Black Teeth (5 page)

‘Working.'

Her eyes fill with pity and I bite my lip. Always I'm making this mistake—thinking she wants me to ask her out but when I do she turns me down. At first it left me red-faced and sleepless, but I've gathered over time that she only wants me to work a little harder.

‘Um…Wednesday?'

And she looks at the roof in hectic thought.

‘I think that's okay. I'll let you know.'

‘Great.'

She makes a face at the rain.

‘How rude is this?'

‘Yeah,' I say. ‘I'm freezing. I've got to get inside.'

‘Fine then. See ya.'

And bang, she's gone. Like she can take a hint. I knew as I said the words that they would have that effect but they were out before I could stop. Now I'm the one filled with pity as I unlock my front door. Marnie's had a lot of friends abandon her in her life and I suppose you can see why—she's as defensive as the Battlestar Galactica and I'm just as bad. We're two weirdos staring at the business end of our twenties and we communicate in tortured allusions: she sends up smoke signals, I answer in semaphore. And our respective hints
that we want to be vulnerable, that we want more than to merely catch each other coming home to our separate flats, they're like tiny planets in a big solar system: they only align every one hundred and fifty-seven years.

We'll go out on Wednesday, to the pizza place across the street where no matter how often we go the owner never seems to recognise us. Where he puts too much garlic into everything and his two teenage kids don't want to work there but they do. I'll order the bolognese pizza because I love all that garlic and Marnie the capricciosa because she long ago dispensed with being dainty around me. Then we'll come back to her place and talk and dance the Fear of Rejection until I realise it's not going to happen tonight, and I'll hug her and come home. And this is all to say: I'm looking forward to it.

6

I fasten my two deadlocks and the deadbolt and switch on the heater and hang up my coat which is damp from having borne the brunt of the outside world. Now it can bear the brunt of this miracle heating unit that gets up to speed in seconds and which prompted me to rent this flat a year ago, during the coldest month in Melbourne since they bothered keeping records. Of course, records topple so often now they can probably go back to not bothering.

When the property agent demonstrated this wall-mounted godsend I thought the landlords had made a mistake. Who spends this kind of money on a rental? In her skirt and high heels, the agent seemed to have left home wholly unprepared for the bitterness outside, and while she claimed to be from Dunedin and therefore immune to the kind of cold you git un Milbun she was more than happy to hover and feel that giant engine summon heat from thin air and blast it in our faces like a merciful and life-affirming car exhaust.

Which meant that, for five minutes, I had to make small talk as Robert Lavigne, trainee engineer at Jetstar Australia.

There wasn't much else to attract to me to this block, where all the common areas are outdoors, built of sparse concrete and decorated with little more than council bins. Where the body corporate exists in name only and the residents walk around with that look on their face like they
know
this is a halfway house for singles and migrants. After Mum died, I had the money for a classier flat. I had the money for a house. But I'm in this place with this heater and this heater makes this place a womb.

The display comes to life at the first breeze of warmth like a chipmunk waking in the spring. It requests access to the server,

which then sends my phone the response code. I log in, delete the message, return to the kitchen for a handful of chips.

When I glance across the room at the terminal, I don't see what's happened. Despite how this is what I'm looking
for
, I don't see it. Clueless, I fill the kettle and rinse a mug.

Already my mind has switched from Wednesday's pizza with Marnie to what's occupied it every day for months: the true purpose of Thruware.

‘Thruware' is a working title. I'm considering a catchier name like ‘Bloodhound' or ‘Aardvark'. It's a new script designed to expedite brute force attacks and rainbow tables and it automates the doxing process to Swedish levels of standardisation. Only certain applications are vulnerable, but if they are then I can raid the datacentre without leaving so much as a timestamp.

Writing and installing this kind of program isn't illegal. People all over the world have programs installed, like say the late great Low Orbital Ion Cannon, because it makes them feel like edgelords and true life genuine AnRkists, but they'd never actually launch it. It's once you
launch
it, once it leaps the node and merges with the traffic that you officially become a criminal. Chalk it up as one more mark against my name when the party van knocks on the door.

Why I'm not worried about the party van is: no one knows about
Thruware. I've never sold it or uploaded it. It has no online status whatsoever, and the Federal Cyber-Crime Department can't scan for what they don't know about.

Also, that they call themselves the Cyber-Crime Department is another reason I'm not worried.

Right now Thruware exists only in this room, is known only to me, and only operates through a secure server and a host of skeletons. I've disguised it with enough nonsense script that even I wouldn't know it if I stumbled on it. But I've left traces of the source code here and there when it hasn't been too risky, tweaked to be rendered useless, and probably the single greatest achievement of my life is that these traces were identified and labelled Ducnet on
rollerbrain.com
and entered into Wikipedia as ‘most likely malware developed by the US military to interrupt the timing systems used in rogue nuclear programs'. That's seriously what it says. The moment I read that, it was like a nerd orgasm.

Ironically, Ducnet, otherwise known as Thruware, otherwise known as Bloodhound or Aardvark, has only ever been used to track down photographs of job candidates doing bucket bongs on Instagram accounts they thought they'd deleted.

But in fact Thruware was written with another project in mind, one it began weeks ago, which is wholly separate from my
job
job and which it completed today. And here's me, I didn't even notice when I looked at the displays.

Rain pummels the window, harmonises with the escalating kettle. I'm about to wash a second mug, an activity I call ‘cleaning up', when all of a sudden I feel compelled to check the terminals again. This is not a sixth sense, merely the unease I get when I'm not at my desk.

The kettle in the kitchen is screaming. I don't hear it because of what's onscreen:

Below it, in green text against the black of the Thruware interface, in a living room blasted by heat, in a block of flats where all of the residents live alone, in what must be the coldest, bitterest suburb of all of Melbourne, shine eight green numerals:

They settle in my brain and I look to my phone, feel the urge to dial the number, as strong as the urge to answer when it rings.

But I don't.

The kettle clicks off. The chair sighs slowly as I sit.

The mad thing I do next is write the number down on a post-it note, in case a power surge wipes it out somehow, or I lose my connection
and
the back-up connection
and
the script corrupts. Then I check I've written it down correctly. Then I look back through the query fields to be sure I didn't error there, that this is what it claims to be. But of course it is. I spent months curating the fields for just this reason—so I would know the number was right if it ever showed up all coy and unassuming in the bottom left corner of my display.

From the home screen it's clear that the target application was Roadside Samaritan, one of eighty-seven granddaddy datacentres that Thruware can exploit because some IT guys don't get paid enough to salt their hashes. To find out more I have to launch the botlog.

20120713 10:24:37:59 L2TP traffic for gy7, interface: 9, protocol: 0, privateRoute: 9 :)

20120713 10:24:37:59 Connect: iii/ <-> address added. Destination: 19.24.78.92 :)

20120713 10:24:37:71 traffic hold. Exploit commenced. DNS address. 45.990.00 :)

20120713 10:24:37:88 traffic clearing for gy8, interface: 9, protocol: 0, privateRoute 9 :)

20120713 10:24:38:06 traffic filter cancelled, exploit resolved, retrieval p07::%lo07, link#1 :)

I know it's kind of douchey to generate a smiley face at the end of every active line of response code, but the log is UTC divided into milliseconds, which means millions of entries, and I don't have to sort them if I can just search for the smileys.

Reviewing the botlog is, usually, my favourite part of Thruware: watching the magic unfurl in slowmotion. Electronic pulses over the course of, in this case, forty-seven one-hundredths of a second, spanned out for me in prose poetry. It's like time travel, watching past events at the speed of brain.

But the first fantasy crashes over me like a wave of valium. I hadn't expected it so soon. I wanted more time. To consider things, to cost-benefit the crap out of the decision before I made it. Have I made it? Am I really about to call this number?

I tip back in my chair, can't prevent what happens next. Also, I can't deny that, actually, this is my favourite part. The fantasy. The mental holodeck.

By the time I remember I'm hungry, my chips have gone cold.

7

The view from the conference room is grey and low, looming cloud. In summer you can sit in rooms like this and gawp at the tennis courts on the roofs of the CBD, wonder what happens to the errant balls that make it over the chain-link walls and down to the unsuspecting proles below. This time of year you wonder why Melbourne doesn't have those pedways that join all the buildings together like they have in Canada—hermetic, corporatised, dehumidified; relieving us of the need to
interact
.

Stuart says, ‘What else does the vetting interview consist of? Apart from inquiries into the person's background?'

Madison takes a third macaroon and bites it.

This should have been a standard meeting, just me and Madison, where she handed over the candidate files and the two of us talked through the schedule for tomorrow's interviews. Which is what we've done every year for the past whatever-years since the firm of Albert Kane and Roach first contracted with me to consult on their internship program. But today we were followed into the conference room by an overweight stooge wearing the kind of colourful braces that lawyers describe as fun. Madison introduced him as Stuart, a partner. He said he wanted to ‘shoot a couple of questions'.

‘Don't get me wrong,' Stuart says, not waiting for a response. ‘We need our candidates vetted. We don't question your ability to do that. But our harvesting process includes half-a-dozen interviews, cocktail parties. Christ, last year we took them ice skating. Why
can't your interview be conducted instead by us, at one of those junctures?'

‘Yeah, no, they can,' I say, amplifying my geeky professionalism. ‘And I promise that all I do in the interview is ask about the subject's background, how much of it is accessible online. It's just preparation for the research phase. You
could
ask the questions yourselves. But then, some people aren't comfortable with…like, digging into a person's…like, online dating history. Or whatever. I mean, to their face. But I'm used to it.'

Madison is the HR boss and she's never so much as coughed suspiciously in the direction of my work. Too, it's her nature to be as direct as a robot overlord: she wouldn't dream of going easy on a third-party actor like me, not out of mere courtesy. But instead of offering even facial support—on her home ground at the edge of the troposphere, in the shmick lawyer's conference room that was
designed
to intimidate me, flanked by an array of sweet biscuits and a crystal water jug paid for by the tears of failed litigants—she looks back with that mannequin bassface and slowly chews her macaroon. Like all these years she's been wondering the exact same thing.

Stuart smiles the way you do when a joke isn't funny, furrows his brow, holds open his mouth and licks his lips.

‘That with which we are or are not comfortable needn't be a concern of yours.'

I can't help a nervous smile, a shuffle in my seat. My nipple twitches. It is there, in my breast pocket, where the post-it burns hot and itchy like a mosquito bite. I tap at my suit jacket and scratch, not too hard in case I somehow smudge the number.

‘Also,' I say, ‘to be honest, I was under the impression my time was cheaper than yours.'

I strafe them with a grin.

‘Obviously…' Madison says, her tongue sifting biscuit-mush from her teeth. ‘This isn't a question of money.'

Last night, in the warmth of my flat, I wasn't able to make the call. Despite the exhilaration of having found the number, my dialling finger couldn't man up and dial it. I knew what I was going to say, had the pretext all figured out. But last night, at the moment
of truth, I got stage fright. Something more than stage fright. Stagefuckingterror.