28th October 2018Jess sat staring at the blinking cursor, contempting a response. She’d opened this job up before, and then thought better of it. It’d been posted on the forum where she often picked up her work and had seemed curiously uninteresting to the hackers there. The financial payoff wasn’t huge, to be sure. And that MP, Jonathan Campbell – he’d been an odious little shit during the st endlessly awful trans healthcare ‘debate’.
“I mean what shitfuckery makes that dickhead think he’s got the fucking knowledge to even talk about trans healthcare?” Jess steamed at Charlie the second she walked in the door. “Do you know what he fucking said? He said sex-based rights had primacy in British w and that ‘trans-identified females’ and ‘trans-identified males’” Jess’s arms filed as she finger-quoted, “don’t deserve separate protection, and that as a bio-essentialist he’s clear there are only two sexes.” She gred at Charlie, her anger radiating. “You know he called gender-affirming care fucking ‘mutliation’? No. What was done to me – that was fucking mutition. I didn’t get no say in it. But he thinks that shit’s just fine. It’s only when people are old enough to consent he has a fucking issue with it. Fucking transphobic shithead.”
“Um?” Charlie slowly pced her coat on the arm of the chair, apparently worried she might trigger another rant. “Who is this?” Charlie finally whispered quietly.
“Jonathon fucking Campell! That fucking arsewipe. You know he’s the so-called ‘Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’. What the fuck right has he got to talk during a debate on healthcare? Couldn’t just shut his stupid face, though, could he? Just had to stick his fucking knife in to make sure everyone knows how much he hates the queers. Maybe I should –” Jess bit down at that, realising she might let slip more than she intended.
“You should..?”
“I, uh, nothing. Just. I needed to get that out. He’s a fucking TERF. I hate TERFs.”
Charlie looked dubious, but eventually let the topic go. After Charlie slid into bed, Jess grabbed her ptop and took a closer look at the job. Jonathon Campbell’s very existence was justification regardless of the pay. Anything that she could do to hurt one of those arseholes? She’d do it for free.
The data they wanted was simple enough to nab – especially because her digging had given her a pretty good idea of where his extra money came from. She was certain she could get into their systems; she’d done it at least a few times before and they weren’t nearly as secure as they liked to think they were. But could she do so without putting both herself and Charlie at risk?
As Jess slipped into bed, ptop in hand, Charlie curled herself around her. “Guh tuh sleep.” she mumbled as she nuzzled against her. But Jess was fascinated by Jonathon Campbell’s unreported income. She kept digging and eventually decided that somehow Liberty Financial Solutions was paying him. The exact route of the payments was still kinda difficult to track, but Jess was pretty certain she could do it. Although, concerningly, Liberty Financial Solutions looked like a shell for something and she’d got nothing on what or who as yet.
But if she did it, there was the matter of her own payment. Slipping Charlie cash had proven useful for hiding the dubious source of her income. Charlie had, so far, been willing to elide questions that might illuminate details about where the money came from. But Jess’d registered the anxiety that Charlie clearly felt about the police digging into – something – about her too much. And every time Jess handed over cash she felt guilt from pcing Charlie at risk. So Jess’d been promising herself that she’d start taking less risky – maybe even actually legal – jobs.
‘Maybe just one st job?’ she thought to herself.
She left unexamined the thought that she’d made the same excuse st time.
Jess’ fingers absentmindedly tapped lightly on the keys. Insufficient pressure to type anything, just the feel of running her fingers across helped her think. That look on Charlie’s face had been abject fucking terror when she’d seen the drug dealers on their garden wall, and then she’d said something… about not being involved in something illegal? Yeah. That was it. Jess’d been a little sus - she’d spent some of the morning when Charlie was out having a quick dig through what she could easily find and turned up nothing. It was clear it still bothered Charlie, and Jess was aware that what she was doing amounted to undering her money through her girlfriend. And that felt shit.
Fuck it, maybe she wouldn’t take it.
But for some reason, she kept circling back. Each day the post was up she wondered why no-one else was touching it. Apart from the payoff which was mediocre – if she was generous – there didn’t seem to be any big red fgs. Finally she slipped into matrix and asked her friends.
J: “This job: http://nzh3fv6j7hqktrs8.onion/3834187.an.q - thoughts?”
R: “Saw that. Cheap fuckers. Liberty can be iffy too.”
J: “Iffy?”
R: “Yeah. N got in a bunch of trouble. Took xem a while to shake it off. ”
Further questions didn’t illuminate the risk any more.
It would hurt Jonathon Campbell. And the Conservatives. And those fuckers deserved it. And that was worth a little risk. Eventually she finally decided the only fair thing was to ask Charlie. Jess felt that Charlie would, even with minimal background, see the significance of the question.
When Charlie arrived home Jess sat her down, home baked cookies on the table, tea in the pot, and said, “There’s this job. I wan’ do it, but I’m worried.”
“Why?”
“This company, uh, they caused friends of mine some… some issues. And I think they’re backing the person who I’d be, uh, researching.” Charlie’s eyebrows quirked at this. Jess looked down at the table, picked up a cookie and nervously crumbled it onto the pte in front of her. “But, this guy, he’s utter shit and I dun’ think it’ll take more’n a few days. ‘N I’ve done work wi’ that company before an’ not got…uh…in…trouble.”
“So why’re you asking?”
“I know you don’t like what I do.” Charlie tried to interject. “Uh, okay. Unfair. It makes you worry. This’ll be the st one. Promise. Shouldn’t take more’n a few days. Maybe a month? ‘N then I’ll get a real job.”
The relief that poured forth from Charlie was almost palpable. Jess was honest enough with herself to know there was a possibility that it’d not be truly her st ever, but she’d try.
In the end it was an anticlimax. Jess cracked the system disturbingly easily. The thought that this was some kind of honey trap kept haunting her, and she piled on the precautions accordingly. The files, when she obtained them, were pretty much what she expected. Conspiracies, cover-ups, nothing that would come as amazing news to anyone, although some of the names were a little disconcerting. Higher up the chain than she normally dealt with. In fact, there were a whole bunch of ministers and politicians going back decades, along with a bunch of others she didn’t recognize. She pulled down a rge pile of documents, logged out of the system, transferred the first specifically requested document across, and waited.
She sat reading and waiting for the instructions she knew would follow. That one document was just the first of several they’d probably want – hopefully she’d grabbed everything she’d need in this one incursion. It’d have some piece of information that allowed them to identify the actual documents or CCTV footage, or whatever it was they wanted dug up. Part of the fun was trying to work out where she would end up picking up the clues from the documents she had.
She curled up on the sofa, legs tucked, tea in hand, and sat flicking through the fruits of her pilfering on her e-reader. Deys, extra costs, budget forecasts, position statements – it was all endless detail on some projects she’d never heard of. Working backwards from the beginning it was clear that Jonathon Campbell had been careless. “Don’t catch you slippin’ now,” she sang quietly, reading over the digital proof of payments made and services rendered. And then there it was. “Huh,” she muttered to herself, “Someone thinks you’re going to double cross them and wants security. You’re in a bit of shit, aren’t you, Jonnyboy.”
Her phone, perched on the arm of the sofa, chirruped: Final payment for information listed sec. 2A para. 3B line 7.
She flicked through the document finally locating the relevant line. A garbled string of characters stared back at her. She cursed quietly. Was it encrypted? or just some chunk of corrupt data? She slid back to her computer and set to work.
