okay, I’m in.”

  “What are you looking for?” she said, her arms crossed, that ugly, squinted look on her face again.

  This is where he chose to bowl her over with tech jargon. Knowing this was an area of weakness for her made it easy. “I started out running a sniffer on the network traffic to this server. I was looking for certain, common factors that might provide evidence of TOR traffic on our network.”

  “TOR,” she said. “That’s what they use to surf the dark web, right?”

  “Yes it is. Anyway, I set up a dozen or so customized snort rules, but all that gave me was a bunch of false positives. I started to set up more, but then the search stopped altogether.”

  “Why?”

  “The TOR client generated new, unsigned security certificates. I was able to seize these certificates from the packet payload. From there, I had two choices: Keep the TOR traffic from reaching the exit nodes, or do what I’m doing now.”

  “Which is?”

  “Making sure the TOR traffic is legit.”

  “Can you just block it?” she asked. “We can take care of the problem at the source.”

  “If you block it, you lose the identity of the user and this was all for nothing.”

  “No, we’d have the traitor.”

  “Yes, but he’s one person. A single spoke in a very large wheel. There is a network of these traitors, of the Resistance. If we get to them, perhaps I can do a physical hack, take out his entire network. We can either hit his workstation, his house or his hidden properties.”

  “How do you know about hidden properties?”

  “They all have them. That’s where the gold is, Ms. Yeung. Do you want to make an example out of these people? Or do you want to sweep this under the rug because it’s hard.”

  “Of course I want to fix it right,” she said, as if it was preposterous not to.

  “Then we don’t take down an ant,” he said with that look in his eye, “we step on the entire ant hill. Then we flood it with gas and set it on fire.”

  Now she started to smile.

  “We’ll say we happened upon it,” he suggested, “then you can take the credit.”

  “This is my operation,” she snorted.

  “Naturally.”

  “So how did you find this out?” she asked.

  “I have a packet which jumps from port to port, called port hopping. This is how I make the initial connection with a TOR exit node. Once I make a connection, and this is how I found this particular server, I identify the traffic. It’s TCP/443 and the traffic payload is encrypted. The TOR client then creates a self-signed SSL certificate via a random domain name. It does this every thirty minutes.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  “With all due respect, Ming,” he said, using her first name, “that would be like me asking you how you’re so smart. You’d simply shrug your shoulders and tell me you just are. So to answer your question”—he said, shrugging his shoulders—“this is w
hat I do.”

  “Are you done?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  He sifted through a host of files until he saw the one named Chiquita. He opened the file and filling the screen was a computer countdown. It gave the days, the minutes, the seconds. And at the bottom of the counter, it said, “Time until TED.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  What the hell was a TED? For a long second, his brain was blank, but then it kicked in. This was not a Resistance transmission, this was a Chicom transmission!

  Had he not known about the Chinese ships heading toward Long Beach, California, or the troop movements up through the southern border by South American forces, he might not have put two and two together so quickly.

  The countdown to a TED was now clear. TED stood for Transient Electromagnetic Disturbance, or electromagnetic pulse.

  The Chinese were going to detonate a high altitude EMP, crippling the entire western half of the United States. All they needed was for the South American troops to get within striking range. The pulse would effectively take out all of their hardware, and anything else that ran on solid state electronics. In a nutshell, the Chicoms would turn a mobile army of power hungry Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans and El Salvadorians into a pack of foot soldiers.

  But would that stop them? Probably not. It would certainly slow them down.

  As he committed the looming date to memory, he considered the ramifications. If the Chinese set off an EMP, it would power down the nuclear reactors, forcing the backup systems to come online.

  Those would run out of fuel though, without trucks to transport the fuel they needed to operate in a grid down scenario.

  Within a month, the generators would quit and the rods would melt. Half of America would be a nuclear wasteland. One giant Chernobyl. That’s before the radioactive elements got into the jet stream, crippling, mutating and eventually killing everything in its path.

  Good God, he thought, the blood draining from his face.

  Now he was thinking about those Chinese ships lumbering across the North Pacific Ocean. Where before they brought in trucks, transport vehicles and tanks, now they had to bring in something else. New systems for the remaining generators? Probably. He couldn’t be sure, not without hacking into the shipping companies mainframe and scanning shipping manifests, but an educated guess was warranted. For him to hack the shipping company under the watchful eye of one duck eating Cambodian named Ming Freaking Yeung seemed impossible.