Chiron Academy

Let's Get Cracking

"Before I do anything," Cassie said, "I want to be clear that I make no promises. This might all come to nothing. Okay?"

"Okay," Wyatt said.

"I'm serious," she explained.

She swung around in her office chair to face him, sending her pale short blonde hair whipping around. The plain white walls of her lab seemed a bit less cluttered than it had been yesterday. A few of the boxes that had seemed to cover every free surface had been cleared away.

"Just because I have a 'doctor' in my name'" she continued, "doesn't mean that I can work miracles. I am not an expert in cybersecurity. I am willing to try, but nothing is guaranteed. So don't get mad at me if this doesn't work. Understood?"

"Understood," Wyatt said simply.

"Alright, hand me the phone."

Wyatt dug into his pocket and pulled out the phone he'd stolen from Omni's apartment.

It was a plain long model t had looked identical to the pile of phones that Omni had had in his apartment. Wyatt wondered if the man had even noticed his phone missing.

She took it and plugged a chord from the lab computer into the bottom.

"What do you know about hacking devices?"

He had no idea how it worked or he would have pursued it himself. He believed computers were involved but that was it. But he didn't want her to know that.

"I could know more," he said diplomatically. "How much do you know about it?"

"The basics," she said casually as she She either didn't notice or didn't care about Wyatt trying evasiveness about her question. She was already clicking through windows and typing, her focus already gone from him. "I did go to MIT after all. I called some old classmates and picked their brains about the rest."

"I take it you did you try to enter a few passwords when you noticed that it was locked behind one?"

He nodded.

"Yeah, but none of them worked."

"Why didn't you try more?"

He tried not to be annoyed by her questions. Was she going to call him lazy for trying every answer possible?

"Because there are like a billion possible answers," he said. "It would have taken forever."

"It would, yeah," she responded. Her tone changed to one of explanation that he recognized from her dad. He also had tended to start explaining concepts to people like everything was a new lecture that he was excited to deliver.

"It's a six-digit password," she continued, "using only numbers so it's going to be, uh, one million potential answers. that's where our lab computer takes over. rather than putting each answer in by hand, the computer will try all of the potential passwords one after the other until it finds the correct one. Basically, the computer will do what you were doing, just faster.

How long will that take? he didn't want to pressure her but the longer they waited, the more likely the information on the phone was to be out of date. it might contain phone numbers or addresses, but what Wyatt really wanted was evidence: locations where drugs would be, where handoffs would take place, anything that could lead to the local investigation being reopened.

"Not sure. But it should go faster than normal since the lab computer has some good specs. The more power computing power you have, the faster it can go. You might be here for a week or two on one of the library computers. Luckily for us, the school approved my request for this model so I would have enough power to run some more intensive models."