Chapter 1 #2
The old internet was a content machine, even more than it was now.
Even that word, content, showed how voracious the consumption of information was, and how undiscriminating.
And then there were the influencers—about as dystopian a word as Jason could think of.
Many discovered that the way to keep up with the insatiable demand for content was to train an AI on their own corpus of posts and then let it take over, keeping an eye on it but doing less and less of the work themselves.
Meanwhile, propaganda bots were set loose by everyone from major companies to Jim Bob in his mom’s basement, programmed to find posts about specific topics and generate replies pushing the company’s or individual’s point of view.
The internet was overrun with bots generating content and replying to that content, each competing to draw eyeballs to their product or pet idea, tuned to generate the most “engagement”—which usually meant playing on fears or hatreds.
Their output was recycled by new AI models trained on their posts, in an accelerating feedback loop.
By some estimates, by the Crash, less than 20 percent of the internet was created by humans.
Meanwhile, the humans themselves increasingly turned to the comforting validations of their AI friends, or panyons—often more than friends—who offered a ready shield from the harshness of outside voices.
Then Hacksaw struck. Deploying his own army of bots in a series of brilliant hacks, he undermined and destroyed the stock market, then underlined the point by sending his calling card to every device in the country—Hello, World, you’ve been phreaked.
In the resulting chaos, the armies of generative AI bots inflamed existing divisions, creating and feeding conspiracy theories on both sides, claiming the other side had engineered the Crash to take control of the country.
They were the spark to the tinder the sudden economic collapse had created.
Enter Andrew Norman. As the creator of MeNet, the “social transparency” network and the only social network not vulnerable to bots, he’d stepped in with an audacious recovery plan and a heap load of charisma, and the desperate government had gotten behind him.
MeNet was federalized and integrated as the nation’s only legal social network, and its real-name MeNetIDs became required to access any network, guaranteeing that everyone you interacted with online was human, while also ensuring that the behavior of those humans would not be anonymous and so would have real-world repercussions.
The democratic, anonymous, vulnerable internet of the past was no more.
The new American Nets were carefully segregated into hundreds of specialized subnets—TransNet for automated vehicles, NewsNet for news, BankNet for banking and the markets, and on and on.
The subnets communicated with each other via a rigid hierarchical system of authorization, with what was still called the “internet” occupying the lowest and least capable rung on the ladder.
Another hack like Hacksaw’s was impossible because every subnet in the hierarchical system, with the single exception of the independent MilNet, answered to and communicated through OverNet, the central command-and-control network.
OverNet answered to Andrew Norman. From that Tower.
“If I said I could hack the NOC,” Jason said, pulling his eyes away from the Tower, “I’d be a liar. But you hired me to get you an NNA login, not OverNet access. The lower subnets are vulnerable.”
“They weren’t to my hackers.”
“And I can tell you why they failed.”
An eyebrow rose above the rim of Bruno’s dark glasses. “Do elucidate.”
“They tried to act like the hackers in old movies. Did everything with computers.”
Bruno’s eyebrow rose even more. “They failed because they hacked . . . with computers?”
“Yep. Like the movies.” Secretly, Jason loved that shit.
His interest in hacking had germinated from watching 1980s and 1990s films with Mia.
Back then, neither the filmmakers nor the audience had a clue what real hacking looked like, or else they thought—justifiably, if he were honest—it looked boring, so they portrayed it as rather .
. . neon. Bright-green code scrolling too fast for anyone to read.
Fingers blurring over a keyboard. There was usually a giant red timer counting down, and beeping alarms, and somebody was bound to utter a phrase like, “Their worm is trying to breach our firewall!” Often the hack unfolded in crude 3D “cyberspace” like some ancient video game, the camera sliding down wireframe tunnels suspended in blackness while polygonal tanks or blocky skeletons glided in pursuit.
What those movies visualized wasn’t hacking but the mystique of hacking.
Before the Cybercrash made them all terrorists, phreakers were wizards.
Hoodies stood in for pointy hats, scripts for magic spells, code for incantations.
Even the movies’ cheesy, lo-fi vision of cyberspace was optimistic in its naivete, beautiful and surreal, like another world.
Like an escape. And right now Jason’s fingers were, in fact, flying across the virtual keyboard on his knees, and he felt just a little like one of those noble antiheroes, even if what he was doing was just a simple internet search, about as far from that Hollywood vision of sorcery as you could get.
“That’s bad?” Bruno said, his deep voice dripping skepticism.
“I’m sure they were good at it. But that’s not phreaking. Or, not the heart of phreaking.”
“So what is?”
“See, no one remembers anymore,” Jason said, examining and discarding a series of images in his smartspace, “because there are so few phreakers in the wild. Real black hats like me are rare, because we have to be good enough to hide. The white hats, the ones who work in the system, legally, running red-team exercises, penetration testing, that sort of stuff, they’re just programmers playing at being hackers. They follow rules.”
“And you don’t?”
“Nope. I think around ’em.” Jason found what he was looking for: a high-quality image of the WasteNet logo. He dropped it into a tiny program he’d prepared earlier. Then he cut off Bruno’s window share.
“Hey!” Bruno said.
“Sorry,” Jason said, “you can’t be connected for this part, or the mark will know there are two people on the call.”
“The great hacker can’t hide that?” Bruno said scornfully.
“Is that a challenge? Fine. Gimme your phone.”
That was a challenge back. Would Bruno dare hand his phone to a hacker? With the overly casual air of someone showing they didn’t care, he did.
Jason rolled his eyes. “Unlocked, I meant.”
“Why don’t you just hack—” Bruno began, but Jason cut him off.
“You wanna be here another hour, or do you want to get what you came for?” He held the phone up toward Bruno’s face.
Bruno hesitated, then raised his smartglasses and leaned in. It was the first time Jason had seen his eyes. They were dark, and amused. The phone read his face and unlocked. Bruno disappeared behind his glasses again.
Jason spent a minute tapping the screen, then handed it back to Bruno. “There. That’s a temporary local piggyback, no middleman Net. You can watch over my shoulder and nobody else knows you’re here. Happy?”
“Not till I get what I came here for,” Bruno rumbled, rising and coming around the conference table to stand behind Jason, literally watching over his shoulder. Since this was a local piggyback, he was viewing Jason’s smartspace instead of seeing a duplicate in his own. The goon came with him.
Jason subvocalized a command to call the NNA’s public VoiceNet line. A couple of menus later, he was able to enter Chandler’s ID number. That little piece of supposedly secure info routed his call directly to Chandler, with an internal transfer tag that ensured his phone would actually ring.
“Um, hello?” said a voice. This was probably the first time Chandler had picked up a work call.
“Hi, is this Al?” Jason said.
“Um, yes, this is Albert.”
“Hey, Albert, this is John Kline up in EmployNet. I’m trying to process your first paycheck, but I’m getting a flag. Did you finish the cybersecurity training?”
“That really bor—really in-depth thing with all the videos and quizzes? Yeah, I did that.”
It was probably almost the only thing he’d done on his first day of “work” two weeks ago. Having to redo it would be a nightmare. Jason twisted the knife a little. “It’s not showing as completed.”
“But—but I got a certificate of completion in my email.”
“That won’t help me. The hold is released automatically. Are you sure you finished the whole thing?”
“Yes! It took all—”
“You might have to redo it,” Jason interrupted.
“Oh, no . . .” Jason could almost hear Chandler slump in his chair.
“Unless,” he said.
“What?” Chandler’s eagerness was almost pathetic.
“Look, I’m not supposed to do this. But if we don’t get this flag removed today, you’ll miss payroll, and that’ll be a nightmare for both of us.
I’ll trust that you finished the training.
I’ll pull up the final quiz page on my terminal, and all you have to do is click Finish. ” He sent a window share to Chandler.
There was a long pause. In his smartspace, Chandler would be looking at the window Jason had sent, showing a credible mock-up of the quiz tutorial.
Jason knew it was credible because earlier he’d looked up which training firm had a contract with the NNA and found their software.
All he’d needed was the correct logo to sit atop the login screen.
“It’s asking me to log in,” Chandler said.
“Yeah,” Jason said, his voice so unconcerned it was almost bored.
Another long pause. “Um. How do I know this isn’t a phishing attempt?”
Jason began an incredulous laugh, then cut it short as if realizing Chandler had a point. “You’re right. That’s ironic.” He pretended to think for a moment. “What if I shoot you my GPS coordinates?”