🔏Girl With No Name - Ch1 - 🅱️➕
Girl With No Name
Ek’s jury was still out. As I scanned CNN’s network activity on my empty-of-identifiers attack laptop for any mention of Julian Ek’s verdict, the gang loaded up the dummy delivery truck. “Last box,” Cat grunted on the comm channel, her voice low and punchy from my laptop speakers.
I didn’t need to monitor CNN. I had dozens of search alerts set up to catch any updates on the trial. Still, the waiting. Ek’s verdict would decide the fate of my whole entire life, like a roman emperor’s thumbs up or down. Would I go down in history as a hero who took down an evil tech CEO? Or a traitor that spent the rest of her life in hiding, committing crimes to subsist?
My window was open. A cold breeze brought the scent of spices up from the restaurant downstairs. My dark curls tickled my bare shoulders, getting long. I’d gotten good at cutting my own hair by then—one less reason to leave my room. Normally I don’t open my window(people can see in) but U.H.’s escape route ran through Cerro Concepcion, and I so rarely got to see their car chases. The church chimed nine outside. My eyes drifted toward the window and its view out over Valpo’s historic district before stopping myself.
My apartment in Valparaiso was… cozy, I suppose; the master bedroom of the living space above a restaurant. Small, but it fit my full bed and a desk. I even managed a makeshift kitchen, which I mostly used to brew dense Cuban coffee. Tragically, it had only one small closet, but also hardwood floors and my own bathroom. It was 300-square-feet, but it was my 300-square-feet; the one place on earth I felt safe anymore.
“Hello, hello? Ground control to D-Zero?”
My truncated moniker startled me. “Y-yes! I’m here.”
“Is the truck parked in the spot?”
“At the distribution center?” I checked my left monitor, the horizontal one, filled with a grid of grayscale security camera feeds. The truck would be on camera B4. B4, B4… There, in the lower right, a backlot with a parked white truck, an Ek Inc. logo emblazoned on the side. I took one deep breath in, then let it out in a slow exhale, forcing my gaze straight ahead. “Confirmed, the truck is in the lot behind Ek Electronics,” I said, then looked out the window.
Valpo rolled out before me like whitewater, an uneven and undulatory collection of hills and valleys splashed by bright paint on small, squat houses. Valparaiso Bay laid beyond, deep and dark, emptying into the Pacific Ocean. The tower stuck out like an unhammered nail amidst the historical district’s UNESCO-protected nineteenth-century Spanish-colonial architecture. Over the past month, the construction crew had trickled out from the tread-flattened ground that surrounded the new skyscraper. It still had scaffolding clinging to its sleek steel facade like moss, and one of those impossibly-tall cranes you only see in cities, hunched next to the nearly-complete Ek Inc. office building. Even halfway across the world, Julian’s reach was inescapable.
U.H. said something in their raspy, androgynous voice, but it was blurred by static. My breaths got fast and shallow. I had to concentrate, counting each breath down to return to normal. I went through everything on my computer screen again. Security cameras, check; police scanner, check; pre-recorded footage, check. A window of potential wardrive targets remained blank.
“U.H. you have the wifi Pineapple I gave you, right?”
“You got me a grenade?” U.H. asked like I’d gotten them a game console for Christmas, voice cracking. From their medical records, I knew they’d recently started hormone therapy.
“Where would I even… No, listen, it’s that… doohickey I gave you, remember? For hijacking nearby wifi networks?”
“Psh, we don’t need that, D.”
“It’s good to have redundancies, y’know, backup plans? In case something goes wrong.”
“Why? You worried about meeee?” U.H. teased like always.
“Yes, of course I am,” I answered, annoyed. “It’s black, with ten antennae? It has a pineapple sticker on it?”
“You could have handed it to them yourself if you’d been here,” Lear scolded in his toasted-marshmallow baritone.
“It’s safer if we aren’t seen together.” Better if I wasn’t seen at all. I opened OBS to queue up the pre-filmed footage for the first security camera, musing that I much preferred working behind the scenes.
“I’ll make sure they take it, Dom,” Cat told me.
“Thanks, Cat. I’m still not getting any traffic. Can you turn it on for me?”
U.H. teenager-groaned.
“It’s called wardriving!” I squeaked. “That sounds cool, right?” A list of half a dozen wifi signals sprouted on my right monitor. The brewery’s network came up, of course, and a few others I recognized from the rare times I worked on-site. “You have a lot in common with the early hacking community,” I told U.H.”The first Def Con was just a bunch of barely-legal teenagers taking drugs and hiring hookers.”
“D, I understood fifty-percent of what you just said.”
Sigh. “The drugs and hookers half?”
“Now that one’s a solid eighty-seven percent.”
“The second B-plus of my life,” I said.
“Hey, me too!”
The research file I kept on U.H.(and everyone else I knew) included their grades in high school before they quit going. A B-plus was the worst grade I’ve ever gotten, but it was U.H.’s best. They got it in shop class. Their rich parents had forbidden them to take it because they said it was, as U.H. tells it, “for the poors,” but by fourteen U.H. was an old hand at breaking rules. Their grade in that impecunious shop class only got docked for attendance. The teacher left a note in their transcript saying U.H. could have taught the shop class—could have taught a physics class about the shop class—if they felt like it. In my experience over the past four years, “if they felt like it” was the only reason U.H. ever did anything.
Lear ran the final sanity-check. “Magnets. Both sets? Okay, and the dropcloth…”
“And the pineapple,” I interrupted.
“Right, D-Zero’s doohickey, yep, we have that. Got your gat, Cat? What about the license plates? Then we’re all chartreuse, mes amis. Get in the back, I’m driving.”
U.H. and Cat gave Lear a perfunctory “yes, boss” before clambering into the dummy delivery truck’s trailer. Their GPS signal crawled across the map on my laptop screen, heading for the bayside highway. I checked the checklist again; kept an eye on the distribution center’s live security feed; re-watched the pre-recorded footage one clip at a time to make sure they were correct. Opening video files still made my heart race. Stupid.
