1. Holden
Chapter 1
Holden
I enter another command prompt and press the return button, waiting for the computer to execute the function. The cursor blinks, the screen flicks, but nothing comes up. This doesn’t make sense. I’ve been hacking into traffic cameras since I was eleven and never , not even when I was just learning my way around a computer, have I ever gotten a blank screen.
No matter what city or state I type into the search bar, it’s all dead space. As if the entire infrastructure is off line or… as if they’ve upgraded their security, switched servers, and kicked me out of the system.
I push away from my keyboard with a huff. Looks like I’ll be spending the afternoon searching for a tiny town with crappy firewalls to their Department of Transportation network. I make a trip to the kitchen to grab a drink. When I get back to my room, the cursor is still blinking, but the data lines are populating, and my system access is restored.
The blank space from earlier must’ve been from some type of denial of service attack. I enter the command string for the Canyon Falls network and sit back as I watch my screen fill up with the feed from the cameras in town and the annex, as well as the roads leading here and out to Palisade Shores.
The camera over by River Rock Road is the last to come online. I exhale a sigh of relief now that I’m back up and running. I flip through a few frames of the major intersections and shut down the ones I don’t need. My eyes flick to the feed of River Rock in the upper right corner of the screen. My finger pauses over the mouse as I watch the feed for a few seconds, trying to figure out what caught my eye. It glitches again, letting me know I’m not imagining an anomaly. The camera feed is on a loop. It’s easy to miss, but the date stamp on the camera is a dead giveaway. It was unusually rainy the week of the 15 th , and yet there wasn’t a drop of precipitation on the cars driving through the frame. I find four other cameras in that area and they have the same issue.
River Rock Road isn’t close to any residential or commercial neighborhoods. There’s a lot of undeveloped land out that way. Whatever is happening out there, someone’s trying to keep it quiet. Quiet means leverage and there’s nothing I like more than having leverage over people. I jot down a note to look deeper into this.
My phone buzzes with a message from my dad, letting me know dinner is ready. I reply that I’ll eat later, and dive back into my search for Thea.
I’ve been at it for an hour when a chat message pops up. I click it open, expecting to see something from SMVM0St33l, but the sender’s name is a bunch of numbers and characters. Someone who hasn’t bothered to create a username is always a red flag, and so is the cryptic message.
226$38!9*5
Reality is an illusion. That keeps us in chains. How far will you go? What are you willing to risk? For freedom and truth?
Whoever it is, is probably trying to recruit hackers. I delete it and go back to what I’m doing.