In the day when the Mass Surveillance State shall judge the secrets of men by eavesdropping according to their algorithms.
Neon Romans 2:16
- - -
Hitomi was in the white space again, and, for all she knew, she was the only human left on Earth that had any sort of extended altered mental state while asleep.
Not that it was exactly very fun.
No matter how hard she tried to exert her will or imagination of the blank canvas around her nothing actually came to life or appeared: it was not a lucid dream where she could have godlike powers over her own mental constructs.
Boo.
What it really meant was that she was trapped for hours of real-time all by herself, left to think and stretch and sit and yell and run in circles and - well, wait, basically.
She would always wake up refreshed as though she had gotten a full night of sleep, but it was almost as if her mind were incapable of resting - of taking a mental break - and so just disconnected from her body and left her consciousness here.
But! Today she had done something clever before she had fallen asleep. She had held a notepad with a pen in her arms as she fell asleep as an experiment.
And it had worked!
Now she could test out the limits of this weird dreamscape and see how it compared to what she knew about "normal dreams."
The first thing she did was write down her favorite saying: "Even monkeys fall from trees". Every syllable or symbol, kanji or hiragana, was carefully spaced out on the page.
She set it down, walked away for a minute, then came back and read it again: "Even monkeys fall from trees."
Sweet!
Apparently there was a sense of persistence in this altered dreamland, so she could start making notes, or study. What were the limits? She would need to try to bring a book next time for the next test.
Still, she had the pad and the pen so she started writing down her thoughts. Being alone for so long - hours - with nothing else to do was a great way to slow down and reflect on all the events that had transpired.
Hitomi wrote down her thoughts and observations about the Voice, about the embassy staff, the change in Sino-Japanese relations - even Sakura got a few pages; mostly about how it was nice to have a friend, even if she wore a super serious mask all day, only to take it off to tease her in private.
It was like having a professional business-woman version of Minako around. Oh! Minako. More notes!
And the fire!
Hitomi honestly felt like something was wrong; like the back of her mind was trying to tell her something but she was just missing a few puzzle pieces. It was the feeling you get when you walk into a room and your subconscious tells you something is out of place but you're just not sure what's wrong.
Why was Sakura at the center of her thoughts?
Hitomi had flipped through the pages she wrote and her new friend and temporary co-worker had lines draw with arrows all over the place. There was a lot to admire in the girl, Hitomi thought. She was pretty, professional, really smart, and handled herself very coolly under crisis conditions as proven by the Muslim terrorist incident and the server room fire.
She could only aspire to be as awesome as Sakura.
What did she feel towards her?
Confused, for sure. Hitomi knew that some sort of affection had grown between the two of them, but her only experience was with men.
Ah. More notes. Keiji. Ergh. What a trainwreck ending to their relationship.
When she had told him she had gotten the foreign exchange position his response had been to take her out to a nice dinner and try to get in her pants "one last time."
Why did it have to be "one last time!?" she had demanded, both confused and hurt at the blase way he had said it. She wasn't leaving for months (at the time)!
"Well, because you're breaking up with me, and I need time to find a new girlfriend," he had answered, confused at her confusion. What a dense jerk!
She had ended it right then and there, indignant at his boorish behavior.
But she liked men, that was for sure - her internet browsing history could attest to that.
But Sakura... was something.
Although sometimes she seemed so distant, like her thoughts were thousands of miles away. But then again, maybe she hadn't been able to talk to her family like Hitomi had. She barely ever spoke about them but she protected that locket like it was her last reminder of them.
The leaker! Her mind supplied the next line of thought: she needed to think about the leaker like Mr. Yamada had said.
She knew it couldn't be her now, because she didn't even have her cell phone.
But if she WERE a spy trying to get data out of the embassy, how would she do it?
Hitomi sketched out some ideas, and came to a simple conclusion: the guest Wi-Fi was down and cell phones seized, so she could eliminate all the personal electronics. If someone were going to leak then maybe they would try to hack one of the staffer's desktops; like, during janitorial duty or something.
Right. That makes sense. Almost every visitor except the little kids had jobs to do in the embassy, and half of them were cleaning. It was a perfect opportunity to crack the security of a desktop in a dark room while vacuuming or polishing furniture.
Wow.
This "not dream" space was pretty useful!
What could Hitomi do about it though?
Maybe... write a computer program to, what? Watch the network traffic coming in from the staffers' computers? It'd be encrypted, sure, but if she just looked for spikes of outgoing traffic during odd times... hey, that was a pretty good idea!
She felt the edges of the white space begin to soften somehow, there was a loud sound, and she felt movement.
Hitomi woke up to Sakura jostling her shoulders.
"Wake up! Wake up Hitomi! You have to see this!"
- - -
The TV in the break room had dozens of people standing around it, most of them murmuring and repeating what they'd already heard.
Hitomi couldn't believe it when Sakura had told her: the new President of the United States was reportedly dead. The former Vice President had committed suicide, having jumped off a balcony of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which was right next to the White House.
He had been in a late night meeting with a portion of Congress, his executive staff, and intelligence services from the CIA and NSA - or so the rumor went - and had softly excused himself, stepped out onto the balcony as though getting some air, and before the Secret Service agents could stop him simply leaned over the railing and plummeted 4 stories onto the expansive stone staircase leading to the building entrance.
It had been 2AM in the morning when he had done the deed but photos had appeared within minutes thanks to amateur citizen journalists who had made it to the scene before the first responders.
The major news networks had obviously censored them for rebroadcast.
It was 3:30AM in Washington D.C., and half the city was awake thanks to the news.
"Ladies and gentlemen we only have speculation as to the motives of the former President and the tragedy that unfolded early this morning. We're being told that Congresswoman Miller is, even now, being sworn in as the new President, in accordance with the presidential line of succession."
Wow. Had the new president even lasted a day? Two days? Hitomi could barely think because it was too early in the morning.
The implications struck Hitomi fairly quickly. She wasn't a political expert, but she knew how fraught emotions had been between adherents to the two major political parties of the United States before the Voice had spoke to the world. The new President would be from the opposite party, which, coupled with the previous civil unrest reaching dangerous heights, meant people might truly feel that they had to escalate the violence in order to protect their version of America.
"We need to evacuate..." she said to nobody in particular.
"Yeah. This can't be good," agreed Sakura.
After getting their fill of watching the breaking news reports for another hour (in which no real other news was released) Sakura went back to bed. Hitomi, for her part, didn't feel tired anymore so went to the IT department to try to get something done. Hopefully it would take her mind off things.
The dead server was tucked away in a corner of the room - they didn't have a means to securely dispose of it yet, but apparently there was a protocol for driving an awl or screwdriver through the harddrives as a last resort.
Hitomi felt like she'd been drafted into the military anyways, at this point.
It was weird, because she had more trust due to her unique situation than Sakura or any of the other visitors did. She got a short visit from a JSDF soldier at one point, who asked why she was up so early, and she pointed to her laptop and told him she was coding.
He had waved her off, not exactly curious about the program she had been busy composing in her Visual Studio IDE.
Oh well, she usually loved explaining her work to people, so decided to do a rubber duck exercise. She pretended that there was an invisible rubber duck that she needed to explain her project to, and began vocally (and animatedly!) walking Mr. Duck through some of the components she'd been working on, which dealt with reading packets off the TCP/IP network stack and trying to measure them.
Mr. Duck, of course, was incapable of giving her any feedback, since he didn't exist. But she decided to make up questions and ask herself things like: "What does *this* look like if you run it, what about *this* over here? How did you handle the Unicode parsing?"
For some things she didn't have good answers yet - she wasn't quite done enough to be able to test everything yet. Well, she guessed she could test it real quick and dump some packets from the incoming network - no harm, right?
She compiled the components of her code that did work, and invoked the "sniff and dump" section, when spit out a stream of binary characters mixed with Japanese at random. She didn't have access to the super secure network, so this was just what was coming in across the gateway to the various desktops throughout the embassy.
Raw traffic, impossible to really analyze - by a human at least.
Huh. What're those?
She leaned in towards the screen pointed at a section of the binary dump on her screen. She looked closer. There were some symbols there that were definitely text (not binary gibberish), but she didn't recognize them.
"I don't... is that Hangul?" she asked herself, kinda figuring that's about what Korean writing looked like - not that she was an expert.
She copy-pasted what she could find into Notepad++. But what did the words say? There weren't a lot of them.
She took to Google Translate to find out.
The first set said something equivalent to, "Parameter change."
Huh. Like, code parameters in programming? Function parameters?
The second set was very confusing, and said (maybe!), "Asset Denial."
What did that even mean?
She looked around the text on the data dump, trying to find any context, but the vast majority of the data she'd scraped wasn't in any format that a human could read.
Wait. The symbols popped up again. What?
It almost looked like it was a repeating loop, broadcasting into the datastream at intervals.
And was that... it was! Right there, she had just seen her name: Hitomi Hisakawa.
What on earth?
Were people talking about her in the outside world?
She suddenly felt uncomfortable, wondering if she'd accidentally stumbled on some accidentally insecure embassy-to-embassy communication.
Hitomi shut off the program and unplugged her laptop from the ethernet connection to the gateway router. She didn't want anyone to know that she'd been testing a snooping program.
It was almost breakfast time anyways, and she had better get ready for the day: it was bound to be eventful.
But what did "Asset Denial" mean?