Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Read online

  “Okay,” Aedo said, and wondered if Cadares would get on her data pad for this. She could write out an explanation—hell, she could link one. But the last time she’d tried that, the response had been an irritated Just explain it to me; I don’t want to read all this stuff, and anyway not a lot of people really got how much more comfortable she was communicating through writing than through voice.

  There was a reason most of her friends were in VL.

  “Okay,” she said again, and pressed her fingers into her temples. At least she did have some experience explaining these things to the non-net-savvy. “Let’s pretend computer security is like a door lock, okay? It’s not, but it’s complicated, and you don’t need to know all the stuff about it anyway. When people who aren’t hackers talk about hackers, they think about people who can pick locks or break down doors, yeah? But when hackers talk about hackers, they mean people who … do stuff around the building.”

  She winced. If that had communicated any useful information, she’d honestly be surprised.

  “When all the news sites were saying I was a hacker, people kinda thought I broke down a door and found a filing cabinet inside and broke into it and ran off with the documents. But a lot of us can’t do that sort of thing; we’re all about making better filing cabinets or windows, or—okay.” Deep breaths. She could wrestle this all into a coherent metaphor. Maybe. “Basically, what happened was, someone invited me into a building. But the building shared a basement with a public building that Energy was renting to store their files. I was poking around in the basement ’cause, you know … I don’t know. Reasons.”

  The fun of poking around somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, a snickering curiosity about how bad these servers were, a blog post or a VL list message she was composing in her head about wow, guys, never run a site with these people, they don’t know how to separate user accounts.

  When the Energy Division had dug into how this had happened, they’d found that the people who were in charge of server procurement were the same people in charge of wastebin liner procurement and data pad procurement, not the people in charge of server management and data security. The guys in charge had just gone with the company that was known for highest uptime and largest traffic and hadn’t known to look at the demographics of the people using them: non-technical sorts who wanted to throw something onto the net and weren’t high-enough profile to attract the attention that would make them regret the horrible security.

  Well, the ED had been high-enough profile. And they’d regretted it.

  “While I was hanging around the basement, I noticed all these elevators, and they all had different people’s names on them. Different building’s names, I guess. And, I mean, most of it was like ‘cooltricks74’ and ‘Gotta Watch Vids’, but then there was this ‘Energy Division Data Backup 034-00A’ one, and I had to check it out. So I used this security exploit that everyone knew about and I got into that building and I started looking at the file cabinets, because none of them were locked, and I found stuff that I thought people should know about. Like, what I did was basically someone found out that a bunch of pre-fab buildings all used the same key code, and they put up fliers around the city so that people could change theirs, and I saw a flier and remembered it, and the basement elevator used the same code. If the ED had used servers with that vulnerability patched, or even ones where I couldn’t access the root directory, I would never have found the documents. I wouldn’t have even tried.” She looked at Cadares. “You get that?”

  Cadares was watching her, a slight frown on her face, and a directness of eye contact that made Aedo squirm. Then, though, she sighed and said, “Internal incompetence?”

  “Yeah,” Aedo said.

  “They needed a villain for the media.”

  “ … yeah,” Aedo said. Mentally, she started gathering up her stuff. Hadn’t unpacked yet, that was good; she could probably get another room at the old hotel, and maybe Cadares would drop her off there. Even if she was useless for Cadares’ grand ambitions. It probably wouldn’t be too much to ask of her, would it? To save the ride fare?

  But Cadares said, “You know people who can break down doors?”

  Aedo thought of LogicalOR.

  She was tempted to answer, no. This little exploit aside, she did her level best to stay away from that sort of thing. Plenty of crackers had the sort of ideology that roused rabble in Aedo’s defense when she got arrested, but her relationship with those people wasn’t one she wanted to invest time into improving.

  No, she thought. She’d played this game once, and she’d lost, and until two minutes ago she thought she’d do it again with a smile, but she’d kinda wanted to have some time to decompress first. Hang out with her friends and program a swords-and-zombies game or something. Maybe go back to blogging about government responsibility and let that stand as her contribution to activism for a few months-slash-years. She could be a firebrand without being an idiot about it, right?

  But the question rolled around in her until it hit the same little core of principle that got her into trouble the first time.

  “You think they’re being doctored?” she said.

  Cadares nodded. “I’m almost certain of it.”

  Fuck.

  “I can ask around,” Aedo said. “But I—you know—you do know this is illegal, right?”

  The instant she said it, she regretted saying it. Cadares stood, gave her a dark look, and exited the room without a word.

  Fuck, Aedo thought again, and looked around the room. She’d had ambitions about sleeping, someday. Now it’d be another four hours looking up tutorials on how to check a room for bugs.

  • • • •

  Virtual Liberation resisted any attempts to define itself or limit membership, which meant that it had a bunch of data accessibility theorists, hackers, hacktivists, crackers, schoolkids with an affinity for programming and an omnidirectional resentment of authority, subaltern game developers, program-library contributors, hobbyists, and random people who showed up because they had net access and were curious about these things and who disappeared after a week because none of it made any sense to them at all. It was chaos; a complete mess. But a beautiful kind of mess like a primordial sludge pool, from which complex life could develop.

  Or something like that. Aedo was a hacker, not an evolutionary biologist.

  After a few hours of sleep, a shower, and a nuked box meal, Aedo logged onto the main boards and set up a private chat, pinging a subgroup of people she trusted to join. Hey guys, want to talk to you all in confidence, she typed. The people she trusted were people who’d know that in confidence, coming from her, directed to them, through this medium, wasn’t a game. Any of you ever come up with a plan of action for whistleblowers?

  There were a few moments of virtual silence, then waving ellipses showed up next to three or four nicks.

  You could always count on someone to be online.

  RHellion: Whats up?

  Aedo let out her breath. The chat would archive from the beginning, so she could discuss things and not worry too much about having to catch people up later. The conversation would still be in the air.

  Another reason virtual life was more convenient than the face-to-face kind.

  Ayeball: Made contact with an energy activist at the ED, Aedo wrote. Wants help getting docs out of One East. Fraud stuff. Thinks data is being manipulated before release from inside the division.

  A moment passed, and then the elipses started dancing again.

  Asterhoidal: WOW ayeball take a vacation! you JUST got out!

  GGXL: I was working on that plan of action with Petey but it stalled out at around

  GGXL: okay n/m I think you need more than a plan of action there, buddy.

  RHellion: Guessing she tried getting an audit kicked off?

  Aedo tabbed over to her daemon and had it search the Energy Division Public Releases; an audit had to be reported publicly, and yeah, there it was. Nothing wrong, at least to the
public eye. She copied the release into the chatroom, and LogicalOR popped up in the program’s online nicks list.

  Aedo winced. Whoever the mind was behind the username, they seemed to like excoriating her in all VL’s discussions—when they weren’t buying her a beer in honor of a prison stay, anyway. To be fair, they excoriated everyone who didn’t take a militant approach to data democracy; they seemed to think the only strategy worth anything was getting into the government servers and causing as much mayhem as possible. Anyone else was clearly Not Serious Enough.

  They might have dumped beer money into one of Aedo’s public tipjars, but Aedo fully expected to be dropped from their good graces as soon as the novelty of her prison stay wore off. She was kinda expecting them to hack her data pad just to show that they could.

  That was the one annoying thing about LogicalOR: when it came to working the net, they did know their stuff. They even had skills which might be useful if, say, someone needed to crack the security on a government database.

  Virtual Liberation might be a complete primordial sludgepool, but it was really good at finding strange bedfellows when you needed them.

  A message popped up in the corner of her screen.

  LogicalOR: so

  LogicalOR: notice that your friend got sniped

  … that probably wasn’t a good sign. She tabbed over and started to type.

  Ayeball: What?

  LogicalOR: you totally moved in with valencia cadares

  LogicalOR: chasing some businesslady tail or some new leaks yeah (i approve)

  LogicalOR: well

  LogicalOR: she is in with the cops my friend and not in a buddy buddy way

  The next message was a link to a news release.

  Aedo clicked on it, and let the secure group chat chatter on without her. The new window bloomed up and covered all their words anyway, replacing them with:

  TROUBLED ENERGY DIVISION LAUNCHES INTERNAL INVESTIGATION

  Amid renewed scrutiny, ED detains seven employees with suspected ties to data terrorist groups

  Aedo skipped the newsese; scrolled down, scanning until she found the words Valencia Cadares right there in paragraph three. A quick flurry of eye movement to find if there was anything about why they’d found her—material on her work computer, thank god, nothing there about surveillance in her home, just inadvisable net searches and a few illicit access attempts to parts of the network she didn’t have permissions for—and for the first time Aedo wished someone had approached her first with a stupid idea.

  She tabbed back to the messenger, and got as far as hitting the W key when two more messages popped up.

  LogicalOR: they are gunning for your kind my friend

  LogicalOR: better watch out ;)

  LogicalOR signed off.

  Aedo sat there for a moment, staring at the signoff message in her chat. Let the words spike her adrenal glands; remind her that yeah, humans had been a prey species once, and wouldn’t it be a shame to let those old instincts sit unused.

  You could freeze, you could flee, or you could fight.

  The conversation in the other window had rambled to a pause—waiting on some point of clarification that she wasn’t going to focus on just now. She took a deep breath and returned her hands to the keys.

  Ayeball: Uh, guys …

  Ayeball: How would you feel about helping me do something fast? Like, maybe now?

  Ayeball: And then maybe visiting me in prison again?

  • • • •

  The thing was, arresting Cadares wasn’t even subtle. They could wave all the trumped-up charges at her that they wanted, but as someone who actually worked for the Energy Division, and as someone who’d done the reasonable, official thing and sparked off an audit, there was an entire legal conversation that was supposed to be happening right now. Terms like reasonable suspicion should have been all over the news release; words like whistleblower protections.

  Terms which got conveniently forgotten any time something like this came to a head.

  Aedo didn’t understand why people didn’t get angry about that, either.

  Cadares’ home office was locked with a passcode and biometrics, and maybe with a dedicated week and a lot of reading done on the blacklisted parts of the net, Aedo could have figured out how to bypass it. She could try guessing the password, too, but someone like Cadares would have a random password required at work, and probably would have just used the same thing at home. So Aedo went for the most effective option.

  She went out to the livingroom, grabbed the coffee table, and slammed it against the latch until it gave way.

  Cadares didn’t live off her datapad. She was one of those people who could leave it behind without feeling like she was forgetting a limb. It was there, sitting on her desk, plugged into the lectric outlet, and a quick swipe of Aedo’s thumb—and a quick polishing off of her thumbprint, after—showed the dashboard, open and unsecured.

  Aedo grabbed it. Then she ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her bag, and stuffed Cadares’ datapad down into it.

  Time to make an exit.

  Walk, don’t run, she thought. If there had been a silent alarm on the door, she wasn’t going to flee the place looking like she’d just triggered an alarm. She paused to hold the door open for someone, then went out onto the street. Slipped onto the first autocab she saw, sat down, and tried to pretend she had a destination other than “away”.

  Then she pulled out her own datapad—not Cadares’, not yet—and put a set of parameters into venue search. Beauty salon, keyword: whole image, demographics: some crossover between new professionals and late-grade students, price range: … she hesitated. If this all blew up in her face, and she couldn’t see how it wouldn’t, she’d be out of a place to stay and in desperate need of resources.

  Then again, if this all blew up in her face, she’d probably have a warrant out for her arrest. And prison was free rent. She typed in as much money as she had, and ran the search.

  First things first: she needed a makeover.

  • • • •

  One of the benefits of finding a place that catered to students in the late grades was that they all knew their academic stipends were going to run out, and there was a kind of universal financial panic that accompanied that. Low cost, middling quality, and high demand kept places like FASHION: Real World Incoming! open, and they didn’t blink too much at any misguided request Aedo could come up with.

  Crop the hair short so it lay against her skull, pluck her eyebrows down to bored lines, shade the cheeks so the cheekbones appeared higher, emphasize the line of the upper lip and de-emphasize the lower, make her eyes appear larger, and the effect was that she looked like an intern who wasn’t quite sure what notes to hit to get “professional” instead of “young counterculture,” but was making a go at it.

  And as an added bonus, if you changed the lines of contrast on your face, you could throw most facial-recognition programs for a loop. The high cheekbones, the dark upper lip—they made her computationally unrecognizable.

  For more money than she’d wanted to spend, the folk at the salon had set her up with a set of interview clothes, all bland and neatly squared away. They made her skin itch with a sensation that was purely psychosomatic, but they were good camouflage. For her price, she couldn’t ask for better.

  The energy building was out on the far outskirts of the business district, where the land and infrastructure both dropped away and let you see that the place had terrain, underneath the stacked buildings and elevated roadways and the lectric lines, the data lines, the lines allocated to whatever the hell security did with them. Stepping out of the next autocab into its shadow, it was like walking back up to a prison: one massive edifice gleaming in the midday light, and blotting out half the sky. All these governmental buildings looked the same to Aedo; a sequence of brainchildren from architects who tried for wild invention and ended up fitting neatly in an acceptable range of lines.

  The psychosomatic skin-crawl
came back in full force, but Aedo squared her shoulders, tried for an expression of bored indifference, and pressed Cadares’ data pad against the door. And got ready to run.

  But there was no request for additional verification. No ever-so-convenient error that locked her out while a silent alarm sounded. Instead the door just slid open—because the data pad had the right accesses, so what did the system care about the person holding it?

  Agencies like this, they talked security, but it was a perfunctory kind of talking. Politics had only just caught up to the idea that things like energy could be embarrassing to the state, and bureaucracy could take a long time to catch up to political exhortation. So that was one obstacle down.

  Internal incompetence to the rescue, again.

  Of course, now she was inside, and that was a whole new problem.

  Cadares’ datapad should have all the permissions it needed to get Cadares herself into anything she needed to use. Aedo, though, didn’t know where that infrastructure was, and unauthorized access attempts were logged by default on most systems. No need for someone to know what they were doing to catch her at it. Asking a human person for directions wasn’t going to end well; rumors spread in places like these, and an intern no one had ever seen before asking about someone who’d just been arrested was even less subtle than Aedo was being now.

  She kept her head down. Tried not to look like she was rubbernecking as she rubbernecked around until she spotted an information kiosk, and strolled up to it. Its screens showed various intra-organization tidbits: an upcoming company hike on the pedestrian paths around the solar farms, costs down three and a half percent due to switching to responsive lighting, the employee being recognized for his or her contributions to the Energy Division was someone decidedly not Cadares ….