Read Part 6

Rick got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. Coding the exploit was taking too long; after the breach last night, Pliant had locked down most of their systems. The gaming network was still active, though — there had to be a way in.

The coffee was bitter and delicious.

He hadn’t heard from Jane in three hours.

The list of Brain-Protocol addresses was the only thing making an exploit possible. There was a time, Rick knew, when a resourceful quack (or “hacker” as they said back then) could just scan the “web” for insecure devices. Then came the neuro-tech boom and suddenly everyone realized the term “Internet of Things” was offensive when the “things” were actually sentient beings. The Internet of Brains stirred up a lot of civil rights questions, but it finally made encryption and authentication mainstream issues.

One of the major security improvements devised during that time was the Honey Web. Every invalid Brain-Protocol address is routed to a “honeypot” server which behaves like a real device, but is actually useless. Any program that goes searching for addresses at random ends up wasting a whole lot of time trying to figure out whether it’s found the sugar it wanted or if it’s just stuck in honey. Without the list Jane had sent him, Rick would have been lucky to identify a single real user on Pliant’s network, nevermind detecting which of those users were hostages, prisoners locked away in cyber-cells. Like Leon.

Poor kid, thought Rick. He hadn’t seen Leon much in recent years — Deborah had been keeping the boy under wraps since he became a pre-preteen. Becoming an E-sports celebrity too young could really mess with your head, she claimed. Rick understood her fears, but it hurt that she thought he would be a bad influence on his nephew. Sure, Rick gave Leon his first pair of virtual-reality baby-goggles, but those only had educational games. If the kid has a technical understanding of how the game affects your mind, he can make his own decisions about what is safe, Rick figured. Then again, no child could have been prepared for the software they just pulled out of Leon.

The scan of Pliant’s network finished. Rick tossed his empty coffee mug into the gel-washer where it landed with a satisfying “blorp.” He sat at his desk and examined the results. Immediately it was clear there were some users who were sending too much data. Any online VR game is going to need a lot of bandwidth, but a few thousand players were transmitting ten times as much data as the others, ten times as fast.

That explains the king-sized rig Jane described, thought Rick, They musta’ been pumping the juice through his noggin somethin’ awful.

Even so, he couldn’t decode the content of this data. Best he could figure, the illegal traffic had to be spoofing requests to make Pliant’s servers think these users were operating normally. That meant faking information about the player’s age, how long they had been playing, and the amount of brainpower they were consuming. That last one had to be a big lie, Rick realized, because the amount of data was way beyond the healthy limit, even for an adult. He might be able to disconnect these kids, but without seeing what was being loaded into their brains it was impossible to know how they would respond. And breaking into Pliant headquarters again didn’t seem to be an option.

Rick looked over at Leon lying in bed. The kid had barely moved since passing out earlier, but his eyes twitched uneasily beneath closed lids.

“I hope you’re dreamin’ bout somethin’ better, little buddy,” he whispered. “Hope you’re not…”

He looked at the cybernetic interface on the sleeping boy’s temple, then back at his workbench. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up an ethernet cord. He sat down on the bed, crossed his fingers, and plugged it in.

To be continued…