Jake is going to create a school. He wants David as a student and as a professor. The two of them are getting so close I think David's found a replacement Father. He has looked to us since his family's death, but he needs someone with a mind as focused as his. David and Jake have even invented a name for the new school. Once our people move, those who qualify can live at Condor, a school for human rights hacktivism. They hope to help shape our future in a positive way. The rest of us just view it as a place for training innovators, and call it Hacker School.
Love and blessings,
Dad
Act III
Hacker School – Charlene
Chapter 1
My future found me while I was in Juvenile detention.
Juvie is not fun. Think of how nicely governments play. Juvie is almost as bad.
What happens when you get kicked out of Juvie? I was trapped next to my cell by three girls. They hurt me, I hurt them, and one was probably broken permanently. They started it, 3 on 1, and weren't worried if they maimed or killed me. The bad damage went to the backup carrying a shiv. Happily I wasn't cut bad. Turns out they are part of a gang. Not good.
When I'm released from confinement I walk up to a big, tough girl that doesn't look like me or them, she prepares to fight.
"Not interested." I tell her. "I hurt three that jumped me; I need to know more about them. Maybe we can work together."
"You can't join my gang." she says, still ready to fight. She's no fool; she doesn't drop her guard.
"I'm not going to join any gang, I want allies. I'll jump in to protect your people, you watch my back. If I'm attacked by just two I'll fight my own wars. If more than that I'd like it if you keep the extras off me."
I do that with all the gangs. Most like the idea, tough luck for the others. Since I'm the only one that knows who'll jump in with me; fights don't happen much where I am. Other gangs join me as I get a rep for being tougher than I am. Anybody that survives here is tough.
I occasionally have to fight pairs, but that was my agreement. Everyone knows, so pairs announce the fight so their gang can watch without getting jumped. No surprises is a good thing. I find the tougher girl, go for a quick disable, then pay attention to the other. I get hurt, but so far I've healed.
Complaints go to admin that I'm taking over and can't be controlled. The stooges think I'll start a rebellion. The guards don't want to put me in lock down because they enjoy betting on my fights.
When my parents are contacted they call an ethical hacker my mom knows. He says ethical hacking means working for our government, anybody else is bad (yeah, right). All my parents hear is "government job." Without telling me, they just hand the gov hacker my private tronics to crack.
His team spent a week with my tronics, and then he comes to me. They haven't been able to crack my code and never discovered my hidden firmware that sends randomly pulsed rewrites. With the kludgy junk the government makes them use, they never will. I laugh when he admits they had an entire network munged and data was morphing into cartoons when they shut the system down. He blames the mung on my tronics. I tell him to his face "My human rights say my stuff is private, my code proves it."
"All we got from your stuff was a single message: 'Private - Keep Out." Then he surprises me. He smiles. It's a real smile, not at all threatening.
"I wish I could fake a smile as well as you do."
He laughs. It's an open, genuine laugh like I haven't heard in forever. He's probably showing me how much I have to learn. "I want you to play along with me. Your court documents are being changed. Tomorrow you will leave Juvie under heavy guard and be transferred. Then you will disappear. Your parents have been told you will be at a secret government training camp. You will see them next year when you turn twelve, again at fifteen, and then be free once you get a government job. They're thrilled."
"No doubt." I stare at him, ready to get in one injuring blow before they shackle me. "But that's not what's happening, is it?" I'll get him in a conversation then hit him mid-sentence.
"No, you’re going to a new facility some friends of mine are building: The Condor Preservation League's home for wayward children -- Condor for short. If you agree they will teach you how to make a freelance living by hacking for human rights. We're building a hacker school."
I just slump. This has to be noise. "Hunh?"
Chapter 2
Most of what life had provided for me was painful surprises and practical jokes. It wasn’t my parent’s fault; they're as trapped as I am. In fact all generations since the dieoff and Great Chaos have been tortured by a hostile world.
No one agrees about what happened, recorded history is a political argument. People believe someone’s propaganda, and judge all arguments by their conclusions. If they agree with you, your logic might stink, but they'll applaud and repeat your nonsense as gospel. If they disagree with your findings they don’t check your logic, they attack your integrity, intelligence, and intentions. This illogic centered on history is based on facts, just selected facts. You can cross an imaginary border and the facts selected will change.
Basically history says mankind had a die off. Today it doesn’t matter if it was natural, the result of biological meddling, purposeful destruction of large populations, or micro-organisms released in war. Billions died, tens of millions kept dying. The minority that lived knew why, even if they disagreed with others that thought they knew why also.
The worst part came from citizen management systems gone bad. Each year prior to dieoff knowledge was increasing by a greater amount than it had in all of history. This year’s knowledge would be added in, next year’s sum would be sure to once again surpass all of history.
It started simply. Less and less knowledge was printed, more and more was stored in easily shared digital archives. Much of the knowledge was aggregated into complex equations constructed by machines from prior complexities. Human ingenuity directed the assembly of these building blocks, but could not start over. Once self replicating androids had improved their own kind for many mechanical generations, who remembered how to build a basic robot? It didn’t matter of course, you could instantly access the archives if you wanted to know.
Print books had become a rarity. Societies were proud of being paperless. Archives and materials were downloaded; errors and omissions were corrected on command for every extant copy. The information available on your network systems was always current.
A few controversial ebooks were released that were popular with readers, but universally condemned by international interests. The books were “recalled.” You turned on your computer and the interactive hologram you had started yesterday was no longer available. What you got was a warning to be more selective in your material; your interest in this suspect material has been noted.
No need to ban books. If they irritate someone influential, recall them. Recalled is a nice way of saying “electronic book burning.” The holo was gone, no records remained. Central police files kept only lists of red flagged down-loaders. Five red flags and you were outed as a threat.
A few nations found it easy to block information that was critical of their leaders, so they did. Other nations joined them. Internet kill switches were provided to tyrants to aid in control of their hated subjects. In case of an uprising one purpose was to confound communications, and delay pursuit of the tyrant as he fled with his spoils of despotism.
Combining these factors created The Great Chaos. In a desperate moment a president of a former world power pushed all the buttons, and ordered even more actions that had been discussed but were not debugged.
All materials in all networked archives were destroyed. No reprieve available. No re-boot.
It may not have happened just that way, that’s what most historians claim. A few historians say the human virus was initiated by already anti-virus inoculated politicians as a cover-up for their recall of archived knowledge that threatened them. Then the argument devolves to if The Great Chaos was int
entional or a byproduct of misunderstood complexity: mankind has always thought too highly of its abilities. The truth didn’t really matter to survivors. Their world had been destroyed.
The world still had fab plants that could construct marvelous creations, and yet retained little knowledge of how to program or repair them. The few books and un-networked systems became invaluable. Communities formed around segregated systems and archaic libraries to protect them. Information sharing stopped.
It's said as many people died (or more) from the results of The Great Chaos as from the dieoff. Life once again became as my Dad would quote: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” - Hobbes. This is the world I’ve inherited from my parents. The strong survive. By fighting or surrendering the less strong seek to endure. To all the religions of the world a new one was added, Information. The priests are called Keepers Of Knowledge; not sharers or distributors: keepers. Few share information, none openly.
Schools are outlawed as are learning materials, but parents will not suffer their children to remain ignorant. Children themselves want to learn. Kids wander through dangerous ruins seeking banned pieces of knowledge to treasure and quietly share. I acquired my scant knowledge by stealing it through my mother’s system with my hacked together tronics. She’s a Knowledge Keeper.
Chapter 3
I’m ready for battle.
Yeah, I didn’t hit the guy at Juvie, but I was ready if he betrayed me.
It went down just as he said, but with a lot of theater. At lunch we notice there are more screws on the catwalk than usual. Lots of weapons, rifles, shotguns, and the type that only kill you accidentally. You know -- guns that shoot bean bags at 100 miles an hour, so you’re kinda safe if your head isn’t knocked into a table edge. There were even some weapons I didn’t recognize.
An extraction team of six body armor goons comes in and grabs me. I fight a bit, but call off the little help I 'm offered from the gangs. They didn’t bargain for this. I'm shackled and drug off feeling like a fool. Had I really trusted someone just because he could fake a laugh?
The goons turn me over to some serious muscle outside an armored van. Muscle one says he will have the shackles returned, he needs the keys. The screws don't like it, but they're convinced by the authoritative aura of Muscles. I'm still shackled as I'm shoved into a cage in the back of the van.
All the muscle laughs as we leave, I don’t see anything funny. It’s time for little Charlene to go down fighting. If I time it right some of these guys will live out their lives in pain. Killing them is too nice. I try a fake smile. I need more practice.
Muscle one comes back, probably to tease me. I’ve been there. I’ll play victim. “Don’t fight back, act scared,” I tell myself. “I want to take out more than one.”
He opens my cage and reaches in. Every instinct screams to hurt him first. Overriding instincts has kept me alive before, it will keep me from giving up my life cheaply now. Muscles smiles, do they all take training courses in false assurances?
He reaches into a pocket for a torture device of choice, and pulls out the keys to my shackles. “Let’s get you out of these first. Then once you get the kinks worked out you can have a sandwich and a drink. Sorry we had to ruin your lunch just to impress those yahoos.”
Yahoos? That’s a new one on me. What’s happening to me? The tenseness in my shoulders is relaxing, and I’m almost about to smile. Boy have I bought into a steaming van load of manure. This is not the place to believe in fairy tales. He motions me to an open seat, as if they planned it for me. I take the sandwich and chow down; they could have injected me with drugs in the cage if they had wanted.
Then everything changes.
He hands me my tronics that are sewn into an old purse. “This belongs to you; it’s a great piece of work. All we did was put in a better battery.” He reaches into his pocket and hands me the old battery too. I had scrounged it out of an abandoned building and nursed it back to life.
I ask him to look away. Using a subroutine I log into a partitioned memory space and run my own recovery diagnostics. I’ll soon know if they’ve planted tracking chips, key loggers, or other junk. All will be checked without using my real login.
My tronics are clean. I don’t know if the van is clean of surveillance, the Muscles Quartet carries so much equipment my temporary partition space is too small to sort it out.
“You’ll be able to get into real clothes at our next stop. Those prison rags have to be a drag. What sizes do you need?”
I tell him what size I wore before Juvie, but know I’ll need larger now.
He nods, “My kids grow quick too. I’ll have my wife meet us with a selection of my daughter’s old clothes. We’ll get you new ones later once we know your sizes for sure.” He makes a call.
His wife, kids, a daughter, and clean real clothes -- this is all too complicated. We got to wash our clothes and take a shower once a month at Juvie. I don’t think I’ve had new clothes more than a couple of times in my life. I guess I won’t attack anyone yet. This is worth seeing through.
I notice I’ve been hugging my tronics. At eleven years old I find comfort in a security blanket. That self knowledge doesn’t have me hold my tronics any looser. I know my tronics are real. Let the philosophers work it out: I code, therefore I am. My tronics are a proof of my existence.
Chapter 4
I meet Mrs. Muscles. She introduces me to her kids. They just let me get within grabbing distance of hostages. She’s ignorant, or has a lot of confidence in Mr. Muscle’s judgment. Another possibility seems unreasonable, that they are willing to take risks to show me I’m trusted. I wouldn’t trust me around someone I care about.
They obviously care about each other; for some reason the idea of trust makes me uncomfortable.
I’m let loose to take a shower and change, alone, in a bathroom with a window. I check the drawers; there are sharp things in them. This stops me. It’s not that I’m trusted, it’s that they know the most powerful weapon humans can posses are their minds. Everything else; blasters, knives, scissors; are but tools. I won a lot of fights against kids focused on their tools rather than using their minds.
If they trust their minds they are my equals. They are treating me as their equal, counting on me using my mind. I leave the scissors; depending on tools will be a trap. I don’t even consider the window. My estimate of this opportunity being real has risen from 5% to maybe 25%. That’s better odds than I’d give for my survival if I go outside ignorant of my surroundings.
I pick some heavy duty clothes. I may not have to fight the muscle brigade, but I’m headed to a school where I will be the new kid. I want tough, loose clothes when I have to fight to establish myself.
Once back in the Van I ask Mr. Muscles “What would have happened if I opened the window in the bathroom and ran”
“Nothing,” he replies “We would have driven on without you. You would have never seen Hacker School. If you want I will let you out of the Van now, give you some food and water, and wave goodbye. We are asking for your help. If you had run or grabbed weapons we would have found out you can’t be trusted. It’s better to lose you now than have you turn on us later.”
“So you think I committed myself?”
“Not yet, you don’t know us well enough to take such a big step. We won’t ask for a commitment, ever. Your actions will reveal to you and to us if you ever do commit.”
“And my actions so far indicate what?”
“You have intelligence, patience and a surprising amount of self control. I appreciate the last as I didn’t look forward to fighting an eleven year old that could probably take me. You have quite the reputation.”
“You’ve got to have had fight training.”
“Of course, but it doesn’t handle cases like you. I’m very good detaining people and at fighting in sports combat competitions. A fight with you wouldn’t be about restraint or scoring points on an opponent. You would use the least effort to stop a chance of your
being hurt and thus made captive. You have lots of experience in life or death fights, and yet you live, largely uninjured. Fighting you I would quickly be lucky or injured, and maybe dead.”
“That sounds pretty close to what I might try, and the results.”
“It would be like a 225 pound prize fighter against a 90 pound Doberman. My money is on the animal that goes all out offensive. The difference is once you incapacitate me, you’ll move on. A dog might stay and keep chewing.”
“What sort of kids will I find at Hacker School?”
“Will you listen to some advice?”
“I’ll listen.”
“Condor only has twenty students right now. None of them are fighters. Like you all of them found ways to access forbidden technology and knowledge. There are twenty hackers in loosely organized classes. You can be pretty, and you can probably out hack all of them with firmware, most with software. There are some brilliant hardware developers. You will learn as much from the kids as the teachers.”
“That’s not advice.”
“It is if you think about our position. We sought you out because we need an outspoken critic that is also a leader. Most of these kids are terrified of the bureaucracies that run the world. That is where your fighting can bring results. You don’t look at fear; you garner your anger and attack. Human rights need a defense of selective aggression. You are uniquely qualified for the front lines of Hacktivism.”
“So you want an attack dog. You’re right, that’s probably me. I didn’t know anyone valued human rights anymore, I found out about them in old hidden books. Supporting natural human rights is a fight worth winning. I just hope you’re telling me the truth.”
“We want as flat an organization as possible. All bureaucracies are police states. If we impose rules we will have to enforce the rules. Enforcement by definition requires threats or actual direct physical force. Authority is never applied equally, there is always injustice. Injustice is tolerated as long as force protects the influential, and the majority feels safe. That’s no way to run a school for human rights hacktivists.”
“So we the students get to lead. What do you the admins get to do?”