Glitch'd - Ch.9 - Privilege Escalation (Patreon)

My eyes drifted back to the editor UI once more, and I found myself staring at my petite new avatar again.

I took in my vulpine body, covered in pastel purple fur except for my belly and a few highlighted areas that were white. My attention soon focused on my cute new face, with my pretty pale green eyes overlooking my little purple snoot. I smiled at my black boopable nose, and my white fuzzy chin. My tall foxy purple ears with the white floof inside, and the new chunky pink earrings hanging from the outside corners. I blushed happily at my new pink bra cupping my larger pair of boobs, while the smaller ones were covered only by my white and purple fur.

I felt another flutter of joy as I looked at the new skirt that hugged my wide hips. Then I smiled at my shapely legs, and my cute feet that were visible in those new sandals. And finally, I took in my long thick floofy purple tail with the white fluffy tip that was happily wagging happily behind me.

Where my smoke-puff avatar had been good and eventually became familiar, this new me was comfortable right from the start. It felt right, and seeing myself like this made me feel happy in ways I still wasn't entirely used to.

Compared to the what was waiting for me out in meatspace... There really was no comparison. This was the real me, here in the mesh. That fleshy shell I left behind in the Nyfoss slums was not me, in all the same ways that my new avatar was. But as long as I remained tied to that meatsack, I was vulnerable. If my connection was interrupted, if my accounts ran out of money and I was forced to log off, that's where I'd find myself.

And now that I'd accepted myself as trans, now that I'd finally found a way to feel comfortable and happy in my own skin, the thought of ending up stuck out in meatspace again terrified me even more than it did before.

So I looked back at Glitch and nodded, "Yes. I'm ready."

She watched me for another second or two before asking over our private message channel, "Are you up for one last heist first? How do you feel about sacrificing your Trodacorp credentials and going out in a blaze of glory?"

My tail twitched and I hesitated briefly before asking, "Are we talking about some nuisance vandalism, or doing actual serious crime here? And who's going to get hurt, if anyone?"

Glitch kept her eyes on mine as she responded in a flat level voice, "Very serious corporate crime, Wisp. The kind of thing people die for. This is something they'll be talking about for years to come."

"The only victims will be the Trodacorp board of directors and wealthiest shareholders," she added in the same serious tone. "We'll be doing some serious harm to an evil megacorp, and I expect the share prices to plummet by the time our work is complete."

As impressive as that sounded I actually had a hard time believing a pair of independent delvers had much hope of doing any lasting damage to a megacorp. We might be able to bring down a couple servers, maybe knock a division or two offline for a few hours, but they had teams of people both in the mesh and out in meatspace standing by to repair any real trouble the moment it happened.

The worst we could probably achieve would be to blank a few servers, but even that wouldn't cause lasting harm. They'd just roll back to their latest backups, and at most they'd lose an hour or two of transactions.

"Let's go somewhere we can discuss the details in private," Glitch suggested a few seconds later. She held out her hand and said, "C'mon. I'll take you there."

I gave my image in the avatar editor one last long glance, which was enough to get my tail wagging again. Then I closed the UI and reached out to take Glitch's hand in mine. A moment later our surroundings dissolved into pixels and numbers.

In typical delver style we bounced through a number of public and private portals, before ending up in a server farm in South America. We were on an unlisted private portal, which rezzed into place around us in the shape of a small cosy cottage in the mountains. There was already a fire burning in a little wood stove in the corner, with an old sofa and a couple arm chairs positioned with a view of the flames through the little window in the door.

"Nice place," I commented as I looked around.

It was basically a one-room get-away home, with a bed and dresser in one corner and a little kitchenette in another. Through the windows I could see a mixed-wood forest surrounding three sides of the structure, and out front there was a small lake with mountains visible further away.

Glitch smiled as she let herself slump down onto one end of the sofa, "Thanks. It's one of my safe-houses, I set up the portal to mimic a mountain retreat from the pacific north-west? It's based on a little place not too far from Old Vancouver."

"Huh," I commented as I hopped up onto one of the arm chairs across from her. I sat cross-legged and wrapped my tail around onto my lap as I asked, "I take it you hacked the server, now you're squatting it?"

The other delver shook her head as she continued to smile, "I own it. Legitimately."

Her smile faded as she added, "My parents were never rich, but they did hold several patents relating to developing and accessing the mesh. That provides some legit income that I use to maintain a few dozen servers in safe locations around the world."

"Oh right," I nodded slowly. After a little pause I asked, "So about this heist you mentioned? What exactly is it you want to do, and how can I help?"

She watched me for a second or two before responding, "I need to steal someone's account. Not just their avatar, I need to gain full access to their entire account."

"I only need it for an hour," she continued, "Maybe less. But it has to happen when the person's already logged in. I have the tools to handle most of the process, but I need direct access to the account in order to hijack it. And I know the account in question logs in through Trodacorp's portal, so I know the avatar is stored in that database where we first met."

With her eyes on mine she stated, "Your credentials can get me in. You can get me access to the avatar database, and through that I can seize control of the account."

Hearing that left me with numerous questions, mostly about the technical side of things. Especially the part about the target being logged in, that's the thing that didn't make any sense to me. First off it'd be much easier to steal an account that was logged out. And second, I wanted to know what would happen to the user. I didn't want to be part of anything that was going to result in actual death or physical harm to anyone.

However, there was one other important question to ask first. "Who's the target? Who's account do you want to steal, and why's it so important?"

"His name is Knut Solberg," Glitch stated. She didn't elaborate, but she didn't need to.

My eyes widened and my ears folded back, "You're targeting the CEO of Trodacorp?! And you want to hijack his account while he's logged in?! Forget an hour, you'll be lucky if you get ten minutes before they yank you right out of the mesh!"

The other delver just gave me a confident smile as she replied, "Trust me Wisp, if you can get me in I'll take care of the rest."

I frowned as I thought it through, but I still had way too many questions. "You know they'll just walk back whatever you do while you're impersonating Solberg. You might get the stock to drop a few points for a while, but it'll recover. I don't care who's account you steal or how good a delver you are, you can't dismantle a whole megacorp inside an hour. It's not possible."

Glitch shook her head, "I won't have to. I just need to set the ball rolling, and things will happen on their own after that."

"Here's the deal Wisp," she added when she saw the sceptical look on my face. "A few days ago during a routine data-theft gig I intercepted a secure internal Trodacorp memo. Top-level stuff, digitally signed, between the CEO and the chairman of the board. It's absolutely damning, heinous stuff, and if it's made public it should be enough to bring Trodacorp to its knees."

"So why not just publish it then?" I asked. "If you've got proof of their crimes then start sharing it. Get it to the media, the governments."

She was already shaking her head before I'd even finished talking, "I've tried that before. Nobody listens to random nobodies, no matter how sensitive or incriminating the data is. Don't forget who owns the media, and who owns the governments. Even if someone tried to take up the story, by the time it gets anywhere the corpos will have wiped the signing keys and covered their tracks. They'll white-wash it as lies, a fantasy story cooked up by some disillusioned criminals."

"I might be infamous among the delver community," she added, "But normal folks don't now me, either as Glitch or Hex."

I couldn't argue with that last point, considering I'd never heard of her before. As for the first point, I couldn't really argue with that either. While I didn't have any first-hand experience with that sort of thing, she wasn't wrong about how Trodacorp would probably handle that sort of leak.

Instead I asked, "So what's your plan? How does stealing Solberg's account help?"

"Nobody's going to listen to some random black-hat delver," she replied with a cunning smile, "But everybody listens to the CEO of one of the world's biggest corporations. When Knut Solberg turns whistle-blower and releases an internal memo to the world as he confesses his crimes, it'll be headline news around the world in seconds. Everyone will be talking about it. The memo will be on the top of everyone's news feed before the confession's even finished. Governments won't be able to ignore it or sweep it under the rug."

Glitch continued, "Even if they try and walk it back afterwards, it'll be too late. Even if they admit their CEO got his account hacked, the damage will be done. Everyone will have looked at the memo. Enough people will have verified the signing keys before the corpos wipe it, they'll know it was legit. By the time the dust settles on this, Trodacorp will be screwed. Hell Wisp, we might even be the first delvers to actually kill a megacorp."

By the time she was done talking my eyes were wide and my ears folded back again, while I hugged my big floofy tail to my chest. Once again I couldn't find fault with any of that reasoning, but like before I had another question.

"Just what's in this memo that's so damning?" I asked quietly. "How bad can one memo be, that you think it's enough to topple a whole megacorp?"

"See for yourself," she stated.

This time she didn't toss me an antique floppy disk. Instead she opened the file herself, then shared that part of her UI. A large holographic screen appeared floating in the air between us, and my eyes started flicking back and forth as I read the text. And the more I read the angrier I got, the more I wanted to see those bastards burn.

Bankruptcy wasn't enough, I wanted to see them exiled to the same sort of underwater forced-labour facility that killed my mother. Which it turned out was designed built staffed and maintained by one of Trodacorp's countless subsidiaries.

As for the memo itself, it was authored by the current chairman of the Trodacorp board of directors.

It recommended a combined strategy of bribery, lobbying, and a massive public-relations media campaign in order to gain mineral rights to the arctic sea, now that the area was mostly ice-free. The bastards had calculated that there was enough fossil fuel reserves there that they could add a minimum of eighteen trillion Euros to the Trodacorp bottom line over the next twenty-five years, if they were allowed to drill and mine there.

It went on to acknowledge that their actions would accelerate the ongoing environmental catastrophe, that extracting and burning that much oil would likely cause sea levels to rise an additional few dozen centimetres over the next couple decades. And that would ultimately result in the displacement of between five hundred and seven hundred and fifty million more people. The memo even acknowledged that as many as ten percent of those people would probably die as a result.

Finally the document pointed out that most of those affected people lived in parts of the world that weren't serviced by Trodacorp, and that they tended to have very low income anyways, so their loss wouldn't have any significant impact on Trodacorp's customer-base. To the contrary, the projections suggested that the increased instability would lead to additional social unrest and riots. That in turn would lead to significant increases in arrests, which would mean more opportunities for Trodacorp to sell their patented 'Submerged Rehabilitation Institution' facilities. Which in turn meant the corporation would actually profit even more, from all the suffering it caused.

By that point I was on my feet, pacing around the cottage as I glared at the text. My ears were folded back, my tail twitched back and forth in irritation, and my teeth were bared.

I was so angry I actually growled, "Those evil gods-damned bastards! They know exactly how many lives they're going to ruin, how many people they're going to kill, and all they care about is how much money they're going to make doing it?!"

"I know Wisp," Glitch nodded slowly. She looked and sounded sad rather than angry as she added, "I wish we could bring all the corpos down. I wish we could bring them to justice, make them pay for what they've done to the world, to innocent people like you and your family."

Then she sighed and shook her head, "But they're just too damned big. They've got all the money, all the cards. Most of the time the best we can do is pick at them, inconvenience them here and there. It was pure luck that this memo turned up in a random data scoop, but it's the best chance that's come up in a long time."

"So what do you say Wisp?" she asked as she fixed her eyes on mine again. "Are you in?"

My blood was still boiling at everything I'd read in that memo, and I was angry enough at Trodacorp and the injustice of the world in general that I was almost ready to agree on the spot. But I still had enough of an instinct for self-preservation that I held off. I took a couple deep breaths and let my anger fade a little, before I met Glitch's gaze again.

With my tail hanging down between my legs and my ears drooping to either side I responded, "I need some actual proof about digitization, before I can agree to anything. I need to know this isn't just an elaborate con to get my Trodacorp credentials."

"Because as much as I want to see those bastards burn," I stated with a little growl in my voice, "I can't do this without a guaranteed exit plan. Otherwise I'm liable to end up trapped in meatspace, where I'll probably spend the rest of my short miserable life in one of those underwater prisons that killed my mom."

And with my eyes on hers I asked, "So what do you say Glitch? No more secrets, no more holding back. Prove that I'll have a future here in the mesh, and I'll gladly burn my credentials to set those corpo fuckers on fire."

Glitch stared back at me for a long second or two, then she smiled. "I knew you weren't just another pretty face."

"I mean you're definitely pretty," she added as her smile shifted to more of a smirk. "And cute of course, but you're smart too. That's why I like you so much."

Her expression became serious again as she finally stated, "If you're up for it we can do the digitization first, but then we have to move on Trodacorp immediately. The memo's already a couple days old, plus we'll have a limited window before your physical body's demise gets reported and your employment's terminated."

"So what do you think Wisp?" she asked as she produced another one of those antique floppy disks. "Are you ready to join the club?"

** This chapter was brought to you courtesy of Camille, who commissioned it! **