Hacking the Naked Princess

by Andy Kaiser

Chapter 0x19

"You found the most boring font in the world.  It's like Keebler green.  What, you got a thing for AS/400s?  You're weird, mate."

"Never said I wasn't."

P@nic pushed out a breath of concentration as her typing speed doubled.  "I know a guy who's an AIX freak.  There's a support group for people like you."

I hadn't bothered to turn on my office lights and neither had she.  Her face was lit only by the sickly green glow of text scrolling by on her maximized Putty session.  My PC was supposed to have a fail-safe, but a hard knot growing in my stomach told me something was wrong.

"You've only got seconds left," I said.  "The machine's got a dead man's switch.  Since I haven't killed the timer, the drive and memory are about to be wiped clean.  So while I hate to party poop on -"

"Oh right, you mean control-alt-shift-c?  Within the first thirty seconds after OS load?  That dead-man's switch?"

I stared back with a stone-faced expression that I assumed would be answer enough.

"Gotcha covered," she said.  Nodding at something on the screen, she closed out whatever she'd been doing, then pushed away and leaned back.  The display was empty now save for a lonely home directory prompt.

"Thanks for testing my security," I said, wondering how she'd gotten the information.  She somehow snuck in a keylogger?  Or was watching me work from a spycam somewhere?  Radiating the best false confidence I could, I walked over to the wall and flicked on the light.

Reclining precariously in my rickety chair, she'd propped both feet on my filing cabinet.  They thumped to the ground as she sat forward to point at the empty monitor.

"Just needed to shut down the botnet.  Call off my armed forces.  Update the blockchain for you."  There was a faint smile that didn't reach her eyes.  "RedAction's done."

"No, they're not."  She watched bemused as I gestured behind me in a vague direction of the rest of the world.  "I was just there.  Or what used to be RedAction.  They tore everything out of the office and ran."

Everything, except for the lone survivor of the exodus, a small USB drive that was weighing down my pocket heavier than the Panama Papers.  Left at RedAction by an anonymous person, perhaps for me to find, for now I'd keep it to myself.

She was confused.  "But we did it.  Your infiltration.  My botnet.  I took out their servers.  We shut them down."

"You think that's their only building?  You think a place like that operates centralized?  All they need is an IP on a new public subnet, and a little time."

"But -"

"Think about it.  The fact that they disappeared so quickly is proof they'll be back."

Her face was sliding to pale.

"RedAction has been around," I said.  "I don't know for how long, but it's been a while.  In a month, the world will have one more new public IP, and they're back online.  That's life.  Just stay paranoid.  Don't trust anyone."

She looked at me seriously.  "Yeah, well, you can trust me.  Thanks for your help.  I owe you a lot."

"I'm just mad I let Reboot hire me to begin with, him posing as Oober with his fake mother.  I should've seen it."

"You're not the only one he took in.  I'm glad we exposed him."

"What are you going to do now?"

She tapped one finger against her lip for a moment.  "I've heard that the darknets are beautiful this time of year.  What about you?"

I spread my hands to take in my tiny office.  "This.  It doesn't always pay the bills, but I like it."  I shrugged, nodding at my PC.  "Although since you've been playing with my toys, even though I of course absolutely trust you, something tells me I should sanitize that sucker.  With a brick."

She waved her hands in surrender as she laughed.  "Just give it a few more minutes before you do that.  Let my transaction hit the blockchain.  I'll help you pay those bills."

"Bitcoin?"

"Yup.  It's down a lot.  A little whale told me it's a great time to buy."

"A whale.  A crypto whale?"

"I know someone.  She likes to manipulate little things, like blockchain pressure and market demand.  The last push she did got me a four hundred percent return."  She swiveled around in my chair and looked up at me.  "Wait five weeks before you sell any of it.  That'll be the peak.  Then do a quick trade to a stablecoin before it tanks again.  Got it?"

I was already on my phone, looking at my bitcoin balance.  What she'd given me the other day was plenty, but now...  For the first time in my life I could measure my wealth in exponents.  I looked again.  My head felt a little light.

"Got it," I said.

She left.  The second my door closed I went to my air-gapped PC and the RedAction USB stick.  It contained nothing but a textfile.  Apart from an uncomfortable reminder of the Naked Princess file, this one was nothing but two short number sequences.  A position indicator?  Latitude and longitude, maybe?  Or a position relative to where RedAction had been?  I wasn't sure, but I did know I had a new puzzle to chew on.

P@nic was gone.  Wherever she went, I didn't hear from her again, but she'd told the truth about her whale of a friend.  I ended up making a lot of money.

RedAction was still out there, somewhere, but without Reboot's manipulation, with P@nic off the grid, with the Naked Princess app growing more obsolete every day, RedAction seemed to have left me alone.

As for the Naked Princess pictures, like everything else, they'd never disappear, but they were eclipsed by equally scummy parts of the Internet.  They were nothing more than one small pool of brackish water in a very large swamp.  Unless I wanted to dig through some very deep archives, I'd hoped to never hear about it again.

As for me, I enjoyed rolling around in my Satoshi-filled bathtub for a while.  When she gave me the money, I didn't have the heart to tell P@nic I didn't really want it.  I needed enough to live, but I couldn't be rich.  It would blunt my edge.  I saw the softness and weakness that came with too much money, and what I'd said to P@nic about not trusting anyone was also personal: I didn't trust myself to live rich.  I didn't know how and would be fine without having to try.

While I kept a small amount as a safety net, someone in the Wikimedia Foundation's financing department had a very, very big surprise.

Money isn't enough.  Money is the motivator for my body, but to get pseudoreligious, mystery and puzzles and excitement are motivators for my soul.  And while, of course, my soul will eventually be consumed by Cthulhu in a bloody wave of cosmic destruction brought by the Great Old Ones, I still had some time left.

Until then, Information Technology Private Investigating kept calling, so I'd keep answering.  Sometimes boring, other times exciting.  Every once in a while I'd panic.

Just the way I liked it.

THE END

Thanks to 2600 for working with me and the Dev Manny experiment.  Thanks to you readers for being a part of this.  If you want Dev to have more adventures, tell 2600 or you can email me your favorite yes/no equivalent at dev@andykaiser.com. - Andy