Chapter 1
Callum sat outside the station, watching the throngs of people move in and out of the underground as if the city breathed them. It was a cold October day. Many of the passengers boarding and leaving the metro were on their way home after a day’s work, eager to unplug from their work life and plug into their personal life, trading corporate screens for personal ones.
He stood up and joined the mass of disembarkers as his watch beeped. 17:30. She was in this crowd. He felt his shoulders hunch up, his pace smooth out, his eyes narrow. The sights and sounds of the city’s nightlife were in their startup phase. Against the darkening sky, neon streamers started their sprint around onyx buildings and old fluorescent signs began to buzz against the pre-war brick. He filtered out the extraneous lights and sounds of streets and focused. He smelled the air.
There.
Auburn hair put up in a short hive, revealing a tender and fair neck. He caught the draft of her perfume and he knew she was the one he had been waiting for. Adorned in a light tan trench coat and a pencil skirt, she walked hastily toward her destination, wherever that may be, oblivious to the man following her.
With three long strides, Callum caught up to the woman. She stopped as she felt his hand firmly, but gently, clasp down on her shoulder. She spun around, ready to strike or run. She had dealt with men who didn’t know how to keep their hands to themselves before. But as she made eye contact, her defenses and any plans of running fell away like sand castles in the tide.
“Callum!” she cried, the glum from her job melting away as she saw her boyfriend.
“Hullo Marcie!” Callum exclaimed. The mass of people split around them, a river around a rock. Callum shuffled them out of the main walkway and to the left of the street, the cobblestone giving way to smooth, black tile.
“Callum, what are you doing here? I thought we were meeting tonight for dinner! I was on my way home to get ready!”
“I couldn’t wait that long. I had to see you.”
“You’re such a goofball!” Marcie playfully slapped Callum on his chest. Her hand bounced off his musclebound torso with an audible thud and she pretended not to notice, hoping that the cold of the air had made her face red enough so that the blush went unnoticed.
“You said you were on your way home? Let me walk you?”
“My, such a gentleman!” She faked a swoon and stood, a giggle bubbling through her.
They began their walk to Marcie’s apartment, arm in arm, swimming through the sea of people.
***
The restaurant was high end. A mirrored ceiling held onto a golden chandelier that hung above a dozen tables, each covered in a sable black table cloth.
Marcie sat across from Callum, an equally black off-the-shoulder dress highlighting her fair complexion and featherlight hair. Callum wore a smart, dark blue shirt tucked into grey trousers. Between them sat an ice bucket holding a bottle of house wine.
“It’s been a bit since we’ve been someplace so fancy,” Marcie whispered, a suggestion of a giggle carrying her words.
“Well, it’s not every day that the coolest girl, sorry, lady, I know gets a big promotion!” He raised his glass,” To you, Marcie!”
She clinked hers against his. “To me!”
“So now you’ll be in charge of moving and fixing server racks?”
“Server racks?” Marcie choked back a laugh before taking a swig of her wine. “No, my friend, I am network defense, internal security, the whole nine yards.”
Callum leaned back, a look of astonishment on his face. Then he asked the big question.
“And is that a pay raise?”
Marcie chuffed. “Oh my God yes.”
Her voice dropped and she leaned in.”Callum it’s six fucking figures. Ha! We can get a real place together. I’m not talking some shanty box on Fourth and Seventh. I mean something real good. High end.”
Marcie knew that this was big news. For the longest time, they had both been stuck with 60k jobs, she in tech and he in public affairs. Now, that had changed. Finally.
A question raced across Marcie’s mind. “This isn’t a problem, is it? Me making… that while you make, ya know?”
Callum let loose a laugh and grasped her hand. “Who would complain about having a hot and rich girlfriend? Fuck no. If anything I’m so damn proud of you.”
“Show me.”
Callum felt Marcie’s foot slither up his leg and stop at his crotch. Her toes found what they wanted and scrunched. He called for the check.
***
They lay in Marcie’s bed, glistening from their exertion, panting. Naked atop the blankets and intertwined, they stared into each other and their hands wandered. Their bodies were taking a break, but their minds were still hungry.
“You’re so good.” Marcie breathed as she stroked him, his hardness softening in her hands as she felt her own heat quiver. Callum remained silent, his hand a painter’s brush across her torso. She whimpered slightly as his fingertips brushed against the base of her breasts.
“What are you thinking?” she whispered, her hand retracted and tucked against her.
Callum leaned in and kissed her softly on the forehead, inhaling the scent of their effort.
“I’m thinking… How did I get so lucky? What did I do to deserve this?”
She rolled over onto him, straddling his sex and began to move back and forth slowly, almost hesitantly. She leaned down and kissed him deeply, her rustled hair creating a curtain between them and the rest of the world. Here, it was only them. She pulled away from his lips as she felt him twitch between her legs.
“You’re you, Callum, and that’s all you need to be.”
With another kiss, she reached down and guided him back inside her.
***
The alarm blared.
“FUCK SHIT FUCK I’M LATE!” Marcie screeched as she leapt out of bed, driven by a feral fear.
“It’s my first day and I’m LATE FUCKING SHIT!” She blurred around the room, covering her nakedness with a hastily thrown on pants suit. She glared back at Callum.
“I love you. Get out. I will see you tonight.”
On the metro, Marcie fidgeted with her phone. There was no service down here and she didn’t dare connect to public WiFi. She could just imagine that when she stepped back to the surface, her phone would light up with missed calls, angry voicemails, and a “YOU’RE FIRED” message. Anxiety took her and she swam in her head until a man sat next to her.
She snapped out of her daymare and looked at him. His face was hidden by a hoodie, but his eyes glinted in the train light. Stubble, grey and dry, peppered his chin.
“Sorry to startle you, madam.” A proper accent.
“Oh, you’re good. Just nervous.” Marcie chuckled, waving her phone around. The man chuckled back and moved on to another seat. How odd.
The event was washed away from memory like a dream upon waking as the train pulled into the last station. Marcie grabbed her satchel and sprinted from the station.
8:45. 15 minutes late. Fuck. She composed herself, walked in through the rotating door, and scanned her badge. The reader bleeped and the turnstile unlocked, allowing her to walk into the halls of CoreTech.
The elevator dinged as it arrived at her destination. Floor 14. The NOC. Adjusting her hair and straightening her clothes one last time, she stepped into the brightly lit hallway. Room 12A. Again she bleeped her card reader and entered the room.
“About fucking time! First day and already late! What the hell, Marcie? What if we had been under attack?”
Marcie stiffened and whirled around to see Rob, the Senior Engineer of the NOC. His bald head contrasted against his large, wavy mustache. He sported a white shirt tucked into a pair of slate slacks.
“Then I guess you would be fucked.” Marcie responded.
“Ha! Get screwed. Wait, don’t actually. Come on over here, I have a job for you.”
Rob pulled a chair up for Marcie and sat down beside her. An open terminal took up residence on the monitor in front of them.
“One of our technicians did a scan of our drones in the area and found that a swarm was not responding. Eyes on the ground say that it is there, just kinda hovering.”
“That’s… unusual.”
Marcie typed into the console
main@noc-term-12a:~$ sudo drone-ctl status --swarm-id SWRM-0892
A second passed. The terminal lit up.
[SWRM-0892] Status: UNRESPONSIVE (12/12 units)
[SWRM-0892] Last Telemetry Ping: 08:31:04 UTC
[SWRM-0892] Signal Loss: Downlink active / Uplink dropping 100% packets
[SWRM-0892] Current Mode: Station-Keeping / Autonomous Drift Prevention
“Well, what do you think?” Rob asked. Marcie took a quiet, deep breath. This was a test. She stared at the output, the keyboard resting beneath her fingertips. The early morning panic had evaporated and her eyes narrowed. She felt her shoulders hunch up, her breathing slow as she leaned it.
“Uplink is dropping all packets. The drones are still sending telemetry but aren’t processing any instructions.” She leaned away from the screen and looked at Rob.
“They haven’t crashed,” she said, “and they aren’t running emergency return home protocols either. Maybe they’re stuck in some sort of loop?”
“Exactly my thoughts,” Rob said, clapping her on the shoulder. “Commands sent out are reaching the local access points that the drones communicate with, but the swarm is refusing to execute them. What do you think the problem is?”
Marcie thought for a moment, leaning back in her chair. She began to talk out loud, working through a checklist. “The Access Point is up and running. We can communicate with it. We know that they are there because we get the downlink. We know that they are just hovering.”
With each statement, Rob gave a nod of affirmation.
“Jammer?” she suggested.
“Our drones operate on a mesh network within each swarm. If one goes down, another takes its place in communication. Uplink and downlink operate on different channels. A jammer would need to block a wide spectrum as our drones and access point use rapid hopping between frequencies. A single jammer wouldn’t work against us.”
“Spoofed handshake?”
Rob’s face lit up, his mustache curling upwards ever so slightly.
“Hell, kid, that’s a good start! Pull drone-LAP logs and see if you can find anything outside of the normal range, anything suspicious in size, or anything that doesn’t fit the pattern. Uplink dropped at…” Rob looked at his watch,” 8:30, so start your search there and work backwards.”
He turned to leave.
“And kid, welcome to internal defense.”
***
Marcie pulled SIEM logs that covered traffic between the drone swarm and local access point. The day passed, filled with her cross referencing IP and MAC addresses with known vectors. Each drone had a secure connection to the LAP. Each drone had a unique IP given by the access point and a burned in MAC address. They operated in a mesh. The node nearest the LAP received the command and sent it to the rest of the swarm.
There.
For a brief moment, a new drone had entered the swarm with an IP in range of the other drones, but the MAC address was not tied to anything that CoreTech manufactured. It was the odd one out.
Marcie looked up the MAC address and found that it came from a small homemade device based on an ESP32. She packaged up her report and sent it up the chain. If the perpetrator had been near enough the drone swarm to send the command through the mesh, then maybe the drones had captured an image of them before they went offline. After all, they must have been right up on the LAP.
Her stomach rumbled.
Rob, who had sat next to her for the past hour, laughed. “Great job, kid. Go home, eat, rest up. Not every day will be as easy as this one.”
It was 17:45 when she exited the underground, making her way home. She remembered yesterday, how Callum had caught up to her, taken her out, made love to her.
She shuffled her coat in the cool breeze and continued walking. She reflected on the day, how the challenge had made her feel involved in something bigger, how Rob’s laugh had made her know that the NOC was where she was meant to be.
Her phone buzzed. She stopped at a corner, across from a bodega. The garish, dry yellow sign was overshone by a neon green light. She glanced at her phone.
Look Up
Standing under the neon sign, leaned against the window of the Bodega, stood a man in a hoodie. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets, his face hidden in conspiracy by the neon light and his hood. She could feel him staring at her.
Thirty seconds passed and the man leaned up, hurled a snot rocket at the ground, and entered the bodega, the door jingling behind him.
Probably nothing, she thought.
A little shaken, she walked home to her empty apartment. Soon, she and Callum would have one in an area that wasn’t so sketchy. She and Callum would be together.
