Chapter 27
twenty-seven
After Logan and Emily leave, Cynnie and I hole up for the day.
First order of business is for Cynnie to let her family know she’s okay.
She gives them an abbreviated version of her scare in the subway.
Although her father makes some sympathetic noises early in the call, by the end, her brother and grandmother only express concern about how it might affect her project deadlines.
Cynnie doesn’t seem surprised or upset by their reactions. I gather this isn’t anything new. All of her family members seem deeply involved in the family business. I’m fairly pissed off on her behalf, though.
After she finishes with them and while she puts the call out on her social media accounts, I get Squid to set up a secure server for what I dub Project Pistachio, after the lead character in an old Dana Carvey movie.
As soon as Squid sends me the login details for , I create three levels of chat rooms. Since I won’t have time to vet the people who respond to Cynnie’s call, I’ll segment them out by having them do coding puzzles.
I use some from Lindy’s class, plus ones I’ve picked up over the years.
I upload the puzzles and sit back to wait for people to arrive.
Cynnie jumps on once I have the rooms set up and starts creating skins and avatars.
I watch her with a little awe. I’m good with infrastructure.
My code is clean, logical, and rarely needs a ton of debugging.
But it doesn’t have the elegance of Lindy’s sequences, and it completely lacks the artistic flare of what Cynnie creates.
My coding creates function. Hers creates beauty.
Users enter the chat rooms while she’s still working. I watch them create avatars and start working through the puzzles I’ve left them. Four pros stand out immediately. I trace their IP addresses. One’s in the U.S. Another has two layers of proxy but I eventually pinpoint them in Mexico.
The other two, I literally can’t find. One minute I think they’re in Russia. The next I’m sure I’ve tracked them to Africa. The next, they ping from Croatia. They bounce around roughly together, never proxying through a single IP address long enough for me to nail them down.
I turn my screen so Cynnie can see it where she’s sitting in my beanbag and point the two out to her.
“Kinofoo and CenturyGirl,” she says, reading their handles. “Want me to message them?”
I nod. “It’ll be less threatening, coming from you.”
She taps on her laptop and I see private chats with Kinofoo and CenturyGirl pop up. They exchange greetings with Cynnie, talk in fairy kei-speak for a little, then confirm they were watching her live feed and are happy to help us dodge the blackhats.
I pull Squid in and set him tracking Kinofoo and CenturyGirl, just in case he catches something I miss. While he works, I call a break and order us takeaway. Since I haven’t seen Ty in far too long, I order extra for him and pop him a message to let him know I’ve got food coming.
His key scrapes in my front door lock less than five minutes later. I grin at Cynnie and go to greet him.
He accepts my hug with teenaged reluctance and turns an amusing shade of purple when I tease him about the date with Dakota that Brenna chaperoned while I was in England. Once his embarrassment begins to fade, he elbows my ribs.
“You’re still coming to her birthday party, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. Come say hi to Cynnie and maybe we can make it a foursome?”
Ty turns bashful in Cynnie’s presence, even though he’s met her before.
He ducks his head and stammers when she talks to him.
She’s always “big” around him, so he has no idea how little he has to fear from her.
He just sees a beautiful, older woman, and beautiful, older women turn all thirteen-year-old boys into stammering idiots.
I set up Ty on a beanbag with a bottle of water, a bag of popcorn, and my spare rig to keep him diverted.
When the food arrives, I load it onto trays and we eat in a circle, with Cynnie and Ty in the beanbags and me on the floor.
I know Logan wouldn’t approve of me sitting on the floor when Cynnie’s in the chair, but I don’t need to dominate Cynnie when she’s “big.” This feels right.
It feels like a family.
Cynnie draws Ty out as we eat. She doesn’t ask questions about school, or even Dakota, which would make Ty disappear behind his baseball cap. She asks about his Dutiful game.
No man can resist a woman who asks about his area of expertise; Ty’s no exception.
He regales Cynnie with his character specs and the game gear he’s won between bites of crab rangoon and sesame chicken.
By the time we’re finishing banana fritters, Ty’s slouched deep into his beanbag, stuffed to the gills, and as relaxed as he’d be if it were just the two of us.
Cynnie helps me clean up and while we’re in the kitchen, out of sight, I give her a deep kiss and a whispered promise of a pleasure spanking once Ty goes home. My growled promise has her shivering and hugging me in a way that leaves me adjusting my board shorts before we return to Ty.
He’s deep in Dutiful, so Cynnie and I return to our respective computers. She logs into her company intranet to work on her current projects. I check in with Squid.
He hasn’t been able to trace Kinofoo or CenturyGirl any further than I did.
That gives me confidence to message them.
I don’t expect either of them to help me with the actual hack, just the proxying.
I tell them I need to be invisible for at least four hours, which is the longest I’ve needed to break WEDGE on my previous runs for Ness.
They invite me into Snarlzilla, a dark web server I haven’t heard of.
Most of the server’s architecture is hidden from me and Kinofoo quickly warns me against poking around.
But from what I can see, it’s a virtual server that jumps systems every twenty minutes, probably proxying through clusters of zombies.
Kinofoo renames my profile DoubleMiddleFingerMan, which makes me chuckle.
Kinofoo invites me into a private room in the server, where I get administrator privileges.
With a sigh, I realize Kinofoo and CenturyGirl are going to be able to see what I do, even in the private room.
I change my profile to DM4XX and start uploading some of the core programs I’ll use for the hack.
Kinofoo: Cynnie says we can trust you, so I’m trusting you that what you’re uploading isn’t a worm that’s going to eat the server.
Trust goes both ways.
DM4XX: It’s not. It’s a hack to break a private security program known as WEDGE. I’ll delete it when I’m done but I’m trusting you that you won’t download it and use it to hurt people.
Kinofoo: I’m not into the security side. What is WEDGE?
DM4XX: It’s a program that controls physical security systems. Door locks, timers, cameras.
CenturyGirl: Door locks? Seriously?
DM4XX: Seriously. For a lot of people, those locked doors stand between their families and a loaded gun.
Kinofoo: Got it. You delete it when it’s done. We’ll delete this room and erase the logs. We’ve never found any key trackers on Snarlzilla, but if you have anything that fucks key trackers, you might want to upload that, too.
I do, and I do.
DM4XX: Present for you two. My very own key-tracker fucker.
Kinofoo sends me a row of smiley emojis.
CenturyGirl: Without getting into it, can we know what you’re doing?
DM4XX: The more you know, the more at risk you are. These guys are not fucking around. You saw how bad they scared Cynnie. They’ve been surveilling me by drone for weeks and sent mercs after me in meatspace. Are you sure you want to know anything?
There’s a long silence while I continue working.
Kinofoo: Yes.
CenturyGirl: Yes.
I tap on my desk to get Cynnie’s attention.
When she looks up, I beckon her to me. She climbs out of the beanbag gracefully, smooths her dress down, and comes to lean over my chair.
I turn and draw her into my lap. Reaching around her, I draw my finger down the chat I have going with Kinofoo and CenturyGirl.
“I’ve interacted with both of them on social media,” she says, tipping her head so she can whisper in my ear.
“Kinofoo’s a furry. I think he lives in Chengdu, China.
He’s posted a lot of furry photographs and videos.
If he’s caught, he’d face imprisonment for bestiality at the very least. I don’t know as much about CenturyGirl.
I think she’s a digital artist in Iraq, but I’m not sure. ”
I nod.
DM4XX: I’m going to agree to do one last hack for them. While the hack is going on, I’m going to burn them. Livestream the op.
Kinofoo: Burns you, too.
DM4XX: Yes, it does. Hopefully so bad they’ll never want me to work for them again.
They’re silent for so long that Cynnie goes back to her beanbag. I glance at Ty and see that he’s fallen asleep, the cans of my good headphones smooshing his cheeks. I snort quietly. Cynnie follows my line of sight and grins.
A series of messages popping up pulls my attention back to the chat.
Kinofoo: We’ll hide you. Bad guys might know who and where you are, but they’ll never be able to prove you did the hack.
CenturyGirl: I’ll work the livestream. I have 110 outlets I can stream to. I can double that if you let me pull someone else in.
DM4XX: What kind of outlets?
CenturyGirl: Everything from Tikker lives to a couple of small newsflash streams. Total distribution around 3M.
DM4XX: That’ll do. I don’t want to endanger anyone else.
CenturyGirl: Are these guys really that bad?
DM4XX: Yes.
They go silent again and I finish uploading what I’ll need.
“That’s it,” I tell Cynnie. “I say we call it a night.”
It’s already after ten. Time for Ty to go home. Time for Cynnie to shed her “big” skin. Time for me to put away everything pressing in on me and concentrate on my little, the joy she brings me, and the absolute freedom of our play.