Chapter Thirty-One
For the next hour, we brainstorm ways to nail Lucas’s ass.
No way tracking his IP address helps. Like, congrats, bestie, he’s on the MIT network. So is everyone else at camp.
“I could pretend to get back together with him?” Stella suggests. “Act apologetic and get him to confess to making the deepfakes. Secretly record the whole conversation.”
“Do you think Lucas is gullible enough to fall for that?” It’s a genuine question. She knows him way better than I do. If she truly thinks he could be tricked by this, then so be it.
She considers, then sighs. “No.”
What if we track down whatever deepfake service he used and force them to fork over the user data? Thing is, there’s no watermark on the image, so it would take serious detective work to determine exactly which pervy hellhole it came from.
A quick Google search reveals that there are a million apps out there that allow creeps to produce this stuff. I hate the world. Maybe technology was a mistake. Things were better when we all lived in caves.
“Could we steal his phone?” I ask. “Do you know his password?”
Stella shakes her head. “I’m certain he’s changed it by now. And he’s superglued to that thing. Sleeps with it beneath his pillow. We’d have to pull a heist.”
For a few seconds, I fantasize about how awesome it’d be to do an Ocean’s Eleven on Lucas. But I’m not trying to get expelled here.
“What if we run a man-in-the-middle attack?” I suggest. “Trick him into connecting to an insecure network and intercept his data packets?”
She wrinkles her nose. “That’s a pretty sophisticated cyberattack. Can you pull that off?”
“Probably not,” I admit. I know the theory behind this stuff, but I’ve never done it for real.
Coincidentally, that’s also how I would describe sex.
God, I’m on the struggle bus here. I wish Khoi wasn’t busy cramming his face with birthday cake. He’d know exactly what to do.
No. I don’t need him to play tech support twenty-four-seven. I can handle this on my own.
This situation reminds me of last year, when someone emailed the school with chemistry test answers and I made a script to catch him.
Sent him an attachment with the message Hey!
I also got the answers for bio. As soon as he downloaded the attachment, it triggered a script that used browser fingerprinting to collect as much data as possible.
That’s how I discovered that the thief was Tommy Gavel and that he had a furry porn addiction.
Honestly, I regret doing such a deep dive. Some foxes you can’t unsee.
But that only worked because Tommy was basically asking to get hacked. He clicked on a sketchy attachment. He didn’t disable his cookies. He wasn’t even using incognito mode. It was giving major “my password is the word password” energy. Made me feel kind of bad about the whole thing.
Lucas cannot be that smooth-brained.
But. What if he is? Why am I so convinced that these kids at Alpha Fellows are so much savvier than everyone back home?
“I have an idea, but it might not work,” I say.
Since no mainstream email server would let us send a script like this, I use an SMTP connection with Python. It takes a hot minute to set everything up, but I did this last year in Chinook Shore.
Then we have to compose the body text of the email. And now I’m staring at the blinking cursor in my terminal like it might magically come up with the perfect words.
“If we’re going to get him to click on an attachment, the message has to be spicy,” Stella says.
I nod. “Maybe like, ‘Here’s the proof to the Riemann hypothesis’?” I learned about that from Khoi.
“What’s that?”
“An unsolved problem in mathematics.” Like the holy grail of math problems. Whoever solves it will get instant legend status.
“What? You think Lucas cares about that? Does anyone care about that?” She shakes her head. “No, no. It has to be…” She snaps her fingers. “Give me the laptop.”
I oblige. She types something and then tilts the screen toward me.
Bro Stella is so hot!! She sent me these n00dz last yr bro wanna see bro
“Maybe remove one of the bros,” I say. “Also, you really had to add in a line about how you’re so hot?”
“Just keeping it realistic.”
I fake-gag and she giggles. Something loosens between us. Even though this entire situation is horrible, I can’t help but smile.
“Can we send the email now?” Stella asks, and the feel-good moment is over. She slides the laptop back to me.
I add a few more lines of code to hide the script in the attachment, then hit execute. For a few seconds, my cursor does that annoying thing where it freezes like it’s having a meltdown.
From the tracking pixel I slid in, I can see that he opens the email almost immediately. C’mon, dude, be the dumbass I know you can be. Take the bait…
He clicks the attachment. I let out a whoop.
Stella grabs my hand all hyped, then lets go once she remembers we’re not tight like that.
My script chews through his browser data and sends along whatever it finds.
Lots of it is useless—I don’t need to know what version of Google Chrome he’s on, and I definitely don’t need to know what’s in his “baddies” bookmarks folder —but he is logged into both the email he used for those deepfakes and his normal email account from Exeter, his private school. Caught in 4K.
Ten minutes later, we’ve secured all the receipts to prove that Lucas is the creep. I bundle everything into a CSV file and send it to Stella so she can decide how to end this fool’s whole career.
“I’m going to talk to Courtney,” she says.
I nod. “You can probably go to the cops too. But obviously that’s a whole ordeal.” Personally I want to report his ass to law enforcement, but it’s not my place to tell her how to handle this.
“Thanks, Char. For everything.”
Well… time to bounce, then. I stand.
“Wait, before you go,” she says. “Why did you start ignoring me?”
“Hmm?”
“We were totally chill that first day. Good vibes. And then… it’s like you ghosted.”
“Oh. That.” I blink.
I could crack a stupid joke. Dodge the question completely. But maybe she deserves to know.
“Honestly, I didn’t like how you and Lucas talked about Khoi.” And I felt bad that I didn’t defend him.
There’s an understanding in her eyes, and then regret. “I don’t feel good about that either. It’s like I became a different person when I was around him.”
I shrug, because I’m not the one she should apologize to.
When I walk out of her room, something bubbles in my chest, like, Huh. I’m kind of that bitch. Kicking Lucas’s ass with that computer script, calling Stella out on her mean behavior, all before dinner.
It sort of reminds me of when I let Lola cut my bangs. I didn’t recognize the new Charise Tang in the mirror, but she was someone with main-character energy. Someone I wanted to get to know.