DEF CON 30 Short Story Writing Contest
https://media.defcon.org/

A Heedful Hacker Homecoming
By Kirkland Brand Email

“Johnny used to work on Docker… then he got covid, his pods are all down, soooo doooown!” Zack howled over Bon Jovi’s multi-octave delivery pumping from the bookshelf speakers connected to his bluetooth amp. As he contorted his face to embellish the performance piece, his girlfriend, Amy, noticed he was wearing the same Defcon t-shirt he had on the previous day, taking advantage of the dark fabric to hide errant coffee stains. Despite the recycled shirt, he somehow managed to swap yesterday’s cargo shorts for a different pair of abundantly pocketed trunks.
“I should NOT have told you that was SOOO clever the first time you sang it,” Amy, playfully teased after hearing his impromptu karaoke for the dozenth time that week.
“I can always compose something new!” He smirked.
“No more Docker-Dad jokes!”
“We gotta git commit, the content we got! It doesn’t make a difference if we checkout or not!” Zack belted out, testing his abysmal new lyrics to a captive audience of one.
Amy had enough and used Bluesmack to DDoS the speaker and the 80’s anthem abruptly stopped playing. As she watched Zack fumble with his phone to troubleshoot the silence, she quickly pivoted to use a knob attack, took over the simple bluetooth speaker and began playing Nightjar.
“Awww!” Zack whined then decided against battling over control by launching his own attack. Amy preferred newer music while Zack was stuck in the past. The pair constantly fought over the playlist that filled the room when neither of them was on a zoom call, or a teams call, or a slack huddle… there were too many ways to connect.
“What do we have left for lunch?” Zack asked aloud, hoping Amy had stashed an extra box of frozen pizza away for the emergency that was every day, every hour since the pandemic started a four months earlier.
“I dunno… not much. We’ve been putting off going to the store for a while…”
For the last few months, a walk down the hallway to drop a bag down the garbage shoot was akin to a dangerous, but brief, sprint through an India-Jones-Styled booby-trapped chamber. Potentially deadly virus microbes lurked on every doorknob, on every lid, and pervading through the air eager to infiltrate virgin lungs and wreak havoc. Going to the store was extended scuba diving with hangrily-ravenous sharks. Plastic gloved, double-masked, goggles over the eyes, the pair would scurry down the aisles at Whole Foods performing an O(n log n) merge sort, desperate to outperform a lousy O(n) acquisition of precious food by never being on the same aisle twice or at the same time. Almost as important as the food was the purchasing of cleaning supplies required to continue surviving the bubble they created on the 8th floor apartment they had barely left since March.
Having completely given up on controlling the music, Zack refocused on his screens, then audibly sighed.
“I’ve never worked this much in my life… it’s like they think I’d normally work ninety hours a week if I was completely available all the time,” Zack complained, reclining in his Herman Miller.
“Yeah, I’m too available!” Amy agreed, doing her best Jerry Seinfeld impression.
“Too available!” Zack snorted, channeling George Costanza.
The pair had recently binged every episode of the aging sitcom about nothing to rinse out the peculiar aftertaste of Tiger King. They typically were not the sort of couple who parked themselves in front of the television night after night, but their evening plans were indefinitely cancelled and had subsequently run out of conversation topics. So now they watched Stranger Things and The Mandolorian when they weren’t working unreasonable hours, agreeing to calls with colleagues in Asia late into the night or up at five in the morning to parlay with Europe. Amy had been hired at a FinTech company a few months before the pandemic that hunted for the breadcrumbs of financial crimes in the ether of wire transfers and blockchain proof of work. Zack’s role had started out as a subject matter expert on electronic warfare but had slowly pivoted to a hodgepodge of whatever pet project the executives happened to come across. The most recent dalliance was zero trust architecture; an unquantifiable concept that was a modern spin on NAC with a loose mandate to force the user to constantly ask permission like an ill behaved toddler requesting treats.
“All these middle managers wasting my day with pointless meeting after meeting… it’s like I have two jobs… my actual job and listing to drivel for seven hours a day!” Amy complained.
“Too available!” Zack repeated.
“Getting most of my work done at night,” she complained, then paused remembering how the evening had brought their own distractions. A month ago a man had been gruesomely smothered to death under the knee of another man who had taken a public oath to protect and serve the community. The whole event had been captured on video which had spread across the internet like wildfire.
“Were you able to watch the entire video?” Amy probed, looking forlorn at Zack.
“I couldn’t. You?”
“Maybe not even thirty seconds… it was… horrific.”
The next day, the pair donned their masks, gloves, and goggles before dutifully marching to the Whitehouse with thousands of other citizens enraged at the miscarriage of justice. They continued to march, day after day, with the troupe until they found themselves shoulder to shoulder with young white men lighting fireworks and hurling them at police officers standing in a skirmish line behind riot shields. Other enthusiastic, mostly caucasian, youths began hammering windows while their counterparts who more closely resembled the smothered victim whose demise spawned the spiraling outrage, either looked on in disapproval or intervened in the wanton vandalism. Zack and Amy abruptly stopped attending the events after their first whiff of tear gas which forced a nearby protestor to the ground where a samaritan poured milk into their eyes to alleviate the burning.
Now, every night a hundred white college-aged kids would march through Dupont Circle and down the streets for their cause. Zack and Amy had hung a sign in their window, signifying they support the mob. They tried to stay focused on their Zoom calls with colleagues in Shanghai and Sydney about matters of security while the marching continued without them.
“FIRE! FIRE! GENTRIFIER!” The crowd would chant outside of their building while two bashful police officers on bicycles, laxidazically trailed the mob.
“It’s just a chant… They’re totally not going to light the building on fire,” Zack said aloud, mostly to assure himself.
“They lit that church on fire in Lafayette square,” Amy reminded.
“If they did start a fire in our very open lobby… would we be able to get out?” Zack posed.
“Probably not… like a few hundred people live this building. There would be a stampede in the stairwell. We’d all die of smoke inhalation. If something happens, we should go up to the roof and then climb to the next building and wait for the fire department.”
“Is this going to end?” Amy asked, after jumping out of her chair to quickly dim the lights after a hurled water bottle loudly bounced off a plexiglass window one floor below.
“If Trump gets voted out of office then it will probably stop. If he stays then I have no idea how bad it could get… we might have to move out of the city.”
“Ugh! I hate that guy! Is anyone even voting for him?”
“Nobody we know,” Zack shrugged.
“No democracy for you!” Amy belted, doing her best impression of the soup Nazi.
The pair enjoyed the moment of levity while sitting in the darkness, listening to the incantations chanted below.
The months dragged on and the couple spent their days and nights grinding out work, scurrying to the store, and hiding at night. They dreamed of returning to a sense of normalcy. They had even considered returning to their favorite restaurant but the protestors had begun confronting restaurant goers in Adams Morgan.
“I don’t understand why that girl didn’t just do the salute for the protestors!” A flabbergasted Zack pondered aloud.
“Yeah, that was so stupid! Just pump your fist in the air… I mean, I couldn’t image anyone not being in favor of the cause, but even if you weren’t, it’s definitely not worth getting hurt over!” Amy agreed.
“These protestors are making me thirsty!” Zack added, mimicking Kramer.
Finally, the day arrived and the pair walked past the CVS on P Street to vote for Joe Biden. Everyone in line was so excited to participate in the democratic process except for one pompous looking man who thought it smart to wear his ugly red hat with its insidious catchphrase.
“Booo!!” The other voters taunted until one man approached him, spoke something in his ear, and the red hat left the line and quickly walked to his car.
That night the couple celebrated in the streets across from the Whitehouse with the other jubilant survivors of the dark days of the previous administration. It was a mere few hours after the votes had been tallied that the charlatans and propaganda artists began insisting the Dominion Voting System had been hacked and the election results were fraudulent.
“That’s just so stupid! They were not hacked!” Amy belted into the screen at her misguided uncle who bathed his brain in the poison that was fake news.
“How do you know?” He asked.
“I work in security! I know!” She angrily spat.
“Did you see the evidence?”
“There is literally no need to look into it! Biden won. That’s it! And I need to go!” She seethed and closed the Zoom window.
Unfortunately the brainwashed and feebleminded continued living their lies and marched on Congress a few weeks later while Amy and Zack huddled in blankets in their apartment after unfortunately catching Covid. Amy cried while watching the live footage from a mere mile away.
“They need to set up IMSI catchers to grab every person who was near Capitol Hill and then arrest them!” Zack grumbled.
“What if they have burner phones?” Amy babbled with fever.
“They’re too stupid for that! Look at them! Maybe they should grab the IMEI’s, you know the equipment numbers, to figure who has a flip phone and who has a smart phone… to sort for the burners!”
“I thought you were super against tracking people’s phones?” Amy inquired.
“Oh, I’m against it… unless it’s these kinds of people… we should track them and arrest them! Maybe even preemptively… people on these parlor chats need to have the FBI show up at their house,” Zack seethed.
“Totally agree… Ed Snowden is a true patriot!” Amy replied between coughs. “Still, I’m more upset about these horrible people than I am about getting Covid just as they announced a vaccine!”
“Well, it’s bad luck, but we weren’t going to be eligible for the shot for a long time anyways… we aren’t essential, we don’t have any comorbidities, and we’re still young,” Amy trailed.
A few months later, with the new administration in office, Amy and Zack happily walked to CVS for their shot.
“Why are you getting that poison?” Amy’s uncle badgered her over their latest zoom call.
“Why am I getting a vaccine to prevent a deadly disease… is that a real question?”
“You already had Covid!” He scoffed.
“I’m doing this for you!” Amy retorted.
“I already had covid too! I’m fine! And don’t you know that mRNA vaccines have been around for years but the FDA-“
“Let me cut you off right there… are you a doctor, or scientist specializing in virology or epidemiology?”
“Are you? If this was Microsoft, would you just trust what they were telling you?” He pushed.
“You don’t know anything about software either. And, most importantly, I trust the science,” Amy grumbled.
“If you just need the card for work, I know where you can get one,” he offered.
“That is just so… unethical… I don’t think I can have these calls anymore…,” Amy replied coldly, shaking her head.
As he was about to speak, Amy closed the window.
“Serenity now!” She screamed, doing her best impression of Frank Costanza.
“Do you think people going to Defcon this year are going to forge cards?” Zack asked.
“Sadly, there may be a few,” Amy said, regretfully.
“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life! Just take the shot!”
“Those vaccines should be tied to a blockchain… you should be able to prove you got the shot!”
“Well, it doesn’t matter… we got the shot… and we are going to Defcon!” Amy cheered. “Literally can’t wait… I learn so much when I’m there… they’re our people… and we question everything!”
“Amy… maybe we should just attend Defcon remotely… I mean, it wasn’t so bad on Discord last year?”
“Ugh! Thank you! I was too afraid to go but I thought you REALLY wanted to! The thought of flying with people who don’t wear their mask correctly! Let’s stay home!” Amy agreed.
“Besides, I was doing the math and we’d need to get a Covid booster shot for Defcon… and we just had Covid, like, 6 months ago… and we’re double vaxed, so we won’t need to get boosted,” Zack pointed out.
“What? I’ve already scheduled my booster… get the shot! What’s wrong with you?”
“I just got so sick after the last shot… and I’ve got natural immunity now… and it’s not like we expose ourselves. I haven’t seen my parents off-screen since Covid started!”
“Zack, you need to hear me when I tell this to you… get the booster or we’re done!”
“Ok, I’ll get boosted,” Zack sullenly agreed.
“You sound like my stupid, Republican uncle,” Amy griped.
A month later, the boosted pair watched Defcon streaming on Twitch and Discord in their apartment while feasting on pizza bagels, reheated in their oven.
“This is almost as good as actually being there!” Zack smiled.
“Yeah, and I hear a lot of the people at the Casino, the people not attending Defcon, are unvaxxed!” Amy added.
“Stupid! They should be forced! I couldn’t go to elementary school without being vaccines, they shouldn’t be allowed in a casino!” Zack quickly added.
“They should be smart enough where we wouldn’t have to… but yeah, I’m fine with forced,” Amy added.
The couple spent the next few days completely immersed in Discord and twitch.
“I’m really enjoying Defcon this year,” Zack sang.
“I love our life here on the eight floor… I feel so safe when we’re home!”