Hacker

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”
    - Thoreau

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Time to bend a few nails and slap another board onto the woodshed. A story for you:

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HACKER

Rog snapped awake, the monitor dimly lighting the darkened room. The screen lock display was a brooding picture in somber flat-greens and blacks, a view of lonely railroad tracks slashing a cut through an overgrown cliff on one side and trees on the other, and curving away to disappear in a dark mist.  He was glad to see it. He liked the image. Its isolated feel touched something in him  — but mostly because it was a tripwire that told him that the hacker hadn't been into his machine today.

The hacker always changed the lock screen. Roj would discover the pictures rotating through a lazy slide show display after a day or two of not using the computer at all. Once, Rog had dozed off, only to find horror splayed and flayed across the monitor on awaking. He'd never caught it changing.  The hacker took the time to edit these bloody displays before presenting them, often decorating them with garish neon-purple highlights piping the borders.
    
He'd done all he knew to do — anti-virus, anti-hacker, system reloads — last year, he'd even thrown his old computer into a landfill and bought another, a brand-new laptop with built-in security. Yet still, after less than a month of peace, the hacker wormed past it all and again began leaving nauseating little gobbets for him. 

He sometimes recognized the pictures from descriptions he'd seen in online newspapers and on the evening news. Missing people. Found people. Random bloody crimes. Rog supposed they were from the savage "true crime" or graphic death websites on the Dark Web. He'd stumbled onto such a site himself one late night. The horror-show images had haunted him for days.

The police grew tired of the barrage of calls to their overworked detectives telling them that a hacker was pushing the material to his computer. They finally sent an officer to see for himself. He brought a tech from the City's IT department. Everything by then had long gone, of course. The tech declared after a half-hour of work that he could find nothing. He said the machine was less interesting than his mother's venerable HP, used solely for family pictures and an expanding collection of never-tried recipes.

The officer dispensed bored platitudes and advice on how to secure the computer, and how much they appreciated citizens keeping an eye out and calling in tips.

“We’ll let you know if anything coms out of the investigation,” the officer said. Rog had seen the annoyed, condescending look on the officer's face before on co-workers and on appliance-repair techs. It told him he was being classified either as a crank or a con-man trying to cash in on Crime-Stoppers rewards.

They simply didn't believe him.

He'd long since given up wondering why he had been chosen from the ocean of potential online victims. The hacker had never asked for anything, made no demands, in fact hadn’t exchanged a single word with Roj. He seemed to do it for his own amusement. Who knew with these people?

He shook himself free of the reverie and sighed in resignation. He jiggled the mouse to wake the machine and carefully typed his 32-character password into the box it presented.

His anonymous email account, still logged on from the morning, filled the screen. Glancing through the unread “Subject” lines, he was surprised to find that Lucy had accepted his invitation to meet for coffee. He glanced at his watch.  He needed to be there in a little over an hour — he was going to have to get humping.  

Lucy DeGale was his favorite online correspondent. They’d been “talking” for weeks, in texts, emails, and blog postings and comments.  

She was interested in making sure everyone understood her, mostly by airing and displaying all her self-defined complexities. This meant that she carried the bulk of the "conversations", and she spent very little time on any but the most basic information from Rog, which suited his essential shyness. His constant use of virtual networks, anonymous accounts, and other arcana for years to fight the hacker also made him essentially invisible to her or to anyone.

They disagreed on everything, but had become friends despite it. She was an excellent writer and in any discussion she would expand rapturously on her opinions and on how it caused her to feel. He loved arguing with her.

Her life was an open book, as they say. Aggressively open. She viewed any conscious or subconscious attempt to not express her every thought as "concealing the truth".

She either didn't notice or didn't care that on this position, and most others, Rog disagreed with her.  He felt that establishing some intimacy with even one person, much less the entire world, made sense before one made a point of discussing bathroom habits, sexual proclivities, deeply held religious beliefs or thorny moralities, never mind a running internal monologue about whether trimming pubic hair before an upcoming date was "caving in" to the beauty norms of a defective society.

He knew that she was single, being unable to keep a long-term relationship, not least because of her "take me as I am, I change nothing for anyone" attitude. Her penchant for publishing graphic updates about whoever she was with, albeit mostly in terms of her reactions to them was also off-putting.  

Rog chuckled to himself. She was pretty. She was smart. She was a pain in the ass. As a child of the internet, she would tell everyone who would read her about her view of any ex's failings.  "The Taylor Swift of Wordpress," someone once called her, although she wrote with less malicious intent than Taylor.

An online social justice warrior who claimed to live in poverty among "her people" out in Oakland, she rarely mentioned the uncomfortable dichotomies of her actual life. Her parents were mid-range wealthy. They resided in a top-floor Spanish/Mediterranean condo in Pacific Heights. She'd go "home" to borrow their pool and relax for a few days, or up-country to their primitive summer-cabin in the forest to "de-stress".

She'd married for a for a few years, and lived in an ultra-liberal small town upstate, had a child and divorced. She moved back to the Bay area settling into the Acorn Projects in Oakland, or "The Cornfield" as the locals called it. She was the only single white woman living within a mile. Lucy deliberately picked it to raise her child in a more "diverse" environment than she'd had as a youth. A harrowing encounter on a fine sunny afternoon with members of one of the vicious street gangs that infested the complex terrified and angered her. She was shocked to find she'd whispered "fucking chimps" under her breath in the adrenaline-dump aftermath of reaction.

Mortified, she duly documented this as a personal failure on her blog, and in a fit of remorse she moved. She settled into a duplex in a neighborhood "coincidentally" less likely to get her killed. It was nearly in sight of her parents' condo.

During a heated argument one evening, Roj laughed at one of her more extravagant flights of what he called "kumbaya fantasy". She got angry and stopped talking to him.  He made a couple of attempts to renew the contact then moved on, assuming she'd left for good.  Two days later she reappeared in his online feed.

"You shouldn't have laughed at me," she said without preamble.

"OK," he replied. There was a long silence.

"So, are you going to apologize?"

"No."  More silence.

"Why? Did you mean to hurt my feelings? That's not acceptable."

"No, not at all. I am sorry that’s what you thought, if that’s the apology you want."

There was nothing for over an hour.

"Why did you laugh at me?" she asked.

"Because what you wrote was funny," replied Rog.

"It wasn't supposed to be. I was serious."

"Yeah, I know.  Didn't keep it from being funny."

"Oh, fuck you," she said, and the "blocked" icon appeared.

And with that, she disappeared.

A week later she reappeared with a breezy "Hi! How are you doing?" and they resumed, with it never being mentioned again.

She was intrigued that Rog was clearly interested in her in more than a platonic sense, but would not back down or change his opinions to advance that interest. She'd had to at least meet him halfway. This, in her experience, had never happened. Most men would "convert" to her point of view when it was clear there was no more "naughty talk" or risque pictures forthcoming without mending fences. Roj simply wouldn't play the game — which she assigned to being "more honest". 

This attracted her intensely.

She'd been clear that she hoped they'd have sex someday — just the idea that she'd bluntly say that was a shock on many levels for Rog. It shouldn't have been. He realized it was a defining description of her approach to her life.

He was considering whether he ought to resume their last discussion about ordinary people, including himself, who didn't have call on rich parents — and that in any "experience" she had out in the "real world" she knew that deep down that she wasn't at genuine risk — or just move on to the fact that she was interested in him in a rather more immediate sense.  

Still, he bet that her parents could come up with — what, $100,000 on a whim if the banks were open?  He doubted he could raise a tenth of that if everyone he knew contributed. He snorted quiet laughter at himself.

We'll see how her fringe-level social justice mindset does after she inherits all that, he thought. An interesting experiment — he hoped he'd be around to watch it. Still, it was a discussion for another day.

That morning, he emailed that he was going to be in central San Francisco in the afternoon and was wondering if she was free to meet him for coffee somewhere. The return email was an unqualified agreement.

A careful driver, he drove downtown at the speed limit, his nondescript car melting into the background of city traffic.  He was humming to himself. His nerves thrummed lightly with that pleasant "first meeting" tension.  He was going to enjoy meeting her, he thought, even aside from the fact that she truly was a fine-looking woman.

He parked two blocks away from the coffee shop, in the first place he could find not surrounded by surveillance cameras. His ongoing experience with the hacker had convinced him he — everyone really — put too much information out there, culled, used, and misused by criminals, government, and corporations. He had become a strong privacy advocate. He avoided showing up on "The Grid" as he called it as much as possible.  It just wasn't anyone else's business what he was doing all day, every day.  Even Lucy didn't actually know anything about him. It was becoming a matter of principle.

He walked into the coffee shop. She was at a table near a window toward the back.  She glanced up and saw him, and a pleased smile broke across her face.

"Hi, I'm Rog," Rog said.

"And I'm Lucy," she replied.

"I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you look spectacular," Roj said, sitting down across from her. And it was true. Her dark hair hung to the shoulders of her light off-white summer dress. The shocking crimson high heels should have seemed too much but weren't, somehow. She was wearing no makeup, an affectation of hers, but with her wide brown eyes and ready smile, she didn't need any.

She blushed, but with a flicker of a grin. She knew she looked good.

"Well, I was going to just wear sweatpants and a t-shirt, to be honest. But this seems like a special day." She smiled. "Truth is, these shoes are killing me — I can't believe I'm wearing them."

"It is a special day," said Rog. And that too was true. He could feel the piece click into place, and he could see she felt it, too. He knew that he could simply command, "Come with me," and she would.

But not yet. First, coffee.

"It's a bit of a walk to my car," Rog said later as they rose to leave. "If I'd known you were going to wear heels, I'd have parked right here in the room for you."

She laughed.

"Who said I'm going to your car?"

"Yours then."

"Nope, I Ubered."  She considered him for a moment, and he could see the decision made. "But, honestly, I'll be OK with yours."

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He stood naked in front of the bathroom sink, staring at himself in the mirror. He had a ferocious headache, probably from the damned fumes, and was having trouble concentrating.

He'd sanded the porch swing to bare wood and stained it with a supposed light mahogany finish. He grunted with annoyance and hoped this would not be the color when it dried. The ugly stain had splashed all over his working clothes, and they were already in plastic bags.  He wasn't even going to bother with washing them. He'd throw them into an incinerator later. He hated waste like that, but there was no helping it. It was a messy job. He stopped and thought; hadn't he done it last week? No. It was today. The thundering headache was just making it difficult to think.

He turned the near-scalding water up high and soaped his hands and arms, scrubbing hard, the lather turning maroon-flecked pink.

He glanced at the briefcase standing open next to the sink. He should have closed it before he started brushing the stain across the wooden slats — why had he had it there at all? Stupid. There were sticky dribbles and globs all over the neat stacks.

He considered the money for a moment — he could take a little and replace his shirt and pants at least…?

No. It wasn't his. He'd found it, and lucky as that was for whoever owned it, it didn't mean any belonged to him. He thought about getting it to the police, but he guessed that would just result in the cops taking it and it would disappear. He decided to hang onto it until he heard that someone had lost it and return it to them personally. He picked up one of the bound packets of bills and idly riffled it. Someone was looking for it. He figured there was at least $100,000 in there.

He was vaguely curious what story they'd concoct to explain how their briefcase full of money wound up sitting next to that dumpster for all the world like it was waiting for him.

Out in the living-room, the TV news droids were droning on; war, and politics, and local disasters, and a body found in a gang-infested neighborhood across the Bay.

Rog wasn't listening. He had a brush and was scrubbing the money, getting as much of the stain out as he could.

In the mirror, the computer glowed unnoticed behind him in the bedroom's darkness, quietly cycling through the purple-framed slide show of the Bay’s seagulls, swirling over bloody legs and a stained summer dress and crimson high heels.