Hacking the Naked Princess

Dev Manny - Information Technology Private Investigator

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x06

Oober left my office, leaving me to work on his problem.  I knew that the "Dante collection" was a goal of the AnonIT hacking competition.  I had to learn what the Dante collection contained, so I had to learn more about the competition itself.  Unlike most of life's problems, this wasn't something I could Google and get an answer 0.34 seconds later.

I was an information technology private investigator.  For this particular IT problem, I needed to do what my profession demanded.  I had to investigate the old-fashioned way, with shoes and neurons.  I needed to find other humans who knew more than I did, and I had to ask them questions.  Pre-search engine techniques are inefficient and slow, but they still have their uses.

I didn't have much use for college.  Educationally, I mean.  I went because I was supposed to go - my parents insisted it would bring me success and student loans beyond my wildest dreams.

During my brief college career, I'd realized two things.  The first was that college was a great place to "find myself."  The cliche was true, particularly in meeting friends who really supported the weirder parts of my personality.  The second thing I'd learned was how not to learn.  Memorizing the best methods for GPU-CPU load balancing missed the point.  Real-world experience was better, and you can't get that in a classroom.  College was a productive waste of time.

Dozens of living proofs of my opinions were in front of me now.  I'd gone to the North Grove Technical College, and had arrived at the "FRAT House."

It was late, after midnight.  Most normals would be sleeping.  I was right on time.

The FRAT House, like much in the technical world, was confusing for outsiders unless they knew the acronym.  In this case, "FRAT" stood for "Fragging, RPGs, Advanced Tactics."  I suppose the expanded version was still pretty confusing.  It didn't help that one acronym contained another.

I stood in the entryway and imagined what an innocent, uncorrupted freshman would think of this place.  They'd notice the smell first, a mix of Italian and Chinese.  Not the nationalities, the food: Just a few doors down from this building was "Huey Meng," a cheap, greasy, amazing Chinese delivery place.  Next door was "Eat Pizza," equally cheap and greasy, and they served only one thing, but they did it well.  Both places were kept alive by a river of credit card transactions from the FRAT House.

The House itself was a wide basement room in Walker Hall, the oldest building on North Grove Tech's campus.  Rows of abused cafeteria tables spanned most of the room in uneven, barely-parallel rows.  Many were topped by chaotic collections of cables, monitors, laptops, and custom gaming rigs.  Students hunched over these.  Most wore headphones and microphone headsets.

Periodically, synchronized expletives rang through the air, as those on the same teams dealt and received electronic nastiness.  I could tell which users had rented the equipment, based on how violent they were with the keyboards, mice, and joysticks.

Boiled down to its essence, the FRAT House was a pay-at-the-door gaming and gathering center for like-minded geeks.  As the acronym implied, those geeks came here to participate in fragging (which encompassed all sorts of video games hosted on high-performance computers) and other games (board, card, and role-playing games [the classic RPGs, often with actual printed books]).

I wished I could game more myself.  I used to.  These days I had no time, being more concerned with feeding a family of three: Me, myself and I.

I examined the roomful of players.  I needed someone technically skilled.  I didn't much care about gameplay, but instead checked out their gaming rigs.  I ignored each player unless they'd brought in their own custom-built PC.  Transparent cases were best, as I was able to covertly check out what hardware they'd used inside.

I got lucky and found my guy in less than a minute.  He was exactly what I needed.  To speak spintronically, I couldn't have found a better diamond with nitrogen impurities.

The guy's rig had multi-CPUs with a double-digit core total, memory slots stuffed to bursting, a RAID 0 SSD array, and a video card heat sink big enough to put out a bonfire.

As proof that he wasn't just borrowing the case from a roommate, the kid was running Linux and had several windows open - he was gaming in two of them, making heavy use of keyboard macros.  He was examining program code in two other windows.

I looked over the guy's shoulder and checked out his code.  It was freakish, like the result of an orgy between BASIC, assembly, and a Caps Lock key.

Sweet spawn of Cthulhu, this guy was coding in Fortran.  For fun.

Here sat an extremely competent software nerd.  He was exactly the kind of person I needed to talk to.

"Hey, man, you got a second?"

He hit a key sequence on his keyboard, and his monitor went blank.  The kid leaned back in his chair and looked up at me.  Messy dark hair hung into his skinny pale face.

I knew this guy's type.  He wouldn't appreciate wasted time.  So I'd get to the point.

"Hey.  I'm working on the AnonIT competition.  I need info on the 'Dante collection.'"

I paused to see if he wanted to respond yet.  He didn't.  He just stared.

"I was hoping to learn more about the Dante collection, whatever it is.  Got any detail on the competition?  Have you heard of it?"

No response.

"I haven't been to the FRAT House in a while.  Can you point me to anyone else who might be able to help?  Got any friends into hacking?"

He nodded at me, considering, then he spoke.  "Hey.  Piss off."

He turned away from me and secured headphones over his ears.  He unlocked his screen and continued his work.

I sighed.  I'd screwed up.  He probably thought I was a clueless, bumbling cop.  Or, if not, I was interrupting someone who operated with more focus than a Fresnel lens.  In fact, this applied to any video gamer here - all were playing millisecond-timed matches, and would probably give me millisecond-length responses, with no immediate help.

That left the tabletop gamers.  I threaded toward the back of the room.  There, multi-stained couches and metal foldout chairs were corralled to form non-electronic gaming areas.  Several groups of students sat playing a variety of games.

I took in the action.  I saw games of ShadowWalk and Mage: The Collecting.  A group in the corner was role-playing a campaign of Transhuman.

ShadowWalk and M:TC were both fantasy games, and the Transhuman world was high-tech.  I needed to talk to people interested in that kind of world.  I headed to the corner game.  There were three character players and one Game Master.  They sat in a circle around a table.  In front of the players there were collections of paper, snacks, and drinks.  Each gamer had a character sheet, in order to better act out their hero in this create-the-story-as-you-go game.  The GM was in the middle of a soliloquy, apparently as a villain doing his "reveal the ultimate plan" part of the story.

Instead of interrupting, I stood to the side, waiting for the GM to finish speaking and acknowledge me.  Back in my day, role-playing garners were a friendly subset.  I hoped that was still the case.

The GM paused and glanced at me.  I nodded a hello and offered an appropriate smile.  His eyes narrowed.  The rest of the table noticed and looked up at me.

Years ago, I could name everyone in this room, but now I registered nothing but strangers.  I was 26 - pretty young by my perspective - but here I felt old, like a wheel-chair-bound geezer coming back to visit a decades-dead childhood playground.

I felt bad about interrupting their game, but my current job might depend on it.  In this case, hunger won out over not breaking gameplay.

I took a breath to speak, to introduce my problem in a way that didn't come across as creepy or desperate, to show them that I needed help while proving that I was competent on my own.  It was a delicate combination, but I thought I could pull it off.

"I'm looking for a hacker -"

I got out that much before the GM spoke over me.

"The Explorer looks angry," the GM said to his group, and they refocused their attention on the game.  "He lifts up his hands, palms out, and closes his eyes..."

"No!"  A big guy with a beard said.  "Somebody stop him!  I'm still paralyzed.  I can't -"

"Next turn, you'll be back to normal," said the GM.

"S'okay.  I got this," said another player, a girl with a thick, dyed-red braid running all the way down her back.  She consulted her character sheet, and then looked back at the GM.  "Epiphany starts running at The Explorer.  All out.  I want to slam into him and break his concentration before he finishes whatever he's about to do."

"Too late," the GM said with a grin.  "He finishes the sequence.  You sense the Method kick in.  He starts Slow Time."

The girl winced.  "I'll do what I can anyway.  I launch myself at him."

I saw the third and last player come to attention, a short kid, wearing dark clothes and a wispy goatee.  The GM looked at him.  "You doing anything, Lynx?"  After receiving a head-shake in reply, the GM looked back at the big bearded guy, who was eager to speak.

"I'm back in action?"

"Yeah," the GM said.  "Your nanobots clean up the toxins.  You can move again."

"Good.  Because I'm mad: Shiretoko goes into full assault.  Max speed, max effort.  I bring out both my disruptors.  Activate them.  Throw them at The Explorer.  Slice and dice, man, slice and dice."

The GM nodded.

"Okay, here's what happens: The Explorer kicks off Slow Time.  Epiphany jumps at The Explorer.  Shiretoko throws his disruptors, but just a few feet from his hands, they almost stop, just inching forward, as time slows down."

He nodded at the girl.  "Same with Epiphany.  You've jumped for a tackle, arms out, both feet off the ground, but are barely moving in midair.  Everybody's vision starts to fade to black as light itself crawls around you.  It's really hard to breathe  As consciousness fades, the last sound all of you hear is The Explorer.  He's laughing, just like he did after he killed Shiretoko's brother."

The big bearded guy grimaced and shook his head.  He had tears in his eyes.  "Damn that bastard."

The GM seemed about to continue, then he paused.  He thought for a few seconds.

He looked up at me and smiled.

Uh, oh.

I'd seen that look before.  I knew exactly what it meant and what was about to happen.  But I wasn't prepared.  I had nothing.

"Shiretoko, Epiphany, and Lynx.  You all wake up, though you're barely conscious.  You can't see or feel anything."

The big bearded guy nodded eagerly.

"I activate Mind Expansion.  I go online."

"Once you start the connection," the GM said, "it's immediately hijacked by another being.  It identifies itself as 'Sphere.'  It starts to talk."

The GM slid me a piece of paper.  I picked it up and read his scrawled note.

You interrupt my game right at the end of my scenario?  Then you gotta pay for the privilege.  You better be good.  Wow me.

The group of four looked up at me.  The big bearded guy and the girl seemed confused.  The GM and the quiet kid just watched expectantly.

I thought about my options, and then shrugged.  I was on a case and I needed help.  If this game was the pitfall, I'd just grab a vine and start my swing.

I took a deep breath, then grabbed an empty chair and sat at the table.  Both were good stalling tactics, but I couldn't delay any more.  Time to talk.

"Hm.  Well, I suppose I'm The Sphere.  Or just Sphere.  Whatever."

The GM glared at me with +4 Eyes of Irritation.

My problem wasn't one of shyness or inexperience.  I knew they wanted to hear me speak and I knew the rules of the game.  But I was out of practice.  Being asked to make a random, unplanned DRPG appearance in the middle of a storyline wasn't unheard of, but it was tricky.

I hadn't gamed in years.  I rebooted my mind's VM to an earlier image, that of a younger Dev Manny, a kid more concerned with technology and games than with homework, who got his lulz by solving problems, who needed no fuel besides imagination and caffeine.

"Shiretoko," I said.  I dropped my voice to Intense and Serious.  "You're angry.  You want to avenge your brother.  I've been sent to tell you how close you are to your goal, and how to get even closer."

"Who sent you?"

"Our shared ally wishes to reveal itself at a later time."

The big bearded guy playing Shiretoko nodded solemnly.  Good, he was into it.  If the players would accept my performance, the GM would, too.

"I tell you of a Portal Monk," I said.  "She was different, for she loved the night and hated the day.  The glowing stars and traveling moon were her intimates, her inner peace.  But she grew angry, because the day stole her energy, and made her sleep through her beloved night.  So, being a Portal Monk, she created a Method.  One that would enable her to move past the day quickly."

I looked around.  The players were listening, eager to hear where I was going with this.  The GM wasn't.  He was grinning.

"This monk's power...  She learned how to accelerate time."

The Transhuman game had two core game books and three major expansions, all packed with characters, powers, and story ideas.  Years ago, I had them all memorized.  Today, no.  But I remembered enough.

"Oh!"  The girl with the long braid got my point.  The quiet, wispy-goatee kid was now grinning along with her.  The big bearded guy leaned forward, not yet seeing the connection, and was waiting with his eyes locked on mine.  I continued.

"The monk's name is 'Ko' and the Method she built is called 'Overclock.'  Shiretoko, seek out the Portal Monks and beg them to teach you Ko's Method.  Then train your teammates.  They need you.  So does the memory of your brother."

I spread my hands to include everyone at the table.

"At your next battle, when The Explorer slows down time, you will use Overclock.  Overclock will counter the effects of Slow Time and you will all remain unaffected.  By the time the Explorer realizes this, it will be too late.  Use this power to attack.  Shiretoko, avenge your brother!  Take this opportunity... to slice and dice."

I sat back, finished.  Silence oozed around us.

The big bearded guy slammed the table with both hands.  His eyes shone with excitement.

"Oh yeah," he said.  "This is gonna seriously rock."

"So," the GM said to me.  "You're looking for a hacker?  Lynx here is who you wanna talk to."  He nodded at the kid with the wispy goatee.  The kid shrugged and looked at me curiously.

While I didn't know this kid's ability or influence, I was farther than I'd been before.  This was a chance to drill deeper into the hacking community, and to learn more about AnonIT and the Dante collection.

"I'm Dev," I said to the kid.  "Good to meet you."

He nodded.

It was the same with role-playing games as it was with life: The quiet characters are often the most interesting.