Left Behind: with Hackers!

I thought I'd have some fun with Freds idea of Hacker!Chloe. It's actually strangely cathartic to write some truly terrible fiction.

Note: the following is not intended as an accurate portrayal of hacking. Of of keyloggers. Or of piggybacking. Or of ip addresses. Or of Rayfords manliness. Or of firewalls...

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[The following takes place in the small underground bunker underneath New Hope church.]

"Dammit," Chloe muttered under her breath, leaning closer to the computer screen, the blue light showing her profile in high contrast. Rayford, just closing his seventh phone call in the last hour, slammed the handset down on the reciever with extreme manliness and turned to his daughter.

"What is it, honey? You've been on that machine for hours."

Chloe leaned back in the office chair, closing her eyes wearily. "I was trying to find a backdoor into Nicolae's private net through the FBI's system. With the number of security camera's his forces are installing, I thought for sure he had to be using the existing infrastructure."

"You hacked the FBI?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Sure. They've got a direct link to the traffic camera system. Just piggyback a keylogger virus through the camera's wireless, have it record someone's password, and I can log in remotely."

"And you made sure that couldn't be traced back to us?" asked Rayford, his brow creasing in worry as he wondered what pigs had to do with hacking. "If they find out where it came from..."

"Obviously I used a proxy, dad. I'm not thick. As far as they know, I'm based in Ethiopia."

"A proxy. That makes sense," Rayford said, nodding knowingly. He couldn't let his daughter realise the he didn't have the slightest clue what she was talking about. Manly men never let women think they knew more than them. "So what does that mean?"

Chloe threw up her hands in frustration. "I can get the FBI's printers to print out your resume if you want, but there's no sign of Nicholae at all. I've also checked NASA, the DOD, and a bunch of other sites. Either he's building his entire net completely from scratch, or..."

Chloe trailed off, and her eyes widened as they returned to the computer screen, which was scrolling through reams of code Rayford couldn't make sense of. Her fingers flew to the keyboard.

"Or what?" prompted Rayford.

"Gimme a minute, need to bring up the IP list" said Chloe distractedly. Different images and code windows popped up and vanished as her fingers based sharply at the keys. A large list of numbers appeared on the screen, and she scrolled to the very bottom, where there was a number separated from the rest of the list: 255.255.255.256. It was flashing red.

"Ahah! Got you!"

"Got what? What is it?"

Chloe looked at her father triumphantly. "Web Two Point Oh. He's not building it from scratch, he's copying it. The sites I were hacking were just figureheads, filled with information after he'd had a chance to censor it. The real sites are stored on a private network. And now that I know where it is..." she grinned evilly. "... I can hack it. Give me a few hours to DDoS the firewall ports and write some java trojan C++ viruses in x86, and I'll be able to tell you anything and everything about Nicholae's operation."

She leaned back into the screen, typing furiously, the light from the screen reflected off her determined face.

Rayford shook his head as he walked back to the couch, striding with fatherly manliness. It was good for Chloe to think she was doing something useful, playing around with her computers, but what hope could there be for her technology against the antichrist himself? It would be up to the men to do something useful.

He picked up the telephone handset for the eighth time, and dialed Bucks number again.

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Note (cont): ... or of DDoS attacks. Or of programming. Or of the internet. Or of doing anything at all with a computer ever. However, Java trojan C++ viruses are totally real and they will make your computer melt.