Book 6 Chapter 2
The following day, I waited until school was out and met up with Anastasia in the evening.
We met in the café lounge of the business hotel she was staying at. It only had dried-out sandwiches and coffee that had been watered down who-knows-how-many times. Even so, the hotel felt like entering another dimension for a high schooler like me.
“Took you long enough!! You could always just alter the attendance data.”
“I didn’t build Maxwell to do things like that.”
“If you ask me, you have to be crazy if you built something to those ridiculous specs for nothing more than your Class Rep’s swimsuit dance.”
Ahem.
Anastasia did nothing but complain, but she had apparently not wandered around town alone during the day. She had made a point of waiting until I got there, so she was obedient and cute.
Yes, Anastasia was just plain cute. Even if she was a tiny but heinous hacker. She had long blonde hair with a strong whitish tone and she had almost transparently white skin. The wine-red dress and the expensive robot dog she held in her arms were blatant attempts to look more mature. Those mismatched hints of wealth looked adorable on her. The fact that what should have been negatives only made her cuter showed that her glow was the real deal. It was clichéd to say a young girl looked like a doll, but you didn’t often see one who fit that description so perfectly.
“What did you do during the day?”
“Hm? Hung around the hotel getting over my jetlag. That and some shopping on Wild@Hunt.”
“…Online shopping while on an overseas trip?”
“Use your GPS and they can deliver to you no matter where in the world you are. I didn’t like the complimentary soap and shampoo, so I bought a full bath set.”
That all sounded adorable enough, but…
“Oh, right. And I was bored, so I used my mobile device to start searching for where Maxwell-chan is located.”
…What would have happened if she had succeeded? Maxwell had been uncharacteristically silent since I arrived and it would probably be best to remain cautious until the festival was over.
“Erika and Ayumi will join us once night falls.”
“Hmm. A Zombie is one thing, but being a Vampire can’t be easy. They have a lot of restrictions for an Archenemy, but they’re also really well-known, so they have specialized hunters wandering around.”
Of course, Erika would know that better than anyone, so there was no point in bringing it up with her.
“Then I’ll have to do my more questionable shopping before the chaperones show up.”
“Wait.”
“Truth, you understand, don’t you? It’s really unusual for this many of our kind to gather in one place. And it lets us make deals in person, sidestepping all the surveillance networks. Now’s the only time to gather some special hacker tools.”
There was truth to that, but you needed specialized knowledge if you were going to do that. For one thing, if you bought a used computer or mobile device from a hacker, you never knew what kind of backdoors would be leaking all your data. If you would stop looking after using commercial security software and seeing the “0 threats found” message, it was best if you stayed away from this. Even I thought it was too dangerous to try.
“They’re going to be here,” said Anastasia.
“Is there someone you’re searching for?”
“Of course. How much research do you think I’ve done for this day?”
We left the business hotel and found the giant LCD monitor on the wall of a discount store wasn’t working properly. The store’s ad was gone and it instead scrolled through a long list of names. The title at the top was “Tomorrow’s Victims”. Some idiot had apparently sent out a crawler checking for vulnerable smartphones in the city and was sending out a warning to the owners of phones that could be hacked at any moment.
“How tasteless,” said Anastasia.
“The people who do these things were all inspired by you, weren’t they? Free Play Free Access, Hack or Slave, Digital Lifesaver, and so on.”
“Truth, that is not at all true. I don’t show off with my warnings. You can warn people by sending a harmless virus to their machine. There’s no reason to spread it to the public like this.”
“Someone’s laid their spider web over the public phone network and optimized their access speed beyond belief. And is that multiple people fighting for control of those drones overhead? This is getting dangerous.”
“No,” replied Maxwell. “They are being controlled by AI as they efficiently fly around Kukyou City while autonomously attempting to steal wi-fi transmissions from professional and amateur sources alike. Because no one can be legally charged with crimes spontaneously committed by a machine.”
“Stop them immediately.”
“Sure. I will guide the culprit to the hacker festival.”
Because I messed with some cyber criminal’s fun, suspicious signals began flying around, but they were naïve if they thought they could track the source of the signal at this point. It was far too late for that.
If they wanted to have some fun, they should have started by taking over all of the communication bases in the area. They had to have known that frantically trying to do that after the trouble started would be too little too late.
“Anonymized server located, random IP table analysis complete, individual located. Shall I report them to the cyber criminal team of the local police’s community safety division?”
“Today’s the festival, so you don’t have to go that far. Begin a ransom attack. Begin random encryption of their hacking tools using Route 3.”
“Ah ha ha! Truth! You’re essentially bricking their machine!!”
“I’m not asking them to spend 50,000 years decrypting it themselves. Maxwell, embed the correct random number table file in a vending machine that supports IC cards. They can begin a desperate treasure hunt. By getting some exercise running around the real city.”
The Techno Parade was presented as a festival for white hackers, but there seemed to be no clear division between white and black. Even with Anastasia, it felt more like she enjoyed the challenge of staying within certain boundaries than she was acting out of sense of justice.
“Well done, Truth. But that went a little too well if you ask me. Were they using commercial products?”
“It was Winners 10 Living Professional. The network connection had no wired ports and the graphics card and motherboard were combined, so I’m guessing it was a tablet with a detachable keyboard.”
“Wow, what an idiot!!” Anastasia expressed herself in a truly American way. “They had failed from the moment they thought first-rate hackers simply messed with an $899.99 computer found on the shelves of an electronics store and downloaded some sketchy freeware onto it. Software and hardware are two sides of the same coin. Vulnerabilities you can take advantage of with a commercial computer are smalltime. If you want to use real magic, you need to have a proper wand.”
I wanted to say that hackers came in many different forms, but there was a festival going on. Unless they were a local, I doubted many of those here would be the type who faced their keyboard in a room with a large machine. With fiber optics, there was no real time loss with sending a signal to and from your hacking machine on the other side of the planet, so most of them would be here with no more than a mobile device or handheld gaming system. The only exceptions would be the ones here in RVs to show off their homemade hardware.
“Maxwell isn’t that kind of illegal server system.”
“And yet you won. Overwhelmingly so.”
Well, it could be hard to describe what hacking and cyber attacks were, but they were basically sending signals in ways the developers had not expected.
In terms of video games, a hacker using a commercial computer was like finding a trick the staff intentionally put in the game and a hacker that prepared their own hardware was like finding a bug the staff had not intended to be in the game. You could think of the difference like that.
For example, your options with a single barcode changed depending on whether or not you had a barcode reader. Professional hackers like Anastasia wanted to be able to read every kind of code, so they enjoyed putting together a server system to read and analyze any new code that came out.
And they would of course make a lot more progress than the people who viewed the barcode’s stripes with their own eyes and desperately tried to figure out what it meant. Programs were nothing more than code and formulas, so you technically could work out any file in your head if you worked at it long enough. But there was an obvious difference between what someone could do in a lifetime if it took them 100 years to solve a single formula and if it took them 0.01 seconds.
Even a truly impregnable-looking encrypted file or firewall was like the grooves of a CD. If a normal person stared at the glittering surface of the disk, they could never read the data stored there, but bring in a cheap CD player and they could play the music at the push of a button. Hacking was like using that for a game of cat and mouse played at incredible speed.
Of course.
In an actual cyber attack, you could have a million successes in a row, but a single mistake could still get the signal traced and the police kicking down your door.
“But, Anastasia, you skipped grades all the way to a Massachusetts university, didn’t you? Is there anywhere that knows how to solder chips better than there?”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. You’ll regret it if you look down on the insane inspiration of amateur inventors, Truth.”
“…Are you mocking me for teaching myself how to build a simulator?”
“I meant it as the highest praise,” she immediately replied.
She pulled out a notebook-sized tablet separate from the handheld game system connected to the small robot dog’s head.
“Anyway, this is what I’m after: a quad floating-point processor. Can’t you see the future in this?”
“…Just from its appearance and controller, it looks like an emulator for a really old game system.”
“Yes. Four cheap ICs read each other’s load while taking over each other’s calculations for the optimum circuit. But there’s no reason to stop at four. If you mess with the code and scale it up, you might be able to create a machine that can handle parallel processing with a hundred million or a billion units. The electronic traffic control is, simply put, insane, so the signal loss is nearly zero and almost all of the participating machines’ power can be utilized for the project. I know you know just how powerful a machine like that would be.”
“…Now that’s a scary thought. Are you planning to decode the human genome next?”
“I finished that more than half a year ago. Oh, but don’t tell anyone, okay?”
I had no idea if she was joking or not.
“Boiling metal in wine didn’t open the door to room-temperature superconductors, but it really is the insane ideas that are creating the new age of hardware. You’re a part of that for building a disaster environment simulator on your own, but these aren’t the cheap gifts you get by opening a textbook and building up your knowledge from the ground up. So I’m honestly jealous since I wasn’t given anything not seen in my academic records.”
“That’s just the grass looking greener on the other side. It sounds like mockery to the people who were driven out of academic society.”
“Truth, there’s nothing quite as meaningless as people with definite skill worrying about what the ignorant people around them think. Or maybe we should hope there is still room for misunderstanding in this age where big data and predictive AI searches are so well known.”
But setting aside whether we understood each other’s view…
“Is the person who made that chip at the festival?”
“I made a new account under a fake name and got them to friend me. It took 16,054 characters of building up trust before I achieved the rank of Peerless Friend. Not to mention giving five stars to all their shitty blog posts and web novels. I am the great Maiden who let her hacking tools handle it when I hacked into an IMF mainframe and changed the value of a dollar to 89 yen, yet here I was doing all this stuff manually! So make no mistake. Getting the chip itself would be best, but I’m at least getting the plans for it.”
“What if they take you for all you’re worth and then run off?”
“I’m prepared to pay the asking price. And to show the utmost respect for this amazingly cool and insane lone wolf inventor. But if I still don’t get it, I’ll make a physical connection and check through their storage. I’m getting my money’s worth either way.”
“…How festive of you.”
“Oh, even I’m praying it won’t come to that.”
“Why do Americans love to claim everything they do is grounded in justice?”
“Watch a Hollywood movie and you’ll understand. In fact, I’ve never seen a superhero that didn’t do the same thing. Oh, there they are!”
Anastasia started sneaking around after seeing someone walking on the sidewalk across the road from us. As far as I could tell it was only an exhausted middle-aged man wearing a bright gray suit that looked like he had only spent a grand total of 19,800 yen on his entire outfit. …Could it be even cheaper than our school’s uniform?
“Hey, Anastasia. He just looks like someone heading out to eat a bento in the park because there’s no place for him at the office. Isn’t it possible he’s just a victim being used as a relay point after being infected by a zombie machine virus?”
“What are you talking about, Truth? Can’t you sense that aura which can’t be detected using the modern trends? Well, maybe your own aura is just so powerful you can’t sense his.”
“We need to talk later, Anastasia. What kind of person do you think I am?”
Meanwhile, the giant LCD monitor on the wall of a discount store broke the silence.
“We have an update concerning the data leak at Kukyou 1st Broadcasting the other day.”
While waiting for the crosswalk light to turn green, Anastasia chuckled cruelly.
“I bet they never thought they would have to use their own broadcast to report on their fabricated abuse case. Could anything be more ironic, Truth!?”
“…The fact that you can laugh about this is all the proof anyone needs that you’re fit to be a hacker, Anastasia.”
“The fact that you can think you aren’t one after what you did shows that you’re more than qualified yourself.”
But it did not end there. The announcer on the screen plainly continued.
“Whether or not the rumored information is true, the methods used to release it were undoubtedly those of a cyber criminal. We are hereby announcing our intention to submit a report of damage while working with the security division and the police to track down the culprit.”
“Wait, wait, wait.”
“Tch. That’s a pretty cheap way of manipulating the narrative. Truth, they’re accusing you in a desperate attempt to distract from their own abuse scandal.”
The light had changed, so we crossed the crosswalk while continuing our conversation.
But TV was mass media. The ethics committees could be a pain in modern times, so they could not just read off baseless news stories. This farce would require a lot of preparations below the surface beforehand.
“Maxwell, check the surrounding data. See if there is any digital trace of people investigating my personal information or the incident related to Shindou Matsuri.”
“While I am sick of these vague commands, I have detected something you should probably listen to first, unless you care what the third-rate sports journalists and online news posters are saying. This may be presumptuous of me, but I really think you would prefer to prioritize this.”
“…That’s incredible as ever. A series of 0s and 1s is smoothly using sarcasm.”
Anastasia peered over at the screen with her eyes wide.
But that aside, we were crossing the crosswalk toward that plain-looking office worker. And he seemed to have noticed us.
“Thanks for this,” he said with a bitter smile.
…Anastasia may have had me join her for this deal because if a small child pulled out a bunch of money on the roadside, it could look a lot like a nasty sort of mugging.
But I was not given time to think on that much longer.
“A camera crew has just entered the harbor container yard where I am physically located,” said Maxwell. “What they intend to do should go without saying.”
“They traced the signal? Are they planning to take in the machine I used to reveal my identity from the flow of data!?”
“A broadcast van is parked nearby to relay the live broadcast. They must plan to have an emergency news broadcast for their public execution. If necessary, I can physically erase all of the data. What are my instructions?”
“You mean you can short out all of the parallel processors that make up what you are, right? I’m not going to lose you to something so silly.”
“Feeling emotional is fine, but I have no physical arms or legs. If they know the number to my container, they will not overlook me.”
The middle-aged man must have sensed trouble because after handing Anastasia a postcard-sized computer chip packaged in plastic, he rapidly left the scene.
…This wasn’t looking like something I could solve just by standing around. We moved to a nearby open café and sat at a table without ordering anything.
“Truth, send in a fake delivery order. Have the container moved!”
“No,” said Maxwell. “The investigators have already entered the container yard, so physically moving me now would only draw attention to me.”
Anastasia and I stared at the screen and started up a TV tuner app.
“Maxwell, it doesn’t look like the actual broadcast has begun yet.”
“Sure. But it is only a matter of time. They seem to want to secure the hacking machine before sending out the report of locating it.”
Needless to say, I was done for if they had Maxwell. And criminal tools were disposed of after the trial, so Maxwell had no future either.
That said, moving the container in front of their noses would stand out too much, so it would be meaningless.
“They will make contact in approximately two minutes. If you have no plan by then, I will execute the physical erasure of all data even without your authorization.”
Was there nothing we could do?
No, I had to calm down and think over it again.
I set my smartphone down on the round table and tapped my finger on the table.
“Maxwell, you’ve already hacked into the broadcast van they’re using as a mobile base, right? That’s how you know their broadcast schedule for the special report.”
“Sure.”
“…That means we aren’t completely helpless. The lizard’s tail is still alive.”
“?”
Anastasia scooted her chair closer and tilted her head, but I didn’t have time to explain.
“Use the broadcast van’s host computer to access the camera crew’s mobile devices and rewrite the internal files.”
“What should I rewrite?”
“Change the target container number from D-19 to F-92. That’s the one I found by accident before and wasn’t sure what to do about.”
“Sure. So it is that sort of plan. Then I shall also make a benevolent police report.”
“Please do.”
My little war buddy asked what was going on while holding her small robot dog in her arms, so I patted her head with one hand while the intercepted transmissions came in. The container yard was a fixed location. To make use of the security camera footage and the signals passing through the area, I had already tampered with the communication bases there.
“We don’t need a director’s cue. Once I give the signal, begin the broadcast. We’ll teach them just who they were messing with here.”
“I’ve found the target container.”
“Double check it. F-92, right? Then let’s take a look inside!!”
Anastasia raised her voice despite the waitress giving us a suspicious look while washing the windows.
“Truth!!”
“Don’t worry. F-92 is the altered data. It isn’t Maxwell’s D-19.”
“That will only delay them. They’re sure to start searching the surrounding area afterwards. Even without a hint, they’ll find the correct answer eventually if they check through every container. You need to come up with another idea!”
“I’m not giving them a chance to do that. I had those idiots in checkmate from the moment they touched the decoy container.”
“?”
Anastasia was more confused by the look on my face than what I was saying. The complete lack of worry probably did look odd.
The following conversation played out on the intercepted signals:
“It has an analog lock. We’ll pry it open with a crowbar. Ready, set, go!”
“It’s open. Send the camera in. Begin the broadcast as soon as we have the hacking machine!!”
“…Hold on. What is this? A pile of bags full of white powder…?”
Good.
I clenched my fist below the table.
“Maxwell, intentionally trip some alarm or another.”
“I have already sent a police report. The police have arrived by both land and sea.”
As soon as I snapped my fingers for no real reason, the greatest comedy of the modern age began on my smartphone’s speaker.
“Freeze, you fools! This is the JCG!!”
“Eh? Wha-…?”
“Did you come here to swipe this smuggled contraband? Well, too bad for you, but merely touching a controlled substance is against the law. You are all under arrest!! …This is going to be a long night for you.”
“N-no, we’re from the TV station…!!”
Anastasia looked confused at first, but as what had happened dawned on her, she seemed gradually overcome by an urge to laugh.
She set the small robot dog on her lap, held her belly with her small hands, and roared with laughter.
“Pff, heh heh. Ah ha ha ha!! Truth, when did fall to the level of a cheap fire alarm!?”
She was not referring to that button you shouldn’t press. That term also referred to a malicious hacker that used prank phone calls and home security systems to send police officers to people’s homes.
That aside…the waitress was giving us a pretty nasty look now. We hadn’t ever ordered anything, so we got up from our seats.
“Maxwell, check over the entire container yard.”
“Sure. The broadcast van has left and a member of the camera crew was tackled to the ground after impulsively attempting an escape. That adds obstruction of a public official’s duties to the charges, so he will undoubtedly be arrested and detained. Once they leave, I will put out a false delivery order to move my container’s physical location.”
Anastasia tilted her head while letting the quadrupedal pet robot use its cameras and sensors to follow her on the sidewalk.
“Come to think of it, the TV station abandoned their camera crew right away, didn’t they? They could have tried a little harder by claiming freedom of the press.”
“Only because they were still preparing for the live broadcast. If it had already been playing over the airwaves, they might have resisted it to the bitter end, but they were able to avoid any trouble for themselves by cutting off the lizard’s tail.”
In a way, that helped me out a lot.
I breathed a gentle sigh while watching a group of electric bicycles tear down the side of the road at highway speeds. They had likely had their power limiters removed by messing with the program.
“But, user, in that case…”
“Yeah, it means the group at the container yard wasn’t made up of regular employees. They were probably hired as an external security team that the TV station itself can claim ignorance of.”
In other words, they were professional hackers that a well-known company could not officially hire. If a group like that had come to the container yard to take revenge, then this could end up being a lot of trouble.
“Hmm. A company-sponsored hacker team, huh?” said Anastasia. “Even if we limit it to pro-Japanese ones, that isn’t enough to narrow it down.”
I was fine with just ending the fabricated abuse by preventing the TV station from going too far, but I had made a much larger enemy below the surface.
I had already unwittingly picked a fight with them.
But I did not regret what I had done.
I glanced over at Anastasia while she said hello to a college girl with a pet robot like they were two wealthy wives or something. …And it occurred to me that Anastasia was technically a college girl herself despite how small she was.
So what mattered now?
“Maxwell, check the local police. I’m sure that hacker team will be released soon enough, but don’t let your guard down. This isn’t over yet.”
“Sure. What should I do about the arrested criminals?”
“I don’t care if they’re released. But track them using security cameras and satellites. If they guide us to a hideout where more of their companions are hiding, we can use that to our advantage.”
There was one point I was curious about.
Fighting someone I could not actually see was fine by me. The sparks had reached me from the moment the TV camera was brought to the container yard. But there was something I definitely wanted to have before starting a battle of 0s and 1s.
“…That was way too fast to obtain Maxwell’s actual container number.”
“Could you simply be underestimating your opponent?”
“Yes, the kind of miracle hacker seen in movies might exist somewhere in this wide world. By the way, Maxwell, you know the container yard cargo list management computer, right? Not the ship transport one that’s fluidly updated all the time, but the one that’s practically sitting around in storage.”
“Sure. The Winners 3.1 Future Edition.”
Anastasia did a spit take while having her pet robot greet the other one (although I imagine it was actually making cyber-attacks using IR and short-range EM just for fun).
“Bff!? How many bits is that!? That kind of fossil should be in a museum!!”
“The old man stationed there is obsessed with retro go games and refuses to give it up.”
Even I could only shrug at that one.
He had very different demands compared to those of us who sought processing speed and flexibility. And he had used it with care for so long, so it was definitely worthy of respect.
“Shockingly, it’s a yellowed desktop with a 5-inch floppy drive and a cable plugged directly into the phone line. That’s probably good enough since he only searches for text data, but it actually prevents any modern hacking methods from working. He unplugs it from the phone line whenever it isn’t in use, it doesn’t have much memory, and the drivers are so old that malware won’t run. And while the company has abandoned the OS, that old man has been writing his own security patches every month. So I doubt your average hacker’s homemade malware could randomly access it while gathering data from the high-speed internet. You would have to be pinpoint targeting that retro machine and rebuilding your hacking tools for use on it. And yet they pulled it off only a day or two after the TV station incident. How did they do that?”
“Ah,” said Anastasia, finally getting my point.
Since she had completed her greeting (or mock battle or benchmark test) with the college girl, we walked away with no real destination in mind.
…Yes, it may have been possible to hack into that fossil of a machine that lived on with the old man’s original patches. But there was nothing you could do without something first telling you your target was a fossil machine like that.
“Several companies and universities shared data during my development phase,” said Maxwell. “Could their servers have been illegally accessed?”
“Just seeing the circuit diagrams I shared wouldn’t tell them you’re in a container. Much less where that container would be.”
We arrived at a small park where four-wheel-drive RC cars were driving around. They had round targets on the top and they seemed to be programmed to automatically flee when a cork gun was aimed at them.
“I also used to supply periodic simulation data,” said Maxwell. “Could they have located the source of that signal?”
“We had that data loop around the planet three times just for fun, remember? I doubt they could have found you like that.”
Programming was taught in normal school classes these days. I thought about the issue while seeing children holding tablets out toward the fleeing off-road cars and trying to stop them using IR hacks.
Was I just being too self-conscious?
Was this opponent simply more skilled than me and some unknown person in the sea of data already had me in the palm of their hand?
If not…
“…This might be a troublesome opponent.”
“Hm? Truth, you don’t mean…”
“Yes.” I nodded. “This might be a hacker who uses a special ‘power’ as an Archenemy.”
For example.
If a hacker could read people’s minds, they could omit the trouble of searching for unknown vulnerabilities or infecting the target’s computer with a key logger. They could simply type in the password to log in to the secret system.
If they had special eyes that could predict the future, they could erase their tracks 2 seconds before being traced and escape every single time.
If they could control an engineer’s mind, they could even have a vulnerability intentionally built into a system during development.
You might want to laugh that off as silly, but in this age, superhuman Archenemies like Zombies and Vampires were walking around like they owned the place. And computer networks were not a privilege granted only to powerless humans. Even Anastasia was actually a maid fairy known as a Silky.
By linking together an ancient power with the futuristic network covering the planet, new possibilities would emerge. That was a privilege only granted to those born to the proper bloodline, so a commonplace person like me could never hope to match them.
This was likely the most troublesome opponent there was: a supernatural hacker.
They were a standalone hacker that could force their way to the core of your secrets even if you disconnected the cable or isolated the system.
“Pro-Japan, working for a company, and has a supernatural hacker…?”
…If I was up against an individual or group like that, then even that Winners 3.1 fossil would not be much of a barrier. They would draw the right card right away and send their forces to my inner citadel. Even moving Maxwell’s location might not do much to hide.
Who was the enemy?
What kind of Archenemy?
What was there power and how adaptable was it?
I couldn’t relax until I knew that. And running away wasn’t going to answer any of those questions. I had to attack, attack, and keep attacking until I had revealed their unseen identity…
“User, I have found some odd data connected to Kukyou 1st Broadcasting.”
“Only now? What is it this time?”
We left the park and passed by a lot of makeshift shops with amps and speakers lined up on the road. …One of them looked like a junkshop selling parts for stun guns. Talk about dangerous.
“It is a record of a large sum of money being repaid. It was sent from Kukyou 1st Broadcasting and to the Japan branch of the Wild@Hunt online shopping company. Normally, this sort of payment is one-way from the sponsor to the TV station, so repayments like these should be very rare.”
I grabbed the back of Anastasia’s collar as she started approaching a makeshift shop and she tilted her head.
“Hm? Hmm? Could they not play the company’s ads because of an on-air accident or something?”
“Maxwell.”
“I checked this year’s records at the office of the TV station’s lawyer, but there was no trouble related to a program that had any kind of sponsorship contract with Wild@Hunt. In other words, we should look at this the other way around.”
“The question isn’t why the station was repaying them. The question is why Wild@Hunt se
