Hacking the Naked Princess

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x0A

The spider slashed at my face with at least half of its legs.  All were tipped with gleaming black talons.  I backpedaled and lifted both arms in a defensive block.

My last conversation was yet another warning from someone else who'd seen the Naked Princess file.  It had not only freaked out Lynx, a young, impressionable college kid, but Minotaur, an old-school, seen-it-all hacker.

Whatever the Naked Princess was, I had to see this picture.

The spider skittered forward, and stabbed at my guts.  At least one strike got through.  I hit the macro for a medboost.

Unfortunately, my conversation with Minotaur had created more questions.  Sure, I had a better understanding of what was in the Dante Collection, but getting more answers required talking with more of the winners of the AnonIT competition, including the missing P@nic.

What had happened to her?  Was it a self-imposed disappearance, or had someone else made the decision for her?  P@nic's wanna-be-boyfriend Oober had specifically requested no police.  After his casual mention of P@nic's country-level botnet access, I wasn't eager to get any authorities involved.  Even acting as the Information Technology Private Investigator my business cards said I was, something told me the NSA wouldn't see my side.  So, my path was clear: Finding a missing girl hacker for a love-struck boy hacker took priority over reporting a world-spanning crime.

A plasma gun fired from behind me, and vomited hot death over the low-level spider.  It sizzled, fried, and died.  I turned around and saw the person I'd come to meet.

"You ready?" Oober said over the public channel, his voice crackling in my headphones.

"Born that way."

I wanted to talk to Oober - likely the last person I knew who'd seen P@nic.  When I'd asked for the meeting, he'd agreed, but insisted on someplace safe.  Secured.  Private.  So I went back to my office and hauled out my dusty VR headset, and went online to Oober's recommended meetup: The Transhuman MMORPG.

We were gaming with a group of specialized monster-hunters, prepping for a raid on a demon nest.  Our raid leader was busy trying to coordinate the actions of dozens of other gamers around the world, and was paying zero attention to us individually.

Our cover established, Oober and I worked our way to a safe spot and camped while the raid leader barked out plans.  We completely ignored the leader, and switched to a private channel to talk.

"Anything new?" Oober said.  He'd positioned his headset mic too close to his mouth.  His breathing was repeated, static bursts that kept rhythm for our conversation.

I'd originally met this kid in real life - as a young, disheveled, skinny loner.  In this game, he'd designed himself the opposite.

In the dimness of our raiding party's location, Oober's avatar practically glowed.  He was a tall, lean, wide-shouldered fighter, covered in armor.  Metallic implants bristled from his arms and legs, many moving independently from the rest of him.  A contraption of servos and electronics was in constant motion around his head, obscuring his face while at the same time angling to display a mechanical fang-baring glare.

Having just spun up my own avatar in the last few minutes, I had no idea what I looked like.  I was pretty sure I'd picked a human.  There was a fifty percent chance I was male.

"I've learned a few things," I said to him.

"About P@nic?"  His avatar's appearance didn't match the voice I heard.  Audio-compressed IP packets couldn't hide his worry.

"Yeah.  I spoke with Minotar, one of the AnonIt contest winners.  He spoke to her for quite a while.  I've got some chat logs to go through."

"So?  And?  Where is she?"

"I don't know."

I'm not even sure she's still alive.

"You don't know."  His breathing hissed louder over the audio channel.

"I know a lot of other things.  Just not that one.  Yet."

He thought for a moment, then spoke.

"She wasn't like anyone else."

His voice was quiet, almost as if he were talking to himself, just a small voice speaking personal thoughts over a secured channel inside the buzzing chaos of a MMORPG raiding party.  You couldn't get much more private than that.

"I mean, yeah, she has the whole hacker thing, the botnet control, but it's more than that.  When she transferred to our school, she was the only one I'd met besides me who was outside of pop-culture crap.  Clothes, TV, the school cliques, none of that superficial stuff was important.  She was a higher-level operator, you know?  You get me?"

"Sure."

"At first, I thought it was because she was from overseas.  Like it was a cultural thing, being an Aussie, or something.  But it wasn't that, because she has a way of looking at -"

"Hold up.  She's Australian?"

"An Aussie, yeah.  She's pretty Americanized, but you can still hear it.  I dig the accent."

My brain performed a sudden bit shift, and multiple clues thunked into place.

Oober's avatar flew up and away as I yanked off my VR headset.  I was back in my office.  I blinked quickly and shook my head, acclimating back to the real world as quickly as possible.  As I did so, I pulled out my cellphone and flicked to my notes on the case.

I scanned the list of AnonIT competition winners:

p@nic, patient zero, agent_from_harm, dragon_bawls, minotaur *and* chixor zed

I knew about the missing P@nic.  She was the reason I was working this case for Oober to begin with.  I'd talked with Minotaur already, too.  There were the others, and...

Chixor is slang for a female nerd.

Zed is the pronunciation of the letter "Z" for any country outside of the USA.

I slammed the VR set back on my head and Oober's avatar dropped back into my vision.  I adjusted my mic and spoke fast.

"Listen," I said.  "The list you gave me is a list of names, confirmed AnonIT winners.  P@nic is on that list.  And if she's an Aussie hacker, could it be possible that she's also Chixor Zed?"

Oober's stunned silence allowed me to get out my next thought.

"If Chixor Zed and P@nic are the same person, that means she's won the AnonIT competition twice.  Why?  Why would anyone want to win it again, and have to maintain two alts?  That doubles the danger and the risk of exposure."

Still no response.

"This can't be about bragging rights," I said.  "There has to be something more she needed, even after the first win.  Maybe she had to win it twice because she'd missed getting something the first time.  Or... or maybe she wanted to put something back."

I was so proud to have made my little breakthrough, it took me a few seconds to realize that since I'd returned to the game, I hadn't heard Oober breathing.

"Oober?"

I pinged his Avatar.

Silence oozed over the private audio channel, covered by a thick layer of Nothing Else.

I looked at Oober's avatar, with his collection of embedded biomechanical weapons and face-obscuring electronics.  The constant motion seemed wrong, because the rest of the character stood frozen, rooted in place.  There's nothing more creepy than an avatar waiting mindlessly for its player.

Hopefully he'd just bailed when I'd dropped away to check my cellphone.  Or there'd been an emergency, something he couldn't get away from.  Maybe something he had to get away from.

If that was the case, then when I'd spilled my new realizations about P@nic, had I still been talking to Oober?  Had he left by then?  If he was gone, then had I been talking to myself?  Or had someone else been inside Oober's avatar, listening?

I dropped offline.

If I was lucky, Oober would contact me soon and explain his disappearance, hopefully something as simple as a bio break.  But I'd worked in IT long enough to know: Hope is a terrible survival trait.  My methods were data collection, comparisons of probabilities, and collections of "what if."

I'd just collected plenty of new data.  The probability comparison told me something was very wrong, first with P@nic, and now with Oober.

As for "what if?"  For the first time in this case, I wasn't sure I wanted to know.