Chapter 10: Network Intrusion

When they made it back to the apartment, Flower gave Selkie her usual greeting, the Broker’s coloration brightening as he reached out to stroke his pet. David set down the empty delivery box by the door, feeling a little less claustrophobic in his suit after their jaunt to the surface. Like Selkie with his social battery, it helped to be able to take breaks and allow himself to recharge.

“I have some reports that I must file before I begin my rest cycle,” Selkie announced, heading deeper into his apartment with the little slug orbiting around him happily. “Do you require anything before you return to your habitat?”

It was a polite way of telling him to scram, and he wasn’t sure if Selkie needed a break from social interaction, or if this was more classified work that David wasn’t supposed to see.

“I figured I’d get a shower and finish up a little work myself before I turn in,” he replied, watching the Broker leave the polished floor. The alien swam up to the second level of his apartment with a few kicks of his tentacles, landing on a balcony-like overhang opposite the one that housed his habitat. Mounted on the wall was a bank of consoles with several touch panels and monitors. It wasn’t too different from what David had seen at the research facility – maybe something akin to a home workstation or a personal computer.

There was a Broker chair in front of it, and Selkie settled into the stretchy netting, gently pushing the eager slug out of his way as he reached out to press some of the controls. The displays flared to life, starting to display Broker text, but David couldn’t see much from his low angle.

“I will wake you shortly before we leave for the facility,” Selkie added, turning his head to glance down at his guest.

“Goodnight!” David replied, the implication not lost on him.

“There are no nights here,” the Broker replied. “But, goodnight.”

David swam up to the second level as Selkie resumed his work, entering his habitat through the force field. He shed his suit, then hopped into the claustrophobic shower, letting the cool water wash away all of the day’s accumulated sweat. While the suit had cooling systems built-in, moving around underwater for long periods could be arduous. He took his time, and after drying off inside the cubicle, he stepped out and slipped on some fresh shorts.

It was hard to see much detail through the foggy walls of the habitat, but Selkie didn’t seem to be sitting at his computer anymore. Perhaps it was a good opportunity to test his new software...

David pulled the suit back on and sealed it up, then stepped out of the habitat, floating down to the first floor. He glanced in the direction of Selkie’s sectioned-off bedroom warily. Before he started snooping around, he needed to make sure his host was asleep, so he began to explore the rest of the apartment. The Brokers weren’t accustomed to sharing their private spaces with other people, so with any luck, the security measures on his devices might be minimal or absent. The quickest way into a secure system was rarely hacking through firewalls or exploiting a backdoor, but simply targeting the weakest link – the person. No amount of security software would save someone who wrote their password on a post-it note and stuck it to their monitor.

There was the control system for the hologram suite, but that had been activated via voice command, which was something he couldn’t reproduce. Selkie’s terminal was the better option – he had seen Brokers using consoles and touch screens enough to get an idea of how they worked. He passed more strange alien artifacts and pieces of unidentifiable furniture, staring at the exotic fish as he walked past their tanks. In one corner of the apartment was something that looked like a kitchenette – the appliances reminded him of the ones he had seen in the cafeteria. Maybe he could use the excuse of searching for food if he got caught outside his habitat. There was a sectioned-off room that might be a bathroom, as well as a lounge area with something that looked like a couch made of netting.

Before long, he was certain that he was alone, and he leapt up onto the second floor. The terminal’s screens were still turned on, likely in some kind of standby mode, one of them displaying Broker symbols. Hopefully, it wouldn’t blare a deafening startup sound when he activated it.

“Here goes nothing,” he muttered into his helmet, reaching down to launch the translation software. He tapped at the panel on his wrist, blowing up the window, then turned his eyes to the console. After a moment, English text appeared to hover over the Broker characters. The symbols read standby.

Not sure what else to do, he reached out and touched the display, the rest of the monitors coming to life. Just like the tablet that the Administrator had handed him, his capacitive gloves were just as good as a sucker. He was faced with another elaborate Broker user interface, but this time, all of the text was being translated.

This was indeed the home terminal – used both as a personal computer and apparently to regulate various systems inside the apartment. The rightmost of the four main displays was configured to show environmental conditions like water temperature and the status of the filter. Another seemed to display something that looked like a stock market feed, or maybe that was tracking Selkie’s personal assets.

As he began to explore the local file structure, he found that it was remarkably familiar and intuitive. The Brokers, too, had concluded that nested folders were easy to keep track of. The only thing that threw him off was that they seemed to write from top to bottom rather than left to right, something more akin to Chinese or Japanese. Their words were also arranged in strange clusters that were always shifting and changing in relation to one another, multiple different colored squares morphing to make new words and characters. Maybe that was why a lot of their monitors were arranged in portrait mode.

“What do we have here?” he whispered to himself. He dragged his finger across one of the touch displays on the console like a giant trackpad, the motion reflected in the display directly above it, navigating to a symbol that seemed to launch a program. His translator couldn’t display a one-for-one translation, interpreting the name as security monitor.

When he tapped it, several windows popped up on the nearby displays, showing feeds from cameras like some kind of CCTV system. It didn’t take him long to recognize his laptop, and to realize that all of the cameras but one were positioned inside his habitat. They were watching his bed, his desk, and there was even one positioned to watch the entrance. The Admiral had been right – he was being observed at all times. Any guilt that he had been feeling for betraying Selkie’s trust quickly evaporated. Selkie was his handler, and David had known that the Broker would likely report his actions to the Administrator, but it was unnerving to confirm that he was being recorded while he slept. At least there wasn’t a camera in the shower...

He noted that the rest of the apartment seemed to be clean, so Selkie wouldn’t have video of him accessing the computer unless there were Administrators and Council members all spying on each other like some kind of Russian nesting doll of suspicion. David didn’t have much choice but to assume that the buck stopped at Selkie. It might be in his best interests to let them continue to believe that he had no way of reading Broker text.

After glancing warily in the direction of Selkie’s room again, he resumed his digging. If he wanted to be able to access the Broker network without detection, he had to find a way around the surveillance. Sure, he could take his laptop into the shower, but Selkie would figure out that he was misbehaving pretty quickly. Turning off the cameras would likely be detected when he came to check on the footage, so he had to take a different approach.

Perhaps a high-tech problem could be resolved with a low-tech solution. The camera that was positioned over his bed had a top-down angle, which meant that there were positions he could sit in where it wouldn’t be able to see the screen of his laptop. It might not even have occurred to them that he might use the device in bed. As long as he made frequent trips between the table and the bunk, making sure that the cameras could see the monitor at intervals, they might assume that he was just restless. Out of view of the cameras, he could do whatever he wanted.

He turned his attention to the networking problem, finding something similar to the GUI that the Brokers had installed on his laptop to handle ad-hoc connections. There was no password system to access the menu – no security checks. Why would there be? This was Selkie’s home, and he had no idea that David could access his computer, never mind read the text. Without the translation software that the Brokers had unwittingly provided, it would all be gibberish to him.

There – a security key for the apartment’s network. It was a long, complicated string of values, but all he had to do was take a snapshot with his camera. He closed the surveillance camera views and put the console back into standby mode, careful to move the net chair back to its original position. For all he knew, the computer might alert Selkie that someone had accessed it, but it seemed unlikely. A simple password or face scan would have completely locked him out, but it must not have occurred to anyone that he might get this far. Like a fish in its tank, they expected him to stay inside his bubble.

Webber’s words echoed in his mind. They think they’re smarter than you. They are mistaken.

Armed with this new information, he crept back over to the other side of the apartment, keeping a wary eye on Selkie’s bedroom. Before reaching his habitat, he realized that the cameras would show him leaving his room and reentering shortly after, which might raise suspicions if Selkie checked the records. He needed a plausible alibi. After looking around for a moment, he bounded over to the kitchenette, rummaging through some kind of cupboard that was recessed into the wall. He retrieved a food container, then returned to the habitat. Selkie had commented on his mammalian metabolism several times already, so with a little luck, he could play it off as a midnight snack.

He set it down beside the laptop on his desk, then shed his suit, making a show of eating for the cameras as he began his work. When he was done eating, he moved his laptop over to the bed, angling it in such a way that an observer wouldn’t be able to see the monitor. To anyone watching the recording, it would seem as though he was casually catching up on some work.

Armed with the passcode that he had retrieved from Selkie’s computer, he was finally able to access the wireless network through the little adapter, the system showing that he was connected. He felt a surge of excitement, but he was getting ahead of himself. If he managed to gain access to whatever passed for the Broker intranet – assuming that such a thing existed at all – it wasn’t as though he could open up their websites in a browser.

The only tool that he had was the program that allowed him to access the research facility’s server. He opened it up and turned on the translation tool, English text appearing to hover over the Broker characters on the GUI.

Yes! Rather than showing the file structure that he had become accustomed to, the window opened onto some kind of unfamiliar launch page. It reminded him of what he had seen on Selkie’s console.

Just as he had posited, the program that they had installed on his laptop was just a shell – like a virtual machine that was emulating Broker code rather than going through the trouble of converting all of the software to run locally. When he accessed the server at the facility, it must be something akin to a web portal or a terminal. They hadn’t built in any security measures to prevent him from accessing other systems, likely never imagining that he would have the opportunity.

He scanned the page, and while a lot of the translations were stilted and unhelpful, the Brokers liked their symbols and icons just as much as humans. It seemed that there was a home network that encompassed all of the devices and utilities in Selkie’s apartment, and the virtual machine on his laptop was being treated as some new device. A touch device, apparently, because a keypad-like virtual interface was hovering over the right side of his display. All the better, as he doubted that it would have taken keyboard inputs. Everything must be linked to some central computer that did all of the actual processing, making each device on its network a remote terminal.

There was also a portal to an external network, which might be the city’s intranet. When he tapped at the icon, he was taken to another page, this one featuring several more stylized icons. Each one seemed to represent a different theme, such as information, recreation, and services. It must be some kind of front-end.

He began to browse them, checking the services page and seeing yet more icons. Some of them were recognizable. One of them looked like the delivery drone that he had seen, and another was clearly an abstract representation of a shuttle. Maybe it was the equivalent of ordering takeout and taxis. There were many other options that he didn’t recognize, but he was more interested in the other categories.

The information icon held a lot of allure. Maybe he could discover more about their technology and their solar system – find something that might satisfy the Admiral. Instead, he found his finger wandering to the recreation icon. What did the Brokers do for fun?

He was taken to a page filled with animated images rather than icons, and as he scrolled down the page, he realized that they were representations of different scenarios. These were games and simulations – likely intended to be accessed through the holographic device that Selkie had shown him. Each one had some values beside it, likely representing the purchase price. They weren’t free, clearly.

This wasn’t too different from a game storefront for a virtual reality device back in human space, though the Broker systems were far more advanced. Most seemed to promise relaxation of some kind, and it was easy to imagine stressed-out Brokers coming home from a hard phase at work and tapping into some soothing simulation to decompress, as they put it. One was called Sabbatical of Harvest, and appeared to show a Broker relaxing on the shore of a lake surrounded by strange trees and foliage. Did it take place on 1d? Another was easily recognizable as a view of a coral reef in shallow water, seen from the perspective of someone lying in a net hammock in a luxurious room. Was this simulating the experience of living in a coveted reef condo?

Others were more like interactive movies and concerts, perhaps giving the Brokers a way to experience more linear stories and curated experiences. In the same way that a human might watch a recording of a music video or a movie, the Brokers would experience it through their holographic booths. There seemed to be a wide variety of musical styles that came with their own visual and sensory components, but with no frame of reference and little to translate, it was hard to imagine what they might entail.