“Accelerant. That’s all it was man. An accelerant. Welcome to my world.” Jesk on the theory of Moore’s Law.
Seventeen years ago the greatest hacker that was ever born came into this world. His name? Good luck finding that out. That was the first thing I erased from the cloud. I was eight years old then. I’d always hated my family. Mom was so damn busy rambling about the second coming; and Dad? Dad was too stoned to care. But they did love me, I guess. I mean there weren’t many kids in five points that had themselves a brand new Primal back in ’43. I unlocked the firmware in like five minutes and had myself the ultimate hacking device.
Dad was so happy when his stupid-ass checking account had five hundred K in it. He didn’t care enough to ask where it came from, but I think he knew. With dad so stoned he barely moved from the couch and mom always protesting some new form of debauchery she’d found on the internet, I was free to do what I really wanted, read the net.
The net is so much more than the World Wide Web! You can get lost for hours reading the crummy code some lazy programmer did for a jerk-off Corporation’s firewall and server protection protocols. I mean half the time these guys don’t even write for some of the techniques I use to peer into what they’re hiding. And it isn’t like I’m doing anything new; I learned everything I know from how-to videos and some basic logic. It’s like these guys just don’t care, or sometimes they follow the code.
When I was twelve I bought a flat in neo-Miami, on the artificial beach they built after the waters wiped out like most of Florida when they rose. It was ok, fast bandwidth with super close access to a hardline across the Atlantic to Europe. I don’t even think my parents reported me missing for like three weeks, and it didn’t matter anyways, because I was out of the system and my parents just looked like nuts at the police station. I know! I hacked the security cams at the precinct and YouTubed the whole thing! Still can’t believe my Ma cried.
After that I just sorta hung out and made some new friends around the net, friends like you wouldn’t believe. I once met a guy who rerouted relief aid from a natural disaster area to a conflict zone and attributed it to the other side. War ended like a week later, or at least that’s what the link said. It wasn’t until about ’51 that things changed for me. I was sixteen and vacationing in New York with some cyber bros. They were on this aug kick and had brand new cerebral augs that let them bypass the analogue system, aka the eyes and dive directly into the net. They were complaining about how much the surgery and units cost (it’s not like they actually paid for any of it with their own money) and how these bio-aug companies were really sticking it to the consumer and that we should hack one of them and plant a slow-burn. I was fired up on black-ice and spent 36 hours writing the code.
Then it was just a matter of choosing a company. So I switched to consumer mode and started sifting the web for the biggest fish in the sea. It wasn’t long before I came across this company that was always in the fortune five hundred list and had spent way more money than anyone else on some new muscle tech. I didn’t get the details exactly, but I figured they were as good as any and went ahead and attacked their primary servers.
The Server had the weirdest secondary passcode I’d ever seen. It was so simple, it wouldn’t have been a problem fifty years ago, but in 2051 a four letter passcode just won’t do man. I mean I know that the primary passcode was rock solid and as unhackable as the Pentagon’s was, but there’s no excuse for this kind of laziness. The programmer behind this secondary passcode had to be a member. I mean It makes perfect sense: ‘Oh you can hack the most state of the art system money can buy? Why bother putting up any more defenses, you’ve already won?’.
Then I saw everything. I saw what the company was doing now, where they were planning to go and how they were going to get there. Man, these guys were dark. Pages of text documents describing the application of some new limb tech and acquirement of new assets based on the dealings with some guy named Jim, who was labeled in accountings as ‘free-lance security and head-hunter’, whatever that means. The whole thing screamed new world order and I was happy to have dropped the bomb and gotten out. It wasn’t until I heard about the deaths of my hacker friends six months later that I found out their connection was using an outdated proxy and had linked my actions back to their hack spot. It isn’t like it was my fault, they knew the code.
I’ve always gone by an alias, changed it every year, every year until I started digging into this whole BioSol mess, then I became Jesk. Jesk-Reader. Why? Because why the hell not?