The Birth of an Infamous Hacker
You get to Choose Whether this Character Lives or Dies
Read the paragraphs that follow. If you like the character, if you don't like the character, either way, you decide whether the character and storyline survive to the pages of my next book.
The Hacking of Federal Servers
It's 2 o'clock in the morning. All good children are
asleep, but Rose Lewis clicks and clacks on a keyboard in her bedroom. Her 5th
grade vocabulary book provides a comfortable table that separates the burning
battery from her bare legs under the covers of her twin-sized mattress that
sits on the floor in the corner of her bedroom. The book is more useful as a
table; Rose far surpassed that vocabulary level before the end of 3rd grade.
A cat poster hangs on her wall. The fuzzy, fluffy
feline stretches upside down. Text on the poster reads "I'm fine.
Really." Mom gave her that poster at Christmas. Rose had a habit of saying
that exact phrase to her mother when her mother would ask if "anything was
wrong." Mom asked if "anything was wrong" frequently; Rose apparently
forever appeared concerned.
Rose winks at the poster and presses the enter key
on her keyboard. "Here it goes, Rosie, let's see if I am still fine after
this."
Rose imagines what it would be like if she had a
sister to share this moment. Would they be huddled under the blanket together? Would
her sister be as nervous as she? The press of this button changes everything. Being
an only child is lonely. If anything, it helps Rose develop a stronger
imagination.
"Holy cow!" she utters, holding her hand
over her mouth to muffle the sound, so as not to make her parents aware of her
nocturnal activities. The computer screen scrolls tens of thousands of lines of
protected documents from a federal server that Rose should not be able to
access.
"I can't believe that worked!" she
mutters. Rose looks to the door of her room into the hallway to see if she
anyone is stirring. She saves her logged keystrokes into a script. The script
will allow her to return to the federal server's command prompt with the click
of a button. She closes the laptop knowing that her TOR connection will
automatically disconnect and hide her from any person who tries to trace her
computer's signal and location.
To be safe, Rose disconnects the battery on the
laptop. She hides the laptop beneath a loose floor board and returns to her
mattress. The floor board pries free with a letter opener that lives under the
end of Rose's mattress.
The next few days will be difficult. Will she be
able to keep this secret? She wants
to tell someone, anyone, that she just accomplished the impossible. Does she
need to say her farewells to family? If the federal government detected her
breach, they would descend upon her quickly, and she would never see her family
again. Rose gives her parents big hugs before going to school the next day.
"What is that for?" Her mother squeezes
back. Rose drinks in the moment; it might be her last.
Roses' father continues drinking his coffee and
reading the news on his tablet. "You are a strange child," he says.
Rose grabs her backpack and heads to the bus stop,
where she waits alone with her imagination.
At school, Rose imagines what it would be like to be
one of the popular girls. She sees them huddle around the lunch table. They
laugh and giggle. She wishes she could laugh and giggle, but Rose knows that if
she were part of a clique that she would not be able to contain it--she would
blurt out the fact that she had broken into a federal server last night. Rose
sits with her tray alone in the corner and knows that this is the only way to
keep her secrets safe. No one in her school would understand her anyway.
Rose is on high alert. She peers out the windows in
class looking for red and blue flashing lights or black vans filled with men in
black suits holding big guns. Rose walks the hallways, and she imagines what it
would look like if smoke bombs went off and teams secured the hallways to
escort her to some government detaining center where interrogations would usurp
the next several weeks of her life preceded by a life-time prison sentence. On
the bus ride home, Rose looks to the sky for helicopters. She wonders if an
image of her bus is being transmitted by satellite to a secret command room,
where a gruff man who looks like he'd rather be smoking a thick cigar than
watching a school bus gives the command "Go and get'er boys!" For
three long days, Rose looks for any sign that she has been caught, but nothing
comes. Did she really get away with this?
Rose starts her laptop using a Tails boot-stick for
extra security. Tails is a special operating system that assures Rose that when
she is done with the laptop, that there will be no trace of the work that she
did during that session. It is the operating system used by spies and secret
journalists across the world, who send reports on oppressive regimes from
within the country's own boarders.
The thumb-drive with her script requires a
32-character password to decrypt the information on the drive. Rose inserts the
stick and taps her fingers rapidly on the lid of the laptop while she waits for
the password prompt. Click, click, click, and she is back into the server.
Exploring an unknown system is time consuming and
boring. At the same time, there is a sense of wonder. You never know what the
next document will contain, and you will never know if you don't take the time
to open the file and read it's contents. Some files require finesse. Some files
are encrypted and must be molded into a form that is readable. Rose has tools
that she has accumulated over the years to speed up the process of cracking
into protected directories, upgrading her user's access level, and peeking into
every corner of a system.
Rose peruses the documents. She finds bills, drafts,
comments, and correspondence. They describe methods and means for taking
control over the internet, plans that would make every internet signal
identifiable to the person typing at the keyboard, instructions on how to link
harmless words with terrorist ideas and bring down the purveyors of ideas that
are different from "approved language." She downloads documents that
she finds most interesting. Some of the documents are too long. She will read
them later. If Rose is correct, she has uncovered documents pertaining to the
end of the internet as she knows it. The information highway would become a
'pay-to-play' system where only the privileged few who pay for the 'right' to
communicate are able to do so under the watchful eye of an invasive government,
that seeks to overstep its boundaries every chance that it gets. The hacker
boards will go bonanza over these documents!
She closes the connection to the server and packages
the documents into a gzip file. She creates a torrent file and uploads it to an
anonymous IRC channel. No one can know that "Rose Lewis" struck a
blow for the freedom of the internet... the inability for her to claim success
for this victory eats away at Roses joy. She needs a cool handle, like a hacker
name. Then at least, she can prove to people down the line that she is the
hacker who accomplished this feat; that is, if they are worthy of her trust.
Rose looks at the sticker on her laptop case that
displays a pyramid, an all-seeing eye and the text "New World Order"
in a creepy green and white text. "NWO" she thinks....
"Nocturnal... Wize ... Owl". She smiles. It's not the best name, but
it's something. Behind closed eyes, Rose imagines the news headlines:
"Unknown hacker, NocturnalWizeOwl cracks into federal systems and absconds
with terabytes of private documents." She adds a footer to her post that
identifies her as "NWO (NocturnalWizeOwl)," and she adds a public key
and digital signature that she can use in the future to link her payloads
together in a digital resume for a mysterious identity with no face.
Tonight, NocturnalWizeOwl is born. She hits the
"send" key, and wishes her new persona into being. Rose whispers,
"May your years be long, Ms. NWO."
In the morning, the hacker boards blaze with chatter
about the documents circulated by NWO. No one knows that Rose Lewis is a
computer genius, but everyone knows now about NWO. Rose thinks, "Well,
that's something at least. I'm making my mark."
You Decide---Should this character exist in my next book?
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