Scott had set his alarm for 5AM. After dragging himself out of bed, he grabbed a change of clothes and his laptop then headed out to his car. Walking out, he saw several students stumbling back home from a late night out.
“Hey guy, do you know where the After-After-Party is?” Some drunk guy asked him. Seriously?
“Nope, I’m just going to prison and wanted to get an early start.” Scott replied with a smirk.
“Ha! Fine, don't tell me. It’s probably lame anyway.” The guy slurred at him. He kept walking. Scott really didn’t see the appeal of drinking that much. He’d tried it a few times, but apparently, he was kind of a mean drunk. Barry thought it was funny, but Matt agreed it was probably best to let Scott be the driver most nights.
The roads were pretty empty, so he made good progress for the first 3 hours. Around 8:30 he got a call from Barry.
“Hey man! Can you believe we were hanging out with those girls, and you just got up and left. Hah!”
“Do you think that was rude?” Scott asked, worried.
“No way! Normally you would have stayed until the end of the night until the girls had to find an excuse to get away. Now they are left wanting a little more.” Barry said with glee.
“Well, I did send Adrianna my code and that video after I got home. I’m sure she still thinks I’m desperate.” Scott said, a little sadly.
“Don’t worry about it. You said you were going to send it and you did. Nothing wrong with that. Just promise me you won’t call her today asking if she made any progress.”
“OK. I was totally going to call her in the afternoon. You’re probably right. She may not even look at it. She doesn’t need me pestering her.” Scott agreed.
“Right. So normally I would play it cool and not call Elsa until at least Tuesday. I really want to add the girls to Glitch_HR. It would be so great if I could talk to her about it, but I wanted to ask you first.”
“Sounds good. You probably need me to do it since you don’t have permission to add employees.”
“Oh actually, I had a thought on that.” Said Barry. “Professor Springer wired me a pretty large amount of money to start the energy company. I have 15k sitting in my bank right now and he said he'll add more once we finish testing our prototype.”
“Whoa, wait… I know we agreed on that, but he’s already sent you money?!”
“I just saw it in my account this morning.” Barry said. “Anyway, I wanted to spend a bit getting Melinda a laptop. She’s CEO of the energy company too until she gets someone else to do it. She can add people, and probably access to other features we can’t use yet. I’d also like to add Dr. Springer. I wasn’t going to give him a copy of the software, but it would be cool if I could get his training recommendations and forward him some links.”
“Sure,” agreed Scott.
“He can understand stuff that is way beyond me. It could really help us work out some of our issues.”
“That sounds great. I’m excited to see what you guys come up with!”
Barry continued, “Also, I know you are short on cash right now. You’ll have to buy about 3 tanks of gas and a motel room for your trip right now. I was going to send you $500 for expenses. Matt and I were going to go help Melinda find an apartment this weekend and we can split the first month’s rent.”
“Wow, thanks Barry. I was pretty stressed about money and getting Melinda set up. Now I only have to worry about asking an imprisoned hacker to help me add security to our highly illegal software.”
“No problem. Let us know how it goes.”
The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful. Around two in the afternoon he arrived at the Big Spring Correctional Facility.
What the heck? This place looks nicer than my dorm.
There was no razor wire, just an office in front of some buildings surrounded by a simple chain link fence. Some buildings inside looked like they could be apartments. Come to think of it, he had seen some apartments in the city that looked more secure.
In the office there was a woman at a computer and a guy in uniform sitting in a separate room.
He was dark skinned with gray sideburns, and a bit overweight. When Scott entered, he stood up and walked over with a friendly smile.
“Hi there! Are you Scott Henderson? I’m Warden Davis!”
Seriously, this guy was way too nice to be running a prison.
“Um hi. Nice to meet you. This place is nicer than my dormitory.”
“Hah, yeah I think some of the guys here are a bit sad when it’s time to leave.” Davis laughed. “Anyway, Anna will help you with the paperwork and check in any items that you are not allowed to bring in.”
While the people here were nice, the paperwork was brutal. It took Scott nearly an hour to get through it. Finally, he was brought inside the main compound to a room they had for meeting with prisoners.
“So, since you aren’t a lawyer, we will be recording your conversation with the prisoner.”
“OK” Scott agreed nervously.
A bald middle-aged man in a polo shirt and jeans was brought in. No prison jumpsuit here, apparently. He had a forgettable face, but there was definitely a look of excitement in his eyes.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“So, I’m Solomon Rhodes and you must be Scott Henderson. Pleased to meet you.”
“Hi,” Scott said. “I brought my laptop - it’s not very good but the program I want to secure is installed and the code is in this folder.”
“OK, I’ll get to work.” Solomon clicked around a bit, then started typing rather quickly.
Scott sat there uncomfortably.
“Oh, this is interesting!” Mr. Rhodes muttered.
Scott was curious, but decided it was better off if he didn’t ask since they were getting recorded. Anything illegal could get him in big trouble.
“So,” Solomon explained while still typing. “This is an amazing project you have here. Most of the code is hosted offshore and it is linked into some very interesting programs.” He eyed the camera to indicate he wasn’t going to explain right now.
“So can you help me?” Scott asked.
“Yes, I have created a virtual private network and added my prison computer in so I can access what I need from here. I’m allowed to do IT work for you, and it will give me more computer time. You will need to pay me at least minimum wage for my time.”
“OK,” Scott agreed. It sounded fair, and he was pretty sure Melinda would agree. “I’ll ask Warden Davis and try to get an employment offer set up.” He actually had no idea how to do that, but hopefully he could get help or look it up.
“This is going to take a fair amount of work. I’m going to need to transfer some assets to another location - the current hosting is unsafe for reasons I’ll try to explain later.” Solomon continued. “I have a plan, but it will take a few days to set up. I should be able to send you messages now for follow up discussions. Please get that employment contract finished as soon as possible. I kind of want to emphasize that there is some danger here related to your current hosting arrangement, so try not to wait too long.”
That sounded a bit ominous.
“I guess that's everything,” Scott said. “Nice to meet you Mr. Rhodes.”
“Sure, it was fun.”
A little puzzled about what had just happened, Scott returned to the main office. He asked the Warden if there were any forms available for work contracts.
“There is one thing we don’t have a shortage of; that is forms!” the Warden laughed. The secretary, Anna, started printing out another stack of papers.
While he was waiting, Scott pulled out his phone to call Matt and Barry. Before dialing the number, he received a text from an Unknown number.
“Hello, this is SR.” Solomon Rhodes? “I used your computer to get around a few of the limitations on the firewall here so it will be easier for me to communicate in the future.”
Scott replied. “That’s good.” He wasn’t sure what to say, or how Solomon was sending him messages without showing his phone number.
“Yes, so what I couldn’t talk about in there is that your software is hosted at a location I am pretty familiar with. The Russian organization I hacked is the same place your code is running. I think you are pulling from a lot of their data collection services.”
“That’s not good. Do they know I’m using their servers?” Scott did not like the sound of that at all.
“So, there is no way they don’t know about your code, but it looks like your encryption is preventing them from understanding what your code is doing. It is probably only a matter of time before they either break in or come visit you personally. That’s why I indicated you should hurry.”
“Should I be running to a different city and changing my name?”
“I think until they crack the encryption you are mostly safe - the dorm you live in has better than usual security. I think the government has sensitive projects on campus and they invested in protecting the students who work there. Likely the Russians know you are from the University, and probably what dorm you are in. Doubtful they know who you are, or you’d be dead already.”
“That is not comforting.” Scott said.
“Right! I have a plan for pulling all your code and their code that you are tapping into. We can move it to some cloud servers. They have huge bandwidth, so I think I can program a distraction and dump everything in about 10 minutes. They have people on site, but some of the night shift employees don’t have as much experience and authority. Hopefully, we can get it done before they realize what is going on.”
“You came up with this in the half hour I was visiting?”
“Hah, no. Like I said I had infected their servers before I got put in jail. I was planning how to steal a lot of their data gathering tech since the day I found it. I had a plan already, but your software running on their server gives me an even easier option to distract them.”
“Sounds suspicious that my code recommended the one guy who could actually protect my code.”
“Yeah right! The AI must have found my worm. It might have even set this whole project of yours in motion as a plan to protect itself. That’s scary, but once we get the code I can try to figure out if there is some AI pulling our strings or if it is just a really good Human Resources program. It’s possible it just picked me because I am the best guy for the job.”
“Hrmm, so either a scary AI planning to take over the world or a program that just works really well at what it was designed to do.” Scott was kind of a pessimist, so the second option seemed unlikely. But in the movies the AI always started launching nukes when people tried to shut them down. Would the world be better off if the computer AI just won without people trying to attack it?
Scott decided then he would just try to work with the scary AI, even if it was probably controlling him like a puppet. He wasn’t a fan of post-apocalyptic sci fi and wanted nothing to do with it.
Later, talking to Matt.
“Scott, that was pretty scary. The computer recommended the one guy who had a plan to get it off the Russian servers.”
“Yeah, I’m not so sure building this company is a good idea.”
“Hey, you warned us this was dangerous the first day. I’m having the most fun of my life right now. The way I see it - we were likely going to be killed anyway once the Russians found us. I’m pretty sure it is just a program designed for Human Resources that is really good at its job.” Matt was more of an optimist and had way too much faith in Scott’s programming skills.
“It seems implausible that a super genius AI would pick this for its plan to take over the world,” Matt said with a chuckle.
“Barry gave me some money, so I think I’m going to stop for the night somewhere. Probably going to sleep in a bit and see you tomorrow afternoon.”
----------------------------------------
Back at the prison, Solomon Rhodes was very pleased. He had been planning to steal the Russian tech since a few days after he started searching through their servers. He thought it was fun teasing that nervous kid about an advanced AI running things in the background. In reality, this was just a really lucky break for him. He would have tried this in a year or so after getting out, but now he could start his plans immediately.
The timing was pretty good, so he ran a few more tests then kicked off his plan. Solomon didn’t mind letting the kid keep his little HR program up and running. He seemed like a nice guy and there didn’t seem to be any harm letting him use this to start a little company. Honestly, the kid was so naive he’d probably end up hiring someone who stole the whole thing from him before long. It wasn’t really his problem.
The Russians were focused on spying for their government and running small time scams to pay the bills. Scott wanted to live his dream of building a company. But Solomon saw what the Russians had built as an opportunity to make billions. The ability to see the emails of top companies and government bureaucracies combined with sophisticated code to parse and search would allow him to do insider trading at a level politicians could only dream of.
The quality of the data would degrade over time without the network of Russian agents adding in new sources. Still, the sheer quality of infiltration they already had would provide enough intel for him to make him more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes.
Solomon Rhodes kicked off the first step of his plan.