"Shut the fuck up Romeo. And get your hand off my ass."
The woman of many names glanced up impassively at the man who was now grinning in a mixture of mischief and chagrin. She was used to his behavior and knew that it was playful flirtation with no depth behind it. She wasn't worried.
"Aw come on, baby. Don't be like that."
She shot him a glare that held a tinge of menace, but not enough to show that she was serious about her threat. Replacing the sucker in her mouth that she had taken out so she could berate him, Crystal sauntered over to her laptop once more.
Seeing as no one was looking her way, she sighed. The current operation was a messy one- the bank they trying to seize assets from was a particularly high security one- even digitally. They had encrypted their customers' account details with a complex revolving algorithm, the key to which changed every twenty six seconds. Their firewall was also hard to penetrate, consisting of five separate layers. Each layer needed its own worm to break it- and creating a worm to break one layer took their team three months.
They had been halfway through their third worm when Crystal spotted something of vital importance. A single line of code in their program. A dead man's switch of sorts. All five firewall layers had to be disengaged at the exact same time- else, all servers would shut down and all the data would be lost from their grasp.
They would then no doubt tighten security even more, which was not good for them given that so much time had been invested in their efforts so far.
But still. Seven and a half months had been wasted on creating those perfectly useless worms. And that was plenty of time slaughtered already. The client's deadline was coming up and the pressure was mounting on the team. And her.
"Crystal, I managed to hack into the mainframe. I have access to their software."
The faux blonde's head snapped up, the voice rousing from the meditative trance she was falling into. With renewed energy, Crystal twirled the lollipop stick with her tongue as she strode across the room to Pearce, a girl of just eighteen who was a prodigy in the making. Someday, Crystal was almost certain, she would take the world of cybernetics and the deep web by storm.
"Hm. Interesting…"
Crystal trailed off, deep in thought. Pearce looked on in unabridged curiosity, watching her mentor and idol at work, while she fiddled with her tongue piercings- the very ones that formed the basis of her alias. She frowned though. Accessing software files in the mainframe was child's play. Why on earth would Crystal want that data anyway?
The blonde looked up, the glassy look clearing as she came back to earth. Pearce figured it was now safe to ask.
"Crystal, why did you want this data anyway? It's worthless. I mean, who cares if a bank uses Microsoft Word or…"
She looked at the monitor.
"… Wow, um. Redlight District Explicit. They really should know that what they think is private really isn't. But still. What can you do with a list of programs their computers run?"
Crystal looked over, a hint of a smile gracing her face as she looked down at the slightly younger girl.
"Patience is a virtue, Pearce."
With that, the blonde smirked and walked slowly back to where she came from, leaving the pierced brunette curious and slightly irritated.
Crystal perched on the edge of her seat, glancing at the calendar. The client gave them until the twenty ninth. That leaves just over seven days. If her hunch was right, with a steady supply of coffee, Hershey's Drops and if Jonah- Krusty's dealer- can manage it, Adderall or something of the more leafy variety for the men, they could theoretically finish a day before the deadline and relax as the fireworks went off.
Maybe. But then again, it was probably wishful thinking. She was probably more tired than she knew.
She scrutinized the code again. It stumped their decryption system, but that was expected. It wasn't as if they had supercomputers or anything of the sort. Their program just ran the basics- Myzkowski, ADFGVX cyphers and most of the more common transposition cyphers, grilles and substitution cyphers.
It looked like pure jibberish. A sixty one by sixty one square of seemingly random numbers and letters that would be any cryptologist's nightmare. And to make it worse, it changes. Every fucking twenty three seconds. They've been at cracking the code for months. Crystal surmised that with every code, there was a set pattern in which it can be cracked- in other words, though the numbers and letters change, the way they are randomized doesn't.
But still. There were six people in the room. Crystal, Pearce, Romeo, Trix, Skye and Krusty. The combined IQ of the room was north of 900 points. Yet, seven months later, the code was still holding strong. Romeo, Trix and Skye were still at it at this very moment. The resident cryptographers.
They take pictures every twenty three seconds and upload it to their database of photos. They run all the photos through recognition software in hope that a code might repeat itself once again- but thousands, if not tens of thousands of photos later, still zilch. In front of the three were empty beer cans, hard boiled sweets and an overflowing pile of hard copies as they sifted through letter by letter, number by number. They also ran the patterns through less well-known decryption keys as well. Still square… two?
Crystal knew at heart that it would be fruitless. But if her less than legal life had taught her anything, it was to always chase down every path to the very end. And besides, with the deadline approaching and face it- no other choice, this was all she had. Either break the code and win, or get stumped and lose.
She sighed and rested her head in her arms. She needed a break and with a quick sniff, determined that she needed a shower too. She reeked of sweat, marijuana smoke, stale Doritos and mint ice cream. Though the ganja smoke was second hand. She didn't like the feeling of being disconnected from her body, though it did up her concentration a bit.
She could feel a headache coming. Three sleepless nights in a row did put a toll on her body. And some proper nutrition was in order as well.
Crystal needed to properly weigh out the pros and cons of her risky operation- the hunch Pearce's find gave her. It was a last resort tactic and horribly high-risk. There is a chance they could find what they need that way- upload the worm and virus, steal the data and of course, the money. But there was also a good chance that it would be a dead end. Also, it would involve leaving themselves open, disengaging their firewall for thirty seconds so that the data packets can come after being bounced around a couple IPs in a few different countries.
Thirty seconds to most people wouldn't mean a thing, but in their world, it was an eternity of vulnerability. If someone put a tracker onto a data packet somehow, it would be game over.
She would call the shots. It was her responsibility. If they get caught…
Crystal shook her head, staring at the screen. The code had changed and it looked even more meaningless than before. But strangely, after a few seconds, she started seeing things. A Rubik's cube. Her eyebrows knitted in confusion.
"What the fuck?"
She rubbed her eyes blearily and muttered to herself. She was tired. She needed sleep- even an insomniac in the making like her. And out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Krusty with his neon green bong, billowing with smoke. She rolled her eyes with exasperation. Great. Now she was hallucinating as well. He looked impish, collapsing on the couch while exhaling a great cloud. Next to him was his trademark French bread sandwich. Hence, Krusty.
"Just great. Just fucking amazing. Ah fuck it."
She muttered to herself under her breath. She had made up her mind. Her brain would obviously be screwed up in the next ten minutes- she could already barely think straight. Too much cryptoanalysis (at which she was an amateur at best), can drive a person crazy. She was going to get some sleep. A good five hours and a pot of French vanilla coffee, black in the morning would do her a lot of favors.
"Yo. Romeo, Krusty. Skye, Pearce, Trix. I'm gonna get some sleep okay? Wake me up whenever one of you wants out too."
Some murmurs of "Okay" and "Good night" rang around (masked by a resounding "Can I join you?" from Romeo, that Crystal promptly replied to with a quick flick of a middle finger). She stood up and stretched her spine, before padding off barefoot to the couches in the adjoining room.
Plopping down and sinking into the cushions, Crystal drew a blanket over her body, mentally noting to change and shower tomorrow. Her own lack of hygiene was testament to her nerves about the current mission. Now… if only she could fall asleep…
Her body felt as if it was weighed down with lead, tiredness oozing out of every pore. Yet though her brain itself was delirious from the lack of sleep and calories, her mind was working in overdrive, trying to push away the approaching darkness. In other words, she was petrified of what the oblivion had in store for her. All the numbers and figures etched into memory were now coming to the surface, trying to delay the inevitable.
She saw shapes dance across her peripheral vision, red, blue, yellow and green. The last thought she had before she succumbed to the lull of sleep was: "What the hell did Krusty lace his grass with?"
A little girl stood at the top of the stairs, looking down into the darkness of the lower floor. She was thirsty. Simply thirsty. Crystal knew not to go down and begged the girl not to go. But she was powerless. The five year old with honey brown pigtails and pink unicorn pajamas held tightly onto the railing for balance and descended down the stairs into the inky blackness, dragging a crying Crystal along with her.
The child was ignorant of the gore on the walls. The brain matter, arterial spatter and high velocity blood spray on the lemon yellow-ochre striped wallpaper. Yet, the twenty year old didn't miss it. Her innards twisted at the sight and she felt sick to the core. She tried to resist, tried to stop following the little girl, but it was to no avail. She was magnetically drawn through Hell.
She knew what was coming next, but that didn't lessen the horror of seeing the mutilated hand that had been scrabbling at the floor out of desperation for life, fingertips reduced to stubs, fingernails non-existent. Crystal wept as her mother came into light, lying face down in a pool of rapidly congealing blood, her body slashed open with such great force that it had almost burst.
Nausea threatened to overwhelm her. She begged for mercy, for the horrible visions to end. She screamed for the girl to "just stop", but it was futile. The little girl just kept walking slowly in her quest for a glass of water.
Crystal tried and tried again to shut her eyes from the sights, but failed miserably. She was forced to watch as the girl cut through the hall to get to the kitchen faster, keeping the same, torturously slow pace. Moonlight filtered in through the bared kitchen windows, doing nothing to hide the dead body of her father from view.
He sat at the counter, illuminated by the moon like some grotesque centerpiece in a macabre art gallery. His head was thrown back as he stared blankly at the ceiling with glassy eyes. His throat was slit from ear to ear and his arms had fallen to his sides as if he was worshipping some bloodthirsty deity. Organs were… missing.
Most noticeably his heart.
How did she know he no longer had it?
If the blatant hole in his chest didn't make it obvious enough, the object itself lay in front of him, carelessly tossed onto the counter. It didn't seem intentional. The killer seemed to have been too engrossed in his knife-happy episode and accidentally hacked away too much flesh.
Crystal retched, yet nothing came out. The girl had put a small stool up to the sink and was calmly filling up a glass, her back still to Crystal. The atmosphere changed around her, becoming more menacing- almost demonic. Gulping sounds filled the kitchen and the ring of glass on marble was heard as she set down the glass.
Slowly the girl then turned around.
Crystal shrieked and backed away as an unearthly face came into view. A cruel, twisted grin spread across her young face, contorting her features into something of pure evil. She advanced step by step towards her, yet she couldn't, for the life of her, move.
She was almost within reach. Hands outstretched, the girl leaned forward, pincer-like fingers reaching for her throat. Just as the undoubtedly cold appendages were about to encircle her neck, Crystal's vision went black.
For a second, she was glad the ordeal was over. But her mind had other plans.
The vision came back a second later, the girl now standing several feet away, looming in the darkness. Two other figures stood behind her and the flicker of light revealed that they were her parents' corpses- still wearing the clothes they died in. Her mother's long black hair veiled her face and her father's blood still dripped from his neck wound steadily.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
In unison, the three stepped forwards and came fully into view. Crystal had given up fighting, reduced to a sobbing mess, shrinking back into a corner whimpering.
"Why? Why did you let us die? Why…?"
"How could you? You should have fought… You lived… and let us die…"
"You killed us… you… killed us. You."
Crystal slapped her hands over her ears and screamed at the apparitions.
"NO! Please, I'm sorry! No more, no more! PLEASE!"
Silence. There was absolute silence. After a few seconds, she dared to open her eyes again and found that the three were gone. She sobbed quietly to herself, tucking her head into her knees, until the metallic tang of blood hit her nose. Jerking her head up, she looked around to find its source.
She looked at her own hands, coated it blood so thick it was almost black. A knife- an ornately carved, curved blade coated slickly in blood was next to her. Her hands shook and tears welled up again. It was all her fault. All her fault.
But then, she saw something that she couldn't remember from before. And something she couldn't make sense of. Shapes again, but this time, the net of a square, drawn in the same blood onto the linoleum of the floor. And next to it, a moldy old apple, with a single bite taken out of it.
Crystal didn't know what it meant, but she was too shaken to care.
"Mother, Father… forgive me… FORGIVE ME!"
She screamed again into the now deserted house and she felt as if a cork had popped. She was rising back to the surface, out of the depths of her deepest and darkest fears and memories.
"AAAARRRRRHHH!"