Simon wiped carbon dust off the monitor. The air was thick with black dust and ozone, electric, mutant and strange; a prism for city lights, a black smog for daylight shadows. It was perfect for him, like a cover.
Diana’s hand is hot on his shoulder. He can feel her heart beat in the ball of her palm. He pretends to disregard her as he feels for her pulse to slow. Her breath on his neck is heavy. He cannot hear it over the heady repetition of bass and drums but it stirs carnal thoughts. Diana’s a wild card, young and street-smart, sexy with that savvy that comes from knowing it. Simon reaches for his glass of Zap and sucks up a lump of feverfew residue from the bottom of the ice, sharp and bitter. He rubs his tongue against his lips and sucks his smoke to change the flavor. “How would you like to die with me Diana?”
“Don’t know, guess it would be liberating…and romantic.”
“Exactly. Hey, you want a Benny?” Simon asks.
“How about Ambrosia?” responds Diana.
Between the heat of her breath and a memory of the sound of her pleasure, he struggles to redirect. “Ah sweet, not yet. We’ve got things to do.” He pictured her lips as he killed Cain. Diana pretended not to notice.
He actually liked Club Eleqtriqe because they didn’t make it easy. First of all, there was no hardware accessible to tamper with. All they left you with were some dumb terminals and a web browser. The operating system was tightly bolted down and the standard exploits were secured from the settings menu all the way down to the display properties. Whoever designed this system knew what they were doing. What they hadn’t locked down was the ability to view jpegs. He browsed to a file with overruns in the filename he had planted on a benign host for just such an occasion. The resulting overload launched a telnet session. This singular opening allowed him to inject a little hacker utility called Cain and Abel into the works. He used Cain to sniff the network, enumerated the computers, and found the weak link of PCs within 200 seconds: An excruciating wait.
The runt of the network happened to be the controller for the lighting system. He listed the user accounts on the remote machine looking for default users. His instincts were good and his memory was even better. Simon could list every default account in any operating system going back a decade and knew the OEM admin for every commercial router he’d ever encountered. He cracked the account with the same username as password within the fifth try. He dropped Abel onto the remote machine and set it up to harvest user account information.
Within minutes it was running in the background of the light controller, hardly a blip in the memory usage while the lightshow played on, indifferent to his exploit. A riot of disco lights bounced off the carbon particles. Dancing with strobe lights and laser beams. Colored lenses turned: red, green and blue, crossbeams of yellow triangles and white flashes, all the while copying the password hashes back to his phone via wireless so they could be cracked at his leisure. This would take a while, so, he figured now was a good time to grab a Benny.
“Nah you go ahead, I’m goin’ to get mainlined.” Simon stood up and let Diana in. He had a moment of hesitation as he considered the risk he was exposing her to simply by having her here with him, let alone running the hack while she was on the machine. But, he figured, it was better not to say anything, plausible deniability and all that. He subtly nudged the memory stick out of site as she sat down at the computer. He would do all the cleanup work after he came back. Even the most bush league sys admin would be able to spot Abel running if Simon didn’t cover his tracks.
By the next time they came to dance, he’d have the admin password and would be moving on to the server. Once there, he could drop a keystroke logger onto the server itself and have it setup to distribute keyloggers to all the other machines on the network.
His buzz was slipping and his head was droning into an oblivion of white noise. A Benny would help him concentrate. A buzz-drink like nectar: strawberry nectar loaded with all the vitamin C’s to send you pissing three times before the glass was gone. Echinacea, plus whatever other nutrients a joe has got to suck down to hold himself together and still have the strength to bend his joints. Then they add the smart sauce: bayberry, damiana, lippia, and sassafras. One hundred percent decaffeinated upper. Simon’s undertaken a mission. He needs all the help he can get. “Hey, Di, see if you can’t hit a vital records database would you? I’m curious what a death certificate looks like.”
Simon heads downstairs to the smart bar. Simon’s three years older than Diana. That’s about as long as he’s been paying rent in cash and living on the lam. His life of crime has caused him a few complications. A couple of mistakes have stacked up against him now.
Life off the network isn’t an easy enterprise, in the city especially, and Simon was too much an urbanite to escape to the insomnia of Alaska or some godforsaken lava flow in Hawaii. But most important was Diana. If he gave himself up he’d lose years, and, he feared, perhaps he’d lose her. She would tell him that she’d wait, but the heart is a fickle thing and the rest of the body is even easier to tempt. Simon knew that the key to his freedom was programmed into the system. He realized he had to reenter the database of civilization instead of trying to live outside of it.
At the bar Simon scouts out for a guy with his plastic down. He settles in behind him as if waiting to order just long enough to make out the guy’s name. Then he disappears, circling around to the other end, all the while keeping an eye on the card to make sure the guy actually starts a tab. Once the card is in the system he hits up a different bartender, placing the drink on the tab. He almost feels sorry for them, his victims. It’s just too easy.
One sip of the strawberry and Simon thinks of Diana. And of aphrodisiac Ambrosia, her subtle request, to make love and leave the madness. A whisper to stop running and to sleep a narcotic and sensual sleep; the naked sleep of the mind, of animal awareness and peace. Pink and tan milk honey Ambrosia. Sweet honey milk glittering with the crystals of wild dogbane and dyed by pinkroot. Thick and rich to drowned the bittersweet.
Simon stood silently over Diana’s shoulder. She was consumed by the irradiated tube, did not sense him.
“Get anything?”
“Pretty straightforward actually,” she answered. “Just what you’d expect I guess.”
“You need some identifying records. Stuff with watermarks and whatnot so it’s hard to forge and some medical records, like X-Rays.”
“That’s what I figured,” Simon ponders what excuse to use to get himself back on to do his cleanup. After hitting a blank he figures he’s better off not to give one. “Let me in right quick. I forgot something.” He tries to conceal what he’s doing, but he ought to have known better. She is on to him.”
“I’m not going to help you kill yourself if you don’t change your life. You’ll just end up right back in the same place”
“I just need a little runway.”
“It’s a waste of your skills. I’m not going to put up with this forever. You are better than this. You know I’ve been patient. You’re going to end up selling these cards to one of these Eastern Block crooks and its going to blow up on you. They might decide they’re done with you.”
“You know I’m careful.”
“All it takes is one instant. If you’re going to set me up to lose you… then I’d rather let you go on my own terms.” Diana meant what she said, yet, the words felt empty. She knew she was hooked. That for every time that she was disappointed it only took one small hook and she was reeled in again. She was addicted to compromising, to satisfying, to settling.
“I know, I know. But for now I have to come through, I’m committed.” Simon saw Diana soften. He sensed that he could let it go and it would settle into the unspoken agreement that they perpetuated. “Let’s get out of here.” Simon wished that it was going to be easy to. That it was all about obligation and money. What made it hard was that he loved the feeling of whirling through life like leaving chaos without footprints. The con was his voice, it was his gift. He was good at it.
“Where are we going?” she asked. Despite her frustration, Diana was feeling the rush of a mission.
“The morgue.” Simon answered.
“What for?”
“We need some evidence of our premature departure.”
“Toe tags?”
“Forms.”
“Got ya.”
“I just haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet,” Simon said. Diana’s heels click, but the city’s too busy to bother answering with echoes.
