After she was released on bail, a different but equally faceless civil servant approached her to make the same offer, with an added sweetener; they could make all this trouble with the law disappear, as if by magic. The only conditions were that she had to achieve a First, and to keep her nose clean from now on. It was all the motivation she needed, and Bridge still found it ironic that an offer to her friend, which he ultimately declined, had led directly to her own career.
SIS gave her a fully backstopped cover story to protect her family and friends, which she maintained in public spaces online. But on u.l.g-n her misdirection went even further; she claimed she ‘worked in finance’ and refused to say any more. Not that anyone asked. Almost all of the regular netizens used aliases, and those who didn’t were cagey about what they did away from the safety of their keyboard. The group’s specialist demographic meant much of the discussion was technical talk about hacking, coding, obstinate servers and idiot users, so it was understandable many wanted to remain anonymous.
Tenebrae_Z was more anonymous than most. All anyone on u.l.g-n knew about ‘Ten’ was that he was some kind of BOFH — Bastard Operator From Hell, online slang for a high-level admin doomed to work with idiot users — and that if his tales of weekends in the garage were to be believed, he owned a selection of very fast and very expensive vintage cars.
T > Found 14 images so far. Oldest dates back six months.
P > so random. any clue who☺s posting them?
T > Anon user, black hole email, obscured IP. That figures, if it☺s a puzzle. WHICH IT IS :-D
P > how did you even work out it☺s a code
T > That would be telling.
P > I AM NOT A NUMBER!
T > LOL. Actually, a number is what I decoded from one of the recent posts. A phone number.
P > \ (@ o @) / !!!
T > I called it earlier.
Bridge and Ten hadn’t liked one another to start with. Their first proper interaction was an all-out flame war that split the group right down the middle, and just for once it hadn’t been Linux vs Red Hat, or Vi vs Emacs.
Not long after she joined the group, someone — she didn’t remember who, it had been yet another newbie who stumbled in, caused arguments, then disappeared — posted a rant declaring The Mission to be the apotheosis of ’80s goth, as proved by the decline in Eldritch’s work after Hussey’s departure, and by the way, Fields of the Nephilim were a flour-filled bag of shite.
This was a red rag to Bridge’s bullish and unconditional love of The Sisters Of Mercy, plus the lingering remnants of a pre-teen crush on Carl McCoy, thanks to her older sister’s bedroom posters. It was her sister’s record collection that had drawn Bridge into the subculture in the first place, starting with French ‘coldwave’ bands like Asylum Party and Excès Nocturne before diving deep into the UK import scene. When she’d later moved to England, she was shocked nobody had heard Mary Go Round’s Dark Times, or Opéra de Nuit’s Invitation, and talked them up whenever she could. Sure, most of this stuff had been released before Bridge could walk; but so was half the British music her new friends talked about.
She responded to the inflammatory post with the kind of withering disdain and righteous fury normal people might reserve for someone suggesting that Hitler had a point, and at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. To Bridge’s disgust, Ten sided with the newbie, and for the next three weeks uk.london.gothic-netizens became the sort of place the Daily Mail would hold up as a poster child for why the internet was destroying modern society.
But over the course of thousands of words of intense argument about the definition of modern goth, the role of Bauhaus and Joy Division, the genius or pomposity (or both) of The Reptile House EP, the border between goth and metal, and whether Siouxsie and the Banshees were the last true post-punks or the first true modern goths, Bridge realised she and Ten had a lot in common. Not their specific tastes, which were almost diametrically opposed, but their attitudes to life, music, and most importantly hacking, were completely in sync.
They began private messaging, bitching about events and people on the newsgroup, occasionally helping one another out with tricky coding problems. After Bridge started working for the Service, she suggested they build an IRC server to keep their conversations entirely within their own control and untraceable. Ten went one further, challenging her to help build their own protocol, so as to keep it entirely unrecognisable to prying eyes, and offered to host it in a hidden partition of an admin server in Telehouse North. Nobody would notice a few tiny encrypted packets flying around the wires, and as they both used onion skin multi-node random routing to hide their true digital locations, even if the server was discovered there would be nothing to connect it to them.
P > what was it, like a competition winner☺s line?
T > Nothing so glamorous. Just a bloke. I said I☺d got his message. He☺s here in London, we☺re going to meet tomorrow night.
P > WTF, you have no idea who he is
T > Well, he☺s obviously a massive nerd, so that shouldn☺t be a problem.
P > seriously Ten, who is this guy. could be a nutter
T > You☺re just
