dotmeme

  Also by Mike A. Lancaster

  Human.4

  The Future We Left Behind

  dotwav

  Copyright © 2018 by Mike A. Lancaster

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the authors’ imaginations, and used fictitiously.

  Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Sky Pony® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyponypress.com.

  www.themindfeather.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon file.

  Cover photo: iStockphoto

  Cover design by Sammy Yuen

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-0807-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0808-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Interior design by Joshua Barnaby

  This one is for the resistance:

  the people who refuse to let greed, bigotry, and hatred

  overwrite their common human decency.

  Contents

  01 :

  EMERGENCE

  Chapter One •

  Rules of the Internet

  Chapter Two •

  One Does Not Simply Walk into a Bowling Alley

  Chapter Three •

  Is This Battletoads?

  Chapter Four •

  Challenge Accepted

  Chapter Five •

  “Are You Serious?” Face

  Chapter Six •

  I Don’t Know What I Expected

  Chapter Seven •

  Coincidence? I Think Not

  Chapter Eight •

  Follow All the Clues

  Chapter Nine •

  I Can Has Cheezeburger?

  Chapter Ten •

  Has Science Gone Too Far?

  02 :

  SINGULARITY

  Chapter Eleven •

  Where Can I Download More RAM?

  Chapter Twelve •

  Horror Movie Logic

  Chapter Thirteen •

  I Accidentally the Whole Internet, is This Dangerous?

  Chapter Fourteen •

  Did He Died?

  Chapter Fifteen •

  O Long Johnson

  Chapter Sixteen •

  It’s Over 9000

  Chapter Seventeen •

  Awaken, My Masters

  Chapter Eighteen •

  Ermahgerd

  Chapter Nineteen •

  Alt + F4

  Chapter Twenty •

  2spoopy

  Epilogue •

  All Your Base are Belong to Us

  You want to get a look at the true soul of humanity?

  Look at what it does on the Internet when it thinks no one is

  watching, or it thinks that the only ones watching are its approving

  peers. Watch the time it wastes, the flame wars it starts,

  the bullying it engages in, the gossip it spreads, the lies it tells.

  95% of the world’s data was created in the last two years.

  Ask yourself: How much of it do you think is worth the

  memory space it takes up?

  Then despair.

  R.K.O. Dubrovna

  The Internet You Deserve

  no2sjws

  evolution is past STUPID. things ca’nt just appear out of chaos

  Theresa Madoff-Wood

  + no2sjws

  Things not only can, but they DO just appear out of chaos. It’s called emergence. Put enough energy into small systems, give them enough time, and complexity emerges. Larger systems—which often seem impossible to account for without ascribing them to miracles—are really just products of information, energy and lots and lots of time.

  no2sjws

  +Theresa Madoff-Wood

  ha ha ha ha ha I put energy into my horse two years ago and it just became a unicorn

  YouTube Comments

  CHAPTER ONE

  RULES OF THE INTERNET

  When the kid with the Nike cap and wispy sideburns took his seat in front of the computer, he had no way of knowing that he was completing a complex circuit that had been a full five weeks in the making. Although he often posted about conspiracy theories on message boards and comments sections—from the Illuminati plan for a new world order, to mind controlling chemicals in airplane contrails—as far as he was concerned, today he was just having a bad day.

  Sure, his laptop had gone down in spectacular—and, indeed, fatal—fashion; and his parent’s broadband, which had been getting flaky for a while now, had decided to crash and burn, meaning he couldn’t even use his dad’s computer. But he hadn’t seen the pattern that was hidden beneath recent events, just as he hadn’t seen the reason behind that pattern, or the people responsible for making it a reality.

  So he was oblivious to the fact that it had been five weeks, almost to the day, since a single, careless keystroke had leaked his unmasked IP address to a computer terminal in London, leading to his immediate identification.

  Or that he had been under four weeks of near-constant surveillance from members of the Youth Enforcement Task Initiative, a secret branch of law enforcement that recruited and used teenage operatives to carry out its missions.

  He certainly wouldn’t have believed that it was three weeks since a section of YETI moved to the West Country, took up the lease on an abandoned shop on Yeovil’s South Street, and opened up its own cyber cafe a few hundred meters from the kid’s house, purely with the intention of luring him inside.

  Nor had he noticed the two weeks of careful social engineering and manipulation that had not only made him aware of that cyber cafe, but had worked to associate it in his mind with the keywords discretion and safety.

  The week YETI had spent remotely mucking with the kid’s computer and home network to loosen his trust and faith in both computer and network had been discounted as a string of bad luck, nothing more.

  The hour since a remote logic board burnout turned his laptop into an expensive paperweight had not been a continuation of that “bad luck,” as he thought, but rather the final part of the plan.

  Everything had been leading to this precise moment.

  The moment the trap was finally sprung.

  The moment his addiction to online hijinks led him to the new cybercafé on the high street. The one that—for reasons he would never be able to parse—felt safe enough for him to engage in some digital mischief.

  Ani Lee was already in position—the digital spider at the heart of this very special corner of the web—three screens down and running software that would make Sideburns think he’d woken up in a science fiction movie if he got even a sniff of its code. Hell, it made Ani feel that way, too, and she’d been using it for months.

  She watched as the target took off his cap and suppressed the urge to roll her eyes when he linked his fingers together and cracked his knuckles before lowering his hands down to the keyboard like a maestro sitting down at the piano.

  The kid’s name was Eddie Wells, and he was seventeen years old.

  He certainly wasn’t
a maestro.

  If truth were told, he barely knew his scales.

  To his school friends, he was generally quiet and unremarkable—monosyllabic mostly. His teachers thought he was treading water, capable of doing better in pretty much all his subjects, just too lazy, or disinterested to bother.

  Online, however, he was far from quiet. With a list of aliases including chimpotle, e-boy, sux2bu and c@fish, Eddie missed few opportunities to troll, abuse, insult, and punk. Of course, there was no law against being obnoxious online, but he didn’t stop there. As part of the online group victorious—activists and hactivists from one of the dark hive minds that thrived on the Internet—he was responsible for acts of mischief and mayhem that had quickly attracted YETI’s attention.

  He was also the first victorious member they’d managed to put a meatspace name to.

  Eddie took a thumb drive from his pocket and slid it into the computer’s USB port.

  Showtime, Ani thought. Let’s see what you’ve got.

  She opened up the window that mirrored Eddie’s screen and watched as he pulled a browser off the thumb drive and opened it up. It was a custom job, set to a home page that was a victorious message board called dot2me. Bookmarks for warez sites and pirate torrent sites sat on his menu bar, mute testament to Eddie’s browsing habits. As good as a written confession if it fell into the wrong hands, at least offering probable cause to give his whole computer a good going over.

  Ani had been logging on to dot2me often enough to know that ninety-something percent of the site was a waste of bandwidth and time: terabytes of offensive images and movies; bad Photoshopping; juvenile jokes, stories and fantasies; memes and absurdities; all mixed up with a whole heap of tedious profanity.

  Eddie clicked through a few threads with the listless casualness of someone with a limited attention span. He made sure to stay away from threads labeled NSFW, and that seemed to limit his browsing options. To just about zero. He frowned, closed the browser, took what he thought was an innocent look around the cafe, then went back to the thumb drive and opened up another program.

  Ani was underwhelmed with the software. Although it was a custom implementation of the ForceCrack password cracking utility, it was one that had been floating around the net for months, and was hardly state-of-the-art. Eddie got ForceCrack monitoring the traffic in the room over Wi-Fi, then started pulling data from the other users in the area, looking for something he could mess with, steal from, or exploit. Just another kid looking for mischief, given bigger scope for said mischief by his software’s knowledge of Wi-Fi protocols.

  “Looking for trouble? Here’s something I made earlier,” Ani muttered to herself, as she pulled up another window and set her own skills loose.

  She started up by brute-forcing her way into an ad hoc network that YETI had set up to look like the back end of the biotech company, Instanto, whose genetically modified crop agenda was back in the news after cross-contamination from an experimental site had spread to fields in the USA that were supposed to be safe from such accidents.

  Which was just the kind of target that would get Eddie excited, based on some of his recent posts and boasts. He was one part bored teen, searching for trending videos and giggles; two parts malicious troll, flaming anyone who disagreed with his poorly formed opinions and—when it suited him—one part S.J.W.: social justice warrior.

  Ani checked on Eddie’s screen to make sure he was keeping up. Sure enough, he’d turned his attention to her tantalizingly encrypted data. She got her own software to fight him off, just not too well, leaving him some gaps to slither through, which he’d peg as good luck or great skills depending on the composition of his ego.

  Ani made the whole process look legit, and YETI’s fake Instanto network did its part, appearing to rebuff her digital advances, and allowing her to show off madder and madder skills. With one eye on Eddie’s computer screen, she saw the precise moment when he noticed what she was up to. He suddenly ignored everything else in the room and focused in on her activity.

  She let him watch the ease with which she cut through layer after layer of—albeit compliant—security, and she ended up in a convincing simulation of an executive’s mailbox.

  When she thought he’d seen enough to whet his curiosity, she triggered an alert, shut down all her activity, acted panicked, grabbed all her stuff, and headed for the door.

  She got ten yards down the road before she felt the tap on her shoulder.

  Hook, line, and sinker, she thought before turning around.

  “I saw what you did.” Eddie Wells said with an air of vain arrogance that he really hadn’t earned. The only thing he’d achieved, in truth, was walking into a baited trap—and that was what a lot of mice got broken necks for. And it had been a trap devised and baited by Ani, who was still only fifteen years old (if only for a few more weeks), two whole years younger than he was.

  Still, Ani had to make him think he had the upper hand. And the only way that was going to happen was through the employment of skill that intelligence field operatives the world overused every day of their lives: acting. She made her face look as shocked as she could.

  “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, weakly, turning to leave.

  They were standing on the pavement outside a Chinese restaurant and were the only people on the street as far as Ani could see. Which just went to show how good YETI’s surveillance was; she knew it was there, and still couldn’t see it.

  “It’s okay.” Eddie said. “I’m not a nark.”

  Nark? Ani thought. Someone needs to watch less TV.

  “I’m not the police, either,” Eddie felt the need to add.

  Well, duh, Ani thought, but what she said was, “Then why were you watching me back there?”

  “Curiosity, I guess. But that was some righteous skillage.”

  Skillage? Really?

  “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaking me for someone else. Look, I’m going to just go …”

  “Wait up. I’m serious about your skills. Don’t see many people like you in this town …”

  “I’m not from here,” Ani said. “My parents brought me here. They call it a holiday, but it’s more like a punishment. Don’t like it. Not staying. So I’m not going to be around to join your Secret Squirrel club, or whatever. Nice meeting you, though. Except it wasn’t.”

  Eddie laughed.

  “Instanto?” He said, incredulously.

  Ani feigned surprise.

  “You saw that?” she asked. “I knew someone was trying to spy on what I was doing, but I had no idea …”

  Eddie puffed up with some weird kind of personal pride. Pride for something that YETI had drawn him into, and that Ani had pretty much spoon-fed to him. She’d even added the word spy to her sentence to fake-flatter him more. Sometimes, she despaired about the human race. People rarely painted self-portraits when they described themselves—even when they were describing themselves to themselves—and whoever Eddie Wells saw when he looked in the mirror, Ani bet it wasn’t the clumsy e-clown who, if YETI played its cards right, was going to bring down the collection of hackers, activists, and digital pranksters that called themselves victorious.

  “Have you heard of ‘victorious’?” Abernathy had asked her, five weeks before.

  They were in the briefing room at YETI HQ. Ani had been called in from a combat training day on very short notice, which seemed to suggest some urgency, although it had taken Abernathy eight minutes of small talk to reach the question: How she was settling in, finding the training, liking the salary package, enjoying the London life?

  Then, when he’d run out of those kind of questions, he’d asked her about victorious.

  “Are things so quiet around here that you’re watching old reruns on Nickelodeon?” Ani asked back. “Because that way lies madness. Believe me, I know.”

  “Nickel-what?” Abernathy muttered.

  “The cable channel?” She received a blank look from Abernathy. “Victorious
was a sitcom. For tweens. With music …” Another blank look. “Then you must mean victorious, the hactivists, a new group with random targets, sort of like anonymous, but with longer attention spans.”

  Abernathy knitted his brows together in what was either thought or a frown. Ani still couldn’t read the guy. She guessed that was sort of the point.

  “victorious has been on our radar for a few months,” he said. “But then groups of hackers teaming up for cooperative mayhem tend to have that effect on us. I don’t know if you’ve been following their exploits … Except, silly me, I do know, because that’s the business I’m in … So perhaps you can give me your observations before I waste my breath explaining things you already know.”

  He settled back in his seat and watched her.

  Expectantly.

  Ani nodded.

  “Just as the 4chan image board gave birth to anonymous, victorious leapt from another Internet hive mind: this time called dot2me. dot2me was always seen as an inferior copy of chan, with less emphasis put on grotesque and offensive content, and more on memes and bad Photoshop. So, with a lot less nudey pictures and bad language, 2me was seen as a lot less cool than 4chan, but lately it has gained some web cred by spawning its own cyber-activism arm, modeled on anonymous. It appears to be by invitation only, the mischief arm of 2me, and I can’t figure out how to get an invite.

  “One thing, though: they’re getting bolder, more audacious, with every exploit. They started off by hacking into, and then exposing, some of the big charities for the donations they’re wasting on salaries and SUVs, and not putting into the hands of those who need the money. Then they started obtaining and leaking confidential data from big companies, bringing some of their darker secrets into the light. Word is that they’ve been working on world government systems recently, trying to destabilize entire countries with secrets that the individual governments would prefer stayed secret.