Sixty-One

There is no technology, no matter how wonderful, no matter how useful, no matter how frivolous, that cannot be turned to evil. Atomic energy can be used for bombs, a video can be used for blackmail, a chia pet can be used as a club. Or in my case, graphics cards intended to make video games go faster can be used to crack passwords.

Contrary to the claims of TV, encrypted information cannot simply be decrypted by wicked smart hackers. “This is military-grade encryption. It will take me twenty minutes to hack,” is one of the stupidest things you’ll hear during an evening of television. Given a file full of usernames and encrypted passwords like the one I got from Xiong Distribution, the only way to crack the passwords is by guessing. Lots of guessing. That’s where my massively powerful guessing engine comes in. You guess a password, encrypt it, and see if it matches the gobbledygook in the password file.

I had created the guessing engine for a start-up called PassHack, whose mission was to show you that your weak password could be hacked. Turned out that nobody wanted to know that their password could be hacked, and PassHack went out of business. But I had kept the password hacking engine. Sort of a combination souvenir and nod to the same technology-hoarding tendencies that cause me to save old power cables. The thing was a little old: it could only make a billion guesses a second, but it still had some game. With that kind of speed I could guess every possible seven-character password, then every password that had ever been cracked, then all the words in the dictionary with the Os converted to zeros, etc.

I sat in my office, the last of my Green Monsta IPAs at my side, and fired up my password cracker. In a few minutes it had started to work on the Xiong password file.

My stupid flip phone rang. No idea who it was; I hadn’t bothered to load names into the thing.

“Hello?”

“It’s Adriana. Is Maria with you?”

My brain stalled. “What?”

“Is Maria with you?” she repeated.

“With me?”

“Maria’s taken off.”

“Taken off?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“She ran away?”

“Catherine and I were having a fight, then we called her and she wasn’t in her room.”

“Maybe she went for a walk.”

“She’s ten.”

“Ten-year-olds can walk.”

“We’ve looked all over the neighborhood.”

“Did you try calling her phone?”

“She left her phone here. Why would she do that?”

“She knows we have a GPS on it.”

“Dammit!”

“Did you check Caffe Vittoria?”

“Of course we did!”

“Don’t yell at me. I didn’t do anything.”

“Do you think this has to do with #TuckerGate?”

I turned the question over. Internet trolls have done some horrible things, driving people to suicide, forcing them to move, enticing them into sexual liaisons. But I’ve never heard of them kidnapping a kid as part of an online war. Still.

“It’s possible,” I said.

“You have to do something!” She hung up.

Do something.

I opened Twitter and looked at #TuckerGate. The same long stream of vitriol and death threats scrolled by. I didn’t even process it. Some people seem to be able to make an online fight their raison d’être, waking up every morning ready to do online battle for some obscure issue that has taken hold of their minds.

But I can’t. I burn out. The arguments, counter-arguments, threats, insults, memes, and unfiltered meanness rub a raw spot in my brain, raising a blister then forming a callus. After that, I don’t care anymore.

I skimmed the scummy discourse looking for any mention of Maria. Headed over to 4chan, and, eyes half shut, ran through the top pictures. I threw together combinations of #TuckerGate and “Maria” and did searches.

Came up empty.

As far as I could see, the writhing mass of trolls was still sure that I was a murderer, perhaps even a mass murderer, but if they had taken their hatred out on Maria, nobody thought to mention it.

What now? Wander the streets yelling her name? Ask these morons for help? Wouldn’t that be a heartwarming end to this tale? Internet trolls discovering their inner humanity by helping their target find a runaway girl.

Fat chance.

The rage was back: churning stomach, twitching hands, the fervent wish that CapnMerica would try to arrest me right now so I’d have a reason to pound him into pulp. I sat at my kitchen nook and looked at Click and Clack, who ignored me.

Who has fucking crabs as pets?

Dark images of a smashed crab tank flashed through my mind, followed by horror, guilt, and self-loathing. The hamster wheel in my mind cranked and clattered, spinning in a loop of abuse, slander, and decapitated corpses. I looked up at my cabinet full of whiskey. Pregame drinking? Maybe sit alone in my kitchen and drink rye whiskey out of a jelly jar? I could just flat out declare myself an alcoholic.

Fuck that. I hate meetings. If I was going to drink, I’d do it in a bar. Bukowski with its craft beer, loud music, and twenty-something vibe would do nicely. I grabbed my coat, opened my newly installed front door.

Maria sat on the steps in my hallway, chin in her hands. She looked up at me with red eyes.

“Can I come in?”