The beast’s awakening
By Eric Kenvin
I was always interested in conspiracy theories, but I never thought I would be at the center of one. If Jessica told me when I got this job that at the end of the project, I would be hacking into the Americorp mainframe, and trying to delete the database that I had spent the past two years creating, I would’ve thought she was crazy. Well, more crazy than I already thought she was anyway. That was before I became involved with the American Restoration movement.
I had started to hear about them about a month ago on the news. Of course, they were portrayed the group as a bunch of jobless hippies, but I stopped trusting the news when they started getting government subsidies. Besides, most people told me that I looked like a paranoid hippie anyway, and they were probably right. My black hair was long and greasy, I had a beard that I could never get quite right, acne that wouldn’t go away and glasses that were too small for my face. The only thing that didn’t scream dirty hippie was my name, Jason Black. Most people probably imagined some tall dark and handsome character when they first heard my name. I was never sorry to disappoint. I didn’t spend much time looking in the mirror though, I’d rather spend time on more important things than how I look.
I didn’t care whether they were hippies or not, at least the protesters were starting to take action, and even if I didn’t know what they were about or exactly what they were doing, I did know that something was wrong. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and I suspect neither could they, but everyone seemed to be living distracted, blunted lives without any real sense of purpose. I wanted to know why, and I had been searching for an answer all my life. If anyone was going to figure it out, it was them. I did some research online and found out they were holding a rally in Love Park, a few blocks from Americorp during the time I usually took my lunch break, so I decided to head down there.
A crowd of roughly sixty people were gathered in front of the sculpture reading “LOVE” in red capital letters. Two people were holding white banner was draped across the top that read “Restore America,” and a man in a raggedy suit was speaking into a megaphone. Although it was odd for them in this day and age to hold an information session outside instead of on the net, it was refreshing to me that some people still preferred meeting face to face as I did. Something intangible and irreplaceable was lost in purely digital communications.
The man in the suit seemed to be giving some kind of speech. “There seems to be some confusion about where we stand and what we stand for. The media is calling us a simple mob of malcontents. America was once the land of freedom, of opportunity, but that age has long been at an end. We have been faced with an insidious and invisible prison for decades, and the cage is getting smaller. It is not a prison of the body or the mind, but a prison for the spirit. What spirit can hope to flourish when it has no future. What soul can be free when it cannot grow? They are stealing our hopes. They are stealing our futures.”
The crowd seemed enthralled, and I admit I was curious. This man spoke as if he was from the past. None of the common memetics, buzzwords, or three letter acronyms were used. It took longer for him to say what he wanted, but it had a certain elegance to it that leant credibility to his speech, at least more credibility than most of the shows I watched on the History channel.
“We just barely scrape by in the dregs. Given enough to survive, but never live. It’s not just a few of us, it’s all of us. We ask the question: why? Why are so many afflicted with this same way of life? It is because you are under control. Sure, you are free to do and think as you please so long as you have the means. But, ever since our currency became digital, Americorp has been able to manipulate the flow of money, and therefore how much the numbers in your paycheck can buy. We are wage slaves. We are fooled into doing meaningless tasks day after day with the illusion that our lives may one day get better. That our big break is just around the corner. I tell you now, that is a lie. There is no knight in shining armor. This is a disaster, and we are the rescue workers.”
My alarm went off, telling me that my lunch break was over. I knew that what he was accusing Americorp of was impossible, I was working on the systems that he was saying were manipulating the economy. The wealthy have been controlling politics for as long as I’ve been alive through ravenous lobbyism, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that they were keeping the majority of the people from reaching that level of wealth through economic manipulation. The man in the suit was still speaking, so I decided to stay until he was finished.
“Some may be content with survival, indeed those in control would be kept at ease if you were content with your home that is really owned by the bank, with your television that keeps you happy with lies, with your education that you’ll be paying for until you die, with your car that you spend your paycheck on to keep running, with your food that leads you buy blood pressure medication, and your computer that keeps you distracted from your purpose! Life is more than simply living! Life is progress! Life is change! The question remains, how do we change this system? How can we free ourselves from this slavery? We must strike back against those in control, against Americorp, and take back this country for the people!”
I could probably get fired for this. It was hard enough getting my job in the first place, and I didn’t want to think about how many other college graduates applied for the same position and were now unemployed. Something in the speech raised a question though, was a job really worth it? Especially this job, at the company supposedly keeping the country from thriving. If our lives can never get any better, if we’re doomed to live week by week without any change, if I have to work overtime, watch what I say, watch what I wear, watch who I talk to, and hide who I am just to keep my job, is the paycheck really worth it? That doesn’t sound like freedom. Maybe they were right, but I had to do some digging to make sure about Americorp.
They started walking out of the park, and I was in the middle of the crowd. Then, the man in the suit shouted “City of love, city of greed,” and the crowd replied “We’ve got hungry mouths to feed.” Oh god, they weren’t walking away from the park, they were marching. They were marching to Americorp, and I was marching with them. After about 10 minutes, we came to the Americorp headquarters where I worked. There was a small courtyard in front of the entrance, but the protesters were standing on the sidewalk. They were still doing various chants while I tried to edge my way through the crowd. When I started walking across the plaza, someone at the front of the crowd tried to stop me and said “Hey, you can’t go past the sidewalk, it’s private property so you could get arrested.” I turned around and said to him, “It’s ok, I work here.”
I expected him to get angry, but he just smiled and said “Yeah man, we all work for Americorp.”
My office was on the fifth floor. It was about the size of the living room in a small apartment, and there were tables stacked with papers lining two adjacent walls. Jessica was back from her break as well. We had started working on this project two years ago, but we still didn’t quite see eye to eye. She always wore a sleek suit to work even though the dress code was technically business casual. Her red hair was always perfectly straight, and she always wore a thick mask of makeup. She would have been an attractive woman, but her obvious narcissism was repulsive. Not to mention she was way out of my league. I could still hear the chanting of the crowd as I sat down at my desk though their words were muddled.
Jessica turned around halfway in her chair and asked, “Hey, did you hear about the new iJect 2.0? The screen size is 3 inches bigger than the 1.0, and at double the resolution.” Most of our discussions started by debating about some new technology that I thought was too gimmicky to be useful and too expensive to be practical. She, of course, had to have one, even if the current version was just about the same. I could’ve gone into the politics of why companies churn out this junk, and how terrible the working conditions are in their factories, but I know by now she couldn’t grasp the idea of caring about anyone but herself.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’ll get one though. Three inches isn’t worth two thousand dollars to me, although I guess some people might be a little more desperate.”
She either didn’t get my joke, or she decided to ignore it. “Anyway, we got a present today from upper management, new project specs. Check your email.”
I did, but I couldn’t believe what I was reading. They were right. The email read, 1.) Controls on relative value of currency. 2.) Dynamic currency total. 3.) Refine upper limit algorithms. The list went on and on. Now that the system was stable, they wanted more control over the variables. They wanted to manipulate the currency, just like the man said at the rally. This must be where conspiracy theories start, I just never thought I’d be at the center of one.
I turned to Jessica and asked, “Did you see these new requirements? They seem a little sketchy to me.”
She shrugged and replied, “Hey, they don’t pay us to ask questions. You knew what this company was about when you signed up.”
I guess I did know, but I wasn’t exactly thinking about that when I was fresh out of college. I just wanted a job, any job that would justify the ridiculous price I paid to work for those four years. At that time, I would’ve worked for the devil, but things had changed since then. After two years of working here, it just felt empty. There was no purpose in it anymore. I always thought I had clear goals, get a good job, get a decent apartment, get a car, get a hobby, but now that I had all of those things, I felt trapped by them. I used to think that having these things would somehow allow me to do what I really wanted with my life, that freedom was just around the corner. Now I realized that freedom today was impossible, and the chains would only get tighter.
“We can’t do this Jessica. These requirements… they’re talking about total economic control. It’s not right. Things are already bad enough…”
She looked unamused. “Fine, quit if you like. They’ll just find someone to replace you. In fact, I might even get a raise.”
“I’m being serious here Jess, this could destroy our economy. Do you understand what it could mean to just change the value of the dollar on a whim? How many people would be affected by this?”
“First, don’t call me Jess. Second, I don’t care what happens to Ping Chang in ‘chukabuka-stan’ as long as we’ve still got Versace and Lou Vuitton. So if you’re not going to work on this, go ahead and quit.”
I went home early. I had to get ready for that night. I already had access to the database and keyloggers on most of the computers at Americorp. You can never be too careful. There wasn’t any question about it anymore, I had to do this. I had to delete the database. I had to take down Americorp, because I was the only one who could[V1] .
I sat down at my desk and loaded up my stealth program before launching Kompass. It allowed me to mask my net connection by constantly bouncing between different service providers, so my identity could stay hidden. The Kompass operating system was released while I was in high school, and it revolutionized the way the world looked at computers. Instead of just staring at a boring screen, it turned the net into a fully 3d world. The idea of individual computers was replaced with avatars, and HD monitors were replaced with head mounted displays and kinesthetic simulators. Some chose to see the net as an expansive city, each building representing some sort of data cluster like a web page. Others saw it like outer space, travelling to different planet sites faster than the speed of light. I saw it as a sea, with schools of data fish and corporate whales gliding just below the surface, waiting to be caught. Now, however, the game was not only to catch, but to kill. Everything was a game these days.
My avatar was a pirate ship, the Time Keeper. I booted up the system, and set it down just outside of Americorp waters. I chose the look of my ship, as all hackers did. I carefully crafted it in my spare time to be a digital extension of myself. However, as I looked around at my ship, I thought maybe I had just been born in the wrong age. The horizontal sails on the Time Keeper were reminiscent of a DaVinci flying machine. The engines below resounded in a constant rhythm, like that of an old steam powered locomotive. Even the wooden decks were an antiquity, everything in the year 2025 was made of cold, hard, steel.
There was flaming oil around the barrier of the Americorp sea to keep intruders out, a firewall, but I already had a trojan planted on my work computer. You never know when those things are going to come in handy. I pulled up the holographic keyboard and typed “C:
Now that I was past the firewall, I could see hundreds of schools of data fish through the crystal clear waters. There was one specific and particularly elusive one I was looking for. His name was SUDO, and if I caught him in time, he would let me do anything I wanted with the system. I could delete everything: all of the data, all of my mistakes, all of the corruption, and everything that threatened the freedom of this country. In this system, SUDO looked like a golden dolphin, jumping momentarily out of the data clouds only to disappear in the next instant. As a part of security protocols, he would seem to jump randomly from one school of data fish to another, but I knew the algorithm. I started typing to launch the sonar program, but before I could I received a message. The communicator on my wrist read, “BLK_WDW: ur here late.” Shit, what was Jessica still doing here. Maybe I could try to play it off, like I’m still working.
I typed back, “TME_KPR: just doing some late debugging. You?” and waited for a few seconds in anticipation. No way this was going to work, if she sees I’m logged in as my home user, I’m done. Not only is it against company regulations, it’s against the law to mask your identity on the net. I walked from the captain’s wheel, across the deck and looked over the wooden railing toward my opponent’s ship, the Black Widow. While the Time Keeper was reminiscent of an 18th century pirate ship, the Black Widow was more like a stealth ship, all sharp angles and cold, black metal, not that it affected its abilities or speed here. The ship was just graphical avatar. Here, it was all about the skill of the captain.
A message finally bleeped back, “BLK_WDW: not buying it jason, u xd the line work today, and i want that raise.” Just after she sent it, the sky turned black and the surface of the water started to segment, dividing into a grid of oscillating blocks. Schools of data fish began to glow blue. The game had begun.
It was a hacking defense program that basically froze all users at their current locations while the system started searching for intruders. If either one moved, it would detect them automatically, but most computer savvy people knew there was an exploit. Searching took time, thirty seconds to be exact, and at the end of each cycle there was a small window of opportunity where all users were invisible and could jump to a new data node. This turned hacking into a strategy game, like a kind of high stakes chess. The infiltrator would take the offense, and would usually be trying to capture a certain data node. The administrator would be on defense, trying to stop the hacker, either destroying their avatar to eject them from the system, or attaching an alert beacon to warn the network security systems and the police. Each system was laid out differently, which usually gave the administrator the advantage, but that wasn’t the case here.
The clock was already ticking, and I had about twenty seconds to decide my first move. I’m in the user directory of my work machine, but I don’t have admin rights so I wouldn’t be able to see SUDO if I was right on top of it. 15 seconds. I need to get admin rights, Jess has them now, so I could log in as her if I could get to her computer, maybe find her password. Where can I go from here? Programs? 10 seconds. To obvious, that’s definitely where she’ll try to catch me, but I’m not that stupid. Downloads. I can launch an outside connection from there and jump to her user directory. 5 seconds. That should work. Type. I typed fast on the holo keyboard “cd ./downloads telnet 129.68.21.1/user/blkwdw”
The system lagged for an instant while the search was refreshing and I hit enter. My ship teleported to the downloads node, and I heard a splash in the programs directory. I had an instant to glance over and see Jessica’s ship in firing range just before mine launched the net off the port side. It sunk down and as it harnessed the school of data fish I could see Jessica readying her port scan cannons. The fish pulled the net with surprising force, taking my ship with them under the surface of the water and towards Jessica’s user directory.
I resurfaced in Jessica’s user directory, and by now the timer was reset. 30 seconds. Check the keylogger, find her password, get admin powers. “vi log.txt” 25 seconds. Really? C0uture? Ok. “su Blk_Wdw: C0uture” Alright that’s done, I’ve got admin powers, where is SUDO? I looked around and at first I couldn’t see it. 15 seconds. Then I saw it, just off to the center of the system. It would be at the center in two turns, but I couldn’t get caught until then. I got a message “BLK_WDW: i know what ur trying to do, u cant win.” I ignored it, I knew what I was doing. 5 seconds. There was a node close by that was already searched, so I would be safe there. I typed “cd ../” and the system lagged again as the search reset.
I teleported to the safe node, and typed in “cd home/” to go to the center node next turn. Jess was in the center node, she must’ve known SUDO would be there soon, but she was a turn early. She would have to move again when the search reset or she would be booted from the system. The communicator on my wrist read “BLK_WDW: ur move jason. try not to xplode lol.” Jessica… she’s taunting me again, like she has something up her sleeve. I’m going to take you down you selfish bitch. The holographic keyboard hung mid-air at my fingertips, awaiting a response, but I still gripped the large wooden steering wheel. Even though I knew it was digital, I was still comforted by the feel of something tangible, controllable, in my hands. Either way, I won this round and all I had to do was wait to press enter.
I teleported to the center node, but something was wrong. The waves here were too chaotic, like there was something affecting the water. The fish beneath my ship were glowing red instead of blue, and the water was starting to evaporate into steam. It was a logic bomb. The school of data fish detonated beneath my ship, destroying the sector and immobilizing my ship. “BLK_WDW: nice move jason.” She thought she had won, but I could see it just under the surface. SUDO, but it was a darker gold than usual, like it was also being affected by the logic bomb. I launched a scan on it. The console read back “Security Systems Loaded. Notification Armed. Scanning for Intruders…” SUDO was protected. If anyone got control of him, it would know that an intruder was present, and it would send my login data to the security system, then the police. It would only be a matter of minutes before they showed up at my door. I’d get a half an hour if I was lucky. I would end up jobless, homeless, in jail, or worse. If I could just disconnect. Unplug, cut my losses, and pass this off as a test run. I couldn’t turn back now though. I had already made my decision. I was finishing this.
I walked to the bow of the ship, took hold of the harpoon cannon with both hands, and brought up the targeting overlay. I breathed in, aiming steadily at SUDO. I slowly pulled the trigger. In slow motion, the harpoon glided through the air, struck the surface of the water, and just before hitting its mark, melted into a white hot liquid which engulfed SUDO. When it cooled down, there was no longer a harpoon, but a golden dolphin. The sky turned red as it sent out a message to the security system. The police would be at my door in half an hour, but I didn’t need that much time to do what I needed to.
Still standing on the bow, I brought up the keyboard and typed “exit_all,” and the hacking defense system shut down. The sky turned blue, the firewall dissipated, the water began to flow naturally, and my ship floated once again on the surface. I looked back down at the keyboard and hesitated for an instant. I finally got to type it, the command that nobody should ever have to type. “rm -rf *.*, delete_all.” Data fish started fading and disappearing. The water began to tear like a flaming piece of paper, leaving only blackness. Soon it was just the Black Widow and the Astalica. They were both stored on the same system, and they too started to dissolve into tiny blocks of data, rising into the air and fading away. The chat program had probably been deleted by now. A welcome change from her scathing comments. As my ship dissolved, and I was pulled out of the system, I only had one thought. I won.
In the end, I was caught. The police showed up about 15 minutes after I exited the system, enough time for me to have a drink and savor my victory. As I sit now behind these bars, I feel no regret for my actions. All I ever really wanted was freedom, and though by body is confined I feel more free than ever before. For the first time in my life, I felt as if my actions were driven with purpose that I had chosen, not one that had been forced upon me. I deleted the system, but it was only a matter of time before they rebuild or recover it. There was hope however, I was only one of many, and the silent were not sitting by idly any longer. The insurgency against this corporate corruption was alive and well. We, the people, are awake, and the masters will know our voices.
[V1]Should I describe what his apartment is like here? I could show the kinds of things that are in his house, newspaper clippings to show his obsession with conspiracies, and his antique collection to show his love of the past if these things are not apparent by now… It’s a little long as it is, but it might develop his character a bitmore.
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