“Hack Attack”

Jax could smell the tall, steaming cup of coffee placed in the car’s cup holder. Digits' City Car was little more than two seats on three wheels powered by a motorcycle engine. Of course, it was better than taking the bus. . . by a little bit, thought Jinx.

“Any luck?” Jax asked Digits who sat in the driver’s seat.

“They changed the sentry program since I hacked them a few days ago,” said Digits as he typed away on the small, corded keyboard. The spiral cord stretched to the portable cyberdeck. The deck’s case was the size of an open, adult hand. A palm sized screen hinged up on a folding arm. Several lights flickered and flashed as the various processors worked diligently to process the Living Code of the Lynx Operating system.

Digit’s sleek, virtual reality glasses beamed the interpreted code directly onto his eyes. Standing before him was the three headed dog. Each head of the Cerberus program required a proper answer or else all three would howl a warning to the mainframe administrator. Within the span of only a few seconds, Digits had ran all three of his Code Cracker programs. The answer then dawned on him. Digits cued up a Beethoven song and instantly Cerberus dropped to the floor in a deep sleep.

Digits watched a menu materialize offering a table of the network’s contents. With a thought, Digits moved seemingly at light speed down and around the corridors of the network. He stopped suddenly and was welcomed by a drowsy-eyed bloodhound laying at the foot of a door marked “Security”.

“Any luck?” Jax asked.

“Almost,” Digits said. A moment later, Digits smiled. “All done,” he said.

Digits pulled to the curb in front of the side entrance of the Globe ‘Troder’s adopted warehouse. Like Digits an hour before, Jax was sporting VR goggles except hers were a bright pink and of a slightly higher quality which had Digits wondering where she got the cash for such extravagance.

“I don’t know,” said Jax as she unplugged her glasses from Digits’ secondary jack. “It sure looks suspicious to me,” she said having reviewed two days of video of Donny, owner of “The Olive Oil King” store, loading women into and out of Sav-a-Buck Moving Trucks.

Without warning, Digits’ cyberdeck began to whine in an ever higher pitch as the processors overclocked and the fans shut off. Digits knew immediately he had accidentally downloaded a Trojan Horse. The Deamon program was stronger than most others and operated autonomously once activated.

Every second that Digits hesitated, the Trojan Horse was snipping and inserting new code into the deck’s Living Code like a laboratory gene editor splicing DNA.

The small car lurched forward with surprising force as Digits foot pressed the accelerator pedal.

“What are you doing?” Asked Jax as she began to juggle the overheated deck from hand to hand.

“We have to get rid of that deck, but not here,” said Digits as he cranked the car’s wheel hard to the right and headed toward the shopping mall.

The sirens never did synchronize as the black, unmarked, security vehicles halted abruptly at the empty construction site of yet another shopping center apartment building.

Corporate police scurried from their seats as their rear lids popped open. Each officer collected their preferred firearm before slamming the tail lid closed. They then scurried over the waist high, concrete barrier and disappeared into the site’s girder-framed skeleton.

“How did you know?” Asked Jax as she and Digits sat watching from the car hundreds of yards away.

“There’s no reason to delay the Trojan Horse attack unless it was tracing us,” said Digits. “I wonder who they are?” Digits continued before skewing his face after sipping his cold coffee.

(CREDIT) P. Benjamin