Ari the Life-Hacker

My mother is dying. She’s dying from an extremely curable form of cancer. Unfortunately, our family doesn’t belong to the one percent. We can’t afford the treatment since the health industry, along with everything else, including the world’s governments, has been monopolized by CYBR Corp.

I will not be standing by while my mother dies. Not anymore. For the last year, I’ve done very little else besides training my mind and body to become a netrunner. Typically, it’s highly unusual to become a netrunner before the age of eighteen, when you get your government-issued holocomm, but if I wait another three years, my mother will be…well, I can’t wait, alright? So I scrounged up enough Johnnies running cybersecurity gigs to get the necessary implants. Sure, it’s second-hand chrome and a little behind the cutting edge of the latest CYBR Corp bullshit they’re putting out. And I may have only been able to get a cybersurgeon to install the chrome by blackmailing him with data I skimmed from his computer while doing a gig for him, but whatever. Sue me. Let’s see what you do when your only living family, the person who raised you and cared for you when no one else in this twisted world did, is dying right in front of you.

“This is it, Mom,” I say softly.

“You don’t have to do this, honey,” she pleads weakly.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well…be careful. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I give her a kiss on the forehead, stand from the bed, and walk out of our shared bedroom, shutting the door gently behind me.

“You can do this,” I mutter to myself.

I feel so nervous. Everything I’ve done for the past year has led to this. And it could all come crashing down around me in the blink of a cybernetically-enhanced eye. But it won’t. Because it can’t. I will save my mother’s life. I won’t let her die of a treatable disease while those rich bastards sun themselves on their mega yachts.

I walk through the living room to the front door, checking once again that the locks are, in fact, locked, and the security system I stole is, in fact, armed. They are, and it is. I’ve checked five times today. But it doesn’t hurt to check again, right?

“Just go, do it!” I tell myself.

I pick my head up, roll my shoulders, and march toward the closet in the hallway. I open the door, revealing no shelves, towels, or cleaning products but, instead, a hollow rectangular space occupied by a rusty folding chair with a highly intricate and compact computer resting beside it. It’s my netrunning rig. I stole it, too. There’s no amount of part-time gigs in all of Nova City to fund one of these. At least not one that’s good enough for what I need it for. The implants I could get away with being sub-par because, at the end of the day, they’re just extensions of myself. If I’m strong enough, mentally and physically, to do this, then it won’t matter. So I earned those and bought them with real Johnnies because why not? But the rest of it? No way.

I sit down in the chair, close the door, and turn on the refrigeration device mounted to the wall. I start to get extremely cold very quickly, but soon, I’ll be generating enough heat to boil water with my skin. I reach down to the rig, tap the sensor to awaken it, and grab the bundle of wires attached to the back. The rig begins to glow with blue light, letting me know it’s ready. There’s no startup sound, no fans spinning. It’s completely silent, liquid-cooled, efficient in every way. While my skin itches and crawls, this thing will be as happy as can be.

“This is it, Ari,” I tell myself, taking a few deep breaths, “time to save her life.”

I plug the wires into the ports in the back of my head, behind the right ear. Three connections, three ports. Then, I slide down in the chair until my knees are resting on the door. I’ve developed this position over my testing. It keeps my physical body still and anchored in space while my mind is digging through the net.

With one final deep breath, I close my eyes and press the tip of my left thumb to my left ring finger. In the time it takes my nerve endings to send the signal to my brain that my fingers are touching, my consciousness has left my body and is now within the net.

I look around, taking in the digitally rendered replica of our apartment. I’m standing, or, rather, floating in the center of our living room. It’s my anchor point for netrunning. I open the front door and float into the Stream: an endless, twisting, flowing web of glowing blue chords. Here, all information is accessible if you know how to navigate it. And, more importantly, have access to it. This is, of course, if you’re not skilled enough of a hacker to get it anyway. Which I am. And I will.

I float along, the blue chords of data twisting and flowing all around me. They’re visual representations of information, interactable through touch, if you can call it that. There’s no actual sensation of touch when netrunning. Not one a normal person would recognize, that is. Anyone can plug themselves into a netrunning rig and float around a little digital replica of a real space, provided they’ve got the cybernetics to allow the connection. But only a handful are strong, skilled, and crazy enough to delve deep into the endless, abstract tangle of data known as the Stream. As soon as you leave the comfort of real-world replication, your mind begins to panic. That is, until you spend enough time here that it feels just as real as reality. That’s how I feel. I’ve spent so many hours here exploring the Stream, accessing random information streams, and floating through parts of the net barely conceivable to the human mind. I find it comforting. Here, I’m in complete control. Out there, my mom is dying, and I’m hungry all the time, and the landlord knocks on the door with his shotgun every other week, asking where the rent is.

But I need to focus. I’m not just here for the usual escape. I’m here to pull off the heist of my life. Hell, if I pull this off, it’ll be the heist of a century, no doubt.

I float through the Stream until I feel the pull of my desired information space: the Nova City Central Reserve (NCCR). I grab onto it with the translucent tendrils of information that make up my hand, and I’m suddenly standing in the lobby of a bank. I look down, and my body is entirely invisible.

“Perfect,” I say to myself. Actually, I don’t say anything, but it feels like I do. It’s difficult to describe the sensation.

The point is phase one is going perfectly. Typically, when someone connects to the NCCR net, they become a digital avatar of themselves and interact with the bank like it’s real, like people used to, or so I’m told. All currency, transactions, and banking as such have been fully digital and automated through CYBR Corp’s systems for as long as I’ve been alive.

I float through the ones and zeroes that make an image of bulletproof glass, and the façade of the bank disappears. I’m once again swimming through the Stream. Only this time, I’m inside the private Stream belonging to the NCCR. By the time this information has become thought in my mind, security daemons are sinking their digital claws into my data, attempting to sever my connection to the Stream they’re guarding. I don’t actually “see” anything attacking, but I’ve hacked enough private servers in preparation for this to know a daemon attack when it’s happening. It feels like you’re falling asleep, but not the kind when you’re lying in bed. It feels like the sleep you slip into when you’re being knocked out with anesthesia.

This is exactly what I’ve trained so hard for. Everything comes down to this moment.

I dig into the sensation of falling asleep, pushing past the barrier with the data of my existence. I find the core of the daemons behind their hostile programming. I latch onto it, digging my tendrils deep into their subroutines until I find what I’m looking for: an override for circumventing their hostile measures. It will make them see me as part of their subnet, another fish in their Stream. I latch onto the override, working as efficiently as I can to implement myself as part of their core programming, to be recognized as a friendly string of ones and zeroes in their non-existent brains.

I can feel myself being pushed out. I’m falling asleep. In reality, I’m waking up. For half a second, I can see the inside of the closet I’m in and feel my skin burning and itching, but I force my consciousness to plunge itself back into the net. After a few tense moments, I do it. I manage to hack the daemons and force myself into their core programming, turning them into my watchdogs rather than my attackers.

With the daemons out of the way, I take a moment to gather my wits. I float through the NCCR Stream, scanning the chords of data. Each time I prod a chord with my tendril, its data comes into focus. It shows me who owns the account, how much money they have, and where it came from. There’re countless people here who are good, hard-working, everyday people, just like my mom and I. I pass right by their chords. What I’m looking for comes a few sections of chords into the Stream. I touch one and see some one-percenter with millions of Johnnies all coming from drug smuggling, human trafficking, you name it.

“Perfect.”

I latch onto the chord, diving deep into the account. I dive below the surface information. I don’t need to see the name or the transaction history. I need the raw data that comprises each and every fraction of a Johnny in his blood-stained bank account. Once I reach the core of the data, I sic the daemons on it. They isolate the data, carving it out of the surrounding information. Within a few moments, I’m holding a glowing blue orb of pure information containing the code that represents a ridiculous amount of money. I bring the orb to the center of my code, and it becomes absorbed into me. I can feel it disperse, then disappear.

And just like that, I’m a multi-millionaire. What’s more, this guy has nothing. And the best part? Thanks to my new daemon friends, this money is completely isolated from its source. There’s no transaction history, no bloody trail leading it back to its owner. He gets to keep that little record of his twisted empire as evidence of what led to his downfall. And I get to save my mom.

I swim back through the Stream, floating through the glass of the bank. I move to the front doors, ready to exit this subnet and go back to the main Stream and back to my apartment. But the door won’t let me through. I look down and realize I’m an avatar. I’m no longer invisible.

“Shit!”

I reach into my own data and probe for the source of this disturbance. Before I can identify it, bodyguards are running toward me through the digital bank lobby. These bodyguards are more daemons, but they have visible manifestations to keep the illusion alive for the other bank-goers. I call the daemons I absorbed from within the NCCR Stream. Two giant panthers appear in front of me, fangs bared and claws sharp. Daemons can look however you want them to. I want them to be big cats.

“You have violated the law! Cease your activity!” The daemon bodyguards command.

“Cease this!” I yell back, admittedly not a very clever comeback.

I send my daemon panthers toward the guards. They claw through the bodyguards’ chests and legs, tearing them to ribbons. They don’t bleed or scream or anything; they’re just data. Instead, they turn into literal ribbons of blue data. They’re corrupted, fragmented, useless. Other people using the digital bank begin to scream and run through the door, vanishing as soon as they touch the handle.

I turn my attention back inside my own body, my avatar, my data. I dig deep within myself, looking for the virus that snuck its way into me while I was in the NCCR Stream. I find it, latch onto it. I dig into its core and find out it’s a containment protocol. It’s locked me to this tiny fraction of the net, unable to travel back to the Stream or to any other part of the net. I hack into it, cutting through its subroutines until I find its core programming. I move it through my data, wrenching it from myself. I gather it back into itself, turning its containment into its own prison. I toss it, a ball of writhing information, toward the digital glass of the bank.

With the virus gone, I once again vanish. I float through the door and into the Stream. After a few moments, I’m back in the net rendering of our apartment. I grasp the two daemons’ cores and turn them into an impenetrable wall of hostile code for anyone trying to break into my subnet. Then, I fall asleep.

And I wake up in the closet, sweaty, uncomfortable, triumphant. I unplug the wires from my head, turn off the netrunning rig, and open the door. I shakily get to my feet, my body completely spent from the intense hacking I just put it through. I feel lightheaded and numb, but I don’t care. I stumble a few feet to the door of the bedroom, swing it open, and smile at my mom.

“I did it, Mom!” I declare, filled with excitement and adrenaline.

“Oh my goodness,” my mom answers, seemingly less excited, “I really hope this won’t cause you any trouble.”

“Who cares? I got so much money, Mom! We’re gonna be okay! You’re going to live!”

Despite herself, my mom starts to cry. I stumble over to her bed, fall into her arms, and cry with her.

“You’re going to live.”

“Thank you, Ari, thank you so much.”