title: Defcon 65
author: Jack Urban

Great! Another Red Star Glory and it was already 16:12. The tow truck driver unhooked the battered Chinese delivery drone from his collection rack, and it made a lightweight thump onto her service cart. The yellow Amazon logo on its body meant that it had to be fixed tonight, or she would get a less than entertaining post from the accounting department about missing the SLA the company had with Amazon. She has never met any of the people from corporate, did not plan to, and took a small amount of pleasure imagining the bean counters as bobblehead billboard avatars.
 - What the hell is wrong with this thing? It's almost five! - Natalie yelled at the scurrying drone service worker.
 - Look, lady, I just collect them and drop them off wherever. Be happy it's not covered in dog crap like this Daiso one I just pulled from a backyard in Wickliffe.
The driver reached into his truck to get a tablet for her to ack the delivery while she marveled in disgust at the brown streaks now complementing the obnoxious pink paint job of a drone adorned with an overly enthusiastic cartoon character.
Natalie picked up the bulky RFID scanner, waved it at the Amazon drone, and its registration and last flight path appeared on the screen. No obvious on-board diagnostic error codes were present in its circular buffer. She would have to open it up and bench-test each logic board.
She mounted it on the hoist and proceeded to pry at the service panels with a large screwdriver. The Red Star Glory drones were pretty old, and were not designed with serviceability in mind. Stuff made in China was usually pretty robust, but these were made to Amazon’s notorious cost-cutting specs, and plastic tabs were used just about everywhere an engineer would usually put a screw. 
A plastic tab snapped under the pressure and she cursed the humid Ohio summer air.
Natalie’s boss walked into the service bay holding a tablet. He made an average survey of Nat’s face, the drone, and his tablet.
 - Oh that sucks. Hey, are you going to be at that VR space tonight? I have a friend who needs help with some old thing, figured you could take a look. I would appreciate it.
 - If I ever make it out of here, yeah!
She liked her boss. He was one of those old-school guys who really knew how to repair things, still wore denim, was willing to answer her inexhaustible questions, and was generally a reasonable human being. He also let her take whatever parts and tools she wanted that were destined to be crushed. This was a decent unofficial perk of the job, as it helped with her side gig of fixing electric bikes and random mobility toys of yesteryear. In return, she gave a hefty discount to anyone John referred to her. 
92 minutes later she was enjoying her renewed sense of freedom as the warm night air and cool OLED street lights where paving her way to the VR cafe along the ever-moving automated train track with cars shuffling goods from an Amazon distribution center to hubs all over the country. VR cafe was a bit of a nostalgic misnomer. There was nothing inviting about the space. A large old industrial building subdivided into poorly-lit acrylic-laden bays. The big draw was unmetered blazing-fast redundant network access, clean bathrooms, and a decent food service counter staffed by a guy whose face was devoid of judgement. People mostly came here to compete in esports, or to work some assinie VR job. Nat rented a bay primarily for the network access, and to have a space to work on her side-gig in peace, without being hassled by her family for having parts and frazzled wire bunnies slowly encroach on their living space. The network access here let Nat scour the overseas online communities for firmware images and service manuals she used in attempts to defeat the DRM on mobility devices without having to worry about her access getting pulled for “suspicious activity”, like it was at home, to the further annoyance of her family. Here, it simply got lost in the noise, or maybe the VR cafe had some sort of special deal with the network provider. She wasn’t sure, and was not going to compromise her stay here by asking too many questions.
Her wrist vibrated. A post from an unknown US-ID scrolled on her jacket sleeve.
 - Hey, John sent me to you. Said you can fix my bike.
 - Bay 12 - she motioned back a reply at the post
A minute later, the wheel of an old Zero motorcycle scraped the acrylic sliding door of the VR bay.
 - Oh, sorry. I’m Kim. You’re Nat, right?
The woman looked to be in her late 40s, with short carbon black hair, a matching airbag jacket, and a light blue silk scarf tied around her neck. 
 - Yeeeah. Hi. Um, just put it over here for now. What can I do for you?
 - Well it is my baby and I’m not getting the range from it that I used to.
 - That thing looks pretty old, probably a manufacturer forced decay thing, shouldn’t be too bad. Let me see if I have the stuff for it.
Nat plugged a charging-comm cable into the bike and started flipping through her library of manufacturer software while her curious customer was busy scanning the shelves full of random junk in Natalie’s bay.
 - Hey that’s a Thinkpad! My dad used to have one of these when I was growing up.
 - Oh, that, I think its a cool device. It doesn’t work, couldn’t find the part for it, but I thought the retro design was pretty interesting so I kept it. 
She finally found the right interface software for the bike and fired it up.
 - Huh, well it looks like someone already re-flashed it to remove the decay. The battery pack is pretty degraded according to this thing. Oh wow, it’s lithium ion?
 - Its impolite to guess an old woman's age. - grinned Kim.
 - No, its cool! I don’t get to see too many of these. It's going to take me a bit to see if I can source something to replace these battery packs. Can you leave it with me for a few days?
 - Sure. How much do you charge for something like this?
 - Oh, well, since you got a personal referral from John, I’ll cut you a deal. Depends on what I find. How do you know John, if you don’t mind me asking? 
 - We used to work together at a tech company before the Internet collapsed and the DATA act of 2040. He’s a great guy. We stay in touch.
Although Kim looked confident and approachable, Natalie thought she noticed a ripple of sadness wash across her aging eyes.
 - Yeah, he is a good boss. You know, I’ve always wondered what it was like before the network! But finding information about it is pretty tough. Most of the stuff I find is archived low-resolution flat media, but nothing really interesting. Looking for historical records on it has gotten my network access cut off a few times already.
 - Things are different now. You’re young. Be careful with that stuff. God, I sound like my father. I’m sure you don’t need to hear it seeing how you’re illegally flashing mobility devices in a VR cafe. 
A patron a few bays away let out a primal celebratory yelp, solidifying the awkward pause.
Kim reached into her jacket and pulled out a flat plastic card.
 - Actually, here. This may be of interest to you. I gotta go. Post me about the bike. It was nice meeting you.
With the black plastic card deposited into Nat’s hand she quickly ducked out of the bay, leaving Nat in a semi-frozen state.
The card looked like a regular tablet data slide, but did not appear to be readable in her terminal. There was no label on it, except for a random collection of white squares that looked like some sort of artistic stamp. They seemed remotely similar to something she has seen before. What the hell was it? And what an odd encounter with the owner of the Zero bike now keeping her company. Wait, that’s it. The white squares on the card weren’t for decoration, they were an identifier she’s seen on some of the really old bike parts. It was a QR code! She searched through her notes to find an old manual on decoding these for reading the serial number of some vintage Apple iFriend batteries. An hour later she was able to read the QR code. But the data did not seem to make any sense. Then she remembered that during that time, a primitive text encoding was used on just about everything. ASCII. A few gestures in, and she was staring in disbelief at the decoded message.


U R INVITED TO DEFCON65 AUG 12 BUFFALO NY 400 EXCHANGE ST


Defcon. She’s heard about the annual hacker gathering, but after it got raided by the Safe America Department two years in a row, information about it all but disappeared from the network. Some of the overseas news aggregators said that it has gone underground, while others said that it was canceled year after year. Wait, was Kim a hacker? When was it again? Aug 12th, that's in two days! Also, how is it already 21:00? She would have to think about this tomorrow. Nat slid the bay doors closed, grabbed a burger pizza taco from the food stand and headed home.


Nat woke up with more questions than the night before. 
 - Am I really going to do this? 
Her train of thought was interrupted by a post vibrating her sleeve. A new season of Synth Sorrow was released on VTube, and her friend Nikolas was clawing at the opportunity to spoil it for her. 
 - Well, it sure sounds better than hearing about Synth Sorrow for the next few days.
According to the invitation, Defcon was tomorrow in Buffalo, NY. She pulled up the auto-bus reservation portal and selected what seemed like a reasonable ticket to see how much it would cost to get there. A notice flashed on her sleeve.
“You reservation will not be completed. Please refer to the Safe America Department for clearance before attempting to book again”. Which was instantly followed up by a nagging vibration on her wrist and an accompanying post from the local SAD office notifying Nat that her recent activity was deemed suspicious, and would require her to appear to give the purpose of her travel in person.
 - Damn it all to hell!
Her sudden interest in traveling on a short notice has raised suspicion with the government’s crude network activity monitoring machine learning. Now she would have to find a different way to get to Defcon and take extra steps to ensure that SAD had better things to do than pay her a visit when she does not show up to their office later today. She decided to deal with the SADs first. This wasn’t her first time skipping a check-in after triggering some surveillance program on the network. Natalie’s attention turned to the continuing trickle of social media nonsense about the new season of Synth Sorrow.
She walked downstairs with a plan. First the kitchen. She called out to house AI.
 - Mr.House?
 - Good morning, Natalie. What can I help you with?
 - What’s the best snack and scent package for binge watching Synth Sorrow?
 - VTube, in partnership with NestleKraftHathaway suggest the …
 - Great, order one for me please, and a set my status to “Synth Sorrow binge! DND PLZ”
 - You got it!
A few minutes later she was watching a Daiso drone, this one without brown adornment, lowering a heavy paper package onto her back porch. Satisfied, she grabbed the box and headed down to the basement where her brother was flailing his arms in a VR rig. 
 - Hey, Barry, whatcha doing? - Nat tried to sound as innocent at possible while holding the box.
Her brother peeled the head ring off his face with a raised eyebrow.
 - Beware of nerds bearing gifts, eh? Want to join me? There’s a new dirt track set in New Mexico I think you’ll enjoy.
 - No, that’s okay. Hey, can you do me a favor? She motioned the box at him with a sheepish grin.
 - Now that, is a sizeable bribe. What, exactly, is it that I’m doing?
 - More like, what am I doing?
 - Okay, and what ARE you doing?
 - I’m binge watching Synth Sorrow and do not want to be disturbed. And you are going to have a novel opinion about your sister wasting her weekend on that terrible show for social media.
 - Sounds reasonable to me.
 - You’re the best, bro!
 - Hope there are Ketchup flavoured chips in this snack pack, or I might add some embarrassing details to what else you’re watching on VTube.
The VR gear around his neck erupted with an audible complaint from his friends still waiting for him to return to what was most important.
She turned around to walk up the stairs, made another turn back towards the box, fished out a burrito wrapped in a self-heating aluminum pad, swung around another 180 degrees and hurried upstairs. The burrito would come in more than handy for sure.
In her room she queued up VTube to show the latest season and threw the VR headset on her bed. 
 - Now, how the hell am I going to get to Buffalo?
Renting an uber was out of the question already. Borrowing a motorcycle was plausible, but she would likely get stopped by a patrol on the interstate. Her gaze outside the window fixated on the freight rail cars being shuffled by the automated propulsion gates in the distance. A crazy idea stirred in her mind. It was that kind of day, it seemed. She’s read on one of the Asian mobility repair forums that gangs have been able to target some of the cars carrying high value goods by reading the destinations of the cars from the RFID tags embedded on the side, and sending a scrapper crew to pillage it when it was on a slow moving set of rails. Most of the time, they were caught and arrested, but it did not stop them from trying. Natalie had a theory she wanted to explore. She packed a light bag, threw in some meal bars for good measure, and was heading for the door, when her wrist vibrated with a post asking her to rate her VTube binge snack pack. 
 - Sloppy, Nat. Sloppy! - she scoffed at herself
 Even the worst of the government monitoring algorithms would not take the bait of her staying home all weekend if her personal tablet suddenly walked out of the house and went on a road trip. She unhooked it from her wrist, and threw it onto the couch.


An hour later, armed with the RFID tool and a few old drone RFID tag she liberated from her job, Natalie settled in at the top of a hill overlooking the railway. 
 - These things can’t be that different from delivery drones, right? - Nat asked herself.
With freight cars periodically sliding down over the hump toward an automated track switch, and the RFID scanner set to debug mode, she started flipping through the frequencies. 13.5 Mhz, 27Mhz, 433Mhz, 915Mhz, 2.45Ghz - bingo! The scanner began decoding some rudimentary protocols. The tags used by the railway to direct the cars turned out to be pretty simple. They contained the expected ownership information, asset tracking numbers, and destination. She decided to rig up a simple test. She flashed one of the drone RFID tags, setting the owner to a global waste disposal company and a destination for Houston. But how would she trick the railway scanners from reading only her tag? Perhaps, she could mask the tag embedded into the body of the rail car with with something thick and metalic to prevent communication with it in the first place. Nat made a mental inventory of what she had on hand and smiled at the thought of the burrito wrapped in thick metal foil. Mediocrely satisfied with the contents of the burrito, she chose a junk hauler destined for New Jersey as her target. Jogging alongside as the car made its way to the switch she slapped a piece of the burrito wrapper on the plastic casing of the car’s RFID chip and attached her newly flashed drone chip right next to it. The aluminum wrapper blended right in with the mesh of graffiti on the rail car. She watched with anticipation as the car approached the track switch. To her refreshing amusement and pride, the track switched with a clunk, sending the car south towards Texas. The only thing left to do now was to pick an empty rail car that was easy to get into while it was moving and make sure to secure the burrito wrapper.


On Aug 12th Natalie stood a distance away from a disheveled industrial building, once again, questioning her own sanity. The last thing she wanted to do was to get murdered after coming all this way. She watched as man with a blue mohawk and carrying a retro backpack entered the building. That was probably a decent indicator that it was not, in fact, an organ harvesting operation. Natalie walked up to the front door and a man in a red t-shirt greeted her.
 - Private event. You got an invitation?
Natalie dug the plastic QR code from her pockets.
 - First time? Leave your tablet at home? - the man continued
Nodding in response, Nat’s face was a cocktail of curiosity and caution. The man opened the door and ushered her inside.
Stepping into the dustily lit warehouse, Nat was greeted by moderately busy scene of people grouped up around a projection stage and few, off to the side, crowding a row of card tables piled with electronic scrap. She decided to play it cool and observe for a minute when she saw a figure sitting at the end of a row of chairs centered around the projection stage motion to her. It was Kim! 
 - Hey, you made it! Welcome to Defcon!  - greeted Kim with a warm smile.
 - Thanks! I thought it would be… bigger. 
 - It is. Ever since we got shut down by SAD in Vegas, we’ve split the conference up into smaller locations. The talks are broadcast via a satellite link, and attendance is invitation only. It has taken us years to rebuild, and finding new blood has proven to be a challenge. Maybe you can help change that?
The projector hummed with a determined glow and a figure appeared on the projection stage standing in front of a acrylic podium.
 - Hello everyone. Welcome to Defcon 65. We’re still here!
The room erupted in a cheer.
 - Welcome home - Kim smiled.