Backhack

“We'll give you 24 hours to make the delivery,” said the voice on the other end of line. Whomever it was, they were using a voicechip to mask their voice so it could have been Spetz's own mother and he still wouldn't have been able to recognize it. But Spetz's mother had died the previous winter from alcohol poisoning so he wasn't too worried about that possibility.

“It's not enough time.” Spetz said, hoping that the fear in his voice wasn't coming through his own voice distortion device. “The security around the node was much tighter than expected. It will take time to find a way in.”

“That is not our concern. We need delivery within 24 hours or the contract if forfeit.” and then the line went dead.

Spetz killed his end of the transmission, slowly took off his headset and leaned back. He felt a ball of anxiety growing in his stomach, waves of nausea coursing through his body.

There was no way to get through the security, it was just totally beyond his skills. This was his first big job as a computer hacker, and it looked like he was completely screwed.

“Not a great way to get a reputation” he muttered to himself as he got up from his battered console, stumbled through the ruinous mess that was his room and took a nervous leak in the his decrepit bathroom.

He sat back down heavily at his console, a battered Taifun 650 that he'd bought six months ago from an alcoholic pawnbroker in Yakutsk. It had seemed like a good investment at the time, and had definitely been the best he could afford, but now it was clearly not sufficient for the job at hand. He looked out his window, over the ruined apartment complex he called home, and tried to think of a way out.

Spetz had grown up in the tragedies that were the eastern provinces of New Russia. His parents had been comfortable bureaucrats during the Soviet era, but the collapse forced them to eke out a survival in an economy that quickly rotted away around them. Ten years ago their city hadn't been on any maps because of secret defense work, but now had become so depopulated and desolate that it wasn't worth a notation on any modern map.

His family had stayed in their apartment complex while everyone else had fled. His father had died two years ago from a heart attack, likely brought on by his alcoholism and poor diet. When his mother died, he'd moved to a top floor deserted apartment complex, but hadn't had enough money or any connections that would help him to go abroad or even try to find a job in the western provinces. He'd always been a computer nerd since he was young, and being physically puny, it seemed the best career options in what was left of an economy.

He'd started out doing small jobs, stealing credit card numbers from Europeans and giving them to Central American gangs, but it was barely enough to survive. Two weeks ago he'd stealthily approached a data pirate node in Belgium and said he was available for work. He'd used double blinds and numerous redirects so their attempts to discover his identity had failed, this serving as a rough qualifying examination.



One week ago he'd received a basic job. He was to hack into a Bahamian databank and get certain files.

He didn't know who the client was. It could have been Japanese yakuza, Sicilian thugs, or some corporate security department. It didn't matter to him as long as they paid, and he'd started work immediately after a celebratory drinking binge.

He'd spent the last week trying to find a way in and hadn't succeeded. In the end, he'd sent a message to his contact saying that he'd needed more time. This had not been well-received, and the result had been the short call where they'd given him 24 hours more.

He'd hacked continuously for the time given, and but still had no luck. He'd made a call to report his lack of success and met with silence, and then a dead line.

There was nothing more for him to do, and he hadn't slept for three days, so he cleared off his bed and collapsed into a restless sleep.

His computer screamed. Torn from his sleep he discovered that one of his dropboxes was being hacked. The dropboxes were small computers around the world where people could leave messages for him, without any way of tracing back to his home node. He might have tried to backtrack who was hacking the box, but that would have required him to establish a stronger connection, and right now he hoped wanted to hide his own tracks. There was nothing for him to do but tell the dropbox to wipe all its memory.

He sat back and tried to shake the cobwebs of sleep away. It was probably just a routine security sweep, nothing to worry about.

Another dropbox screamed and went silent. This didn't make any sense, the two drops were completely unrelated and there was no way that someone could know the location of both. Spetz's skin went clammy.

He sent out inquiries to a couple of his hacker friends to see if they were experiencing similar problems. He received confused replies: they weren't experiencing any weirdness, what was he talking about?

When the third dropbox, a university server in Oslo, screamed its death-cry, he knew he that he was being hunted. And not by someone in a hurry, whomever it was was methodically stripping off his outer defense. They were content to slowly cut off his network elements one by one.

This wasn't right, this didn't make sense. He was the hacker, he was the one who was supposed to invade other peoples' computers and steal their data. He didn't like being on the business end of a cyber attack. Worse yet, he didn't know who was attacking him or how.

He opened a line to his hacker friends.

“Spike, Reem, I'm getting attacked by someone and I don't know what they're using. Three of my dropboxes just got killed.”

“How are they killing the boxes?” Spike asked, to Spetz's chagrin her voice had more intellectual curiosity than anything. “Are they using NoS or serial z-hacking?”

Reem chimed in. “Maybe they're using Qyundan processes?”

“No, no. It's something different from those. I would have recognized that.”

None of them were veterans hackers and they quickly exhausted their ideas. Over the last couple months they'd been hanging around cyberrooms, hoping to demonstrate their coolness and astuteness to the upper-level hackers, but hadn't had any success so didn't have anyone they could reach out to for help.

Spetz slapped his fist on his military surplus desk. “You guys don't seem to be getting it. Someone is trying to eat out my heart. I need to go figure it out. Send me any ideas you come up with, and quick.”

“I'll send you what little I have. Good luck, Spetz” Reem said.
“Yeah, dude. Good luck” said Spike, and they both logged out.

Spetz had never felt more alone. “Screw pride, I want to figure out what the hell is going on.” he muttered as he composed a quick email to some of the hacker cyberrooms, practically begging for insight.

He tried to focus, but with unerring constancy, his dropboxes continued to scream and die. They sent information through a series of redirects more complex than the Swiss legal system, so there wasn't any way to connect them back to him directly. It would take his hunters days to trace back through any of his redirects and even then, the security on them was solid. Spetz tried to force himself to breathe, he had some time.

And then one of his redirects screamed. It was a Beowolf cluster in South Korea and it went dark before he could set up any last ditch countermeasures. It died practically before he even had a chance to be aware of its death.

His entire network was being eaten, dissolved alive by some creeping force in the shadows. It was like he was a bear surrounded by invisible wolves that kept taking bites out of his hide, and yet giving him no way of fighting back. Another redirect died, and he realized he wasn't a bear, he was a slow, blind pig being eaten by famished timberwolves.

It didn't make any sense. Whomever it was clearly knew a great deal about his network and likely could have tried to hack his home network directly, and yet they were cutting away at his network with slow, cold precision.

The tempo of the attacks increased. Redirects stumbled and died in quick succession. His final drop box went dark and he found that his backup systems had already been eliminated.

He sent a final plea for help to the newsgroups. He then tried to reach out to one of his last redirects and discovered that his connection was locked. Whomever was attacking him had hacked the local internet system and now he couldn't access any other nodes. He was cut off, and the only way to his home system was controlled by someone or something that had very effectively disemboweled everything he'd built.

He monitored the connection, watching to see what would come down the line. He thought he might be able to stave off this final attack. That he might somehow recognize the assault and employ countermeasures. Part of him knew this was an absurd fantasy, but he watched and his fingers hovered over the keyboard, waiting to spring into action.

He waited, and for a period there was nothing. But then something started to come down the wire, some code that he couldn't understand, that seemed to affix itself to his entry ports and eat at them, beginning to dissolve the best security he'd installed.

He saw there was nothing he could do, it would take him days to understand what was happening and it would be moments before this strange code blew through his defensives and entered his inner sanctum. He did the only thing he could: he reached up and unplugged his computer from the network. For the first time in years, Spetz was cut off from the network.

He glanced back at his screen and had a rude shock. The attacking code should have died, cut off from its source, but it didn't. It just kept going, as if it had a life of its own. Spetz uttered a cry of disbelief.

He had no choice but to reach up and hit the console's power knob. His screen and most of the apartment went dark and silent. He'd routed so much of his apartment through the console that only a single military surplus light glowed to hold off the night's darkness.

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Outside a ruined apartment complex, Ivan Peterlych smoked an unfiltered Chinese cigarette. With each deep inhale, its glow lit the doorway he stood in, but for the most part he was hidden in the shadows. A couple street lights lit the avenue, most had been stolen or broken years ago. Scraggy grass grew along the cement, lined with rusted hulks of ancient Soviet cars and piles of trash.

He looked up at the apartment building down the street, a huge cement monolith that could have held hundreds of families but, judging from the number of lights, contained only a handful now.

His implant beeped an incoming coded message. He snubbed out the cigarrett, it wouldn't be long now. A couple moments passed and then someone exited the building and walked down the street towards where Ivan waited.

It was a young, slender boy who shuffled like someone who'd been slapped around for most of his life, and just received his latest installment. His fake leather jacket hung on his frame, and even in the darkness Ivan could tell that he was pale and gaunt.

When he got close, Ivan casually stepped out of the shadows and pulled out his gun. He called out Spetz's real name. Spetz looked up, saw Ivan's bulky form and the unmistakable shape of the gun. He turned and ran, sprinting back towards the apartment building.


Spetz ran wildly, with abandon. He kept expecting to hear the retort of the gun and feel the bullet find his body. He reached the building and turned a corner into the main hallway, feeling safe, like a baseball player getting to home base. And then he saw another form in the hallway. There was a bright flash and he saw everything in harsh relief. The form was a large man, dressed like a typical mafioso and holding the pistol that had flashed. Spetz felt a giant punch in his stomach, his legs stopped working and he collapsed to the ground. The mobster walked up to him, pointed the gun at his head, and then Spetz's world ended.

Petro looked down at the crumpled body, the blood leaking out from underneath. After a moment, Ivan walked up, barely glancing at the body.

“Let's go.”
“Shouldn't we do something with him?” This was Petro's first kill and wasn't sure what the gravity of the moment demanded.

“No. The directions were simply to kill him when he left the building. He's dead. We can go home.” Ivan was an ex-policeman and knew that the police weren't going to rush to the scene, but it would still be better to put some miles between them. He turned and walked off. Petro followed but glanced back a couple times at the body.

After a moment, Petro caught up to Ivan. “What'd he do? I mean, he didn't look like much.”

Ivan frowned. “You really shouldn't ask questions. The key thing is to do the job, get out, and keep your mouth shut.” He walked on for a couple steps. “But I do know that he was a nobody, that he was some lightweight chump who got in over his head.”

“So why did he have to get killed? Why didn't they simply have us break his legs?”

Ivan shrugged. “Sometimes they like to make an example of someone and this chump was a great choice. He didn't have any connections, he didn't have any family. We end him and there is no blowback.”

They walked up to where their vehicle was parked, a low slung, hydrogen-powered motorcycle with sidecar. Ivan hopped into the sidecar and Petro fired up the engine. Within moments their headlights had disappeared down the road.