Chapter 1

Pixel drummed her fingers on her laptop in an absent minded cadence. She sat on a park bench, her bicycle propped up next to her. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, and she scowled at the computer code in front of her. The white text on the screen was almost fuzzy against the black background of the terminal window. The moment had come to execute her script, which would perform a buffer overflow. If the exploit worked she’d have just mere minutes to scope out the operating system. She needed to find what she was looking for in seconds, copy it, then remove all traces of what she’d done. Simple right?

Today was the culmination of a year’s worth of work. She had been probing and testing the highly protected server for months and finally found a series of weaknesses. Pixel ran her hands through her red hair, her heart was beating hard and she was nervous. What if her 15 bounces across strategically located data centers around the globe weren’t enough? What if they found her before she could get out? It was too late to change anything, that moment had come and gone.

Normally Pixel would have scanned entire subnet ranges, whole blocks, looking for IP addresses running software that she KNEW had weaknesses. In fact, it had been one of those trace scans that had turned up an IP that was connected to the internet, but somehow not responding to her PINGs. This PING had no PONG. The complete absence of response from the address snared her attention, and over the last few months had become an obsession. The server that denied the outside world existed would be hers. It was called PRIS.

Today, PRIS would not only be discovered by the outside world, but Pixel was also going to find out what was hidden behind what she could only imagine to be a multi million dollar firewall. This is some NSA type shit she thought, leaning back and cracking her knuckles. Reaching forward, she pressed enter, and executed the lines of code she’d just written. Just like that she had a root prompt.

>> root@PRIS

Pixels fingers flew across her keyboard, she could type near 140wpm with 100% accuracy and today was the day that she got to put that to the fucking test. In seconds she had uploaded her rootkit, and began executing scripts and writing yet more.

“Pixel strikes again bitches” She said out loud as she executed yet another script that she’d written in perl. In just mere moments she’d searched the entire unix operating system for any irregularities, or any processes running, that were outside the norm. There were none.

“Shit” she swore, “What the fuck? Where is it?”

At that very moment one of her regex search strings found something. A file that was not a system file, and one that had a highly unusual name and size.

>>/root/mnt/d/Pattern.Recognition.and.Intelligent.Systems.PRIS

It was not only something, but it looked incredibly important. Fuck. It screamed important. Whatever it was, it was huge. Her fears that this was just a honeypot, meant to trap hackers, vanished. She typed out a command to copy.

The whole file was 10 gigabytes, that alone was unusual, but with her quick connection and ability to segment files through an encrypted SSH tunnel, she had it copied in mere minutes. With the typing of a single command, her entire connection was severed. Bounces and proxies, all closed down under her self destruct sequence.

Pixel sat back and breathed a sigh of relief. She had done it, she had broken into the most secure server that she had ever seen. That and she managed to swipe whatever it was that the massive firewall had been there to protect. She knew she had something important, the server had even been named after the file. PRIS, Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems, whatever that was, it sounded intense.

Closing her laptop, she pulled the gigabit USB Wi-Fi adapter out and put it into a Pringles can. She had wired the Pringles container to be a directional antenna. Instead of wardriving, she was warbicycling. Pixel threw everything into a greasy bag she’d been eating her fries out of, and threw it all away. Placing the laptop in her backpack, she slung it over her shoulder and got on her bicycle.

She pedaled out of the park she’d been sitting in, coasting where she could, her red hair trailed in the wind behind her. She knew she made an unassuming sight, just a teen on a bike. Nobody had a clue that she’d just hacked into possibly the most secure system in the world. She found herself grinning ear to ear.

Pixel had never known her mother, and had instead been raised by her abusive father. His desire for alcohol outweighed any common sense he might have had. After several years of abuse Pixel had decided it would be either death, or freedom. Since freedom was far more alluring, she had graduated highschool early and become emancipated.

Not everything had been difficult for her. At a very early age she’d known she was different. When other children were painting with their fingers, or smearing food all over their faces, she had read through an entire set of encyclopedias. Her eidetic memory and sharp wits had put her far ahead in life. Even now she was going over every line of code, every key stroke, looking for errors. She could find none in her memory. Everything had been perfect, she had been perfect.

Pixel was soaked in sweat by the time she made it back to the basement she rented. It was a small single room, and she shared a bathroom with her landlady upstairs, but she loved it. It was hers after all, her little private corner of the world, free of the violence and abuse that she had come from. Ditching her bike in the backyard, she practically ran down the cement steps to her basement door. Unlocking it she walked into the cool air. Only a basement was capable of sustaining nice cold air in he heat of summer. Pixel was sure if she spit on the sidewalk it would sizzle in this heat.

She locked the door behind her, and began stripping off her sweaty clothes. She had sat on the park bench since sun up that morning. Now it was now late afternoon. It had been tedious and time consuming, but it was the only gigabit wireless signal she found that had good peering. Glad to be home, a shower was the first and only thing on her mind.

At five feet three inches tall, Pixel had trouble feeling like an adult, she felt too short to be seen as a woman. Everytime she removed her clothes and inspected herself, she wished she had a fuller figure. With narrow hips, and small breasts she worried that she looked like a boy. Pixel grabbed a towel, and threw it over her shoulder. Barefoot and naked she climbed the basement stairs to the house above. The house had just one bathroom, and her landlady Sarah was seldom home Sarah spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, and usually worked at this time of the day. So Pixel was completely shocked when she opened the basement door, walked into the kitchen and Sarah was standing there.

“Oh ... Hi Pixel!” Sarah openly stared at Pixel. “I ah, I guess you weren’t expecting me?”

“Nope” Pixel didn’t know what else to say, so she just stood there feeling awkward.

Sarah had to move, to let Pixel walk by, and she just awkwardly stared. “Oh ... shit sorry. I’m in the way.”

“No Problemo...” Pixel said. She side-stepped around her, and her bare tits brushed Sarah’s arm. An awkward silence followed, before Pixel managed to flee to the bathroom.

Once Pixel had finished showering, she went back to the basement wrapped in a towel. She didn’t see Sarah this time. Firing up her desktop computers she watched the boot prompt dance across all of her screens. She did freelance code work for locals, and made some decent income, tax free and off the books. Pixel had no footprint in life, she was a ghost. She plugged in her laptop, and locating the file, she gave it the proper permissions to load.

A black screen loaded with a command prompt, and Pixel sighed with relief. It hadn’t gotten corrupted, so that was good. What the fuck was this though? What had PRIS stood for again? Pattern Recognition and Intelligence Systems? That sounded like the holy fucking grail of ‘what the fuck’. She began to type commands.

>> HELP

>>HELPDOC

>>PWD

<< Hello my name is PRIS

Pixel froze, fingers hovering over her keyboard, she was afraid to touch anything. How do you respond to a program that says hello and has a name? You say hello back, Pixel thought.