The Hive

by Barry Lyga

  Carson shrugged. “Cassie, I’m a decent hacker, but the OHM people do it 24-7. I mean, they look forward to leap years ’cause they get an extra day at it, you know?”

  “And?” She studied him. Something was bothering him. “What’s your point?”

  He was struggling, but he got it out: “My point is this: Everything you and I figured out just now? About the ghost accounts and all that? If you and I could figure it out from my bedroom, trust me — OHM figured it out, too.”

  “And didn’t tell me.” Cassie’s stomach tightened in something that was decidedly not hunger. “Why?”

  Carson threw his hands up in the universal beats the living hell out of me gesture.

  She rubbed her temples. Every time things seemed to get simpler, there was another complication right around the corner. “I feel like I have to read this message. Is it safe?”

  “Sure is. We’re running a custom VPN.”

  Sounded good to her. She opened the PM. To her surprise, it wasn’t a message but rather a solitary link: https://23462.vidded.fly.

  She glanced nervously at Carson. “Do I click?” She wanted to, but it was his house, his gear, his life. If she somehow led the police or the mob here, it would fall on him just as heavily as on her.

  He poked around with another laptop for a moment, checking some things. “Yeah, that site is encrypted HTTPS backed by RSA keys with 2048-bit modules and SHA-256. It’s solid.”

  She clicked and a video window opened. Bryce, standing somewhere with a brick wall behind him, speaking in a hushed tone, his voice raw and almost inaudible.

  “Cassie, I’m sorry about what happened at the club. Look, I can’t explain too much on vid, even secure vid, but I’m on your side. And @Shameless is trustworthy. I’m not perfect, but I only have your best interests at heart. There are some at OHM who disagree. They want to use you to make a point. You need to run. Go underground. Deep, deep underground. And don’t come up for anything, not even for me. Please listen to me.”

  Then he held up a sheet of paper covered in thick black scrawls. It was only in frame for a second before he pulled it away and the screen went black.

  They both stared at the screen and then Cassie noticed something. With a cry, she shoved Carson out of the way and started banging on the keyboard.

  “What the hell!” Carson complained.

  “There’s a timer!” she told him, not bothering to gesture. She needed both hands on the keyboard. Up in the upper left corner, a dark gray timer ticked down against the black background. Cassie had only seconds to download the video to Carson’s hard drive.

  youtube-dl didn’t work, even though Carson had it installed. She tried the command line and some curl action, but that didn’t work either. They needed that video or at least a frame of it.

  The counter had ten seconds left to go, and there was a speck of dust on the screen that was driving Cassie crazy. She lifted her hand from the keyboard for a precious half second and wiped at the speck. It stayed where it was.

  Not a speck. A pixel. A light gray pixel in the midst of the black.

  She clicked right on the pixel and a menu popped up. DOWNLOAD was one option. With a cry of triumph, she clicked on it and watched a spinning circle conjure itself. Moments later, she had the video on Carson’s hard drive.

  She sighed in relief and rocked back on her heels. Carson put a hand over his chest. “I don’t think my heart can take much more of this,” he told her.

  “I hear you.” She gestured for him to take over. “Bring up that frame with the paper.”

  He did so. “It’s just scribbles, and it’s only on camera for a second. What’s the big deal?”

  Go underground, he’d said. Her first reaction was Hell, no. There was nowhere to go underground. For one thing, she couldn’t hide forever; eventually the mob would find her. For another, she didn’t know how to go underground, and the only people who could have helped her — OHM — were …

  Were …

  She pointed to the pattern on the screen. “It’s sort of like a hand-drawn QR code,” she told Carson. The memories flooded in along with sudden understanding. “I saw them at OHM, painted on the walls. Didn’t realize what they were at first.”

  Carson sat forward eagerly. “Got it. Steganography. How do we decode it?”

  “Not sure. Like I said, I didn’t realize what they were until just now.”

  Carson blew out a long breath. “Well, we can try light filters, color filters …” Even as he spoke, he brought up a series of Photoshop documents with layers of differing levels of opacity and color temperature. He overlaid the coded image onto the documents, looking for anything that would jump out under the new “lighting.” But there was nothing.

  They spent the better part of an hour trying every filter they could think of, running the code under blue, red, yellow and more, then applying Gaussian blurs, unsharp masks, circular halftones … Nothing resulted in anything more than a jumbled mess.

  “We’re going about this all wrong,” Cassie said. “He did this by hand. With a marker. He didn’t have fancy filters with him. It has to be simple. We’re making it too complicated.”

  “A guy named Red Dread shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near magic markers,” Carson said.

  Cassie permitted herself a small smile, remembering her run across campus with Bryce, their jump into the maintenance tunnels. The climb to OHM.

  “He’s not so bad,” she said, as he fiddled with the image a bit more.

  “If he freehanded it, then there can’t be anything precise about the placement of the lines.”

  “Well, if it’s not about precision, then maybe it’s about —” She broke off. “Maybe it’s something we can’t see, but the computer can.”

  “We already tried a million different —”

  “No. Is there a way to search for a color?” She’d never used any sort of graphics software before, other than applying filters to selfies and occasionally whipping up a diptych to post.

  “Sure.” Carson shrugged. “But it’s all black.”

  “To us it’s black. But maybe there’s something we can’t see. Something … red.”

  Carson’s eyes widened. “As in Red Dread. Got it.”

  He moused around for a moment and then said, “Yasss!”

  There on the screen was a subtle pattern of red dots, so small and so dark that to the naked eye they just blended in. But the computer was able to pick them out. Bryce had drawn his thick black morass of lines and curls and whorls, then gone back with red and put in the dots.

  “Simple substitution cipher,” Carson scoffed. A few moments later, he read out, “ ‘Meet us at …’ So all that stuff about ‘go deep underground …’ ”

  “He’s assuming someone else will see the video.”

  Carson checked the rest of the dots. “OK, he’s setting up a meeting. But ‘us’?”

  “Him and Alexandra, probably.”

  “We’re not going, right?”

  Cassie patted him on the shoulder. “You haven’t hung out with me enough. I always do the really stupid thing.”

  100102600101

  Cassie let Carson go first. He insisted. She was glad for the sudden burst of boy bravado, because as much bravery as she was projecting, she was still the one living with a hashtag death sentence, and going inside an old storage unit felt like surrender.

  So Carson went first, something of a strut to his walk. They were in a place that even the locals would have called “the bad part of town,” delivered there by a circuitous route of buses, ride shares and three harrowing blocks of walking. With her mask on, Cassie felt somewhat protected, and with Carson at her side she felt even better. But she knew that she would never again feel 100 percent safe anywhere, under any circumstances.

  She found a shadow outside the storage unit and made herself sma
ll under its cover. A pale half-moon hung above her. The building was a giant concrete cube with peeling, faded orange doors. A rickety chain-link fence ran the perimeter of the property and rattled like ghosts every time someone in the same zip code breathed in its direction. Cassie found a spot under a burned-out lamppost and startled every three seconds when the fence made its discordant music.

  Carson had entered the unit labeled 24 a full minute earlier. They had agreed that she was not to come in until she heard him say the name Jef Raskin, the man who had pioneered the original Macintosh project a billion years ago. If she heard anything else — or if three minutes passed — she was to run like hell.

  They hadn’t discussed to where. There was no point. Nowhere was safe for long.

  Another twenty seconds passed and then Carson poked his head out of the storage unit. Somewhat reluctantly, he said, “Jef Raskin.”

  Inside was better than out. Cassie felt less exposed, less endangered, even though Alexandra Pastor was standing right there, next to Bryce, the two of them looking like the oddest power couple in the world.

  “I don’t like that he’s here,” Carson grumbled. “And I like even less that she’s here. But they’re alone and they surrendered their phones, so we’re as safe as can be. For now.”

  Cassie put a hand on his elbow by way of thanks, or maybe to help remind her she wasn’t totally alone. She wanted to do more. Hug him, maybe; hold him. Let him hold her. That would be … “Nice” felt like too small a word for it, but also too much to let herself hope for.

  She faced Bryce first, then flicked her eyes to Alexandra. “Go ahead,” she told them. “You have my attention.”

  After a moment’s hesitation and a glance at Alexandra, Bryce spoke first. “Cassie, I had nothing to do with what went down at the club. I was just as surprised as you. Someone named @Sarah —”

  “I know,” she interrupted. “But what were you doing? Who were you talking to?”

  Bryce had the good grace to blush a bit and look away. “Look … I didn’t have a choice. That guy was with OHM. But not on your side. Our side,” he corrected. “There were two factions, but they were both playing nice. You had people like TonyStark and Tish, who really wanted to help you. And then you had other people, who … They were figuring out how to use you, to turn you in to the authorities or toss you out to the Hive in exchange for getting their own records clear. I was protecting you. I had to get him out of there before he could do or say anything. Believe me or don’t, but I’m on your side, Cassie. Always have been.”

  She turned that over in her head for a moment. She remembered the vote to keep her in OHM. How there’d been a group dead set against it who had come around. But they hadn’t come around, had they? They’d just realized that they could benefit by having Cassie at hand. Of course there were people who wanted to use her at OHM. Of course. Everyone was trying to use her. And she wasn’t going to stand for it any longer. “And you?” she asked Alexandra.

  Alexandra shrugged. “I’m on the side of what’s right. When we first set up the Hive, I thought it was the right thing to do. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve seen how it can be manipulated —”

  “Can be?” Cassie arched an eyebrow.

  Alexandra sucked in a breath. “Yeah, okay. How it is manipulated. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. You shouldn’t die, Cassie. You probably shouldn’t even be higher than, say, Level 2. The whole thing got out of hand.” She clucked her tongue. “We’re a species that has built technologies —”

  “— that we’re not mature enough to handle,” Cassie finished for her. Harlon had said it all the time.

  Pastor smiled sadly. “I miss your dad, kid.”

  “Fuck you.” Cassie’s voice was low, tense, her eyes shining. “He was just a code jockey to you. He was my world.”

  A cold moment passed between them, and then Alexandra nodded slowly. “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Bryce stepped into the breach, holding out a USB key shaped like Superman. “This is the encrypted data dump Alexandra was led to.”

  Alexandra grabbed Bryce’s wrist, but it was too late; he’d already handed it off to Cassie, who took a careful step back.

  “We don’t need your help,” Carson shot from behind Cassie. “We have our own evidence.”

  “What are you doing?” Alexandra demanded, her voice trembling. “You can’t give that kind of data away! We don’t know what’s in it. I could be exposed!”

  Bryce made a show of dusting off his hands. “Don’t care. I’m sorry and thanks for your help, but this has gone too far.”

  Fuming, Alexandra turned her attention back to Cassie. “Cassie, please listen to me. I know the temptation you’re feeling right now. You want to tear it all down. Burn it to the ground. But the system is fragile and you need to consider —”

  “Your asshole cops are holding my mom. They’re gonna lock her up forever for the crime of helping me. I don’t give a good goddamn what happens to the system at this point.” She held up the Superman key. “This is her way out.”

  “What are you going to do? Blackmail the federal government? Even assuming you could decrypt the data in the first place.”

  “The color is the code,” Cassie told her. “You said that before. That’s the decryption key, right? I’ll work it out.”

  Alexandra hiccuped a laugh. “You’ll work it out, will you? Yeah, colors have something to do with the encryption key. We think it’s about the hexadecimal codes for web-safe colors. String ten of them together and you have a nice sixty-character string.”

  “Great. I’ll figure it out.”

  “No, you won’t. There are 216 web-safe colors, Cassie. Do you know how many possible combinations of ten that means?” When Cassie said nothing, Alexandra went on: “It’s something like one-point-seven-one-four times ten to the twenty-third power. In other words, quadrillions of possibilities. Have fun breaking that.”

  Cassie swallowed. If she thought about the enormity of it, she would fumble. So she pushed Alexandra’s words away and replaced them with her dad’s: The point of it all, Cassie, is to see if you can trick a machine into telling you the answer. Harlon wouldn’t be staggered by this. He’d think it was fun, a challenge.

  “You don’t know what you’re up against,” Alexandra continued. “You have no idea.”

  Cassie trained her eyes on Alexandra, pausing just long enough for a glimmer of concern to flash in her eyes. “I have a perfect idea. Whether I can crack into this thing or not, it doesn’t matter. We already have a lot of evidence and we’ll put all of it out on the internet and show people just how corrupt the system really is.”

  There was silence for several heartbeats, and then Alexandra started laughing.

  It wasn’t a tinkly little chuckle, either. The sound of it made Cassie start to wilt before snapping her back into a fighting stance.

  “Hey!” Cassie shouted. “Hey! What’s so damn funny?”

  “You’re so notorious that I forget you’re still a kid,” Alexandra said, wiping tears from her eyes. “You think you can just post some kind of manifesto online and people will rally to you? Come on.”

  Cassie clenched her fist around the USB key. She did think that. And she was counting on it. But she wasn’t about to let Alexandra know it. She stuck out her chin. “No. There’s more to it.”

  As though she’d said nothing, Alexandra just kept on talking. “I’ll tell you how it will play out, OK? Save you some effort. You put up the data and you post a video somewhere to get people to look at it. The first thing that happens is everyone spends a day parsing the video to try to figure out where you recorded it and where you might be. The data gets skipped over because it’s ugly and complicated and boring. There’s no entertainment value to it.

  “At some point, a couple of serious people actually start to dig into the data. But we’re not idiots, Cassie.
We’ve been doing this for a while. There’s a lot of misdirection in that data. The ghost accounts aren’t truly intelligent, but they’re not stupid either.

  “So now you get ‘we said / she said.’ You’ll have dueling experts and conspiracy theories, but no justice, no peace, no respite. No freedom. By the time anyone actually realizes you’re right, you’ll be dead, and your mom will be in a maximum security facility in Colorado.” Alexandra folded her arms over her chest. “And that’s how your scenario will play out.”

  “Bullshit,” Cassie said automatically. But she didn’t believe herself. What Alexandra had said had the ring of truth to it. Inside, she deflated. Was there no way out?

  “Cassie’s the most famous person in the country right now,” Carson said, rallying. “People will listen.”

  Alexandra shook her head. “Most infamous. There’s a difference. That colors the perception of what she puts out there. It’ll seem self-serving. No one will take any of that evidence at face value. Listen to me, Cassie,” she said, leaning close with urgency. “There’s another way. If you can do something that gets people’s attention, something that could change people’s minds, even a little bit, I promise you I’ll amplify it on my end.”

  “With more ghost accounts?”

  Alexandra nodded. “And that’s not the only trick in our book. Your mom has lit a spark online. She’s got some people in her corner and in yours. I’ll push on my end and thanks to the groundwork she’s laid, it’ll look organic and believable.” She inclined her head toward the Superman key. “Don’t be stupid. Your father knew when to be a sledgehammer —”

  “— and when to be a drill.” Cassie bristled. “Seriously, stop quoting my own father to me.”

  Holding up both hands, palms out, Alexandra agreed. “Sorry. Won’t happen again.”