Drawing Amanda (14 page)

“You need help with that?” Rungs asked.

“I can guess the password.” He typed in “Picasso2B” and smiled as the computer connected. He missed being so special to someone.

“Can you get your email?” Rungs asked. “I just sent you something I want you to install. Click on the file and it’ll let me see and capture your session.”

While Inky installed the program and restarted the computer, Rungs explained, “Your IP, Internet Protocol, is like a street address for your computer. Every computer online has one. It’s used to route information. It’s a string of numbers. Too bad we don’t have his email address—that would make it easier. Once we have his IP info, I’ll try some tracing moves to see if we can get his info.”

Inky took a deep breath and signed on to Megaland. The welcome screen looked different on his father’s color-calibrated monitor. It took a few moments for the chat box to appear.

“He’s got a sign-on notification. Chat box always come up like that?” Rungs asked.

“Yup.” Inky nodded. “Figure it’s because he’s still building it.”

“That’s not gonna last past beta,” Rungs said.

Megaland:
Welcome back, Picasso2B. What brings you to Megaland today?

Picasso2B:
DK. bored I guess. How’s it going?

Megaland:
The beta testing is going well. I animated some of your drawings – amazing program Blender is. It’s all testing very well.

Rungs said, “Tell him you want to see them. Keep him on line as long as possible. I have a ton of data strings and I have to figure out which one is his.”

Picasso2B:
Can I see them?

Megaland:
Now?

Picasso2B:
My stuff has never been animated before. It’d be cool to see.

Megaland:
Give me a couple of minutes to load it up.

The sentence lingered on the chat box. The cursor blinked. Rungs was busy reading and capturing the strings of numbers that filled his screen.

“I’m getting somewhere,” he said.

Inky looked around his father’s study. He stared at the bow and arrow on top of the bookshelf. It was a gift from one of the tribesmen his father had filmed in South America.

He looked away quickly to see that the chat box was filling with text.

Megaland:
You there? Let me know when you’re ready.

How can I ever be ready for this? Inky thought, looking over at Rungs. But he was anxious to see his drawing come to life.

Picasso2B:
Ready.

The screen filled with Inky’s drawings. He watched as the basketball dude strutted toward the front of the screen, and the figure he’d dubbed advertising guy pulled out a chair. Then he saw a gift box, which opened itself, leaving wrapping and ribbon on the floor. A strange, silent birthday party. Then the first figure he’d drawn, his Megaland girl based on Amanda, emerged from the box.

Inky was thrilled to see his work on his father’s big clear screen. He could see how the computer program had altered and enhanced his originals, and he was thinking what he’d have to do next time to compensate for those effects. The Megaland girl nodded yes and no, leaned forward and back and pointed to what seemed to be the back of a closet filled with shoes. Then the second box appeared, and from it, his Green Goddess.

“Wow,” he said, taking in the detail of the dress made of lettuce and spinach leaves.

Rungs got off his chair and stood behind Inky for a closer look. “Way cool,” he said.

“Did you get your address?” Inky asked.

“It looks like it’s redirecting. Could be something at the provider to manage demand. I’ll know when you chat some more.”

The Green Goddess stared out at Inky from the screen. He could see Amanda’s face in hers. He thought of Amanda that day in the cafeteria when Hawk dragged her away. What had she said to Amanda about him?

Megaland:
What do you think?

Picasso2B:
I love it. You did a great job, Woody.

Megaland:
So did you, Picasso2B. We’re a great team.

Inky glanced over at Rungs. He felt a little self-conscious having Rungs see this conversation. But Rungs was more interested in the data than the content, he figured.

Picasso2B:
Thanks. Have you shown it to anyone?

Megaland:
Your work is having a lot of impact.

Picasso2B:
Do you have a lot of testers or is it like one girl somewhere?

Megaland:
Interesting question. Why do you ask?

“It’s still redirecting,” said Rungs. “Slow down between responses. The pauses are good.”

Inky typed more slowly, exaggerating his delay between keystrokes.

Picasso2B:
Just want to know if I’m any good, I guess.

Megaland:
You are very good.

Picasso2B:
So like more than one person said so.

Megaland:
Marketing research determines user appeal. Your work appeals.

Picasso2B
: Cool.

Inky paused before he continued typing, both to appease Rungs and to take in the compliment.

“Bleeping machine.” Rungs said. “IP check says he’s using a proxy, and the next test I ran should’ve shown me a header that leads to the original IP. But I’m getting gibberish.” Rungs stood up and looked over Inky’s shoulder again.

Picasso2B:
Any testers work more than the others?

Megaland:
It’s all statistical, so responses can be weighted, but you don’t want to bias your results. I have a lot riding on this data. You don’t want the peccadilloes of one user to get in the way.

Picasso2B:
The what? Peccadilloes? Sounds like a creature from the stone age.

Megaland:
Lol. The
stoned
age is more like it – the Sixties. It was one of my favorite words in high school.

“You can wrap up if you want,” Rungs said, looking up from his laptop.

Picasso2B:
So do you need more drawings from me?

Megaland:
What you’ve given me is great. You’ve gotten the gist of the game. I’ll be working on the final frames next.

Picasso2B:
I’ll look over my stuff and see if I can get you something soon.

Megaland:
I’d like that Picasso2B. I’d like that.

“SMHID,” Rungs said after Inky signed off. “I’m totally scratching my head in disbelief. His IP address is scrambled. ”

“What does that mean?” Inky asked.

“Could be a couple of things. Some people use a proxy to get around Internet censorship—like people in China do to get on Facebook, or some countries where copyright stuff blocks Netflix. Sometimes NGOs or dissidents use Tor to keep the government out of their pants, but that’s crazy slow. Any reason to think he’s part of an international company?”

“No. He said he ran a recording studio in the City. I thought he owned it. He said it went broke.”

“Could be that someone else is tapping into his communications and they’ve got it redirected. Could even be that he’s being hacked. But most of time, in the stuff my father does, when someone’s address is scrambled, they’re hiding something or hiding from someone.”

“Maybe you’re making too much of this. Maybe it’s none of that,” Inky said. “Maybe he just doesn’t want anyone to steal his ideas.”

“From what I saw of the game, there’s not too much to steal.”

Inky thought about defending the game and his work, but Rungs looked too serious.

Rungs closed his laptop and said, “IDK. But I’m gonna go home and see if I can figure it out.”

Inky sat in the beanbag chair after Rungs left, feeling drained, like the mushroom beige color of the chair. Rungs seemed to thrive on all the spying and subterfuge. It made Inky profoundly tired. His eyes closed, and soon he was dreaming. In his dream he saw an image of Amanda—not as Amanda, but as an Indian from one of the tribes his father had filmed. She wore the body paint of hunter-gatherers. In her hand she held a pot, no bigger than a coffee mug, but more squat. Her fingers lifted the fitted lid. When she peered inside, there was a small stick glowing orange and red in parts: embers that she took from home to home.

Inky woke up with a start. He knew absolutely what he would do for his core project. He fired up his father’s computer again and began to search for copies of his father’s emails about the Awa Indians he’d gone to film in Brazil.

Chapter 24

Peccadilloes

R
UNGS NODDED TO THE HOUSEKEEPER
and went straight to the workroom. The flashing lights of his father’s electronics beckoned, more appealing than any toy store.

He loved it when his father would tell him a bit, but never too much, about a case he was working on. He’d always longed for a case of his own, so when Inky presented him with the mystery of Amanda’s haircut and the game, he blew it up, stretching the “what ifs” into ominous truths. He’d never admit it, but at first he didn’t disagree when Inky said that maybe he was making all this into more than it was.

But then he discovered the rerouted Internet connection. It would be easy to blame it on the general lameness of a service provider, but that wasn’t it. So even if nothing nefarious was going on, it presented an intriguing puzzle, more interesting than his homework, and something to occupy him while his father was away. Rungs set to work.

He opened a fresh document. First he copied all the key data, lining up strings of numbers, guessing the IPs surrounding Megaland. Then he wrote down the facts he knew.
Woody.
Recording studio
.
Megaland game.
The page was not full. He must know more.

The guy knew his way around computers. He was good with 3D programs. He’d posted to boards—that was another clue. Then there was the email from his friend at Dalton with the snip of the posting asking for game testers, the post with the information he’d passed on to Inky. That could tell him something, too.

Rungs searched through his messages and found the months-old email. He copied the post to his page. He laid the message next to the IP information he’d pulled at Inky’s house. There were four groupings of numbers, just as there should be. He tried some of the jailbreaks known to unlock the dark net. Even the U.S. government could get into Tor with them, but it wasn’t working.

He stared at the numbers for awhile. It seemed to him that someone had taken pains, then and now, to scramble the IP, but it didn’t look like he was using proxies purchased from a list, and it wasn’t one of the known anonymizers his father’s programs could detect. There were plenty of reasons not to use them. Some proxies were super slow. Others came from services run for crooks by crooks, which left you open to as much trouble as the anonymity avoided.

Still, he’d taken pains to write a proprietary piece of code to mask his computer. And it was pretty good. Rungs wanted to know what this guy was hiding and why. But first, he knew, he needed to find out how he was doing it. He rubbed his hands together in excitement.

Rungs had a code cracker program he sometimes played with. It used rudimentary scrambling and substitution. He ran the numbers through the program. It returned a long list of possibilities.

He stared at the page-long list. Running each number through a lookup program would be tedious, time-consuming and more trial and error than deductive reasoning. Monkey at the keyboard stuff. He wanted to think this one out. He could picture sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee telling his father just how he’d gone about it, their roles reversed this time, with his father in rapt attention, appreciating Rungs’s cleverness. Sweet.

But he wasn’t there yet. What else did he know?

Recording studio. Music. What else? “Think, Rungs, think,” he said to himself. His father would say everything’s important. Even the little things. Especially the little things. That’s what makes people individual—the unique things they do, their habits, their quirks—their peccadilloes.

OMFG, bam, Rungs thought. Peccadilloes. Woody had used that word in his chat with Inky. Said it was from the Sixties. Somewhere in that fact was a clue that would help him crack the code. He put his palms together and lowered his head to thank the universe and ask for guidance in finding his solution.

A recording studio guy would be into music, he figured. He put that together with the Sixties, and on a hunch, Rungs Googled “Sixties music,” “popular Sixties songs” and, just because he was dealing with code, “songs with numbers in the title.” He copied the top results into a master list. He scrolled down the list: “In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans; “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Revolution 9” from The Beatles; “Eight Miles High” by The Byrds; “2000 Light Years from Home” by The Rolling Stones; “If 6 Was 9,” by Jimi Hendrix.

That last song sounded like a key to crack a simple cipher. Perhaps that was it: if 6 was 9, the key to how Woody distorted his proxy to obfuscate his IP. Rungs went back to the information he pulled at Inky’s. What if he transposed the numbers with the base assumption that 6 equals 9?

Rungs wrote the numbers 1 through 9 in one column. Next to the 6 in the next two columns he wrote 9. If he followed the code, 7 would either be 8 or 1; 8 either 7 or 2. He filled in his two columns and came up with options—Woody’s IP was either 96.232.14.62 or 93.767.85.37.

It was late. Rungs was hungry and a little jittery from all the sweet Thai coffee he’d been drinking. But he’d only just begun. Now he was sure that this Woody guy was doing something he didn’t want detected. Something more than developing an interactive game.

Armed with the two possible IP addresses, Rungs ran a “Whois” on each one, careful to check all five Regional Internet Registries. When one came up as malformed, he knew he had the key to Woody’s identity. Now it was easy. Almost too easy. With some clever tracing and tunneling, Rungs found out the IP hooked back to Megaland Studios. Its owner: William “Woody” Turner. Rungs mentally chided himself. He might have saved himself a bit of trouble if he’d guessed that the guy’s studio had been called Megaland. It seemed an unlikely choice for someone covering his identity, which suggested that he didn’t think he was doing anything so wrong. Intriguing. Was it ambivalence or self-righteousness?