For Money or Mayhem

{2} Cyberspace Knows No Bounds

It was nearly midnight and I was back on the cyberstreets. There’s a whole virtual world hidden behind the one we see with our eyes. In my mind, that virtual world is more real than the spring rain that had returned late tonight. April showers bring May flowers as the saying goes. In cyberspace I could have flowers whenever I wanted them.

I was working on a contract that I’d put off while we were tracking the identity thief. I regretted ever having taken the job. But she’d been so convincing and so vulnerable.

It’s one thing if an abused wife comes to me and asks me to investigate her husband’s online activities so she’ll have evidence that he bragged about hurting her and can justifiably sue for divorce or even press charges. I’d had one case like that in the past year. I was only too happy to help her nail her shit-bag of a husband.

But the young widow who came to me with her deceased husband’s laptop seemed so sweet. She was hanging on to the dream of her husband and wanted anything of his that she could get.

Better to stay living in her own virtual world instead of his, I say.

It was a sad story. Her husband was killed in action during his second tour of duty, just days before he was scheduled to come home. What they shipped instead was not her living, breathing love, but a flag-draped coffin and a footlocker full of personal belongings. In the trunk was her husband’s laptop computer.

It was password-protected, of course. There’s an military regulation on basic security measures in the field. I suppose a soldier’s laptop could be a security risk if it fell into the enemy’s hands. But the army is surprisingly lax about giving the same device to the family of the deceased. Apparently they place a lot of faith in the family of fallen soldiers, or in the impossibility of breaking the password.

Of course, that’s false assurance. If I have the computer, I own everything on it.

That’s what she said she wanted.

“We’ve been married two years. We were together as much as possible for four years before that. He was my high school sweetheart,” she told me. Twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Pretty in the way that all young women are pretty. Maybe fresh is a better word. The makeup she wore amounted to a little foundation to conceal the bags under her eyes. It had been a month, but her eyes were still red from crying. “We got married after his first tour of duty. We didn’t have the money before that. I thought we’d have a normal life after that. But they offered a big bonus for him to take a second hitch. It was enough that when he got back we could put a down payment on a house. It was our dream.”

I let her play out the story the way she wanted it to happen. I’ve had dreams myself—and disappointment.

“They called me last week and told me I could pick up his effects. I had to drive down to Lewis-McChord to get them. They didn’t even deliver them.” The tears dried in a streak down her cheek. She was suddenly very angry. “Isn’t that a stupid word? Effects? I gave them my husband and all they could give back was a stupid trunk full of ‘effects!’ I hate them!”

“Why do you want to do this?” I asked. “Your memories are happy. Why do you want to dig into the computer?”

“Because… I can’t help but believe that somewhere in there… he’s… he’s still alive.”

I took the laptop from her hands. I had a bad feeling. People live double lives all the time. Was he really as wonderful as she thought? Or when I opened the laptop, would I find the Sergeant Mason that was still living there was someone different than his young widow imagined?

“You know I could find out something bad. I’m not suggesting that I will, but what will you do if the husband you remember is not the same as the one I discover?” I asked.

“It doesn’t make a difference. Back it all up so I can see it and then wipe the disk and reformat it. I brought all the software. I’m going back to school and I’ll need a computer.”

“What else?” I asked softly. She hadn’t told me everything yet.

“Mike was an avid gamer and was real into social media. We used to joke about all his virtual friends. But… it really is a community, isn’t it? They deserve to know he’s gone and that he gave his life for his country.” She paused and dabbed at her eyes before she went on. “I don’t want to know who they are. I don’t need a hundred or a thousand unknown people telling me about Mike. But please tell them that I thank them for being his friend and that he is at rest.”

I suggested she see a counselor before she made a final decision. She was adamant and suggested that if I was unwilling to do the job, she would find someone else. Since she’d come on the recommendation of a mutual friend, I didn’t want to blow her off. So now, just a couple of days from when I told her I’d have it ready for her, I pulled the laptop out of its case and set it on my desk. I pulled the drapes and turned off all the lights except the keyboard lamp at my desk. The world around me went dark.

When I’d recovered from being dumped six year ago—at least recovered sufficiently to function again—I found this efficiency apartment on Capitol Hill. The SoDo loft I moved from had been designed to show off a rising star in the tech world—someone who had loud parties and beautiful artifacts. Like Hope. The little apartment I moved to was a cave where I could hide and lick my wounds. In the intervening years it had become a refuge from the real world and a gateway into whatever I wanted in the virtual world.

My new neighbor, Eric, helped move my meager possessions into the room. There was some television show about gay guys helping straight guys look good. Eric could have run that show. He made decorating suggestions. He would be very pissed that Cali was doing my makeover. His efficiency apartment the floor below mine was identical. He’d explored dozens of tricks to optimize the space.

Then he saw that all the furnishing I had was a recliner. My box of clothing, computer equipment, stereo, and one painting made the room look huge and empty.

“We need to go shopping,” he said brightly. “I have a pickup truck. Let’s go to Ikea!” I declined, politely.

“First, I want to paint.”

“Oh yes. I see you in pastels. Blue would go so well with your eyes.”

“Black.”

“Oh Honey, she really did a number on you, didn’t she?” I just shrugged my shoulders back at him, so he continued. “All right, Hamlet. Black it is. But you do not want to paint these walls.”

“Why?”

“You’ll never get them white again and your lease specifically states that you will leave the apartment in the same condition as you found it, including white walls. Just ask Jared.” I remembered my apartment manager having pointed that out when I signed the lease. I sighed.

“But I need it to be black.”

“Okay. Here’s what we do…”

It was a genius solution, a little more complex than just painting the walls, but worth it. During the decorating that followed, Eric and I became good friends. Jared even approved the plan with the stipulation that I had to restore the apartment to original condition before I left. He collected an additional month’s rent as a damage deposit in case I skipped and he had to hire painters.

We hung paintable, strippable wallpaper and painted the room. We hung black drapes. We tacked black fabric to the ceiling. When we were done, I had a black room in which even the glow of the monitor was absorbed and sound was muted by the soft surfaces.

I had my ‘mantuary,’ as Eric pointed out. He warned me that no woman in her right mind would spend the night there. I asked if there was a way to ensure that no men would, either. He had the good grace to laugh. And leave.

I was in my own little womb, and it was my gateway to cyberspace.

Who are you really, Sergeant Mason?

His widow had filled out an extensive questionnaire. She didn’t understand at first why I wanted things like names of brothers, sisters, parents, pets, schools, mascots, and hobbies in addition to social security numbers, serial number, addresses, and birthdates. Once I explained that passwords were rarely random, she filled out the form with more information than I was sure was necessary. In an effort to make a password memorable, people often use familiar names, numbers, or terms for their password.

I was prepared to enter all the information in a database and let my software do the work of cracking the password. I set the computer up on a wired network and then attempted to access it with my own computer, plugging in each potential password in succession from the database. I have secondary software that will write variants of words, substituting numbers for letters and capitalizing first letters of syllables, among other things.

I never needed to run the software.

Elaine831, his wife’s name and birthday. Testing shows a 72% strong password rating. Unless you happen to know his wife’s name and birthday and the fact that Army regulations stipulate that “passwords must be at least an eight-character string using the thirty-six alphabetic-numeric characters. At least two of the characters should be numeric.” Just like the Navy.

I entered the virtual world of Sergeant Mike Mason.

Through his journal and photos, I followed him down streets I’d never walked where every shadow could be a sniper. He ducked into a doorway, swinging his rifle left and right as the light on his helmet swept the room. In the empty silence that greeted him, he allowed himself a deep breath, shook the sweat out of his eyes, and then moved back into the street.

By the time I tracked him for a quarter of a mile, sweat was running down my own forehead. My heart was racing when I heard shots fired. He slammed himself against the wall, trying to disappear against the rough surface behind him. The shots were a street over. Not his responsibility. Another deep breath and he forced himself to move forward again.

At the next door he repeated the process. Enter. Sweep. Breathe. I was no longer certain if the droplets running down our cheeks were sweat or tears.

At the end of the street, a Humvee with a man in the turret waited for him. The door opened and he dove in. Two others joined him. They moved out, returning to base. They joked and laughed. There had been no one there in the empty buildings waiting to attack them. Got them on the run now, don’t we? They’ll never show their faces here again.

Being in a computer is more real to me than watching a movie. I grew up in the age of text-based gaming, long before virtual reality put avatars on screen and made digital constructs of cities, zoos, and planets common. I see everything, just based on a few words or even a line of code that I read.

I tailed Mike Mason through his journal, his email, his photos—watching, seeing for the first time the threats the young soldiers saw in every shadow, every bump in the road. It took me back to my own time in the service, though I was always in the bowels of the ship whenever it saw action.

When he came off duty, he sought the comforts all soldiers seek. He read email from home and talked to Elaine on Skype. There was no beer to be had in the Muslim country and base security was tight. There was no way he was leaving the safety of his base when he was off-duty.

All he wanted was someone to talk to.

The time difference meant that Elaine had to go to work soon after he got off duty. They had to break off their conversation before he was finished talking. Again. He had lots of online friends, but there was only so much he could tell them. Every day he was frightened. Every night he was awakened by any noise. Every minute he missed his home and his wife. He was exhausted and there was no hope of rest.

“If I could just see her for a few minutes—hold her and put my face against her hair—I’d be able to sleep again. God, of course I want to make love to her, but I don’t know if I could do that—right away, at least. I’d be so caught up in just being with her that I’d fall asleep in her arms before I could do anything else. This tour is so much worse than the last one. I should never have re-upped.”

I was surprised to find that I recognized one of his aliases on a gaming site that I played. There are several million casual and hardcore gamers online at any given time, but there are comparably few of us who still do old-fashioned text-based gaming. Finding he was one of them forged a deeper kinship with him. I wondered how a guy almost twenty years younger than me got into text playing. In one way or another, we could all track our legacy to John Patterson, a local game developer who made it big, building an online empire. Patterson still maintained the biggest text-based gaming site in the world and, being officially retired, manages a huge charitable foundation. I have half a dozen sub-domains on his network to run my own games from. Instead of fancy branding and graphics, all Patterson’s text game sites bear the legend, “Remember guys, it’s just a game.” It’s the kind of guy he is.

I tapped into his game identity and told Sergeant Mason’s online friends that he had been killed in action and that his wife thanked them for being his friend during his final days. The forums were flooded with messages, condolences, memories. I set up a memorial website so that people could see a few of his pictures and leave messages. I’d ask Elaine if she wanted the address, but it was really for the benefit of the friends, not her. A few messages I downloaded onto the backup. Most I let go. I set his other online pages and forum registrations to expire in 30 days so his friends could continue their tributes and comfort each other.

But, of course, not every social forum is innocuous.

The chat room he’d chosen was like any other in the long line of sleazy and dark holes where he could get lost. His online friends were prone to joke and ask him if he’d had any bacon lately. But people shy away from too much information when an online buddy starts showing his weaknesses, fears, depression. In the stark anonymity of a not-so-popular webcam site, he’d found a confidante. She was special. The first time he saw her webcam he thought he’d just seen Elaine. Of course, Elaine would never do the things this woman did. She’d never dance like this in front of so many men. But every time he saw her, he imagined for just a moment that it was Elaine.

He was going to stop coming here. He wouldn’t come back tomorrow night. The dancer wouldn’t miss him, and if she did, he wouldn’t know about it. He just needed to spend a few more minutes with her.

I watched the public area of Angelique’s site for a few minutes, the message area saying, “your nick is guest256.” She relaxed on a bed with a college pennant hanging on the wall behind her. I saw a poster for a popular band just to the side come into view when she shifted the position of her webcam a little. She held a stuffed monkey doll in her lap, occasionally using him to bat at the camera or manipulating his long arms and legs to pet her own breasts. She wore a dark bra and panty set, not quite as trashy as some of the girls I’d seen while making my way to this room.

I watched the flow of text next to the image as she typed out messages to a dozen people who were on-line with her—the visual equivalent of a group talking around the dinner table, only she was dinner. The messages ranged from banal to risqué to rude.

“r u rl?”

“u lik cox?”

“nice ass”

Occasionally she would respond to a message if there was anything said that could be responded to. Otherwise she just read the screen and occasionally shifted her position to give the voyeurs a different angle. I’d have left without a second thought if she hadn’t looked so much like Elaine. She might not remember Mike since it had been over a month since the last time they talked according to his log. But his log had shown hours spent on the site. That wasn’t cheap.

I logged in.

“OneTinSoldier just joined the conversation.”

“Mikey! I missed you! Wanna go private?” Her response was immediate and it looked like real excitement on her face.

“Yes, please.”

In a moment the public screen went blank with a message that said “In private session.” Then the screen cleared and her image came back on. It was a higher resolution camera for the private session, and audio came on as well. I was hoping no video feed from my end came on automatically.

“Mikey, I’ve been so worried. You just dropped off the face of the earth. Tell me what’s happening.”

I pasted the message I’d prepared into the text box and pressed send.

“I regret having to inform you that Sergeant Mike Mason, whom you know as ‘OneTinSoldier’ was killed in action on March 10. On behalf of his wife, I’ve been asked to locate Mike’s online friends and let them know. She has also asked me to express her appreciation for your friendship with Mike over the course of his final days. I’m sorry to have to bring you this unpleasant news.”

I’m pretty good at reading people for genuine feelings… at least I tell myself that. What I saw on her face was an instant transformation. She looked square into the camera with tears running down her cheeks.

“That’s not funny, Mikey. Please, don’t be mean to me,” she said.

“I’m sorry to have to bring you such bad news,” I typed. “There is a memorial website at this URL.” I gave her the address and watched while she typed at her keyboard. I could tell that Angelique believed it was a practical joke until she actually saw the story. She was crying when she looked back at the camera.

“Who are you?”

“I’m just a hacker his wife hired to let online friends know he was gone.”

“She knows about me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I look like her. He told me that, but he never showed me pictures.”

“From what I can tell on his computer, you helped him get through his loneliness while he was overseas,” I said. “That means a lot to everyone.”

“I’m just a performer. But I really liked Mikey. He wasn’t rude like most of the assholes on here. He just wanted someone to talk to. Of course, he didn’t mind if I was naked while we talked.” She smiled a little even though the tears were still flowing freely. “Sometimes I was jealous of his wife,” she continued. “I won’t leave any messages. But thank you for letting me know. I thought he was just tired of me.”

Sergeant Mike Mason’s life came to an end before his story was finished. He’d gone where I could not follow. I was snapped back into the reality of my black room, my armpits sweating and my head aching with fatigue. In front of me, only the glowing screen of his computer, the connections severed.

I finished backing up his email, his daily journal, and his photos and music onto a thumb drive and put an install disk in the drive. Then I turned to my own computer to write my report.

“Completion of project. Attached is a backup of Sergeant Mason’s personal files. Hard drive has been wiped and original system restored and updated. Additional software provided by the client has been installed. Computer is fully usable or salable with a current value estimated at $450.”

There was little chance that Sergeant Mason’s virtual life would ever impinge on the memory of his real life.

Now they could both be at peace.

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