One should expect one's partner in all things domestic and carnal to have just a lime bit more sympathy.
"Hey, geek!"
Archie jerked his head up with a start and moved his body fractionally, enough that the finger hovering over the B4 button jammed into it. Archie gasped as the blinding pain ripped through his head for the fourth time that day and struggled mightily to remain standing. Archie became aware he was suddenly drooling; he desperately tried to suck it back into his mouth and to keep from vomiting all over the front of the vending machine. He closed his eyes and waited for the nausea to pass. When he opened them, Acuna was standing next him.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Acuna asked.
"Headache," Archie said, wetly. "I get them pretty bad. It's an allergy thing."
Acuna looked Archie up and down for a moment, sizing him up. "Yeah, well, look. You're coming with us. Schroeder says that guy Creek and the girl are going to visit has a lot of computer and technical shit at his place. If Creek and the girl aren't there, and the guy isn't useful, we might be able to get something out of his computers."
Archie nodded, eyes still closed. "Okay," he said. "I'm going to need a couple of minutes, though. I need to do a couple of things before we go. I need to set some drillers to get into Creek's computer system."
"You're still not in that yet?" Acuna asked.
Archie shook his head—slowly. "The got some unbelievable defensive software on his system. It's military grade at least."
"Fine," Acuna said. "I have to numb myself a little more anyway. But make it fast." Acuna looked over to the vending machine and frowned. "What did you get?"
"What?" Archie asked.
"You pressed a button but I don't see anything at the bottom."
"I accidentally pressed B4," Archie said. "It's empty. I meant to press B5, but you startled me."
Acuna snorted. "Try G2," he said. "It's got aspirin in it." He walked off. Archie stood there for a few more seconds, then dully pulled out his credit card, slipped it into the vending machine, pressed "G2", and retrieved his packet of pain reliever.
Back at his computer, Archie considered the problem of Creek's computer system, which was, he had to admit, just a fucking masterpiece of defensive security. Archie had been flinging driller after driller at the thing, each of the autonomous programs designed to hunt out specific areas of weakness in the system's security, drill into them, and then hold the door open for other programs to extract data.
Your average home system would fall in about 15 seconds with a minimally complex driller that was essentially a password generator, with a spoofer to fool the system into thinking each password entered was the first attempt. Small business systems and home systems of people who worked in the computer industry or who were simply paranoid about their home systems required a more specialized driller, with more subtle ways of getting in.
On this medium level of complexity, Archie liked a driller that mimicked the information retrieval protocol used across the network—the driller would fool the system into thinking it had requested information and stream a self-extracting program into the system, which would root around and send data back out, piggybacking on the system's legitimate outward bound traffic.
Now, larger business and government systems, heavily protected as they were, required awesomely designed drillers capable of multidimensional, simultaneous system attacks. Corporate-grade drillers were the state of the art; the hack who coded one that laid into a well-defended system would be king among the hack geeks for at least six hours, which was typically the amount of time it took IT to dislodge the driller and backhoe the hole in the system's security.
Archie had done Creek and his system the professional courtesy of assuming a low-level driller wouldn't cut it, and had begun probing his system with mid-level drillers, all of which reported back failure. Archie only had one high-level driller in his archive, but it was a doozy; it had famously drilled open the USDA system and ferreted out the crop forecasts for the year, leading to a collapse in the agricultural futures market. Archie hadn't written the driller, but he respected the hell out of the coding skills of the hack who had; the driller was elegantly designed. The USDA driller would be useless for any major corporate or government target, of course—on that level, a driller only works once—but it should have been more than enough for any home system on the planet. It wasn't.
If Archie had six weeks and nothing else to do, he might have been able to whip up a new driller of similar quality as the USDA one; as it was he had six minutes. So he elected to take another tack. He fired up a new window and logged into Basher's Dungeon, a hack forum, and posted a message as Creek taunting the hacks therein and proclaiming his system as hackproof. Such a taunt wouldn't dislodge serious hacks, but it would get some of the less skilled and more excitable hacks moving, and once their attacks starting bouncing off Creek's system, some of the more competent would sense the system as a legitimate challenge. To sweeten the deal Archie wrote that inside Creek's system was the long-rumored, never-seen video of a famous pop star going down on her not-famous-but-equally-hot identical twin sister.
That should work, Archie thought, and sent off the message. Then he reached into his archives and pulled out a monitor program and a retrieval program. The monitor program would observe the various attacks on Creek's system from the outside by tagging drillers and other programs as they reached Creek's system and then tracking their progress against it. When one of them cracked the system, the monitor program would alert the retrieval program, which would enter and grab information.
Archie was obviously no longer looking for Robin Baker's identity, but if Creek and the girl slipped away again, the information they found could help track them down. Archie directed the retrieval program to focus on personal information documents and all activity within the last couple of weeks. That was bound to be a lot of material but Archie could trim it down once he had it, and it was better than trying to download every file in the system.
Acuna stepped into the room. "Time to go," he said. "Wrap it up."
"Already wrapped," Archie said, and closed his computer. Let's see you handle this, Creek, he thought.
Brian noticed the hack drillers plinking at Creek's system the same way a musk ox notes a swarm of flies buzzing around its nose. He warded off earlier attacks from what he assumed was a single anonymous source, but he noticed that these new drillers were born substantially less sophisticated than the previous attacks and coming from multiple, non anonymous sources. So whoever was bothering him now was both stupid and clumsy. Brian left the diggers to their futile work and sent scouts of his own back down the pipe to the originators' systems (unsurprisingly easy to crack) and looked through their logs to find what they all had in common. What they had in common was a recent visit to Basher's Dungeon. Brian appropriated one of their identities, signed on, and found the post claiming to be from Creek.
That's sneaky, Brian thought. While he didn't approve of the attack on Creek's system (which was, in a manner of speaking, an attack on Brian himself), Brian could appreciate whomever it was trying to get other people to do his dirty work for him.