Chapter 10 - The Parasite in the Code
Arthur spent the next four hours in the basement, his keyboard clacking like a machine gun in the quiet room.
He had locked the basement door from the inside. Eleanor was sitting on the stairs behind him, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face pale under the harsh fluorescence of the ceiling strips.
"What do you mean, someone accessed the local drive?" Eleanor asked, her voice cracking with fatigue and rising panic. "The system isn't connected to the web! You swore to me the basement network was completely isolated!"
"It was isolated," Arthur said, his fingers flying across a terminal screen filled with rolling lines of green code. "The physical cables run from the camera domes straight into the network switch on Rack Two. There is no wireless card in the server. There is no cloud backup running on the local drives."
He hit Enter. A log file expanded across the center monitor.
"Then how did they get the image?" Eleanor shouted, stepping down off the stairs, her silk dress rustling loudly. "How did an email get sent to your private address with a photo taken from the bedroom camera three hours ago?!"
Arthur stopped typing. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on a single line of text near the bottom of the terminal screen.
MAC ADDRESS: 00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E — CONNECTED VIA LOCAL USB TETHERING.
"It wasn't hacked from the outside," Arthur said, his voice dropping into an icy, hollow tone that filled the room like a physical fog. "Someone plugged a device directly into the front USB port of Server Three at 11:42 PM last night."
Eleanor stared at him, her mouth opening slightly. "A physical device? But... nobody has the code to the basement door except you and me."
"I know," Arthur said.
He slowly turned his head to look at her.
"Where was your phone at midnight, Eleanor?"
Eleanor’s face went from pale to chalk white. "My phone was on the kitchen island! I was uploading the analytics report! Are you accusing me?! I built this channel with you! My face is on every thumb-nail! Why would I sabotage my own life?!"
"Because you're tired," Arthur said softly, his eyes narrowing as he watched her facial muscles twitch under the blue light of the screens. "You've been asking about the offshore accounts for six months. You asked me last week if we had enough saved to retire if the channel got taken down by a terms-of-service strike. You know the hormone suppressants are illegal, Eleanor. If the medical board finds out what we've been giving her, it's not a fine. It's twenty years in a federal penitentiary."
"I didn't do it!" Eleanor screamed, stepping toward him, her hands clenched into fists. "I didn't touch your stupid servers! I don't even know how to run a USB tether!"
Before Arthur could answer, a loud, chime echoed through the room.
May you like
It was the system alert from his primary streaming dashboard.
A new video had just been published on their channel—a video that neither Arthur nor Eleanor had uploaded, a video that was currently broadcasting live to two million subscribers.
