3.

Gather Round the Stone

N1T3 awoke like a hungover noob, head ringing from an ear-piercing ping.

His net-scraping alert system was pinging his rig. Before collapsing like a lump of bled meat, he’d set it to monitor various search terms, and compile them for later review. Then, he’d used it to relay his story, his survival.

All the same, net-silence was witnessed in the time between sending and receiving his ping. The cause was obvious; the Hacker community had gotten the message loud and clear. It was scrambling. They wouldn’t have had time to recover from last night. Not yet. Not fully.

N1T3 figured his escape had fouled up corp-sec’s plans, but enough to save anyone else? He wasn’t sure. His story would’ve put to flight all but the thickest hackers. He just hoped it was enough.

Hope was still thinner than he’d have liked.

But stock had to be taken. Corp-sec couldn’t work in the day as it did in the night. Plus, a sudden repeat of last-night wasn’t possible. Corp-sec couldn’t run such blatant ops so often or even the light-net propaganda couldn’t keep the suspicion off.

And the last thing Corps wanted now was further awareness of what was happening. They’d take a loss before misstepping that greatly.

What was happening, N1T3 knew, was a corporate takeover. A total takeover. In fact, it had been happening for close to a decade. Roughly the same amount of time he’d been out of circulation with the general populous.

He now had only borrowed time, and not much of it. Not unless truly hidden again; an impossibility given he was likely at the top of corp-sec’s hit-list.

The Hackers wouldn’t kid themselves; a first volley had just been fired and a war declared. Would-be leadership was being targeted. N1T3 and others like him, murdered for the sake of the ever-hungry, corporate bottom-line.

Now was time for strategy.

In the game they all knew to be playing, the Corporations had just made their opening gambit. Not clever as they went, but effective. Then again, death– attempted or otherwise– seemed a hell of a lot more than simply effective. It was repugnant.

Especially in a world with no need for violence.

N1T3 and the others knew that to be their world. Even if it wasn’t a practical reality yet. It would get there, given time. Society had evolved infinitely more, better ways of handling problems. Violence was brazen and downright foolish for the damage it did.

In a postdigital world, even a little damage was infinitely more destructive.

It was avoidable, too so long as those individuals involved not already so vested, afraid, or lazy to otherwise prevent it. Well it had been avoidable. Even if no other corp-sec targets survived, rumors would get out– someone would learn the truth.

N1T3 rolled on his cot to stare at the grafitti’d ceiling. Eons of spray paint formed a base-coat beneath words and doodles in varying states of decay. Some were recognizable enough. Slogans were abundant. Written in satire or well-meaning mischief. None mattered.

Bits and pieces of another life attempted to rise in the back of N1T3’s mind. He held them back, falling from the cot onto the floor still fully-dressed. He’d been too wrecked to even remove his armor-thick layers of warmth.

Even if he’d wanted to, the adrenaline and exertion had taken too much from him. He’d collapsed into the sleep of the recently near-dead, then awoke wishing he hadn’t.

The irony was too palpable.

Childhood in the changing world of London had prepared him for irony, but not like this. London’s strive to remain prim, proper, and staunchly conservative despite being hollowed inside-out by crooks, corps, and here-the-under-sign’ds was a joke in comparison.

He fell to his feet, barely noticing their utter ache. He was never meant to be a foot-soldier in a battle. Rather, he was an intelligence officer. Unfortunately, in a battle for intelligence, he was exclusively targeted.

He managed a piss in the old bathroom. The plumbing and electricity still functioned via some overlooked allotment for the city. He’d spliced the power anyhow, so as not to draw attention, but no-one cared about excrement unless it was backing up on them.

In that way, N1T3 had upgraded. In every other way, he’d gone underground.

Trace-back the error.

Back at his workstation, he sifted remote logs from his old server before it went offline. As a general rule, all server logs were exchanged a few times a day. Usually, as little more than a boring, routine list of averages never requiring further investigation.

This time, the logs were off the charts. Alert codes in three and four-letter chains. Power-spikes. Voltage jumps. CPUs and GPUs maxing. Drives failing. All of it in seconds. Obviously, N1T3 was the cause. He’d written the program. Initiated it– just before being chased across a rooftop by sniper fire.

Still, it was nice to know his work wasn’t all for nothing.

He surfed the dead-server’s logs. Nothing. All routine. A few pings here and there, but all systems. No user-pings. All redirects. None explained anything.

He sank in his chair, a stiff, metal, folder he’d have to find a way to replace. Yet another of the victims of the night.

He winced:Chalk-up the tally.

The thought reminded him of Clockwork, An33$A. He realized how insensitive he’d been. Reality forced him forward. The night was over now, or rather, near to beginning again. This was his revelry, that moment of procedure that allowed one to take stock.

The damage. He hated the idea, but all involved needed to know the extent.

Over the course of a series of forum messages and links, he gathered the general feel for the night, what had and might happen:

Corp-sec had run a smash and grab op to crackdown on a series of bleeds in the power-grid. Not uncommon, especially in the inner-city.

Power was at a premium, after all.

It was harder to trace elsewhere where voltage didn’t dip naturally because it wasn’t taxed as often. So, they found it.

A hacker fucked up. It happened. A younger one. One still cutting teeth and shooting metaphorical blanks on a cheap rig. Probably with less know-how than an oyster sucking cock.

All the same, a near-freak occurrence given circumstances. Rather than run somewhere hidden, the kid ran a line in from a rooftop, splicing into an old line connecting one region of the city to another.

What the kid didn’t know was that no section of power-grid couldn’t be shut down entirely without losing sparse levels of surveillance. What, in effect, formed a fortress-cities’ outer ramparts, moat, and sentries. All points where the fortress walls met the outside world, corp-sec often checked.

Because the kid didn’t know shit, he missed that these were digital defenses. Requiring power. Simply shutting out power-hacks from those areas meant shutting out the areas themselves.

What were a few, slow-drip leaks in no-man’s land when the grid was taxed so much worse elsewhere? On the other hand, the taps going over the walls, or nearest them, were considered the most traceable.

It was the difference between tracing wires one at a time, or in giant telecomm clusterfucks.

Few people realized how important that obscurity was. Power was power. One electric, the other ethereal. The few that did, had little choice but to remain outside its cloaking shadow. The few that couldn’t, fought for survival everyday.

So, the rest took notes to better understand how to exploit the weakness or avoid exposure. Unless Humanity fell, they figured, the observations might be valuable to someone somewhere. But nothing was valuable to a kid-Hacker with starry eyes.

The universe is a big place, after all.

N1T3 wanted to curse the kid, that he’d been smart enough to figure out everything and bright enough to know how it all worked, but dumb enough to get it all so wrong. Worst of all, to write it all down– or at least something that had given something away.

N1T3 still wasn’t sure what.

He wanted to curse the kid, but fact was, the coming conflict couldn’t be avoided. It was Human nature, the consequence of self-guided Evolution.

Specializing in number-letter strings and strong hunches meant nothing against automatic weapons. They had their place certainly, but in Human hands. Not postdigital, post-Human hands.

Even the notes ending up in corp-sec hands through happenstance was fine, provided they did something benign or unexpected with it. Yet they knew its value as anomaly, aberration.

And seized it.

That was dangerous. Corp-sec had seen the power of Hackers, their value. Despite obscurity. Then, somehow traced them physically.

Anomalous enough, but N1T3 doubted even allowing for schemes, corp-sec couldn’t afford more exposure right now. Which meant he wouldn’t know how it had been done. Not yet.

And he might make the same mistakes they’d all, already made.

He needed time. However much he had would be less than he needed. Sure, if Gen-pop got wind of corp-sec moves too fast, media-spin couldn’t take effect properly.

But flip-side, N1T3 and the other Hackers couldn’t force the Corps’ hand either. And neither side could move without assured, widespread adherence to their orders.

Things not going the right way couldn’t be going any way. There was no room for gray here. There was only yes or no. On-off. 0 or 1. Anyone trying to find middle-ground would be swept into one or the other unwillingly. It was best to let things simmer as they were– if only long enough for the dust to settle.

He finished his recollection and research, then addressed his alert with his full attention; a growing archive of everything regarding the building he’d left behind, its surroundings, An33$a, Clockwork, other hackers he knew of.

In it were the countless attempts at exclusive snippets from various light-net media agencies. All of them fronts or affiliates of the big-4. Each sang the same tune; fire in an abandoned, London building becomes arson, becomes terrorism, becomes heroic peace-keeping gone awry.

And there, nestled beneath the updates, misinformation, and outright lies was Martin Black. At-large. Presumed dangerous. Wanted in connection with domestic terrorist activities.

N1T3 smiled; domestic terrorist, for coding. Typing. Calling bullshit. The corp-media was already pinning him as another violent revolutionary.

How they’d found him was one thing. Finding out who he was really, was another entirely.

Mostly, because the information was utterly useless. Martin Black had long ago ceased to be; had long ago become N1T3.

The latter’s infamy was built off legends his fellow code-jocks told of him. Originating in the old vets that knew him as the up-and-comer he’d once been, and the encyclopedia of history, tech, and code he became, he’d surpassed any and every expectation and challenge.

To Hackers that knew him, he represented something more, as a symbol of their innate ability to redeem. To revise. To learn and grow.

Yet, the reports shook N1T3 deeper than he liked. Martin Black was his name, his childhood, his life. A part of him forgotten in the consequence of time. Something phantom yet cross-fading eternally with the present.

At least, until the war was over. Now, it had only just begun. Who knew if he’d live to see its end? What mattered was ensuring the proper stratagem remained even if he– or no-one else for that matter, remained with it. In essence, ensuring the Hackable nature of society was always known.

If there was anything N1T3 was capable of, it was that.