Albert hesitated.
He'd kept secret the existence of this flash drive; he hadn't told anyone that he'd received it, not his teammates, not his mom, and not even his father—who was downstairs in his home office at the moment, probably reviewing Quantum Shield client audits or reading the national news. Or maybe both. At the same time. Henry was always watching something. Maybe even him.
Albert exited out of the drive notification that popped up on his screen, then ran a sandbox environment. A bit of paranoia never hurt anyone. Besides, you never know what sort of surprise or prank might spring up on you. It always paid off to be on the safe side. For Albert, paranoia was as much instinct as it was inheritance.
His father had drilled that into him at an age other kids were still playing with toy cars. On top of that, where other kids got PlayStations and Xboxes, Albert was playing all his games on a Raspberry Pi console his father had set up for him.
Reminiscence aside, he had to get to the bottom of this mysterious flash drive's content. When his sandboxed secure shell loaded, a plain-text folder appeared:
\GHOST_B01_ROOT\readfirst.txt
The rest of the files were password-locked. Great, the first thing he gets from a random, mysterious people he hasn't seen nor even knows the names of, and they're already testing his hacking skills.
Albert opened the file. The file was only a few lines of text, but the message was clear and straightforward:
"I know who you are. I know who he is.
If you want the truth, decode this chain:
54.91.6.42 / port 8133
Ask for: .spectre"
No signature. No sender. Looks like Albert would have to decode all of that on his own. The file provided him with just an IP address and a file name that was a bit too dramatic for Albert's more refined taste.
He leaned back in his chair, the wheels creaking like a guilty conscience. This could be a prank. A virus. A digital scavenger hunt. But part of him—the reckless, code-hungry, very tired part of him—was intrigued.
“.spectre,” he murmured. “Seriously?”
The name unearthed a long-lost memory. He hadn't given it much thought at first and simply dismissed it as his father telling him stories to intrigue him in the world of cyber security.
"Don't you get it Albert? There's no such thing as a clean firewall anymore. There's always a spectre in the cache," his father had said.
Unlike in the past, when he was still a child, Albert now gave this much more attention than he would have admitted. He first tried pinging the IP, just to see if there were any packets he would receive from it.
Nothing. Dead. Whoever these guys were, they were serious. And really, really good.
Albert then booted up his Tor browser and used it to access the IP through the onion network. This time, he received a response. The IP was alive down in the murky depths of the dark web.
Port 8133 opened like a creaky trapdoor. No authentication screen. Just static. Then: motion.
A window blinked open. Inside, a low-res security feed. Time-stamped five years ago. Location tag: QSA Archive Node #17.
The footage was grainy, but clear enough.
There was his father.
Henry Vale, stubble on his chin (he almost never found the time to shave, and if he did, he would use that time to pursue the next up-and-coming cyber criminal), lab coat open, standing in front of a server rack. Talking to someone off-camera. Smiling.
But then the timestamp skipped. Albert immediately noticed it. A whole 5 minutes had been shaved off the footage, as if something—or someone—had been edited out.
Henry was now alone. Coat gone. His smile was gone as well. He now had a different expression. A grim one. Cold Focused. Like he was another person entirely.
Albert rewound the footage. Same thing. Smiling. Skip. Dead serious. Albert was about to close the video, when something caught his eye. Or rather, his ear. It was barely discernible due to the distorted footage and sound, but it was definitely, unmistakably there. He just had to make sure of it before taking any action.
He booted up the top-secret proprietary audio decoding software developed by the FBI and given to his father as a gift for his services. The only other people who had access to this software were the Interpol.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
He separated the audio from the footage using a custom-built video-to-audio converter program (he didn't trust any of the online audio converters with such sensitive data), then he ran a few optimizations, and finally the audio was ready to be heard, sounding rather crisp after being digitally enhanced by the program.
His father was speaking in a foreign language. Albert found this very strange. His father never told him that he could speak a foreign language. His mom never told him that either. Which could mean one of two things: either his father was hiding something big from them all, or this was an overseas trip and he just learned a few words and phrases from the local lingo.
Albert came up with a great idea. He'd test his dad to see if he was actually hiding the fact that he can speak a whole new language, or if it was just something he picked up on his trip.
He jumped out of his seat and flew down the stairs, stopping just short of his dad's study. He took a moment to compose himself and regain his breath, and then he knocked. One, two three...
"Is that you, Albert? Come in, come in."
After opening the door and stepping into his father's home office, he carefully stepped over the exposed fiber-optic cables on the ground. His father had an impressive server operating right out of his home.
"Dad, I just came across an article featuring a Russian hacker group that was arrested a few years ago. They weren't anything special, but their grandfathers were spies during the Cold War. All eight of them. Almost like those kinds of shenanigans run in their blood."
"And what of them? As you said, they weren't anything special, so there must be a reason you've come all the way down from your room to tell me about it. So, out with it, chop-chop."
"I've decided to start learning the Russian language. If such a gang pops in the future, I'd be able to snoop on them without having to rely on translators or large language models. What do you say?"
"Ah, Russian... Well, if that's what you want, I won't stop you. In fact, during my time at university, I took extracurricular language classes for Chinese and Romanian. It was nothing impressive though, I barely scraped by enough to pass the HSK1 and A1 proficiency exams, respectively, in both languages."
This shocked Albert, but it also reassured him. His father did not in fact speak another foreign language, nor was he trying to hide the fact he's been learning other languages in the past.
"I could understand the rationale behind learning Chinese but why Romanian? It's as random as they come," Albert asked, a puzzled expression on his face.
"Ah, well.. You see, that would be because my girlfriend at the time was Romanian. But hey, don't you dare tell any of this to mom, she'll never let me hear the end of it. Got that?"
Albert, a knowing grin on his face, said "I gotchu covered dad, your secret's safe with me."
"Anyways, did you ever use what you learned in those classes in your trips to China and Romania?"
"Why yes, I did. I once spoke to some Chinese diplomats around four years ago, in very broken Chinese, mind you, but they were impressed nonetheless. They thanked me for spearheading the defense against a security breach that was caused by mass DDOS attacks coming from North Korea."
"And as for Romanian, I haven't been there since ten years now, but I did speak a bit of it with some researchers there. They wanted my input on a new software they were developing."
"Thanks dad, that motivates me to keep going. Love you!"
And with that, Albert was off to his room once more, now armed with new knowledge he didn't have before. Knowledge that would certainly be of use in cracking this encrypted flash drive.
Plus, he now had a definitive location of where the video could have taken place. It was somewhere in Romania, he was sure of it. The mysterious people who'd given him this flash drive had no idea he already knew their location. The best part? He got the information right out of the horse's mouth. And the horse in question wasn't even aware that he gave away such crucial information.
He played the footage once more, and this time he noticed a brief flicker at the end of the video, way too fast for human reaction times, so he was unable to pause it at that exact frame, no matter how many times he tried.
It was time to take out the big guns. Digitally speaking, of course. He pulled up a new shell window and wrote a few lines using the FFmpeg package to extract the last few seconds of the footage as still frames. Once the frames were saved into their target folder, he opened them up, and right there on the last frame, the following text appeared:
"NullSpectre is unto us as Darth Vader is unto the Death Troopers.
Albert frowned. Death Troopers. Weren't they some kind of elite Imperial unit? Did these guys see themselves as NullSpectre's special forces of the cyber crime world?
They must have caught on to his love of Star Wars from his online alias, Luke Skywalker. They wanted to let him know they weren't just your regular, run-of-the-mill hackers; they were the real deal, the Death Troopers among the Storm Troopers, the elite among the 'peasants'.
Albert kept reading.
If you want answers, meet a representative of ours at the public library entrance 8 am tomorrow morning. You will be scanned for bugs. Protocol.
Geez, who do they think they are, agents of the Galactic Empire?
There was more to the message though. Albert read the last bit of the message, his eyes shining at the prospect of taking on such a challenge:
Note: Do not try to find us, for we are the Shadowy Legion that is the cyber world's version of the Imperial Fleet. We are Darkness itself, and we leave no trace behind.
Bozos! I already figured out you're in Romania, and I didn't even do anything special yet. Just you wait and see, I'll pinpoint your exact location if I have to. And no siree, I'm not going to any library to meet a stranger early in the morning. He can keep his information to himself. I'll rat them out on my own.
。。。
Elsewhere...
In a dim-lit datacenter under a false identity in a remote village some miles away from Bucharest, a terminal blinked twice.
The flash drive had been opened.
The man monitoring the display gave a low-pitched chuckle.
"Hello there, Vale. Let's see what you're made of."
Twenty minutes later, after nothing else had happened, the mysterious, shadowy person's grin faded.
"Perhaps I gave you too much credit, Vale Junior. It seems as though you're not fit to chase your father's shadow. I expected you'd take at most 5 minutes to decipher and decrypt the entire thing," and with a bored expression and a huge yawn, he flicked his TV on and resumed watching the latest episode of Subteran.
FFmpeg: a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams