Dreams of a Red Horizon

8 - Kristina

I connected to the room at the time we had agreed. The world from the interview was gone, replaced by a simple workroom. A rounded couch sat in the middle of the room facing a large glass panel set against a wall. Joseph was already working at the panel, lines of code displayed across its surface. After a few moments, he turned around and smiled at me. "You're here, good."

"Well, this is when you said to meet." I said.

He nodded. The room filled with an intense silence.

"You already started?" I asked moving behind him, breaking the stiffness between us.

"Yeah," he said moving aside so I could look at it.

My eyes scanned the code. I stopped, puzzled. "Wait, what is it that we're doing? What's the job, really? You were kind of vague earlier."

"You tell me," he said.

I rolled my eyes at the fact that he was testing me again. "Well, you said something about hacking into a network of displays, but that's not..."

"Not just a network of displays, but every display. On every street corner, in every home."

"That's impossible," I said shaking my head.

"Is it?" he asked, smiling playfully at me. "Why?"

"Because, that's hundreds of millions of devices. You'd have to have an army to do something like that."

"Exactly."

"I don't get it," I said, dumbfounded.

"How many people are connected to the net, every day?"

"Everybody."

"And of those people who are connected to the net, how many download apps?"

Suddenly it clicked. "An army. You're going to put malware in an app, so that people's Sensee units will hack all the displays for you. The social effect."

He laughed, "You got it!"

"But, how will you get enough people to download it?"

"I haven't quite figured that part out yet," he said. He turned around and looked back at the display.

"You could just find out who's making the next pop ap, then hack into their system, and embed your code into theirs." I suggested.

"Yeah, we're not going to do that."

"Why not?"

"Well, what do you think would happen to the app developers?"

"I mean, I guess it depends on why we're hacking the screens. I'm guessing there's some content you want to play on it or something? Who are we even working for anyway?"

"Sorry, can't tell you." He said not turning away from the screen.

I sighed. I figured as much. "So what are you working on then?" I asked.

"The crack itself. We need it to, at a predefined time, activate a subroutine that accesses the local displays and deploy a media stream. I figured if we could get that done first, we could figure out the rest later."

He turned around and looked at me. "Are you ready?"

I nodded.

---

For hours we coded. Classes and variables and strings all came together like a song. Each note another function callback. Each return a chorus, a refrain, a bridge. The song built and grew, crescendoing and building in intensity and rhythm.