ZerOes (15 page)

THE LODGE

W
hite hat hackers make Reagan's panties itch. And not in the good way. In the
I used poison ivy to wipe my ass
way. They don't even call themselves that—“white hat”—probably because it sounds too simplistic. No, no, most of them go with “ethical hackers.” You can even get certified for it.

It makes her almost puke in her mouth.
Ethical hackers
. What the fuck does that even mean? Everybody has ethics. Some people have self-righteous ethics, others have self-indulgent ethics, some folks are godly, others are Satanic, but everybody has some kind of code, and her code is right in line with that old magician Aleister Crowley:
do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
. Thelema law, though she doesn't really understand that part because she has no interest in actual magic or any of that occult crap. Crowley was a creep. She just likes that line.

Here, at the Lodge, everything's still the same for her. It's not for the others—they've all spray-painted their black hats white for now, but hers was always gray, gray, gray, and that color shall it stay, stay, stay.

Right now that means doing what Shane Graves wants her to do. And what he wants her to do is hack Chance Dalton. Cut him open like a frog in a dissection pan. Remove everything but still keep him alive. (That last part isn't Shane's directive, and he probably doesn't agree. Shane probably wants Dalton dead. Figuratively, if not literally.)

So. Time to get to it, then. Maybe this time, too, she can find out just who hacked her while she was hacking Dalton. All that bullshit about gods and monsters—
and the gods did flee
. A message for her? For Dalton? For
Graves
? It has a thread, and when she finds it, she plans on pulling it. If only for the satisfaction of unraveling the sweater.

She enters the pod in the morning—scratching at her bra, because it's an old one and the wire is poking out—and doesn't see the difference at first. But when she sits, yawns, and rubs her eyes, she does.

A coffee machine. One of those little Keurigs. These machines are better than Harry Potter's house-elves. Pop in one of their little
magic ampules
of
caffeine magic
, press a button, and boosh. One cuppa comin' up. She gives a thumbs-up to the camera. Says, “Thanks, Big Government.” Cheeky air-smooch.

Too bad she's still gonna have to bypass their systems and use their own piss-poor security infrastructure against them.

She sets up shop. Sees her folder—Jesus, another pen test. A cloud computing company: Thunderhead. Normally, this one might present a bit more fun—after all, they're responsible for an unholy host of cloud computing storage accounts. A mortuary for people's hidden data. For some reason, the average dumb-ass feels a lot more comfortable storing all his really secret stuff in the cloud. Not, like, bank records and legal documents. The really
juicy
stuff: Naked photos. Forbidden e-mails. Or the two finest words in the human language:
sex tape
. (Even though it's not a tape, the name has stuck. No pun intended.) Shit, you wanna find out if someone's into dog fucking or kiddie touching, look no further than his Dropbox account.

Today, though, that pleasure of kicking over rocks and seeing what squirms underneath will be one that has to wait. This has to be fast. They got their “evaluation scores” from yesterday—Hollis read them out as he walked them to the pods. Letter grades, like they're in fucking high school or something. A for Aleena (barf), B+ for DeAndre (she'd do him), C+ for her (not bad for not trying; also her grade average in high school, so), C– for Wade (not bad for an old man), and Hollis
declined to name a grade for Chance (unsurprising). Today, all Reagan has to do is maintain the same mediocre average.

She moves fast through the penetration (insert joke here, she thinks, or maybe, insert wang here), and it's breezily easy. Problem with most public cloud computing solutions is that, first, they often use client-side software to access them, and apps are notoriously weak—it's like hiding all your gold in Fort Knox but then making the entryway a squeaky screen door. But the larger problem is that cloud computing must first pass through that hive of scum and villainy: the Internet. The Internet is a place of glorious rot: everything that passes through it, or even
touches it
, is subject to decay. It's too big, too sprawly, to be well protected—anything that uses Internet protocol to parlay its information and access is the equivalent of a person traveling through a bad part of town just to get to work. You open yourself to intrusion.

So, intruding on Thunderhead's cloud services is no big thing. Reagan's documenting everything as she goes through it, hastily noting weaknesses—it's simple, she notes, to download the client and hack the client, thus kicking open that screen door and finding her way into a wealth of personal storage. Tens of thousands of accounts. Client names. Usernames. Passwords. Plus, drumroll please, home addresses, phone numbers, and the pièce de résistance: bank data. Places like this are the cause of many a hacker's nocturnal emissions.

Still, the usernames and passwords are all encrypted. Passwords are stored as these gibberish algorithms—hashes, or “hashies,” in the parlance. Problem is, you can't translate them backward because of the algorithm. So your best bet is picking some plaintext passwords (“plains”) and trying to run them through the same algorithm to see what patterns start to emerge in the encryption hashes. It's like a souped-up hacker version of a
New York Times
puzzle.

Reagan pretends to everyone else that she's just some dopey troll, but she likes to think of herself as a jack-of-all-trades. But that also means
master of none
. Encryption is not her specialty. Thankfully, hackers are a mix of loners and pack animals, and even lone wolves leave behind food for the other hunters. All she has to do is download a toolkit. Automated, hit one button, and it starts to scroll through names, passwords, looking for patterns, solving for
x
(or, rather, solving for XI}EWR!(TUH2782#34, but whatever).

That'll get her somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the total. The rest she'll have to figure out by hand, which requires Googling names and seeing if she can find pet names or maiden names or hobbies or anything else that might give a clue as to a person's plaintext password.

Still, for now, let the cracker run its course. Names and passwords pop up like badminton birdies and are swatted down.

Reagan brews coffee. Sips at it. It's flavored—caramel vanilla. Tastes a little like chemicals, but she likes chemicals, so whatever.

Then one name pops up and is gone again. Except it pings her radar. She stops the cracker. Goes back, searches for the name.

There. Philo Kallimakos. Greek guy (she assumes). Name is familiar because she saw it just yesterday. He's one of the big investors behind Arcus Land Development: same a-holes she “penetrated” just yesterday. Can't just be a coinky-dink. They're giving her companies that are connected, however loosely.

Reagan thinks:
Okay, let's crack this nut
. Password cracker bypassed him, which means he won't be one of the 30 to 50 percent in the first pass—which means she's gotta do this by hand. So she pulls up Google, which of course is blocked, which of course makes her job all the harder.

Except.
Except
. Yesterday she found a host of usernames and passwords allowing her into Arcus's infrastructure, so she starts trying those. Fifth try: Bingo, bango, bongos in the Congo. The username-password combo from the Arcus FTP site lets her into Mr. Kallimakos's cloud computing folder.

She scrolls through hundreds of folders, all of them named like gibberish. Strings of gobbledygook characters. She pops open a random one. Inside: thousands of files. Most of them encrypted. Some of them, though, aren't: she opens a few graphic files, sees images of what looks like—Greek pottery? Each image a broken shard, showing parts of what look like some kind of monster—a few shards show parts of a black snake with red scales, others offer up wings of black and red feathers. A different graphic file shows a scan of some kind of . . . woodcut? Words in Latin.
IMAGO TYPHONUS
,
IVXTA APOLLODORVM
. Something that looks like something out of Lovecraft rising up out of the ground—snake fingers, tentacle legs, mouth vomiting lightning.

She opens up one more image. It's the same freaky Lovecraft thing, except it's stomping forth; men and women are running from it and
appear to be changing into rabbits, dogs, birds. Some of them half changed, others changed all the way. All of them fleeing.

And the gods did turn to common beasts
.

AND THE GODS DID FLEE
.

She feels suddenly dizzy. Arcus to Thunderhead. Gods and monsters. The person who hacked her tied somehow to Philo Kallimakos? How? How is that even—

Her thigh vibrates. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She looks up—sees the camera light has gone from green to red on both. Which means she's taken too long.

She pops the fly on her jeans, reaches down her pants. There's a cryptophone duct-taped to her inner thigh: matte black, small screen, fairly concealable. This one's a Floydphone—aka a “Fromitz Board”—made by some text-adventure-game fan and sold as a crowdsourced device. It needs an access code to connect, a code that Shane gave her (because Shane also gave her the phone). She punches in the ten-digit code and instantly a text pops up:

Stop dicking around
.

She gives the phone the finger. She'd give it to the cameras, too, but nobody's watching those. Right now, the eyes on the other end—guards, she's guessing—are seeing a loop of her working from earlier. First half an hour or so, roughly mixed up and replayed back. Someone paying careful attention might notice, but at a casual glance? Not so much.

She texts back:
Soon
.

When she looks up at the screen, the folders—the hundreds belonging to Kallimakos, with thousands of files—are disappearing. Files flying to the trash one by one. Zipping quickly. She tries to take control, tries to save them, but the delete command has already been issued. Thirty seconds later, the folders are gone and the main page is empty. “God damn it!” she says. Suddenly she's contemplating doing exactly what Dalton did—picking up the whole computer and chucking it on the ground. She shoves her hand in her mouth, bites down on the soft pad of flesh between her thumb and her wrist. Not enough to draw blood. But almost.

The Floydphone vibrates again with a new text:

NOW

She's about to text him back, tell him what happened. But her thumbs pause. What if he already knows? What if he's the one who did this? Deleting this stuff just to mess with her.

Maybe Shane is the one who hacked her.

That's the thing about being a troll—you're suddenly pretty sure that while you're trolling the world, the world is trolling you right back. Normally she likes that feeling—it lends everything a sense of parity, of insane quid pro quo, but suddenly now she's feeling incensed, disturbed, and downright paranoid.

She sucks it up. Deep breath.

Fine
, she types.

Then she takes a few moments to compose herself before she goes back to hacking that poor, dumb Chance Dalton.

DeAndre's got a new task—pen-test some start-up search engine called Glassboat out of the Bay Area—but he just can't quit the German geothermal company.

Right now, the network folder he's trying to crack on their end doesn't even allow for the entry of a password or anything. It's user based, and it knows he's not the user. He throws everything he has at it—or, at least, everything he can manage to scrounge together here in this data prison pod—but he can't trick it into thinking he's the one who set the permissions on the file.

He scours around, looking for any other clue inside their systems. He finds some shit about something called “Sandhogs”—a little research shows they're some kind of union out of New York City, Local 147. The ones responsible for digging subway tunnels, bridge footers, things like that. That doesn't help him.

An hour in, he's sweating like an addict who sees his fix but can't get a taste. He's anxious, grabby, eager. He knows they're watching them, and he hasn't bothered to change that. Let 'em wonder what he's up to. He can't help it. He has to know.

He
has to
.