Chapter 3: Not a hacker.

2016.

I was not a hacker. Not that kind, anyway.

It was a futile attempt at recovering what was lost.

Senseless. And ultimately, targetless.

At one point in life, I could have followed that path. I could have built a career in information security —and if the gears of fate had rendered me in a similar situation, I would have been more confident to carry my plan forward. But I chose something more interesting.

Was there even a plan? Breaking into their servers, finding the data that I know I could use to destroy their lives, erase my tracks. I wasn't planning to frame anyone: I knew they had something to hide. Everyone does. Even the ones who think they don't.

That plan wouldn't have magically fixed anything: even if I had succeeded, the damage that their lives and decisions had caused would still live on. Such a plan wouldn't clean my reputation —I was late to that, by years.

It would have been nothing but petty vengeance —bringing very little to celebrate in the long run. And we were far past being able to correct their behaviors. They wouldn't ever change.

Yet there I was, in the information gathering step —from an Android tablet, using the library's wifi, the one that was left running for a few hours after closing. How? They had plugged the router to a $7 countdown timer. Talk about graceful shutdowns.

Termux, nmap, metasploit, and a long et cetera. I wasn't commited enough to install BackTrack, or its newer rebrand, Kali. The small ARM device had all the software I needed for spoofing its MAC address, tunneling, portscanning, testing exploits, all that. It was the beauty of Linux in a pocket.

But the beauty soon dissipated. I couldn't believe how tedious everything had become. More than a decade before, I had found excitement in writing an Assembly program that rewrote the interrupt vector table to disable the silly security software that prevented the users from making permanent changes in the school's computers by intercepting DOS system calls. Or even running John the Ripper for days on a 80386 (or was it Cracker Jack?), and rushing back home with the excitation to check for the new cracked passwords. Oh, you naughty webmaster, uranus2... your anus too, indeed.

However, this wasn't a teenager’s love for technology. This was a middle-aged woman's exasperation and rancor.

I couldn't believe that I had fallen under the spell of fiction, the one that I had always criticized. The portrayal of the heroine of lost causes, surviving her way through knowledge and creativity. An artist of sorts. The hacker’s dark arts. And yet, reality had rendered me in front of a stultifying terminal, checking the results from the last run of metasploit, yawning. And starting to feel the cold.

My dissipating hatred prompted a re-evaluation. Who was my target? Were Alain, Hank, or even Herman ultimately responsible of my fate? Maybe the sole responsibility was on me. Or maybe just a stupid set of initial variables. Maybe I could blame the Big Bang.

I hated them all, the Big Bang included. Well, I hated myself as well. This last one was a good target to destroy in a vengeance-driven frenzy. Besides, that would eliminate the pain. A pity, those self-preservation instincts.

I didn't think that fate had correctly set things straight, not in the karmic way that I had desired. But who was I to impose a skewed sense of justice?

No. I wasn't a hacker, not in the infosec meaning. Only in its primordial meaning: I loved technology, systems, complexity, solutions.

As much anger as I felt, there was no real benefit for me from executing great vengeance. I didn’t have it in me. No, that wasn't me, but a counterfeit version of myself.

My solution became then to drop the plan and forget. To acknowledge conciliation. To let go.

To be honest, I didn’t even know what had brought me to that park.