I had never met her in person, but I knew her, and I had loved her, and when her body was discovered by the police, a part of me died too.
They located her body early Tuesday morning, when some night cook at Dillon's Cafe stepped outside in the alley for a smoke and noticed a pair of flawless white legs sticking out from underneath a pile of garbage bags.
Still wearing those red stilletos... oh man-- and the way she used to wear them with her glinting sequin dress which seemed to hug every curve of her body.
The way her black hair used to wing out at the sides of her head, and the way she would look directly at you and smirk and god could only know the devious things she was thinking... sorry, I digress.
She lived three doors down from me, in room 230 of Continental Place.
We passed each other only twice in the hallway, but both times, she looked directly at me as that frustrating smirk slowly hijacked her face and captivated my gaze.
I remember her most clearly as the star singer at "The Runway Club" downtown, where I would eat most of my meals alone, working outside of my apartment.
She always seemed to be leaving her apartment-- I don't ever remember her entering it, but I do recall that she was always hanging around older men-- forties, fifties-- the type who had enough money to burn, and lifetimes of secrets.
One of them was responsible for this-- I had never been more certain of anything in my life.
She must have discovered something, something dangerous to them, and they snuffed her to keep it from getting out.
Statistically, most murders are committed by someone the victim knows personally; I had to get her contacts; I had to find her phone.
Although I knew it meant breaking my vow, vengeance had to be served, and swiftly, and if I didn't act on her behalf, no one would.
And I have to admit, a part of me just wanted a reason to go bad again.

I had to find out if her phone had been collected by the fuzz at the crime scene as evidence, or if it was still unaccounted for somewhere.
I logged into the Federal Crime DB (using the username and password I'd set up years ago) and started going through the data which had been logged by the fuzz just hours ago.
No phone was mentioned in their report-- good, that simplified things.
Just as I began to feel mildly elated at the prospect of quickly finding and incriminating the guilty party, of tying together this unsolved crime with expediency, I came across the classified photographs of the scene-- what they had done to her-- primarily to her face...

I turned my computer off and went to my window.
I stood there, stationary, for what must have been over an hour.
I stared out the window at the rain in the late afternoon, falling on the city street below in waves of torrents, like wind through grass on a plain, accompanied by dim sepia light which leaked through the cloud break in the sky, down onto this vulgar city.
And as I watched, a deattached rage began building inside of me, a latent disgust.
I turned from my window and looked at my bed.
The wall clock read 4:49 pm.
I dragged my bed five feet away from the wall and knelt down, prying up the floorboards.
Pulling my steel box out from the floor, I opened it to get at my equipment.
For a second time today, my breathing stopped, but this moment was accompanied by a nostalgic sensation, a rush of delicious memories-- a surge from my youth.
It was like smelling the sweet perfume of a long-lost love and instantly recalling not just specific moments, but the feeling of the entire relationship-- out of darkness, unremembered, miraculously thrust into the blinding light of the present, full of forgotten detail.

I removed my burn fone, and smiled, feeling it again in my hands.
I retrieved the fone's battery and charger from the box and plugged the charger into the wall socket.
Next, I found the faux ID which least resembled me (Albert Devlin) and rummaged through the box to find the accompanying credit card.
I pulled out my police scanner, my lockpicks, and my face-scrambler.
I palmed the Beretta M9 9mm pistol (missing serial number) and my two loaded magazines.
I had left it clean and well-oiled.
I set it on my bed.
I grabbed my old hunting knife; the tip was still nicked from when I had slashed that rich prick's car all those years ago.
I laughed, feeling a bit wild and reckless again.

I showered, then dressed in a pair of skinny jeans with a black v-neck t-shirt and some hi-top sneakers.
Best to go casual for this part of the plan.
I slipped on a pair of latex gloves.

I strapped the hunting knife to my thigh, tucked the Beretta into my side holster, clipped the scanner onto my belt, put my face-scrambler around my neck (it was one of the discontinued puka shell necklace models) and slid the picks into my pocket.
I tested my face-scrambler, cycling through all my saved profiles before settling on Albert Devlin.
I went to the mirror to see test my facial expressions and smiled;
I looked Caucasian.
I grabbed my longcoat and went to my door.
No one was in the hallway, and no one was at her apartment.
Good.
I stepped out, locked my door, and headed down the hallway.
Her next of kin would probably come by tomorrow to begin the process of claiming her belongings.
They might even come today.

I didn't have to worry about hallway cameras; one good thing about living in old housing.
I made my way to her door, which only had a single deadbolt.
After inserting the tension wrench, the door unlocked as soon as I slipped the 'S' rake in.
I went inside and locked the door.

Her apartment was a mess.
Unbelievably messy, actually.
It didn't seem to be vandalism from someone turning her place over; most of it seemed to be clothing.
I had to be quiet, since her apartment still had power and the fridge, stove, or TV were listening for spoken commands.

I grabbed a chair and reinforced the locked door.

There were three ways I could go about gaining access to her contact list and other data: I could crack the local encrypted memory in her phone, or I could gain access to a personal computer with saved login data and access her Federal User Account by auto-logging into it.
The third way involved an old contact of mine who worked as a Federal Admin; I could always ask her to send me her data, but this method was significantly riskier for me, and it would also take longer, since FAs are monitored pretty heavily these days.
Finding a laptop would be the most convenient method, but she didn't seem the type who would own a computer, so I started looking for her phone.

I went into her bedroom and looked next to her bed.
I found the charger and some used needles, no phone.
Her clothes were everywhere, all over the floor, and hanging out of some half-opened dresser drawers, like her dresser was vomiting them into the room.
I didn't want to be here more than five, maybe ten minutes, but it looked like I might be here longer than that, given the state of disarray which she had lived in.
I started to feel melancholy-- all my idealistic notions of her were crumbling, faster than I thought they would as I pried into her life.
She was just another ridiculously beautiful woman who was also a junkie, self-pitying, illogical.
Unable to plan out her life or think about the consequences of her choices.
Always hooking up with the wrong guys, living a frivolous, purposeless life, dictated by the stronger will of others, not so much by her own.
I wondered what five-hundred creds would have bought me with her and started to feel worse.
I pushed these idle musings out of my head and went back to the task at hand.
I looked at the top of her dresser, and went through the drawers one by one.
More drug paraphernalia, no phone.
I checked the bathroom sink, next to the toilet.
I scanned the counter top of the kitchen, the dining table, the sofa cushions.
Nothing.
No sign of a computer either, or even a tablet, wristwatch or data-jockey.
I started to move the clothing around on the floor next to the sofa, and that's when I felt extra weight in a pair of pants.
I reached in and pulled out a small black phone.
I thought it was strange-- I had pegged her as the dumb-frivolous-model type, and had expected her phone to have a rhinestone encrusted case, or maybe something with Marilyn Monroe on it, or a margarita.
So why did she have a minimalist, small black phone?
And that's when I noticed the clothing on the floor near the couch was from a man.
And another revelation came to me as the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up: I had forgotten to check the entire apartment first and make sure no one else was here.
I pulled out my hunting knife and went toward the back room of the apartment.
I looked into the back room, which was an office space with art supplies and a half-painted nude portrait fixed on an eisel.
I was the only person in her apartment.
I suppose I had lucked out this time-- it had been too long since I had done one of these things-- one of these acts of my youth.
I was going to give her room one last look-over when I decided to open the phone (covering the camera with my thumb), and go through the contact list if it wasn't locked-- perhaps her phone number was listed on here.
If so I could call her phone and see if it was in the apartment.
Unfortunately, the phone was locked.

I went back into her room and started checking clothing on the floor when I spotted her gym bag next to the dresser.
The clothes were still damp, she must have used them yesterday.
Searching the bag, I found a locker key from The Excelsior Gym, the largest gym closest to The Runway Club.
The key was imprinted '7C'.
Strange that this wasn't on a keychain with her apartment key-- she must have removed it recently.
I realized that I could always send a Federal request for her user data, using my fabricated Federal login credentials, but this was undesirable because it would draw attention to my faux-account.
I decided I would find out what was located in her gym locker first.

I pulled the battery out of the black phone, so my location couldn't be worked out from relative signal strength among multiple cell towers, and I left her apartment.
As I walked down the hallway, I went over my next steps.
I'd boot the black phone up again after desoldering the antenna from it and replacing it with an appropriate-valued resistor, to render it incapable of transmissions.
Then I would run a Differential Power Analysis attack to recover the AES-256-bit encryption key and decrypt all the local data stored on this phone, see where that leads.
I'd go to the gym and check the woman's locker, but I'd have to do this when there weren't many people there, say 2-3 am or so.
In the meantime, to pull off a DPA attack on the black phone, I had to get my Tektronia Oscilloscope and test-bed back from Nathan Adler.

I checked my watch.
6:15pm.

I left Continental Place Apartments and entered the street.
Nathan's, then prep black phone, start running DPA, probably finish that, re-check the crime DB for any new info, and then head to the gym for her locker.

I got on the metro (public transportation) inserted the battery into my burn fone and looked up Nathan's number.
Just as I was about to dial, I stopped, and looked up.
This was going to be a moderate amount of work-- I would be taking on some moderate risks for a dead woman, a stupid dead woman who I barely knew, for whom the fuzz would probably find justice for anyway.
I guess at least I wasn't bored, at least I had something to do today other than idly check up on my already well-off financial assets, cut myself, or think obsessively about suicide.
I really wanted a drink, but I'd given that up years ago too.
I was breaking all sorts of rules today, and that worried me.
I pressed the call button and popped some Adderall.
I was actually interested to see if Nathan's number still worked.
The fone was dialing, so I guess the number was still in service.
The call connected, someone had picked up on the other end.
"What do you want at this hour?". It was Nathan.

"Sex, money, power." I said, completing the handshake.

"Well well well, after all these years, you finally cracked. How have you been man?"

"Been good. I'm just in the game to find out what happened to a victim in a crime. I need my Oh-scope and test-bed back. Just for tonight."

Nathan didn't say anything for a moment.

"Well, I actually, ah..."

"Let me guess, you sold it."

"Yeah, I sold it. I owed somebody a favor, and since I had moved onto the software side of things, I really had no need for it anymore."

"Well I hope it was a really big favor. That scope alone was valued at over 10-K."

"Holy cow, you're shitting me."

"No, I'm not. Who else has an oh-scope and a test-bed?"

"Well hold on; let me call that guy and see if I can borrow it. You said just for tonight?"

"Yes, just for tonight."

"Ok, I'll call you back in ten minutes."

I hung up and looked around on the bus.
Some teenagers were up front sharing pictures and giggling.
An old woman clutched her side-bag and smiled as she looked out the window.
A man and a woman talked softly to each other, the woman resting her head on the man's shoulder.
My mood elevated significantly as the Adderall kicked in.

Nathan finally called back.

"I'll have it here by 9pm."

"Ok, sounds good. See you at nine."


#######################################################

I took a cab to his place at 9pm.
He opened the door and said "Nice face."
I picked up my old scope and test-bed and returned to my apartment, leaving the cabbie a 50 cred tip.

I turned off my face-scrambler necklace and started re-charging it as I created the DPA test setup.
All of my old presets were gone on the scope, as well as the test bed.
I sighed as I set to work on reprogramming them.
The couple next door began screaming at each other-- a domestic disturbance serenade.

I went to my desk and opened the case on the black phone.
I desoldered the antenna and replaced it with a 50 ohm resistor.
I turned it on and verified that the phone still worked and that there was no signal.
I pulled out the battery again and placed the phone in the test-bed, hooking it up to the variable DC power supply, placing the scope probes across the 1K ohm test resistor, which was inserted in series with the power supply for monitoring drops in voltage associated with the device's power behavior.
It took me over three hours to set this all up, to get the phone automatically booting and the scope automatically saving measurements of the boot sequence power trace.
I began to wonder if any of this was worth it.
Did I mention I didn't really think much of her any more?
How many murders happen every day in this city, how many of them happen to people who had it coming?
People who knew they should've gotten out a long time ago but didn't.
Perhaps murder and violence is human nature.
Might as well try to stop a lion from eating meat.
Or water from flowing downhill.

At least I wasn't bored.

I left the test running, grabbed my face scrambler, my own gym bag, a protein shake from the fridge and left for the Excelsior Gym, the largest gym closest to The Runway Club.
As I passed her apartment, I noticed that her door was kicked in.
The doorframe was split in half on the lock side and a shoe print was left on the door.
I didn't look to see if anyone was still inside; I walked away as fast as I could.

#################################################################

I walked into the Excelsior Gym and held her key up to the RFID reader.
The reader beeped green and I walked past the front desk without any hindrance.
The large wall clock in the main workout room read 2:45am.
No one was here.
I moved from the workout room directly to the woman's locker room.
I hoped that there were no women in here, a man in the women's locker room could turn into a sex-offender hunt which could potentially expose me as a cracker.
Whatever happened next would happen-- shikata ga nai.
This was as good a time as I was going to get to uncover the contents of her locker.
I walked in and started reading locker numbers.
These lockers were numbered in the 600's.
Dammit-- I was going to have to go to the end of the locker room, walking past all of the aisles.
I walked very quickly.
As I turned a corner, there was a woman, an employee, sitting at an equipment checkout desk.
She looked up from her tablet and stared at me wide-eyed.
I had learned that the easiest way to disarm people's initial reactions was to not act nervous or surprised, like you've been caught.
I tilted my head with an apologetic smirk, like I had practised and executed so many times before, as I walked closer to her desk and then past it.

"Hello" I smirked, "can you tell me where locker 7C is? My sister is very ill and forgot her antidepressants when she was here earlier today."

She was alarmed, but not dangerously so.

"Hey, you can't be in here!"

"Just down this way I imagine? Oh thank you. I won't be a moment."

"Hey!"

I walked faster as she got up from her desk and was on my tail.

"You can't be in here!"

"She's dangerously manic right now and we just need to get her antidepressants."

I turned the corner to go down the first row of lockers.
7C, right here.
I inserted the key and opened the locker just as the girl-employee turned the corner, watching me.

"I'm terribly sorry, but it's a medical emergency."

"I'm calling security!" she threatened.

The girl walked away, probably to call security.

I looked into the locker. Empty. Bare metal walls painted a drab tan color.
I was beginning to get angry.
I walked as quickly as possible, almost jogging, out of the women's locker room.
The girl was at her desk, phoning security.
I exited The Excelsior just as security entered the lobby on my tail from the workout room.
As I walked to the Metro station, I listened to my police scanner.
Dispatch sent out a message to the fuzz on patrol, telling them to look for a white male with red hair and a moustache who had trespassed into The Excelsior Gym.
I entered a stall in the men's bathroom of the Metro station and took off my face-scrambler and shirt.
After putting them into my gym bag, I got onto the 3:30am eastbound.

I was the only one in this car, aside from the driver, and a single woman who sat directly across from me.
She looked about my age-- about thirty-two or so, and wore a blue and white striped sundress.
Pretty.
She looked at me and I smiled.
Then she eyed my muscular, shirtless body-- I think I could see the exact moment on her face when she noticed my scars.
She looked away.
My smile faded.

Back at Continental Place, the dead woman's apartment door was still ajar.
I walked into my apartment and locked the door behind me.
I tossed my gym bag down on my living room floor and checked on the status of the DPA attack.
I had the encryption key.
Over one hundred thousand voltage traces had been fed into a C++ averaging program on my work PC.
The final average voltage trace had then been input into a thresholding program, which had assigned one and zero values to the average trace, producing a 257-bit number.
The first bit was not part of the key; it was the average initial power level of the phone when it first booted up.

I set to work reconfiguring the test-bed to read the encrypted memory from the phone, decrypt it using the recovered key, and store it all on a USB flash drive.

I had it after an hour.
I was beginning to lose my ability to think straight from fatigue.
I decided to take an initial look at the data before crashing to bed.

I popped the USB drive into my work machine and looked at the pictures first.
I recognized whose phone this was almost immediately, and oh man, the photos were bad.
The most recent photos were of her murder.
I viewed them in reverse chronology
There were pictures of people posing with her dead body.
Pictures of her, eyes duct-taped shut, bruised, and tied to a chair.
There was a video clip of them cutting up her face, mocking her while she screamed herself so hoarse that she began to sound inhuman.
I suddenly didn't feel like this was such a purposeless effort any more, and that unbearable rage began to mount inside of me again.
Several pictures showed clear images of their faces.
I could incriminate all of them with these photos alone.
Other pictures were from earlier dates, they included nudes of her, dick pics and nude selfies of the phone's owner, club scenes of the two of them hanging out.
Other pictures were of the phone's owner at strip clubs with his male chums.
Drug pictures.
Cliche pictures of things like sports cars, specialty drinks, guns and porn.
This guy was human garbage.
I looked at the call and message logs and saw that the majority of his correspondence was with her.
He was in his late forties, and he had done all of this because she had cheated on him.
I wished that I could spend five uninterrupted minutes with him alone-- the same type of privilage he had enjoyed with her.

I would look at the rest of this data tomorrow.
I got up from my desk,and crashed in my bed.
Just before I succumbed to sleep I asked myself, what good was it?
What good was any of it?
I wanted a drink so bad-- you have no idea.
My lips felt dry and my heart began racing as my anxiety began to surge.

I got out of bed and turned my TV on.
I went to my couch and fell asleep there.

########################################################

I awoke at midday from a bad dream, not knowing where I was at first.
The dream was about Karen, before she had commit suicide.
I popped an Adderall and went into the shower.
I had an interesting idea while showering-- it was to find the dead woman's phone number from that guy's cell phone data and call her phone from my burn fone.
If her phone was still powered (a long shot), I could keep calling over and over until someone picked up.

After getting dressed, I looked in the man's contact list and found her.
I loaded her contact info and the photos onto my burn fone, grabbed the battery, and rode the metro.
I called her number and my fone was dialing.
I guess it was still powered somewhere-- someone had been charging it.
It went to her voicemail greeting after ringing six times.
I hung up and called again.
Voicemail again after six rings.
I hung up and dialed again.
Same thing, so I hung up and dialed again.
This time the call connected.
Someone on the other end had picked up.
I held the fone up to my ear and listened.
No one said anything; I started talking, hopeful that the person on the other end wouldn't hang up and never answer again.

"I found your little black phone, asswipe." I said with disdain.

Silence. And then.

"Who the fuck are you?"

"That's incidental I'd say, considering the photos I found after breaking your data's encryption."

"Bullshit."

"Here, this one is my favorite."

I sent him the picture of the girl, tied up and bloody, strapped to the chair.
I sent another picture of him and his cronies with the girl in the background, their faces all clear and in focus.

"Okay." he said. "What do you want?"

"Why don't we meet at The Runway Club tonight, say 10pm? You make the reservations. We can talk about a deal. Money for data."

A pause. Then...

"Okay."

"Great. Bring your friends; this concerns them also."

"I plan to." he said and then hung up.

And then I realized what I had been planning to do all along without ever consciously realizing it.
I wanted to make a permanent difference in someone's life.
I wanted my life to finally count for something, something more than just stupid, sophisticated pranks, digital voyeurism, and burning notorious, malicious crackers.
I got off the Metro on 3rd Avenue and went into the liquor shop.

################################################################

When 8pm rolled around, I was still pretty buzzed.
It was absolutely lovely-- I had missed this feeling.
I had gone to the movies and fed ducks at the park and hadn't done anything technical or electronic all day.
I went home, popped some Adderall, and got dressed in my favorite slim, black suit.
I threw some gel in my hair and wore cologne.
I double-checked that there was a fully-loaded magazine in my Beretta and took the safety off.
I turned on my work machine, and coded a script to automatically upload the pictures to a wikinews community site in an annonymous post at 9:30 pm.
I did a test run of the script with demo values, verifying that it would work as intended.
I then set the test values back to the real values and started laughing; I couldn't help it.
I took the small black phone, along with my burn fone and my hunting knife, and headed to The Runway Club.

I went to the alleyway and hid my gun and knife under a trash can lid next to the alleyway door of the club.

I went to the front and checked in.
I said his name and they guided me to his table.
No one was there yet (it was 8:47pm), so I made like I was going to the washroom, but went to the kitchen instead.
I went through the kitchen to the door which led out into the alley, opened it, and discretely armed myself with my gun and my knife.
I found myself laughing again-- I forced myself to stop and be serious.
I snagged a bottle of wine from a rack, and re-entered the club from the kitchen entrance, making my way back to his table.
They had really good acts tonight, and very talented signers.
All the same, I was beginning to wish I had brought something to work on, or at least to read; I was getting bored.
A hostess approached me, wearing a signature Runway dress, and asked me if I would like to order anything.
She had enormous eyes.
I smiled.
"I will pay you two hundred creds to sit here and talk with me over a glass of wine."

She looked at me, and then looked around to see if anyone was watching.

"I can't-- I could lose my job."

"I will pay you two thousand creds to sit here and talk with me until my party shows up in a half hour."

She stared at me in disbelief.

"Let's see those creds."

I pulled out my card and asked for her phone.
She handed it to me and I swiped my card for the amount of 2,000 creds.

She sat down.

"You must get a lot of girls with that kind of money." she mused.

"No, actually I can't stand most girls. But I do like intelligent ones with cute faces." I winked at her as I opened the wine bottle.
She smiled.
I poured her a glass and then one for myself.

"So what's your name?" I asked her, drinking the wine and not letting it breathe.

"Katy." she said. "What's yours?"

"What do you like to do Katy? What are your goals?"

"I'd like to own my own beauty salon someday, but I have to save up for beauty school first."

As these words left her mouth, I saw him enter the club with his friends.
The doorman assigned a hostess and she started bringing them to our table.
I quickly pulled the pistol out of my suit pocket and set it on my lap, under the table cloth, out of sight.

I looked at Katy.

"Katy, I'm sorry, but my party is here. You should leave now; I don't want you to get hurt. Good luck with your beauty salon."

She looked at the men in suits approaching and then at me again as she stood up with some measure of visible fear.
She walked away quickly.

I remained sitting and drinking my wine.
The man and his friends approached with the hostess, who helped them get seated and left.
Every one of them from what I could see were wearing shoulder holsters.
No one had pat them down, but then again, in this city, it wasn't that surprising.

We stared at each other, he and I, no one speaking-- I didn't want him to speak to me-- I didn't want to hear his filthy voice.
I had his phone under my hand on the table top.
I slid it over to him and rested both hands on the table.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"I just wanted to be sure that you didn't win re-election." I replied.
I grabbed my pistol, stood up and fired.
None of them had reacted yet because I had done it so fast.
I shot him first and kept firing at the rest of them.
Screams erupted and some of his group returned fire at me.
The sounds were deafening.
I felt some rounds rip through me and fell to the ground.
I kept returning fire until they had all fallen.

People continued to run out of the crowded club, screaming cacophonies, speaking in tongues.
I put two more rounds in him and staggered out into the alleyway, through the kitchen.
My leg was wet-- blood was trailing behind me.
My stomach and chest burned-- my shirt was wet.

I reached the alleyway and fell down, struggling to breathe.
Sirens.
I looked around at the garbage and realized that this was where her body was found.
I started to laugh with a gurgle.
I checked my watch.
9:37pm.
The data had been uploaded.
I lay on my back, smiling, knowing that although it was a small change, tomorrow would be a little better for this vulgar city.