Fabricated City: A Quiet Love Story
Yeo wool paused the flight of her fingers over the keyboard and looked up briefly from the monitors. It was time to accept that her apartment needed cleaning. The mess of leftover take-out containers and dirty laundry was reaching the critical stage where she either had to call in a cleaning service or move out.
She cringed a little at the trash heaps she had generated. The apartment was spacious and well furnished; it was the type of upscale complex that had appealed to her as 'living in style' when she first leased it. With it's lavish decor and equally lavish price-tag, it screamed money. When it was clean, there was no one who would guess that it's owner had grown up in the slums, or that at one time she had been at home in the squalor of unpainted walls and bare mattresses on cold floors. But the mess now seemed to betray her dirty origins.
With a sigh, she turned back to the monitors. She had a cleaning service on call, and could probably have them here in a hour. But it would require shutting down for while they cleaned.
Another day then. Today she had a mission.
She pulled back her short black hair to fit the headset into place and activated the app that would convert her alto voice into a male's deeper baritone. Tucking her short legs up under herself to get comfortable in her swivel chair, she logged into the Game.
Her avatar 'Mr. Hairy' appeared alongside the other Team members as they entered the waiting space. Her Team. Considering she had only been playing with them for three months, it was strange how they already felt familiar, like friends she had know for a long time and had come back to visit. Since she had no friends in the 'real' world, she knew she wasn't in a good position to make a comparison, but the feeling of camaraderie was undeniable.
As they waited for everyone to arrive in the ante-area of the game, there was the customary joking. In the recent few weeks, most of the Team had solidified the bond by meeting up in real-life.
Everyone but her and the Team Captain.
Cap hadn't been able to make the events and she, we'll, she hadn't even considered it. She didn't do 'real' anymore. Even her avatar didn't bear any resemblance to her. With his bulky figure and grizzly, bearded face he was about as far from her slim frame and delicately female features as she could have made him.
She grimaced at the idea of what they would think of her if they met her in the 'real' with her anti-social tendencies. In the last few years outside of the net she barely spoke. She wasn't even sure she knew how to hold a conversation. Meet up? No thank you. The 'net' world was so much better.
Still, she was curious.
She surveyed the other avatars and wondered briefly how similar to the 'real' the images were portrayed. She knew "Cover" and "Conceal" were a married couple in the game and the 'real'. Cover's game body was a svelte blond with a revealing leather bustier and equally tight leather pants. "Conceal", "Demolition", and "Near Space" sported intimidatingly masculine avatars, and "Captain Kwon"...
...Yeo wool paused on the thought.
It wasn't the first time she had imagined what Cap looked like. Maybe because his voice sounded younger than the others. It was soothing, with a certainty in it's quality. In her imaginings she envisioned that in the 'real' his appearance would be as assuring as his avatar.
Yeo wool guessed that his avatar was probably very close to his true appearance with short dark hair and a lean frame. Some time over the last three months of interaction with him, she had become convinced that for him, the Game wasn't just a game.
She remembered from the beginning, there was a fierceness and seriousness to his voice when he issued orders. In the game chat he seemed relaxed and unimposing, but when he entered the game, donning the title "Captain Kwon" a transformation occurred. His voice became strong and commanding, his focus and resolution absolute.
He had taken his role, his responsibility to the Team so seriously. Taking risks with his character, dying over and over to protect the weaker players, to protect her. Something about his tone, the way his breath transversed the audio channel; she could tell that surviving the game mattered to him, but he was unwilling to compromise the life of his Team members for his own success.
She knew other's might find his personal immersion in the game funny, even a little pathetic. But she understood.
For so long, she had been living in the digital world that the boundaries between the 'real' and the 'digital' reality had faded and in some places disappeared. Her day and night had little distinction these days. Surfing the net, playing games, hacking. This was her true world, interrupted only briefly by the necessities of sleep and food and the occasional shower. The hacking brought in the money, the money brought the food to her door and bought new hardware and software to support the hacking.
Yeo wool was drawn out of her thoughts by "Demolition" who had noted that they should have started 5 minute ago. Cap still hadn't arrived.
Yeo wool frowned. That was really odd behavior for Cap. They'd had late starts before but never because of Cap. He was consistently early.
Another five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty. The Team agreed to disperse and return in three days.
Three days later, Cap has still not logged in.
Yeo wool began to be more than just curious. When he didn't show up on the third day, she had hacked into the games server and looked at his login profile to see what his normal login patterns appeared. With her skills, that was child's play.
The query showed that every day for the last 2 months, like clockwork, he had logged in 2-3 times a day, so this was an anomaly. Going further back in her query, she saw he had logged in consistently for more than a year. He was a dedicated gamer.
By the time a week had passed, she became more and more concerned. In her previous search, she hadn't gone into his personal file. While more than capable of hacking personal information, she had her own brand of ethics when it came to online contacts; you didn't hack friends.
But by the second week of no contact she worried that something might have happened.
What if he had been in a traffic accident, or was in the hospital? She knew from past conversations he was unemployed. What if he hadn't gotten a job and wouldn't be returning? Given his dedication, that seemed unlikely. Possibilities kept swirling around in her head, making it difficult to concentrate.
At 3:30 in the morning on the 3rd week of Cap no logging in, Yeo wool gave in. She entered the codes necessary to access Caps profile and performed a cursory identity search on the "Kwon Yoo" and billing address that appeared.
The results returned by that first search shocked her brain like being suddenly submerged in ice water.
She had known what she expected the search to return.
Her software algorithms were top-notch, so she always got something. She was expecting school grade reports, part-time employment records, maybe personal blogs and photos with friends. Unlike herself, she know a person with Cap's easy-going and confident personality would have friends, probably even a girlfriend. A fleeting thought that she hoped there was no girlfriend flash through her ind unheeded and she discarded it; that was none of her business.
She just wanted to know he was okay.
What returned was a torrent of information of recent news results.
Glaring headlines read "Rapist. Murderer" with close up photos of a man shockingly similar to Cap's avatar. The images and words flooded her screen as she click link after link.
Disbelief converted to horror, horror to disgust as the information filtered through her quick mind.
It seemed like incontrovertible evidence; video, bloody knife, finger prints, pictures of a lovely girl-child and the grieving parents. The words 'semen'... ...'stabbed her 31 times'... 'raped twice.'
...coming out of her shock, Yeo wool thought she was going to retch.
The videos were endless. The media had latched onto the gruesome details of the murder scene; with the mutilation of the corpse and the depravity of the horrors the girl must have lived through. To Yeo wool, even displaying the details for all to read seemed like a violation of the girl. She felt dirty from reading it.
It described how Kwon Yoo had repeatedly met her after school, developed a relationship with her at a secluded rented apartment and eventually killed her there. As she scrolled through the content, she'd felt her body going numb with it, her brain refusing to process any more.
She had logged off the net and walked raggedly over to the couch, curling her legs up to her chest and hugging them. She stared into the darkness of the room and tried to do what her brain always did when it needed to protect her from the 'real' and if she couldn't retreat to the 'net', she deliberately disconnected her emotions.
Yeo wool wasn't sure when she had first started to do this.
She was aware it wasn't a normal, or a healthy response to emotions. In the series of psychological counseling sessions she had attempted, her Psychologist had termed it "Temporary Emotional Detachment Disorder". She had explained it wasn't that Yeo wool was incapable of expressing or interpreting her own feelings, but that in the struggle to do so she was simply choosing the easier path of avoiding them instead. Essentially, by not feeling, she was removing herself from the situation, just as by spending most of her time in the 'net' she was removing herself from 'real' life.
The Psychologist had been matter of fact about how this protective measure was usually learned from a traumatic experience, and that they would need to dive deeper into Yeo wool's memory to find the issue.
That was when Yeo wool cancelled the sessions. She knew what was in those memories, and she had no intention of going anywhere near them.
But for all that Yeo wool was conscious that her emotional condition was not normal or healthy, she also recognized that there was a definitive advantage to being able to break away from the emotions that could swamp her. When she disconnected emotionally, her analytical mind could take over.
Yeo wool had an amazing analytical mind, part of what made her such a successful hacker. Her ability to logically deconstruct and analyze the variables and functions of a problem from multiple angles was one of her greatest strengths. She was systematic in her approach to a search for truth; examining and discarding assumptions in a strict fashion.
So in the quiet hours of that morning, sitting on the couch in the dark, a few logical assertions clarified and crystallized in her mind.
Firstly, the media description of Cap as an anti-social addiction to violence in video games was inaccurate. While truly, the game they played had violence, Yeo wool had never observed Cap being violent for the sake of violence. She had observed this behavior in other players in other games. It was evienced by the shooting and mutilation of bodies already killed, the use of violence against NPCs when it was not part of the mission. These were not behaviors displayed by Cap. Nor had he made any verbal statements that would suggest a violent personality. Cap's focus had been on winning, not on the gore sometime necessary to win.
Secondly, Cap did not fit the characteristic profile of child rapists. Yeo wools own experiences had led her to in-depth research on the subject and she mentally ran through the checklist of factors related to child sexual abusers.
Cap has grown up without a father, but his relationship with his mother was close one. From Cap's off-hand comments, Yeo wool knew he lived with his mother and cared about her deeply, but she gave him his space when he needed it. It was unlikely he was a victim of child sexual abuse, physical abuse, or parental violence. Indeed, he had mentioned that because his mother had been protective, he hadn't had much exposure to violent media until his late teens when he started gaming. In general he seemed emotionally well adjusted.
Lastly, logistically speaking, Cap did not seem to fit the profile of someone who approached children. In searching through her memory of her query of Cap's login, Yeo wool recalled that Cap spent an inordinate amount of time logged in online, mostly during the time children would be out of school. When would he have made the time to meet and develop a relationship with the girl?
Coldly, now that her emotions were detached, Yeo wool picked apart and examined the evidence in her memories. Examined. Weighed. Re-examined. And finally, as the dawn shone it's first light onto the couch and onto her chilled, exposed toes, Yeo wool came to conclusion. She had not slept all night, but no longer felt the call to sleep. In the dimness, she stood up and returned to the chair in front of the monitors. She tucked her cold toes under her thighs to warm them and began to let her fingers fly.
It took a Yeo wool the better part of the morning to realize that something was very wrong with how her search for information was progressing. The normal methods were turning up unusual results.
Yeo wool hacking skills specialized in tracking of persons. Much of her daily business came from finding missing persons. Bail jumpers, dead-beat dads, cheating spouses, even the occasional missing child, these ere her targets. And she could track them with a skill that might have been the best in the business if there had been a way to independently judge such a thing.
So the first thing that Yeo wool did was to track Cap's movements over the week before the murder. By hacking CCTV footage and his cell records she followed him for the previous three weeks from his house to the LAN gaming center each day, and from the gaming center to his house.
But then she encounter her first hurdle. For the week leading up to the murder she was stymied. In each camera along the route, the footage showed nothing. The cell records were simply gone.
And the more she looked the more obvious it became that the evidence had been tampered with. Date stamps didn't match audit logs, frames of the footage showed tampering. It was very well performed, she wasn't sure she could do it any better herself, but it was there.
The more she look, the more she realized that every piece of evidence she saw appeared professionally staged.
At noon, Yeo wool was in full-blown search mode when her system alarms sounded. As a security precaution, she had set up digital 'trip wires' to alert her when an outside source was trying to compromise her system. With the immensely strong firewalls that she had built, the ability to get past the firewall could only mean a master hacker.
Yeo wool didn't believe in this kind of coincidence. Somehow, in her search for information on Cap she knew she had tripped someone else's alert and they were now searching for her. If they could do this, she was in serious trouble.
Her analytical mind quickly pulled the pieces of the puzzle together. The evidence pointed to Cap being framed. She had heard stories about the kind of people that had the power to leverage that skill set. She knew first-hand that the very wealthy could play with law and justice like their own personal toys.
The people who could do so welded immense power. They also had the power to find her. The alert was the final convincing evidence for her, with only one logical conclusion. Someone knew that she had discovered the truth, that someone was now looking for her, and if they found her, it was over.
She didn't second guess herself. In moments, she was entering the kill command, running the protocol that would wipe all of her systems data and eliminate any trace of her on the net. While the protocol ran, she efficiently entered her bedroom and packed a bag: toiletries, change of clothes, stacks of cash. She changed into jeans and an oversized hoodie. As she stepped out into her living room she watched as the protocol finished running and the monitors shut down. As she exited through the door for the last time and walked down the street, she didn't look back.