Ch. 66 – Back and Forth

Derrick shifted his weight from knee to knee, to relieve the soreness that came from staying on all fours on to hard landing to look down at his phone, which was resting on the metal part of the landing. The phone was working overtime doing the dictionary attacks on Maxine’s other wireless networks, and was almost scalding to the touch, so it needed cooling via direct contact with the metal, or else it would throttle and slow down on the dictionary attacks. And judging by the remaining battery, it might need every second it could get to pick the right default password out of the heap—if Maxine even was using a default password.

The fuzzy diagram in the image from the printer’s front-facing camera taunted Derrick. It seemed to contain a lot of information, judging from the blurred and pixellated shapes on it. But it was just outside the brightest part of the photo, and the light from the camera flash couldn’t quite reach it.

There had to be some sort of way to get a clearer picture of it. Maybe by adjusting the flash settings on the printer’s camera?

Mm . . . no. The camera flash settings were probably hardcoded in the firmware, for a printer like this one. They wouldn’t be easy to change.

Derrick tsked, and glared at the security door, as if it would magically go invisible, and show him the inside of Maxine’s hideout, so that he could get more clues on how to illuminate the diagram. If the door had eyes, it would’ve glared right back.

The picture itself held a clue, though. The glowing white strip at the bottom of the image was probably the paper that Derrick printed earlier. If it was that reflective, maybe it could bounce light from the camera onto the diagram?

But, how could he manipulate the papers? He’d been able to move a paper out of the way of the camera by printing another page. But if he tried printing yet another page, it might just block the camera again. He didn’t have enough control over how the papers moved when printing them.

Derrick wiped his screen with the corner of his shirt, before scrolling through the printer’s documentation yet again. What else could he do with the printer? The list of documented printer commands was both short and confusing, but he had to try something, or risk relying solely on the dictionary attack. Might as well start from the top of the list. Derrick began typing in commands, the phone toasting the tips of his index fingers as he pecked at the on-screen keyboard.

The commands might’ve been doing something as far as he knew, but they returned no feedback to his phone. Derrick switched to the Wi-Fi cracker app; it was still chugging away, trying to crack the second network’s password.

Derrick sat back down, crossed-legged, and looked into the darkness down below, blinking the blue light of his phone screen out of his strained eyes, and closing them. Fuck, he was tired. Maybe he just needed a little rest to clear his mind, and then the documented commands would start making sense. Okay. He would count to ten breaths, and then get back to work.

One breath.

Two breaths.

Three breaths.

. . .

Two breaths.

. . .

Wait, how many breaths was he on? It was actually pretty comfortable sitting cross-legged on the landing. The air on front of him was so still, it might as well have been as soft as a nice mattress. Soft and comfortable enough to fall onto—

Derrick jerked, throwing out a hand to stop himself from keeling over. He wiped the drool off his mouth and gripped the landing’s railing, shaking his head. Almost falling over from exhaustion wasn’t exactly a new experience.

How many times had he been up until the early morning, trying to figure out why a mod wasn’t working, or repairing a part so they could use it for an ongoing job? It was always so tempting to just close his eyes and sleep for a while. But that didn’t pay the bills. And this time the stakes were higher; forget about bills, their whole shop would be gone if he didn’t get information on the Drifter.

Derrick blinked a few more times, moistening his eyes, and then went back to tapping commands.

Bloop.

Notification: pOutput tray extended

A notification appeared at the top of his phone, signaling that the printer had returned feedback from one of the commands he’d just put in. Fuck, which one was it? He went back three commands in his history and sent them one by one, waiting for the feedback to return.

Subnet reecho 1

CmdEndPaletteReDef

CmdTray 3

And it finally did return on the final command.

Notification: Paper output tray already extended

Now what did this notification mean? Paper output tray, was that the printer’s output tray? Where the paper fell onto after printing?

Derrick took another picture with the flash on, and the image was slightly different than before. The glowing glossy paper at the bottom of the image extended farther out and up into the photo. Which meant that the output tray had really extended out!

Okay, so that might be useful. But could he do anything else with the tray? He sent another command.

CmdTray 2

Paper output tray deployed, came the notification.

Another picture with flash showed that the glowing glossy paper had moved back down in the photo, implying the tray had gone back to where it had started. Derrick heart started to thump, in the way it only did when triumph was moments away.

CmdTray 1

Two notifications came in quick succession

Notification: Paper output tray retracted

Notification: Check paper output tray for obstruction

The next photo was very different: the entire screen was covered by the glossy paper again, just like it had been in the first photo, when the page had gotten stuck over the camera. So he’d ended up back at square one. But this time, Derrick had more tools to work with.

He had ten percent battery left on the phone. Streaming a half hour video would drain all of that away. So hopefully he could keep this short. Derrick cleared his mobile terminal, and started typing a loop script, switching between the different keyboard modes to get all of the syntax in. He could take a picture off of the printer’s camera to see how the printed pages were sitting, but live feedback would be more helpful in this case. He executed the script, and his browser app opened, new tab after new tab opening up every second, with a new picture from the printer’s camera. It was almost like one of those old-style videos in the history books, from the time before computers existed, and men in top hats cycled a bunch of film transparencies in front of a projector, or something like that.

With the ‘video’ playing, Derrick wiggled the output tray back and forth as he printed pages. The pages sprang forth into the air, slid off the side of the output tray, or bunched up. It was like watching an artsy film about a bunch of anthropomorphized papers jumping off their equivalent of a fifty story skyscraper, into the dark void below the printer.

His mobile browser started lagging, as the icon that showed the number of tabs counted up until ninety nine, before giving up and displaying an infinity sign: a fun little joke by the developers, but one that only induced more anxiety, as the battery icon in the upper right of his phone’s screen ticked slowly down to zero. But as the images started coming slower and slower through the gasping browser’s pipeline, a shining patch of white started appearing on the side of the images.

Derrick put his hands up, not daring to send another command to move the paper output tray. The latest image showed a page: standing almost vertically, having been caught between the tray and the body of the printer itself. The light from the flash made the page gleam, and some of that light reflected off of it, brightening the rest of the room in front of the printer. The diagram was also brightened. Derrick interrupted the loop which was commanding the printer camera to take more photos, and saved the latest image to his phone’s local storage. It wasn’t a second too soon, as his phone’s OS logo appeared on the screen, along with the words “Shutting down.” It had run out of battery. He hadn’t brought a phone charger with him, and Maxine had probably picked the tower clean of any useful tech already, so his chances of just finding one laying around were slim, so there went his chances of breaking into the other Wi-Fi networks.

Maybe he’d have to come back the next day, or hope that Maxine responded, so he wouldn’t have to sit there, scratching his head trying to break into her systems to find information on the Drifter.

At least he had gotten something out of it. What was on that diagram? It was something that Maxine had deemed important enough to pin to the wall. But she rarely talked about her side projects. Maybe she was slinging corporate ransomware when she wasn’t helping a struggling mod shop get unauthorized access to schematics and root access to various mods.

It was time to leave. Derrick stuffed his phone in his pocket, where its heated radiated out along his thigh. It kind of hurt, but there was no time to spend cooling the phone down.

He descended down in total darkness; his eyes were still adjusted to the blue light of his phone, which was also no longer there to guide him. He hopped onto the boat, and paddled back towards the shore.

#

Derrick walked under the starless night sky towards Hack Alley, and slipped inside, locking the door behind him. A charger. Where was his phone charger? Derrick’s phone made its familiar and reassuring boop noise when he plugged it in, and he held the power button down, waiting for it to finish its boot sequence.

Tony was out, or he’d gotten into some sort of trouble again. That Xian guy seemed like the type to find trouble. He was a protester or something, he had said? And he was a failed one at that. If you thought about it, there were only two types of people who would bounce back from that many failures:

- True believers, who would keep pushing their cause no matter how practical

- Scammers and grifters, who didn’t care about the results, but instead how many people they could string along into their schemes.

After all, Xian had moved from place to place, and if the White Leopards got pissed off and retaliated, he could just close up shop and leave. Hm, why had he opened a barbershop in the first place? Had he always been a barber, or did he start cutting hair after moving to Chinatown?

The phone’s wallpaper loaded in, and the screen to present his PIN appeared. It was time to see what that diagram was all about.

The saved image from the printer was the latest one in his gallery app. Zooming in showed that it was a diagram of the greater New Shore City, with circles seemingly indicating points of interest, which were connected somehow by the lines on the map.

And what did those points and lines mean? They were spread out all over the New Shore City area, with quite a few in Chinatown as well. The map seemed to be a print out of some sort of unfamiliar digital map. If so, he could overlay the image of the map he had onto a digital map, and figure out what locations the points corresponded to.

But the image itself was still rather blurry and hard to read. Some image processing to even out the illumination, and maybe some AI upscaling too, would help make it readable. But he certainly wasn’t an expert in either of those . . .

Just then, a knock came at the door. Derrick closed the gallery app, and threw the phone in his room, before creeping up to the door and looking through the peephole.

It was Sally.