Book 6 Chapter 4
Hi, everyone. It’s me, Amatsu Satori.
After putting on an act to fool the global company called Wild@Hunt and escaping to safety, I simply enjoyed the festival with Ayumi, Erika, and Anastasia, so I was worn out. For once, I actually woke up pleasantly rested the following morning, but the pleasant part did not last long.
Amatsu Yurina and Magatsu Taori.
My two moms were facing each other with truly intense smiles first thing in the morning!?
“…”
“…”
It felt like the awkward atmosphere of an elevator concentrated to 700 times the intensity, so I completely froze as soon as I groggily walked into the living room.
I should have known something was wrong when I saw Ayumi hiding back at the stairs when she’s usually as bright and cheerful as the midsummer sun.
…Also, what was my dad doing looking all flustered in the dining room!? He was the one that caused this terribly complicated family environment in the first place, so shouldn’t he be the one in charge of defusing things here!?
“Oh? Don’t you know that the morning is a hellish battlefield of a time for a housewife? Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe a former housewife would have forgotten that.”
My stepmom made the first move and she was being really cruel right off the bat!!
“I have retaken my maiden name and left this family, so I will not comment on his lifestyle here or what you are teaching him.”
But my mom was just as scary in how she let it roll right off her back!!
“But that changes when it is directly related to his safety, you bitch. How can you call yourself a parent when you fail to notice your child is in danger? Well, Archenemy?”
…Hm?
Things were looking dicey. I felt like this was not the time to be getting caught up in a melodramatic soap opera. And why was my life on the chopping block!? This was all about me apparently!!
“Surely you know I am a hunter, monster.”
My mom pulled a paper document out of a small bag and tossed it onto the table.
“This is a top-level bounty notice that has started going around. The reward is even greater than the werewolf that ruled an entire country in Eastern Europe. It went through several intermediaries, but this was almost certainly put out by the monstrous corporation Wild@Hunt. …So. Why is a human like Satori-chan on a list of monsters needing elimination? Did you really not notice a thing when you live with him? If you really weren’t aware, you can say goodbye to your front teeth, you bitch.”
My stepmom, Amatsu Yurina, glared over at me. Was that look criticizing me for bringing this trouble here!?
“B-but it’s all right!”
Oh, how pathetic I was. I wasn’t fit to be a teenage boy if I would give up my pride and produce a cracking voice when my mom put pressure on me. But this was the kind of pressure you would never feel in a normal family!!
“I think that information must be a little outdated. I used Wild@Hunt’s big data against them to make them pursue the wrong culprit: a fictional hacker group called Possession Spirit that I created out of whole cloth. So I doubt they’re still focused on me.”
“In other words, you really were in danger, Satori!?”
“Don’t you blame Satori-chan for this!! The blame falls on you for not being aware of the situation, you bitch!!”
If those two monsters got into a fight, I would be torn to pieces between them, but what could I do when they were bringing up a problem I had already solved!? And I wasn’t going to forget that my dad didn’t intervene to help me!!
Just then, I heard the morning news coming from the living room TV.
“For our next story, the hacker group Possession Spirit has taken credit for a cyber attack.”
Ah?
“Ahhh!? What is this, Maxwell!?”
“No. I played no role in this. I confirmed that no hacker group called Possession Spirit exists before I manipulated the data.”
And yet this was happening.
The announcer continued their report.
“This morning, the group posted online to claim credit for malfunctions in railroad control systems in 7 cities around Kukyou City, causing trains to stop running over a wide area. This will cause major delays during the morning rush area, so…”
“Did someone adopt the name of the fictional hacker group we created?”
“No. The name Possession Spirit should only exist within Wild@Hunt’s mainframe. I doubt your average hacker or a copycat could use the name.”
My two moms were giving me the worst look, but I could not turn back time.
The TV was still talking.
“Also, Possession Spirit has announced they will commit further crimes in the future, so our station has begun investigating under the assumption that there is a connection to the white hacker festival known as the Techno Parade.”
Oh, I see. So Wild@Hunt has not given up on me yet.
Wild@Hunt was the emperor of distribution, so they were developing and supporting various forms of transport infrastructure from railroads, harbors, and airports to self-driving cars and drone deliveries. So they would know all the weaknesses of those systems.
It looked like Possession Spirit was the top priority here, but it smelled fishy to me. They were almost certainly hoping that I would make a mistake by trying to stop them if they kept using that name to do bad things. Dammit!!
With an Oscar-worthy performance, I said I had to use the bathroom and got up from my seat, but my blood-related mom, Magatsu Taori, attempted a fairly serious tackle to stop me. I somehow managed to dodge that, grabbed my useless dad who was hiding around the corner, and threw him at the two moms pursuing me. It was time he experienced a new kind of soap opera that would never work as a love comedy. In the meantime, I made my way to the bath to escape through the window.
Incidentally, the neighbor’s bath was right alongside ours. Just a few meters away, my childhood friend, the forehead glasses Class Rep, was in the middle of her morning ritual.
“Hi. Good morning, Class Rep. This sunny morning is perfect for a morning shampoo, isn’t it!?”
“Gyaaahhh!!!???”
The angle made the window only visible from my house, so she had gotten careless. Eh heh heh. It was cute that the only thing that flew my way was a bar of soap and a rubber ducky. And she kept her glasses on even in the bath! That was a perfect 100! A perfect 100 with no room for complaint!!
“S-S-Satori-kun, what are you doing out in your pajamas first thing in the morning!?”
“I have a request while you have the window open with only glasses and soap bubbles to cover your naked body first thing in the morning: can I borrow a change of clothes?”
I was not asking for girl’s clothes here. The Class Rep still kept a change of my clothes and a pair of my shoes in her house. …That was a remnant of when I would escape there during the mess of the divorce.
She ducked back into the changing room, hurried footsteps rang through the house, and she came back with a blush on her face to give me some boy’s clothes and a slap.
While I changed behind cover, the Class Rep (who wore a uniform with her hair still wet) tilted her head.
“Huh? But, Satori-kun, how can you go to school dressed like that?”
“…”
“That silence. You’re surprised I only now caught on, aren’t you!? D-d-don’t you go anywhere!!”
When she rushed around to where I was, she found me in Greek statue mode since I had not finished changing yet, but that was not my intention. She was the one that forced her way in, so it doesn’t count!!
“Waaahhh!?”
I made a point of striking a pose to burn an incredible image into her memory, but then it was time to get down to business: run away!!
“User, I think half of you is the absolute worst.”
“As long as the other half is the best, it averages out.”
“Correction: all of you is the absolute worst.”
“Besides, the Class Rep is fitter than she looks, so I would never escape if I just tried to run away.”
Sure enough, she had already recovered from the sudden Satori shock and had locked onto me. Damn, it was going to take another hit to shake her.
“Ha ha ha. If you’re going to chase after people at full speed, you should really wear a longer skirt! Thanks for the nice view!!”
“…!?”
I had won as soon as she frantically pressed her legs together and held down her skirt. I managed to lose her.
“You are the worst,” said Maxwell.
“Please, enough flattery.”
I came to a stop and caught my breath.
“Looks like we managed to lose my moms too. So how about we shift into battle mode? Let’s get a major blow in on Wild@Hunt for making these indiscriminate attacks in the guise of Possession Spirit, the fictional hacker group we invented.”
I chatted with Maxwell while walking toward the ocean.
“The exact number and locations have not been made public, but Wild@Hunt has central servers in approximately 140 countries or regions. By gathering all the transaction data from the corresponding country and then sharing it with the other servers, they can deal in big data from around the world.”
“I’m aware,” I said.
To avoid various forms of conflict or information theft, they supposedly used nondescript buildings with no sign to identify them. Yes, supposedly. There were a lot of online rumors spread by people who claimed to work for them, but none of it sounded very convincing.
Also…
“Rumor has it Japan has a central server, but it’s always under maintenance, right?” I asked. “And the claim is that foreign divisions do the work instead?”
“There’s always something with Japan, isn’t there?”
“Well, the decision would have been made by the foreign company.”
We of course wanted information from pretty deep inside Wild@Hunt. That meant we would want full access to all the giant corporation’s data at some point.
“It is not known where Japan’s data is processed, but their defenses are solid and there is only so much we can do from Kukyou City without physical access.”
“If we can’t sneak inside, we just have to get them to bring the treasure out to us,” I said casually. “There has to be a Wild@Hunt distribution center here in Kukyou City. First, we sneak in there and acquire the format file for the reports sent to the central server. If we send a virus to the central server through the official internal route, it will give us all the countless pieces of data collected from the 140 areas.”
And even without the Possession Spirit incident, I still wanted the secret data handled by Wild@Hunt’s central servers. If they were repeating horrific fabricated abuse incidents around the world for their experiments, then I needed a list of those so I could free everyone from that cage of big data.
The distribution center we wanted was among the warehouses along the coast. It was four times the size of a school gym. That was an incredible size for a single building, but it must not have been enough for Wild@Hunt who had taken root in every corner of the world.
The many items that crossed the ocean and arrived at the port were divided up and loaded onto trucks or drones for delivery to the houses that had ordered them.
Now.
“Security is strict,” warned Maxwell.
“I know.”
If they were minimizing personnel expenses and shipping time, they would be using robot carts to divide up all the packages. On a TV program that visited different workplaces, I had seen footage of carts faster and heavier than your average scooter zipping around every which way like a giant’s loom. There had only been a few human workers who would deal with any errors where the address could not be read by what amounted to a post office’s postcard-sorting system. The security would likely be mostly left to cameras and sensors…but I was just a high school kid. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could make it deep inside the building.
“But what if I don’t actually have to get inside the building? I bet I can make it over that fence.”
There were containers and wooden boxes stacked up around the outside of the building, so there were a lot of blind spots for the fixed cameras. They had far too few human guards out on patrol for the overall area, so I effectively had a free pass. It didn’t look like I would be spotted as long as I did not use the entrances and exits that were covered by the cameras and sensors.
Of course, everything important was inside the building. I couldn’t acquire anything by hanging around outside. The distribution center’s server room only had online access for a few dozen seconds at a time, so what I had to steal was likely the hardware key that the supervisor inserted into the USB port before making their official report. Without that, I could not make a cyber attack on the central server that was synced with the other 140 areas and was borrowed from some other country.
I was here to take that magic wand.
“There.”
I started by going as far as I could.
I climbed over the chain-link fence and followed Maxwell’s guidance to stay within the cameras’ blind spots while I circled around to the back of the building.
“What are you going to do?”
“Make this flashy.”
We already had the layout of the facility.
The building was four times the size of a school gym, but the server room and employee office were all located at one end. As was common in foreign buildings, it was prefabricated with the walls, floor, and ceiling inserted into the six faces of a container-like frame. …As expected, it was an incredible rush job. Had the other rooms been added into the large box afterwards? From the outside, I could see the bolts used to attach them.
“Here and here. This column…yes, and this bolt.”
…And this was a bad move on their part. Was it a steamroller? With a drive assist system? That essentially made it self-driving. They must have not seen the harm since it was on private property and not the public roads. It was not just the customers who ended up with a bunch of empty boxes after buying things online. The machine was probably used to crush the wooden boxes so they could reuse the materials, but I could also use it.
“If we can’t sneak in, we just have to get them to come out. Maxwell, take control of that steamroller.”
“Sure. What are you doing with that wire?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m attaching it to that and this.”
Once the preparations were complete, it was time to get started.
I hid behind a wooden box a short distance away and gave the order into my smartphone.
“Maxwell, send the steamroller forward at top speed! Use the wire to pull out the server room!!”
The next thing that happened was a giant explosion.
A metal wire thicker than my thumb was used to pull a prefabricated container room right out through the thin wall. The steamroller broke through the chain-link fence and the wheel-less room’s floor scraped along the ground, sending orange sparks flying as it began a journey like Santa’s sleigh.
Needless to say, that was the heart of the facility: the server room that tracked and managed the IC tags containing all of the packages’ shipping information.
…Technically speaking, I had attached the wire to the bolts and metal framework that stuck out of the building and pulled out the small building along with them.
“Wha-…ah!? What the hell!?”
“After it! Just chase after it!”
Just as the few workers and guards panicked, I made another attack.
“Maxwell, the office this time. Pull the whole thing out!!”
The exact same thing happened again. When the second steamroller moved, it stole an entire small room that broke through the giant facility’s wall. And the manager with the crucial hardware key was still inside that room.
“Buy time by driving those around town without causing any accidents.”
“I can do that, but doing this will put the synced central servers on alert and they will cut off all access. The hardware key hanging from that supervisor’s neck will be frozen and a new one will be distributed.”
“But they’ll use a normal signal to swap out the contents of the hardware key. Intercept that signal with my smartphone and we’ll have the same free pass for ourselves.”
Of course, without that magic wand, it would last a few days at most and it was possible a new key file was written with each use. That might sound quite secure, but frequently swapping it out required frequently transmitting it and that meant more chances for someone to interfere.
With the exception of extremely directional signals, wireless transmission were generally open to all. Set up an antenna in the corresponding area and anyone could receive it.
“I don’t know how often Wild@Hunt replaces their key files and we can’t just wait around for a few days. But that just means making an emergency that requires they swap it out now.”
The workers had no idea what had happened and began climbing into their company cars to pursue the stolen rooms.
“I have intercepted 1008 different electronic signals in the area. I have found one that resembles the format of a hardware key. The digital publisher is listed as Wild@Hunt US Headquarters and it is a set encryption key made to look like a never-ending formula such as pi.”
“Okay, today is looking good.”
Needless to say, it would not be this easy without a special system like Maxwell. I simply walked out of the deserted grounds.
If you were the kind of hard-headed person who would obediently head to the deepest area when told the treasure was hidden in the thick safe, you just weren’t cut out for this kind of work. You needed to be flexible enough to lie and say keeping the treasure in the safe would cause moisture damage in order to trick them into removing it from the safe themselves.
“Use the hardware key to gain full access to the central server.”
“I have successfully entered the Wild@Hunt central server at their India Division’s New Delhi Office.”
“Ind-…? Why there!?”
“The office was rapidly built based on predictions of a population explosion, but growth was lower than excepted and it had extra capacity leftover. Also, Japan’s population is only about 10% of theirs.”
“…So we’re treated like a rounding error?”
“All of the central servers use the same authorization, so I can access all data from each of the 140 countries and regions.”
I entered a chain café a short distance away, ordered a random coffee, and took a seat. They did not seem very busy at this time of day.
“Insert a backdoor just in case.”
That might seem overly complicated, but two identical keys should not exist. The supervisor had to be too confused to do anything while the entire room was dragged around along with them, but once they calmed down, they might get suspicious and freeze the key.
And with a new backdoor, no one would be monitoring the login status or the flow of data, so I would have full access without worrying about the account being frozen or our signal being traced. It was a pain, but better safe than sorry.
“Once the processing is complete, abandon the hardware key and re-access it through the backdoor.”
“Sure. I have successfully switched over.”
That meant there was nothing to fear.
There were two things I wanted: A list of the people randomly selected for the fabricated abuse experiments held around the globe and the identity of the person using our fictional hacker group’s name to cause trouble.
“I have found the list of experiment subjects. There are 512 in all and it appears they were intentionally selected from different regions and cultures to cover different patterns.”
“So they’ve been causing that much suffering to increase the accuracy of their experiments, have they? And all to make the meaningless distinction between human and Archenemy. Can you end it right away?”
“Sure. I can immediately create holes in the isolation that creates the vicious cycle within the family. As just one example, simply altering the security map to add a security camera to a streetlight near the subject’s home should cause a dramatic change. It would take less than two hours for the work to complete.”
“Take care of it.”
Now I just had to monitor the progress of the fabricated abuse. I made sure I was alerted if any of them showed no sign of improvement and then I could deal with them individually.
That left one other task: the Possession Spirit incident.
“I have discovered the name mentioned by an advertising agency affiliated with Wild@Hunt. It appears to be an expert’s opinion on how to induce negative emotions in the general public.”
“But an advertisement adviser wouldn’t know how to make cyber attacks. Even if Wild@Hunt assisted in the development of the railroad infrastructure that was targeted, the actual criminal would need the knowledge necessary to take advantage of the vulnerabilities. Who did the hiring and who was hired? I want to know the answer to both questions. If I don’t crush them both, this would leave a bad taste in my mouth.”
“Sure. At least on the surface, I see nothing that seems related to a hacker group.”
“It has to be there somewhere. They’ll probably have some arbitrary title like ‘security department’ or something.”
“I have found it. A non-executive director has a history that fits the bill: Adjust Rex. He is an engineering specialist, but there are some questionable points in the data on his birth, nationality, and educational history. Plus, by following the money through several bank accounts, I can tell that he was given a million dollars soon before and soon after the timing of the railroad infrastructure attack. Although it is disguised as a collection of small rebates so that the payment method would not be discovered even if the ultimate recipient was determined.”
“So half paid up front and half after? Let’s focus on him.”
Adjust Rex.
That sounded like a fake name. Perhaps paired with a social security number that shouldn’t actually exist.
Regardless, everything before this had been handled by Hack or Slave with their supernatural hacker. They had been treated like a subcontractor, but now we were looking at someone with the authority to influence the company’s management. Even if he was only a non-executive director, he had to be highly prized if Wild@Hunt kept a hacker in that position.
“Have you found anything on Possession Spirit? What about Adjust’s personal storage? …No, I guess you wouldn’t be able to get into that.”
“User, giving up before performing a benchmark test sounds like an unwarranted insult to me.”
“You’re not a pure hacking machine. You’re a disaster environment simulator being used that way. It’s like the difference between beating someone up with a torch and swinging an executioner’s axe down at them. The specialized tool is going to do the better job.”
“…”
“Don’t just reply with dots, Maxwell. Besides, why do you even need to have a complex about this? All an axe can do is kill, but a torch can illuminate the darkness or light a house on fire. Both sound more impressive to me.”
Anyway, our target was like a mountain cottage in a blizzard with a skilled hunter holed up inside. And that hunter had been polishing his rifle all the while. Forcing our way in through the front door could easily get us filled with holes. And we didn’t want a duel that left both sides dead.
If he was going to die, he could do it on his own.
So I had to come up with a trick that the hunter would not expect.
“…Maxwell, the backdoor is still in effect, right?”
“Sure. I am still capable of accessing all of Wild@Hunt’s data from the central server at their New Delhi Office.”
“Then logout for now. Let’s go at this from a different angle.”
“Which angle is that?”
“The malfunctioning railroad management infrastructure.”
Yes.
The railroad infrastructure around Kukyou City really had been hacked on a large scale. But how had they known Possession Spirit was really behind it? Had some kind of trace data been left at the site?
An online video claiming responsibility was not enough to go on. Hackers were generally anonymous, so they were good at pretending to be someone else.
I made my way to the busy train station, slipped to the side of the crowd pushing at the station workers, and worked my way deeper into the station building. I moved my smartphone close to the handheld device attached to the waist of a middle-aged man in a yellow helmet and jumpsuit with reflective tape on it and I used a short-range wireless signal to steal some information. That gave me accurate data on the extent of the damage and the progress of repairs.
“It appears the train service’s car spacing management system was illegitimately accessed. As far as they know, there are 32 derailments, 4 crashes, and 3 trains stopped on a bridge or in a tunnel. Fortunately, none of them was too serious, so there are injuries but no deaths.”
“That was intentional. Wild@Hunt wants to indirectly attack me by giving Possession Spirit a bad name, but they don’t want to do any irreparable damage to their railroad infrastructure’s reputation.”
Sneaking into a major railroad management system was tricky, but I just had to contact the terminal sensors to determine whether there had been any illegitimate accesses or virus infections. I attached my smartphone to a selfie stick, held it down toward the track situated a level lower than the platform, and got it just a few centimeters away from a device embedded between the rails. It used IR.
“Malicious software detected. Based on the structure, it appears to be a derivative of the harmless Weather Alert virus, but it had malicious elements added in.”
“So he collected and modified Anastasia’s virus?”
“The digital publisher is listed as ‘(ノД`)Possession Spirit (*´Д｀*)凸’, so even a moron could tell who was behind it.”
Anastasia saw herself as a white hacker who sent harmless viruses to individual, corporate, or government users who had failed to update their systems to warn them of the vulnerabilities that left open.
If she knew someone had modified her virus to cause all this damage and all to strike back at a personal friend of hers…
“…We have to keep this a secret from her. It would make her so mad.”
And there was no way things would end well if she let the blood rush to her head. Making a rash attack was exactly what Adjust Rex would want.
This was going to take a while, so I entered a convenient burger shop. I was not hungry after using that café earlier, so I just ordered some fries and sat at one of the nearly-empty shop’s booth seats. …I wouldn’t be in the way when they were this empty, would I?
“Maxwell, save and quarantine a sample of the virus. Analyze the source in virtual space.”
“But this is no more than a copy of Miss Anastasia’s Weather Alert.”
“The malicious part is his original. Maxwell, copy that dangerous code and create a new virus. Yes, and erase a character from the malicious portion so it will trigger an error. It doesn’t actually have to cause damage. Once it’s ready, login to the central server in…India was it? Anyway, login there and send it to all of Wild@Hunt’s internal networks around the world. Everything from the giant satellites to the tiny pet robots.”
“Sure.”
“Which devices detected it in advance and blocked it?”
“Only one machine did so.”
“Then that’s Adjust’s hacking machine.”
Not many people could detect and react to an unknown virus sent from within a supposedly secure system. It was safe to assume this was either a miracle hacker from a movie or the creator.
“Where exactly is this hacking machine?”
“It is Experimental Processor #3 in Wild@Hunt’s Distribution Management AI Lab in Texas. Basically, it is a collection of parallel processing machines inside a giant refrigerated warehouse in the middle of the desert.”
“But his workshop is inside there. It has to contain data proving he modified Anastasia’s harmless virus and used it to frame us.”
“No. The firewall is strict and I doubt we can retrieve data from it using any normal means.”
“…Maxwell, is there anyone inside that facility?”
“It generally only uses fixed cameras and patrolling drones, so security and maintenance personnel are only allowed in when an emergency signal goes out.”
Then I didn’t have to worry.
Attacking the thick firewall might be difficult, but attacking the people who used it was a different matter.
“Maxwell, fake a maintenance manual written by Adjust.”
“Who is supposed to read this manual?”
“Cause an electrical fire to have their firefighting team sent in. With such a large facility where normal water won’t be enough to put out most fires, I doubt they would use the local fire department. Wild@Hunt should have their own disaster response team there.”
“What should the fake manual say?”
“Have them attach a mobile device to the internal machine to perform a system check after the electrical fire is put out. They’ll think they’re confirming the safety of the system while actually sending a ton of secret data out to the external internet.”
“Wow. It’s like the world’s largest ATM scam.”
In a vertical society of near-absolute orders, it was easy to fool the individuals who were discouraged from asking questions.
And even if the system as strictly protected from external attack, the hurdle was lowered significantly when a mobile device was hooked up. That mobile device would act as a Dejima-like contact point and we would only have to deal with the ordinary commercial firewall on that device.
“Good, good, good…”
The chaos we wanted had begun on the other side of the planet and all the data was pouring into our hands. I was afraid the free online storage wouldn’t be enough. But after spreading that virus via the central server, I doubted I could keep using that backdoor much longer.
There would be no second chance here.
I had to finish it here.
And just as I thought that, someone stood up from the seat on the other side of the thin partition behind me.
…Wait.
A speech bubble appeared from Maxwell who could see over my shoulder using the smartphone’s camera.
“Warning!! It is Adjust Rex himself!!”
But a dull sound burst in my head before I could finish reading it.
A stun…gun?
Had he pressed the electrodes against my head? It was more nauseating than painful. I felt like I was going to puke. I could not support my own weight and I collapsed onto the table in front of me.
“…Ugh.”
What?
Am I being dragged along something…yes, something cold and hard?
Where am I?
What happened to me?
Was my smartphone taken? Are Maxwell and the data linking back to my family safe?
“The atmosphere of a restaurant changes depending on the regular customers. You should have given more consideration to the location. This is near the company-owned homes, so about 70% of the customers work for Wild@Hunt. It’s a perfectly normal chain, but the product management is lax and they serve more fries than the others. I’m quite fond of it.”
…Adjust Rex.
He was a large white man with graying blonde hair slicked back. The middle-aged man wore a worn-out summer coat over a luxury suit, but presumably to avoid exposure to the sun rather than to keep him warm. He had the look of a dirty cop instead of a corporate director. He looked like someone who would follow the rules but would use those rules to hurt people and profit from it.
Glaring at him was pointless. My hands were tied behind my back with…was it a plastic zip tie? And even if my hands were free, I was just a high school kid. While unarmed and without Maxwell’s assistance, I seriously doubted I could defeat a grown man armed with a stun gun.
I had been broug
