Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles (4 page)

What’s worse is the knowledge that it didn’t have to be this way, that life would be the same if only one little thing had unfolded differently.

If only we’d left the house ten seconds earlier.

If only Dad had taken a right on Chestnut instead of Palmer, which he rarely took because of the traffic.

If only I’d sat on the driver’s side instead of Tommy.

If only . . .

Doctors were shocked that I’d survived the impact. When I told them that I never lost consciousness they thought I was lying. I wish I were.

I remember everything: how time slowed just before the other driver slammed into us; the screeching, grinding metal sound our car made when it flipped and slid to a stop in the grassy median forty yards away.

I remember it all.

When the first responders arrived, they found the van on its right side leaking gas onto the ground. Dad had been killed instantly and Mom was bleeding out. Tommy was dead too. That was the worst part, seeing him.

His body hung above me by his seatbelt. His eyes were still open and his arm hung limp. Blood streamed down his arm and onto my face. He just stared at me, his eyes still frozen with the fear he must’ve felt as he died. I heard his last breath.

When the firefighters cut me from the car I was hysterical, they’d said. That’s the only part I don’t remember.

I went into the bedroom at the end of the hall. Mom lay motionless in her bed, propped up by a couple pillows. The brain trauma she’d suffered in the accident had paralyzed her from the waist down, and in recent months she’d begun deteriorating at a frightening pace. She could still speak, but she had no memories of her past and couldn’t form new ones. Every day was like starting over—remembering and forgetting who she was, who I was, who Lettie was. And there was the
pain
, which came in agonizing waves that sent her into near delirium. It wouldn’t be long, doctors said, before she would be gone.

I sat in a chair beside her.

“Hey, Mom,” I said quietly.

Her eyes were glassy and fixed on the ceiling. They were a deep brown. Dad used to call her Angel Eyes.

“Are you the nurse?” she whispered.

“I’m your daughter, Nyah.”

“Nyah.” A lost look came over her face. Her eyes drifted left and right like someone trapped between waking and sleep. “A pretty name.”

“You came up with that.” I noticed her nails were freshly painted, a sparkly blue, like something you’d see on an expensive sports car. Lettie did her daughter-in-law’s nails every week before her neurology appointment so she’d look her finest. “I like that color on you.”

She winced. “My head hurts so much. Make it stop.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

“I wish I could,” I said.

“Please . . . ,” she begged.

I checked the IV used to deliver the steady doses of pain meds that Dr. Benton had prescribed to keep her comfortable. It was already maxed out and there was nothing more I could give her.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hating myself for feeling so helpless. “I’m sorry . . .”

She moaned quietly and closed her eyes.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I sat there for a long time, listening to the gentle sound of her breathing.

“Why is life so unfair, Mom?” I said and shook my head “This shouldn’t have happened to you. You and Dad and Tommy were good people, the best kind of people. You were this family’s laughter. You laughed so often and got everyone else doing it too.” I laughed then, thinking about it, but the sound was choked and came with tears. “And Dad, boy he just wanted to try anything and everything, didn’t he? Remember when he bought all of us Rollerblades?” Another short laugh, more tears. “We must have looked like the Four Stooges, arms and legs flailing, going down the street. Tommy fell and broke his arm! But you had him laughing all the way to the hospital.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me, a look of puzzlement on her face. “Don’t cry.”

“I messed up,” I whispered. “Nothing’s gone the way I’d planned and now everything’s wrecked. And it just keeps getting worse.”

“Please don’t cry,” she said again.

“I’ll try not to.” I leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “I’ll take care of you, Mom, I promise. I’ll fix this. I’ll find a way to get the money we need. And I’ll find Pixel and everything will go back to the way it was.”

I wasn’t sure I could fix this, though. Not all of it. I’m not sure anyone could, but I had to try. Hot tears dripped off my cheeks.

“I love you to the moon and back,” I said and stood. She’d already drifted to sleep, but her face was still twisted as if she were trapped in some terrible, inescapable nightmare.

Before I left her room, I looked back and vowed that tomorrow would be a better day. BlakBox may have fallen through, but that didn’t mean I would give up. I couldn’t. Pixel was still out there and the clock was ticking to get Mom into the clinical trial. There was still a chance, however slim and unlikely, that I could get the money. But to get it meant I had to find someone who’d dropped out of my life and off the grid.

I had to find Austin.

As I slipped through the door and closed it gently behind me, I said it out loud: “Tomorrow
will be
a better day.”

But in my heart, I wasn’t so sure.

B
lakBox Corporate Office

S
TONE SAT
in the dimly lit fourth-floor office suite, eyes fixed on the only other man in the room. Walter Bell stood beside the floor-to-ceiling window, hands clasped loosely behind him as he gazed beyond the glass. The outside world was still and soot dark except for the glow of distant streetlights.

“You’re certain?” Bell finally spoke without turning.

“Yes, sir. I confirmed it myself. The files were fully compromised, just as we suspected.”

“I see.” A long pause. “And the location of the files now?”

“Undetermined. A search of the boy’s phone and laptop turned up nothing. He either destroyed the files or transferred them elsewhere before we caught up to him.”

“That’s a problem, wouldn’t you say?” Bell said as he turned toward him. “Until the files are recovered, we must assume that the girl has them and intends to provide them to authorities.”

Stone dipped his head once, agreeing.

“That’s a situation I can’t allow, you understand,” Bell continued. “Find her and recover the data. Silence the threat and make sure it never surfaces again.”

“Understood,” Stone said. “And the boy?”

“He’s outlived his usefulness. Deal with it quietly. Tonight.”

“Of course.” He stood and straightened his suit coat.

“And Stone,” Bell said, eyes narrowing to slits. “Take care of the girl. I can’t afford any loose ends on this.”

“Of course.”

W
E DON’T get
to choose our lives, when or where we’re born. Usually, even our names are chosen before we come kicking and screaming into the world.

Nyah means
life purpose
. My mom got pregnant with me while she and Dad were doing Peace Corps work in Calcutta, which is where she was born and lived for eight years before an American family adopted her. Doctors said she’d never have kids, but she believed her life’s purpose was to be a mom. It must’ve been true because she became one twice.

People used to believe that naming a thing or a person defined its existence and gave it meaning. Adam named the animals. Explorers claimed faraway lands in the name of kings. Aboriginal boys survived rites of passage into manhood and were given new names. New identities.

We still believe in the power of names, hackers especially.

Every hacker has a handle, an alias that we’ve chosen to define how we want to be known. Maybe it’s our way of redefining ourselves not for who we
are
, but for what we
could
be.

I could count on one hand how many people knew both my real name and my handle.

Austin Hartt was one of these people.

We first met at Dr. Benton’s office six months after the accident. Back then, I never wanted to go to Mom’s neurology appointments, and I hated myself for that. What kind of daughter wouldn’t want to be there for her mom? But I couldn’t bear watching her get poked and prodded while she just sat there, a numb, unknowing look on her face.

On the days I couldn’t handle it, I’d sit in the waiting room while the doctor ran his tests. I hated that office and everything about it: the pine-scented antiseptic in the air, the strange patients, the hum of the air conditioner running nonstop even in winter. Most people die twice: first when they give up on life, and finally when Death comes to take what’s his. The waiting room felt like a stopover somewhere in between.

Austin was the most normal person there, though he never smiled. He would sit in the same chair, always with his laptop in front of him. He had a compulsive habit of tapping each of his fingertips seven times with his thumb. I counted.

I don’t think he noticed me until the day I brought my own laptop, the one with the black-and-white Anonymous decal: an image of a Guy Fawkes mask and the phrase
Keep Calm and Expect Us
.

I glanced up from my screen and caught him staring at me. He didn’t look away when I made eye contact. Most boys would’ve looked away, but not Austin.

“That’s clever,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

He pointed. “That sticker. I like it.”

I shrugged.

“Knowledge is free,” Austin said. “We are Anonymous. We are Legion.”

He paused, raised an eyebrow and nodded once as if to say,
Go on, your turn
.

“We do not forgive,” I continued. “We do not forget.”

“Expect us,” we said together.

It was the motto of Anonymous, a global collective of “hacktivists” who’d banded together to remind big governments and corporations that they served the people and not the other way around. Anonymous was controlled chaos at its finest, a crowd-sourced cyber lynch mob of sorts that made its home in the digital world.

“Are you an Anon?” he asked.

“Isn’t everyone?”

“No.” There was an awkward moment filled only with the air conditioner’s hum. “Do you have a mask?”

A mask.
A handle.

I tilted my head:
maybe.

“I hope it’s a good one. So many of them are ridiculously unoriginal.” A beat. “So what is it?”

I just smiled.

He dipped his head and went back to work on his computer. I was still watching him—wondering how old he was, why he was seeing Dr. Benton—when movement on my laptop screen caught my eye: the cursor was moving on its own. Someone was hacking me! My fingers flashed over the keyboard, telling the system to terminate all external connections and locate the source of the intrusion. Then the answer dawned on me.

I looked up and there was Austin, smiling at me over his laptop monitor. He glanced at his screen, back at me. “Trinity,” he said, naming my handle. “Really?”

Ten seconds. This guy was good. He’d gotten through my firewall like a Mr. Fatty at a buffet and found my handle in no-time flat. Granted, my guard was down and I’d disabled my best firewall to tap into the local Wi-Fi, but still . . .

“Impressive,” I said.

“I like it,” he said.

“What?”

“Trinity. Three in one, one in three. There’s a story behind that, I’m sure. Either that or you’re a fan of
The Matrix
and couldn’t come up with a better idea.”

“Maybe I just like the sound of it.”

“Or maybe you have multiple personalities.”

“Possible. I am sitting in a brain doctor’s office, after all. For all you know, I’m crazy.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“No,” I said with a wry smile.

“Well, my advice, Trinity, is this: don’t wear your mask too long or you might start to forget who’s beneath it. Masks are funny that way.”

“Too late.”

“I’ll bet not.”

We became friends that day. For the next few months, we’d see each other in Dr. Benton’s waiting room and talk like ladies at the beauty parlor until he had to go into the office or I had to leave. Our first date—my word; I don’t think he ever thought of us as dating—was to a gallery exhibit of computer art by the surrealist Christos Magganas, whom we both admired. After that, we went to movies, had picnics in Golden Gate Park, strolled through Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf. But mostly, we chatted online—never on the phone because he didn’t own one. He said the electromagnetic waves irradiate brain tissue, which was a problem considering he had a tumor.

He had moved from Boston to California to be treated by Dr. Benton about the time my family had been smashed into early graves. Austin rarely talked about his medical condition, and when he did it was only in passing. His tumor was rare, I knew that much. He said that over time it had become inoperable and when he lived in Boston he’d had some kind of delusional episode that prompted his search for better treatment.

He was two years older than I was—twenty-three months, actually—but intellectually he was on a higher plane altogether. He was a genius in every sense of the word. Something had happened to him when he was younger that made him that way, but he couldn’t remember what. In fact, he couldn’t remember anything before age thirteen.

I just think he was a freak of nature in the right sense.

Sometimes he’d tell me about his latest projects. If you haven’t already guessed it, he was a hacker too, but if I was Pikes Peak, he was Everest. While I was cracking server firewalls, he was developing data-mining algorithms for the NSA and CIA. Those were his weekend projects, side money so he could work on other, more important, things. Passion projects, he called them.

One of those was an application he’d worked on for years. He called it MetacogNet, an artificial intelligence program that attempted to replicate the complex “left” and “right” brain capabilities of the human mind. It had the potential to revolutionize the way data becomes usable information.

Austin’s findings drew the attention of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who bankrolled the program’s development. But immediately after launching the company, Austin cashed out. A larger tech company had given him ten million reasons to walk away, so he had. He’d never wanted to run a company; he had other things in mind.

That was almost a year ago. Soon after that he’d faded from my life: there one day, gone the next. The jerk. He’d stopped answering my e-mails, stopped logging into the online chat services we used, stopped showing up at the doctor’s office. I’d gone by his apartment once to find out what I’d done wrong, but he’d never come to the door. I’d spent most of my life being ignored and had gotten used to it, but this . . . this hurt.

Soon I stopped trying. If he didn’t want to see me anymore, that was his loss. I hadn’t realized how much I thought of him until he wasn’t there. If that sounds lame and pathetic, you’ve never been in love, or even in a close friendship.

Just wait, it’ll happen.

The morning after BlakBox, I rode my motorcycle, a beat-up Yamaha I’d bought online, over to Austin’s apartment. It was in a warehouse by the Bay that a real estate developer had converted to an upscale apartment complex. I was the only person who knew where he lived. He’d always wanted to stay anonymous to the rest of the world, which I understood.

Looking at the building from where I parked on the street out front brought back painful memories of the last time I’d spoken to him, how he’d said he had important things to do—things I wouldn’t understand. He was throwing away our relationship.

That was the only time I’d ever yelled at him. It was the only way I could handle the pain and betrayal I’d felt. Anger is so much more manageable than grief. I hadn’t known it would be the last time I’d see him.

But now I was there for Mom. I needed money and Austin was the only person I knew who could help. A hundred fifty grand was pocket change to him.

I followed a cobblestone walkway to a set of black double doors. A steel callbox with the word
Sentex
etched into it was bolted to the brick wall. It had a keypad and digital touchscreen that normally would’ve had a long list of the building’s tenants and their unit numbers. But here, there was only one.

K. Os—Unit 500.

K-OS. Austin’s handle.
Chaos.

I dialed his unit on the keypad and waited. The call system rang a dozen times then automatically disconnected after no answer. Maybe he wasn’t home. More likely, he just never answered the buzzer.

Guess I’d just let myself in. I’d brought along a decryption application I’d coded to bypass the door’s security protocol. Using a pocket tool, I worked the metal box’s back panel free, spliced a cable with an adaptor I’d brought, and plugged the other end into my iPhone. In less than twenty seconds, the door latch disengaged with a click, and I went in.

The building was all but abandoned. Austin was the only person who lived there because the developer’s plans had been bigger than his bank account, and he’d gone bankrupt before anyone else could buy a unit. Everything was half finished and covered in drywall dust, including the elevator, an open freight lift with a gated door.

I got in, pulled the gate closed, and it lurched slowly toward to the top floor.

The elevator stopped and I stepped out. Twin steel doors, black and formidable, were set in the opposite wall. A thick metal plate with the numbers 111110100 was welded to the door. Only Austin would convert his unit number to binary code.

There was no doorbell, no knocker of any kind so I pounded on the door with my fist. It barely made a sound, like punching a gravestone.

“Austin! It’s Nyah!” My voice echoed around me.

I listened: only silence beyond the doors. I’d come this far and I wasn’t going to leave until I’d spoken to him. No, forget that. I wasn’t leaving without the money.

I tried the silver door lever. It turned easily under my hand and the latch clicked. Unlocked. What good was a having a front door like Fort Knox if you left it wide open? But I suppose it made sense when you’re the only one in the building.

I eased the door open and went in.

“Austin?”

The loft was cavernous, with pitted hardwood floors, exposed brick walls, and ceilings twenty feet overhead. Daylight spilled through huge windows rising high on the walls.

“Hello?” My voice disappeared into the large space.

There was none of the furniture you’d expect—no couches or chairs, no coffee tables or bookshelves. Instead, the space was filled with organized clusters of high-tech lab equipment, panels of large-screen monitors and computers, and row upon row of blinking, humming server racks. And above it all, large rumbling ductwork that dumped cold air into the space, no doubt to cool the equipment.

Over the thrum of the ventilation, a sound pulsed—a droning
whum whum whum
that moved through the apartment like an electrical current. It was too thick and resonant to be coming from the servers.

“Austin?” I called louder. “It’s Nyah. You here?”

I walked deeper into the loft, passing equipment that belonged in a hospital, not a computer lab: light boards plastered with skull X-rays taken from various angles, large stainless-steel tables meticulously organized with chemistry equipment, microscopes, centrifuges, electroencephalogram (EEG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) machines. All of it was dwarfed by an enormous, shrink-wrapped machine strapped to large pallets. The label stamped on the side read SignaTech NeuroImaging Solutions.

Neuroimaging? What was he doing with
that
?

I rounded the last server rack, and the far side of the apartment came into view. I froze and my breath caught. There he was, standing barefoot in a grey hoodie and black jeans. He wore a black knit beanie, pulled tight over his head, and large red headphones.

He hadn’t spotted me yet.

Austin was leaning over a tyrannosaurus-sized control panel that reminded me of a mixing board I’d seen once in a music studio, only bigger. He seemed lost in his own world, frenetically dialing knobs, pushing buttons, sliding controllers, all of it punctuated by quick glances up at an array of screens mounted to the panel. As he tweaked the controls, the sound reverberating through the room changed subtly.

He looked past the screens and I realized the noise was coming from a sound booth of some kind beyond the control panel—a room within the room with a glass observation window set into the wall facing the control panel.

I took a step toward him and my motion drew his attention.

He jerked upright and turned. His face was drawn and thinner than the last time I’d seen him. Paler. His eyes went wide like someone shaken from a deep dream.

Without taking his gaze off me, he pushed a button, killing the sound, and slipped the headphones off.

He stood motionless for several long breaths. I was probably the last person he’d expect to show up in his apartment.