Rule 34 - Charles Stross [60]
“Neither do I.” You raise your glass to him. “Watch me practice not drinking alcohol.” He looks irritated but responds in kind.
“Here’s the package.” Tariq slides a wee memory card across the table at you. “There’s a hi-def movie file on this card. Play it, it’s a movie. Change its suffix to dot-exe and run it, and it’ll do something else. Remember to change it back again after you’re done with it of an evening, awright?”
You eye the card with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Then you pull out your phone, elaborately remove the Argyle sock, and inspect it carefully. There is, as you anticipated, no signal, so you roll the sock back over it and stare at Tariq pointedly. “I’m still on probation,” you remind him. “I thought you said this was about testing a chat room?”
“It could be.” Tariq’s noncommittal. “There’s a VM in there, and it’s hosting a web app with a chat room. Nothing else. But you don’t want it to go anywhere near the net. You’re going to stay one hundred per cent off-line while you’re running it, and you keep it that way. Get the picture?”
You get it alright, and it gives you pause for thought. If Mr. Webber gets the idea that you’re a webmonkey for your cousin, he’ll yell at you because you’re nae supposed to go near a web server while you’re on probation—but as long as it’s legal webmonkey shit, you’re pretty sure you can plead wife-and-two-bairns-to-support and get off with a slap on the wrist and a talking-to. They’re supposed to be trying to rehabilitate you, after all, and Tariq’s not one of the dodgy playmates named in the injunction.
But only because he was too smart to get caught.
This doesn’t sound like your regular webmonkey business. There’s no need to take elaborate concealment measures if something’s halal—this business with stegged VMs and sneakernet exchanges in wireless shadows has got to be something else. Just like Colonel Datka’s bread mix.
“I’m not taking it unless you tell me what it is.” You leave the chip on the table, stranded sober and central between two beer glasses. “Seriously, cuz. A man could go to prison.”
“Not really. Not unless you fuck up.” His moustache twitches upward at the corners. “The VM contains a web app with a chat-room application and some test data. I want you to unit test the chat room and its templates for browser accessibility, search semantics, the usual shit. That’s all, except I want you to keep your yap shut and make sure you’re off-line while you do it. Five hundred euros, take it or leave it.”
That’s good money for a webmonkey, and you’re tempted. But. “What’s the payload going to be?” you ask.
“I don’t know yet. Fresh bluefin tuna sashimi by airmail, fix your speeding tickets, your bank balance is temporarily overdrawn, hello I am the widow of Barrister Nkomo, dearly beloved in Christ can you be sincere, we know what you did last Saturday night. Who the fuck cares? It’s just money. They give me the site, I mess with the chat-room software, you get to test it all works. That’s all. There’s no payload there.” Not yet.
You watch as your left hand reaches out to cover the memory card. It’s like it’s at the end of someone else’s arm, someone a couple of years younger, someone without a wife and kids to protect, someone who’s never done time in prison. It’s like it belongs to someone stupid and short-sighted. You’re not short-sighted and stupid; you know better than to take on a Joe job—a hijacked copy of a legit website, one that Tariq’s upstream mate is going to turn into a shell for some kind of scam after he finishes busily installing backdoors in the community portal. Knowing Tariq, it’s probably going to host some horrible malware that’s going to recruit unwitting mules to visit the chat room, then infest their phones and empty their bank accounts. But it’s not a Joe job, you hear yourself thinking, if there’s no payload. It might not happen. If the word yet didn’t keep appending itself to that thought, you’d be a happy camper.
“Relax, cuz.”
“Five hundred euros,” you remind him, and stand up, leaving your half-full pint: You