Data Kill: 2. By a Thread

An ongoing story serially posted at the forum for Trese Brother's Games
Set in the world of Cyber Knights RPG 
Written by Paxdad

Trese Brothers Forum
Discussion Thread 


Data Kill: 2. By a Thread
Commonwealth Projects
09:12:42.98, 03/01/2217
The previous day...

“I thought I told you to never show your face in this part of town again you fracking maricón!” Every other word that Trituradora spoke was punctuated with his fist. “You’re lucky I left my chrome knuckles at home cabron!” Trituradora, was typical of the Los Val wanna be’s that this neighborhood bred by the dozen. Khaki shorts worn low, wife beater tank, and a big 85 tatted on his neck. Ever since the Los Valentinos gang took over, the Commonwealth Zone had become one of it’s gladiator academies. The weaker local gangs swore allegiance to LV, but still kicked eachothers asses whenever the opportunity presented itself. Sl1p’s head rocked back, he was vaguely aware of a ringing sound, then heard some muffled voices speaking spanish in the lowrider on the street. 


“Yo, some shit’s going down at the park, homes! We need to roll!” one of the gangers called out and banged twice on the door of car with his palm.  

Trituradora leaned in close to Sl1ps bleeding nose and growled low, “Your lucky day puta.” He loosened his grip on Sl1ps shirt and brought his fist up hard into his groin then turned and walked briskly toward the lowrider. The gangers whooped and laughed as it’s engine roared to life. Trituradora flashed a sign and yelled, “85th Street Gamberro’s!” as the car began to pull away. 

Sl1p was hurting. Bloody spittle dripped in long stringy strands from his mouth. Without thinking he screamed after them, “Frack you! You goddamned bastards! FRAK YOU! FRAK YOU!” and flipped them the bird.

Trituradora laughed and pulled a cheap nickel plated pistol from his waistband and pointed it at him suggestively. “Next time, it’s your ass puta!” and the low rider sped off with a squeal of tires and the smell of burnt rubber. 

Sl1p slumped down and lay crumpled on the sidewalk breathing heavy. He stifled a small quiet sob. The beating he could handle. He was no stranger to the way of the fist thanks to his old man. It was the damn humiliation and indignity of it that killed him. Rage burned in his heart as he wiped his eyes. Never again...never again...after tonight he hoped it would be over. One way or another he planned on leaving this shit hole project for good. He slowly gathered himself up and began the long slow journey home. 

Sl1p’s 19th birthday was today, not that he much cared or that anyone would really notice. The birthday party’s stopped years ago when mom left the old man. As he made his way past the bums and the trash he thought about tonight. He had been preparing for this night for 4 years now. Sl1p was physically small and not very strong, which made him a natural target for the neighborhood gangers. His entire life now felt like a marathon, running from bullies, running from his old man, and running for his life in the streets. Frankly he was exhausted and felt like he was hanging on by a thread.

It was Sl1ps love of reading that led him to this point today. It began when he was about 8 at the public library where he would spend countless hours in front of the data terms reading books and killing time so that he wouldn’t have to hang around the apartment with the old man. He soon learned how to use the net and the world opened up to him in ways he could scarcely imagine from the prison of the projects. He began to grow conscious that in a world that demanded money, influence or power to move up, that words were free, ideas were free, and if he could just find the right combination of both, they could set him free. If he could harness the power of the data at his fingertips he might just find a way out of the Commonwealth in something other than a body bag. 

The matrix was a strange dichotomy, on the one hand you had the corporations trying to lock it down, and filter the public discourse as much as possible, intent on making it a 24 hour shopping mall and entertainment plex. On the other hand you had academics and the many anonymous hacktivists working for a free and open net. The slogan “Data wants to be free!” was their rallying cry. In the years that followed the ecological disasters and the numerous corporate wars which effectively created isolated city states when governments failed. So much knowledge and data was thought to be lost that it was forgotten by much of the general public. 

Sl1p had found otherwise. Through his persistence he had found online code base repositories of programming languages and began teaching himself how to code. Locked in his room at night, or hours spent at the library he coded in plain text, line after line after line, until he had coded hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The lack of a compiler did not dissuade him. In a few years he had become a master at theoretical programming. Since the library data terms were locked down he still needed a deck before he could test and run any of his work. 

Every cred he could scrounge through odd jobs and petty theft he put aside and piece by piece he built a deck from open source components purchased at the local electronics store.  He downloaded an open source OS and code compiler and had his system up and running in terminal mode until he could get a data port. At last he had the basic tools to begin making his dream a reality. The happiest moment he remembered in his childhood was the instant when his first program successfully compiled and he typed the execute prompt into the command line. That moment validated the many years of learning and working with theories only. At last he could see that the fruit of his labor had not been in vain and it was a balm to the wrath of the gang beatings. It was his frequent trips to the electronic store down on 84 St. that had brought him through the 85 Street Gamberro’s territory and eventually across the path of Trituradora, who seemed to harbor a special irrational hatred for him. 

He stumbled and nearly fell on a crack in the sidewalk and saw that he had made it to his building. He tried not to look too closely at the bone thin junkies hanging out in halls, drab specters of former lives, as he made his way across the dingy lobby to the elevator. A warbly ding sounded and he boarded the car and pressed 16. 

Sl1p was 16 when the old man disappeared on a drinking binge and he had seized the moment to go down to the Tattoo Parlor to get ported. It was a humid night in the Commonwealth and a hazy fog clung to buildings like wool. The dome’s climate control units had been on the fritz all summer and the environmental conditions swung wildly between extreme heat and cold. He made his way down dim hazy streets, neon islands in the soupy fog lighting the way. On the door of the parlor were a pair of red Chinese dragons each holding the world in it's claws. This made him smile, his hand on the door handle, he took deep breath and stepped inside. 

The bright fluorescents bathed the place in a cold, blue/white antiseptic light that was much more sterile than the operating room turned out to be. They ran his cred stick, doped him, shaved the back of his head, cut the circular hole in the base of his skull then bolted in a cheap neuroplug that would allow his brain to interface with a data jack directly. The operation took about 15 minutes. When they’d finished, they shoved a bottle of painkillers into his hand and sent him out the door. He felt like a garbage truck had run over his head and he had barely made it home that night. The resulting infection almost killed him, as did the old man when he returned, but it was worth every agonizing minute to be able to slip into the stream, full immersion, free in a manner of speaking, if only temporarily. His psychological construct could now drift in the cool radiance of the net, like a star in the vastness of space, he rejoiced and savored every nanosecond of freedom he could get. It was like heaven. 

The elevator doors opened and he shuffled down the hall pausing momentarily at his door. His hand trembled  slightly as he slid his key card on the reader and the lock clicked open. He slowly pushed the door and made his way inside the dimly lit apartment. The A.C. was going, and beer cans littered the floor. As he made his way toward his bedroom he hazarded a glance in the direction of the old man’s room. All he could see was his bare leg laying atop a tempur foam mattress. It twitched very slightly and a smile came  to Sl1ps face. Mostly the old man had withdrawn this past year, ever since he got his joybox he spent most of his free time plugged in, comatose in electric fantasy lands. While the old man had been at work last night he’d overrode the safety protocols on his joybox and inserted an infinite loop that couldn’t be terminated from within the program. That would ensure he couldn’t wake up in a rage and interfere with his plans tonight. 

Sl1p showered and washed the blood and the dirt off, his muscles relaxing in the hot water. He grabbed a snack from the cupboard and headed into his room to prepare for tonight. He got dressed in tight black jeans, black knee high jack boots, and a black t shirt. His spiky mess of black hair shot through with streaks of electric blue stuck out at a thousand different angles. He completed the look with a pair of black headphones, plugged into his deck blaring industrial synth. He sat down at his console, plugged in the data jack, and slipped into the stream. 


He had spent the last several years after getting ported piecing together rumors and hints dropped here and there, scattered about the matrix like bread crumbs. Rumors of a secure subnet traveled by hackers, net jockeys, and cyber knights, also known as Darknet. The shadowy underworld of the matrix. These were the paths created by anonymizing servers and programs that shielded user identity from easy detection. Sl1p finally gained access to an entrance node last summer after corresponding with some academics in Hamburg for two years. It was along these dark data corridors that he found the online data museum The Googleheim. A multinational project initiated by scholars who feared a new dark age. A categorized repository of every public search and cached web page from all of the major search engines before the government blackouts and corporate censorship had shut them down. The massive amount of data housed there was moved to Darknet when fascism threatened it’s existence. It was within the electric walls of this temple to technology that the final pieces of puzzle fell into place for Sl1p.

From the underground news feeds of Darknet he learned of incidents of cyber warfare and malfeasance. He read stories that provided the flip side of the coin he never saw from the mainstream corporate media. Stories of high tech heroes and scoundrels, stealing from the almighty corporations and releasing classified data files that exposed their lies and tyranny. Stories from covert news hounds that watch dogged the corps, and risked their lives by publishing their dirty laundry. Writers that were every bit the hero as the hacktivists they wrote about. Sl1p had befriended one such newsie in Darknet and had become a runner of sorts for him on the surface and had met him face to face a couple of times when he did jobs for him. His name was Dodger, and he was the editor of the news blog Freedom Forever! Though Dodger’s server was in Darknet he would flash breaking news to the public hubs in a vain hope of waking up the general populace. His work with Dodger had brought him into contact with several hackers and the forums where they voiced their public statements. He even communicated directly with a few of them over time, yet he was searching for one in particular. 

Of all of the shadowy figures that were whispered about in this secretive subculture none were more storied, iconic, and revered, than DAT. His exploits were legendary if even half of them were true. Some said he was a renegade corporate programmer, others a data merc, still others a rogue ai that turned against its corporate masters. The stories just got more outlandish from there. Sl1p had pieced together every single shred of information he had found on DAT and he had held several long discussions with Dodger to try to pin him down. Dodger wanted to pin him down as badly as Sl1p, but for very different reasons, and he was full of ideas and notions that he had never been able to quite put together. 

Sl1p was certain, from the accumulation of stories that DAT liked to ghost off of public hubs and was one of the few hackers that spent more time on the surface then he did in Darknet. This last week Sl1p had finished a program that would allow him to seize control of a public server and run a series of subprograms that would analyze packet traffic, sniff IP’s,and more importantly a utility that logically scanned and broke down memory channels and collated all of the data gathered from the other tools to look for anything out of the ordinary. If he could just happen upon the right hub at the right moment he felt certain he could unmask his IP and hit his deck. 

Tonight was going to be his programs trial run. His friend Hans, who ran the neighborhood electronic store had rigged a chip modification for him that would approximate a Cyber Knights Quantum Chip but would only provide the barest minimum amount of shielding if he was lucky. Sl1p had no illusions about what would happen to him if a Cyber Knight caught him breaching his deck. Stories of chummers whose brains were fried by cyber attacks floated around like autumn leaves used to. That was why he risked the trip this morning. Hoping to avoid the 85th St. boys by getting an early start. He swallowed hard and struggled a moment but then pushed that thought from his mind! He had to be on his game tonight when nanoseconds counted and he was going to be fishing for the biggest fish in the sea. 

Sl1ps discussions with Dodger led him to focus first on Liberty Square tonight. There had been a lot of chatter on the corporate radio bands about strange occurrences and corporate web outages in that area. While a hacker could be anywhere, Dodger thought DAT liked to get close to the action. Whether he was an adrenaline junky or just liked to maximise the extra speed from running on the local network was anyone’s guess, he was an expert at masking his presence and obviously did not fear the public webs. The other thing in his favor was that Liberty Square had a happening nightlife. It had a very crowded public scene and had some of the most crowded public servers in the NBZ. The sheer amount of web traffic in that area put percentages in his favor. 

The net appeared to Sl1p as a vast dark void with bright blossoms of light representing users and large neon towers representing systems. Sl1p thought about the parameters of his search and time and space seemed to shift around him as his construct flowed across the network to the public hub nearly instantaneously. He started his night hitting the popular bars and clubs that had data term access. Scan after scan, his software package seemed to be working great but a full scan was time consuming and he wasn’t having much luck. He next focused on the sim lounges  and viewing parlors where people chipped in for entertainment. Hours started to pass and he was getting frustrated and a little freaked out about the idea of unplugging the old man in the morning. This had to work, but it was like looking for a byte in a terabyte! He hit up the tea houses and dim sum joints next. Sweat started to dot his brow in the real world as his blood pressure began to rise and fear began to knot his insides. This was taking too long!

It was 02:35:22.48 when he began scanning the D@ily Gr1nd espresso bar. With most of the worlds growing regions reduced to blasted wastelands, coffee had become a rare commodity that only the most affluent partook of. His mind raced and his heart kept pace as he grew more agitated. The memory scan and analysis was the longest part of the process, and he was itching to get to the next hub on his list. As it neared its final cycle he began to shift his mind to the next location when he noticed a dead space or more precisely several blocks of memory glowing red in his minds eye, a memory range that was occupied with no explanation, and no signatures or traffic coming off of it. Every other block of utilized memory in this place as well as every other he’d scanned tonight was pinging it’s credentials and sending/receiving data packets out into the net, but this was altogether different. 

His stomach turned and leapt into his throat! He began to pant in his excitement. Could he have done it? Was that really the most famous hacker in the NBZ sitting dark as a black hole in the busiest espresso bar in Liberty Square? He stopped thinking, he paused, and then before the trace could disappear on him, he activated his diversion. A doppelganger program that looked like a green blip of light, like a cursor on the ancient terminals of the 21st century. It was programed to begin low level probe attacks on the nearest secure system and it raced off and began hitting the Liberty Credit Union. 

A second maybe two passed before he saw the briefest shimmer of light around a vague construct and drove his intrusion program deep into the heart of a cloaked avatar like it was a vampire. His intrusion was uncanny and left not a trace. His distraction must have worked! It was the only explanation he could come up with for ease of his breach. He passed a liquid tendril of code into the opening and began to sniff around. Immediately he was aware that this was no ordinary chummers deck. Encryption shot through every fiber of this place. In his minds eye he saw a vast hall of black polished marble shot through with white crawling spider veins of encrypted code. A data readout in another vault of his mind was running probability numbers against every byte of known data about DAT and with each microsecond the probability that this was his deck grew. At 80% certainty he unleashed a data dump to destabilize the decks infrastructure and security. 

The code tendril grew and swelled profanely to monstrous proportions and disgorged a tidal wave of junk data that washed through the black hall with immeasurable force! The walls collapsed and mercurial liquid filled every inch of the void left behind in the breached partitions. The environment shook and rocked as the decks OS nearly collapsed under the force of his assault as the memory stack was overloaded. Sweat soaked through his shirt. This was a fine line he was playing tonight. If the deck collapsed before he could complete his tasks, this night would be for naught. His mind raced through the corridors opened up by his attack until he found an unguarded port. He locked the port open and began injecting a code string. It would take about 3 microseconds. After the first one passed the system began to stabilize and the data walls began to rise again, slowly at first but they were quickly gaining speed. After two he became aware that a trace program was trying to lock on him. On three he saw the black glimmering, furiously beating wings and shiny obsidian carapace of a hornet that could only be an HK, hunter killer countermeasure rounding the corner at the end of the corridor. 

He fled! tracing his steps back through the black maze racing as fast as his mind and his augmented processor could go. A buzzing began to fill his head, was that feedback from his data jack, or was he imagining the roar of the wings of that abhorrent apparition that was closing the distance behind him? His field of vision dimmed to a circular cone as he focused all his attention on the exit port through the firewall. He was almost there! The walls of the hallway began to close on him in the final stretch. A second more and his mind would be pulverized in a vise that would lock up his construct and burn away his cerebral cortex! He shut down all non essential programs, flushed his memory cells, and overclocked his processor to eek out every last ounce of speed he could and then he burst back into the stream! He was out! He raced through the traffic of the public hubs and brought his mind back to his deck as fast as he could go! He did it! He fracking DID IT! He was breathless. Tonight had been the single most terrifying, yet exhilarating night of his entire life! 

He let out a shout of triumph that was devoured by the lonely peeling walls. All he could do now was wait. He would see this through to the end before jacking out. He thought about what might happen next and though he was afraid, he was at peace with himself. He thought briefly of the old man dreaming away in his room next door, he thought about his sad little life, and then he thought that he might listen to some music. And then he thought that he might listen to some music. 

And then he thought that he might listen to some music...