1 Hacking a space station
Night. A regular night.
Plain and cloudless.
Black from the deficiency of the sun with slightly bluish violet hue at the edges due to the scattered blue light emitted from the opposite end of the world. The stars were twinkling in the black void with a crescent blue moon in the centre.
Under this cosmic infrastructure, in a clearing over a forested mound laid an old forgotten temple. Empty, devoid of a living soul. Although, the same can't be said for the shabby rundown graveyard surrounding it's perimeter.
Still, the remaining holy power of the long lost shrine, purified the evil stench of the rotten dead preventing the birth of a poltergeist. So in the end, we all can safely assume that the place is devoid of a being capable of producing mechanical force.
Bamboos and cedars lining the broken walls of the temple added to the eeriness of the courtyard. A warm July wind blew through the woods. The crickets started to chirp after being roused by the wind. The loudness slowly increased as more joined the rhythm. After some time, they even became tired. So the silence returned.
***
A boy slowly entered the forlorn compound through a grassy path. The boy seemed to be in his early teens, lean and tall. He wore a regular pink polo shirt and black jeans with a lighted miner hat over his head.
Now then, who was this young man? Why did he come to the ruins for? Stargazing?
Well, the boy was Hritik Saeed, a regular high school student. Orphaned when he was six months old, he was under the care of his grandmother. She died of lymph node cancer after a long struggle of 10 years, leaving him under the care of an old maid and the local priest.
The old maid left her service when she found her long lost son. He ran away from his home in his early twenties. He came back to take his mother back with him. The maid wept with joy and left with her son. Tired of the jeopardy, he applied for a high school in the city and sold off his property in the village. Leaving behind his predecessors urns under the care of the local priest, he rented a house in the suburb.
The reason for which he frequented the godforsaken place has actually got a long back story. The weak frail looking teen has got a couple of secrets unseen to his friends and acquaintances.
Pen and paper said that he was a below average child with mental deformities. Poor grade, slurring incoherent speech, dyslexia, muscular dystrophy and, in short, a born loser. The fact that he got into the elite school due to his handicapped status was well known. He was frequently bullied and treated with contempt.
Moving on to his real identity, he was a complete insane biological unit ever born in the world. There was no doubt that he was a prodigy. If any doctor tried to understand his genius complex brain, he would lose his sanity from the intricate reasoning and conflicting outcomes.
What made him a prodigy? Did he win the spelling-bee award for 10 consecutive years? Did he come first at Zoogle Innovation Meet? Was he an inept athlete or academician?
No, none of them.
What made him special was actually related to all of them! He had inept knowledge in all the subjects, his physical strength was off the charts, his skills made him strong enough to knock out an opponent three times stronger than him and most importantly he lacked any openings. A cold phlegmatic gentleman under the guise of a fool. A genius never seen by the world. *dramatic sounds from some classical opera*
His feats lay far and wide. For example, he hacked on to the server storing the encrypted data on the ID cards issued by the government and decoded the data. He stored the data in his external hard drive. It was so very sleek that the technicians are still unaware of the fact that they had a data breach.
He had also made a model for cryogenic engines for a spaceship to send humans on Europa, a nanobot blueprint to fight cancer cells, a non-toxic compound analogous to chlorophyll which can be used to produce oxygen from sunlight in a laboratory with 88% efficiency. Though he never made them public.
It wasn't that he was shy. He just simply hated coming under the limelight. He loved being a normal bullied high school kid, knowing that he can easily break a few bones of the strongest kid in their class, who was scouted by the national kickboxing association. Well, as people say, ignorance is bliss.
Nevertheless, even a black hole would have its end. It brings about its own destruction by means of particle and antiparticle pair interaction and emission of Hawking radiation near its event horizon. The energy is released, decreasing the mass of the chasm.
Similarly this extremely bored boy's mind has given rise to an extreme segregation of polar personalities to cope up with his bubbling potential, a lot like Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. One time he would be a sweet and naughty school boy and during another, he would be a sly hacker who plans to throw the whole world in chaos. Not exactly 'overthrowing the world' but something similar. The thing which this villainous mind wants is beyond the perception of a regular human.
***
So we move back to the past situation …
The boy walked towards a large tomb. The marble obelisk has worn down from weathering. He pushed the loose stone cover over the grave, it moved aside with a low grumble revealing several electronic equipment - radars, transmitters, receivers, panels, circuits, battery and numerous others. This was his storehouse.
As this graveyard was abandoned centuries ago, most of the graves had been robbed. The empty compound is now used by Hritik as his hidden laboratory. There were other tombs in there containing similar junks and inside the basement of the temple, he had made a chemical laboratory.
He pulled out some of them. Sitting on a nearby tomb he went to tinker with the circuits. He quickly wielded the wires, embedded some components. Pulling out a laptop he connected a usb from one of his tweaked transmitters in the port.
Most of the equipment was actually very costly, he had a tough time trying to salvage the dump yards and stealing some sophisticated machinery from labs and factories in the military bases. As he says, 'Everything is fair for the sake of science.'
He started his real job. He typed in some parameters in his laptop.
' … establishing links with transmitter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … network established.'
The five transmitters were placed at the four corners of the compound with the fifth one at the top of the spire of the temple. The five apparatus are working synergistically to form a large array. The large array is capable of hijacking any radio receivers at a distance of 1500km, be it an military drone, aircraft, missile or satellites.
Hritik wasn't some petty scientists, he aims for the stars … umm … literally. So, his current goal was to hijack the International Space Station as it will fly over his location within a few minutes at an altitude of 400km. Of course, he isn't some petty villain; he has got a huge plot. This was just the beginning of his conquest!
He turned off the light on his hat and looked at his laptop.
'Globe FM detected…
Ence5556 detected…
AstroBoy002 detected…
RX-78-2_Gundam detected… '
Lots of receivers have been detected, though neither of them were from ISS. Suddenly a new signal appeared which made his lips curl with a malicious smile. He looked up in the black sky, one of the shining dots seemed to be moving across the southern sky diagonally at a fast pace. Faster than stars but slower than burning meteors.
"Aahhhh … there you are!! Come to papa. He he … " He pressed a key.
'Alternate link formed, estimated time before link breaks, 3 min 4 sec 2 ms.'
'Encryption detected.'
He continued to type in. He could easily hack into the Controller Room but the real problem was that he needed some customised data which required direct tweaking of the on board machinery. He basically needs to install a spy bot in its core system along with a couple of other codes.
'Network decrypted.'
'Opening root inventory. File uploading started…'
'Status: 2%... 7%... 43%... 89%...'
'Integrating codes with the core system… '
'Connected.'
He quickly set in a timer. The devices would take some hidden readings, store them until it comes within the field of his transmitters and ultimately deposit the valuable data within the 3 minutes it is going to have contact with his array within one of its time period.
'Data collection ongoing …
Rt534: 5%
8khTa:81%
Wtg97:32%'
'Connection lost. Estimated time of recurring connection: 94min.'
He turned off his laptop and breathed a sigh of relief. So it was done! The first phase of his plan was a success. He quickly stashed his equipment within the tombstone cum storage and left the compound whistling jovially.
As he walked through the grassy path which leads his house in the suburb at the foot of the mountain to the temple, he turned on the light and pulled out his notebook along with the pen stuck to the front placket of his shirt. This diary is filled up with his current stats and achievements.
"ISS hacked"
He quickly wrote it down on the ledger.
***
Entering his run down apartment, he sat on the table to complete his homework, writing a unique poem in contemporary Victorian pattern. Every student was given a unique theme. He got the theme 'night'.
He went through the notebook once, carefully writing the piece. It took him twenty minutes to come up with satisfactory results. A smile appeared when he read through it.
Extremely vulgar and perfectly bringing out the nature of an adolescent kid. On second thought, it would be fit for some truants in their late teens. Well, what would a regular fifteen year old kid write?
This threw Hritik in a dilemma. His innate writing qualities were naturally very high, unfit for maintaining his lowkey status. So he had to downgrade his writing to a great deal. As people call it - 'bastardization'. Nevertheless, he always adds vulgar ideas to maintain an overall negative impression of teachers on him.
Most of the students thinks that he is too dumb to realise what is good or bad. It was actually good, his subtle vulgarity kept away the elite good-natured students and his plebian and dumb demeanour attracts the school bullies. A perfect maxima of screwed up student life!
