3 Chapter 3: Error

When my alarm woke me up, I was still on the couch. On the TV, the news were still going on about Time Square. Apparently, they managed to unplug all the screens and turn the power back on. The lady in red had been replaced by a guy in a brown suit, he was interviewing an FBI public relation agent.

-We believe that the hacker responsible for the attack is the well-known black hat, SignusÆternus. Most of the code matched his style. However, we can confirm that he was not working alone, as the backdoors seemed to have been installed about a month ago by an unknown hacker. The FBI will offer a reward of one million dollars to anyone who can provide information leading to the identification and/or capture of Signus or any other member of the terrorist organization that calls itself The Root.

Terrorist, I liked the sound of that. It meant the FBI was afraid of us, of me. Everything was going just as planned. The fact that they attributed the hack to Signus meant they knew nothing of my involvement. They also seemed unaware that it was because of GuyF4k3 using a bit of social engineer (he pretended to be a janitor for two months) that I managed to breach the server security. The guy in the brown suit took over the FBI agent.

-I have just been informed by our investigation team that the damage caused by the attack could be around 20 million dollars in equipment and losses due to the power outage. Compensation will be issued to many companies in the area and all the TVs will have to be replaced.

20 million, not bad. It is not as much as when RainbowPal0066 managed to crack more than 10 000 saving accounts in one of our funding operations, but still, the goal was publicity, not making the city of New-York go bankrupt. I looked at the time, it was 8:37. I still had about 3 hours left before I had to leave for school. I glanced at my computer, a message was displayed on the screen:

PROFILE COMPLETED: NAOMI WILD

I had completely forgotten about her. I should probably take the time to look at it before meeting her again after school. I opened the document, I now had access to every bit of digital information about her. I browsed the file not looking for anything in particular. She had an older brother, her dad died in a car accident when she was eight, that could come in handy, and her mother remarried with a rich businessman. The rest of her family information was not particularly interesting. She had an uncle that died of lung cancer last year, but according to her phone location services, she only visited him twice since he was diagnosed three years ago. That's right, I had access to all of her previous locations.

Anyway, what I really wanted to know was her personality. That was what took the program hours to compile. After a few clicks in her profile, there it was, the conclusion of the software on who was Naomi Wild. She was the absolute contrary of me: a total extrovert, clueless with technology, a tendency to trust people very easily, one of the most "popular" girl in town, etc... The only thing we had in common was the school we were attending and an unconditional love for cats. Her profile had much more information, but unless I was searching for something specific, it was useless to go through all the data. I linked the file to my phone just in case I had to look up any useful info later on. I put my computer in sleep mode and got ready for school. I still had two hours left before French class. I fed Balthazar and opened my laptop to work on my big project: operation genesis. I still had a long way to go, but I was making progress. I had not talked about it to anyone in The Root yet, but I might do so after the next operation. I now had a good 20 000 devices in my botnet, not nearly enough for what I wanted, but I could still do a lot of damage if I felt like doing so.

A while later, my alarm got off. It was time to leave. I lived about 700 meters from school so I could easily get there walking. I liked it, it gave me time to think. In French class, we worked on a famous poet named Baudelaire. I'll spare you the details, but turns out he was pretty epic, his main goal in life was to be completely useless to society. After that, I still had two hours before meeting up with Naomi. I do not know why, but I was starting to feel stressed. I still thought it was weird that she would come to me for help. I mean, she was popular, she could have asked any of her friends. I did not trust her, I did not trust her at all. I decided I would wait for her at the library, that would give me some time to think about all this.

While walking in the hallway, I realized everyone was talking about the Time Square Hack and The Root. I smiled, they had no idea that they were a few meters from the guy who did it.

-Why you smiling, weirdo?

I jumped, I had not seen her coming at all. I guess I could forget about relaxing at the library now, good thing I had brought my extra strength Tylenol today. What kind of bad luck made me crossed her path two hours before the agreed upon time.

-Aren't you supposed to be in math class? I said, ignoring her question.

She froze for a second, I was not supposed to know that. Fuck, I was such an idiot. How could I mess up this badly in a single sentence? GuyF4k3 (our social engineer expert) would be ashamed of me right now.

-I figured studying maths with you didn't count as skipping class, she answered, anyway, how did you know I was supposed to be in class?

This was bad, I had to come up with something, and fast!

-Uh, one of my friends has math class with you.

That was a complete lie, I had no friends, it was time-consuming. I knew she was supposed to be in math class because I just looked up her schedule to know how much time I had left before helping her study.

-Cool, she said, who's he?

Fuck, fuck, fuck, she was onto me, I had to change the subject.

-Shouldn't we be studying math instead of getting to know each other?

Hacker skill: subterfuge. It worked, she smiled and said:

-Yeah, I guess you're right, only thing is I still haven't eaten anything yet. So I was wondering if maybe we could, like go grab some food or whatnot.

Perfect, she had to eat. That would give me some time to relax at the library while she would go get something.

-Sure thing, I said, you can go, I'll wait for you at the library.

She looked confused, that was clearly not the answer she was expecting. Maybe she wanted to study while eating?

-I was thinking we could go, you know, together, she said.

Now I was the one who was confused. Why would she want that, something was off. I did not trust her.

-Why would you want us to eat together? I asked.

She must have forgotten her wallet or something. That was it: she wanted me to pay for her. I was 97% sure I was right. She smiled, looked at me in the eye and said:

-You really are clueless Damian Blue, it's cause I find you attractive, obviously.

What? My program crashed...

Damian.exe had stopped working.