Eventually, the man reached the end of his rope, which was attached to a mossy green trap with assorted claws and insectile legs poking through the slats. Releasing a latch underneath, the greasy guy dumped out about a dozen crabs along with the half-eaten remains of a chicken carcass. This last was returned to the bay with a fling and a splash before being replaced with fresher bait from the bloody bag. Another, more labored fling and the trap disappeared as well, followed by rapidly unspooling coils of plastic rope.
The crabber then started sorting through his catch, deftly flipping shellfish onto their carapaces, the better to examine their worthiness, while preventing their skittering escape. All were deemed fit with the exception of one, which seemed to have lost a leg along the way and whose shell was cracked and oozing something that looked like guacamole. This one the crabber kicked aside like a hockey puck, albeit one with seven highly agitated legs trying to claw up the sky. Within seconds, the dock became an outtake from The Birds as seagulls swooped in from all quarters to descend on the helpless delicacy.
A lesbian couple engaged in some major PDA a few benches down turned disapprovingly at the sound before taking their love to some other part of town.
“It’s just nature, ladies,” the sports coat called at their retreating backs before reaching into a weighted pocket and removing a phone. He open-tweezed his fingers, zooming in before tapping a snap to document the carnage. “Dog eat dog,” he continued, narrating aloud the keywords of his upcoming post. “Hashtag Darwin. Hashtag I will survive.”
Well, George thought, I guess we’ll just have to see about that.
Like a lot of his hacks, George did it to see if he could. The “it” in this case: the remote hijacking of a luxury EV owned by a certain CEO who’d been snapped stepping out of it at TechCrunch Disrupt, Davos, and the West Coast premiere of Hamilton. The car in question was the latest would-be Tesla killer, a limited edition called the Voltaire, a double-meaning moniker intended to conjure up both electricity and environmental friendliness, with faint echoes of the Enlightenment. George had gotten the VIN by hacking into the California Department of Motor Vehicles database. The attack itself would involve a cyber missile custom tuned to seek out personally identifiable information of the sort George had given it, shuttling back and forth across the global loom of wired and wireless interconnectivity, looking for a seventeen-digit go code to do the thing it was programmed to do, which in this case was taking over the vehicle’s so-called “copilot mode” (a legal nicety to keep the owner responsible for any crashes that might occur during what was basically a live beta test of an autonomous vehicle). Once in, George would hijack the navigation system and have the vehicle deliver itself to an address of his choosing.
The hack itself didn’t require a lot of original coding, not with all the drop-in script available out there. All he had to do was open a window; Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, and then Ctrl-V the grab into his text editor; after which, a delete here, an insert there, new parameters for the conditionals, reassign a few variables, and voilà, he had custom-built malware ready for compiling. He’d started with the hackers’ gift that kept giving, the Stuxnet worm, which had already bred a whole family of cyber weapons of mass destruction, from Stuxnet II, the Reckoning; to Son of Stuxnet; the Bride of Stuxnet; and It Takes Two to Stuxnet: This Time It’s Personal.
A couple of white hats had already demonstrated that the data link connector for a car’s onboard diagnostic system could be used as a back door into pretty much any subsystem on the vehicle’s controller area network, allowing a hacker to turn on the air conditioning, blare the sound system, or even apply the brakes. The same researchers who’d exposed these vulnerabilities were quick to stress that a hacker would first have to gain “physical access” to the inside of the vehicle to do any of this (the implied warning: beware of valets with taped glasses). As press releases went, it was the typical mixed message about all the computers on cars nowadays, namely: “Worry, but don’t worry. The hackers would have to jump through so many hoops . . .”
The only problem was—and George would be happy to point this out if anybody ever asked—hackers live to jump through hoops. Hoop jumping is, in fact, what makes hacking interesting. And physically plugging in to a car’s data link was one way to get controller access, but there was also the infotainment system, the two-dollar hooker of Bluetooth devices; finding something to connect to was basically its job. Systems like, say, the driver’s phone. And if that phone happened to have a Trojan horse that executed once its Bluetooth shook hands with the car’s hands-free system . . .
George nicknamed this particular exploit the Big Blue Daisy Chain of Mass Destruction. All he had to do was get within Bluetooth range of a smartphone that might in turn get within range of the smartphone belonging to a certain CEO and proud owner of a midlife-crisis EV that came with copilot mode already installed.
So George trailed his latte-liking, barista-flirting, middle-aged, middle-managing cyber weenie from latte assembly line to the dockside park bench, day after day, getting his pattern down, looking for an opportunity when he finally decided to just walk right into the guy while staring at his phone.
“Excuse me,” George apologized, blotting at a puff of escaped milk foam.
“You almost made me drop my phone,” the guy who’d dropped his latte prioritized.
“I said I was sorry.”
“You need to watch where you’re going,” George’s target continued. “Whatever Pokémon you were hunting can wait. What if I wasn’t here to run interference and you had tripped over that railing?”
“I guess I owe you my life, then.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that—”
“Nope,” George continued. “You saved my life. Now you’re responsible for me. What’s your last name? I’ll change mine. Mind if I call you Dad?”
“You’re crazy,” the target said, backing away.
“Crazy for feeling like this.” Pause. “Why are you running away? Dad! Stop, Dad. Please . . .”
And there it went, George’s Trojan horse riding in the pocket of the sports coat, an exquisite bit of code ready to hop from phone to phone and up the org chart until it found its true target and waited for him to call his private jet from his car and . . .
Bingo.
As tech giants go, V.T. Lemming, founder and CEO of Quire Inc., was a late bloomer. While he claimed to be a contemporary of Steve Jobs—he’d tripped and head-butted the future father of the iPhone at a Home Brew Computer Club meeting when V.T. was only ten—the younger man seemed to lack Jobs’s luck and timing. Pretty much everything he came up with for years was an inferior copycat product as likely to crash a person’s system as function as advertised. And so his spreadsheet software could only add and subtract columns of figures—the key functions business owners would want in such a product, he’d assured himself. A poor man’s PowerPoint that couldn’t handle graphics or animation. A web browser that seemed to actually prioritize infected or malicious sites. A media player that wouldn’t work with pirated content.
And then the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was introduced by a consortium of cell phone manufacturers, allowing mobile devices to connect to the internet and developers to sell games over the air, thus laying the groundwork for Google Play and the App Store that would come several years later. Having soured on the Windows and Mac operating systems by this time, V.T. gave WAP a look and was reminded of the simpler eight-bit computers of his youth. Mixing nostalgia with practicality (fewer lines of code meant less time investment between failures), the not-getting-any-younger programmer proceeded to work his way through a series of betas and misfires until he’d become thoroughly disgusted with the entire tech industry. Resolving to ball up his contempt into one ridiculously pointless game, V.T. decided on an homage to a popular electronic pet of a few years prior known as the Tamagotchi, which in its Americanized and cellular incarnation became My Hippo. A textbook example of truth in advertising, My Hippo consisted of nothing more than a hippo standing incongruously in front of an old barn. Users could spend real money to buy their hippo fake stuff—a straw hat, a stalk of grass to munch from the corner of its mouth, a polka dot skirt or leather biker jacket (the gender of the hippo was said to be “proprietary” and was never divulged). The only movement in the entire—it was hard to call it a game, per se—thing was the briefest grin from “your hippo” when you bought it stuff. And true to H.L. Mencken’s dictum that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, My Hippo proceeded to do exactly what he had assumed—maybe even hoped—it wouldn’t: it made money.