System Seven (2 page)

“Sam, mode two, volume
low.”

A spotlight lit a
desk, a computer screen came alive, and jazz fusion filled the room. He padded
over to the mini-fridge and retrieved a beer. He glanced down: the workouts had
to resume before his belly ballooned like his dad’s. The resemblance was
already forming.
Fear the genes.

The jazz was too much
for the hour. “Sam, load my new age playlist.”

The music shifted to
synthesizers and strings.

At a window he stared
at the faint stars hovering over the hills. In the half-tired, half-wired haze
of early morning, he imagined stepping out as a giant and foot-planting the
Sierras to launch into the heavens to explore. Star-lit nebulas and crowded
solar systems swung past in a seconds-long vision that ended with the familiar
feeling of being cheated.

Growing up, everyone
thought that by the year 2018 mankind would be in space, working and mining the
planets at least, if not flitting from star to star in true exploration.
Instead, they hadn’t even come close. Rovers chewing soil on desolate Mars was
as far as they’d come. Corrupt and spineless politicians had allowed the
government’s coffers to be drained by military industry. Corporations
effectively owned the country and war was still the only black hole they were
interested in. Space programs of substance never regained funding.

He swigged his beer
and thoughts landed on a terrestrial vacation instead. A campsite, firelight,
good beer and good grub, followed by mad love under the stars. Truth told,
camping sounded better, wood smoke or not. Catalina Island was great but
required flying, no matter how short the flight. Driving would steal a half a
day.

He opened a cabinet
where a brass Buddha incense holder from Berkeley wafted memories thicker than
smoke. He set it on the window ledge and fitted a sandalwood stick into the
happy teacher’s belly button. Tiny sparks danced as the first strands of gray lifted
into the room.

At once memories
stirred. Gatherings with friends to test psychic abilities. The trip to Area
51. Experiments with dream journals. Ouija boards, channeling, meditation, and
nights spent staring up at the stars, sending out vibes to attract aliens.
Among the crazy efforts were powerful times that still lingered with a life of
their own. The lucid dreams and out of body experiences remained the pinnacle
experiences. It seemed a lifetime ago and in a way it was. A part of him was
still amazed at the edgy and wondrous experiments and always would be.

He pushed aside the
mesh of memories and settled in front of
Grunge
,
the shop computer. If writing code didn’t wear him out, nothing would.

Half an hour later,
movement caught his eye. A sleepy Kaiya appeared from the dim of the stairwell
with his cell phone in her hand.

“Um, Mr. Bakken? You
forgot something. It’s Matt.”

Seeing her, he wanted
to ignore the call. She’d come up wearing only her black silk sleeping shorts.
He turned in his chair and welcomed her in an embrace.

“Sexy,” he whispered
around her lips.

“Mm-hmm. Take your
call.”

Matt apologized before
reporting an anomaly at one of the edge routers that protected InterGen’s
network. “Utilization went nuts but I’m not seeing why. I think I’m missing
something. Can you take a quick look?”

He withdrew from Kaiya
and tapped the VPN to reach the router in question. After a scan of the logs, a
detail jumped out: a standby network card on the router had been activated and
reconfigured.

“Damn.”

She knelt next to him,
asking with her eyes.

“Shit’s in the fan, I
think. Maybe even a hack. Sorry, babe.”

“S’okay. Go get ‘em.”
She stood, stroked his cheek, and strolled over to the window he’d looked out
earlier. The woman he loved, inside a room full of technology, peering out at
nature beyond – he took a mental snapshot.

A flow of data coursed
out the hijacked router. The network systems monitors all showed green and no
alarms had gone off – there was still a chance an InterGen tech had set up
something unauthorized. A captured sample of the data stream revealed the type
of files being transferred.

“Christ. Someone’s
moving around music? Who would be so stupid?”

• • •

A miniature neon beer
sign over Johan’s desk cast its glow in the smoke from his pipe. Across the
studio apartment’s floor lay laptops, network cabling, and a pair of routers
blinking in the dark. Laptop speakers tried to do justice to a discordant
Eurobeat mp3 but came up woefully short. Corduroy curtains blocked out the
morning light.

The Dutch hacker
watched the cargo stream from InterGen to his client’s server in Thailand. For
five hundred euro and as a test of InterGen’s security it was worth babysitting
the transfer.

He ashed his pipe into
an old coffee mug. InterGen had been on his bucket list for over two years. He
had nearly given up trying except for the thousand different ways for profit
once inside. In the end he lucked out with a combination of fresh tools that
exploited an extraordinary vulnerability in the Crest series of Rocom routers,
one that could only be another NSA backdoor. Finding them was all the rage.

He peeled a
thumbnail-sized strip of the claylike hash from the trim of the monitor and
fired up another bowl. After a deep pull, the transfer paused onscreen. He held
his breath and willed it to continue. It did.

“I am a god,” he
quipped as he exhaled. He started to check email when the transfer paused
again, then once more.

He set the pipe down
and pulled up a console window to investigate.

• • •

“It’s a hacker.”

Back at InterGen Matt
asked, “How? What’d you find?”

“A root account on one
of the old Promulgate servers is active. He’s pushing shit out now.”

“Where’s it going?”

He grunted. “Another
hacked box unless he works for the Canadian Tourism Board. They might be able
to see where the packets are going.”

“You’re going after
him?”

“Damn straight I am.”

A call to the Canadian
NOC went to voicemail. He marked it urgent but could only wait.

“Crap, I can’t believe
this.”

The thought of someone
cracking open the network was as annoying as it was surprising. Rocom routers
were the most secure shit on the planet; the Crest series cost a fortune. The
only thing that kept him from driving to InterGen was Kaiya’s soft hands rubbing
his back and the nudging of her breasts while she listened to him describe the
hack.

“See here... this is
where he defined a new network. And here,” he tapped at a string of text, “the
shitball rooted the old Promulgate server and hijacked it. He’s got about
fifteen gigs of porn and music stashed and is sending some out now.”

She shook her head.
“Owned by a hacker, babe. Not good.”

It sucked to hear but
was true. “Yeah. I don’t see any new sessions so he hasn’t gone exploring yet.
I’ll have to shut him out if he does. Crap, I wish Canada would call back.”

• • •

Across the planet from
InterGen, Johan minimized the window, satisfied his gig on the Promulgate
server was safe. The interruptions originated from somewhere inside the network
but had since smoothed out. Relieved, he celebrated with a couple more tokes of
hash. Soon he’d have help in cracking open database servers, a profitable gig
as long as they stayed hidden.

His other side venture
was setting up the extortion of a famous British playwright suffering from a
case of pedophilia. With forged system access to a private server hosting child
pornography, Johan had extracted membership information. Of course the
playwright hadn’t registered under his real name but had paid with a credit
card, a transaction recorded and stored by the server operator without consent.
Johan had run the entire credit card database against the Underground’s
collection of databases to cull a match.

In this case, the
blackmail would likely be routine. He’d already infected the playwright’s
computer with a custom tracker rootkit that logged and transmitted a daily
report showing how long each page was looked at, how many times – a play by
play of the sick obsession. With those reports he would extract one hundred
thousand euro for not presenting the facts to the playwright’s wife of nine
years... or to the papers. For an additional fee he offered the bonus plan:
destruction of the server’s records incriminating him. Most took the option. An
added five thousand euro for a minute’s work. That he would later release
copies of the records anyway was something he kept strictly to himself.

He drew deeply from
his pipe.
Karma can be a bitch.

Outside, a concert of
car horns erupted just as an email arrived from Crosstalk.

He arched his brows
and blew a thin plume of smoke, noting the synchronicity. Two years ago a set
of jpegs from Crosstalk netted them half a million euro. The images of a Dutch
parliament member engaged in illicit sex with a youth had been taken with his
knowledge though obviously a trust had been betrayed. The extortion went
flawlessly with the help of an intermediary in Arnhem. There had been very
little contact from him since. A couple of false starts on jobs that didn’t pan
out. Crosstalk always worked the big ones.

He again pulled deeply
from the pipe. The email was encrypted as it had arrived from the Underground’s
Magistrate system. Using Crosstalk’s private key, he opened it to reveal an
Alcazar link and a single paragraph.

THEY ARE TRACKING ME
RIGHT NOW THEY HAVE ME I AM DEAD TONIGHT. THEY ARE ON THE GROUND AND IN PEOPLES
MINDS DON’T LET THEM FIND WHO YOU ARE!! GET THIS AND RUN NOW ZERO RIGHT NOW GO
LOW FAST BUT FIND A WAY TO LET IT OUT. LET THEM HAVE IT!! MAKE IT COUNT!!!! I
WAS DARREN BLYTHE ENGLAND, HCS. REMEMBER STATEN-GENERAAL.

High was suddenly
almost too high. He read the paragraph once more in disbelief. That Crosstalk
used his real name was almost as surprising as the message itself.
Go low
. To run, to disappear. Not a
warning given lightly. The link would kick off a download from Alcazar, the
Underground’s secure storage network.

“Seriously?”

Almost ten minutes
left on the mp3 dump to the Thai client. He clicked the link to start the
Alcazar download. Forty chunks. It could take twice as long as the Thai
download.

Run now Zero right now go low fast.

“Fuck.”

• • •

Up in the shop the
music faded and Sam interrupted.

“
Incoming call from
Lisa Delanger of the Canadian Tourism Commission
.”

“Here she is.” Austin
pressed a button on his headset to connect and winked at Kaiya curled up on the
recliner. She had slipped into one of his paint-splattered t-shirts.

The Canadian admin
required minimal prompting before producing the next hop: a backbone router for
a large telco in New Jersey. With thanks and a promise to let her know how the
chase ended, he signed off and dialed the network operations center contact listed
for the telecom. A bored voice answered the phone in Jersey.

“Austin Bakken here
from InterGen California. Your gw08 router is being used right now by a hacker
to stream his data. If you could do me a huge favor and just check where those
packets are headed to? I’m trying to track him and–”

“Ah
shit
...” The voice was suddenly more
awake.

“— I’m hoping you can
help. The packets are inbound from–” he rattled off the IP address of the
Canadian hop, “–and can’t be missed, there’s a ton of ‘em.”

Keyboard clatter mixed
with a string of cuss words. “Okay, got them.”

“Them?”

“Two destinations.
Hang on. One’s Thailand. The other... Germany. The load’s going to Thailand and
your hacker’s in Europe. Or using Europe anyway. I’m going to have to shut this
down–”

He asked him to wait.
“I need another ten or twenty minutes to track.”

He got ten so he sent
Matt chasing the Thailand server. The real trace was through the router in
Germany to the hacker. A lookup showed a website and email hosted off the
address, the domain registered to a brewery. He phoned internationally to the
technical contact, someone named Andreas Bietl. An assistant regretfully
informed he wasn’t available.

When would he return?
It was lunchtime, maybe an hour. Could he type a few commands at the router in
question? No, he wasn’t authorized to but would take a message.

A sudden dead end in
the grab for the hacker.

• • •

One of Johan’s cells
rang.

“Ja?”

“Nosy admin called
from InterGen in America trying to track you. I brushed him off but Andreas may
have to deal with him. What are you up to now?”

The InterGen job blown?
If nothing else was truly wrong, that certainly
was.

“Just a dump of music
and porn. I have other things to concern me right now, but please thank
Andreas, and thank you.”