The Phone Hack

Excessive, Wayne Lee thinks bemusedly, sipping his shrinkflated latte as he glances out the large fixed window of the Starbucks he’d chosen as his latest hunting ground. If brutally effective.

Thirteen surveillance cameras, all wired into a single ten-foot tall, off-white pillar, stare impassively down upon the teeming throngs of Humanity that pass unceasingly beneath its glassy-eyed gaze, relaying everything it sees back to one of hundreds of monitoring stations secreted across the length and breadth of the tiny island-nation. It is one of thousands such Watch Pillars erected to restore and maintain Nagapore City’s age-old reputation as the ‘safest country in South-East Asia’ post-Uprising, each one of its lenses capable of a minimum 2K image recording at a distance of sixty-plus feet even under poor lighting conditions.

“Goddamn Bug Eyes, you think they can see us in here?” Cherie Chua muttered, a nervous grin plastered across her round, snow-white face. Sweat beaded her brow, threatening to smudge her makeup as she fidgeted uncomfortably in her bar stool, absentmindedly adjusting her knee-length pencil skirt, her own latte untouched and ice-cold.

Seated beside Cherie upon his own bar stool, Wayne rolled his eyes and smiled indulgently, taking another sip of his lukewarm latte. His eyes remained fixed upon the view beyond the window, never once turning to look at his client. Across the street, the Watch Pillar, or ‘Bug Eyes’ as the locals derisively named each accretion of surveillance equipment due to the machines’ resemblance to an insects’ all-seeing compound eyes, continued its silent vigil, one camera trained directly at the coffee shop, its lidless mechanical stare enough to unsettle even the most stoic and law-abiding of citizens, if one gave such overt surveillance too much thought. The key to remaining calm then, was to keep one’s body and mind distracted and quiet, respectively. That both states of being were actively encouraged by the government was an irony not lost on Wayne.

“Hey, are you listening to me? My question wasn’t rhetorical, y’know,” Cherie whispered urgently, anxiety strangling each syllable. “I paid you to…”

“To get back enough Public Credits to raise your Social Rating above ‘D’,” Wayne finished for her, cutting Cherie off from her rant, his gaze still cool and fixed firmly ahead. “You presumably did not hire me to expose us both to the undercover Police officer sitting at the corner table to our right, pretending he’s deeply interested in a 6 month old copy of Men’s Fitness. Nor did you hire me, I think, to let the whole country know you hired me by having a conversation with you right in front of a set of Bug Eyes.”

“Then why did you bring me here?” Cherie hissed, her voice cracking slightly under the pressure. Wayne would not have been surprised to see tears welling up in his client’s eye had he turned to look at her. “You don’t need me for this, right?”

Wayne sighed. Cherie wasn’t completely wrong, though he was loathe to share his reasons for bringing her along; work had been lean recently, what with the recent government crackdowns on ‘ethical hackers’, and Wayne wasn’t making nearly enough money in his day-job that he could afford to turn down a client, regardless of his suspicions.

“I need you here to verify that the procedure worked,” he said, the lie felt weak, but he’d been so busy coding the app and planning the hack over the past week that he hadn’t truly had time to think up a good excuse. In any case, if his suspicions were to prove true, then nothing he said would really make Cherie get up and leave. “I like to wrap business up on the spot; follow-ups with clients are dangerous.”

“Yet, we’re seated directly in front of a Bug Eyes?!” Cherie all but growled. “Are you insane?”

“The Eyes acts as a relay into the Ministry’s servers; it’s how I’ll transfer our mark’s Creds from his account into yours.”

“Your mark, you mean,” Cherie said coolly.

“Yeah, of course; if anything goes wrong, nothing gets traced back to you. Though, of course, no refunds, yeah?”

Cherie said nothing, merely wringing her hands as she muttered imperceptibly under her breath. Wayne took another sip of his latte and scanned the room.

The Starbucks was a cacophony of inane human chatter, the space full of the usual sorts; teenagers with too much of their parents’ money to spend, young adults nursing grande fraps with price tags their accountants, if they had one, would baulk at, over-worked office-types hijacking the shop’s free WiFi to answer work emails during their lunch breaks, and of course, one undercover police officer attempting his best ‘gym bro’ look in the far corner.

At least they picked someone who looks like he respects leg day, Wayne thought, a twinge of jealousy sparking in his chest as he stole a glance at the cop’s tree-trunk legs. Working two jobs, one of which was distinctly illegal, left little time for physical exercise, or at least, that was the excuse Wayne liked to use.

The door opened, the chime of its attached doorbell lost amid a sea of background noise, and Wayne’s mark strode into the cafe with all the swagger of a whipped dog.

Wayne spared a glance at the man whose life he was about to ruin. Middle-aged, sporting a slight paunch with flecks of grey adorning a head of close-cropped hair, Wayne knew him only as Terence Chin; a perpetual middle manager for the Ministry of Public Affairs who worked more hours than his estranged family would like, Terence hadn’t received a single promotion or raise in two years despite the hard work he’d put in and the copious brown-nosing he’d engaged in. Under kinder circumstances, Wayne felt he might have pitied Terence, maybe even passed him over for another mark.

However, given the number of Wayne’s friends and colleagues that the Terence’s employers had ‘disappeared’ over the past five years post-Uprising, the hacker found himself struggling to muster even the barest hint of sympathy for Mr. Chin.

“Is that the guy?” Cherie asked urgently, barely able to keep from glancing over. “Let’s get this over with. I can’t even buy a train ticket with a ‘D’ rating.”

“Of course,” Wayne replied. “Doing it now.”

He swiped open Cherie’s phone and opened the app he’d installed onto it earlier, letting the programme search for and connect to Terence’s phone over the cafe’s WiFi. Within the span of minutes, Wayne’s app had crawled Terence’s phone, digitally cloned the man’s online credentials, then used its new identity to piggyback its way onto the Public Affairs servers via the Watch Pillar from across the street. With a data-tether linked securely to Cherie’s phone, the app began to alter server records to reflect a one hundred percent increase in her Public Credits account, swiftly raising her Social Rating score from a dismal ‘D’, to a more respectable ‘B’ while simultaneously seeding hundreds of digital false trails and decoy trojans to mask its entry and eventual self-termination. It wasn’t a foolproof system; a skilled enough hacker could reconstruct the intrusion by retracing the hack via the wreckage left in the wake of the app’s path through the servers, though of course, that would take time. Time he could use to disappear, though Wayne suspected that was a luxury he would not soon be afforded. Still, it had been worth it to get this close. He almost felt he should thank Cherie for the opportunity. Pity, he thought as he passed her phone back to Cherie after wiping the app from it. I was beginning to like working the phones at the agency.

“God, you did it!” Cherie whispered, awe coloring her voice as she logged in to check her Public Credit score via the Social Rating account that all Nagaporeans had to install on their smartphones per government mandate. Needless to say, Wayne had only a spoofed copy running on his second burner phone.

“Yup, looks like you’ll be able to buy those train tickets now, eh?”

“I don’t know how to thank you!” Cherie said grinning, wiping tears from the corner of her eyes.

“Well, you could start by not having me arrested, Officer.” Wayne suggested bleakly, gulping down the last of his now tepid latte. “I mean, since you asked.”

Cherie rose to her feet and stared blankly at him, confusion etching itself onto her face in a near-perfect mixture of shock and indignation.

“My, you’re quite the actress, aren’t you, Ms. Chua? Even now, I’m almost inclined to believe what you’re trying sell me.” Wayne said, smirking as he rested his chin on steepled fingers, elbows on the table. “But, we both know I was screwed the moment I went through with our deal and got you those credits, so there’s no need for you to keep up the pretense, yes?”

Some among the crowds heard him and had gotten up to leave in a hurry, others too far distant remained seated, continuing to laugh and work and chat. Wayne hoped the coming altercation wouldn’t cause them too much distress.

Cherie grinned savagely as a meaty hand came to rest heavily on Wayne’s right shoulder; the undercover officer with the tree-trunk legs having quietly sidled up to him.

“Ouch,” he said. “I don’t suppose a quip about ‘heavy hands’ would go over well now, would it?”

“Not a lot is about to go over well for you, Mr. Lee.” Cherie said as she sat back down and reached for her own icy latte. “Urgh, hate these things; too much sugar.”

“The benefits of Capitalism, I suppose,” Wayne said, grinning. A squeeze of his shoulder erased said grin.

“So, you knew,” Cherie said flatly, turning to look him in the eye. “How?”

“Honestly? I didn’t know. Not until we met here for the job. I had my suspicions, sure, but it was only here that you confirmed them for me.”

Cherie’s eyes narrowed. Wayne took her silence as his cue to carry on.

“A ‘D’ rank Public Credit score doesn’t keep you from buying a train ticket, you didn’t even react when I mentioned your undercover buddy in the corner and when I said I wouldn’t refund you anything if things went south? You didn’t even blink; not exactly typical client behaviour, let’s just say.”

Cherie’s face began to contort into an ugly sneer. Wayne thought the look fit her much better than any of the previous ones she’d sported.

“So very clever. Yet, here you are, sitting right in the middle of a trap you sprung for yourself.” Cherie said. “Why? You giving up the game, Mr. Lee? Tired of skirting the fringes of society like a mongrel?”

Wayne rounded on her. Only the big hand on his shoulder keeping him from adding an extra ten years to whatever sentence he was sure he’d soon receive.

“At least I have my freedom.” Wayne snarled. “Unlike you and…them.” He all but bit out the last word, casting a contemptuous sweep of his eyes across the cafe.

Cherie couldn’t contain a short bark of laughter. “Our psych profiles did flag you as possessing dangerously liberal beliefs, but to hear you spout such nonsense in person, my god.” Cherie leaned in close enough for Wayne to breathe in the minty aroma of what he assumed were breath mints. “You treat the public like you’re better than them, yes? Like you know something they don’t? Well, they’re not the deluded ones, Mr. Lee, you are.”

“They’re…”Wayne began, but Cherie cut him off with a wave of her hand.

“They’re what? Not free? Not free as you? Oh, Mr. Lee,” Cherie chided, as if addressing a simpleton. “Look around you; the people are happy. They don’t want freedom; they want rules and boundaries that can protect them, their loved ones and their property from invaders and even themselves. They want order.”

“They’re happy only because you tell them to be happy.” Wayne retorted. “If they were shown another way…”

“They’d still still choose ours,” Cherie finished for him. Her sneer had become a smirk that Wayne desperately wanted to wipe from her face with his fists. “People want leaders that provide the constraints and support needed to keep chaos at bay; provide those, and they will follow.”

“From where I sit, the government seems a lot better at providing the former rather than the latter.”

“Spoken like the failure our evaluation teams predicted you’d be,” Cherie said, shaking her head as she stood, signaling to tree-trunk legs that it was time to go. “What did you even think you were going to accomplish here, eh? Hacking into our servers, maybe? Planting some kind of virus?” She scoffed. “You were never even near our servers; we would never let a rodent like you anywhere near wires you could chew. But, I’m still curious; we were always going to round up you and your kind, but you could have enjoyed a few more weeks, even months of your precious ‘freedom’. Why give yourself up now, eh? Was I right, Mr. Lee? Were you tired of running?”

Wayne grinned even as he was hauled to his feet by his armpit. “I just wanted to show the people another way.”

Across the street, the Watch Pillar began to spark and fizzle. The ever-present green glowing LEDs that studded the Bug Eyes dimmed to red, each camera drooping like a deflated balloon.

“What did you…” Cherie began.

“As I said, the Bug Eyes can be used as a relay into your servers, but you assumed I’d actually try and get into your servers at all. Nah, my buddies tried subtle during what you call the ‘Uprising’, but me? I’ve always been a more flamboyant type.”

“Ma’am,” Tree-trunk legs said, lowering his own phone, a look of consternation etched across his sharply defined features. “It’s the Inspector; he’s asking why your phone just pinged as the centre for a major security cascade failure.”

The color drained from Cherie’s face as the muttering in the cafe began to take on a decidedly more ominous tone.

“You…” she hissed, moving menacingly towards Wayne. He didn’t flinch, merely grinned.

“Time to change the narrative a bit, I thought,” Wayne said. “Time for the people to see what life can be like when Big Sis isn’t staring over their shoulder 24/7, eh?”

All around them, the murmuring intensified until Wayne’s laughter was drowned in a cacophony of confusion, anger and bewilderment.