Doug hacks Manny's medical records...
Apr. 7th, 2004 10:15 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
x-cypher.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsNote: Takes place this evening, and runs through the night to "ohmygod o'clock", as Rossi puts it.
Doug begins on his assignment from Emma. He hacks into the asylum's computers, after a long roundabout adventure, and gets Manuel's medical record. Which, but for pretty much the name on it, is encrypted at various levels. Doug manages to work his way through the first two levels, and gets stuck on the last one. Marie-Ange comes by to see why he wasn't at dinner, and winds up staying for moral support. Finally, when Doug's about ready to give up, Marie-Ange gives him inspiration. After finishing up that encryption(still leaving a bit to do), and working himself into a stress migraine in the process, Marie-Ange uses a construct to carry him to bed and stays to watch over his sleep.
Much thanks to Frito for her assistance with the computer security stuff, as she was basically posing half of the hacking stuff.
Doug sat down in his high-backed leather office chair and opened his laptop to boot up. ~Laptop, check. Music, check. Case of soda, check.~ Rolling his neck to pop a few vertebrae, he cracked his knuckles and lowered his hands to the keyboard like a concert pianist about to perform a beautiful piece of music. With a few keystrokes, he brought up a search for the Spanish asylum.
A basic search brought up simply an address, and some preliminary contact information. Phone numbers, a postal address, and the emails of a few staff members, a few with a similar domain name, but most from various local hospitals or universities. A strong majority of the information was in Castillian Spanish, with a smattering in Basque, and the rare gem in good old plain English - badly translated.
Doug winced at the mistranslations. Cocking his head, he decided to take a closer look at those email addresses, focusing on the ones with the similar domain name.
The domain name, run through a WHOIS and tracert function returned back to another domain, and that to a bank of IP addresses, belonging to a university in Madrid - seemingly, the medical department.
Doug scratched behind his ear and thought for a moment. He knew that in hacking, appearance very rarely bore any resemblance to reality. Leaning forward, he dug a little deeper on the IP addresses. Half the addresses led back to student machines, computer labs, legitimate workstations on a university campus. Roving addresses that changed nightly, but rotated between the same groups of machines. Nothing too surprising or out of place. A few were static - linking back to research labs - servers designed to hold medical data, papers, information on experiments so that doctors could access their information without actually having to leave their labs.
Doug knew a firewall when he saw one, and worked at masking his IP address so that it would appear as though he was accessing the servers from an approved address. After a few long seconds of nothing more than "Transferring data from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.", a familiar grey box popped up on his screen, requesting - as expected- a UserName and Password.
Doug grinned. ~Okay, might as well try the golden oldies first.~ He tried a few of the infamous backdoors to Windows XP, on the off chance that someone was stupid enough to run such a buggy OS on a secure server.
Unfortunately for Doug, it seemed that someone at whichever university this particular server was located as actually owned half a brain. Most of the backdoors simply failed, though one of the more common ones produced a simple popup box that said, in Spanish. "Real Hackers Use Linux."
Doug barked a quick laugh. "Someone with a sense of humor. I like that," he muttered in Spanish. "Okay, let's see how you handle this one, jackass." Pulling up his own event log, he back-traced the addresses of the location he was trying to access and pulled up PCAnywhere.
PC Anywhere did actually connect, though all it got him was a locked-down desktop. Whoever was logged in did seem to have a rather disturbing taste for the desktop porn, however, as the wallpaper was a collage of scantily clad young Asian women. Doug cocked his head. "Not bad, not bad, but I prefer French redheads, thanks," he replied out loud to his opposite number. He blinked at a subroutine entitled "EvardsBlackTentacles". "Oh, now that's just _wrong_," he said as he shook his head. "Another D&D wannabe. Less time reading the Monster Manual, more time in that scary place called the Real World, numbnuts."
The login currently up was practically useless - some research assistant was using it for a glorified jukebox, porn repository and typewriter. It did, however, contain two very, very valuable pieces of information. The first was simply the assistant's email program and address book. A list of names could always prove useful. The second was buried in the registry entries for -another- login. Buried in a list of variables for what appeared to a program for allowing secure connections was hacker gold. A username and password. Recent, valid and unencrypted.
Doug grinned. "What did you say your username was again?" he asked himself, making a "clacketyclacketyclack" noise to himself as he typed in the username and password. The data server was -mostly- used to hold a Oracle database, containing a truly staggering amount of data - someone was apparently doing a lot of research. A -lot- of research. Five linked SCSI hard drives - the new 10 terabyte Stark line, it seemed.
Doug blinked at the volume of data. "They better be using those Shaw routers, or this is going to take a _long_ time," he mused. He started querying the database for every keyword he could come up with. Thorazine, empathy, suppositories...he even threw Manuel's name in for good measure, not that he expected any return from that.
Leaving the search running in the background, he brought up his logon password and decided to adjourn to the kitchenette for a snack, and maybe see if Marie-Ange was in her room, just to say hi for no reason.
When the search finally finished, it spat out a stream of raw data, sorted only by the parameters Doug had entered into the query - numbers, medical data - temperature, blood pressure, blood cell count, long descriptions of symptoms written in Spanish and Basque, and the same repeating bits of information over and over - the name of a facility in Madrid, another in Paris, and a name - Dr. Eduardo Subato.
Doug grinned at that little gem. The next step was fairly logical, as he brought up one of his throwaway email accounts, ones that couldn't be traced back to anyone remotely resembling Douglas Ramsey, and sent an email to Dr. Eduardo Subato that looked remarkably like penis enlargement Spam. After the email was sent, he pulled up the headers and scanned through them, looking for a trail.
The headers on the return-receipt were positively useless. The headers on the profanity-laden response to the Spam that arrived a scant few minutes later, however, were practically a map, right to the STMP servers for a small ugly little mental health facility, just outside Madrid, if the IP locator program was correct - and it usually was.
Doug grinned. "The simplest solution is usually the best." Sometimes it amazed him at how often his "hide in plain sight" strategy worked wonders on giving him an in to the situation. Using the mail servers, he began looking for an entrance into the facility's computers.
Most of the regular backdoors - various exploits in the OS, in the software itself were locked down. Someone had done a good job of regularly maintaining the boxen. On the higher end of the port numbers, however, there were a few, locked down with only the network firewall to server as a barrier between the innards of the machines and Doug's prying 1's and 0's.
"Who's your daddy?" Doug whispered to the computer as he gently probed at the firewall. "You know who your daddy is. You shouldn't keep your daddy out...who's your daddy?" Finally, he found a hole and slipped in. He clapped his hands together. "That's right, _I'm_ your daddy. Now talk to daddy." He started looking for Manuel's records.
After pushing hard inside the patient records, the files finally responded, birthing a lone single file.
---
Name: Manuel Alphonso Rodrigo de la Rocha
Social ID: [redacted]
Diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia, delusions of grandeur, [redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]
Suggestion: Incarceration until medically cleared by [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]
Signed: [redacted]
---
Doug blinked. "Well, that's no fun. Where'd all the interesting stuff go?" he asked rhetorically. The file size gave the answer, as it was vastly larger than it should have been, to the tune of several hundred bytes. Doug settled in and began working on the encryption on the file.
The file was locked down hard, the visible data a shell for a string of what seemed like random characters and spaces - complete gibberish. It didn't seem to correspond to any of the known simple encryption schemes - it definitely was not PGP, or GPG - those were primarily used for email in the first place.
Doug snickered. The lowest level of encryption security was a 4-bit cipher. Hadn't these idiots heard that 4-bit encryption was practically never used because of the computing power available to the average hacker these days? And that wasn't even counting what Doug had available. In fact...just as Doug was going to brute-force the encryption, he blinked, and began simply typing out the encrypted text as though it were plaintext. "Some days I love being a mutant," he grinned.
The larger chunks of data broke down into a tightly-worded explanation of Manuel's diagnosis and the reasons for his stay in the facility. Even inside this basic layer of protection, significant portions of the file remained gibberish - long strings of numbers and letters and characters in the middle of the file.
---
Diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia, delusions of grandeur, suspected mutantcy
Observational Evidence: Exhibited a form of psionic mind control over [redacted]. Seems to be able to manipulate and sense emotional states. [redacted]
Suggestion: Incarceration until medically cleared by Shaw Foundation doctor Subato. Recommend extreme measures be taken for the protection of medical staff.
Signed: [redacted], Eduardo Subato, [redacted]
---
Doug nodded. "Now we're getting somewhere." The next level, it appeared, was 16-bit encryption. Harder, but not unbreakable by any stretch of the imagination. He narrowed his eyes, looking for a pattern. It took him about fifteen or twenty minutes, right to the point where he was about to fall back on his old brute-force number-crunching methods, he began to see a bit of a pattern. Forty minutes of trial-and-error later, he was through the second layer and more text spilled across the screen.
The file opened again, delivering more useful data - names, a number, and longer strings of complete and utter gibberish, filling half Doug's screen with random characters.
---
Social ID: 13587-2284-9980492
Additional Observations: Subject tests positive for X-Factor. Suspected Rating Omega. Subject must be evaluated pursuant to Special Order Nine.
Additional Observations: Subject's family is well-connected. We have obtained permission from [redacted] to implement [redacted]. Doctor Subato will be coordinating with [redacted, redacted, redacted].
Signed: Dr Marie Crane, Dr Eduardo Subato, [redacted]
---
Doug peered thoughtfully at the next level of encryption. 256-bit. Reportedly unhackable. Doug grinned to himself. The Holy Grail of hacks. He'd heard rumors and urban legends about someone who'd managed to hack a 256, but they were invariably lies and exaggerations. If he could pull this off, though... He grinned at the thought of Kitty killing him in a fit of hacker jealousy and immersed himself in the code.
The sun had long since gone down, and Doug was -still- sitting at his desk, the empty cans of soda neatly stacked next to him in a geometrical pyramid,. when Angie poked her head inside the door to the boy's room. She carried a plate - having noticed that Doug had missed dinner, and both Artie AND Miles had commented on him building a castle from soda cans, she decided that he was probably not likely to move for a while, and wouldn't remember to eat unless someone brought him food. Maybe not even then, she thought.
He looked ... intense - she thought. His eyes were flickering back and forth rapidly over a screen full of letters and numbers and odd little characters, and a spread of open books covered his desk, stacked on each other, pages marked with slips of paper, with pens and with the wrapper to a Reese's cup. Marie-Ange shook her head, and approached the desk quietly, trying to get Doug's attention without startling him.
Doug, for his part, was completely immersed in his hacking. He had, some indeterminate amount of time earlier, asked Kitty if he could borrow her laptop so as to have one to keep data on while the second ran the brute-force decrypt program he was running. At this rate, it was unlikely that even one of Tabitha's "time bombs" could have drawn his attention away from the glowing LCD screens.
After a few minutes of standing practically next to Doug without him noticing, Angie finally gave in. A herd of cattle - or Jamie's - wasn't going to budge him. She waited until his attention blinked away from the screen of whatever-that-was to the screen that looked like it might make sense in a warped sort of way and reached out to pass a hand in front of his face.
Doug jerked back, startled. "Gah!" He pressed a hand to his heart, which was suddenly beating double-time. "Angie?" he asked, slightly confused. "What's up?"
"I did not mean to startle you. You have been staring at that screen for the last five minutes while I was watching." Angie smiled gently, and held out the plate, which contained several sandwiches, and a handful of cookies. "You missed dinner. I thought you might be hungry, since no one has seen you all evening."
Doug's stomach, which he had been ignoring, picked that moment to rumble grumpily. "Um, yeah. I guess I am kinda hungry. I missed dinner? What time is it?" he asked somewhat fuzzily.
Marie-Ange shook her head. "Ten-thirty. Have you been here since classes ended?" She looked him over carefully.. "What on earth are you doing that has you here and not moving for hours on end? And building castles of soda cans?"
Doug waved a hand at the dual laptop screens in front of him. "I've been hacking for Ms. Frost. Didn't I tell you about what she asked me to do?" His short-term memory of anything but the hacker fugue he'd been in was definitely fuzzy at best.
"You did, last night. I .. did not realize it would make you this odd. " Angie peered at the screens. "What are you looking at? It looks like ... nothing. Like just letters and numbers."
Doug grinned wryly. "That would be the essential problem. The file is encoded. So what _should_ be regular words comes out looking like randomized letters and numbers. And I have to figure out how to get it back to looking like regular text."
Marie-Ange looked horrified. "Doug, that screen of letters and numbers has changed three times since I got here. How many things are in that file?"
Doug grimaced. "There are two hundred and fifty-six bytes for every byte in the file. A byte is a unit of memory storage. It's not quite 256 characters for every character in the file, but it's close. And I have to figure out for each of those characters, which one of the 256 is the correct one. There's a pattern to it, but I'll be damned if I see it right now." He ran a hand through his hair frustratedly and leaned back as far as he could in his chair.
Marie-Ange leaned over and brushed a kiss over Doug's forehead. "If there is anything I can do to help, tell me?"
Doug shivered at the kiss and wrapped his arms around Marie-Ange's waist, resting his head against the top of her chest. "Just...stay?" he asked tentatively. "And listen to me ramble, and believe in me?" He bit his lip nervously.
"Of course." Angie responded quietly. "I like when you ramble. I do not quite understand it sometimes, but I like to hear it just the same." She waited until Doug had unwrapped his arms from her waist, and pulled a chair over, sitting close enough to Doug so that she could occasionally check to make sure he was actually -eating- his food, and far enough away that she did not have to look at that screen of scrolling numbers and letters. It was disconcerting.
Doug ate mechanically, especially when Marie-Ange prompted him, and dove back into the code. The main problem was that, with 256 bits to choose from, literally dozens of patterns looked promising, but wound up coming just short. It was driving Doug slowly insane. About midnight, he crumpled up another sheet of paper angrily and whispered intensely so as not to wake Miles and Artie. "I'm so close, I know I am. I just can't seem to make that last leap." He rubbed tiredly at a crick in his neck and sipped at another soda.
Marie-Ange gently pried Doug's fingers from his neck, and gently worked at loosening the tension she could feel there. "Can .. it wait? You cannot do all of this at once, love. Maybe you need to take a break and look at all those letters and numbers differently tomorrow?"
"Look at them...all at once..." Doug muttered, then his eyes widened. "That's it!" he whispered. "You're a genius, Angie." He quickly sent several print jobs to the printer in one of the computer labs, then gathered up both laptops under one arm and grabbed Marie-Ange's hand. "C'mon, c'mon!" he chivvied her hyperactively.
Angie blinked, shrugged and let Doug lead her to wherever he was going. She wasn't sure what she had said, or why he was so excited, but he was the computer genius, and she was fairly sure he would explain it. In English. That made sense. Eventually.
Stopping at the lab, Doug picked up the load of pages that he had printed, then pulled Marie-Ange to the dance room. Spreading the pages carefully across the floor, he grinned up at Marie-Ange. "It was like you said, Angie. I couldn't do it all at once. Not on the screen, anyway. So I needed to look at it differently." He spread his arms at the meticulous array of gibberish printouts.
Marie-Ange's eyes widened at the grid of paper on the floor. "So.. you printed all this out, and..now what do you do?"
Doug leaned over with a Scotch tape dispenser and began taping pages to the floor in order. "Now I look for a pattern."
"This seems a bit ... backwards to break a computer code.. but you are the genius here." Marie-Ange pulled over one of the folding chairs at the edge of the room and sat down. "Can I do anything to help?"
Doug handed Marie-Ange a pad of green graph paper and a mechanical pencil. "Take notes," he instructed tersely, already beginning to lose himself in the random characters in front of him.
Angie blinked confusedly at Doug's slightly brusque tone, but shrugged, chalking it up to whatever had caused him to go all strange at the computer. She rested the pad in her lap, and watched Doug intently.
As Doug immersed himself in the code, he stopped talking except for occasionally calling out a letter or number to Marie-Ange. As he went on, his body language became more and more controlled and tense, to the point where even Marie-Ange, who couldn't read body language like Doug could, could see tendons tense like steel cables in his back and neck. It even got to the point where Doug's breathing slowed to a shallow pant, and sweat dripped down his forehead. The only movement he made was to carefully wipe the sweat away so that it would not drip on the pages in front of him.
Marie-Ange dutifully wrote every letter and number Doug called out in neat block print. As he grew more tense and pale and quiet, the urge to shake him out of this state grew stronger, but she thought it might break his concentration. After the better part of an hour, she had several lines of paper filled, and was watching him steadily as his already almost unnoticeable movements slowed to nearly nothing.
Finally, Doug reached the end of the grid of paper, calling out the final symbol to Marie-Ange. He leaned forward onto both hands from his kneeling position, and his head shook as he slowly came out of the fugue. Suddenly, his body rebelled, and he cried out as clutched his hands to his spasming back, falling gracelessly onto his side and curling into a ball.
The pad of paper and pencil were dropped to the floor carelessly as Angie darted over to kneel next to Doug. His eyes were screwed shut, and he was.. whispering something in a language she couldn't quite make out. It sounded familiar though. "Doug?" she whispered. "Do you need me to get a teacher?"
Doug shook his head, then whimpered as a massive migraine decided to make its presence known. He struggled to stop muttering in Spanish and Basque and managed to switch to French. "No teachers. Hacking's sort of...illegal," he managed. "Don't know if I'd get in trouble." He made a vague waving motion at one of the laptops. "Put the code in," he whispered.
Angie blinked in confusion for a moment, then scowled. How could Doug be not only -still- worked about the code, but doing something illegal for Manuel? He was really too good-natured sometimes - too willing to do things for other people regardless of the effects on himself. When his waving gesture became a bit more insistent, she sighed, and picked up the laptop he had indicated.
She brought the computer back over to where Doug was lying, picking up the fallen pad of paper on the way and before doing anything, sat down on the floor to check that he was still at least sort-of alert. She propped the laptop on one knee, and nudged Doug gently until he rested his head on the other. Typing painstakingly slowly - concerned that if she made a typo, she would not know how to go back and change it, she copied the letters from her paper into the box on the screen.
She clicked the button just below the grey box, and watched warily - both the computer screen and Doug - as the program ran, the little laptop whirring and clicking as it decrypted the file again. After a few moments - not long at all, really - a testament to Doug's ability to write a solid program - the laptop chirped, and a window opened.
---
Special Note on file:
We MUST NOT let Interpol know about subject. [redacted] is classified ULTRAVIOLET. No outside unauthorized medial supervision is to be permitted.
Additional Special Note: LEOPARD and MOUSETRAP have failed. FISHHOOK is disabled. Perhaps try physical coercion?
Authorized, [redacted] on behalf of the Crown.
---
Doug closed his eyes wearily. "More encryption," he sighed. "No more," he whispered. "Too tired..."
Angie frowned, and saved the file. She closed the laptop with a firm hand, and put it on the ground. "No more, indeed." For a few minutes, she sat, running her fingers through Doug's hair, trying to help soothe the pain she could see on his face. When it was more than obvious that he was not going to move on his own, she sighed, and very gently lifted his head, so that she could stand.
Marie-Ange was well aware that there was no way she, alone, could get Doug from his curled-up spot on the floor to his room. She couldn't ask a teacher, and she wasn't sure she wanted to wake anyone. Making a little frown of concentration, she thought for a moment, then rolled her eyes, chastising herself for being -stupid-. She tugged open the suede bag on her belt, and sorted through the cards rapidly. "Strength. Of course."
She knelt again, and patted Doug's cheek. "Wake up, Doug. You need to go to bed in your own room, and not on the floor, silly."
Doug blinked wearily. "Huh? Don'wanna move. Back'urts. Head'urts," he slurred.
"It will hurt more if you sleep on the floor, and then someone will ask you why you are here and not on your nice soft bed." Angie sighed, and concentrated on the card in her hand. "I cannot carry you, Doug, but if you insist on being stubborn, I will put you to bed."
Doug looked up at Marie-Ange sadly. "'M not bein' stubborn, Angie. Hurts to move," he whimpered.
"I know, love. It will hurt less once you go to bed." She frowned, and finally pushed her power out towards the card, manifesting the figure of a woman, dressed in white, and a golden lion. With a tiny grunt of focus, she dismissed half the image, leaving just the woman, who, at Angie's mental command, bent to slowly left Doug off the floor.
Doug's eyes closed and he curled up tiredly against the construct, not entirely aware of what was happening at this point.
Marie-Ange let out a careful, controlled breath, and gritted her teeth in concentration. At her direction, the construct began slowly walking towards the door, while Angie rushed around collecting papers and the second laptop. Her image sped up just a little once she could put her entire attention on it - but it still took many minutes to get from the dance room to Doug's room - and then another few on top of that making sure they did not wake his roommates.
Once Doug was gently settled on his bed, Angie dismissed the image, which faded away silently. She sat on the edge of his bed and carefully removed his glasses, placing them neatly on his nightstand. She tugged a blanket up over his legs, and sat down in the chair she had pulled over earlier in the night to watch over him.
Doug woke up slightly at the blanket sliding over his legs, and smiled tiredly as he watched Marie-Ange pull up a chair. "Stay?" he asked softly and tentatively, his heart in his eyes.
"As long as I can, dear." She brushed her fingers against his cheek, and settled down in the chair, waiting until after Doug's eyes closed and his breathing evened out before pulling a book from one of his stacks of paperbacks and settling down to read by the light of a small flashlight snagged from her book bag.
Doug begins on his assignment from Emma. He hacks into the asylum's computers, after a long roundabout adventure, and gets Manuel's medical record. Which, but for pretty much the name on it, is encrypted at various levels. Doug manages to work his way through the first two levels, and gets stuck on the last one. Marie-Ange comes by to see why he wasn't at dinner, and winds up staying for moral support. Finally, when Doug's about ready to give up, Marie-Ange gives him inspiration. After finishing up that encryption(still leaving a bit to do), and working himself into a stress migraine in the process, Marie-Ange uses a construct to carry him to bed and stays to watch over his sleep.
Much thanks to Frito for her assistance with the computer security stuff, as she was basically posing half of the hacking stuff.
Doug sat down in his high-backed leather office chair and opened his laptop to boot up. ~Laptop, check. Music, check. Case of soda, check.~ Rolling his neck to pop a few vertebrae, he cracked his knuckles and lowered his hands to the keyboard like a concert pianist about to perform a beautiful piece of music. With a few keystrokes, he brought up a search for the Spanish asylum.
A basic search brought up simply an address, and some preliminary contact information. Phone numbers, a postal address, and the emails of a few staff members, a few with a similar domain name, but most from various local hospitals or universities. A strong majority of the information was in Castillian Spanish, with a smattering in Basque, and the rare gem in good old plain English - badly translated.
Doug winced at the mistranslations. Cocking his head, he decided to take a closer look at those email addresses, focusing on the ones with the similar domain name.
The domain name, run through a WHOIS and tracert function returned back to another domain, and that to a bank of IP addresses, belonging to a university in Madrid - seemingly, the medical department.
Doug scratched behind his ear and thought for a moment. He knew that in hacking, appearance very rarely bore any resemblance to reality. Leaning forward, he dug a little deeper on the IP addresses. Half the addresses led back to student machines, computer labs, legitimate workstations on a university campus. Roving addresses that changed nightly, but rotated between the same groups of machines. Nothing too surprising or out of place. A few were static - linking back to research labs - servers designed to hold medical data, papers, information on experiments so that doctors could access their information without actually having to leave their labs.
Doug knew a firewall when he saw one, and worked at masking his IP address so that it would appear as though he was accessing the servers from an approved address. After a few long seconds of nothing more than "Transferring data from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.", a familiar grey box popped up on his screen, requesting - as expected- a UserName and Password.
Doug grinned. ~Okay, might as well try the golden oldies first.~ He tried a few of the infamous backdoors to Windows XP, on the off chance that someone was stupid enough to run such a buggy OS on a secure server.
Unfortunately for Doug, it seemed that someone at whichever university this particular server was located as actually owned half a brain. Most of the backdoors simply failed, though one of the more common ones produced a simple popup box that said, in Spanish. "Real Hackers Use Linux."
Doug barked a quick laugh. "Someone with a sense of humor. I like that," he muttered in Spanish. "Okay, let's see how you handle this one, jackass." Pulling up his own event log, he back-traced the addresses of the location he was trying to access and pulled up PCAnywhere.
PC Anywhere did actually connect, though all it got him was a locked-down desktop. Whoever was logged in did seem to have a rather disturbing taste for the desktop porn, however, as the wallpaper was a collage of scantily clad young Asian women. Doug cocked his head. "Not bad, not bad, but I prefer French redheads, thanks," he replied out loud to his opposite number. He blinked at a subroutine entitled "EvardsBlackTentacles". "Oh, now that's just _wrong_," he said as he shook his head. "Another D&D wannabe. Less time reading the Monster Manual, more time in that scary place called the Real World, numbnuts."
The login currently up was practically useless - some research assistant was using it for a glorified jukebox, porn repository and typewriter. It did, however, contain two very, very valuable pieces of information. The first was simply the assistant's email program and address book. A list of names could always prove useful. The second was buried in the registry entries for -another- login. Buried in a list of variables for what appeared to a program for allowing secure connections was hacker gold. A username and password. Recent, valid and unencrypted.
Doug grinned. "What did you say your username was again?" he asked himself, making a "clacketyclacketyclack" noise to himself as he typed in the username and password. The data server was -mostly- used to hold a Oracle database, containing a truly staggering amount of data - someone was apparently doing a lot of research. A -lot- of research. Five linked SCSI hard drives - the new 10 terabyte Stark line, it seemed.
Doug blinked at the volume of data. "They better be using those Shaw routers, or this is going to take a _long_ time," he mused. He started querying the database for every keyword he could come up with. Thorazine, empathy, suppositories...he even threw Manuel's name in for good measure, not that he expected any return from that.
Leaving the search running in the background, he brought up his logon password and decided to adjourn to the kitchenette for a snack, and maybe see if Marie-Ange was in her room, just to say hi for no reason.
When the search finally finished, it spat out a stream of raw data, sorted only by the parameters Doug had entered into the query - numbers, medical data - temperature, blood pressure, blood cell count, long descriptions of symptoms written in Spanish and Basque, and the same repeating bits of information over and over - the name of a facility in Madrid, another in Paris, and a name - Dr. Eduardo Subato.
Doug grinned at that little gem. The next step was fairly logical, as he brought up one of his throwaway email accounts, ones that couldn't be traced back to anyone remotely resembling Douglas Ramsey, and sent an email to Dr. Eduardo Subato that looked remarkably like penis enlargement Spam. After the email was sent, he pulled up the headers and scanned through them, looking for a trail.
The headers on the return-receipt were positively useless. The headers on the profanity-laden response to the Spam that arrived a scant few minutes later, however, were practically a map, right to the STMP servers for a small ugly little mental health facility, just outside Madrid, if the IP locator program was correct - and it usually was.
Doug grinned. "The simplest solution is usually the best." Sometimes it amazed him at how often his "hide in plain sight" strategy worked wonders on giving him an in to the situation. Using the mail servers, he began looking for an entrance into the facility's computers.
Most of the regular backdoors - various exploits in the OS, in the software itself were locked down. Someone had done a good job of regularly maintaining the boxen. On the higher end of the port numbers, however, there were a few, locked down with only the network firewall to server as a barrier between the innards of the machines and Doug's prying 1's and 0's.
"Who's your daddy?" Doug whispered to the computer as he gently probed at the firewall. "You know who your daddy is. You shouldn't keep your daddy out...who's your daddy?" Finally, he found a hole and slipped in. He clapped his hands together. "That's right, _I'm_ your daddy. Now talk to daddy." He started looking for Manuel's records.
After pushing hard inside the patient records, the files finally responded, birthing a lone single file.
---
Name: Manuel Alphonso Rodrigo de la Rocha
Social ID: [redacted]
Diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia, delusions of grandeur, [redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]
[redacted]
Suggestion: Incarceration until medically cleared by [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]
Signed: [redacted]
---
Doug blinked. "Well, that's no fun. Where'd all the interesting stuff go?" he asked rhetorically. The file size gave the answer, as it was vastly larger than it should have been, to the tune of several hundred bytes. Doug settled in and began working on the encryption on the file.
The file was locked down hard, the visible data a shell for a string of what seemed like random characters and spaces - complete gibberish. It didn't seem to correspond to any of the known simple encryption schemes - it definitely was not PGP, or GPG - those were primarily used for email in the first place.
Doug snickered. The lowest level of encryption security was a 4-bit cipher. Hadn't these idiots heard that 4-bit encryption was practically never used because of the computing power available to the average hacker these days? And that wasn't even counting what Doug had available. In fact...just as Doug was going to brute-force the encryption, he blinked, and began simply typing out the encrypted text as though it were plaintext. "Some days I love being a mutant," he grinned.
The larger chunks of data broke down into a tightly-worded explanation of Manuel's diagnosis and the reasons for his stay in the facility. Even inside this basic layer of protection, significant portions of the file remained gibberish - long strings of numbers and letters and characters in the middle of the file.
---
Diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia, delusions of grandeur, suspected mutantcy
Observational Evidence: Exhibited a form of psionic mind control over [redacted]. Seems to be able to manipulate and sense emotional states. [redacted]
Suggestion: Incarceration until medically cleared by Shaw Foundation doctor Subato. Recommend extreme measures be taken for the protection of medical staff.
Signed: [redacted], Eduardo Subato, [redacted]
---
Doug nodded. "Now we're getting somewhere." The next level, it appeared, was 16-bit encryption. Harder, but not unbreakable by any stretch of the imagination. He narrowed his eyes, looking for a pattern. It took him about fifteen or twenty minutes, right to the point where he was about to fall back on his old brute-force number-crunching methods, he began to see a bit of a pattern. Forty minutes of trial-and-error later, he was through the second layer and more text spilled across the screen.
The file opened again, delivering more useful data - names, a number, and longer strings of complete and utter gibberish, filling half Doug's screen with random characters.
---
Social ID: 13587-2284-9980492
Additional Observations: Subject tests positive for X-Factor. Suspected Rating Omega. Subject must be evaluated pursuant to Special Order Nine.
Additional Observations: Subject's family is well-connected. We have obtained permission from [redacted] to implement [redacted]. Doctor Subato will be coordinating with [redacted, redacted, redacted].
Signed: Dr Marie Crane, Dr Eduardo Subato, [redacted]
---
Doug peered thoughtfully at the next level of encryption. 256-bit. Reportedly unhackable. Doug grinned to himself. The Holy Grail of hacks. He'd heard rumors and urban legends about someone who'd managed to hack a 256, but they were invariably lies and exaggerations. If he could pull this off, though... He grinned at the thought of Kitty killing him in a fit of hacker jealousy and immersed himself in the code.
The sun had long since gone down, and Doug was -still- sitting at his desk, the empty cans of soda neatly stacked next to him in a geometrical pyramid,. when Angie poked her head inside the door to the boy's room. She carried a plate - having noticed that Doug had missed dinner, and both Artie AND Miles had commented on him building a castle from soda cans, she decided that he was probably not likely to move for a while, and wouldn't remember to eat unless someone brought him food. Maybe not even then, she thought.
He looked ... intense - she thought. His eyes were flickering back and forth rapidly over a screen full of letters and numbers and odd little characters, and a spread of open books covered his desk, stacked on each other, pages marked with slips of paper, with pens and with the wrapper to a Reese's cup. Marie-Ange shook her head, and approached the desk quietly, trying to get Doug's attention without startling him.
Doug, for his part, was completely immersed in his hacking. He had, some indeterminate amount of time earlier, asked Kitty if he could borrow her laptop so as to have one to keep data on while the second ran the brute-force decrypt program he was running. At this rate, it was unlikely that even one of Tabitha's "time bombs" could have drawn his attention away from the glowing LCD screens.
After a few minutes of standing practically next to Doug without him noticing, Angie finally gave in. A herd of cattle - or Jamie's - wasn't going to budge him. She waited until his attention blinked away from the screen of whatever-that-was to the screen that looked like it might make sense in a warped sort of way and reached out to pass a hand in front of his face.
Doug jerked back, startled. "Gah!" He pressed a hand to his heart, which was suddenly beating double-time. "Angie?" he asked, slightly confused. "What's up?"
"I did not mean to startle you. You have been staring at that screen for the last five minutes while I was watching." Angie smiled gently, and held out the plate, which contained several sandwiches, and a handful of cookies. "You missed dinner. I thought you might be hungry, since no one has seen you all evening."
Doug's stomach, which he had been ignoring, picked that moment to rumble grumpily. "Um, yeah. I guess I am kinda hungry. I missed dinner? What time is it?" he asked somewhat fuzzily.
Marie-Ange shook her head. "Ten-thirty. Have you been here since classes ended?" She looked him over carefully.. "What on earth are you doing that has you here and not moving for hours on end? And building castles of soda cans?"
Doug waved a hand at the dual laptop screens in front of him. "I've been hacking for Ms. Frost. Didn't I tell you about what she asked me to do?" His short-term memory of anything but the hacker fugue he'd been in was definitely fuzzy at best.
"You did, last night. I .. did not realize it would make you this odd. " Angie peered at the screens. "What are you looking at? It looks like ... nothing. Like just letters and numbers."
Doug grinned wryly. "That would be the essential problem. The file is encoded. So what _should_ be regular words comes out looking like randomized letters and numbers. And I have to figure out how to get it back to looking like regular text."
Marie-Ange looked horrified. "Doug, that screen of letters and numbers has changed three times since I got here. How many things are in that file?"
Doug grimaced. "There are two hundred and fifty-six bytes for every byte in the file. A byte is a unit of memory storage. It's not quite 256 characters for every character in the file, but it's close. And I have to figure out for each of those characters, which one of the 256 is the correct one. There's a pattern to it, but I'll be damned if I see it right now." He ran a hand through his hair frustratedly and leaned back as far as he could in his chair.
Marie-Ange leaned over and brushed a kiss over Doug's forehead. "If there is anything I can do to help, tell me?"
Doug shivered at the kiss and wrapped his arms around Marie-Ange's waist, resting his head against the top of her chest. "Just...stay?" he asked tentatively. "And listen to me ramble, and believe in me?" He bit his lip nervously.
"Of course." Angie responded quietly. "I like when you ramble. I do not quite understand it sometimes, but I like to hear it just the same." She waited until Doug had unwrapped his arms from her waist, and pulled a chair over, sitting close enough to Doug so that she could occasionally check to make sure he was actually -eating- his food, and far enough away that she did not have to look at that screen of scrolling numbers and letters. It was disconcerting.
Doug ate mechanically, especially when Marie-Ange prompted him, and dove back into the code. The main problem was that, with 256 bits to choose from, literally dozens of patterns looked promising, but wound up coming just short. It was driving Doug slowly insane. About midnight, he crumpled up another sheet of paper angrily and whispered intensely so as not to wake Miles and Artie. "I'm so close, I know I am. I just can't seem to make that last leap." He rubbed tiredly at a crick in his neck and sipped at another soda.
Marie-Ange gently pried Doug's fingers from his neck, and gently worked at loosening the tension she could feel there. "Can .. it wait? You cannot do all of this at once, love. Maybe you need to take a break and look at all those letters and numbers differently tomorrow?"
"Look at them...all at once..." Doug muttered, then his eyes widened. "That's it!" he whispered. "You're a genius, Angie." He quickly sent several print jobs to the printer in one of the computer labs, then gathered up both laptops under one arm and grabbed Marie-Ange's hand. "C'mon, c'mon!" he chivvied her hyperactively.
Angie blinked, shrugged and let Doug lead her to wherever he was going. She wasn't sure what she had said, or why he was so excited, but he was the computer genius, and she was fairly sure he would explain it. In English. That made sense. Eventually.
Stopping at the lab, Doug picked up the load of pages that he had printed, then pulled Marie-Ange to the dance room. Spreading the pages carefully across the floor, he grinned up at Marie-Ange. "It was like you said, Angie. I couldn't do it all at once. Not on the screen, anyway. So I needed to look at it differently." He spread his arms at the meticulous array of gibberish printouts.
Marie-Ange's eyes widened at the grid of paper on the floor. "So.. you printed all this out, and..now what do you do?"
Doug leaned over with a Scotch tape dispenser and began taping pages to the floor in order. "Now I look for a pattern."
"This seems a bit ... backwards to break a computer code.. but you are the genius here." Marie-Ange pulled over one of the folding chairs at the edge of the room and sat down. "Can I do anything to help?"
Doug handed Marie-Ange a pad of green graph paper and a mechanical pencil. "Take notes," he instructed tersely, already beginning to lose himself in the random characters in front of him.
Angie blinked confusedly at Doug's slightly brusque tone, but shrugged, chalking it up to whatever had caused him to go all strange at the computer. She rested the pad in her lap, and watched Doug intently.
As Doug immersed himself in the code, he stopped talking except for occasionally calling out a letter or number to Marie-Ange. As he went on, his body language became more and more controlled and tense, to the point where even Marie-Ange, who couldn't read body language like Doug could, could see tendons tense like steel cables in his back and neck. It even got to the point where Doug's breathing slowed to a shallow pant, and sweat dripped down his forehead. The only movement he made was to carefully wipe the sweat away so that it would not drip on the pages in front of him.
Marie-Ange dutifully wrote every letter and number Doug called out in neat block print. As he grew more tense and pale and quiet, the urge to shake him out of this state grew stronger, but she thought it might break his concentration. After the better part of an hour, she had several lines of paper filled, and was watching him steadily as his already almost unnoticeable movements slowed to nearly nothing.
Finally, Doug reached the end of the grid of paper, calling out the final symbol to Marie-Ange. He leaned forward onto both hands from his kneeling position, and his head shook as he slowly came out of the fugue. Suddenly, his body rebelled, and he cried out as clutched his hands to his spasming back, falling gracelessly onto his side and curling into a ball.
The pad of paper and pencil were dropped to the floor carelessly as Angie darted over to kneel next to Doug. His eyes were screwed shut, and he was.. whispering something in a language she couldn't quite make out. It sounded familiar though. "Doug?" she whispered. "Do you need me to get a teacher?"
Doug shook his head, then whimpered as a massive migraine decided to make its presence known. He struggled to stop muttering in Spanish and Basque and managed to switch to French. "No teachers. Hacking's sort of...illegal," he managed. "Don't know if I'd get in trouble." He made a vague waving motion at one of the laptops. "Put the code in," he whispered.
Angie blinked in confusion for a moment, then scowled. How could Doug be not only -still- worked about the code, but doing something illegal for Manuel? He was really too good-natured sometimes - too willing to do things for other people regardless of the effects on himself. When his waving gesture became a bit more insistent, she sighed, and picked up the laptop he had indicated.
She brought the computer back over to where Doug was lying, picking up the fallen pad of paper on the way and before doing anything, sat down on the floor to check that he was still at least sort-of alert. She propped the laptop on one knee, and nudged Doug gently until he rested his head on the other. Typing painstakingly slowly - concerned that if she made a typo, she would not know how to go back and change it, she copied the letters from her paper into the box on the screen.
She clicked the button just below the grey box, and watched warily - both the computer screen and Doug - as the program ran, the little laptop whirring and clicking as it decrypted the file again. After a few moments - not long at all, really - a testament to Doug's ability to write a solid program - the laptop chirped, and a window opened.
---
Special Note on file:
We MUST NOT let Interpol know about subject. [redacted] is classified ULTRAVIOLET. No outside unauthorized medial supervision is to be permitted.
Additional Special Note: LEOPARD and MOUSETRAP have failed. FISHHOOK is disabled. Perhaps try physical coercion?
Authorized, [redacted] on behalf of the Crown.
---
Doug closed his eyes wearily. "More encryption," he sighed. "No more," he whispered. "Too tired..."
Angie frowned, and saved the file. She closed the laptop with a firm hand, and put it on the ground. "No more, indeed." For a few minutes, she sat, running her fingers through Doug's hair, trying to help soothe the pain she could see on his face. When it was more than obvious that he was not going to move on his own, she sighed, and very gently lifted his head, so that she could stand.
Marie-Ange was well aware that there was no way she, alone, could get Doug from his curled-up spot on the floor to his room. She couldn't ask a teacher, and she wasn't sure she wanted to wake anyone. Making a little frown of concentration, she thought for a moment, then rolled her eyes, chastising herself for being -stupid-. She tugged open the suede bag on her belt, and sorted through the cards rapidly. "Strength. Of course."
She knelt again, and patted Doug's cheek. "Wake up, Doug. You need to go to bed in your own room, and not on the floor, silly."
Doug blinked wearily. "Huh? Don'wanna move. Back'urts. Head'urts," he slurred.
"It will hurt more if you sleep on the floor, and then someone will ask you why you are here and not on your nice soft bed." Angie sighed, and concentrated on the card in her hand. "I cannot carry you, Doug, but if you insist on being stubborn, I will put you to bed."
Doug looked up at Marie-Ange sadly. "'M not bein' stubborn, Angie. Hurts to move," he whimpered.
"I know, love. It will hurt less once you go to bed." She frowned, and finally pushed her power out towards the card, manifesting the figure of a woman, dressed in white, and a golden lion. With a tiny grunt of focus, she dismissed half the image, leaving just the woman, who, at Angie's mental command, bent to slowly left Doug off the floor.
Doug's eyes closed and he curled up tiredly against the construct, not entirely aware of what was happening at this point.
Marie-Ange let out a careful, controlled breath, and gritted her teeth in concentration. At her direction, the construct began slowly walking towards the door, while Angie rushed around collecting papers and the second laptop. Her image sped up just a little once she could put her entire attention on it - but it still took many minutes to get from the dance room to Doug's room - and then another few on top of that making sure they did not wake his roommates.
Once Doug was gently settled on his bed, Angie dismissed the image, which faded away silently. She sat on the edge of his bed and carefully removed his glasses, placing them neatly on his nightstand. She tugged a blanket up over his legs, and sat down in the chair she had pulled over earlier in the night to watch over him.
Doug woke up slightly at the blanket sliding over his legs, and smiled tiredly as he watched Marie-Ange pull up a chair. "Stay?" he asked softly and tentatively, his heart in his eyes.
"As long as I can, dear." She brushed her fingers against his cheek, and settled down in the chair, waiting until after Doug's eyes closed and his breathing evened out before pulling a book from one of his stacks of paperbacks and settling down to read by the light of a small flashlight snagged from her book bag.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-04-07 08:21 pm (UTC)*remembers her power is cat burglery, not universal translation*
*calms down*
Excellent log.
...
Date: 2004-04-07 08:36 pm (UTC)Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-07 08:40 pm (UTC)Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-07 08:49 pm (UTC)Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 05:45 am (UTC)(I am so sad. We had this nice exponential thing going with the layers until I remembered that 256 x 256 (65536) is Fricking Huge and doesn't actually exist outside ... maybe Hank's happy dreams or something.)
(For I am a nerd. Even if Angie isn't. ;)
Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 06:16 am (UTC)(*nod* That would be of the truely massive. And yeah, you are. :D)
Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 06:18 am (UTC)As its stands, you can't break 4096 without a bank of computers... uh.. well, okay, I think the current 'guesstimate' is like, "Every desktop in New York State" or something. :)
But if you could break it down and pull patterns and give -that- to Doug's power to chew on, it might be doable, but he'd be in a world of headache after. Not that he's not -now-, but hey. ;)
Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 07:13 am (UTC)Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 07:53 am (UTC)'cept I can't come up with a good one -either-. Headaches and nosebleeds make sense, which is why they're used so often.
Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 09:52 am (UTC)Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 11:22 am (UTC)Mental ones...
Vision doing weird things: reversals, colors, wiggling side-to-side, blurring, graying out, inability to focus. No pain necessary, at least not until you walk into the door. Or stare at things too long.
Ears ringing. Other phantom noises?
Phantom odors?
Itching. (Man, that would be annoying.) Tingling. (Possibility of many bad jokes.)
Feeling as if body parts not normally subject to this have gone to sleep and are waking up.
Fidgetiness.
Extreme thirst or hunger?
Synaesthesia?
Remind me
Date: 2004-04-15 01:41 pm (UTC)Manuel
Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 12:13 pm (UTC)Like, for instance, amnesia?
Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-08 07:13 pm (UTC)Re: ...
Date: 2004-04-09 11:43 am (UTC)