//------------------------------// // episode 5 part 1:operation blue light // Story: Conversion Bureau: St George // by kryxel //------------------------------// (theme for this chapter) >_ Since the dawn of their existence, humanity had sought and found ways to change and understand the world, fulfilling an all-encompassing desire for more. > loading HollyHack Shell… … Shell loaded. First, humanity made fire. Then, they learnt to understand it. Finally, they mastered it. HollyHack Shell is © and tm Kryxel Industries, XXXX A.D. HackerView software is a registered trademark of Ray10k ltd, and licensed under the GNU restricted license, version 1XX.23 However, even after mastering a force of nature, humanity quickly grew bored. So, they started looking for new things to discover and new ways to change the world. loading shell extensions… HackerView… Loaded successfully. Ping.doom… Loaded successfully. RRoll filter… Loaded successfully. Drama Queen… Loaded successfully. FireWatch… Updated to version 3.64.12, loaded successfully. Rewriting time... Completed Syncing Titanic... Done Reversing the polarity of the neutron flow... In progress. Humanity made art, science, music, expressions of how they loved everything. They dug down, finding silver, gold, diamonds, all the material beauties hidden below the rocks. Shell extentions loaded. Please identify yourself. ID:>_ But even with all the shiny, beautiful things humanity took or made, there was one thing they valued higher than anything else. One thing, for which some gladly would give their lives: Knowledge. ID:>G4L1ND4 Password:>******* So, humanity wrote books, hoping to preserve the knowledge for another generation. But in time, they discovered a problem: books were expensive, and troublesome to spread. Identity confirmed, Access granted. For years, humanity made do with cumbersome books, until one day a device was built that could hold a thousand books in a space that could normally hold a few dozen: the computer. Starting VisRep.exe… But even then, the problem of spreading knowledge persisted. Humanity, never satisfied with a partial solution, tried to find an answer. And in time, they found one. … They connected all the computers in a network, allowing anyone to access any information they were looking for. However, this created a new problem. … Greed and secrecy. Some information was not intended for anyone outside of certain groups to be known. So, it was hidden and protected from prying eyes. … For the most part, no-one cared. Everyone had their secrets, right? A few however, did care. … Some of them just wanted to see if they could break the defenses. Others believed or even knew that they HAD to find out for their own safety. And just a few were just curious. … Curious. Curious, to the point of greed. Wanting to know, only for the sake of knowing. Lindy had such curiosity. VisRep.exe loaded. Starting simulation. ---------- Conversion Bureau: St. George. Episode 5: Hackers and Ponies Part 1: operation Blue Light. (chapter music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qikrROXaGlE) ---------- Blinking her eyes, Lindie found herself in the center of a large room. The walls were covered in tiny lights in all colours of the rainbow, some of them blinking at various intervals, while every inch of the floor was covered in electrical circuits or microchips. Lindie smiled. Even after seeing it a thousand times, this place would never break the spell it had over her. This was the place where she felt the most real, the place where she and she alone ruled supreme. Her computer. Of course, she hadn’t just opened up the tower and crawled in, much as she wished she could. In fact, physically she was on her bed in the St. George Conversion Bureau, looking for all the world as if she was sleeping peacefully. But restful as the experience was for her tragically limited body, her mind was anything but resting. It had been expensive to have the neural implant installed, but being one of the people who got things for others.. well a good computer was always needed. Shaking her head, Lindie snapped out of her daydreams. Focus now. Processor cycles are a-wasting. Time for operation Blue Light! Much as she loved just messing around with her computer, trying out new esoteric programming languages or infecting some virtual devices with the newest viruses, just to see what they did, Lindie had a hunger for knowledge. It didn’t really matter about what, if it was written down, she wanted to know it. Recently though, she had run into a very interesting source of potential information: Doctor Tennant. Not only was he in charge of the bureau she was staying at, but more than once he had accidentally shown to have knowledge about things most humans couldn’t even think of, without going mad from the sheer implications. So, to fulfill her hunger for knowledge AND to occupy her time at the bureau, Lindie had decided that she would find out all she could from, and about the mysterious Doctor. However, she had quickly ran into a snag: the guy did not exist. Nowhere on the internet was there any information on him, she couldn’t even find his first name! However, there was another reason why she was doing this. She had a few… “Friends” who needed a bit of help. Recently, they had traveling around in the old Euraziazone, mostly in the area that used to be called China until Russia took it over. They had asked for help translating some files they had found, but Ancient Chinese had always been tricky, even to modern translation engines. Still, the good Doctor had hinted that he had some ultra-advanced translation program, so Lindie had figured that if she could get into his machine, she would be able to get the translations. In the end, she knew there had to be one place she had to break into to get what she was looking for: his personal computer. So, for the last week she had been trying to break into it, so far without success. Still, I am sure tonight I’ll finally find out all about him! Just you wait, Doctor! ---------- Operation Blue Light was a variation on an earlier attempt, which had involved trying to access his computer via the computer of one of the other Bureau officials, Colgate. That attempt had failed when Lindie tried to hack her computer, finding that Colgate had apparently created a completely new written language to protect her computer from prying eyes. Still, the idea was sound, so tonight Lindie had planned to make use of the computer of Ditzy "Derpy" Doo, who seemed to be rather close to the mysterious Doctor. Smirking at the thought of what she would doubtlessly find, Lindie drew three circles in the air, activating the hyperlink to the computer of Surprise. Surprise had given her access to her own computer, mostly for letting Lindie set up some pranks. Tonight though, she would be using it for a different purpose altogether. The air in front of her shimmered, until suddenly a large ornamental door appeared in front of Lindie. Pushing it open and walking through, Lindie felt her excitement rise. Operation Blue Light, start! ---------- Surprise’s computer was visualized as a large ballroom, with streamers and balloons all over the place. At first glance, one would assume that the place was not guarded by any means, but Lindie had found out the hard way that Surprise took security almost scarily serious. Ok, six steps forward, quarter turn right, one step backwards, three sideways to the right again, roll forward until you hit the wall, crawl to the bookcase… To an outside observer, Lindie looked as if she were dancing some strange and silly dance, but the fact was that if she missed a single step, the various traps, pop ups, and Easter eggs would throw her out of the system, not to mention how they would affect her own computer. Lindie had learnt this the hard way, when she had tried to just walk to her target. It had taken her hours to get rid of the strange winged balls of fluff that had started to eat away at her system, and even after restoring the back-up she had lost quite a few important files. Good, made it without triggering anyting. Now, which book was it again… Standing in front of the bookcase, Lindie started reading the titles on the backs of the books, quietly muttering the names. “Nobody dies, no… Time braid, no… Waking Nightmares, no… System Settings, Bingo!” Pulling out the book with one hand, Lindie raised her free hand into the air, a pen appearing in it. Opening the book, she started to use the hacking tool, disguised as the pen she now held, to rewrite the outgoing and incoming connections, and also taking a moment to disable a few security features that would get in her way later on. Performing another series of acrobatic maneuvers, she reached a door in the wall. The door looked like the door on a public toilet, except the symbol on it was a silhouette of a muffin. Lindie pushed the door open, closed her eyes, and stepped through. ---------- Ok, new system, let’s see what you look like! Opening her eyes, Lindie saw… white. A white hallway with white walls, a white ceiling and a white floor stretching out in front of her. Huh, plain. Guess it is because it was only installed a few days ago… Carefully edging forward, looking for anything that stood out on the sheer whiteness of the place. Suddenly, she felt the floor under her right foot give way a little. Looking down, she saw that the floor had been hiding a button. One that she was standing on. Slowly turning around, Lindie looked at the hall behind her. A massive wall of fire had replaced the wall where the door she entered through, and was now advancing towards her at quite the disquieting pace. “Awww, Bugshit.” Lindie started to run, taking a turn at a sudden split in the hallway as she reached inside her pocket. When she retrieved her hand, she was holding on to what seemed to be a black disk. Slapping the disk on the wall, she grabbed the edge and dove through before pulling the hole almost shut, leaving a hole through which she took a look outside. The firewall however, failed to notice the hole and passed over it, leaving Lindie completely unhindered. hehe, always a good thing to have a hole in your pocket! Any good hacker had a tool for each situation, but Lindie always designed her own. Not because they were better (well, not only), but mostly because she loved to give a bit of color to her tools. Where most would use some kind of floating blip of light to represent a tracing program, she had made a wind-up mouse. Where others would make their password cracking tools look like a simple display with a few buttons, she had made a large, literal skeleton key with a menacing skull on top. And where more “serious” hackers would represent their viruses as guns or grenades, she opted for gloves-on-springs and impractically huge hammers for such purposes. Right now, she rolled out of her portable hidey-hole and grabbed one of the mice, whispering instructions for it to find the local connection to the Doctor’s computer. Putting the tin toy on the ground, it scurried off. And now, I wait. A few minutes later the mouse returned, a cube of cheese in its mouth. “Good boy, now let’s get moving!” Taking the cube and breaking it in two, a series of footprints appeared in front of Lindie, showing her the way to the access point. Lindie started following the trail, spreading some sand from a small bag in her hand. The “sand” was in fact a program that locked most security measures in an infinite loop, effectively putting them to sleep. It wasn’t long before she ran into a simple door in the wall, signifying the connection to another computer. ---------- Carefully stepping in, Lindie looked around. The room she was in had a stone floor, but the roof and walls were obscured by a dense mist, making it look as if the place went on forever. In front of her, a small group of sandstone tablets stood. Taking a closer look, they turned out to be covered in unreadable gibberish. Doesn’t matter. These are just plaintext files from the look of it, he must be keeping the programs elsewhere. Looking further, Lindie was about to reach for her mice again when she saw something unusual: a tin dog, surrounded by skeletons. In real life, the sight would have terrified her. Here it was just a warning, the remains of some other hackers that had gotten themselves permabanned. Not taking any chances, Lindie grabbed her bag of sleeping dust and sprinkled a handful over the dog from a distance. Nothing happened for a moment, until a few stray particles suddenly collided with something. A hidden file? Interesting… Grabbing a magnifying glass with a lens larger than the pocket it came from, she looked in the direction of the particles, revealing a shimmering outline of a rectangle. Gotcha! Lindie threw another handful of dust at the hidden box, causing the cloak to fail and revealing a large, blue box. Walking around it, Lindie started muttering to herself. “’police call box’...? Strange. Looks old...” Standing in front of the strange box, she slowly reached out, taking hold of the handle on the door. For a moment she just stood there, expecting a million security measures to spring to life, but nothing happened. Steeling her nerves, she pulled the door open. The inside was blue, wooden, and above all, empty. “You know, most people would call that stealing.” Lindie turned around, standing face to face with an old man in a black jacket and a cane in his hand. "Besides, not like you could open her if she did not want to be opened." The old man took a step forward, his face having the expression of a father finding his daughter with her hand in the cookie jar. As he walked closer, he started changing. He got shorter, longer, older, younger, all shades of hair color from white to black to chestnut, he got a scarf that seemed to go on for miles, the scarf became a cape, the cape became an umbrella with a handle shaped like a question mark, nothing about the strange man stayed the same. When he stopped in front of Lindie however, he also stopped changing, settling into the form of a man in a brown suit and tan duster, wearing a pair of eye-piercingly red sneakers. Lindie, somewhat disturbed by the strange avatar, stammered, “D- Doctor?” The Doctor nodded, before reaching into his pocket. “Time to wake up, Lindie. Snooping is a bad habit.” In his hand was a small pen-like object. He pointed it at Lindie, and pressed a button. ---------- Lindie sat up with a splitting headache. A sudden and complete internet disconnect would do that, especially when bouncing back through three different systems. She checked her internal bio-links to see if anything was broken and found that it was not. "Dang! Banned and tossed... been a while since that happened.” ---------- The Doctor sat up, and pulled the visor off of his face before patting the console. "There. Your hard drive is safe once more. Good thing you added that backdoor for me. Anyway, when you are done rebooting and upgrading the security systems, you can find me in the daycare. I have some papers to sign for one Miss Rainbow Springs. /////////////// Ray10k here. So, a lot of Hollywood Hacking going on in this chapter. I can’t help but wonder, are there no computers in Hollywood? Because, at times it seems that all big producers seem to have no bleeding clue how they work! I’m looking at you, Die Hard 4 / Independence Day / War Games / Etc. Still, it is fun to watch, right? Kryxel here. they have to hack like that due to people wanting action. a guy sitting at his computer for three hours typing codes is not going to hold an audiences attention for long.