Hacking the Naked Princess

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x16

"Stop him!  Anyone!"

Her scream was so shrill it hurt my ears.  I used that pain as motivation to keep running.

The life of an Information Technology Private Investigator is one of action and adventure, heart-pounding action.  Or that's what I once told a friendly drunk on the bus about two years ago.  The reality of my job description was far less excitement and a lot more Googling.

The wash of adrenaline had kicked my fight-or-flight response into top gear.  My pounding heart was a pressure in my chest that was moving up my throat as I ran.  Focusing on gasping through each breath, my muscles shook in a scary mix of electrified and weak.  My body was at redline.

The point is that since I was racing down the hallway inside RedAction headquarters, with multiple people screaming behind me, and me bouncing off walls trying to escape from an office building I'd just broken into...  Man, I was out of shape.

I chanced a look back and saw the mass of people chasing me, all led by Oober's impostor mom.

At least the plan had worked: P@nic's USB stick was now inside a LAN-connected PC.  Her botnet was already attacking this place and had choke-slammed it offline.  Hopefully the USB inject was all P@nic needed for her next steps.

All I needed to do was escape.

I turned away from the wave of angry office workers and my face slammed into a concrete pillar that was wearing a hat and utility belt.

I bounced and landed on my back.  The concrete pillar leaned towards me - it was the security guard who'd originally seen me enter the building.  He'd brought his turkey-sized fists with him, and one of them grabbed me by the shirt and lifted me to my feet.  He spun me around and wrenched my arm so high behind my back that my fingers scraped against my neck.  I screamed.

He wasn't satisfied because he then threw a Wozniak-sized arm around my neck, and he squeezed.  My heart pounded harder as I struggled to breathe.

My vision doubled in front of me.  Oober's fake mom stepped out from the wave of business-casual flotsam.  My eyes were streaming tears and my head was counting down to an explosion.  I tried to blink but couldn't.

Oober's fake mom leaned in, her friendly and vulnerable face suddenly glowering cruel and sharp.

"That's him," she snarled.  She looked far up at the security guard behind me.  "Take him out."

The guard grunted in acknowledgment and the Wozniak pressure increased.  My throat - unable to choke - began to spasm against the pressure.

She leaned even closer, her eyes filling mine as my vision grew blurry.

"Goodbye, Mr. Manny."

My vision flickered and grew dark.  I saw her pull back with an odd expression on her face.  The vice around my neck had apparently squeezed enough and my vision went black.  This wasn't the way I wanted to go.  I'd rather have died during the First Attempted Singularity Upload, but my life - while shorter than expected - had at least been interesting.

I fell as the darkness enveloped me.

The screams began.

That was odd.  I didn't believe in an afterlife.  Unless Lovecraft was right after all, I really shouldn't be hearing the wailing of the eternally doomed.

An angel of light flared at the center of my vision.  Then another, off to the side.  Handheld lights flicked on around the office as people turned on their smartphone flashlights.  Black shadows danced on gray walls from a dozen weak LEDs.

From the floor, I saw the mountain of a security guard reaching toward me for a Round Two.

I began to laugh.

"What is this?" Oober's fake mom hissed.  She looked down at me.  Lit from beneath, her face looked gaunt and haunted.  "Tell me right now what -"

"Your Internet's offline," I gasped.  "And now the lights are out."

I had hoped P@nic had time to do whatever she was planning.  Looks like she had, and she did.

"What," Oober's fake mom breathed above me as I struggled to sit up, emphasizing each word, "do you know about that?"

Since I was laughing in her face, she decided to kick me in mine.  Her black sensible pump wrenched my head to the side and I felt my teeth loosen.  I stared at the shadows on the floor as dark liquid dripped from my mouth.  I squinted up and grinned into her cell phone flashlight.  I could taste the blood staining my teeth.

"She's coming for you," I said, and spat blood onto the floor.  "When the lights are out, everyone get ready for P@nic."

Her eyes widened.  She looked from me to the mountain range of security guard.  She nodded at him.

I again felt the brutal embrace of the Wozniak as it lifted me and squeezed.  I gurgled and struggled and my hands felt suddenly heavy and weak.  The pressure didn't stop, and the starfield of cell phone flashlights around me flickered, dimmed, and disappeared.

***

The botnet was a world-spanning grid, millions of nodes within nodes, layered, interconnected points of energy blasting information back and forth.

The nodes' energy began to flash in rhythm, to become steadier and more constant.  Across the world, nodes within nodes paused, re-oriented, coordinated.  Packets exchanged, nanosecond timers synchronized, and the entire botnet - hundreds of thousands of zombie systems - turned to face their target.  As one, they screamed at RedAction.

P@nic had taken control, and she'd turned her many tools into a single weapon.  Her botnet could not be stopped or ignored.

RedAction was offline, worse than a drunk at the holidays... except for one small trickle of traffic.  The USB drive that P@nic had me sneak into the building was a skeleton key, programmed to be ignored by the massive botnet.  With that secret path through the botnet blockade, she was able to simultaneously take RedAction offline, and still access and compromise their internal systems.

She'd apparently started with the lighting controls.  How long her access would last, I didn't know.

As my consciousness swirled around me, as I tried to determine what was reality or an oxygen-starved fantasy, I forced myself back to consciousness.

I opened my eyes and saw nothing different.  The lights were still out.  I had no flashlight myself - my cell phone was gone, along with my wallet.  With increasing anger, I realized they'd even taken my Leatherman multitool.

I heard no sounds, none of the scramble and screams of people that should be running around in the dark.

There was an odd smell nearby, and it resolved itself into emotion - a pungent sense-memory from my childhood.  It was laser-burned polycarbonate and aluminum, from a time when technology was so antiquated we had to physically engrave our data, like cavemen etching into stone.

Is that... a recordable CD?

I reached out blindly and felt around.  Yes, there was a whole spool of old CDs.  I ran my fingers over the smooth surface, brought them close to smell the faint but unmistakable odor of permanent marker.  Important to some admin many years ago, now a bittersweet memory of my first Linux distro.

I sat up in this pitch-dark room.  I smelled plastic.  Shielded cabling.  Spindle motors.  Dead power supplies kicking out watts of age and dust.

Crawling and exploring, my blind eyes wide in the darkness, my hands fumbled over boxes, cases, cages, and towers.  I gasped as my hands ran over what felt like a TI-99/4A.  This place was a museum...  Or a graveyard.

I felt around the ancient tech, marveling at eight-inch floppy drives, some still containing disks with long-forgotten magnetic bytes.  I ran eager fingers over old-school monitors, back when they were thirty pound boxes and not flat panels.  I found old towers, from when PCs and servers weren't designed for planned obsolescence but for Armageddon.  The heavy steel tanks would outlast us all.

RedAction had decided not to kill me yet.  Perhaps they realized I was their only immediate connection to P@nic and could be used as a lever against her.  Since they weren't with me now, I guessed that whoever was in charge decided it was more important to deal with P@nic's attack than me.

I wasn't supposed to be here.  Not part of the plan.  I felt the hot burn of embarrassment, of leaving P@nic in the lurch, of saying her name out loud to the wrong people, of getting caught and not being able to help.  I felt shame - until I fully realized my situation and RedAction's big mistake.

I was early man being handed a burning torch.  I was the Primitive Technology Guy with the R&D already done.

I was an IT private investigator in a room full of tools.

I didn't know how much time I had, but I would take this ancient technology and I would use it to improve my situation and escape from this room.

I got to work.