StarFall Comics
Proudly Presents:
Metal Fire
#7 False Maria 01
A solitary figure sat in a darkened room, Oakenfold music blaring from a set of strategically placed surround sound speakers. Cleverly scented candles in jars were everywhere, on tables, chairs, and the floor itself, littered about. Their flames dancing shadows on the walls and their subtle scents drowning the air. Behind her, an expensive large screen television swirled with patterns and colors in beat to the techno beat. It all mixed together in the black to give her surroundings a mosaic of sight, sound, and smell.
The figure couldn't help but be taken in by everything, by the experience. Her eyes closed, her body swaying to the careful tones and repetitions of the music, she momentarily forgot the scrolling text on the half dozen computer monitors before her. Information moving at a varied pace. Web articles, stock numbers, corporate databases, file downloads, internet searches, user forum posts, and telnet connections, all together forming their own accompaniment to the bass and treble.
She forgot her task, and stood, forgetting the terminals and her work momentarily. She danced to the music, like she used to with friends, at parties and clubs, sneaking in with fake ids and careful fashion choices and a sly wink. Her hips remembered and her feet remembered and even the night remembered.
In seconds the figured was entranced with the sensations, and it didn't matter who or what she was. For these few moments, it didn't matter. She was fifteen and she was happy.
Eddy looked up from his meal to see a friendly face waving at him from the other side of the restaurant. He was a bit surprised to see anyone he recognized at this time of night. The food here was only mediocre, but it had the advantage of being open twenty four seven. Considering his sloppy work hours, it had become one of the few places guaranteed to be serving food when he was hungry.
Valentine Sims came on over to his table, a heavy load of engineer books under one arm and a day or two's worth of missed sleep under her eyes. It must be exam week at the university again, that would explain her being up at this time. He checked his watch as she sat down and realized he'd forgotten to wind it again. Probably for days.
"Hey Eddy, I figured I might find you here," she greeted him in an amazingly cheerful voice. She was one of those wonderkind school-aholics that actually enjoyed the studying and research that came with post secondary school life. Of course, she'd probably enjoy it more when her grades started reflecting the amount of effort she was putting into her education.
Eddy managed a smile and a murmured reply around a mouthful of gravy and meatloaf. She gave him a jokingly disgusted face, and put her books on the seat beside her.
"Sorry," he added, after swallowing. "I asked how you were doing."
"Great. I did my Math this afternoon, and I think I aced it. I was just zimming through the questions." Eddy could only describe her as giddy. "And get this! I talked to Prof Metts and he said if I managed a 3.0 this year, he'd give me access to the labs!"
"You know, after all this, you're probably going to end up designing arms and other assembly line machines for a car factory somewhere."
"Party pooper. Leave a girl her dreams." She grabbed a book from her pile, and slid in between his large orange drink and his paper napkins. "This is what I want to get into. This is the fun stuff."
He put down her fork, and chuckled. "I don't even know what that says."
"Then maybe you shouldn't have dropped out," she teased him. "It says Nanotechnology. Its a theory of using cell-sized robots to do pretty much anything."
"I thought you wanted to make a moon rover or something."
"Mars. I wanted to make a Mars rover. But that was last month." She slid her book back, and flipped through a couple pages. "This... This is new stuff. This is virgin territory, Eddy. No ones cracked this. I could be the one." She paused a bit, a dreamy smile on her face. "In a couple years time, I might be writing my thesis on this stuff."
Eddy mostly tuned her out. He'd known Val since he still went to university, and she was one of the few he still kept in touch with. He wished her the best of luck with her studies, he really did, but he knew he had a better chance of being voted president then she had of getting her doctorate. She was a bit... flighty. He noted her study books included the new David Weber sci-fi hardcover.
He picked at his food a bit more, yawning quietly. "So what you out for tonight? My charming company, I hope."
"Actually, I supposed to meet Jenny and Amanda here. We were going to burn the oil studying for our engineering final tomorrow," she smiled evilly. "You were just happenstance."
"Shucks, I'm hurt," he mocked. "Come on, at least have a bite with me. Gravy's actually pretty good tonight."
"Can't. Unlike you, I've got loans to pay off eventually."
"My treat," he egged her, tapping the plain manilla envelope on the table beside him, unlabeled but for his name neatly written on the front.
She looked at the envelope confused a moment, then she frowned. Eddy swallowed his food, and prepared himself for a lecture. He knew the look that she had. It was the same look his mother used to get just before she scolded him for drawing chalk outlines on the driveway or something.
"You did it again," she said. "I can't believe you. You did it again. You promised."
"Actually, I said I'd think about it."
"I thought you were going to stop."
"It's kinda my job. No one pays me for doing dick all."
She leaned in forward, an honest concern in her eyes. "It's illegal. Someone's gonna catch you, and you'll go to jail." She pleaded to him. She pleaded to him before, but somewhere she knew it wasn't going to do any good this time around either.
"It's not like I'm hurting anyone. This kind of thing happens all the time, all over the place. Don't worry about it."
She frowned, it was obvious she was going to worry about it. He got lucky this time around, however, as two other girls with armfuls of textbooks and papers entered the restaurant, looking around the tables. Her study mates.
"This conversation isn't over," she warned him as she gathered up her books and stood up. She paused a moment, and sighed, rubbing her eyes with her free hand.
"Look, I don't want to sound like a complete wart, but could you at least be careful?"
"Always," he flashed her his best winning smile, and saluted her with a piece of baked potato stuck at the end of his fork.
From this view, you could see everything.
He had acquired this office nearly four years ago. The landlord had a substantial debt he had agreed to let pass on agreement of a negligible lease of a few floors of one of downtown's more prestigious buildings. Of course, on paper it looked like he was paying twice what the square footage was worth. Tax reasons.
This particular office, however, was his own special place. There were board rooms for the meetings and offices to meet fellow partners and even a few soundproof rooms for the more extracurricular activities, but he had put this corner room aside the moment he saw it. With a view like that, it was a shame to dirty it with business.
Two of the four walls were floor to ceiling glass, slightly tinted to bring out the contrast of the skyline. The other two walls were painted a tasteful blue that complimented the expensive carpeting. The only piece of furniture in the spacious office was a black leather couch, carefully chosen to match the trim of the windows and the color of the door.
He didn't do this all himself, heavens no. Money had bought the services of top talent interior designers, men and women who spent years of their life learning the intricacies of feng shui and interior decoration. They'd taken his light suggestions, and transformed the office into a single place he could sit down, look out upon a city, and relax.
He sat with his legs crossed, his hands casually on one knee. Watching the sun rise gracefully on the horizon, the reds and oranges bleeding into the black of night. He carefully woke up and dressed smartly every morning, and sat in this room, and watched the dawn. Every morning. He refused to let the moment pass him by, least he take it for granted. One day he knew he might not be able to enjoy this little pleasure. Or at the very least, not in such comfort.
He blinked slowly a moment, then reached into his Armani's inner pocket, and opened his cell phone. Rapid dial, he called his secretary and asked her to send Poe in. Eventually, he'd go to his office, and look over numerous account books and passed reports. Debts and obligations, dirty little secrets and flowing money and product. Hundreds of people to keep happy. Hundreds more to keep in line. But right now his mind wasn't on his 'day job', but on the handsomely bound report that sat on the couch at his side. He only read these special reports here, in this room.
Like the dawn. Something not to take for granted.
There was a polite knock, and well tailor man quietly entered the room. He didn't come too far in, mind you, he knew better. But he stood quietly, his hands behind his back.
"What do you think of religion, Poe?" he asked his guest more suddenly then he probably should have.
"I try not to think of it at all, sir," Poe replied after a few seconds of consideration. The man smiled, to himself, slowly rising off the couch, picking up the report. He had hired Poe for many of his talents, mostly his more clandestine ones. But he had hired Poe because he was careful and he took time to think. It was amazingly difficult to find men who would take the bother to think nowadays. Too many were prone to just react.
He breathed deeply and then strolled to Poe, handing him the report.
"Tell Gregory to step up the schedules. He's being far more then cautious these past few days," he took a second to straighten his tie. Appearances demand respect. He demanded respect. "I want to see more substantial results by the weekend."
"Of course, Mr. Hamilton," replied Poe.
The next evening found Eddy sprawled on his couch, tapping away at the arrow keys of his laptop playing a downloaded version of Ms. PacMan. He did his best to maneuver the yellow hockey puck graphic around the maze, collecting the dots while avoiding the colorful ghosts, but at this high a level, his power ups didn't help much, and those bugger ghosts just moved way too fast. In moments, the yellow character was caught, spun in its death animation, and spit the bolded words 'Game Over' at his screen.
He frowned, disappointed. He could have made it; he should have went left, into the tunnel off-screen. Instead, he got greedy, and went for the bouncing fruit, hoping for enough points to earn a free man. Caught going for the cherry again.
He sighed, typing in his name for the high score. Best to get to work anyways. Despite his earlier generosity to Val, he wasn't as well off as he made out. The money in the envelope would only cover food and rent for a month, maybe a month and a half. It was his own fault for being picky.
He opened the envelope, and pulled out the list of requests from his go-between. Same old same old, another list of websites, databases, computers, mainframes, and B.B.S.šs that someone or other wanted hacked into. And, as was getting more and more usual, most he ended up scratching out with a fat bold red marker.
At first, it had been a pretty sweet deal. Someone wanted a bit of info from a protected machine and had been willing to pay for it. A company directory here, a product schedule there, nothing really spectacular, nothing that would really hurt anyone. Way he figured it, they could have just as easily bribed some half depressed cubicle worker at their rival company to sneak out the information just as easily. If they wanted to pay his prices to do it instead, so be it.
But lately, it seemed the type of jobs he was getting were more and more on the shady side. One was to change tax records. Another was to erase a bank loan. Someone wanted all their parking tickets to disappear. And there had been that one last month that turned out to be an attempt to get him involved in a multi million dollar real estate scam. Sure, what he called a day job most people called white collar crime, but even he had a line he refused to cross. Let some other greedy bastard take the job, ruin the lives of a dozen people and spend the next eight-to-ten behind bars for it.
After ten minutes, he had narrowed the list of twenty-seven to two. And neither of them paid more then two hundred apiece. Course, they weren't worth more then two hundred apiece, either.
Logging onto his laptop, he opened a telnet window, and connected to a provided telephone number. Running programs to scan ports and test computer security, he snuck into the system and quickly found what he was looking for. Some slob believed his boss was back stabbing him in company reports and wanted proof. A copy and print-out of saved memos, evaluations, and a few department employee files later, the guy would have everything he needed. Eddy covered his tracks, erasing all record of his access from the appropriate files, and logging off.
All in all, almost half an hour's work.
The second one looked to be just as menial. Somebody wanted the usernames and passwords for a local underground BBS, the kind that only gets listed in quarterly fanzines the government keeps trying to squelch. Eddy couldn't help but smile, the job had all the earmarks of a fed case. It happened once in a while, an FBI or NSA agent would stray from the book and enlist help. He figured that was one of the reasons he hadn't been hauled in on anything yet. As long as he kept mostly clean and lent the occasional helping hand, he was ignored in most sweep ops.
It took him an hour just to find the number for the BBS. It was one of the low key ones, no doubt about that. Probably one of those anarchy conspiracy survivalist's network, plotting on overthrowing the Illuminati by assassinating the president or something. He always got a kick out of those. Once he connected, he was almost immediately punted out by the firewall.
He connected again, and tried to skirt around it, probing as carefully as possible. Again, the security programs discovered him, and disconnected him. This time he discovered the security program had gone so far as to partially delete his operating system, making his computer crash. What the hell?
Eddy sat up straight, and grabbed a couple disks. It took him only twenty minutes to get his system working right again, but by the end of it, he was grinning like a teenager with his first Playboy. This was no ordinary security, this was something custom made, and made very well at that. Well, never let it be said he backed down from a challenge.
He spent the rest of the evening either attempting to connect to the BBS or repairing the damage inflicted on his system. At some point he managed to order some pizza during a lull, but he never ended up touching it. He didn't have the time, he was too busy coding a program to get around one defense only to find when he used it, he just got hit by another. It was incredible, how adaptive the whole thing was; he found himself jotting down notes with ideas and clues, scribbles about improving his own security. He'd never seen any computer system so responsive.
Finally, just before dawn, he managed to get into a directory with the most recently logged users recorded. Not the list he was looking for, but with a proper name and password, he could attempt logging in normally. Even then, as he tried, the system still recognized the connections as his system, and refused to log him in.
At the end, he was reduced to hooking up his old desktop model. He left his laptop to randomly try to connect with a handful of the passwords he collected, occupying the BBS's security while he used a different username and password to 'sneak in'.
* SYSTEM CONNECTIONS ARE MONITORED AND RECORDED.
* THIS SYSTEM IS CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE LOG IN BELOW.
* ENTER USERNAME:
*> kimroberts
* ENTER PASSWORD:
*> metalfire
* CONNECTING. LOGGING ON. CHECKING MAIL.
* YOU HAVE NO MAIL.
* YOU ARE LOGGED ON.
"About fucking time," Eddy muttered to himself.
In a room elsewhere, the techno music had been replaced by the new U2 song being played on the television screens. The figure ignored the half melted candles, threatening to topple over with the weight of their deformed wax. She was intent on the screens before her, analyzing the text and organizing it into directories and folders. Most of it was deleted, a dead end or a wild goose chase or just plain wrong. The worst part of conducting research on a subject you don't really understand is that most of the time you just don't know what to look for.
The computer monitors flickered suddenly, and she glared at them, willing them right. She looked at a black and white screen on the floor at her feet and saw the varied attempts at illegal access. She couldn't help but be amused at the unknown intruder's persistence; no matter how much she booted him out, he kept trying. However, she was quickly getting tired of it.
With a few keystrokes, she let the user through her firewall long enough only to send a particularly nasty virus at his system. Within seconds, the connection hung, and the computer at the other end crashed. So much for the cowboy. With any luck, she still had time to read the online webcomics before moving on to the data incoming from Western Europe.
However, as she checked over her connections, she discovered one too many. One person was on that she couldn't account for. She figured it for a glitch, a zombie process that failed to deactivate properly, but when she checked it, it reported a direct phone connection to another computer. When she checked the log files, there was no trace of the connection ever being established.
She got worried. And the more she looked, the more panicked she got. No record of time of connection. No restrictions assigned to limit the use of root commands. This wasn't right. She cancelled every connection across the board, knowing she'd have some explaining to do the next day. It didn't help, the phantom user refused to disconnect.
No. No. No. This wasn't happening. She booted up another system, connected to the phone company, traced the call. Everything went quiet as the program chugged, even MTV in the background all but forgotten. Someone had gotten in. Someone had managed to hack in.
When the trace came back, she snarl instinctively. Looking at the monitor below, the computer she had sent a virus at, she realized they were from the same person. Decoy. The bastard had tricked her.
Suddenly all the monitors blinked, text replaced with graphics and icons, a representation of a deeper operating system. She stared at it for a second or two, uncomprehending. The pictures on the screens seemed terribly familiar, like they mirrored her own thoughts. Then with a fury, she screamed, yanking cords out of the walls. Cables, links, power cords, torn out by hand violently, every one, causing the monitors to flicker then fade. One by one, the little blinking lights went out.
She stood quickly, knocking the chair under her back and away as she ran to the window. She could feel her cheeks, slick and wet with tears she didn't know she still had. The window was the full length kind, the sort that slid away, opening out to a small balcony beyond. She reached the railing, the street a dozen floors away, the early morning traffic dots sliding on the paved lanes below.
She looked out across the horizon, as if she would gaze into the heart of the sky itself, climbed up onto the rail, and leap off.
* PACKET ERROR 204.16&@#/1a^%...
* DISCONNECTED
Eddy stared at the screen, unbelieving. Something had happened. He had been deep in the system, more careful then he had ever been. Wiping up after himself, erasing electronic footprints, and placing safeguards against being discovered and kicked off. Then he went looking for the root, the heart of the system.
He was boggled by what he found.
It was some sort of graphical operating system, amazingly complex, unlike anything he had ever seen before. He was transfixed by it, the ever-changing connections and organization represented by icons and images bleeding into and out of text. He couldn't help but compare it to a Hollywood special effect and a fevered dream, all rolled into one.
Then it was gone.
He looked at the clock to discover the time, but saw the first rays of the sun filtering through his curtains instead. The sight instantly enticed a yawn. Maybe it had been a dream, the product of cold pizza and a day and a half of no sleep. He probably had just gotten tired, maybe even half fallen asleep at the keyboard, and been discovered by the BBS operator. He hoped he had covered his ass enough in his dreariness. From the looks of his laptop off to the side, he might have to scrap the hard drive completely.
The phone suddenly rang, startling him out of another close attempt at sleep. Ouch, this was getting to be too much. He needed some rest. He'd give it a night or two, and try to log in again, using some of the passwords. Before he was kicked off, he had managed to leave a back door for himself, a hole in the security so that he could get in easier. To his surprise, one already existed, he just had to adjust it to his use. At least he wouldn't have to risk any more firewalls or viruses.
He got up, considering just crashing out on the couch. He doubted he could make it all the way to his bed in his tired state. As he sat down on the couch, he realized the phone was still ringing. Ah, his adoring public. One last question, then beddy-bye.
"Edward Babbage speaking," he said. He hoped his voice sounded a little less slurred and sleepy to the caller then it did to him.
"You bastard," said a girl's voice on the other end. "You fucking bastard. I found you, you can't run away."
Eddy didn't say anything. Never mind being dead tired, but now he was being randomly insulted. Telemarketing has no taste.
There was a dull thud somewhere in the distance, then another. It took him a long drawn out moment to realize it wasn't some far away thing, but something against the wall of his apartment. Something was outside. Which, of course, was impossible, he was on the fourth floor.
Another thud. Loud pigeons?
Then the world puked on him, everything blurring. He dulled noted the sound of the explosion, his wall bursting into the room in an almost cartoon fashion. Brick and mortar littered everywhere, smashing the laptop and computer. Bookcase toppled, coffee table flipped up into the air and thrown clear through the drywall into the bathroom.
Eddy was tossed into the hallway, the phone dragged with him and beaned him on the head when he landed ass first against a closet door. Dirt and debris scattered and landed around him, he felt a warm stickiness at his forehead letting his fading senses guess he was bleeding. Probably from a couple places.
One eye wouldn't open, no matter what he tried, and he was quickly losing any inclination to keep the other one open either. Pain and one doozy of a headache blurred together with lack of sleep to slip him quickly toward blissful unconsciousness.
Just as he went, he wondered if he was dying. The morning sun blinded him from the impressively sized hole were his wall used to be, and a silhouette walked toward him with a silvery grace.
It was a girl, as bright as silver and she made a musical whir when she moved. An angel. Game over.
"Bastard," she said, almost sobbing. "You can't hide."