http%3a%2f%2fi.imgur.com%2ftCuZKXD.png [http://i.imgur.com/tCuZKXD.png]
Let’s get this out of the way: buying Scripts in the darknet is illegal. Using them is more illegal. Using them to steal the usernames and passwords of San Mabrada’s City Council is way more illegal than that.
That’s why I was sitting on the stairs outside the Kerbal Library in the middle of a storm, shivering. I felt the raindrops smash against my jacket and the cold seep through into my bones with every gust of icy wind. My nose was red and runny and my fingers were numb, and tapping into my burner Berry computer was like trying to play the piano with ten finger-sized tree-branches.
If you want to do something very illegal, you do so far away from home. That’s common sense in Lower Cañitas District, where young men like me wear their Strikes as symbols of status. So I went to the library. It was a nice spot, closed because of the storm and the rain was as effective as a gray curtain to guarantee my privacy. Also, it had free wifi.
The cold and the risk of getting sick later on was well worth it. A City Council password can be more useful to an imaginative mind than to the councilman themselves, even if they change it two or three hours after the leak is detected. That meant there were enough imaginative minds willing to pay me for my troubles, and that made those troubles no trouble at all.
I finished the configuration of my personal hacking OS, set with the Council intranet in sight. That’s step one of three.
I know very little real hacking myself, and I am not ashamed to admit I couldn’t hack my way into my own personal blog if my life depended on it. Beauty is, I don’t have to. The Hack OS I used set me back only twenty dollars. I made that amount back on my first digital break-in. The software does all the heavy lifting for me. It’s like a gun that aims itself while I look for cover and hide. The only thing I have to do is make sure it’s loaded.
The script I had in my back pocket was the bullet. Like hunting a monster, you have to make sure you have the right tool for the job, silver for werewolves and blessed for a vampire. I hunted databases. Different sites run different security measures, so before each job I had to go and get the right script.
I held the tiny nano-USB chip between my fingers and carefully loaded it into the Berry. It began unpacking and while the progress bar filled, I thought of the month’s payments I was going to make in a couple hours. Maybe even secure some extra hours of home-heating if I budgeted.
Sounded like heaven.
Some heating, a warm meal, and spare cash to fight off the debt collectors hounding the neighborhood. Not bad for a two-hour-job.
The script finished unpacking and I loaded it into the application. I had only one shot at this, since the nano-USB the script came in formatted itself just after the unpacking was complete. In this way, the script creator protected his identity from the police if a careless Script Kiddie messed up and left a USB lying around after a break-in. I suspected those hackers were the ones making real bank, and with none of the risks I took. Smart guys.
Loading the script was step two. Step three would be pressing the “start” button, wait until the software was done and the usernames and passwords were safely stored inside a small portable hard-drive next to my Berry.
I realized something was wrong just as my finger hovered over the button. I froze and studied the screen.
The Hack OS must be connected to the Internet to work. It has to show the incoming connections as well as the outgoing ones. Most of the time you got publicity bots trying to get enough metadata for their targeted ads. Other times it was a person. Hence the burner Berry computer, to be discarded in the nearest dumpster as soon as the work was done. To the bare-bones user interface, it looked as a string of I.P addresses flashing in and out of a corner display every half a minute. The bots simply came, took a look at the net usage, found nothing interesting or marketable and left.
But the I.P address I saw flash on the screen as I was about to start the hack had already been around two different times.
I cursed in a whisper and the storm hid my words even from my ears. I stood up and looked at both ends of the street. Maybe I had enough time to slither off into a back-alley…
Sometimes you get a police bot in the small traffic influx of the net. The Hack OS search is one of their priorities. Remember, scripts are highly illegal.
Most of the time the OS detected the bot and deleted itself from your burner computer before it registered on the police archives. But when the bot slipped by the firmware…
Even across the curtain of rain, I heard the sirens and a moment later I saw them, coming at me in a blur. No point on running now, it was an automated police-car. You could try running from one, of course, as they were programmed to arrest non-violent criminals. But sometimes they malfunctioned. You could get splattered under their wheels as they chased after you and pleaded with you to surrender peacefully.
I didn’t feel like placing my life in the hands of drones. Drones programmed by public contractors, at that.
But I had to do something or I would go to prison.
“No way a judge strikes me for this one,” I muttered to myself, as the drone got closer and closer. I had about twenty seconds of freedom left before my inevitable arrest. And, as I said, using a script to steal the account data of the City Council was super illegal. Government tampering, aggravated. No judge would allow the Strike System to cover for it, not in a million years. It would be jail time for me, and Sis would have to fend off for herself for five to ten years.
I grabbed the Berry and stabbed at it with my wet numb fingers as fast as I could without getting careless (a typo in this situation literally meant jail-time) with my heart beating inside my chest, threatening to make me lose my calm. I finished typing and struck the “start” button hard just as the drone pulled by the sidewalk in front of me. I threw the Berry to the floor one second before the robotic authority ordered me to do so, from a speaker so powerful it dwarfed the storm.
YOU HAVE BEEN IMPLICATED IN AN ILLEGAL SOFTWARE SITUATION. STEPPING AWAY FROM THE HACKING DEVICE IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST, AS IT WILL BE CONSIDERED AN ACT OF COMPLIANCE BY A JUDGE.
Its onboard camera registered enough distance had been achieved between me and the computer and the back door in front of me opened upwards with a hiss, like an automated limo which arrived to pick up a teenager and get him to prom.
The drone blared again.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. ALL COMPLIANCE WILL BE RECORDED AND MEASURED AGAINST YOUR CRIME, AS WILL BE ALL RESISTANCE. PLEASE, UNDER THE PUBLIC SELF-REGULATION ACT OF 2034, PROCEED TO PLACE YOURSELF UNDER ARREST.
And it stood there, looking at me expectantly with his little high definition camera.
“Van is going to kill me,” I thought. Yeah, I had promised Mom and Sis I was going to behave. Too late for that, though. And taking my time to obey a direct command would be seen as contempt by some judges.
So I walked down the stairs with a brisk pace and stepped inside the drone. There, I just placed myself under arrest. The door closed after me. It wasn’t locked.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION, it repeated at me, in a lower volume that came from the inside. TRIP TO THE CAÑITAS POLICE DEPARTMENT IS BEGINNING NOW. CURRENT COURSE IS CALCULATED TO TAKE THIRTEEN MINUTES; DO YOU WANT TO SUGGEST AN ALTERNATE ROUTE?
“No, this one is fine,” I said. I reclined myself on the seat, looked at the drone’s roof and sighed.
THERE ARE WATER BOTTLES ON THE BACKSEAT COMPARTMENT, the drone suggested. It began the trip to the Police Department, driving itself exactly per local speed laws.
A small flying drone would come for my burner computer five minutes later or so, braving the storm with cold software courage, and would bring it to the Department as Evidence. Meanwhile, lying on the stairs with its screen cracked, the Berry was in the process of hacking the shit out of the poor databases of the Kerbal Public Library itself.
Hey, it’s less illegal than going after the Council.
###
The thing with officer Harrison is, it’s very hard not to like him. He cares about his job, cares about his district, always keeps a mug of warm chocolate near his desk and doesn’t mind sharing with felons.
When you walk into the Department he looks at you like an uncle would, or your father if you have one: He’s not mad, only disappointed to see you there.
But he’s not one to judge or spiel you, he simply makes you company while you wait until the Sergeant forwards your case into the electronic Courtroom and you get your third, last, strike.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
What I mean is I hated when officer Harrison was around the Department. One good thing not having my father around was I hadn’t got to worry about disappointing any male authority figure, why would Harrison dare come around and make me feel all guilty?
Not all guilty, really. There’s heating in the Department. No police are going cold on winter. Not even the drones. That’s some perspective for you.
The worst part of Harrison was, after the trial, he liked to accompany you home, talk to your parents.
He knew my mom very well.
We stood by the door of my apartment while Harrison rang the doorbell a couple of times. The corridor was bathed in a yellow, sickish light, the exact tint a filmmaker would use for a scene with heroin addicts. A dog barked in the background and I could hear the Da Silva’s yelling at each other two doors from us, as they used to do on weekends from 9am to 6pm without fault.
“I can just let myself in,” I told Harrison without much hope. He gave me one of his Uncle looks and rang a couple more times. Just when I got my hopes up that mom wasn’t home today, I heard her familiar footsteps down the apartment hallway. The door opened partially and I saw her gray eyes staring fearfully at Harrison’s badge. Then a second later she recognized him and the fear disappeared. Like clockwork, it was replaced by anger and then disappointment when she saw me standing next to him.
“Oh, not again,” she muttered. She closed the door, unlocked the chain and opened it fully. Mom was a tiny woman in her mid-thirties, with steel-gray eyes that Sis had inherited. She wore a washed apron and an old pink dress and her black hair in a tight ponytail. She used to be beautiful, I was told, before the drink and the poverty wore her down.
“Grace,” greeted her Harrison. He put a hand on my shoulder, “Cole here got into some trouble again. I guessed you may want to know.”
“Thank you, James,” mom said, staring at the floor with shame. Then she recovered. “What did he do this time?”
I’m standing right here mom, I can tell you.
“The drone network caught him hacking the Kerbal Public Library with those scripts kids like to use. Heaven knows what he wanted with the Library, but the judge gave him another Strike for it.”
“Oh, Cole…”
It was my turn to look at the floor.
“That’s his third strike,” mom went on, “right? Another one and…”
“Yeah, Cole has to calm down for a while,” Harrison said, “we talked about it on the way here. You have a moment, Grace? I’ve been around the block and I have some suggestions for Cole, maybe you’d like to hear them?”
Mom nodded, “yes, please, James. Come inside, I’ll get us some coffee.”
Then she looked at me up and down, with her hands on my shoulders, like she was the gendarme of a factory examining her latest android for any production damage. “Are you fine, Cole?”
“Yes, mom,” I said, my mouth dry.
“Go inside. We’ll talk later about this.”
I raised and eyebrow and stared daggers at her, but did as she said. I passed her and said with a growl, “there’s nothing to talk about.”
I’m not proud of what I do but I do it to keep my family afloat. She and I both know it would be much easier if that didn’t include caring for a recovering alcoholic.
Or had she already faltered this week?
The Dorsett household was small and cramped. The kitchen and the living room were the same. It was also my bedroom, too, a corner of the room separated by a curtain that I had added a year ago, to afford me some privacy. My bed was a reworked sofa.
Everything in our tiny apartment was second-hand —except for the Internet. But it was clean and we had fresh food and clean clothes. Compared to some of the other apartments in the complex, we were royalty.
Behind me, Harrison went to take a seat while mom fetched some coffee flavored mixture. I could hear the conversation:
“—I know he means well but those kids he hangs out with… They are nothing short of a gang, I fear they are taking him down the wrong path…”
No way I suffered through that talk if I could help it. I stomped my way down the short hallway into our apartment two bedrooms and into Sis’ room. At least she had a door I could close to put some distance from the kitchen. Her room was the best-looking part of the house, even if it had too much pink. She had k-pop bands posters covering her walls and
Van was already waiting for me, her arms crossed and an angry scowl on her freckled face. She looked like sixteen-year-old version of mom, minus two kids and a drinking problem. She wore a baggy t-shirt of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, torn jeans and sneakers.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” she whispered at me as soon as I came in. “Do you want to kill our mother with worry? Because that’s what you will do if you go to jail, Cole. You lying prick, you promised—”
“They were going to cut the Internet,” I interrupted her. “Lack of payment. She didn’t tell you that, did she?”
That took her back a step and I knew from the second of doubt that crossed her face like a shadow, that mom had kept that a secret. Pride or shame; didn’t matter. Different face of the same coin.
The Internet is the canary in the mine for families like us. When it goes, the other amenities like water or electricity soon follow.
“Even then,” she said, recovering her balance, “going scripting again? You should have told me, Cole, I’ve some spare cash…”
“That you are going to need when you go to college,” I cut her off, “so don’t even think about it, Van. Let me worry about this stuff, I can manage. I’ve managed for years now, I’m not going to stop now.”
“Yes you will, you’re on your third Strike, Cole,” she said, “and you are not getting them off anymore once you hit eighteen. You know this, right?”
I nodded dismissively and looked the other way. Yes, I was on my last chance, then it was off to prison for a decade.
That only meant I had to be more careful nowadays. Van was skeptical.
“I can get some help,” she said, with and nodded back towards her PC, “set up a donations page or something, you know. People do that.”
“We are not beggars,” I felt the familiar rush of anger burn on my stomach, just like every time she prodded the subject, “and there is no such thing as a charity with people. Your fans don’t own you, Van. But they will sure try if they start feeding you.”
Sis was a streamer, she played video-games while her fans watched on the Internet. Sometimes they tipped or paid a subscription to choose from a pool what games she should play that day. She was popular, and I knew she would be even more so if she had a better computer. Her old, battered model could barely play ten percent of the games on the market.
So yes, it was true. She could probably take care of half the household payments if she wanted.
Didn’t matter one bit, I wasn’t going to let her.
“It’s like living in 1960 with you,” she said, “but whatever. If you are in jail, I’m taking command of the family, you know. You’ll have to call me Supreme Overlord while you are getting beat up in prison.”
“You are just waiting for your chance, huh, power-hungry maniac?”
She smiled and uncrossed her arms.
“Of course. Today the apartment and tomorrow San Mabrada. Now go be quiet in a corner and pretend you are a tree. I logged out of my stream when I heard officer Harrison on the door. Fans get angsty if you make them wait.”
“Children do that too.”
“Say something like that out loud and I’ll literally murder you. As in, literally literally murder. I’m on zero Strikes, Cole, I have a chance of getting away with it.”
I spent the next few hours on a corner of the bed, watching some shows on my smartphone with some earplugs I raided from Van’s cabinets.
I made sure to keep quiet even if I didn’t like the idea of a thousand or so people watching her play. There was a chance she could get away with murder, after all.
When the pale sunlight was leaving the window, mom came inside and announced I was going to start a “prim and proper” job on Monday. Also, I was grounded into next year.