Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

Wednesday, April 13

There’s a quiet hour after dinner when no one seems to pay attention to where anyone else is. Most of my class is in the rec room or studying in their rooms. A few are taking a break in the dorm’s common room. I’m sure that Evan will come looking for me eventually for a game or a show, but for now I have a little time on my own.

I’m going to see if I can figure out if Father was lying about Mom or not. I always figured she’d supported us with her writing, but when I think back on it, she only ever had a few books published, and those hadn’t exactly been best-sellers. Maybe my childhood had been funded courtesy of regular deposits from Father. Or maybe he’s full of it and trying to make me feel like I owe him. Either way, I want to know for sure.

Plus, I’ve told a few lies since I arrived here, and pretty much all of them will unravel if she ever mentioned our extracurricular computer activities. I’m guessing Mom kept that to herself, since we committed more than a few felonies together. But she could have mentioned something about me learning coding, and that would be a discrepancy that I’d need to figure out a way to explain. I figure my best shot is to hack into the computer network. That’s less risky than trying a physical break-in, as long as I’m careful. What I’m looking for is probably on the computer network anyway.

I consider my options. I’ll need to hardwire Mom’s laptop somewhere where there are physical network ports, since the wireless doesn’t connect to anything besides a small and tightly walled off internal network. I’ve seen a few jacks in the Residence, so that might work, but it’s always crawling with people. The Research Center, where his office is, should have plenty of ports, but also has a bunch of security cameras all over it, so trying to set up in there doesn’t seem like a great idea.

The only other option I know of is the Learning Center. I jam Mom’s laptop into my backpack, then set an alarm for an hour on my tablet and throw that in too. That should give me enough time to do some useful snooping but not so long that anyone will notice I’m not around. I make my way into the building and down the long hallway toward the computer lab. The door is open and the lights are off. Excellent.

I take a quick detour past Janet and Roxanne’s office, keeping my feet as quiet as I can. Through the thick door, I can hear fast drums and an angry guitar riff. Roxanne must be on duty tonight, since it would be jazz playing if it was Janet in there. That’s fine by me. Roxanne seems like the less attentive of the two of them.

I slip back to the computer lab and settle in front of one of the workstations. I log in long enough to get the machine address of the network adapter, then open the laptop and spoof that address. I unplug the computer’s ethernet cable and quickly plug it into the port on the laptop. With the address spoofed, it should look like the same machine as far as the network knows. I still have Jeff’s password, so I use his credentials instead of my own to log in to the network. Mom’s first rule of hacking: never get caught. If anyone is going to take the blame for what I’m doing, I’d rather it be Jeff than me. It would be even better if I could have stolen Chad’s password, but that would have required me to sit next to him, which is definitely not worth it.

I think back to the last hack that Mom and I did. Carbonica. One of the few coal mining companies still running in the country. They faked their safety inspections for years and ended up with a collapse that killed a bunch of miners. They denied everything, of course, up until Mom and I hacked the proof from their servers and made their own website serve it all up on their front page. That was a great piece of work, and I had learned a lot helping Mom do it.

The important part of that hack right now is that we used one of her previous targets as a proxy to make it look like the attack was coming from one of Carbonica’s competitors. I poke around the network and choose a few public servers to use as proxies in the same way. Bouncing the network traffic around like that misdirects it and makes it less likely that anyone will trace it to me here in this lab.

If Roxanne were paying close attention to the network, or if she had automated tools that could pick up anything suspicious, this is about when I’d expect to hear the faint music from down the hall either stop or get suddenly loud as she opens the door to come down and investigate. I wait a minute and just listen. Neither happens. I think I’m clear.

I wish I had Mom’s email password. I asked Gramps on my Sunday call if they had it, but they didn’t. If I had that, I could just read her mail and see if she’d been talking to Father. But I don’t, and cracking that would take forever, so I have to dig into the Institute email system to see if I can get to the conversation from Father’s side. It’s a pretty standard mail server, easy to install, easy to administer, and not hard to hack. It’s not even patched to the latest version. I scan through Mom’s exploit toolkit for an attack that’ll work. Looks like there was a zero-day a few months back—after the date of this server’s latest update—that should let me skip authentication. That’ll do it. I trigger the exploit and use it to log in through the web client.

I try to get into Chad’s email first, just to test things out. Scanning through his mail, he’s got some messages to and from Phil and Stan in class two, and an occasional email to his teachers, but it’s mostly back and forths with Father. Chad emails him almost every single day to report on what a good boy he is and any rule-breaking my siblings have done. He gets replies maybe twice a week that basically all tell him good job and to focus on himself. What a suck-up. I’m glad he hasn’t had anything of substance to say about me yet. I log out.

Now that I know it works, I hold my breath and log back in as Tom Butler. The page loads and I’m good to go. It looks like he’s the kind of guy that doesn’t delete his email. He’s got so many messages in here, almost all of them read. He or someone on his staff must spend a good chunk of their day keeping up with this stuff. The archive goes back for years and years.

I filter my ill-gotten gains for mentions of me. I find plenty of messages dated since I arrived on campus. I don’t have time to worry about them right now, but I make a mental note to check on them later. I filter all of those out and start looking through the older messages. There she is. Mary Kimball. My mom.

Father has been straight with me. There’s correspondence with my mother going back for years. Definitely her writing style, I’d know that anywhere. Quarterly reports tell him all about my grades, health, attitude, and what a fine young man I’m becoming. She bragged to him about all my accomplishments: AP tests, honor roll, chess tournaments, math contests, even academic decathlon. I‘m pretty sure if I’d been an athlete, she’d have bragged on how I did in all my games. But there isn’t any mention of anything I’ve done with computers since I was really little. Good, but a little weird. Like she was hiding that from him. What did she think he would do if he knew I could code? Come and recruit me for the nanobot club?

My tablet’s alarm beeps quietly from my backpack. I reach in and shut it off. Time to get out of here before anyone notices I’ve been gone. Reluctantly, I close the window with Father’s email. I definitely need to get back in here sometime soon and read more. I tear down the misdirection tunnels and my connection to the proxies, then switch the cable so the workstation is plugged back into the network. I don’t think using Jeff’s account will leave any traces. Hopefully, Jeff won’t notice a thing when he logs in tomorrow.

I step out of the lab. The fast, muffled flow of beats and chords coming from down the hall tells me Roxanne is still in her office. Probably doesn’t suspect a thing. I head back to the dorms. I arrive just in time to see Evan get headshot by Andrea on one of the screens. He sees me and tosses his controller at me from the couch where they’re sitting. I catch it and settle in between them, ready for the next deathmatch. I still have a lot of homework to do before tomorrow, but I can squeeze in a couple of games before I start on that.