The True Master Ch. 11

Kate blinked, "So you can hack into anything?"

I shook my head, "No, I can break encryption schemes. I have to already have access to the data to do so. And at the moment I've only tested it on symmetric encryption like AES, I'm not sure how it would fare against something like RSA or similar. The mathematics involved are different and I haven't written a program to test them yet."

"So you can hack more stuff?" she asked, her face easily communicating that she had not understood a word of what I had said.

"Yes," I said.

"Alright then, let's do this!"

I really needed to bring in another computer programmer, or hacker. I was doing things that were supposed to be decades off but I couldn't get any recognition for it or explain it to anyone.

I turned around to my computer, the program already up and running I quickly began to assault on the Companies servers. To anyone observing the majority of the attack would look like a standard DDoS attack. In fact the majority of it was, the traffic originating from the collection of servers I already had under my control routing their traffic all over the world to make it look like a botnet attack.

This was something that network engineers had to deal with on a daily basis and was the most common type of attack that showed up on the news, although it hardly qualified as hacking since all it did was slow things down.

While that was keeping the Companies network engineers and firewalls busy though I was running a brute force attack on their SSH terminals. With Kate acting as another processor and my own successful tests of the scheme I was fairly confident we would be able to get access to their network.

"You feeling OK?" I asked Kate as the program ran.

"You started it? I don't feel anything," she said.

I frowned and glanced back at her, she did appear to be handling it better than I had. Probably had something to do with her brain being better adapted to artificial input and processing.

"Tracy? As soon as we break in we're not going to have much time so be quick," I said.

"Ok!"

It took only fifteen minutes to break through the Company firewalls, now that I knew where they were hiding them inside of their network and I had a way to break encryptions schemes, It seemed like it was almost too easy.

"We're into the network Tracy, I'm looking for Beth."

I was scanning all of the devices on the local network of the Company building I had no idea what Beth would look like on the network so it took a precious few minutes. I sorted out anything that had a standard office operating system which left me with a pool of over a dozen networked devices any one of which could have been Beth.

The serial numbers inside of the addresses matched up though, and looking back at the data I already had on Beth I quickly narrowed the search.

"Found her, this is probably going to feel weird Tracy," I said as I started the connection, a few hundred miles away the input from Beth's eyes was being funneled into a computer network and out of the Company servers into Tracy, who would hopefully be able to interrupt them.

"I'm good!" she said.

Tracy stiffened, her hands gripping at the chair's faux leather her nails almost puncturing it.

"She OK?" asked Dr. Song concerned.

"Should be, it's a one way street for data."

Dr. Song stepped up to Tracy and pinched her arm, the woman didn't respond.

"God damn it," I turned back around to my computer, the data stream was still active. I looked at it more closely, there was a lot of data nearly ten gigabytes a second.

"Tracy!" shouted Kate.

I turned around, Tracy was standing but her stance was wrong, her limbs were stiff and the only expression I could use to describe her was robotic.

Her eyes were open, and she was staring directly at me. I shivered, the look in her eyes was not Tracy.

I glanced back at my computer, the data stream was spiking again going far past what my ISP should have allowed. Whatever was going on here it was beyond my control.

"I'm going to cancel this!" I said.

I began to quickly type in the commands that would cancel the link.

"Master!"

I glanced back around Tracy had turned to the laptop that was next to her analysis chair, and her hands were moving more quickly than even I could type.

"Shit," I strode across the room towards her, she made no move to stop me when I reached up and pulled the jack out of the back of her head.

For a moment Tracy remained standing, and then pitching forward she collapsed into the chair limp.

"Don't unplug yourself!" I said to Kate.

"Song!" I shouted.

It took a moment but the resident doctor made her way out of the back room where she had set up her lab.

"What that hell happened?!" she shouted.

"I was running an experiment, Tracy started behaving weird and I couldn't shut down the process logically, so I went for the physical shutdown."

Dr. Song nodded, and stooping down she slowly rolled Tracy over on her chair. Pulling a small penlight from somewhere she opened on of Tracy's eyes and shined the light in.

"She's responsive at least."

I nodded, and moving back to the computer I ran the shutdown command. Within moments the normally very loud computer was turned off and the basement was suddenly very quite.

"You can disconnect now," I told Kate.

She nodded and disengaged the cable.

The two of us went over to stand next to the doctor and Tracy.

"It looks like she went into shock, but she should recover," said Dr. Song.

"Good," Leaning over I picked up the laptop.

"What happened?" asked Kate.

I looked at the laptop for a moment, and studied the commands that Tracy had entered.

"The Company's a step ahead," I breathed.

"What?" asked Kate.

"The Company hacked us instead of the other way around. Tracy just sent our IP to the Company. We need to leave," I said as I read through the commands. Here I was thinking I had the upper hand that we were going to save Beth.

Furious I threw the laptop down on the ground watching its screen crack. Stalking over to my computer I unplugged the laptop and the two redundant backup drives.

Leaning over to the side of my server of a computer I flipped a switch, the power supply units inside the things switched on and dumped the full AC current into the motherboards and peripherals. We didn't have time for a more destructive solution.

"Grab anything you want we're leaving in five minutes," I said.

Kate and Dr. Song looked at one another, "We're leaving?" asked Kate.

"The Company know where we are, she just sent them our location. We have to go!" I said.

--

--

*The True Slave*

The Master was shouting different things yelling at everyone to get warm clothes on and get into the cars now.

Tracy was still out of it, and I had to half carry her upstairs and help her get dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

"Let's go!" shouted the Master as he burst into the room and grabbed his jacket from the closet.

"What about all of this?" I asked waving my hands around the room and the house in general.

"I would say we should burn it but that's liable to get out of control too quickly. The Company knows where we are Kate, they might even know who we are. We have to leave now!" he said.

The Master blinked and looked at Tracy, "she feeling better?" he asked.

"What happened?" asked Tracy her voice barely audible still sounding like she was out of it.

"We'll figure that out later, we have to go!"

The Master hurried the both of us back down to the garage, two cars were idling in the driveway, Jeremy and Dr. Song in one and Helen was behind the wheel of the Master's car. He quickly opened the back door and threw his laptop in and then gestured for me and Tracy to get inside.

Slamming the door behind us he jumped into the passenger seat.

"Let's go!" he said.

Helen hit the gas and the car jerked forwards.

The Master pulled out his cell phone and quickly dialed.

"You and Dr. Song should be safe, ditch the cell phone when we get back to town. We're going to have to go on the run again and set up somewhere else."

The Master listened for several moments and I heard Dr. Song shouting through the phone.

"That's just stupid!" said the Master raising his voice as well.

He listened again for a moment.

"Fine, still toss the phones."

The Master disconnected the call. Rolling down the window he then tossed the cell phone out the window.

"What happened?" I asked.

"They don't want to split up, or rather Jeremy doesn't really care and Dr. Song doesn't want too. They're being stupid."

"What do you think happened?" I asked.

The Master turned and looked back at Tracy who still seemed a little bit dazed.

"My guess is they put a call home protocol in the dolls after what happened with you, and enough of that programming filtered in through Beth to Tracy for it to operate," he sighed.

"At least that tells me the different generations of chips are backwards compatible, meaning the newer programming should be based on what you guys have."

The Master leaned back in his seat, and closed his eyes.

There was a slight twitch in his cheek and for several minutes he said nothing as Helen continued to drive down the winding road.

"Master?" I asked.

"What the hell am I doing? I honestly thought I would be able to take down a multinational by hacking into it, by pulling out just a few of the foundations. I can't even save one person, I can't even save you and I've had access to your programming for months!"

The Master's hand whipped out and hit the door, the plastic paneling cracked and the metal groaned for a moment.

"Now we're on the run again, I'm going to have to start over again, every fucking thing I do only makes things worse!"

I didn't know what to say to the Master, I didn't know what we could do.

--

--

February 26 2016:

*The Company*

"What did you get?" asked Adams as she took another sip of her Coffee. Jon had called her in the middle of the night and had immediately gone off about some sort of homing program.

"For the newer models of the Doll's you know the ones I've been working on. I had the techs put in a homing program. Someone tries to tamper with the code or the mechanisms and the Dolls call home telling us what happened."

"Alright, but we've not distributed any of the newer models yet. The only ones in service are here, and you've made what? Five?"

Jon shrugged, "Five, twenty, something like that, but you're right we've not distributed any of them."

"Then why call me in them idle of the night?"

"Because someone tried to hack into one of the new ones, it was a standard cyberattack from what the techs have told me up until they accessed on of the newer dolls and linked it to an older model. We only know of one person at the moment who's hacking into our dolls."

"That Marcus guy, the one that has the defective doll Belial messed with," said Adams as she put the coffee aside no longer needed.

Jon nodded, "yep, and we've got a location. Could we use this opportunity to test the other protocols?"

"The offensive programming in the new models?" asked Adams.

Jon nodded, "We've got all of the training complied from those different brain scans, why not put it to use?"

Adams closed her eyes and thought for a moment, "Do it."

--

--

February 27 2016:

*The True Slave*

All of yesterday we had driven south, the cold weather that I had gotten used to at the cabin quickly faded as we retreated through the states each one blurring past as we went.

Tracy had recovered well enough, the Master hadn't let her drive the car worried about her passing out or suffering other ill effects.

He'd spent most of yesterday in the backseat of the car with her, his laptop attached to the chip in the back of her head as he ran tests and compared things to make sure that whatever had happened to her would not repeat.

We had finally stopped in some diner off of the side of the high way, and piled out.

Dr. Song and Jeremy had been together in the car behind us for most of the day and just between the two of them swapping drivers they looked more worn out than I felt.

"Could we please just check into a motel or something?" asked Jeremy as he sat down in the booth next to the Master.

"We need to keep moving, use more of the back roads and avoid cameras," said the Master in a whisper as the bored looking waitress came by and took our order, everyone getting a strong cup of coffee.

"We've traveled something like a thousand miles, they can't track us this far even if they were tracking us in the beginning," said Jeremy.

The Master looked over at him plainly irritated, "what's that supposed to mean?" he asked.

"You're paranoid, I've never had someone track me across state lines," said Jeremy.

"Nothing you've done would put a multi-billion dollar industry at risk," snapped the Master.

"Will both of you stop?" said Dr. Song, "We're all exhausted and I don't feel like playing mediator right now!" she said.

The Master and Jeremy glowered at her but listened.

For several minutes everyone around the table was silent as we nursed our coffee and waited for the food to arrive.

Looking out of the window I watched the cars as they drove past the small diner, mostly old beat up cars that were fitting enough for the out of the way place we had stopped. Trucks and cars that were from the 70's.

As I watched my mind elsewhere it took a moment to recognize the black van, it was clean and couldn't have been more than a year old based on how everything looked. By the time my mind registered the oddity the van had pulled up into the lot next to the two cars of our group.

"Master!"

He looked up just in time to see the people streaming out of the van, all of them dressed in black combat gear with the words of a certain three letter agency emblazoned on their uniforms.

The men charged into the dinner, the waitress carrying our food let out a blood curdling screech as they started to yell for everyone to get down on the ground.

Jeremy was the first to react, he scrambled up out of his eat and bolted towards the kitchen of the restaurant. He didn't make it far one on the black suited men simply raised a gun and fired, instead of the bang of a gunshot there was only a slight hiss of air.

Jeremy collapsed onto another table a barbed needle syringe sticking out of his back.

Before Dr. Song could even turn a similar needle made it into her neck.

The Master turned to look at me, and he shouted something I couldn't hear as the world faded to black.

--

--

*The True Master*

I opened my eyes slowly, and my stomach rebelled.

Without thinking I leaned to the side and retched, bile and sick fell onto the floor and all I could do for several moments was purge my stomach.

"Is he alright?" asked a female voice.

"He's fine. Our friend here gave him a rather high dosage of tranquillizers, some people react rather badly to them," said another voice male this time.

Spitting to try and get the taste out of my mouth I looked up. A woman dressed in a suit cut to her frame and a thin man dressed in clothes that were too large for him were standing in front of me. Flanking them were several of the people who had abducted us. Beth stood among them dressed up in the armor as well.

I swallowed but didn't say anything.

I was strapped into a chair movie style, leather bands around my wrist and up my arms, around my legs and my chest keeping me nearly immobile in the chair.

"Well it's nice to finally meet you Mr. Roland. You've caused quite a lot of trouble for us," said the woman.

I spat out another bit of bile and looked at the woman, "You know my name, what's yours?" I asked.

"You can just call me Adams," said the woman.

"Well what now Adams?" I asked, trying to act more confident then I was.

The woman smiled, "I'm going to kill you, there's no avoiding that considering how much headway you've made."

The woman walked over to a desk and picked up one of the helmets, "You've managed to break into the very tight security we have on our products, and you were in the process of duplicating it."

She lifted the helmet that Dr. Song had made and I had programmed, it hadn't been attached to my computer when we left the cabin, so its memory was still full of all the data pertaining to the reprogramming.

I glared at the woman.

"It's simple, I want to know who you were working with and how much of the dolls programming you were able to duplicate," she said as she placed the helmet back down.

"No one. I was trying to figure out how to counteract the programming."

She raised an eye at that and sat down in the chair across from me.

"So out of the goodness of your heart you dumped your job and life, assaulted a man and stole his money, then broke into some very heavily secured servers. All while resisting the temptations of not one but three dolls designed for nothing else but to illicit a sexual reaction in men."

"They're not doll's they're people," I growled.

Dams rolled her eyes and leaned back, "So you did have sex with them. So much for your morality."

"I'm ready to pay for what I did, and I have every intention of freeing them from the likes of you!" I said.

Adams sighed, "You want to tell me who you were working for? Do that and we'll just kill you quickly. If not we just stick an Interface in your head and then ask you. Then we tell you to pick up a gun and kill yourself."

"So what are you going to do when I tell you the same thing with the chip? It's only a matter of time until someone else figures out like I did."

Adams stood, "and the same thing will happen to them."

She motioned and the man in the frumpy clothes shuffled forwards, sticking me in the neck with something.

--

--

The world was black, shapes were flickering around the edges of my vision. After what felt like hours the indistinct form of a man materialized in front of me.

I wondered what the hell was in the drugs they had given me.

"You're not dreaming," said the man.

I blinked, trying to focus my eyes.

"What?" I asked.

"You're not dreaming, this is more like an interactive chat program. You've made it far enough for me to trust you," said the man.

My vision focused and I found myself some sort of empty room, the only solid objects in front of me seemed to be the table and chairs from the interrogation room.

"What?" I repeated.

The man across from me didn't look solid, his form was hazy almost like he was composed of gas or liquid. The most indistinct feature was the face.

"You made it far enough into the scenario, I can trust you with the technology."

"Do I have to repeat myself again?" I asked.

The man chuckled, "No, I guess you do deserve some amount of an explanation."

He leaned back in his chair, and putting his feet up on the table spread his arms out wide, "I invented the Interface, or the chips as you call them."

"And you are?" I asked.

"Belial, I was there at the beginning when the Company came to me, they had gotten their hands on what research I had already done and they wanted more. I was already known for having little in the way of moral restrictions, but even I had reservations about what they were going to do, the ability to control the human mind and all the Company can do is think with their dicks."

Despite the oddness of my surroundings and the man in front of me I chuckled, "I had a similar thought."

"Of course you did, but we'll get back to that," Belial waved his hand and an image flashed up on the wall, a woman kneeling in front of some portly man.