Note: See the last chapter for acknowledgments and credits.
Prologue
"But Lord! to see how the world makes nothing of the memory of a man, an houre after he is dead!"
- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, March 18, 1664
(All Mika, all the time!)
THE MIKA REPORT,
by Mika's Watcher
In tribute to a fallen comrade:
Alecto.
(first logged in January 11, 1996,
erased September 17, 2028)
From the Triangle News Service archive for September 18, 2028:
WIRED DISRUPTION UNDER INVESTIGATION
TOKYO-The worldwide Wired network suffered
a serious outage last night, as the continental
hubs for Pacifica and Sudamerica were mysteriously
switched. Tachibana technicians were quickly able
to isolate and eliminate the problem. Rumors that
this was the work of the Virtuosi, the former
global hacker network, were strenuously denied by
Tachibana Network spokesperson Mika Iwakura,
who also stated that a thorough investigation was
already underway into the causes of the disruption.
"We will get to the bottom of this," Ms. Iwakura
assured the public.
Analysis:
Note the very nice equivocation on Mika's part. The public still thinks there are Virtuosi out there to threaten the peace and safety of the world, so the honorable Tachibana representative gains serious points by denying their involvement. On the other hand, she says nothing about the possibility that the disruption was caused by a lone hacker. Satellite records show a transmission from a janitor's closet on the 78th floor of Tachibana Tower at 02:36, the same time as the disruption. The transmission lasted less than a second, and transmitted less than 100KB of data.
WARNING TO THE WEAK OF HEART: A rather energetic rant follows.
Let me give you a scenario to ponder. An extremely brave and dedicated hacker sneaks into Tachibana Tower on the night of September 17, disguised as a maintenance worker. She gets up to the 78th floor, there to get her hands on some nice juicy Tachibana secret. It must have been a real hum-dinger, as the following events would prove. She then locks herself in a janitor's closet. This being Tachibana, even janitor's closets have network jacks, and I'm betting the MIB's aren't keeping a close eye on them. But this is Tachibana, where even janitor's closets are equipped with a MAPU (monitoring and projection unit), so the hacker's first order of business is to smash the MAPU to bits by use of a blunt object, to wit, a desk calendar. The perpetrator of this felony then begins broadcasting her secret via e-mail to four recipients using a laptop computer and a portable satellite uplink dish. Unfortunately, in her rush she forgets to unplug the computer from the network.
Two tenths of a second after the start of the upload, the laptop's CPU is fried by a massive surge of electricity transmitted over the network link. At the same time, the entire floor is flooded with a dense yellow cloud pouring out of the air vents. The would-be hacker's second mistake is in not donning her gas mask before she smashed the MAPU. In less than a minute she is dead, drowned in her own blood as her lungs are torn to shreds by the concentrated mustard gas (for those objecting to this last gruesome detail, I can provide the shipping orders Tachibana sent out the next morning to three different chemical supply houses to replace the raw ingredients, chemicals very unlikely to be turned into anything other than the infamous WWI compound). Mika would say that the problem has been isolated.
To return to my little tale, the small room is immediately occupied by the Men in Black (suitably protected, of course). The laptop's drives and memory are thoroughly analyzed, revealing the nature of the data the woman has tried to transmit, but nothing about her goals or contacts (the fact that I am here today writing this proves they got nothing significant). As for the corpse, a memory extractor is employed on her dying brain, but the woman had foreseen this possibility-a memory eraser unit is found sitting in a corner of the outside hallway not covered by MAPU's, along with a set of instructions the woman had written for herself. It can be concluded that at the moment she embarked on her suicidal mission, she was completely unaware of why she was doing it.
So ends the speculation. The following is fact, and I have the hacking logs to prove every juicy detail.
Tachibana Network is known throughout the world for its overwhelming efficiency. The 25 kilobytes of incomplete data that had been transmitted is tracked down and eliminated from the entire network within six milliseconds. As a result, the only casualties of the operation are 258 web pages and a nearby hospital, which loses all electricity for 48 hours. This in turn leads to three deaths and puts an eight-year old boy in a permanent coma. The four recipients of the e-mail turn out to be dummy accounts with no owners and no users, created using an untraceable method well known to the hacker community. The accounts are monitored, but as might be expected, there is no activity on any of them. This concludes the first phase of the investigation. As the investigators are briefed for Phase Two, a specialized search program is set loose on the Wired, designed to find and destroy information. By the time the populace of Tokyo has woken up and read the news, there is not a shred of proof left that our mystery hacker has ever existed. As Mika said, the problem has now been eliminated.
Now then, when I came to this conclusion a few short hours ago, I did what any other self-respecting hacker would do: I pinged all of my friends. I got only one "huh?" from the server, and a follow-up showed that my fears had in fact come to pass: Alecto is no more.
I've met maybe a hundred hackers in person in my brief lifetime. Maybe a dozen were still alive and completely sane as of September 17. The count is now down to eleven. Alecto was not like any other hacker I ever knew. She wasn't in it for the fame or the secrets, or the secret knowledge that she was better than everyone else. Alecto became a hacker because she used to be a Triangle reporter who actually believed life was fair. The story she tried to write on Tachibana Networks disabused her of this notion. Largely at the urging of everyone's favorite nice person, Mika Iwakura, Alecto lost her job, her career, her reputation, and the nice new house she was just about to finish paying for. She sought me out because she happened to remember me from a visit to Cyberia in our mutual childhood (OK, she was actually looking for another world-famous child prodigy hacker, but we don't speak his name in polite society anymore). At some level she wanted revenge (as if naming herself after the most merciless of the Furies didn't make that perfectly clear), but she told me she wanted the public informed of the truth about Tachibana, and I must say this cynic believed her. She was a very quick learner, and warmed up with several highly successful attacks on various members of the Big Eight before undertaking her suicide run on Tachibana.
In the interests of honesty, I must report that she kept me in the dark as to her plans, and I would probably have tried to stop her if I knew. We'll never know if the secret she tried to transmit would have been worth the cost of her life. But I do know one thing: Mika Iwakura, or one of the nameless Committee members she so faithfully represents on the evening news, thought that Alecto's crime was deserving of erasure, and nobody in power at Tachibana thought to remand the order. As Mr. Pepys remarked of a previous era, "What an age that makes a (wo)man act like a knave."
What will happen next? Well, if Tachibana was as desperate to stop the leak as I've described, the family and friends of Alecto are the next on the hit list. That is why I am not revealing the private identity of Alecto on this page, and that is why if you know who she was as well, you had better find and delete any mention of said information (if you think the tidbit about her being a disillusioned ex-Triangle reporter was too revealing, you obviously have no idea how often Triangle purges itself of anti-Tachibana journalists). I've notified the only other friend Alecto had in the world (to my knowledge), and we had all better hope she finds a way to defend herself before Mika "gets to the bottom of this", because as the Cyberia Massacre of five years ago has proved, the hackers of the world are powerless to stop the Men in Black.
(Because would be just plain wrong!)
