By the time she turned seven, Pandora had learned an important lesson about the internet: its answers got better—or more interesting—once you got past the first page of search results. Because there was rarely just one answer to anything, and once you dispensed with expecting the answer to be correct, that’s when the web bloomed, revealing worlds within worlds, some of them flat, others ruled by an assortment of dark forces, all of them hidden many pages deep. Which got her wondering once again: Why?
Why were computer searches arranged like that, and how did the computer know all this stuff? Her laptop was supposedly kid-proof, but who were they kidding? She googled “How do you take apart a computer?” and—no dummy—printed out the instructions before following them. By the time Roger returned from what he’d thought was a quick dash to the Safeway, he was greeted by the sight of his inquisitive daughter surrounded by a spray of Phillips-head screws, scattered key caps, a dead screen, a chip-dotted emerald-green motherboard, and the pink plastic clamshell, split open like an Easter egg.
“Pandora,” he said, “what on earth . . . ?”
To which his daughter intoned the three-note trademark of a certain microprocessor manufacturer, followed by, “Look what I found inside!”
Roger was not amused. “You’re not getting another one,” he threatened, but who did he think he was kidding? Pandora put the old one back together, stopping just long enough for her father to fetch the fire extinguisher before plugging the power brick back in. “Stand back,” he warned, eyeing the power button peripherally as he reached out and pushed it. The etherealized da-doo-da-doo of Windows Vista starting up chimed from the tinny speaker.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said—not a prediction, necessarily, but . . .
Back in business, the ever-curious child found curiouser and curiouser corners of cyberspace to investigate. Soon, Pandora discovered that the best the web had to offer couldn’t be gotten at through Google or Bing or even, God help her, Yahoo! Nope. The most stimulating internet resources were found by going through The Onion Router (a.k.a. Tor), a one-time naval research project in online anonymity subsequently bequeathed to all manner of questionable humanity.
On the other side of that acronym, Pandora found conspiracy nuts and militarized free-speechers, illicit dealers and their buyers, freaks, fetishists, fringe dwellers, and the frankly disgusting. And she loved it all, the so-called dark web, not in spite of its creeps but because of them and what their presence implied: privacy.
With respect to that precious commodity, Pandora was already living the future by having none. Whether that lack was a feature of her life or a bug was hard to say but nevertheless the unavoidable byproduct of living in a cabin sans door, excepting the front and bathroom ones. Per Roger, interior doors were impediments to airflow and efficient heating. And so, in their place, cheaper and less airtight shower curtains would have to do, and did. It was this lack of privacy, in fact, that emboldened her to invade that of others, with the help of another interest she nurtured online: hacking.
She’d loved the idea of it before she ever did it, the way hacking made use of a skill set she’d been working on for as long as she could remember: the one-two punch of curiosity and coding. And once she got serious, Pandora found that a lot of the heavy lifting had already been done. The dark web provided whole libraries of precoded, hacker-approved hacks; customizable widgets; Trojan applets; documented exploits; and the code needed to exploit them. She found herself thinking in pseudocoding flowcharts, applying these to her ethical choices when it came to taking advantage of certain vulnerabilities, thinking she’d do X if Y occurred, one action collapsing the branching possibilities once she’d committed to it, and so on. Wondering if she should get parental permission before, say, hacking into the teleprompters at Fox & Friends with some choice passages from Das Kapital, Pandora would visualize a sideways diamond with “Ask Dad?” in the center, the “Yes” branching left, “No” branching right. And when “Yes” bottomed out in a string of Zzzz’s, the young hacktivist decided to take the path of parental ignorance, rumored to be the source of bliss, though whose was never specified.
2
It was a perfect day for sitting on a dock by the bay, and so that’s what George Jedson (yeah, yeah, he knew) was doing, wasting time on a park bench overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. He should have been in school but was on stakeout instead, waiting for a certain tech weenie who could usually be found at the pier around noon. George had often watched the target sit and sip at his to-go latte, watching the toy cars going to and fro across the bridge or the container ships passing underneath full of more Chinese crap for the masses.
George had first noticed the guy’s badge while standing in line at one of San Fran’s pop-up artisanal coffee places. The badge was chipped, laminated, and hung on a lanyard the wearer had flipped over his shoulder as he prepared to pay with his phone before making a big deal of stopping, then reaching into his jacket pocket to remove an actual wallet. “I’m feeling retro today,” he announced to the inked-and-pierced barista before extracting a twenty for his anally specific latte, barely letting the change make skin contact before slipping it into the tip jar next to the register.
“Grazie,” the barista said, in accordance with a recent corporate-policy memo.
The badge was the guy’s way of broadcasting his importance outside the office, the iconic Q for the social-media giant Quire (pronounced “choir,” as in “preaching to the . . .”) clearly visible. In imitation of its CEO, this particular middle-managing Q-ling wore an outrageously plaid sports jacket shot through with greens going one way and purples another, the tartan of no known Scottish clan, but almost as iconic as the aforementioned Q, suggesting that its wearer was an aspirant who might occasionally come within the same faciotemporal space as the actual target. Recognizing the badge’s significance, George downloaded the company’s management chart while still waiting for his own order. And bingo, Mr. Plaid was well within three degrees of separation from the CEO of Quire. Suspicions confirmed, George proceeded to tail his subject outside.
But instead of heading to the nearest Q shuttle or calling an Uber, rather than slumming by cable car or godhelpus BART, the man-coat combo had headed to the dock where George now sat, waiting for the combo’s circadian return.
That first time, George’s man in the middle had just sat there on the bench, nursing his latte, watching seagulls dive-bombing out of the clear blue sky to snatch up some floating detritus or sweeping in toward the paved dock to forage among the trash receptacles there. The whole “real-world engagement” vibe the guy was sending was transparent at best. He was playing the role of “tech guy taking a tech break,” which meant his two or three phones were set to vibrate in the pockets of the suit coat he’d draped over the back of the bench, his arm stretched so his hand, forearm, and elbow were in covert contact with each device, waiting for a haptic hum to give his life meaning again. The other dead giveaway was the wrist resting unnaturally on his knee, cuff hiked, keeping a chunky analog watch within eyeshot so he’d know the second it was okay to jack back into the world he was taking a break from.
But then, a catalyzing moment—the sort that turns a disparate group of strangers into something new: an audience. Entering from whichever curtain he’d been waiting behind, a greasily clad homeless man came into view, one sole slapping as he approached the railing with a bulging grocery bag—a locally illegal, plastic one—from which dripped what appeared to be blood. Watching as the man leaned over the rail, George rose slightly, not totally prepared to witness some homeless guy’s suicide, but . . . only to settle back when he realized the man was pulling on a rope of braided yellow plastic that had gone unnoticed until the bum started reeling it in, great, dripping coils piling up on the pavement as he hauled away.