Hack It! by ImmortalObsession | A Chapter Teaser
FBI WARNING: ILEGALLY DOWNLOADED MATERIAL HAS BEEN FOUND ON YOUR PC. THIS IS A FEDERAL CRIME. YOU ARE NOW BEING MONITORED VIA WEBCAM.
At the back of an outdated 60s diner hastily converted into a cybercafé in Queens, NY, Hermione Granger groaned. Customers waiting for iced chai tea and vanilla lattes glanced over, miffed by the interruption of their complicated orders, yet simultaneously nosy enough to try to see what she was up to. Hermione noticed and shot the closest observer, a man with chic square glasses standing in line, a dark look before hunching over the cruddy DELL laptop on the table.
ILEGALLY DOWNLOADED MATERIAL HAS BEEN FOUND ON YOUR PC. Oh really? she thought, opening the system recovery folder after a minute of navigating the C: drive. Windows XP was decidedly an ugly, ancient, inefficient beast. So the FBI just make typos regularly, huh? It figured that half-decent conmen couldn’t even make an authentic virus these days. Hell, her three-year old cousin wouldn’t fall for this garbage. Or maybe deforestation really was altering the fate of the universe and all that extra carbon dioxide was going straight to computer nerd’s heads worldwide?
While the hard drive wiped itself clean, she pictured it, trigonometry textbooks scattered around a desk and diabolical snorts galore as some friendless geek leered at the latest Apple product, eagerly awaiting his victim to send money directly to his bank account – right before he atom bombed their computer. Stupid buttface, she thought irritably, although admittedly this was a little hypocritical of her. After all, where buttface’s nefarious malware and spams infested the Internet like a bad case of tapeworm, she breezed past security networks and hijacked varying forms of digital to do odd jobs for paying customers all across the state. All mostly innocent things of course, like changing grades for a class assignment…or the less innocent, like taking over computers, tracking bank accounts, and getting invaluable code.
It was a risky business, but it was this or double shifts at McDonalds and paying rent late every month.
She’d much rather be a hacker.
With – ironically – her own antivirus called MalgitX.
58% complete, the screen read during the reboot. 59%...63%....
Hermione looked around, frowning at the unisex restroom kingwood9 disappeared inside ten minutes ago and wondering at the state of his bowels. She shook her head, slouching down some more while she waited for the softwares to re-install. School ended an hour ago and she’d come straight here, the usual meeting place for her occasional in-person requests. The hole in the wall, the Three Tithes, liked to call itself a cybercafé in hopes of attracting some younger patrons, when in actuality the only “cyber” thing about it was the free Wi-Fi supplied by the Laundromat next door, and the bran muffins that looked like disabled robots if you looked at them sideways. Despite so many positive factors, the café earned a slightly different reputation than it intended when the h and e in Tithes on the sign out front stopped lighting up in the late 80s.
A regular here since she first started coming in freshman year, Hermione knew the place well – from the faded image of Elvis Presley wallpaper just behind the cheap paintjob, to the dent in the checkerboard floor someone forgot to swap out when they decided to renovate. Coincidentally, she’d discovered her knack for technology in the same year she discovered the cybercafé. An elective requirement at her old public school had given her the option of taking either a low-grade art class or cosmetology course, and since she rates makeup products somewhere around the level of elephant dung and Sundance horror movies, Graphic Arts with Photoshop won out.
The class was virtually easy: show up, do a project, click-click-click for forty minutes. Hermione was bored, but her teacher praised her for her excellent classwork, suggesting she learn a bit more about the subject and teach a weekly class on computer basics at the local library for senior citizens. An overachiever by default, she hadn’t been able to resist the opportunity to build up her college application and impress a teacher. Besides, she’d been going to the library ritually since she was a little girl, more so when Dad died and Mom got that loser boyfriend, Mundungus, who deals anything you can poison your insides with on the shadier side of Harlem. So why not make something productive out of her self-imposed isolation?
The research was simple. She learned what she needed to teach the class (which wasn’t much more than common sense), and then some to pass the time. As Mom started forgetting to pay the utilities bills and the money Dad left them dwindled down to hundreds, however, she realized she couldn’t afford to waste her time doing community service anymore. She needed a realjob. But how would she get one? She was only fourteen, she couldn’t work anywhere substantial for another two years.
Hermione wasn’t old enough to get a job, but through an online software she forged a new birth certificate and working papers that would pass a chain restaurant’s quick inspection. She took online night courses on programming with the extra money left over from rent. Mom had still been lucid enough to be functioning back then, making up a sob story and claiming she couldn’t get a job because of back problems. The government started to send them disability checks monthly. At first, Hermione had been furious when she found out, more so when she learned Mom only got the checks so she could pay for the heroine, not for bills. But they were to the point where fraud was the least of their problems.
There wasn’t enough money, even with the food stamps. There wasn’t enough time, not with the extra hours or neglected homework, or skipping school to cover someone’s shift when she didn’t sleep last night. Outside of normal studies, Hermione slaved over books on network defenses and operating system holes, codes, encryption, security, access control, cracking passwords; anything about computers she could get her hands on. Months later, it came down two things: getting her hands a little dirty, or dropping out of high school to work a minimum wage job for the rest of her life.
Thus, Gryffindor was created.
Gryffindor, Hermione liked to think, was her rebellious side. She came up with the username when she stumbled across a website on Greek mythology. The Ancient Greeks believed in a creature called a hippogriff: a hybrid of a bird and horse, with the upper body of an eagle. It supposedly symbolized love, as its parents the griffin and mare were mortal enemies. Hermione took a liking to that description for reasons she keeps to herself, but was dismayed when she tried to use it and the web server informed her the username was already taken. After a little editing, Gryffindor was somehow born, and quickly became one of the most obscure and efficient hackers in New York.
“So can you fix it?” Gryffindor’s latest client, Kingwood9, grunted. He was back from the rendezvous to the restroom, pulling Hermione out of her thoughts.
“I’m not the Geek Squad, you know,” she retorted. “I don’t usually fix computers, I break into them.”
Kingwood9 grumbled (it took a focused mental effort not to read into his username) in response. His real name was Rubeus Hagrid, but Hermione had christened him Neanderthal the minute he walked through the door of the shop, scratching the razor cuts on his jaw and muttering perplexedly as he mustered the café around him. Presently Neanderthal shoved on his glasses after wiping them clean on a ketchup-stained sweat pant leg, shifting forward to squint at the PC screen.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” he muttered. “It just showed up last week and I shut the thing off immediately, because I didn’t want those government creeps watching me,” he said, with a shudder of his big frame. “I can’t go to jail again, my mom said she won’t bail me out this time.“
“I already fixed it.” Seeing the relief on his face, Hermione didn’t bother to tell dear Neanderthal the message hadn’t even been a genuine threat, but she did add, “It’ll cost you.”
“One hundred eighty, cash.”
“Holy– Listen, I work at TOYS R US. I stock the shelves with Barbie Merpeople dolls and Lord of the Rings action figures. How much do you think I make, Gryffindor?”
“Enough to request me.” She checked the clock. “Sitting here, you already owe me another five bucks.”
“Going on ten. I charge interest, by the way, so if you don’t pay me here you’ll just owe me more.”
“Alright, alright.” Neanderthal aggressively slapped down his pastry. Customers looked around at the commotion, scanning the bony girl in an oversized hoodie with a prehistoric laptop, and the whining forty-year-old-slash-yeti sitting across from her with interest. “I’ll pay, yeesh. Do you take checks?”
“Do I look like an idiot?”
He sighed heavily. “I only have fifty on me and I get paid next Thursday.”
“Interest it is.” Hermione cracked her knuckles and leaned forward, logging into the user account without having to ask for a password – how predictable, it was his brother’s name– and within ten minutes, Hagrid’s DELL was once again restored to its virus-free settings. It just kept getting easier, Hermione mentally marveled. “Do you want the MalgitX?” she asked.
“It’s one of the best antiviruses in the tri-state area,” she replied curtly. “Of course it’s free. I’ll even pay for that flourless cheesecake you’re eating.”
“You’re quite snippy in-person, you know.”
“I’ve got NEWT exams coming up,” she quipped, although admittedly he was right. Hermione and Gryffindor were different, however. For instance, at school Hermione would never exhibit half this much courage among her peers, much less utter the word idiot in her imposing Chemistry teacher, Mr. Snape’s, presence. He’d probably have Filch, the crazy janitor and self-proclaimed Director of Detentions, hanging her by her toes in the auditorium for a week. But people you met online were more often than not shady, failing to make money transactions a week after the job was done, and sometimes flat out saying they weren’t going to pay her. She learned that the first semester of junior year.
Now Gryffindor had a Taser. And kickboxing lessons. Or at least, three kickboxing lessons supplied by a free one-month trial membership at the YMCA. When she was eight.
She really needed to make some friends.
“What are NEWTs?” Neanderthal asked curiously.
“They’re like the state-required exams, the Regents,” she said distractedly. “Except impossibly more difficult.” And required by her new rich-kid school, Hogwarts, which she only attended thanks to scholarship, as fate would have it.
“Can I get a discount? Please?”
Hermione paused. She thought of the bag of cat litter she needed to buy for Crookshanks, and the 72-hour notice for electricity shut-off that had been taunting her for the past two and a half days. “Alright,” she finally said, reluctantly. “Ten percent off.”
Hagrid didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t argue any further as she slid a disc into the DVD-rom and made a few absent clicks. He probably wanted to get out of there before she expended the rest of his wallet.
“Done,” she announced, popping open her messenger bag to get out a heart-shaped wallet with a Hello Kitty zipper. Hagrid looked between the offending object of girly origins and her completely un-girlish self incredulously. She ignored him. “That will be two hundred thirty dollars and seventy-eight cents.”
“Tax.” Actually, it was for the Hershey’s bar she was going to buy on the way home. But Neanderthal didn’t need to know that.
Mumbling something about smart ass inner city kids, her customer grudgingly handing over a fifty and some mysteriously sticky quarters. She tucked both away. “That’ll cover some tuna cans for my Kneazle,” she said. “By the way, I’ll be monitoring your bank account and tracking your computer history, so don’t try to buy any Star Wars collector items on Ebay or whatever it is you do in your spare time before you pay me, because I’ll know. I also want my money by next Friday, right after you cash your paycheck at Bank of America at about 4:15 PM. …And if I don’t get it, your wife will receive some very telling messages shared between you and Madame Maxime.”
Neanderthal turned stark-white, eyes wide and disbelieving. “How the hell-? Did you-? That’s not any of your- Wait, wait, you’re blackmailing me? I thought you were, like, twelve!”
“Eighteen. And yes, I am.” She had the decency to look apologetic, for even if Neanderthal was a strange middle-aged man who spent too much time on French porn sites, he hadn’t done anything bad to her. He could though – and Hermione had to protect herself. Better yet, Gryffindor had to. “Think of it as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes,” she added, trying to be encouraging.
“Andyou charge interest.” He dropped his head in his hands, groaning. “Effing FBI! I’ll never download torrents again…”
Sympathetically, Hermione patted his enormous shoulder on the way out. “I’ll e-mail you the bill.” Gryffindor was, after all, eco-friendly.
The bell hanging above the door didn’t ring at her exit, having lost its ability to do so when the batteries died in 1973. An elderly gentleman seated near the window display watched Hermione Granger walk down the street through the glass. His neat silvery hair and pressed suit suggested he came from a better-off area, like Tribeca or upper Manhattan. His amused grin was unmistakable.
He took one last sip of the cheap, tasteless coffee and strode out the door.
| Coming April 20 2014 |
| Summary: http://immortalobsession.tumblr.com/post/76906792659/hack-it-by-immortalobsession-a-tomione |
