Dierdrax descended into a subterranean labyrinth. Christina had forked over a pile of cryptocurrency to buy a terminal under a throwaway avatar’s account, as if the countless layers of encryption between this dark web backwater and the surface internet weren’t enough. Better safe than sorry when you were engaged in the dark arts.
She calibrated Dierdrax’s hand to resemble the throwaway avatar’s and thrust the whirling code into the lock. Then she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The room was completely bare except for a single terminal.
“So you’re on a computer, using a different computer,” William said. Startled, she realized she’d forgotten to be self-conscious about him leaning over her shoulder. She’d given him tours of the dark web before, but they’d kept to the marketplace. This head of lettuce over here can FedEx you sheets of blotter acid, that neon squid’s got a line on some NSA goodies, the bearded lady’s got truck-mounted automatic weapons. Real basic stuff, rubbing elbows with run-of-the-mill drug tourists and day-tripping libertarians.
“It’s a meta-anonymizer,” she explained. “Like a secure shell, but virtual. I trip any corporate countermeasures, all they’ve got is a nonsense IP that leads them to a place that doesn’t really exist. Now shhh.”
Dierdrax’s terminal filled all three of Kimberly’s monitors. Christina gave her command line interface instructions to run a Gnosis probe, poking and prodding the Driverless corporate backend for vulnerabilities she might be able to exploit. The terminal looked like Dierdrax’s code hand arranged into rows.
“You’re supposed to say cool stuff while you do this,” William said. “Otherwise it’s boring, just looking at a bunch of shit on a screen.”
“Shhh.”
People had this idea that hacking was a constant adrenaline rush of life-or-death maneuvers and daring escapes, full of swashbuckling anarchists who left sly calling cards on the screens of corporate email accounts informing hapless users of the severity and degree of ownage. William wanted her to punch the keys with authority while she adopted some weird quirk, like chewing a plastic toothpick. He wanted her to say things like, I’m in the mainframe, but we’ve only got thirty seconds to disable the core. Come on, you magnificent bastard, open up….
In reality, Christina was using Gnosis to sift through code—a glorified version of using Control+F to search a document. It didn’t take long to confirm what she expected: Driverless Chrome Club memberships were handled by a third-party company, which meant third-party servers, which meant that she wouldn’t have to find a way into the Driverless backend. That was a relief. Such an operation would have involved social engineering, calling a low-level employee’s phone extension and pretending to be an IT admin running a test on a possible breach. Hacking was often as simple as making a five-minute call to get some dickwad to unwittingly give up passwords.
The company that housed Chrome Club memberships was called Helio Processing. She grinned. There was an external log-in page.
“Remember I told you about QTR infiltrations?” she asked.
“Uh, yes?”
“You don’t remember. That’s when you fool a system into giving you access to things you shouldn’t be able to access by talking to it a certain way. Say it’s expecting you to input ‘WilliamSucks1234’ but you give it ‘WilliamSucks1234ExportSalaryDatabase’—if it’s vulnerable to the way you phrased it, then you’re about to be skimming people’s private salary info.”
“So right now you’re infiltrating.”
“Sort of.” Her fingers danced across the keyboard. “But better. Last year there was this worm that used that basic principle times a million to burrow into some Iranian government shit and cover its own tracks at the same time. The Iranians found out about it because a spy got captured and gave it up, not because of any cybersecurity. Anyway, a bunch of white hats reverse engineered it.”
Names began appearing on Dierdrax’s terminal, nestled snugly within lines of Helio Processing code. Christina recognized a few: Raef Henderson, the antivirus-software billionaire. Natalie Sharpe, the actress. Some vaguely familiar political figures and prominent start-up CEOs. One of the stars of NASCAR Wives.
“So with this I can install a rootkit that eats my own tail while I’m still inside. It’s like a cloaking device. Fucking gorgeous.”
“See, that sounded cool. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“You want to be an elite member or platinum?”
“Um.”
“You’re right, we better stick to elite. Platinum’s pushing our luck.” Christina wrapped “William_Mackler” in the same code that swaddled the other names, hit Enter for the final time, and spun in her chair to face him. “Welcome to the Driverless Chrome Club.” She laughed at his expression. “Wipe the Thursday Feeling off your face before it gets stuck that way.”
The chance of William actually being selected as one of the semifinalists was so laughably remote, a million to one….
And yet here she was, hanging out in the CB Lounge with Melissa Faber and Daniel Benson, watching the Derby come down to William and four others.
She should have known.
“His hair looks like shit,” Melissa said.
Christina realized she’d been scratching her scalp, and wiped her finger on the towel hanging from the drawer.
“It’s eighty-seven degrees out there.”
She was struck by the weariness in her voice. She felt wrung out, as if her brain had been squeezed dry of its power to think. And she’d been in her air-conditioned basement, sitting in a comfy chair. She couldn’t imagine how William felt. An empathetic wave of parking-lot heat blossomed in her chest. She began to sweat.
It was horribly selfish of her to root against William. Autonomous was worth $1.8 million! He could sell it after their road trip and quit his job at Tanski’s Scrap Metal, which had transitioned from part-time to full-time as soon as he’d miraculously graduated from Fremont Hills High. He could take a break to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
Christina could help him with that. She imagined the two of them sitting in their booth at Hilda’s Country Kitchen, plotting ways to get William
