Read Online The Silence of Six by E. C. Myers - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: E. C. Myers
Tags: Conspiracy fiction
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engine crawled through the Deep Web indexing webpages. Like the most exclusive clubs, you had to know it existed before you could go there, and you had to have an invitation. The question was, had his invitation expired after a year away?
Max clicked his cursor into the first of two unmarked text fields on the screen and typed “503-ERROR”. The box disappeared and he entered his passphrase. That box disappeared too, leaving a blank white screen.
After ten seconds, he thought the slow Wi-Fi was to blame. After thirty, he wondered if the page had timed out, or if the chat rooms were no longer active. After fifty seconds, he started to get worried.
Loud high heels clacked on the marble floor and echoed throughout the lobby. Max watched a woman in a short red mini dress cross the lobby from the elevator bank and push through the revolving door. Outside, she opened the back door of a waiting taxi.
His computer screen faded to black. He started to panic, but a flashing green user prompt appeared in the top left corner, mimicking an old style computer terminal. Green type scrolled in a retro font: Welcome back, 503-ERROR. Long time no see.
A shiver ran down his spine.
The cursor flashed. Anyone who just stumbled across this and somehow gained access would probably start typing commands, but those in the know understood that there was one more passphrase needed to get past this screen. Max typed: You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
The old lines from Zork , the first text adventure game, came back to him easily. He’d never even played the original game, but he appreciated the analogy: Every target was a puzzle to be solved, a place to be explored. And it took the right strings of characters to get you deeper. Every hack was a text adventure.
The screen displayed the next line from the game: There is a small mailbox here.
Open mailbox , Max typed.
A familiar robotic sound bite played “You’ve got mail.” Max had never used America Online, but the early days of computing had been immortalized in pop culture.
The screen stuttered and suddenly Max was looking at a list of comment threads. The most recent thread, created just seconds before, was titled “back from the dead.” It was about 503-ERROR’s return after his long absence and whether they should give him access to the room or not.
Max wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans then flexed his fingers. The thread directly below the one about him, with thousands of page views and a few hundred comments, was labeled “Who was STOP?”
A new thread appeared: “503-ERROR.” He debated ignoring it, but he was in a tenuous position. He hadn’t logged in for a long time, had disappeared without warning, and there were bound to be questions. If he didn’t respond, or didn’t give the right answers, he could be booted at any time and locked out.
Max clicked on the “503-ERROR” thread to expand it. There was only one post, which said: come inside .
He opened a chat window, clicked Join, and typed 503-ERROR . He was logged in to a private chat room that already had nine users signed in. He recognized only a couple of the names from his old days hanging out here with Evan: 0MN1, Edifice, and Kill_Screen. The rest were strangers, or might have been people he’d dealt with before under different handles: ZeroKal, print*is*dead, GroundSloth, Plan(et)9, DoubleThink, PHYREWALL.
Hackers changed their identities all the time, or maintained multiple identities: Anonymity was one of the last freedoms available on the internet, though even that was harder to come by now, unless you were on the Deep Web. And when you decided to give it up, as Max had, you could just disappear, without anyone ever knowing who you really were or what had happened to you.
A message from 0MN1 flashed on the screen: Who are u?
I’m 503-ERROR , Max typed.
Kill_Screen: the real deal???
503-ERROR: Of course I would say I was, even if I
Max clicked his cursor into the first of two unmarked text fields on the screen and typed “503-ERROR”. The box disappeared and he entered his passphrase. That box disappeared too, leaving a blank white screen.
After ten seconds, he thought the slow Wi-Fi was to blame. After thirty, he wondered if the page had timed out, or if the chat rooms were no longer active. After fifty seconds, he started to get worried.
Loud high heels clacked on the marble floor and echoed throughout the lobby. Max watched a woman in a short red mini dress cross the lobby from the elevator bank and push through the revolving door. Outside, she opened the back door of a waiting taxi.
His computer screen faded to black. He started to panic, but a flashing green user prompt appeared in the top left corner, mimicking an old style computer terminal. Green type scrolled in a retro font: Welcome back, 503-ERROR. Long time no see.
A shiver ran down his spine.
The cursor flashed. Anyone who just stumbled across this and somehow gained access would probably start typing commands, but those in the know understood that there was one more passphrase needed to get past this screen. Max typed: You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
The old lines from Zork , the first text adventure game, came back to him easily. He’d never even played the original game, but he appreciated the analogy: Every target was a puzzle to be solved, a place to be explored. And it took the right strings of characters to get you deeper. Every hack was a text adventure.
The screen displayed the next line from the game: There is a small mailbox here.
Open mailbox , Max typed.
A familiar robotic sound bite played “You’ve got mail.” Max had never used America Online, but the early days of computing had been immortalized in pop culture.
The screen stuttered and suddenly Max was looking at a list of comment threads. The most recent thread, created just seconds before, was titled “back from the dead.” It was about 503-ERROR’s return after his long absence and whether they should give him access to the room or not.
Max wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans then flexed his fingers. The thread directly below the one about him, with thousands of page views and a few hundred comments, was labeled “Who was STOP?”
A new thread appeared: “503-ERROR.” He debated ignoring it, but he was in a tenuous position. He hadn’t logged in for a long time, had disappeared without warning, and there were bound to be questions. If he didn’t respond, or didn’t give the right answers, he could be booted at any time and locked out.
Max clicked on the “503-ERROR” thread to expand it. There was only one post, which said: come inside .
He opened a chat window, clicked Join, and typed 503-ERROR . He was logged in to a private chat room that already had nine users signed in. He recognized only a couple of the names from his old days hanging out here with Evan: 0MN1, Edifice, and Kill_Screen. The rest were strangers, or might have been people he’d dealt with before under different handles: ZeroKal, print*is*dead, GroundSloth, Plan(et)9, DoubleThink, PHYREWALL.
Hackers changed their identities all the time, or maintained multiple identities: Anonymity was one of the last freedoms available on the internet, though even that was harder to come by now, unless you were on the Deep Web. And when you decided to give it up, as Max had, you could just disappear, without anyone ever knowing who you really were or what had happened to you.
A message from 0MN1 flashed on the screen: Who are u?
I’m 503-ERROR , Max typed.
Kill_Screen: the real deal???
503-ERROR: Of course I would say I was, even if I
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