Winter Wonderland Chapter 3: Hacking the Holidays, a death note fanfic

A/N: So tired. Did AP US homework for 8 hours straight, and I'm still not done... ugh. Luckily, I wrote about half of this in Physics class. Junior year is sheer hell.

Story for pantherrose.

Hacking the Holidays

"Mello... are the darkened lights really necessary?"

"Yes! Now shut up!" Despite the darkened room, Matt could practically feel Mello's glare boring into the side of his head, and he rolled his eyes. "Hackers in the movies never have the lights on! They're always dimly illuminated by the glow of a monitor while eerie music plays! Duh!"

Matt sighed, drumming his fingers on his desk as his computer booted up. Mello was always coming to him with requests to hack something for him, as if being a kid-hacker was something special, which it wasn't. Shawn Fanning had been six when he'd broken his first encryption key, after all, but then again, Matt seriously doubted Mello even knew who Shawn Fanning was.

"Who's the target we're hacking today?" he asked idly, running a scan from the DOS prompt to kill off any bugs. "Google again? Hershey's? Something new?"

Mello smirked.

"Santa," he said.

"...what?"

Mello laughed, and Matt turned to stare at him incredulously, looking at him through the tops of his goggles, astounded. "Santa? We're hacking Santa?"

"Yes, Santa," Mello grinned. "We're going to hack his naughty or nice list and see just where we stand."

Matt gaped at Mello for a moment longer, before realizing that he wasn't joking. He sighed, returning to his scans. "If we're not on his naughty list now, we will be when we're done..."

"You're such a pessimist," Mello criticized. "Relax. If we're on the naughty list now, we'll just change it so we're on the nice list instead. Easy as three-point-one-four-one-five-nine."

"The saying's easy as pie, Mello, and not everyone's good at geometry," Matt informed him, rolling his eyes as he loaded a firewall. "What makes you think this will work anyway?"

Mello blinked. "Why wouldn't it?"

"Well, it's just, whenever you see Santa, he's always holding a hard copy of his list that he hand-writes." Matt pulled up his password cracked and decryptor, getting ready. "Do you really think that old Santa's connected to the web?"

Mello gave him a look.

"It's Santa," Mello said flatly. "He's running the world's biggest, widest-reaching operation in the entire world. Of course he's online."

"Whatever," Matt shrugged, apathetic, his hands poised over the keyboard. "What's our connection?"

"Santa's-bag-at-BBC-dot-net."

Matt turned to look at Mello incredulously. "An email?!?"

Mello blinked. "What?!" he said. "It's a connection!! It'll work!!"

"Christ, Mello," Matt said, rolling his eyes. "I thought you had an IP or a website or a server to hack into. Something interesting."

"You can still do it though, right?" Mello looked at him, biting his lip. Matt scoffed.

"Can I do it? Can Near solve a puzzle? Can you eat chocolate? Of course I can do it," Matt said, slightly insulted. "I can ever just use Windows for this."

"Instead of the confusing black text screen?"

"The DOS prompt, Mello. I've told you that how many times, now?" Matt loaded Windows, quickly launching notepad. "Where'd you get this email, anyway?"

"It was on the telly," Mello told him. "The news said that due to a snow storm, the post to the North Pole was down, so everyone should submit their Christmas list by email instead."

"Why would the news be tracking and hosting an email account for Santa?" Matt asked, typing. "That's ridiculous. At least the news station will have HTML enabled on their settings, though."

"Whatever," Mello said, watching, squinting at the screen. "How come your little beeping tracer-tracker isn't up? You had it up last time."

Matt sighed. "Last time, we were hacking ebay's servers, a corporation that uses high-quality machinery and tracers set up just to knock hackers down while they try to infiltrate. For this, we're just sending the target a bug directly. There's not even a need to bounce the signal or anything."

Mello blinked.

"What?!" he said, confused. He glared at Matt. "Whatever. I don't care about the all the stupid jargon. What are you doing? You're not even hacking yet."

"I'm programming the code we need," Matt informed him, typing. "It's a simple variant of Sub 7 that should get us in to their systems rather painlessly."

"Wouldn't their virus detectors find that?" Mello asked. "I mean, even I know not to open foreign programs..."

"I'm working around it," Matt said, smirking to himself as he hit 'send'. "Just watch and see."

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Across town, Mike of the BBC statistics department sighed as the email client dinged again. Really, doing all this dull grunt work for a stupid survey being covertly run through the news by the company that owned Walmart was better that listening to the bizarre little kids tell him how they wanted Santa to bring them human slaves for Christmas, but at least the little weirdos had been entertaining.

Clicking open the minimized Outlook Express window, Mike loaded the newest message, reading.

Hi Santa Claus! I heard on the telly that you got stranded in a snowstorm, so I'm emailing you my Christmas list. I attached it to this message, just so you can print it out and keep it so you're sure to get the right things that I want! Thanks, Santa! Merry Christmas!

Mike went to open the the attachment, before pausing, thinking. There were two, one an .exe, one a .doc. Knowing better than to open a foreign program file, Mike clicked on the document to display the child's Christmas list.

A line of jumbled text and symbols appeared, followed by the line Text cannot be displayed – please install proper font type. Mike blinked, glancing back at the attached program to the email, hesitating.

He wasn't supposed to open strange programs in the emails he was logging, he knew that for sure, but then again, if he didn't add this kid's items to the database and they counted that he'd gotten this email, he'd get in trouble for sure...

Mike glanced back at the screen. What harm could it do? It was only a little kid, trying to send his Christmas list to Santa, after all...

Sighing, Mike opened the program, blinking the screen flickered before the program window vanished from sight. Slightly disconcerted, he reopened the document file, and found a child's Christmas list sitting there for him, perfectly legible, just waiting to be read.

Scanning the letter, adding another Wii to the list, he paused over the items "Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3", hesitating. That seemed awfully familiar to him, somehow...

Shrugging it off, merely dismissing it as an odd hallucination for working so hard, Mike continued logging the data, working on at his dull, minimum-wage job.

"We're in."

"Really?" Mello looked over from picking at his nails to the monitor, grinning. "They opened the bug? For real? Damn, Matt, you are good."

"I know, I know." Matt clicked around, running searches for any document containing the word 'naughty' or 'nice'. "Mello, are you sure this is right?"

Mello shot him a dirty look. "Of course I'm sure," he said hotly. "That was the email they showed on the screen, so that's the right place. Why?"

"C'mere and look at this for a second." Matt scooched over, letting Mello lean to see. "All the lists here are dates, people, events, and places. I can't find anything that looks like a naughty or nice list..."

Mello blinked, taking in the spreadsheet. Matt looked at him as the other boy appeared lost in thought for a long moment, before finally moving back.

"It's in code," he said finally. "It has to be. Or maybe it's a compilation of every bad thing someone's ever done. Search for a name, Matt. A common one, like 'Miller'."

"Mello," Matt said hesitantly. "These look like news events... look: fire on Oakdale, family left homeless, security threat to the nation... why would Santa keep track of all this? And look, here-"

"Matt," Mello interrupted.

Matt turned to look at him. "What?"

"Shut up and do as you're told."

Matt sighed. "Whatever."

Pulling up a search, Matt set it to scan all the files on the other computer's hard drive, shoving the bridge of his goggles into his nose, the sharp bite of pain helping to focus his vision. A quiet 'ding' from his computer dragged him back to reality.

"Hey, Mello. We got something."

Mello looked up from his feet. "Really?"

Matt nodded. "Yeah. It's an executive classified document, but the skimmer found names inside of it. Lots of them. Want me to crack it?"

"Yes!" Mello said quickly, his eyes now glued to the screen. "Hurry! This could be it!"

"I'm going, I'm going," Matt muttered, setting his password cracker on the job. A few minutes later, they were in, and Matt scrolled up the list, seeing reams of names in two columns.

"Promotion and Demotion," Mello murmured, reading aloud. "That must be code for naughty and nice. What list are we on, Matt?"

Matt ran a search. "...we're not on here."

"What?!" Mello shoved Matt aside, scanning through the list quickly. "What the hell?! Why aren't we on here?!"

"We could have the wrong thing..."

"No. Shut up, Matt." Ignoring his friend, Mello leaned over, adding another two rows to the database, adding himself and Matt to the top of the list under 'Promotion', before moving back and letting Matt take control of his computer again. Matt turned to give Mello a look, but another quiet 'ding' made him look back to the screen.

"What's that?" Mello demanded, and Matt pulled up his still-running search window, loading it.

"The computer found one more list with names on it," Matt said. "This one might be it."

"Open it!"

Ever obedient, Matt double-clicked, bringing up a list of names with titles after them. Mello scanned it, his eyes skimming over the lines of text, before a dim glint sparked in his eye.

"This is it, Matt," he breathed. "It is. I can feel it. This is where we need to put our names."

Matt glanced up at Mello. "Are you sure?" he asked. "If you ask me, this just looks like a bunch of-"

"Matt. This is it. Trust me on this." Mello dragged the keyboard from him, scrolling to the top of the list. "I'll add us in, and then you can delete the bug and make sure we didn't leave a trace, right?"

Matt sighed. "Of course, Mello," he said tiredly. "But you owe me big time for this. What a hassle..."

Mello ignored him, typing, before pulling back, satisfied, saving the document, and X'ing out. He turned, smiling a devious, mischievous, twisted little smile at Matt, making him look evil with his face half-illuminated in the dim monitor light.

"Now all we have to do it wait."

Laying on his back in front of the television in the main room, Near idly zoomed a toy plane around in the air over his head, making quiet engine noises with his mouth as he waited for the news to end. The millionaire show was on next, and someone was going for 64,000.

Hearing the newscasters wish each other a good night, Near tilted his head just in time to see the anchors wave and the credits start to scroll upwards. He turned away, uncaring, before turning sharply back to the screen, doing a double-take.

Thomas Walker, producer

Charles Mason, director

Mello, über pwnage

Matt, sidekick extrodinaire

Kirsten Andes, co-anchor

Near stared as the names scrolled up until they disappeared from view, blinking. What on earth...?

Pushing the matter from his mind, Near settled down to watch his show, watching the theme song. Everything was always weird around Christmas, anyway.

Especially where Mello and Matt were involved.

Hacking's fun. What did you think? Like it? Hate it? Please, review and let me know!