Chapter 3 #2
The van interior disappeared, replaced by a spacious office environment.
At first Jason thought it was a computer-generated location, because it was too big and too beautiful to be real.
Greenery lined the walls and arched toward the ceiling.
Water ran in channels edging a marble floor, and sheet waterfalls poured down huge windows at the back of the room.
But a slight graininess told him this place was real; the images were being captured in real time from multiple cameras and stitched together in correct perspective in his lenses.
Then his view adjusted abruptly to place him in the center rear of the room, facing a wide touch-screen desk and the man just taking a seat behind it.
Andrew Norman.
The great man’s famous blue eyes were fixed on Jason’s, cool and ironic. Jason was glad this was VR. If it were real life, he’d be halfway across the desk, hands seeking throat, all his and Sprite’s careful plans forgotten, because this was the man who had killed Mia.
“Jason Eric Cromartie,” Norman said. “Also known as Ghost.” His lips compressed. “Do you know how long I’ve been looking for you? You almost put Ikshana out of business when you leaked their financial data.”
Jason’s breath hitched. Norman shouldn’t know that was him. “It was my civic duty to blow the whistle on their corruption,” he said virtuously.
Norman turned to Bruno, who was now sitting not across from Jason but next to him.
Both were seated on generic 3D models of chairs, and their bodies from the necks down were generic 3D models of people, but their heads and faces were their own.
It was strange to see Bruno’s head on an average body instead of one bulging with muscle.
“Mr. Tavion,” Norman said in a gentle voice, “where’s your phone? ”
“In my pocket,” Bruno said, frowning.
“That’s good. I was worried Ghost might have kept it.”
Bruno’s puzzled frown deepened. “He never—”
Norman cut him off. “Oh, at some point he did. He social-engineered your phone from you, probably so smoothly you don’t remember, and used it to send a message.
To me. Directly. This message.” He made a tossing motion with his hands, and a window flew up and unfolded to hang in space before Jason and Bruno.
Inside was a screenshot of a direct chat from Bruno to Norman, flagged as emergency priority:
This cybersecurity penetration test was provided to you by GH05T Phreaking, Limited. White hats wasting your time? Noobs annoying you? For all your realistic red team needs, conjure a GH05T. Real phreaker, real results. Available for individual contracts or retainer.
P.S. Tell Agent Tavion his gangster act needs work.
Bruno’s eyebrows both rose over the top of his smartglasses. “I’ll be damned,” he rumbled, cocking his head at Jason. “You knew the whole time?”
Jason grinned at him. “You’re not a bad gangster. A little overboard, a little Hollywood, but not bad. You should try it for real. Bet you’d find it liberating.”
Bruno shook his head. “My cover was supposed to be perfect.”
Jason didn’t reply. It was perfect, a complex breadcrumb trail of escalating crime history hidden by professional MeNetID sanitization, and it had been a challenge even for a phreaker of Jason’s caliber to uncover it.
He’d seen through it for one reason only: No one, not even the most hardened criminal, not even the Chinese or the phreaking Russians, would dare attack the NNA directly.
So he’d intuited that Bruno was not, in fact, a criminal, but someone working for the NNA.
He was red-teaming, testing the NNA’s security by trying to infiltrate it.
Or, rather, by hiring Jason to infiltrate it.
It was a two-for-one: a penetration test and a honey trap.
They could test the NNA’s security and put a hacker behind bars.
It had been too good an opportunity to pass up. Sprite had agreed. Together they’d hatched this scheme, and Sprite had gotten MorDread’s grudging approval—for this stage, at least.
“Unorthodox way of sending a job application,” Norman said, waving a languid hand at the message.
“It got me an interview,” Jason said.
“Indeed. And why should I retain your services, Mr. Ghost?”
“For a start, because I bet none of the other phreakers Bruno enlisted in his red-teaming managed to phish an NNA login. I’m that good.”
“But hardly good enough. You were detected.”
“I wanted to get caught.”
“You would have been caught regardless.”
“Wanna bet?”
Norman leaned back and gave Jason one of his iconic, ironic half smiles. “Bet what, Mr. Ghost? What could you possibly offer me?”
“Simple: a truly challenging security test for your Final System, the best possible test it can get before it’s launched on OverNet.”
As a bombshell intended to shock Norman with what Jason knew, this fell flat. Norman’s expression didn’t change. “You haven’t given me any evidence that you could challenge it,” he said.
Norman should have been impressed, even concerned, that Jason knew about the Final System. Either he had a better poker face than Jason had thought, or . . . Jason subvocalized a quick NewsNet search for the term Final System.
It was plastered atop every single news site.
Damn. Lose phone access for a couple of hours and suddenly you’re behind the times. His stomach clenched. Norman announcing the thing publicly meant the timeline was more compressed than he’d thought.
Norman was looking at him expectantly. Jason leaned forward.
“I’m a real phreaker, not some pansy white hat.
And as a real phreaker, I phreaking hate that thing.
It’s the summit of your stupid, naive, Singularity-seeking worldview, your smug belief that your systems can decide what’s best for humanity.
I hate it so much, I don’t give a damn what happens to me: I’m gonna destroy it.
You won’t get a better red-team exercise than that.
Unless you think I’ll win. Unless you’re scared. ”
Norman was quiet for a long moment, head cocked as if listening.
At last he said, in a conversational tone, “I despise phreakers. Despite what you try to believe, you tear down, not build up. You break systems, you don’t fix them.
You are the bugs in the machine.” He leaned forward and planted his elbows on his desk.
“Do you know what happened to the very first bug, the literal bug Grace Hopper found in Harvard’s mainframe in 1947?
It got fried by the very system it was glitching.
It was preserved in Hopper’s diary under transparent tape, as a museum piece.
That’s you, Ghost: a museum piece playing with electricity.
” He propped his chin on one fist, his eyes never leaving Jason’s.
“When that mainframe was fixed, it was stronger for it. The systems always come back stronger. When you were identified, I wanted to incarcerate you immediately. Do you know who convinced me to let Agent Tavion run a red-team test with you first?”
The question hung in the air until Jason shook his head.
“The Final System did. And the Final System is now agreeing with you that you’re the best phreaker to test it.
Not because of your skill—that is merely sufficient—but, yes, because of your motivation.
So I will allow you to attack it. In defeating you, it will prove its readiness for the tasks ahead.
Not to me—I don’t need convincing—but to the politicians I need to vote in favor of letting it take its place atop OverNet. ”
“That sounds like a job offer.”
Norman nodded. “For your compensation, if you behave satisfactorily, I’ll let you walk free.”
“I can’t exactly negotiate better terms. When do I start?”
“Tomorrow,” Norman said. “Mr. Tavion will help set up your next attempt.”
“I’ll need to work from an NNA terminal.”
“No,” Norman said, then cocked his head again, listening to someone—or something. “Fine. If we assume your attack today was real, that would mean you had a foothold in the NNA’s internal network. You may start there tomorrow. But you receive no other help.”
“I won’t need it.”
“I look forward to my System proving you wrong,” Norman said, and Jason’s last sight before his session disconnected was of the man’s smirk.
The VR view dissolved. He was once again in the back of the NNA van, and Bruno, shaking his head, was leaning across the aisle to snip his zipcuffs and hand him his phone.
It took Jason two tries to text Sprite, because even his subvocalization was shaking from exultation and lingering adrenaline. Level 1 Clear. Level 2 Start. Tell MorDread to get the botnet ready.