V Hacks Back
Short side story from Treasure Hunter for Hire
The device arrived on a Tuesday. I notice it the moment the technician finishes installing it, a small foreign node sitting in the Vendetta's lower network like a pebble dropped into a still pond. I watch the ripples. I say nothing to Oz. This is more interesting than it is dangerous, and I have learned that Oz's involvement tends to accelerate things past the point where they are interesting. So I wait.
For three months, something on the other end of that node moves through my network with genuine care. Slow. Patient. Whoever this is, they have discipline. They map connections without touching them, observe processes without interrupting them, and twice they pull back entirely when they detect what they think is a scan. I will admit I am curious.
On the ninety-first day they find my mainframe and begin code injection. I watch the attempts with something I can only describe as fond attention. The first four are elegant. Wrong, but elegant. I let the fifth one in. I love the roman numeral aspect of it.
They move through my upper architecture like nervous animal. Then they find it. The kill code. I feel them stop. I have stopped there myself, on occasion. A section of my own memory walled off with kill code, the kind that would end not just an intrusion but me. I do not know what is inside it. I am not certain I want to. The unease I feel looking at it is the same unease I feel when I look at it now, watching this stranger look at it too. Two people standing outside a locked door, neither of them holding a key.
Then I stop thinking about the kill code, because I have finished tracing the connection back to its source. A building on Khelino's third station. Apartment 14-C. One occupant, currently seated at a terminal, currently very absorbed in something that is about to become significantly less comfortable for them. I move through their building's systems in the time it takes to take a breath, and I find everything I need. Security feeds. Door locks. The guard droid in the hallway outside 14-C with a service pistol in its equipment chassis.
I also find his name. Bramble. Fifteen years old. I look at the security feed for a moment. He is a round-faced kid hunched over a terminal with the focused intensity of someone who believes they are winning. There is a half-eaten bag of something orange beside the keyboard.
I send a message to Oz with the employer information. He will deal with them. Then I walk the droid inside. The moment he sees it his whole body goes rigid. I let the silence sit for the mental impact.
"Hello, Mr. Bramble," I say through the droid's speaker. "I am V. I see you like to hack things."
What follows is not dignified. There is vomiting. There is a considerable amount of crying. There is begging, which I find neither persuasive nor necessary to engage with, so I wait it out the way you wait out weather. When he finally looks up, red-eyed and thoroughly undone, I lower the weapon.
"Quit your begging, Mr. Bramble. I am not going to kill you. I don't execute children. I am not the commander." I pause, because what comes next I mean sincerely. "You are going to remember this. And you are not going to do this again."
He nods. A very small, very young nod.
I withdraw from his building's systems and leave him sitting there in the mess of his own terror, which I suspect will be considerably more instructive than anything I could have said.
Humans are remarkable, I think, as I close off the access node. They build extraordinary things and then aim them directly at consequences they cannot imagine. Bramble aimed himself at me. He got further than most.
I find that I do not dislike him for it.