The Hat Trick by zeroasterix Sunshine in the meeting room. “Sit down Walter, I need to brief you on this case. You too Chatterbox, you'll want to hear this. Bitwise, Random, Patel- can you guys come over here a minute? Dr. Octothorpe, can you put down what you are working on and join us?” “Sure.” “J.B. is going over the sitch,” says Bitwise. “What's 'the sitch' mean?” asks Walter. “The situation,” says J.B. in his leader voice “is not pretty. Someone is playing cat and mouse with us. At Two thirty this morning it seems that we were compromised on the fortress server. The logs have been purged, and the .bash_history has been deleted, but we can assume that source code has been copied. How do we even know we have been penetrated? There is a new folder on the fortress hard drive call Hat_Trick it contains some source code, most likely a rootkit or a virus. New_York was on duty last night, and says there were no remote logins, no sudos. I remind you that the root account has been disabled on the fortress, and there is no way in or out without something being triggered. SUBMARINE is still generating signals, but we can't know for sure if it's been tampered with. I don't know who this is, or what he is up to, but he's messing with the wrong crew.” He takes a big breath, his anger stirs but he keeps it under wraps. “So, order of business: everyone change their passwords. Patel, I need you to scour the back logs, find anything out of the ordinary go back as far as you need to. There has to be some crumb he left behind. Bitwise, play with that experimental honeypot you've been working on, it's time to check our traps. Also, look at wireshark, see if we have caught any stray packets. RND()m, I want you to start looking at our Hat_Trick, full recon, I want to know exactly what that thing does. Doc., you come with me. Walter, I need you to lock this place down, full perimeter check. We have an infiltrator, that puts us at defcon 1 people. Let's scramble!” “What do you want me to do?” asks Chatterbox. “Chatterbox you are our social guy. Go do what you do best, listen on the wire. Talk to your people on irc, check twitter, facebook, security blogs whatever listen for any mention of break-ins, stolen source code or SUBMARINE. We don't live in a vacuum. Oh, and find out what Hat-Trick means.” “I know what it means.” “You do? Well, what is it?” Chatterbox pauses for dramatic effect, no one moves all eyes are on him. “Pulling a Hat-Trick is when you penetrate a girl in all three holes- a true hat trick order is standard, anal, oral.” Enter our villain: Zeroasterix, master of the dark arts, black-hat extraordinaire, mind-manipulator sits in total shadow in the meditation chamber, a sensory deprivation tank. He achieves perfect stillness in complete darkness. Eventually he pulls out of the trance state, opens his eyes, and speaks to himself, repeating over and over like some mantra, “Test of cleverness. Test of nerve. Chasing and being chased.” He breathes deeply and feels exhilaration to the tips of his toes. “Outwit the Other. Trick the tripster, trap the trickster, track the trappers. Find what is hidden, hide what is found.” He knows the motivating incident will get the chase going. “Runners on your Mark. Who chases? Who hides?” Opposition of forces, Interplay. Let me paint the scene evoke the environment, conjure the desktop. Pull up the playlist. [you tube: electro-swing] Zeroasterix emerges from the inky darkness of his float tank dripping wet and enters the flood of white light. His place is the apex of the golden triangle. Bundles of fiber optic cables snake along the floor, while hieroglyphic sequences adorn the walls. He glances at the array of 4k monitors that stream squiggles of alphanumerics, but his glance is only a brushing interest. He looks out across the cityscape made of steel and glass. The sun is sinking into the pacific ocean and appears red behind the haze of smoke and dust kicked up by 8.6 million grubby worms. For them, the day is ending. Jagged black hallucinations rise up on the horizon, is that a cloud of bats? Self-created, a fresh alien insect with quivering antennae, his day has just begun. He suits up, prepares his banana smoothie to which he adds dark powders and mysterious tinctures, carnivorous mushrooms (cordyceps), and algae scraped off the ancient dark pool of Osireion at Abydos. Time to check in make a report. “Hello? Hello? Agent Black here, reporting from cyberspace. Do you read me?” He is the loner, the journeyman way out on the edge of known space making his report, recording audio in total blackness. “This is a violent place- it seems that people need turbulence for transformation. A need for pain to motivate change. It is that constant pressure which drives human achievements, and under the thick layers of time and space is the irritating desire for freedom. I am all alone in this dark dimension staring into this devastating dynamo of destruction and rebirth. This is as far out as I can go, and I feel the darkness crushing me. I may be evolving into something else entirely.” “Agent White here, I read you loud and clear from central station, Omphalos point. I am keeping the peace, doing my best to hold the darkness at bay. “ “I don't know if you are getting this Agent White, the echoes are too much. Instantaneous bio-feedback crashes the input channels. I can't differentiate outside signals from internal diatribe. I am cracking up, maybe just talking to myself. If we lose our nerve and collectively fail to take this evolutionary step, it will result in the spiritual and literal extinction of the human species.” “I am receiving you, Agent Black. Yes, the political and social turmoil we are seeing across the board reflects an underlying biologic crisis. But, it's not that dramatic. This is not the end of the human line, even if it may feel like it is.” There is a long silence. Then quietly Agent Black says, “Human language has within it a virus. Dangerous. It allows us to transform and convey information to future generations but there is a crocodile lurking there, and it hides well because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. Over and out.” “Okay guys,” say J.B. “Report in.” says RND()m like he is spitting out a curse. “Bitwise, has your honeypot picked up anything yet?” “I've tuned the sensitivity levels way up, so I am still filtering the data. But wireshark had some interesting dumps. I've got a pcap here, and it's hard to say what traffic belongs to our attacker, and what belongs to our normal activity. If we assume he has taken on our identities, spoofed his MAC address to appear as an internal machine, it could be anything anywhere. I have isolated some very suspicious traffic, but it could just be erratic packets from SUBMARINE. I am still trying to piece together the data. Come back to me.” “Fine. Keep working. What about you Patel find anything on the logs?” “No. Whoever did this is meticulous with the logs. The records have been touched up, I can tell that much, but other than that nothing. Only thing that keeps coming up are weird timestamps, the numbers 11:11 and 23 keep repeating themselves over and over. It's like he is teasing us.” says RND()m. “What do you mean?” asks J.B. his voice slowly rising in volume. “Well, 23:23 military time is 11:23 pm.” says Chatterbox. “23 is prime, as are 2 and 3.” says Patel. “Telnet! It's port 23! maybe our mystery man is trying to tell us something. Do we have any telnet services running?” Bitwise is catching onto the game. “No.” says Patel “I checked that already.” “Enough!” Bellows J.B. “This is bullshit. When you start looking for some kind of pattern. You tend to find it. None of these are getting us any closer to figuring out who this is.” “He is using a geo-stationary Low-Earth orbit satellite feed, and somehow he's burrowed right into the IPX network. He is beyond the reach of ISPs.” says Bitwise “I tracked some IPs back to Finland, Spain, Hong-Kong, Korea. All over the map.” “This is the communication almost entirely as we plucked it off the wire,” says Patel and throws down the print-out. Dr. Octothorpe picks it up and looks through it. “I can't make heads or tails of it. Is this guy delusional? I think its fiction. He must be downloading sci-fi off peer-to-peer networks, they found a way to piggy-back off the dark-fiber. I know, we are getting bleed though or something. Echoes on the line. Remember, this is experimental technology anyway- we just can't trust SUBMARINE reports without rigorous field testing...” Dr. Octothorpe trails off, out of ideas. “Almost entirely? What's missing?” says Walter. “What?” “You said, 'this is the communication almost entirely as we plucked it off the wire.' What is missing?” explains Walter. “Strange characters, unicode, format encodings probably. Not really sure.” “Let me look at that.” “God-damned it!” J.B. screamed. “We are not just any cyber security team. We are responsible for the data security of everyone who uses this system. I am calling the FBI.” When Zeroasterix uses the Internet it is like taking a drug, information hitting your mainline. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat, then a rush of pure data right into the brain. It lights up all those i connections. Your head splatters in a white explosion, your body falls away and you are suddenly free. This is the realm of the mind alone. It satisfies the need to be without feelings, without the body. Earth bound no more. This is the ghost you. Electron clouds drift. Your nervous system is directly connected to the network. You are the consciousness on the wire. There is a mirror cosmos inside, and without. Since you have lost spatial dimension therefore packet switched network latency is lost. Every time it passes through gateways you are there, the source and the destination. Speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second. According to the laws of thermodynamics such particles and waves travel at c regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial frame of reference of the observer, but distant nebulae spin in complete synchronization, perfectly aligned with other nebulae on the other side of the galaxy all part of the whole. And thus faster than light communication is achieved. It's instantaneous because nothing is separate. We are all a part of just one living sentient organism at all places at once. This is how its always been, right now, right here intersecting the eliptical curve of time and space. The white light diffuses past the blood brain barrier seeping into the central nervous system, selective transport of raw information has heavy security but there are open ports all along the circumventricular organs, released into the oxygen rich, hydrophobic environment of the brain extracellular fluid, the photons self-arrange in a pattern resembling triple petaled flower. Then Agent White comes swarming in after it. Police in riot gear throwing flash bombs, clouds of pepper spray and tear gas. Next the feds in black helicopters, the NSA bristling with wiretaps and antennae, jet fighters, drone aerial surveillance, stealth bombers. Angry as wasps. Keep it real, Zeroasterix tells himself sipping on his banana potion. Tripping slowly, tipping, tilting forward. Once you log out, the unease of limitations creeps in. It gets under your nails, crawls on the skin, like bugs under your collar. You need another shot at it. Agent White comes from East Oakland, a timezone shifter. He may find the system tyrannical, but still believes in it. Hierarchy of command. But, he is starting to drift; power is intoxicating. “My name is Agent White you can call me White. I am glad you called so quickly. This situation could have escalated out of control. I'd like your data please.” says Agent White. “Nice hat dude.” says Chatterbox. “We'd like to explain the situation.” says J.B. “I understand the situation,” says Agent White. “I am here to protect you. I am here to keep the peace. Hand over your keys and there wont be any trouble.” “Wait, wait” J.B backs up “We have some very confidential projects running here. It has taken us years to develop and set up this environment. You need to sign non-disclosure agreements before we hand over anything.” “I am well aware of what you are operating here at this facility.” “Well, if you already know what do you need my keys for? Do you know the Clandestine Chemists? “I don't know. You said Chemists right? “Yeah I've heard rumors. They are supposed to rule this town.” “We've got chemists. Lots of chemists spotted ones stripey ones. What are you doing here?” says Agent White. “We are taking over. That's right White we are going to get those chemists, and when we do we are going to kick them out of here we are going to rule Omphalos point.” “Hmmm so you are bad guys are you?” “What hacker does not love a riddle? Perhaps it is your modus operandi, your raison d'etre. Nothing delights you guys like a puzzle to solve, a complex conundrum to ponder, a brain teaser to untangle.” Agent White stares into the fire. “Stand by for transmission,” he says in a strange tone as if addressing a voice recognition system, then resumes his casual monologue. “It challenges and entertains you.. and us.” Ghost images now dance alongside the blue flickering flame. [Chinese man. “I've got that tune”] Rather than being deliberately enigmatic or opaquely ambiguous, I offer you all the information that I have collected on the suspect. Here's an account to the live datafeed so you can be updated as soon as we get new intel. I have also included annotations and references on every solid lead I could map out. The constellation of clues, the subtleties of the interconnections is mesmerizing. Meaning is within the words themselves, beyond the surface of things. Listen too closely and you can contract the disease.” says RND()m. “Look boys I'm going to say it country simple, your whole operation is nothing but a picture hologram projected by the CIA. What's its purpose? Anyway you slice it, it's a control mechanism. Well, the Queen Bee needs more homey. We'll call a story conference. How about a contest where people can submit their ideas? As a reward we could give them a ticket into the carnival, one free admission to the peep show. Does that sound like a good slant J.B?” JB is relaxed now, sitting back in his chair doodling muscle-boys says, “sounds good to me whatever it takes to keep it going.” “They do need more honey.” continues Agent White. “Or they will just go down the same spiral as everybody else. They just wouldn't be the royal family anymore. Could end up in a semi-detached in Arlington. They are supposed to be a supernatural family.” “Listen to this, Time,” reads Dr. Octothorpe, “with no loop-out or loop-back appears as if we are stuck in time, and suddenly it becomes a resource that we mine, or rent out to other miners- carving out our symbols in the air around us. Neon phosphenes hovering about our head, or giant public works programs, a hundred million hands chiseling out blocks for the masters. But, apply loopout or loopback, and you rise up out of our skulls, it appears so obviously mundane, easy to escape the circuit- and we encounter the 5th dimension. Oh, and Time is running out.” “What is this shit?! What is going on here? I thought we were handling this situation. Why are you cooperating with the guy? And, why am I the only one freaking out about this? The whole situation is unraveling quickly!” says Walter. “Bitwise I heard you graduated from Shodan university,” says Agent White. “Yes sir thats right I passed the national security test and wanted to see some real action, you know.” “Yeah, well this town is pretty rough. Its full of liars” “This town is pretty tough? No problem. Did I tell you I was frigid? I've got no feelings. Nothing bothers me. Never even had an orgasm.” Agent Black's Transmission continues: “Travel the road of death while still alive. Go where the dead go without dying. For anyone else, this pure black place would be deadly. Bring up a shell. List files. Find the crumbling hole gnawed by a rat. The only clue is two dots. Crumbs to follow back up and out the hole. List files again, there's another hole, back up and out again. Now list a final time, there are all the royal families laid out in a proper tree. You can navigate where you want from here. Pass through the gates, I hope you know the password. There are guardians at every door.” “Brute force and nerves are not enough to take you into the presence of the Light Beings. You need to know what you are doing, where you are going, how you stand in relation to the digital gods. You have to be initiated into the mysteries of the Underworld.” [garbled] “Queen of the Underworld, I met her once far below the subway tunnels beneath Mexico City near Chepultepec station.” [garbled] “What do you think is up with this strange occurrence of the number 23?” asks Walter. “I looked it up,” explains Patel “Wikipedia says that Wilson relates the following story: “I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.” “Then I discovered William Burroughs already encountered the potential of language as a virus. He wrote an essay called The Electronic Revolution where he wrote: “Viruses are obligatory cellular parasites and are thus wholly dependent upon the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitize for their survival in an active state. It is something of a paradox that many viruses ultimately destroy the cells in which they are living... And I may add the environment necessary for any cellular structure they could parasitize to survive. Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis will any human creature survive? Is the white race, which would seem to be more under virus control than the black yellow and brown races, giving any indication of workable symbiosis? ‘Taking the virus eye view, the ideal situation would appear to be one in which the virus replicates in cells without in any way disturbing their normal metabolism.’ This has been suggested as the ideal biological situation toward which all viruses are slowly evolving...’ Would you offer violence to a well intentioned virus on its slow road to symbiosis? ‘It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected or that it would necessarily be recognized as a virus. I suggest that the word is just such a virus.” “Do you know what we can do with this code Walter? Bridge language and machine code. Killer virus, verbal chemistry, hack time and space? Release the ideas into the wild.” “How?” “Well, Agent White said something about a short story contest. What if we encode the ideas we are talking about, while applying a lossless compression technique thus scrambling and encoding the virus into the language of the story?” offers Bitwise. “Could you do that? I mean, could you actually craft a story out of the chunks of code? I think it wouldn't make any sense.” considers Walter. “Perhaps.... Well, what if we chalk it to surrealism, or drug abuse. An intentional effect of the author, perhaps the cut-up technique?” “You two seem out of touch. You guys are living in a world of illusions,” says Walter. RND()m interrupts them, “At the end of space and time do all things fall into entropy or do they achiever perfect order?” continues Bitwise. “The alignment of all these synchronizations creates a transparency, much akin the quartz crystal.” Agent White is yelling now, “What do you need from me, that will convince you, to hand over that code? You need a story to wrap things up? To explain things and make you feel warm inside? I've got a story for you. It is about two agents who were working deep in a remote location. One of the agents- we will call him Dawn- got a handful of letters almost every day in the mail, but the other agent- we will call him Dusk- never got any mail.” “One day Agent Dusk offered a hundred dollars to his friend for one of his letters. (in those days that was a lot of money.) 'Of course,' Agent Dawn replied, and he spread out his mail on a table in front of Agent Dusk. 'Take your pick.'” “Agent Dusk looked over the mail and then chose a letter. At dinner that night, Agent Dawn casually asked his friend what was in the letter he'd bought. 'None of your business,' Agent Dusk replied. 'At least tell me who it was from,' asked Agent Dawn. But Dusk refused to tell him. The two men argued but Agent Dusk would not back down. A week later, Dawn offered to buy the letter back for twice the amount. 'Not on your life,' said Agent Dusk and he walked away.” The crew stood around in stupid silence. “That's it?” asks Patel “How does it end?” “Nobody knows.” says Agent White. “Let's make up an ending. Let's say that Agent Dawn sneaks into Agent Dusk's room to steal the letter back, but Dusk walks in and surprises Dawn going through his things. The men fight and Dawn accidentally kills Dusk. He later finds the letter in Dusk's effects and reads it. What would it say?” “I know what it would say,” says Dr. Octothorpe, “It's a letter from Dawn's hatter informing him that his custom made hat was finished and was on it's way...” “Good!” says Agent White, “But it leaves us unsatisfied doesn't it? We expect more from the letter than a bit of trivial news; we expect the letter to go deeper into the personal lives of the two men. We expect the letter to contain some kind of secret.” “Okay,” says Chatterbox, “I got one. The letter is from Agent Dusk's girlfriend back home saying that she's making a surprise visit, and since Agent Dawn is such a good friend, could he please help arrange a surprise party?” “Great!” exclaims Agent White, “This is more ironic because the girlfriend will indeed get a surprise reception, but not one she anticipates. We also can't help but wonder how Agent Dawn will explain the other Agent's death.” “This ending also explains why Agent Dusk would choose that particular letter, since he would have seen his girlfriend's name and return address on the envelope.” “And, the conclusion leaves no legitimate room for questioning. Everything's been explained, and we are satisfied.” Aren't we?