Submission to the DEF CON 29 Short Story Writing Contest:
https://forum.defcon.org/node/237748

title: Networks
author: Gwisinkoht

The neuropenitentiary was located in one of the few states still habitable year-round on the surface. Affluent retirees lived in the groomed neighborhoods surrounding the prison. In the prison, criminals transferred months or years of their cognitive lifespans to the retirees to stave off the dementia that awaited even those who could afford to repair their bodies indefinitely.
Ida was one of those sentenced who voluntarily chose the neuropenitentiary. She lost two weeks of her time instead of six months in a traditional prison in exchange for two years of her cognitive lifespan. Not a great deal, but she was in a big hurry.Some chose to live nomadically on the surface chasing habitable weather rather than retreat underground. Not Ida. She was a builder and could not move as easily as a code monkey.
The transport pod dumped her in front of a metal door that bore her public identification number. Ida unlocked it with a digital DNA-sensing interface of her own design. A quick cheek swab and she was in. One energy-efficient red light had been left on for her return. The smell of freshly baked bread made her mouth water. A soft smile curled the tight corner of her mouth as she picked up a heart-shaped note left on top of a warm covered loaf. It read:

“Dear Lovely I,

I’ve cleared out. You know I can’t be associated with a criminal. Thanks for taking the fall. I promise I’ll put your inventions to good use. Enjoy the bread. It’s your favorite, homemade sourdough.

Yours forever.”

The note was signed with a faint scent of perfume. Ida dropped it. She blindly groped for a pair of wireless earbuds and jammed them into her ears.
“Sorry, this device has been deactivated. Please provide a valid product key to access your music library,” intoned an impersonal voice. Ida threw the earbuds across the room.

---

Years later Ida was zoned out with a pair of rented headphones on a music lounge recliner in the third-party repair district of the city. The music tuned her brainwaves, generating a mild sense of euphoria with none of the side-effects of chemical stimulants. Suzu, the lounge manager, watched her with a conflicted mixture of affection and exasperation before finally marching over and yanking the headphones off her head.
“What the hell, Suzu?” snapped Ida.
Suzu grinned, an expression that squared her strong, elegant jaw and crinkled her eyes. “You know what feels even better than audiostim? Not being evicted. I like you, Ida. I like having you around and taking your money, and I want you to get out of here and go pay your bills.”
Ida pulled a rectangular metal stick the size of her ring finger and pointed it at Suzu. “30 moneri for another half hour.”
“You and your shady moneri,” sighed Suzu. “Still selling spyware to skiddies? Why, Ida? You’ve got real bioengineering talent.”
“I’m paying for your time, not your opinions,” grunted Ida.
“And now you’re paying for my patience too,” replied Suzu shortly. “35 moneri. 25 minutes.”
“Done.”
Artificial rain pattered against the shop windows, washing away the yellow fungus that showed up on every underground surface like a five-o-clock shadow. The fungus wasn’t unpleasant, but internet service providers, or ISPs, whined that it damaged their cables. As registered public utilities, national ISP companies demanded and received taxpayer funds to subsidize the removal of the fungus. Despite their subsidized public status, the internet freedom act of the 23rd century gave them legal rights to selectively choke bandwidth for particular services. The consequence was that they could meet government bandwidth regulations while charging customers extra for access to arbitrarily selected servers. As soon as an ISP discovered what service you used the most, they’d choke it and make you upgrade from the government subsidized plan to maintain access. Small business owners, like Suzu, hated them. She would have switched to a smaller, fairer ISP in a heartbeat if any had existed.
“Say, Ida, what ever happened to your alternative internet project?” mused Suzu for the umpteenth time.
“Jesus, Suzu, what a way to kill my vibe. I told you, the dream died when Ji left me. She had all the funding.”
“I told you not to move in with a conwoman. Inevitably they con you.”
“I wasn’t conned, I was socially engineered.”
“Sure. How much debt were you socially engineered into again?”
Ida’s closed eyes twitched. “About 75 thousand US dollars.”
“And how much is it now?”
“200 thousand. I’m not even making the interest payments.”
The unspoken consequence of defaulting on debt hung in the air between them, hardened it until the tension curled around their tongues and locked their teeth together like untreated tetanus.
Suddenly a young man dressed in the expensive, natural-fiber uniform of a monk from the Order of Reformed Luddites burst into the shop. He clutched a large cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms and wore a faraday hood emblazoned with the order’s icons draped over his head like a veil.
“Do you know where I can please find a laptop repair shop?” he asked breathlessly. Ida decided he was less of a young man and more of an older boy. “Everyone I’ve asked so far has told me to go away…”
“Understandably,” said Suzu. “What’s a Refordite monk doing in the third-party repair district? If anyone has the cash for a proprietary repair job, it’s you folk. What are you really after?” she asked suspiciously.
The boy flushed. “Nothing, I mean, just my laptop. I plugged it into a new monitor and the screen went all funny with a weird message.”
Suzu rolled her eyes, but Ida eyed the bundle. It was clearly an antique model from the size and weight. Maybe even pre-glacial. Her curiosity warred with her desire to stay away from unknown entities. “Let me take a look,” she said finally.
The laptop was indeed pre-glacial, sleek silver metal with a 2D screen, actual physical ports, and a glowing fruit as its logo. Old enough to be highly regulated tech unavailable to the general public. Devices this old were prized by the privacy-conscious because they lacked the kill-switch and built-in spyware that prevented modern devices from operating without a wifi connection. Government surveillance agencies hated them for the same reason.
Ida whistled through her teeth. She pressed the power button with a respectful touch. The machine sang a melodic note and flickered to life. The display was off-color with a grainy image stereotypical of modern graphics software trying to self-adjust to outdated hardware. Blocky green letters stated the following message:


“Under Section 5b of the Intellectual Property Protection Act, this device’s data has been encrypted. Return the device to your local authorities for case review. If you are authenticated, a decryption key will be provided.”


Ida snickered. “A Refordite monk with pirated media on a restricted device? What were you doing, kid? The monks’ CD album collection not big enough for you?”
The boy flushed and lowered his gaze. “I was just looking through some old research papers,” he mumbled.
“Then why don’t you take it to the authorities and clear up the misunderstanding, kid?”
“I can’t. Also, I have a name.”
“Oh yeah? What’s your name?” asked Ida absentmindedly as she ran her fingers over the impractically impenetrable construction.
“…Gwen.”
“Gwen? Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
“Well, I’m a boy, so apparently not,” snapped Gwen. “Can or can’t you fix it?”
Ida’s lips twitched up into a smile. “It’s not a matter of ‘fixing’. This confiscation ware is operating exactly as it is designed to operate. Are you looking for someone to crack it? That’s black hat territory. It’ll cost you.”
“Is this enough?” asked Gwen. He poured out a bag of Luddite credit tokens. Ida’s jaw dropped. The energy-backed tokens were easily worth two hundred times more per unit than the hard-to-trace moneri that Ida usually used.
“Gwen, I can get that fixed for you,” said Ida decisively.
Suzu cleared her throat conspicuously and beckoned Ida under the counter.
“What are you doing, Ida? You could get arrested for helping a minor commit a crime,” Suzu admonished her.
“He’s an initiated Refordite monk, Suzu. He’s gotta be at least 18. If things go south, I’ll claim ignorance and bail.”
Suzu looked hard at Ida. “I miss when you had ideals.”
“I don’t miss being a naïve idiot,” retorted Ida. “See you later, Suzu. Let’s go Gwen.”
“Where are we going? I thought you were going to fix my laptop?” asked Gwen.
“I am. First stop to getting your laptop cracked is DefCon.”


---


Supposedly DefCon had once been a yearly event, but Ida didn’t know anyone who remembered it as anything other than the permanent micronation it had become. DefCon sprawled through the desert underground in an organic meshwork of tunnels and swollen dwelling nodules. Their tunnels were an engineering miracle, though to an untrained eye they looked like half-finished construction. The filtered air ducts, fiberglass cables and devices that ran the building were exposed rather than hidden away. Essential systems were blocked off with metal bars, secured with custom mechanisms that were audited regularly by the critical hands of the local lockpicking community. It was a haven for dissidents, whistleblowers, builders and breakers alike.
Ida had moved to within walking distance of DefCon’s main tunnel entrance as a homeless teenager, drawn by the expertise and creativity that pulsed through the community’s veins. They raised her, encouraged her, even when she left the info sec community for bioengineering. This was where she had met a certain social engineer with moody grey eyes and a sarcastic smile.
Gwen squeaked in excited admiration of the tunnels. “Pipe down,” Ida snapped. “You draw enough attention as it is.”
“It looks so cool,” exclaimed Gwen. “But why are the walls yellow? Don’t they spray down here?”
“No, the fungus is harmless. The ISPs are idiots,” sniffed Ida. “Put these goggles on and let’s go.”
Rather than mimicking the white light of the sun like most large underground neighborhoods, DefCon revelled in every shade of LEDs. Maps were color coded, as were rooms. Ida put on a pair of color-filtering goggles that highlighted specific colors, revealing trails and messages left by other DefCon residents. The googles had a built-in desaturation filter for those who couldn’t handle the visual overload. Ida had never used it.
Gwen blinked rapidly, his goggles under his faraday hood bulging like lidded fish eyes. Ida chuckled. “Like it?”
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” said Gwen emphatically. “You’re so lucky to live here.”
Ida shrugged to disguise the nostalgic pang that shot through her at the sight of Gwen’s enthusiasm. “It’s alright, it’s not all that,” she said morosely.
The two of them snaked through the tunnels following a pale-yellow trail of luminescent bird feathers. The trail led to an offshoot nodule full of dancing people with bird cages tattooed on their bodies.
“Canaries,” shouted Ida in response to Gwen’s questioning glance. “They have implants programmed to kill them instantly if a government agency pushes a software update that they disagree with. Protesters, you know?”
Gwen bumped into one of the Canaries and flinched before apologizing profusely. Ida chuckled. “You don’t need to be so over-awed. Some of them are really dumb. Like this balding guy over here, he’s protesting damage increases in a children’s card game. Claims the games end before they really begin.”
“Fuck you too, Ida,” said the Canary she had pointed out. His name was Kip. His remaining close-cropped hair brought a shock of bleached white to his otherwise dark complexion and monochrome tattoos. “Fuckin’ hell, I never thought I’d see you here again. What’s it been, five years?”
“Yeah well, we all gotta work with hypocrites sometimes.”
“Still bitter? You know Ace wants the same things as you.”
“Ace is a sellout. I don’t work with sellouts. They compromise themselves.”
“At least they don’t hold stupid grudges for years on end.”
Gwen cleared his throat and tugged on Ida’s sleeve. “Gosh, look at the time,” he said loudly.
“Hear that, Kip? The boy doesn’t think you’re worth our time,” laughed Ida.
Kip scowled mockingly at Gwen. Kip was massive, head and shoulders taller than anyone else in the crowd. Now he swooped down to hunch predatorily over Gwen.
“Always listen to what a Canary has to say, kid,” he said in a voice like shifting gravel. “Nobody knows more about government mandated software than a canary. We can stake our lives on it. What’d you need, Ida?”
“Confiscation ware. What’s the going rate to crack it?”
Kip hemmed. “Ace would probably do it free, for you. They’re authorized to review cases.”
Ida pinched the bridge of her nose irritably. “No. I told you, I don’t talk to Ace.”
Kip shrugged. “Fine, suit yourself. I know someone else. Hand me your goggles and I’ll give you her hex code. Tell the kid to wait on the beanbags. He can enjoy the light show.”
“It’s six characters Kip, just tell me-”
Kip gave Ida a meaningful look.
“Yeah, Gwen, go sit on the beanbags. This will take a minute,” said Ida. Gwen hesitated, but a verdant flash of green lasers through fog distracted him enough to eagerly take a seat.
“What is it, Kip? If this is about Ace again, I will backhand you so hard your teeth will fall out before the rest of your hair does.”
“It’s about the kid, Ida. Fuck, did you not hear about the FBI search for a missing luddite boy?”
“So what? He’s a legal adult. If we get confronted, I’ll ditch him.”
“Not this one, Ida. He’s a minor. They initiated a minor for some reason.”
Ida’s blood froze. “They’ll think I kidnapped him.”
Kip put his hands up, palms outward. “I’m not saying anything.”
Ida walked back to Gwen, the strobe lights intensifying her sense of moving in slow motion. She scanned the crowd, suspicion evolving into paranoia. Someone in the crowd caught her attention. Tattoos that were obviously temporary, a certain formality to their movement, 1337 literally printed in bold letters on their graphic tee. Ida’s reasoning ability short-circuited in a wave of panic. She shoved her way to where Gwen lay blissed out in the lights and music. Ida quickly took off her jacket and threw it over him.
“What are you…” asked Gwen.
“Shut up and take off the hood,” hissed Ida.
“I told you, I can’t-“
“I don’t have time!” Ida seized the hood in both hands and ripped it off. Gwen’s silky hair stood on end from the static buildup, floating like a black shroud around his head. His right ear was missing, replaced by a network interface controller set neatly into his skull. It began to spark before Ida’s horrified eyes as black blood dripped from Gwen’s nose and ears.
Ida stifled a scream. She quickly slid the hood back over Gwen’s head. The stranger in the crowd with the 1337 shirt clasped hands with someone in the crowd and disappeared laughing, oblivious to the unfolding drama.
“Why would you do that? I asked you not to…?” moaned Gwen.
“What do you need? What can I do?” begged Ida as the hood became damp with blood.
Gwen curled into a fetal position, hands pressed against the sides of his head. “Just leave me alone. Just go away.” His lanky frame was fragile as a baby bird nestled into the beanbag. The blood wouldn’t stop. Ida ran back to Kip and yanked him down to her level.
“Get me Ace,” she shouted in his ears.


---


Minutes later, Ida and Gwen were in an air-gapped confidential nodule off the main tunnels with an off-duty nurse who asked no questions. The nurse cleaned up the blood on Gwen’s face, administered a healing accelerant mixed with a short-term sedative, and left. Gwen slept on a makeshift bed of shoved together chairs with Ida’s jacket as a folded pillow. His face was dewy with exhaustion but his sleeping expression showed no sign of the trauma he’d been through. Ida closed her eyes and sighed. Then she reluctantly made eye contact with the third person in the room.
Ace leaned against the bare walls with one foot braced against the other, fingers perpetually fidgeting. For several minutes the two eyed each other uncomfortably while Gwen slept.
Ace broke the silence. “It’s good to see you again,” they said softly. Their hair was stylishly cut and groomed, their clothes unpretentious and obviously high quality.
“I see the sellout life pays well,” sneered Ida.
Ace sighed. “Can you think of anything less inane to say?”
Ida swallowed. “Thanks for helping Gwen.”
Ace paused. “I helped you, Ida. I could have helped Gwen by calling an ambulance. It would have been much less trouble.”
“Thanks,” Ida shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably.
“So what’s Gwen’s story?”
“The nurse says the card in his head was a prototype for immersive cyberspace clinical trials. They didn’t go well.”
“And now he’s allergic to wifi of all things?”
“Yeah. But he loves computers. I guess that’s why he joined the Refordites.”
Ace tugged at their hair thoughtfully. “Resilient kid. I might’ve given up on tech if that had happened to me.”
“I know I would have given up,” said Ida forcefully.
Ace smiled. “I’ve never seen you protective towards a kid before.”
Ida snorted. “I almost killed him. Cut me some slack, I still hate kids.”
“Which is why I’m skyrocketing my energy bill to crack the encryption on his laptop on your behalf.”
“Making any progress?”
Ace checked Gwen’s laptop display. “Yeah, looks like we’re in. That’s weird, the trigger was this random research paper on… porifera? What’s that?”
Gwen’s eyes flickered open. “You found it,” he rasped. Ida handed him a glass of water.
“I’ve been looking for that paper for ages,” he said. “I knew it had to be in the iLIFE journal archives, but I had a terabyte of PDFs to look through and no efficient way to filter the search.”
Ace shook their head disbelievingly. “You couldn’t give the task to an AI reader? How did anyone find anything back in the day?”
Gwen ignored them. “The paper describes clinical trials that examined safe exposure limits to a genetically modified Porifera, or sea sponge, that was combined with a fungus to create a self-spreading terrestrial chimera capable of synthesizing molecular glass rods.”
“Calm down,” worried Ida. “Your head is going to explode again.”
“Don’t you see?” cried Gwen in a trembling voice. “The yellow fungus that’s everywhere! That’s the chimera! This paper describes how to use it to transmit signals for a living internet infrastructure. If we could just figure out an interface, it would be trivial to generate long-distance networks. Anyone could make a network with a little money and effort.”
“I don’t understand,” said Ace. “Why would this paper be targeted by confiscation ware?”
“Because the ISPs are on the hook for copyright infringement. They made the confiscation ware. They’ve been secretly killing this information since they can’t kill the chimera,” said Ida slowly. “They’ve been irrelevant this whole time, and we didn’t even know it.”
Gwen looked at Ida curiously. “I mean, they’re not irrelevant unless someone invents a modem for the chemical and digital signals that can compete with existing internet speeds.”
Hope crashed in on Ida like an imploding star. “I’ve got that,” she said faintly. She grabbed Gwen by the shoulders and stared at him with eyes wide and dark as black holes.
“Who exactly are you?” she demanded.
“A promise,” recited Gwen automatically. “A promise of humanity’s resilience. We help humanity back out of the technological corners it finds itself in. That’s what it means to be a monk of the order of Reformed Luddites.”
Ida rubbed her eyes. “That’s crazy. Amazing, but crazy.”
Gwen smiled shyly. “Pretty much. Want to join? They’re always looking for talented new members.”
“Then why all the secrecy? Why don’t you recruit more openly?”
“Don’t need to. You either have it in you or you don’t. If you do, you’ll find us on your own eventually. You can’t stop the signal.”