Hack:Moscow (2 page)

Outside, the sun’s a bright balloon. No matter the weather though, this street is always gray. Six-story apartment buildings loom on each side, darkening the pavement between. In my reprogrammed world, I’d brighten the street’s palette.

The Stalin-era apartments have blocky and concrete facades. Prospect Mira, the main street here, is a fifteen minute stroll from the Metro Alexeyevskay and its green-striped marble pylons. On this lane, each block is numbered, and so is each unit.
Comrades, stand up and be counted!,
someone had sprayed on the sidewall in a thick, cheerful font. Inside the blocks, the walls are thin. I heard that people were encouraged to snitch on each other in the bad old days. Now, in the bad new days, when the toilet’s flush croaks down the pipes, people ignore the sounds. That is, unless you’re Grigory, who pounds the ceiling with a broomstick. There’s a popular song that goes,
Knock once to let me know you’re there. I’ll knock back so you know I’m listening
. The composer must have lived here before.

On the street, a massive pit bull dragged a man behind him. A few windows forward, a
babushka
fluttered her carpet out, beating a counterpoint to a tinkled melody. Anna, Grigory’s daughter, was on the piano again. For a moment, the dust motes danced like scattered tinsel. Rumor has it Grigory is shopping his daughter around to the conservatories. He thinks he’d get paid if she’s accepted. “I told him the system is different now.” Old Nelya had sniffed when she brought it up. “The way he forces her to train. And that mother of hers does nothing for her. Nothing.”

Anna and I went to the same school when we were little. I still remember how she tugged my hand as we walked the two blocks to the bus stop. When she was young, she used to come to my place. We would sit on the floor, knees to our chins, as we set Father’s gramophone and let the composers regale us: Mussorgsky is a folklorist, Borodin’s a court gossip, while Chopin is a chatterbox accompanying us on a stately barge down the Vistula.

Anna and I seldom talk now because Grigory always shoos me; ever since Father passed away, he thinks I’m cursed.

The music stopped. “Andrei.” I heard Anna’s voice. I looked up. Her elbows were propped against the second-story window and her gray-white blouse blended in with the concrete windowsill. The red ribbons in her blonde hair flickered as her long fingers tapped nervously on the ledge. She can’t stop practicing even when she’s off the piano. When she leaned forward, her blouse cupped her curves. I felt heat on my face.

“Andrei, where are you going?” Her lips swelled like pixels, her shoulders rounded. “You don’t call, you don’t talk,” she said, smiling slightly, “have you forgotten me?”

She’s teasing me, but there’s a bass note of sadness she couldn’t quite conceal.

Before I could answer, another window opened. “Andryushka, you there?” Old Nelya’s shrunken head peered down from the fourth floor. “The cabbage soup will be in the fridge. Remember to finish it,” she shrilled.

Time freezes.

The street wraps me in its powdery silence. Ribbons bounce on Anna’s hair. “Andryushka, my boy, my boy,” she sang, then stuck out her tongue.

The heat on my cheeks and the rushing in my ear faded when I saw Grigory staggering down the street, one hand groping the wall for balance. Drunk again. Anna saw him as well, and quickly ducked back in, sleek as a mink. As I walked on, the piano restarted, a dirge she played friskily, a joke only we understood. It felt good to make her laugh, hear her laugh, even for a minute. Then the melody slowed. The dirge was just a dirge again.

Two streets later, I remembered Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet
and a childish promise made. A long time ago, Anna and I had agreed we’d fly away to a palace of music, a place with an unending supply of ice cream and McDonalds. How easily children make promises! How easily children break promises!

Three streets later, there was a buzz on my phone. It’s Luka’s usual warning—
Be careful
.

Just another day in my life.

“Let’s not exchange names for now, eh?” Those were Luka’s first words when we first met two years ago.

“Why do we have to meet face to face?” I asked as he sat down. We had arranged to meet at The Mad Lark, a café near Patryarshy Ponds, the area where expatriates like to stay. Luka had a square hairline, which resembled the Kremlin parade ground. He kept his sunglasses on while we talked.

“I can’t do business with people I don’t know. Who are these anonymous people online? There are computers so smart they can hold a conversation. Am I talking to a God or a dog? Anyone can hide behind a nickname. Most importantly, I need to be sure you’re not with
them
.”

“Who?”

His voice dropped a register. “The F.S.B.” The government’s spy agency? My eyebrows shot up and he smiled knowingly. “You have to be careful if you want to do what I do. Last year, one of my acquaintances was caught.”

“What happened?”

He threw a hand into the air as if to say,
who knows
? “Technically, there are few laws against what we do. But there are unofficial rules. Never touch Russian companies, that’s the big one. Also, I never destroy anything, I only copy stuff. You have to be careful, because if the F.S.B. catches you… See, they don’t care about the law. There’s irony for you, eh? If they catch you, they shoot first and ask questions later. Assuming you’re alive then.” His tone was light, but he looked serious.

I was hooked. “How do you know I’m not with them?”

“That’s what these are for.” He pushed his sunglasses up and tapped the corner of an eye. “I know their type. You’re too young. You’re what, fourteen? Fifteen?”

I was thirteen then—almost—and not about to admit my age, so I didn’t answer him. “Why should I trust you?”

“Excellent question.” Luka leaned forward, and I noticed his teeth—brown with addiction, coffee, cigarettes, or both. “You can’t trust anyone. Especially those who claim they can be trusted. I’m not trying to scare you.” He shifted his bulk. “If you work for me, I can teach you how to stay safe. Unless”—he raised an eyebrow—“there’s a reward on your head I don’t know about? No? There you go.” He spread his fleshy palms wide. “You’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain. You need work. You need money, right?” Father’s insurance money was running out. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. The only people who should be ashamed are people who can’t earn their keep. Now, show me what you can do.”

From my backpack, I pulled out my laptop. Around me, people were on their computers, phones, or tablets. They looked dull, their eyes cast downwards.

Moscow is an urban sprawl girded by ring roads. The Third Rome, the White Throne—the city has many names and even more people, twelve million of them, breathing, walking, sitting, working, dreaming, dying. It’s the heart of a country that has been invaded from East to West: the Mongolian hordes, the Polish, the Swedish, Napoleon and his Grand Army, the Germans and their Panzers; all were defeated. We’re good at fighting the enemies outside yet we hide from the ones within, Father used to sigh. I’m one of the masses, people tell themselves, nobody cares what I do as long as I stay quiet and trouble-free. People become complacent in their anonymity, trusting the crowd to hide them.

Sometimes, they are wrong.

I spun up Crackjammer.
1 0wnz U
, the splash screen of my favorite hacking tool declared as it loaded, its programmer’s ego writ in ghoulish-green pixels. It took less than a minute for my computer to slide between the café’s Wi-Fi router and its users. Streams of data started flowing through my computer.

“A man-in-the-middle attack,” Luka observed, leaning slightly to peer at my screen. “Or shall I say a boy-in-the-middle? Is that Crackjammer?” He was up to speed on the latest warez. “Not the best way. There are two viruses embedded in the code.”

“I found three.” Scrubbing the code line by line had taken me a week. The best hacking programs are booby-trapped—their creators aren’t charity types. Novices download them from pirate sites thinking they are hunters. They end up being hunted. Luka nodded as if I had passed the first test. Around us, coffee cups clinked.

“Keep going.” I loaded other apps to filter the incoming data. It takes the right tools and experience to decipher all the numbers swirling by.

Focus.

The world dissolves around thirteen inches of glass, and I step through into another. Bits and bytes coalesce into meaning. A girl sends an email, a missive of love bundled with a picture, to someone in the United States. Her email promises undying love if he’d get her a green card. Someone is streaming porn, maybe the person squirming in the corner, his computer on his lap. A student is chatting online with his professor about a biology project. Another chat channel, this one with his girlfriend, reveals he thinks his professor a world-class idiot.

A stubby finger broke the reverie. Luka pointed to the student’s chats. “Can you find out who he is?” He waved his hand around the café at the people. Eavesdropping online is one thing; pinpointing the exact person is harder. I pulled up the chat file, copied what the man was typing to his girlfriend and sent it to his professor. Five seconds later, the man in the corner looks wildly around him. Luka’s chin wobbled as he covered his laugh with a fleshy hand. “I was thinking of a technical solution for triangulation, but elegance is what matters, eh?” Elegance—that’s what Father said about coding. I felt myself straighten.

“These little secrets and lies…” Luka nodded slightly, dismissively. “How about something more serious?”

Serious? How serious? For a while, my mind ran wild, straying to the rumors one always hears about on the underground bulletin boards. Programs that control powerful ion satellites orbiting the world; Artificial Intelligences that can, or have taken over the world already; master hacks that control anything—do you want to copy the world, delete, ignore? Vaporware is mostly smoke and myth. What’s serious enough for him?

“Well?” he asked mildly.

I had to come up with something fast, so I expanded my network scan. Corporate hacking is usually a team effort. Any decent hacker will tell you it’s easy to force your way around, to smash and break things—but to do it without getting caught, that’s the hard bit. Bayesian analyzers use heuristics to study your techniques; honey pot traps lure you with fake promises. Professional hackers work in teams. They plan ahead. Sniffing programs are used to understand a system’s maintenance schedules, find all the loopholes. They lurk in the system for months, before getting out. Then, they have ways to sell the data they grab. Most importantly, they do everything with style. I considered my alternatives as I pinged the world. Small businesses are easy targets. Even a newbie can take them down. A brute-force attack algorithm can hurl permutations of characters, trying one set, then another, against their digital locks. Chance and frequency work in cahoots until the right key is found. Simple yet inelegant.

So I do something different.

A few clicks later, my shadow slips under a virtual door crack.
Tack, tack, tack
, Luka’s wedding ring makes a heavy sound as his fingers drum the table. I’m in, but the challenge has grown. From Root, the sub-directories spiral out like mazes. It’d take forever to find my way around, so I seeded my favorite hack for subnets. I call it Silver Rose after the flower Old Nelya puts in the vase before my mother’s picture. A few seconds is all it takes to creep and twine and blossom. Almost there.

As I wait, I look up at Luka, then glance away as his shaded eyes study me. I feel like I want to prove myself.
Tack, tack, tack
, his fingers continue. Is this enough? Can I do more? I want to do more!

Focus.

Down the road, a digit flips in the inventory system of a supermarket. Soon, the store assistants will think all their milk expired three days ago. Across the street, a digital billboard on a pink and white building blinks into a smiley.
Hug me
, it reads. Amused onlookers begin to gather and point. “That’s good.” Luka chuckles at a couple across the road hugging and taking a selfie. Fifteen seconds later, the sign changed back to its original message, informing people of the perks of being an American Express cardholder. “Very cute,” Luka says. Before he turns to me, I hit a final command.

Send.

“That’s it?” Luka seemed disappointed when I shut my laptop. “I expected more.” His phone vibrated. “Hold on.” He froze as others reached for their phones. The same ring tone was resonating across the café, a snippet of a Cossack lullaby I had taped Old Nelya humming while I was experimenting with the Knock-Knock virus a while back. I’d slapped the virus onto the music like a jet pack and aimed it carefully, an on-the-fly adaptation.

Luka stood up. “Let’s go.” Despite his bulk, he flowed from his chair. He kept toying with his phone as he headed out, pretending to be as puzzled as everyone else.

Outside, everyone stared at their phones. Old Nelya was the hottest singer around Patryarshy Ponds. “Shall we head that way?” He spoke conversationally as we walked, then leaned closer. “If you do stuff like that again, make sure you get sunglasses. Keep moving. Walk, don’t run.” After a block, his brisk pace slowed. “This hack, it’s a variant of that virus you posted. You ran it while I was looking at the billboard. I never gave you my number and everyone’s phone is affected, which means…” He looked around until he noticed the rooftop of a maize-colored building. “There.” He pointed at a stand of paneled antennae facing the junction. Moscow Telecom controls the network here, from cell phones to satellites.

I stared where his finger pointed, up high. Before today, I would never have dared to try a prank like this. A wall had crumbled.

“It’s high up, so the technicians update the software wirelessly. You used the Knock-Knock virus as a carrier and customized the music as its payload. That affected all the phones nearby.” As he spoke, a belated fear seized me. What have I done?

Then, I saw him smile. “Let’s go. It won’t be long before someone investigates a mad wireless cell site.” We walked to the entrance of the nearby Metro. “Elegance, misdirection, and still so young. We can work together.” His expression was reassuring as he stretched out his hand. “Call me Luka.”

His handshake had a weight that drew me close.