Mayhem in a Pill
Copyright© 2015 by Shinerdrinker
Chapter 93: Accept These Kudos
Fresh off his team’s victory in the Texas 6A High School Football State Championship, Tim Murphy did what most red-blooded high school-aged young adults would do with a day off – he slept in.
“Ooh, well, look who it is! It’s the champion football star,” Juanita, Tim’s mother, mocked from the kitchen when she caught sight of her teenager on his way to the bathroom. “Come here when you’re finished,” she called out.
Her son answered halfheartedly, “Did you need something, Mom?”
Juanita turned to see her half-asleep son trying to wipe the sleep out of his eyes with his t-shirt bottom.
“No. Just beginning to wonder when you were going to come out of hibernation,” Juanita joked after accepting a kiss on the cheek from her oldest. “Are you hungry?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She simply pointed to a plate of breakfast food piled high and ready for microwaving. Tim simply grunted and nodded yes, but no one was looking at him.
“Arrgh! Another one!” Carmen, his little sister, complained as she entered the kitchen. “Oh, good,” she said, catching sight of her older brother. “They’ve been calling the house phone, and thennnn they started calling mine. Here!” After expressing her frustration, Carmen shoved several multi-colored sheets of Post-it notes at her brother. “These are all for you.” She reached up near the house phone and ripped several other Post-it notes off the bulletin board that served as the house’s news source. “So are these!” She dramatically spun on her heel and marched back to her room, closing the door. She would have slammed the door, but the house rules forbade slamming doors.
Tim couldn’t help it and snickered at his little sister’s theatrics, nor could his mother when they caught each other’s eye. He placed his plate of food in the microwave and turned to get a glass for his drink. Initially reaching for orange juice, he instead chose a couple of cans of his precious Hawaiian Punch.
“What time is it, anyway?” he asked, standing up straight and looking at the digital clock connected to the oven. “Wow. I didn’t think it was that late.”
“You can consider that plate in there as your dinner if you’d like,” his mother suggested, “but I’m planning on meat loaf – and yes, smart ass, I’ll probably burn the outside, just for my champ.” She pulled her son’s face down closer to her for a kiss on the cheek.
“Awesome! You’re the best, Mom!” Juanita was rewarded with a returned kiss on the cheek.
“At the risk of ruining the spotless image of me in your eyes, please try to inform those people that you have a phone and they should call you, not us. We aren’t your secretaries.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tim tried to hide his smile, as he knew his mother did not like being called “ma’am.” It was a word she absolutely hated, particularly when it was directed at her. A moment later, he was rewarded with a swat on the shoulder from a damp dish towel that was resting on his mother’s shoulder.
Tim returned to his bedroom and placed the plate of food on the desk in front of one of his laptop computers. He turned on the TV for background noise, mainly, still tuned to ESPN.
He figured he’d never fall asleep, so he started looking for any highlights of last night’s game. He was surprised to find the game had a prominent spot in the national show’s lineup. The Texas championship football game was the second story of the evening, right behind an NBA game that went into triple overtime. Tim felt slightly embarrassed by the attention he received for his performance in the game. After all, it was the team that won it.
Minutes into the game highlights, Tim’s cell phone rang, and he didn’t recognize the number. In the time it took to push ‘accept’ to answer, the nanites informed him that the area code was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Needless to say, Tim was suddenly very interested in the call.
“Hello?” Tim answered meekly and immediately punished himself. So he tried to cover up his meek answer with a more demonstrative, “Hello. You got Tim.”
“Oh, hey, Tim!” The caller quickly picked up the receiver after dialing and listening on a speaker. “Thanks for taking my call. This is Jatavis Sanders, and I’m in charge of recruiting for the University of Alabama football team.”
“Hello, Mr. Sanders. You just caught me. I just got up, and I’m just beginning to go through the phone calls that my family have graciously answered for me this morning and afternoon,” Tim said plainly while he checked over all the Post-it notes from his sister and mom as they manned the phone so far. “And well ... lookie there, there is your number. So I guess I can put you down as an answered call.”
“Yes, indeed, you sure can. Hey. I just wanted to call and congratulate you on an amazing showing in the state championship. I don’t know if you realized it, but you made our number one recruit look not number one-like,” Jatavis proclaimed. Tim felt he needed to defend his most recent opponent.
“Oh, well, don’t be too hard on him. Antwaun was easily the most difficult player I’ve ever played against. There were plays where I had absolutely nothing to do but try to keep my feet and hope he’d mess up, and that only happened a couple of times.”
“Oh, I know, don’t worry. We saw how hard Antwaun played, and we saw where the big guy would need more work. We are excited to get him here. And hey, I don’t wanna keep you on the phone too long. I just wanted to call to let you know that, of course, the University of Alabama coaches will be watching your prep career with great interest. We hope to get you and your family to visit our campus and take a look at our football facilities, as well, and see firsthand what the University of Alabama can offer you academically.”
“Thanks, Mr. Sanders. We’ll see in the future when I start lining all of that stuff up. Alabama is definitely worth thinking about, that’s for sure!”
“Great! Hey, on a personal note, I can see the time there in San Antonio. Do you usually wake up this late, or was sleeping in some kind of reward to yourself?”
“Little rewards make life more interesting ... according to my dad, anyway. The family lets me do so while they answered the phone as well.”
“From a former five-star recruit like yourself, can I give you some advice?” Jatavis asked.
“Oh, please, yes!”
“Make sure you thank your family for everything they have done to help you along the way. Not just a simple thank you, many of which will definitely be necessary, but try to do something special for each one of them. They have seen everything that’s happened, and they were by your side for all of it, especially your little sister,” he chuckled a bit. “When I talked to her, she seemed to be coming toward the end of her rope,” Jatavis laughed, and Tim returned it.
“Thanks. That’s good advice. I will definitely take it to heart. Thanks for calling.”
“Thank you, Tim, and good luck next season!”
Tim ended the call and leaned back in his gaming chair with a big, stupid grin on his face.
“Who was that?” Carmen asked from the hallway.
“Jatavis Sanders from Alabama.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah, he was nice. I didn’t like that guy from Clemson. He thought I was just a little girl,” Carmen complained as she handed him another Post-it note. “I dropped this one on my floor. I didn’t want you to get it.”
“Oh, awesome. Thanks for answering all these, Carmen.”
“You’re welcome. I also forwarded all the emails of congratulations you got from social media,” she added with a dramatic pause. “I’m glad you’re up. I don’t wanna use the computer for a while. I put it down to go touch some grass.”
“I hear ya.” Tim smiled. “Thanks again.”
She blushed as she pulled the door closed.
“I definitely need to think of something for her. That’s for sure.” Tim returned his attention to the Post-it notes and made a list of who had called and who had called the most. Alabama had called three times, not including the call Tim answered. “Humph,” Tim mumbled under his breath. “I guess they really wanted to let me know they were watching.”
As a self-proclaimed computer nerd, Tim opened his primary laptop and began the mind-numbing process of tracking every call, email, and social media post from every college. Tim was using this process to keep track of every school and every way they contacted him so far. At first, it was just a way to keep track, but soon it evolved into a passion project that suited his meticulous nature well. For anyone else, it would have been tedious work, but Tim was as happy as a pig rolling around in muck!
Tim’s cell phone continued ringing with congratulations from several other college recruiting coordinators. A message from an unusual source came next...
“Tim!” Carmen called out from the hallway before she even knocked.
Tim was impressed she at least called out before opening the door. “Yeah! What is it? Come on in.”
“I got this weird, like, error message on the iPad, and I can’t get rid of it.”
“Here. Lemme see it.” Tim turned the iPad to see what his sister was talking about.
There was a large, almost burned image on the screen. It was designed to resemble a standard Windows popup displaying an error message. When the camera recognized Tim’s face on the iPad, the message changed. “My boss would like to speak with you. Please dial in at your leisure.” The warning prompt appeared as a rotating GIF with an additional line of text. “No tricks. He would like to talk about your great game.”
Tim put his finger surreptitiously over the camera and turned to his sister. “When did this start?”
“Just a minute or so ago,” she answered, worried.
“Ah, it’s nothing. I’ll take care of it. Do you need it back, like, right away?”
“Well, I can find something else to do, but I’m chatting with my friends at five. That’s in like an hour or so,” she answered while looking at her watch.
“Okay, I’ll fix it before then, and I’ll get it back to you.”
“Cool, thanks,” she answered and turned, skipping out of Tim’s bedroom.
Andrew Thomas, the linebackers coach and head recruiter at IMG Academy in Florida, was not looking forward to visiting Leonard Huffnagle down in the strange man’s ever-trashed basement office. Thomas knew he wasn’t a bad guy, just very strange, especially considering he was surrounded by people whose number one, two, and three biggest obsessions all revolved around the game of football. Leonard was, at worst, socially inept, but Coach Thomas had learned he could be a highly valuable arrow for his quiver.
“Yes, um, who’s there?”
Seeing Leonard scurrying frantically around the office, obviously attempting to clean the room, Coach Thomas couldn’t stop his eyes from rolling back in his head. Still, he did successfully stifle an initial bout of laughter at the frequent, blatant, and awkward attempts from his computer expert to conceal a messy office. That didn’t help his normal speaking voice, which could best be described as a nasal squeak accentuated with an off-sequence stutter. The combination of awkward speech and mannerisms often became more pronounced when the man was nervous, as he was now.
“Hey, Leonard, it’s Andrew. You got a minute to talk?”
“Sure, um, just a sec!” The manic cleaning slowed significantly, but could still be heard out in the hallway. Soon enough, Leonard opened the office door for what would probably be his only friend. “Hi there, Andrew! How goes it?”
“Just fine, Leonard. Just fine. Say, did you have a chance to see the Texas championship game?”
“I have a Google alarm set for anything on Tim Murphy. So yeah, I heard about it, but I haven’t had a chance to see anything more than the highlights.” Leonard was almost apologetic.
“Oh, no problem, but it was a great game. I think you might enjoy it. I was hoping you could get in touch with him for us and have him give us a call. We’d love to offer him our congratulations and explore the possibility of working together in the future. We might have a shot at him. In just his freshman year, he’s already cleaned the field of his most difficult competition to date. He is someone we can’t let slip between our fingers.”
“Well, yeah, if he did that well against Alabama’s next future offensive lineman superstar, then why should he stay there?”
“Yes! Exactly! Now, I know you told me you suspected he was the cause of our troubles after hitting him with the iPad Trojan Horse we’ve used in the past,” Coach Thomas expounded, “but I figure we could let bygones be bygones, and we could offer to help him get better coaching for his future than just what he could get from a local high school coach.”
“Yeah, we can make the overture, but Andrew, he has pretty decent coaching,” Leonard stated nervously before pulling up something on his computer and spinning the monitor around for his friend to read. “See? I mean, Greg Fontana played over a decade in the NFL, and he is one of his coaches.”
“Well, yeah, good point,” Coach Thomas acknowledged to his friend, but continued reading the resume of the coach. “But hey, says here, he was the offensive line coach for Roosevelt. As far as I know, Mayhem only played on the defensive line and some wide receiver. He might not have had much interaction with that particular coach,” Coach Thomas said, feeling his own grasping-at-straws hopefulness permeating his voice.
“Well, I guess we could just call and offer our congratulations, but Mayhem blocks our calls, so how can I get through to him for you?”
“Yep. That’s a problem,” the coach agreed, and both men sat quietly contemplating the situation.
“I could try and get him to contact us. I mean, I’m positive that he was the one who broke my defenses, but I still can’t prove it. But Andrew, I think there is a lot we don’t know about this kid. I mean, I had strong defenses for our network, but he tore through them like tissue paper in a hurricane. I’ve improved our defenses a lot since then, but I’m, um, I’m,” Leonard’s confidence quickly began fluctuating.
He took in a deep breath before continuing his thought. “Andrew, I’m worried about inviting him to try our system again. I mean, if he breaks it, I don’t know what I could do to stop him from ever getting into our system again.”
The coach was empathetic enough to understand Leonard was nervous about contacting the young man again. “Well, I guess you could just ask him nicely,” the coach said as if it were the easiest solution. “Just send him a message and ask him to call, but no bad intentions, and unfortunately, before he calls, you’ll be pretty puckered up by the sounds of it, am I right?”
Coach Thomas was jokingly offering advice, but he didn’t realize how much of an admission Leonard was making about not being as skilled at Cybersecurity as the person who had broken through his defenses before.
“Be nice,” Leonard muttered.
“Exactly. Be nice,” the coach agreed wholeheartedly. “Besides, we still would like to have this kid here and winning games for us.
“Imagine if we get him here! You might be able to find out firsthand if he is as good as you think he might be,” Coach added, then got up to leave the office. “Wouldn’t that be a good thing? I mean, to know rather than just worry?”
The Hollywood stereotype of a football coach left Leonard’s hovel of an office without another word, leaving his friend and computer expert contemplating the cookie-cutter advice he had dropped, as if he were a proper authority on the subject.
“Well, I could send a message through the iPad he gave to his sister,” Leonard out loud to himself. “Heck, I could even try to lure him into a trap and fuck up his situation, but I better not. Andrew really likes this kid for the football team.”
Leonard began setting his trap within an invitation. However, his mind continued racing through ‘what if’ situation after situation. Yet, he kept coming back to the idea of working with this kid to improve the system’s security. There were also some more interesting side hustles Leonard still kept from his friend.
Tim placed his sister’s iPad face down on his desk, dug underneath the drawer cabinet in the closet, and fired up his special laptop. It was one of the first things he splurged on himself with the new allowance his family had given him. He reacquainted himself with the road map previously used to track the infiltration of the spying program on the newly gifted iPad from the IMG high school football training academy in Florida. When Tim discovered the program, he decided to investigate. He played a prank on the computer expert the school had hired to install a malicious program designed to spy on potential recruits.
Tim tried using the same backdoor attack he used previously, but he discovered their computer expert had been busy. The new amount of computer encryption put in his way was formidable. However, with the football season over, he found himself with some free time, so he settled in for an afternoon of hacking.
He came away a little disappointed when he discovered a clear-cut entrance into the system. Before exploiting it, he decided to double- and even triple-check for a trap of some kind – and there it was — a new piece of malware designed to counter any unauthorized invasions of the IMG system. An expeditious examination of the new program revealed a phone number hidden and left there by its creator to facilitate communication. Tim saw it as an obvious plea not to damage the newly created system improvement with another cyber prank.
Tim used the iPad to make a video call to the computer expert at IMG Academy.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Murphy. Please hang on for a moment. Andrew, I mean, Coach Thomas would like a word if you please?”
A few moments passed as the systems administrator waited to transfer the call to the coach. Tim decided to try a little diplomacy. “Hey, Leonard, was it?” The administrator nodded. “I’d like to bury the hatchet, as it were, between us. I discovered malware on the iPad the coach gifted me, and I exploited it to access your system through a backdoor. I promise right here not to re-enter the system without permission, as long as you don’t try to enter my system without permission. What do you think?”
Leonard visibly relaxed, “Yeah, I can certainly live with that. Sorry about the malware in the first place. It’s something we’ve needed to use in the past.”
“Oh no, I understand. I didn’t like it when I discovered it because I’ve had people try to get into my family’s system before, and my father uses the home system for his business as well. So I need to make sure it’s secure for that reason.”
“Perfectly reasonable. Oh, okay, here you go. Coach is ready for you. And Timothy,” Leonard said, looking directly into his webcam, “great championship game. That was very fun to watch!”