Immoral Code Read online

  “Because.” She slumped back into the couch and stared at the ceiling. “Because it was what he wanted. To move on with his life. And because I was angry and very good at spiting myself.” She smiled a little—at what, I didn’t know. Then the corners of her mouth turned down and her eyes filled. “Oh, Bluebell. I’ve failed you in so many ways.”

  NARI

  Monday, February 25

  32 Days

  Cowards! Skeptics! Nonbelievers all! No, not really. Except for maybe the skepticism part, of course. But this was some serious shit. Some next-level shit. Life-defining, pivotal, tipping-point, radioactive-spider shit. (Plus the whole class-A felony thing, yeah, yeah, Keag, I know.)

  But!

  As of 3:27 this morning, i.e., when I received a text from Bells that read simply, OK, it was official. Which was why I was using my golden hour, that time between school and my parents’ coming home from work (dad) and CrossFit (mom), to do some serious conspiring with the members of my tiny hacktivist cadre in our personal IRC about how to root Robert Foster’s system. I’d spent most of last night trying to untangle this mess, fueled by my rage at the guy who’d abandoned his kid before her birth, then spent seventeen years never once looking back. Seriously. And yeah, in case it isn’t obvious, I was still super freaking pissed that it’d come to this. The way Bells looked yesterday after Foster hung up…

  Swear to God, if anyone ever makes her feel like that around me again, I’m going to develop laser vision on the spot and burn the offender to the fucking ground.

  Anyway! Rooting the system was…not going well. But two of my group were online and helping me brainstorm. (Per usual, I kept the more incriminating specifics of my plan to myself. Not that what we were discussing was strictly legal, but, well, yeah….Each member’s ops were their own until they decided to tag others in, and this was an altogether extracurricular activity.)

  this some dragon shit yo

  u still tryna pwn that op??

  …PoD?

  But the problem wasn’t the regular firewalls. I got into parts of Foster Innovations’ network just fine. Parts. The email parts. The client list and quarterly report and employee roster parts. But not the finance allocation conveniently linked to FI’s many sumptuous bank accounts part. Meaning I could see the money. I could count it, add it up, fantasize about paying all of Bells’s bills with it. But I couldn’t touch it. What f8ters was suggesting, breaking it down for the plebs, was a Ping of Death DoS (Denial of Service). But I didn’t want to just shut the system down. What I needed was a zero day. The difference between overrunning a shop with so much business they’re forced to close and pull down their security gate (the DoS) and finding the one carelessly unlocked window in a building that was otherwise sealed up tight (zero day). I ran my fingers through my hair and typed back:

  select block frag pings.

  shit

  …

  Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

  wut

  Confucius?

  here phishy phishy

  done done done. email, passwords. got keystroke. But

  There was a knock at my door. I closed the window.

  “Hey.” Reese let herself into my room, closing the door behind her.

  I spun around slowly in my desk chair, legs crossed, palms together, fingers drumming, chin down, and wearing my Dr. Okada face. (Yes, Okada. Yes, that’s Japanese. Because I’m Japanese American. Or, half Japanese—my dad’s, like, sixth gen and half French-English, my mom’s third gen and all American, aka “from here, yes, really, here, Oregon, by way of Minnesota, so kindly shoot that racist question into the fucking sun.”)

  “Why, hello, Dr. Okada,” she said, and dumped her canvas messenger bag on the floor and sat on my bed. “Playing at evil genius today?”

  I spun back to my computer. “A little. Evil-ette.”

  Reese kicked off her shoes. “Ahh. The cute and fuzzy version of evil.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Something that rhymes with Shmellamy and Shmem-Eye-Tee?”

  “Shmes?”

  Reese shook her head. “Nope. Too much. Starting over.” She resituated herself on my bed and cleared her throat. “Ahh. Cute, baby evil. Anything to do with Bellamy and MIT?”

  I laughed. “Yes.”

  “How’s it going?”

  I sighed. “I’m thinking we’re going to have to enact plan B.”

  “Like birth control?”

  “Har har. No. The other kind. The one that comes after plan A.”

  “Gotcha. So, what’s plan B?”

  “It’s…involved.” I opened some of my research, being a couple thousand emails (ninety-nine percent useless so far), years of financial records (proof), client lists (alternate ins and more proof), Robert Foster’s personal info (in case I started feeling doxxy, which wasn’t likely to happen; I mean, I’m not a troll, I’m a freaking vigilante), and staff files.

  Reese tucked her legs beneath her on my bed. Her hair was no longer just turquoise but turquoise that faded into neon pink. And she’d buzzed the outline of a lotus flower into the shaved side because Reese has talent. Raw, sprung from her mother’s now-adulterous womb that way, talent. (Can a womb be adulterous? Probably not. “A womb, being an organ, is not a sentient entity capable of making choices,” Bellamy would say. “Or having thoughts.”) “What color of ‘involved’?” she asked.

  I reopened my IRC. “What color would breaking and entering with a side of cybercrimes be?”

  Her eyes went wide for a fraction of a second; then she pursed her lips and considered. “Graphite. With a smear of vermilion.”

  “Cool. Then that color of involved.”

  …but

  separate systems. One’s cracked. One’s locked. Like LOCKed.

  any overlaps? a fence is thinnest when there’s only one side.

  yeah, ill look

  “What’re you doing?” Reese stood behind my desk chair, watching over my shoulder as I opened a series of windows.

  I answered, “A smear of vermilion.”

  So, there are some things I’m good at. I mean, I’m pretty good at lots of things. Things like basketball and soccer, though I hate team sports so don’t bother joining. Math things and science things and history things because I have almost perfect recall. And kissing-Keagan things (wink wink). There are also some things I’m not so good at, like Government, mostly because I hate that class and think it’s full of hypocritical revisionist-history bullshit. Like, why are we learning about all the things the US government is supposed to be when it’s really a kleptocratic cesspool of special interests and corrupt pseudo-“statesmen” actively refusing to do actual work while getting their pockets lined? Also, saying as much doesn’t make me “argumentative and disruptive,” it means I’m paying attention. I’m also not good at physics because uuuugggghhhh it’s sooooo boooorrrriiinnnngg. I am more than fine with that being Bells’s thing. Oh, and English lit. Blah. Okay, I like reading as much as the next person. But freaking Romeo and Juliet? The Scarlet please-oh-please-why-are-we-reading-this-damned-book Letter? How about swapping that mess of mixed messages for The Handmaid’s Tale or some Octavia Butler? So, yeah. I’m bad at some stuff. Mostly whatever I find boring or a waste of my time.

  As far as contextually relevant skills go, one of the things I’m best at is hacking. You think your shit’s safe? Nope! Bank account passwords? Credit card numbers? SSN? Mother’s maiden name and that of your first pet? That nudie you were gonna send your girlfriend/boyfriend/both, then thought better of it? Yeah. I can get all that. Loads of us can. Maybe you know that. Maybe you’re careful. Maybe your password isn’t P@ssw0rd but wf5TNo09ihtsk8. Doesn’t matter. I can get it.
>
  Thanks to my skills, I knew that Robert Foster got his hair trimmed every two weeks for two hundred bucks. I knew how often he took clients out for drinks (on average, three times a week); the mortgage payment on each of his five homes (Pacific Heights, New York, Martha’s Vineyard, Vail, and Jackson Hole. Vail and Jackson Hole. Freaking redundant much?); which were his favorite weekend getaways (Sonoma and Santa Barbara); the last time he and the fam had vacationed abroad (the Antilles at Christmas) and when they planned to again (this coming May, Tuscany). I knew where he got his suits dry-cleaned; the name, age, education, and browser history of his personal assistant; and what he’d gotten little Evan for his last birthday.

  That’s the thing about living our lives online. I can know you without ever having met you. I can mine the data of your life. And use it.

  But! Soapboxes and PSAs aside, all that still wasn’t enough. I didn’t care about Jeremy’s love of elephants or where Mr. Foster had taken Mrs. Foster for dinner on their last anniversary. What I needed was the gap in his (well, FI’s and their banks’) rather exceptional cybersecurity, a super-secret back door into his financial dealings in order to install the sleek—elegant! Bloody brilliant!—bit of fund-diverting code I’d started working on.

  “Full disclosure?” I asked Reese.

  “Always.”

  “So, I’ve hacked all this—” I waved a hand at my computer screen, windows piled more than a few layers deep. I pulled one to the front: black background with lines of code listed down it. “But I haven’t gotten into the parts that count.”

  “Which parts?”

  “The parts that let me actually do the grand theft.”

  “Okay…”

  “Okay,” I said, and looked at her. “So, Foster Innovations works in venture capital, investing huge chunks of money in all these different companies, mostly tech startups and lifestyle ridiculousness, like gourmet toast delivery services or whatever, right?”

  Still watching my screen, Reese nodded. I turned back to the window, buzzed through the lines of code, again. Looking for a way in, again. Again, again, which was bordering on the definition of insanity, if you know what I mean. “All of which they do online. Which means I can find it. I can look at it. Some of it, at least. But I can’t actually tap into the vein yet. At least, not in a way that’d work. I mean, okay, sure, I could try using Foster’s passwords to log in to his personal bank account and transfer a lump sum out of his savings, but.”

  “But that’d be as subtle as throwing a grenade through his front door, then trying to steal his refrigerator?”

  “Exactly.”

  Tap, tap, keystrokes: No go.

  Clickety-clack, code pirouettes: No go.

  Furious palm-smashing (jokes): No go.

  Every time I tried a different route, I hit a wall. Like I’d said to Formular and f8ters, dragons. A ring of fire-breathing, d0l0s-deflecting dragons catching my shifty shit and lighting me on fire. Or, more simply, I still couldn’t find any unlocked windows—there was no gap.

  (And why “d0l0s”? Well, Dolos is the spirit of trickery and guile in Greek mythology. An apprentice of Prometheus, the Titan who created man and then bequeathed the gift of fire upon us and blah, blah, blah, it doesn’t really matter because I liked the name and voila! Also, most people think d0l0s, as in me, is a dude. Probably a white dude. Probably an American white dude in his twenties, which, you know, isn’t exactly a bad thing to pretend to be. Or at least to let people assume I am. Because hey, if you don’t think the world pays more attention to youngish Western white dudes, then hahahahaha I can’t help you. Case in point. Wanna know who Dolos’s mythological female counterpart is? Apate. The freaking personification of deceit. I mean, how’s that for some entrenched misogyny? Like any of us ladyfolk needed more proof that we’ve been fighting this biased shit since The Beginning.)

  I growled and shoved away from my desk.

  “What?” Reese asked. She stared over my shoulder at my screen with her arms crossed and one eyebrow arched. “No luck?”

  I slumped back in my desk chair with an appropriate level of drama, i.e., I threw my head back, arms out, and groaned a thousand syllables of annoyance into the air beneath my ceiling. “Yeah, no luck.”

  “What’s this one mean? Formular. About one-sided fences.”

  I sat up. I shouldn’t have left that open. Not that Reese’s were prying eyes, but still. “He—or she or they—means that I should find the place where the security is thinnest. Seems obvious, right? And I guess it is. FI works with all these other institutions, banks and such, to spread their money out. So maybe I could get in through them? But if I want my precious leech to suckle at the main artery and not just a few peripheral veins…”

  “Then you need the source.”

  “Exactly. I need to latch onto FI’s primary account. Or better, be Robert Foster for a bit so I can get past this shit like I belong there.”

  “Which is proving difficult.”

  “Which is…”

  I opened a new window, feeling my grin spread even as I fought it.

  “Nari?”

  Fuck it. It was my last idea. My last go at keeping all this a satellite endeavor, aka keeping it digital instead of risking our actual, physical necks.

  “Narioka Diane, you’re wearing your Destroyer of the Universe face.”

  I turned my grin on her. “Pull up a seat, most colorful buddy.” She brought over the little upholstered bench from my vanity. “Have you ever seen a botnet work?”

  “ ‘Botnet.’ ”

  “Horde of zombie computers programmed to do my bidding?”

  She snorted a laugh. “Um, no.”

  “Well, then.” I fired it up and watched the window as computer after computer after computer, located all over the world, logged on, surrendering its computing power to me. (Cue maniacal cackle followed by exclamations of “Mine! All mine!”)

  Reese rested her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. “On a scale of one to very, how illegal is this?”

  “Very. With italics.”

  “You sound super nervous about that.”

  I didn’t sound nervous because I wasn’t. I wasn’t some skid. I knew what I was doing. And I knew that what I was doing was, yes, very illegal, but also very morally gray. Because commandeering a bunch of computers that were, you know, not mine, without their owners’ knowledge or consent, was objectively wrong. But subjectively? What about doing the “wrong” thing for the right reasons? What about the hypocrisy of the powers that be deciding that me doing this was illegal while them doing the same exact things in the name of security (cough, power and money, cough) is A-okay? But, hey, that’s a different argument for a different day.

  “Isn’t this beautiful? I mean, look at it! Look!” My beauty. My baby. The list was so long.

  She leaned in closer to watch the growing list. “You mean, all those are computers…”

  “Primed to do my bidding.”

  “And what is your bidding?”

  “If I told you—”

  “You’d have to kill me?”

  I shook my head. “You’d have no plausible deniability.”

  Reese’s eyebrows rose. “Ah. Yeah, then don’t.”

  But really, my bidding was a targeted DoS attack on the financial arm of Foster Innovations, specifically the finance department. Using my botnet, I’d overload FI’s server with bogus access requests, hopefully allowing me to slip through their firewalls unnoticed. Basically, f8ters’s PoD suggestion plus Formular’s bit about thin fences. A sort of distraction and sleight of hand. Watch the shiny while I steal your wallet.

  My botnet finished logging on, and I dove in.

  This is what power feels like.

  I remember thinking that, those exact words. No hyperbole, no gimmicky vernacular (I do know how
to be serious sometimes). I felt electric and expanding. Like nothing could touch me, while all I had to do was look at a thing to make it burn. I commanded an army of tens of thousands. A singular, obedient horde. All from the comfort of my bedroom.

  Except.

  I disconnected the botnet and covered my tracks.

  “What happened?” Reese asked. “Did it work?”

  I took a deep, defeatist breath. “Nope.”

  “Time for plan B?”

  “Time for plan B.”

  Reese smiled. “Awesome,” she said. “I love vermilion.”

  SANTIAGO

  Friday, March 1

  28 Days

  The cafeteria was the same as it always was, too loud and too crowded. I picked up the orange from my tray and started peeling it. Across from me, Keagan ate a bean sprout, rice noodle, and tofu concoction out of some glassware from home. Glassware because it didn’t have BPA, or whatever’d replaced BPA now that everyone knew it was basically poison, which was one of the things Paisley crusaded about alongside Monsanto and Roundup and industrialized farming and bovine growth hormone and nitrates in lunch meat. Reese sat beside me, eating a slice of pizza. Her hair was new today, bright red with a dark-gray color in the shaved part and her roots.

  “How do you do that?” I asked, waving at her head.

  “Sorcery.” She took a bite of pizza. “And dye I buy online. My bathtub looks like bad tie-dye.” She looked toward the entrance of the cafeteria, maybe waiting for Nari and Bellamy, who sometimes took a few extra minutes getting to lunch from AP Physics on Fridays, or her friend Maddie, who sat with us sometimes.

  I finished peeling my orange and licked my fingers, which tasted bitter from the peel. “I should’ve let you dye mine teal or orange or something before State.”

  Chewing, she studied my head. My hair was beginning to grow back, covering the weird paleness of my shaved scalp. She swallowed her bite. “Dark hair’s hard. You have to bleach it first. Plus the chlorine would wash it out.” She took another bite, still focusing on my head, and said, mouth full, “But you probably would’ve left a kick-ass color streak in the water.”