Tag: hacking

#Lore24 – Entry #283 – Sentinel City by Night #9 – Another Victim, Another Clue

From the Journal of Sheba O’Rourke, Private Investigator

“It was a handful of nights later, after I’d hired a Chinese botnet to start the blowback campaign against Emmerson’s article and begun contacting her myself in the guise of a trio of new sources that were emboldened to tell their tales after reading her article to start the feed of misinformation that I got word that another body had been found with the same MO.  As soon as I got Walsh’s call, I rushed to meet PD at the scene, pushing my Taurus as hard as it could stand; not sure what that grinding sound is, or the wobble when I get up to speed.  Really have to get a mechanic to take a look at that; should probably ask Becky if she knows a good one that works late hours and won’t charge an arm and a leg. 

Think Walsh is starting to warm up to me, or he was just too tired to fire up the hatred tonight.  He looked strung out.  Anyway, this was another dump near the Red Light District.  It had occurred to me that with the many waterways in the city, and its proximity to the Great Lakes, there were plenty of better spots to dump a body.  That could indicate that maybe some part of the killer’s psyche was crying out to be stopped, or that the body disposal was simply an afterthought.

Either way, everything tracked with this being another victim and not a copycat, in spite of Emmerson’s article.  This victim, Sidney Clark, hadn’t been reported missing, however, and this was definitely sooner than the previously established timeline had indicated.  The killer was escalating, though I couldn’t say it had anything to do with the article or not; the timing didn’t seem to track.  As I examined the body, Emmerson showed up and had another confrontation with Walsh, this one rather heated.  She kept trying to draw me into the matter, but I ignored her attempts to speak to me.  I had plenty of lines of communication open with her already, didn’t need a face to face.

It was when I examined the victim’s ID to see where they lived that I made a most curious observation.  Though I couldn’t know what her face had looked like before it was removed, her ID showed a woman who was not up to standards for the killer’s appetites.  She looked to have been severely overweight, the deep scowl on her plump, pitted face only marginally distracted from by her bright green and red hair dye and side-shaved cut.  The body couldn’t have been even half the weight listed, even before the pieces were removed.  The ID was barely more than a year and a half old based on the date on it.  Did we have the wrong ID?  Was there perhaps another victim with whom the IDs had been switched?

I knew what I had to do, however much I disliked using that particular ability on a corpse.  Call me old-fashioned, but using my heightened perception to read the psychic echoes on a dead body seemed a bit too invasive, not to mention that it always left my skin crawling for days, even gave me daymares.  Might have been a little selfish of me, but it’s why I hadn’t done so before and had kept to the evidence and proper investigatory techniques till now.  Still, things had escalated to the point that I suppose I had little choice but to give it a try.

I waited for Walsh to shoo Emmerson off before I showed him the discrepancy between the ID and body, then told him that I needed a few minutes alone with the victim.  When he asked what I had planned, I simply told him it was better if he didn’t know the particulars.  Though skeptical, he obliged and pulled his people back.  Once I had readied myself, I removed my gloves and touched the body, peering into its past.

I saw flashes of the victim’s last moments, felt the echoes of the violence she had suffered, saw only a brief impression of the killer themselves, a cold, doll-like face smeared with blood, fangs gleaming as they wielded the scalpel.  Then a much clearer image emerged, one that wasn’t nearly as horrible, though perhaps even more confusing.  I clearly saw a red-headed woman, kind and energetic, showing the victim a computer-generated image of another beautiful woman, a sense of elation and happiness, contentment.  Then there was a sensation of awakening from a deep slumber, of peering into a mirror, the victim seeing the image of the woman that had been on the screen.  As I pulled myself out of the psychic vision, stumbling back as the connection was broken, I realized what it was I had witnessed, why the victim’s ID didn’t match her current appearance.

The red-headed woman had flesh-crafted her!  The red-head was a Tzimisce!”

#Lore24 – Entry #282 – Sentinel City by Night #8 – The Fine Art of Discreditation

From the Journal of Sheba O’Rourke, Private Investigator

“It was easy enough to find Emmerson’s apartment; she didn’t seem to be worried about being followed, not that she would have noticed me anyway.  I lingered outside for some time after she had returned, waited until she had bedded down for the night before I slipped in and had a look around.  Security on her computer was easy to crack, simple logon screen bypass trick I’ve used hundreds of times. 

My hunch had been a good one.  The story that got printed was the watered-down version of the original she’d written which had included some very specific details about a particular vampiric bloodline that must consume flesh instead of blood.  I had dismissed that possibility early on as unlikely, though seeing the notes Emmerson had on the matter made me reconsider the possibility that a rare Nagaraja had come to town, but only briefly.  From what I knew of them, they did ritualistically preserve corpses to maintain a ready food supply, but they wouldn’t keep so little of the flesh and discard the vast majority of it; why waste perfectly good food, after all? 

Diving further into her files revealed that she had been communicating with an unknown contact who had provided that information to her.  I noted the email address, but it was likely a burner account, given the random nature of the username.  Still, the contact with the mysterious source had began sometime after the second victim, and their information had only grown more concise and revealing as further emails had come in.  There were promises of more information to come regarding the “vampiric conspiracy” to rule the city, with mention of an entire council of vampires already being established. 

Without checking Emmerson’s office system for more data, which seemed unlikely, I couldn’t be sure if she might’ve known more already or not.  My instincts told me to just get rid of her now and be done with it, but Sokolova’s command to save killing her as a last resort still stood.  I’d need to track her source down, too, and that would take more time.  So, I resolved to take a different tactic with her.  After I had setup some backdoor access to her system and returned everything to the state I’d found it, I departed with the snoring human completely unaware of my presence, already planning how I’d go about discrediting her work and ruining her reputation.  Not the first time I’d had to do this kind of thing; I’d developed something of a talent for it over the last twenty years.”

#Lore 24 – Entry #104 – Sci-Fi Month II #13 – h@cKiNg == M@g1k

From the Personal Journal of Chiasa Charity Chiasakaniki, Systems Analyst and Programmer, IT Division, assigned UEF-04, Maharani Morgiana.

It’s a question I’ve been asked before, but not one I’ve ever really took time to think about.  I mean, how does one breathe?  You just do, right?  It’s basically the same with my magic.  Basically.  More or less. Kind of?

I know that’s not really a good answer, but my boss keeps hounding me about it, so I guess I should come up with some kind of answer that he’ll accept.  When that ticket came in for a printer issue today when he showed up asking, I was super stoked to go and deal with it, even if it was just a cable that came unplugged; shame it took me like two hours to make sure the department was in no danger of a similar issue happening again!  Safe now, not sorry later!

Still, my magic…I’m not the only kitsune I know who does this kind of thing, I guess it’s become something of a thing with those of us who prefer to live amongst the big cities these days.  It’s not really techomancy as the term is usually used, cause I’m not really repairing or enhancing or controlling machinery with it.  I guess…it’s like…more like, anyway…the enchantments and illusions we kitsune are known for, just in digital form? 

Ugh, this is hard to put into words.

It’s second nature to me, so it’s more instinctive, I think is the way to put it.  When I concentrate on a given task inside a computer system or network and then reach out with my magic as I work, I can somehow make it work on the code.  Like…let’s see…take a simple function to have the coffee machine brew up a cup of coffee every five minutes for an hour.  If I wanted to hack the coffee pot to say, double that rate for two hours, I just find my way inside and will it to happen.  If you were to ask an arcanist, I guess they’d say I “charmed” it into doing something it wouldn’t normally do.

Same way with ICE and security daemons.  If I encounter that kind of thing, I just “throw up an illusion” and hopefully it’ll believe it and go running off after it instead of coming at me, leaving me to slip in behind it and access the juicy bits and bytes.  Doesn’t always work, but most of the time it does; just depends on the system I’m trying to get into or the program I’m trying to modify.  And yeah…I have taken over a system or two before, just to see if I could, not that I was doing anything that illegal or anything.  “Domination” I guess is what an arcanist would call it.  Well, not the same kind of “domination” you’d find the clergy of Erisaya or Yurisaya practicing, but you know, the “mental” kind. 

How do I know which code to target, how do I see these “daemons” inside a system?  Well…I just do?  Guess that wouldn’t be good enough.  Okay, so…it’s like this, once I get into the zone after initially hacking in the traditional way, I just sort of…see it?  It’s like a VR interface I guess, but on a much smoother and less disorienting level, like pure mental imagery that overlays with the code and meshes with it.  I guess it IS kind of like my own personal VR system, just powered by kitsune illusion magic.  And when I look through these “goggles”, I see safe areas, danger zones, and active threats, like a targeting HUD in a starfighter, kind of, so I just know what to do and where to go.  It’s like jacking in directly for a cyborg with the right implants, just without any of the nasty hardware requirements. 

Kind of. I think. 

Is this making any sense at all?  Maybe not.  I dunno, I’ve never had to describe how my magic works before.  It just works.  Why is that so hard to comprehend?

Guess I need to explain my tails too…he’s asked about them about as much as the rest of it.  It’s a thing with kitsune; we don’t all have multiple tails, a tiny fraction of us have all nine, but everyone I know who can do what I do has at least three, like me.  Maybe I should refer him to the mythology on some world or another instead of trying to explain it myself?  I mean, it’s just how this is for me, like, completely a natural thing, so I just don’t know what to say.  My tails are part of me, they indicate a certain magical potency, and they get animated when I’m in the zone.  I just don’t really think about them that much when it comes to what I do.