Consumed: A DefCon Short Story

May 31, 2016

UPDATE:
I won! My story was selected as first place! Thanks to the organizers and anyone who read my story! I’ll see ya’ll at DefCon!

 

Late this April, I came across the following Tweet:

I knew that DefCon had many different subgroups and contests, but this was the first time I had heard of the short story contest. Depending on the day, I can have a pretty active imagination. As fate would have it, that day was one of those days. My mind began buzzing with different ideas. Eventually I came up with one I really liked, and I began running with it.

This was the first time I had written creatively since probably high school. Needless to say, my skills were a bit rusty and it was challenging to write at first. However, once I started rolling, I found the task therapeutic.

If you enjoy my story, I’d love to have your vote for the People’s Choice award. All you need to do to vote is have a DefCon forum account and then vote on this thread. I would appreciate it!

Thanks to everyone that let me bounce ideas off them and a special thanks to Susan Dickinson for the help with editing.

Without further ado, here is my DefCon Shot Story Contest submission.

 

Consumed
By Tyler Rosonke (@ZonkSec)

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to McCarran International Airport. Local time is 11:32pm and the temperature is 78 degrees Fahrenheit”, a monotone voice carried a bit muffled over the intercom. A skinny white male wearing a white shirt and an unbuttoned plaid jacket stared out the window.

“For your safety and comfort, please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened until the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign”, chimed a different but similarly muffled voice. The man quickly reached into his pocket and pulled out a smartphone and proceeded to power it on. He looked out the window through his thick black framed glasses and was greeted by the Las Vegas strip, blazing below shooting neon lights skyward. His phone, now active, buzzed repeatedly from all the missed notifications, but there was only one he cared about. He opened a SMS message and it read, “Hey Garrett, I just checked into the room. Hit me up when you land!”. He quickly responded, “Just hit ground. Grabbing a cab and will be in the lobby shortly.” As the plane made its final taxi to the gate, Garrett thought to himself, “It’s amazing how after 3 years passed and thousands of miles apart, old friends can just snap back together like nothing ever happened.” The plane stopped and its passengers shuffled out in an orderly fashion, except for a man with a white stripe in his bangs. That man, as if the world owed him something, shimmied through the aisle and past the other passengers. Pushing and shoving he made his way out before anyone else. Annoyed looks accompanied him; however, the only clear glimpse Garrett managed to get before the man slithered out of the plane was a patch on his backpack, which read ‘Omega Industries’. Garrett grabbed his things and got off the plane.

A yellow cab arrived in front of Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel, and Garrett stepped out. As he paid the driver, a short man with long blonde hair in a ponytail snuck up behind him. His short round face began to grin as he stalked his prey. He grabbed Garrett’s waist.
“Holy shhiii…”, Garrett exclaimed as he whipped around to meet his violator. “Jasper!”. The two men laughed, smiled, and hugged.
“Howdy doodly Garrett! How’s my favorite firmware monkey?” Jasper asked, rubbing his knuckles against the top of Garrett’s head. Garrett’s smile faded briefly but crept back. He had missed his old friend, even his annoying name calling.
“I’m doing great. Man, it feels good to be back here. I’m surprised you stayed up for me. What floor we on?”
“No worries dude. We are on lucky number 13! The room is pretty meh, but it will do, especially considering the price we snagged.”
“Rad. Well, lead the way! I’m tired as hell and ready to crash.” Garrett said as he grabbed his bags. Garret and Jasper walked into the hotel, proceeded to their room, and promptly fell asleep.

DefCon was alive and underway. Rooms and even the hallways hummed with commotion. Talk of computer security nuzzled in every crevice. As usual, there were large lecture halls with experts presenting, smaller conference rooms with ongoing workshops, and a massive vendor area. Garrett and Jasper roamed the various rooms and absorbed every bit of information they could. They were hackers at heart, loving nothing more than learning what makes their cyberworld world tick. Shoulders relaxed and faces lit with excitement, it was obvious they felt at home at this place.

As they passed the vendor area, something was stirring. Garrett noticed first. He watched several DefCon organizers, also known as Goons, rush into the vender area as if there were some sort of emergency. A large commotion was starting to bubble out of the vendor area. Without exchanging words, the two friends scurried into the vendor room. As they entered the room, a series of metallic clanks and deep electronic hums broke out for the far corner of the room, accompanied by a fanfare of cheers and applause from an amassing crowd. The two friends were not the only ones to stumble upon this anomaly. Word quickly spread throughout the convention and the vendor area became increasingly crowded. It became harder and harder for the two friends to stay together as they attempted to ninja their way to the epicenter of the discord. Garrett, cut off and separated from Jasper, caught his friend’s eye over the crowd and called as he waved him on, “No worries. I’ll catch up.”

More and more conference goers flooded into the vendor area, all cramming towards the humming, grinding, and clanking. Garrett was jostled farther and farther from his friend as Con goers seized any open gap in the crowd. However, Garrett noticed a split between two booths. It seemed like some sort of channel used for various cabling and as storage for vendors. The channel appeared to run parallel to the direction of all the commotion. Garrett slipped into the channel and let out a sigh of relief. He was no longer being smashed into oblivion. Garrett’s relief quickly turned into panic. He froze as he noticed a group of Goons convening in the same channel. Garrett, as every good perpetrator knows, acted as if he was supposed to be there and carried on. He approached the group and caught the eye of a singular Goon, deep in conversation with the other Goons. Garrett’s heart was leaping; the scene had become oddly unsettling, but he gave the Goon a sturdy and respectful nod of the head. The Goon nodded back and resumed his conversation.
“This is insane. I don’t give a shit if it’s outside of policy, we need to get these guys on a stage.” Garrett overheard.
“What if it turns into some lame sales pitch?”
“It won’t. We’ll make sure to get one of their engineers up there; someone who is passionate about this damn masterpiece they just unveiled.”
“Alright, I’m not in love with breaking policy, but if we don’t do something, we might have a hacker riot on our hands. One hour from now, Track III.” The overheard conversation fueled Garrett’s anticipation.
“What the hell am I about to see.” he thought. The clunking and humming increased in intensity as he came to the end of the channel. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to see.

Robotic humanoids.

The humanoids stood about seven feet tall and appeared to have a steel outer casing. They had no skin or hair, but their pose and form was both human in nature yet decidedly not. Long narrow faces housed two cameras for eyes. Con goers were captivated. The humanoids’ internals hummed and buzzed as their motors spun to perform movement. Loud clanks as they moved across the concrete floor made it apparent they weighed a significant amount.As Garrett scanned the area, he saw convention goers and a handful of humanoids playing chess, critiquing a painting, tossing a football, discussing poetry, deliberating computer security, and most impressively debating philosophy. These weren’t some junky Japanese toys playing soccer. These seemed intelligent. “Impossible”, Garrett thought to himself, “It just can’t be”. He watched in disbelief as various convention goers interacted with the humanoids. It seemed that many of them were trying to stump the machines, seeking to diminish their existence by quizzing and prodding at the humanoids’ intellect, hoping for a crack and for the seeming magic to disappear. But that crack never came. Garrett spotted Jasper conversing with one of the humanoids. He wrestled his way through the crowd, and as he approached them, he saw Jasper whisper something into the humanoids ear. “Howdy doody, Garrett! How’s my favorite firmware monkey?” said the humanoid while rubbing his cold metallic knuckles against Garrett’s head. Jasper laughed hysterically. Garrett skeptically ignored the humanoid’s words and actions.
“Can you believe this?” Garret asked Jasper.
“Believe what Garrett?” the humanoid asked using spot-on diction, “Believe what you are seeing? I know it’s crazy to believe man, but we VX-2052 models are damn impressive compared to previous versions. My name is Cody, by the way; it’s nice to meet you!”
Garrett turned and looked in wide-eyed disbelief at the humanoid as it fired off a casual conversation, slang and all.
“Nice to meet you too…” Garrett hesitantly offered. “Ummm, yea. You guys are pretty phenomenal. Do you mind if I have a private conversation with my friend?” Garret asked.
“By all means! And Jasper, if you want to chat more about buffer overflows, let me know. See you guys later!” the humanoid politely replied, moving to another group of Con goers, interacting with them as vibrantly as the cheeriest person alive.

“This is amazing. Like it doesn’t even feel real. They are brilliant. How in the hell did they create these?” Jasper inquired.
Garrett was still skeptical, but was starting to come around. “I have no idea. I have to admit, they are incredible. But I’m baffled as to how this happened all of a sudden. I mean, this sort of artificial intelligence seemed light-years away and ÔboopÕ of all sudden we have this? It just doesn’t add up…” But Garrett broke-off noticing a slender man sitting at the booth responsible for the humanoids. It was the annoying airplane passenger, the same guy wearing all black, black hair slicked back with a white stripe in his the bangs. There were several other people managing the booth, but it was apparent that he was the technical expertise of the bunch. He sat hunched over his laptop typing away. Looking up briefly from time to time, he surveyed the humanoids and tracked their actions. With each glance, he grinned and giggled as he watched the convention goers’ disbelief become belief.
Garrett looked up and saw the banner: ‘Omega Industries’. Garrett watched as the same Goons whose conversation he had overheard in the channel approached the man. As the Goons and the man conversed, the man became excited, stood, nodded in agreement, and lastly shook their hands. The man leaned over to his laptop, typed for a few moments, and then resumed the conversation with the Goons again. As the man finished typing, the cluster of humanoids began to wrap up their various interactions and began to congregate in the front of the booth. Garrett grabbed Jasper by the wrist, dragging him out of the vendor area.

“What the hell, Garrett? We are gonna miss it! Something is happening.” Jasper protested.
“I’ve got something better” Garrett called back rushing them forward. “I overheard some Goons when I got lost in the crowd. They are allotting a stage and some time for Omega Industries to give a talk. They haven’t announced when or where yet, but I happen to know.” Garrett smugly smiled as he towed Jasper along. Jasper’s eyes began to squint as he puzzled together Garrett’s plan. He smiled and broke his wrist free of Garret. They both rushed out of the vendor area.

The pandemonium in the vendor area had depleted all other activities in other convention areas. The previously buzzing halls and rooms suddenly felt like a ghost town. Garrett and Jasper walked into the Track III lecture room. The room was still nearly empty, so they found seats near the front. A man had recently taken the stage and was wrapping up his introduction.

“So that’s who I am and a bit on my background. Well I’m not quite sure where everyone is,” the man said, saddened, “but they are gonna miss out, ’cause it’s time for the fun stuff. For the last 8 months I have been researching Saturn Solutions load-balancers. My company wanted to make sure that these devices would do as-advertised in both an efficient and secure manner. For those of you who aren’t familiar, load-balancers are basically devices that distribute network or application traffic across a number of servers for both efficiency and redundancy. I set up the Saturn Solutions load-balancers in a lab environment and simulated varying levels of traffic. It was actually quite remarkable, I was super impressed with the availability metrics under load. But being the curious beings we are all, I wanted to see how it was being done. This is when I reversed the firmware and found something quite interesting”.
The lecture room began to flood with people. Garrett winked at Jasper. The man’s face began to light up as the scale of audience he had hoped for was now arriving. His excitement was short lived. Several Goons approached the stage. The man stepped away from the podium for a word with the Goons then solemnly nodded.

Returning to the podium, he announced, “Well, unfortunately this Track is being repurposed. Long story short I found a backdoor. If you use Saturn Solutions load-balancers at your organization, I highly recommend checking out my blog for my findings and remediation. GhostShellSecurity.com is where you can find it and my other works. Thanks.” the man lowered his head and walked off stage.

The room now flooded with Con goers. A Goon approached the podium saying, “Sorry for the change of plans folks. Up next we have Chet Goldstein from Omega Industries. As some of you are probably aware, this is likely going to be one of the major highlights for DefCon this year. Without further ado, I…” Before the Goon could finish his introduction an all familiar symphony of humming and clanking broke out behind stage.

Six humanoids in a military-like formation took the stage. The still amassing crowd cheered and roared. The colossal pack of metal and tech took center stage. The pack synchronously side stepped in opposing directions, dividing down the middle to reveal Chet Goldstein, the man from the booth with slicked-backed hair and a blonde stripe in his bangs. The crowd applauded loudly and faded slowly. Chet, with his chin high, basked in the attention. The audience fell silent, anxiously awaiting the technologic voodoo that was about to be unveiled. Meanwhile, Chet stood, somewhat awkwardly, somewhat endearingly, frozen as if the applause had never ended. He stood there for a few moments and eventually broke his pose and said, “What’s going on kids?! You like my sweet toys?!”

The crowd laughed, clearly ready to buy what he was ready to sell.
He continued, “It’s amazing what gobs of money and the best education in the world can give birth to.” A few sparse laughs came from the crowd.
Chet paced in front, while the towering humanoids remained frozen in the background. “I have been dreaming of this moment my whole life. I have been working my ass off and it’s finally paid off! Look at me now! Marvel in my genius!” Chet yelled continuing to pace.
Garrett and Jasper looked at each other and Garrett mouthed, “What the fuck.” The crowd was baffled, confused as to what exactly was happening.
“You losers have ridiculed me and laughed at me for years, but who’s laughing now!” Chet called as he gestured a punch to one of the humanoid’s guts. The crowd was more confused than ever; mumbles and whispers broke out.
Chet began to laugh uncontrollably and asked, “Is this real life? Am I really standing in front of DefCon right now?!”
An impatient audience member stood yelling “Are you going to talk about the robots or what?”
Chet’s laugh halted; he turned to lock eyes with the accuser. “What the hell did you just say to me idiot? Have you not seen what I’ve done? Show some damn respect.” Chet fired off. The crowd began to rumble and several boos rattled the room.
Visibly frustrated, Chet ranted “Oh come on! Are you guys not impressed with what I’ve built? These things are badass! You all need a reality check. Bunch of incompetent idiots.”
The crowd exploded with booing and hurled slurs. Three Goons rushed the stage to confront Chet, but they cautiously minded their distance from the humanoids.
One Goon grabbed the microphone from Chet and said “That concludes this talk and umm… yea… check out one of the other tracks!” As the curtains began to close, two other Goons attempted to console Chet. His face was now red with anger, he shrugged off the Goons, and stormed off stage. The humanoids remained on the stage, inert but eerily watchful. The show which had promised much was unaccountably over. The two friends made their way back to their hotel.

“What in the actual hell just happened?” Jasper exclaimed as he unlocked the door to their hotel room.
“Beats me. I guess we should have ‘marveled in his genius’ more, maybe then he wouldn’t have short circuited.” mocked Garrett.
“I’m mean how the hell does a guy like that even build something as amazing as those humanoids?” Jasper continued as he shuffled through the doorway of their room. Garrett stopped in the doorway and pondered for a moment.
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe somebody else at the company did. Wouldn’t be the first time someone higher on an org-chart stole a lower someone’s success. Either way, if Omega Industries’ powers-at-be managed to let that shitshow go down, then it’s only a matter of time before something else happens and their secrets are revealed.”
“Especially considering they just pissed off a room of hackers.” Jasper said laughing.
“Honestly, I won’t be surprised if their organization gets compromised tonight. If someone pulled it off, they would be hailed like kings at the con tomorrow.”
“Are you feeling royal?” Jasper joked.
“Lolz. Good one.” Garrett laughed.
“I’m serious. My consulting gig isn’t much of a consulting gig anymore. I haven’t gotten my hands dirty in so long.”
“Yea, I know the feeling. Sorta in the same rut at my job too. But, I don’t know. We aren’t kids anymore, I’ve sorta grown out of those shenanigans.” Garrett sighed.
“Do you remember the pastry shop?”
Garrett burst with laughter. “How could I forget? That vulnerable loyalty-card system, all the donuts our young bodies could handle.”
“There’s a piece of me that misses those days. Seemed like we could do anything with no risk or consequences. Anymore if feels like I’m on a track and can only go one direction.” They both looked down a bit as they realized what fun they used to have and how they hadn’t felt that rush in some time.
“Fuck it. Let’s pop this asshole.” Garrett exclaimed.

The two friends furiously started setting up their gear. Garrett cleared off the one desk in the room and opened his laptop. Jasper leaped to the entertainment stand and scooted the TV to one end of his soon-to-be desk. He promptly pulled his laptop out and connected it to TV to act as a second display.
“I’ll start looking at external system exploitation, you take social engineering.” said Garrett.
“Roger Roger.” Jasper said in a robotic voice.

Garret first looked up what IP addresses were registered to Omega Industries. He then started to cross reference the addresses against various Internet scanning services.
“I’m checking out what Shodan’s got before I start doing any active scanning.” Garrett announced.
“I just fired up Harvester and Recon-ng. Gonna start aggregating employee data.” Jasper confirmed.
Garrett’s screen filled with server after server belonging to Omega Industries. FTP server, SMTP relay, and HTTP server were some of the major targets he found. He took the banner and versioning information provided by the Internet scanning services and started looking for disclosed vulnerabilities.
“Found some juicy targets and checked them against CVEs and ExploitDB, but nothing is obviously vulnerable. I’m gonna keep digging.” Garrett reported.
“Damn. I was hoping we’d get lucky. I just gathered up a couple hundred names and emails. Gonna see what metadata I can scrape off hosted files, might get a username schema.” Jasper replied.
Garrett went back to Internet scanning services and started analyzing once again. Much time passed, but the friends had not yet caught a break.
“I’m gonna go for a walk outside, I need to clear my head and get some fresh air. I’m starting to get bogged down. Care to join?” Garrett asked.
“Good idea. But I’m making some headway with mangling email addresses and usernames, so I’m still feeling pretty good. I’m gonna pass” Jasper said without even looking at Garret.

Garrett left the hotel room heading for the elevator bank. He rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Even though it was late, the casino floor was like a subway station during rush hour. He hated all the smoke in the casino, but it was the cost of getting fresh air outside. He finally made his way through the casino maze and saw the front entrance. He walked outside and found a bench to sit at. He sat down and let out a large sigh. He was out of steam. He began to wonder if they should just call it a night and let the whole thing go. He began to watch the various people on the street. He chuckled when he saw the 150 foot long taxi line and all the poor souls waiting in it. He watched as the taxi clerk evenly distributed people into taxis. Group by group they were all balanced and loaded into a taxi. Garrett’s eyes widened. He stood up and yelled, “The load balancers!” The people in the taxi line jumped at his outburst and stared at him awkwardly. He sprinted back into the hotel and up to his room.

Sitting back down at his makeshift desk, Garrett began to investigate the load balancers used by Omega Industries: Saturn Solutions. He quickly opened a web browser and his cursor pulsed in the address bar as he banged his head with his fist. He tried to remember the blog of the person who presented right before Chet. Jasper then noticed his partner’s irritation.
“Calm down Turbo. What’s eating you?” Jasper asked.
“Saturn Solutions load-balancers. They are running Saturn Solutions load-balancers.” Garrett replied. “That guy said he found a backdoor, what the hell was the name of his blog?”
“I think it was called GhostShellSecurity.”
Garrett quickly typed GhostShellSecurity.com into his web browser and found the post regarding the Saturn Solutions load-balancer backdoor. His eyes zipped left and right as he drank every ounce of information on the page as if he had been without water for days. He laughed as he saw that the backdoor was simply a set of credentials on the administrative portal that allowed anyone to login and have full administrative access. He fired up an anonymizing proxy and configured his web browser to use it. He typed in the IP address of one of the load balancers. The page loaded and he was promoted to login. He entered the backdoor credentials and the administrative dashboard was presented. He smiled.
“We’re in.” Garrett proclaimed. “The backdoor credentials worked.”
“Oh hell yes! Nothing like a fresh exploit being abused in the wild.” Jasper proclaimed.
“Looks like I have enough privilege to flash some new firmware on the device.” Garrett said. He looked at Jasper and grinned. “Looks like you’re favorite firmware monkey gets to build some a custom firmware preloaded with some hacking tools.”
“Won’t the new firmware kill their configuration and take the device down? I’d think they notice if one of their load-balancers dropped off.”
“That’s why I’m going to rip their configuration off and make sure my custom firmware is preconfigured with it. There will only be a momentary blip in service while the device reboots.” Garrett answered with a satisfied smile. Garrett pulled down the current configuration and grabbed a clean version of the firmware from the Saturn Solutions website. He began back loading various hacking tools and install the current configuration.

Chet Goldstein sat alone at a desk in dark hotel room. The only light visible was that of Chet’s laptop screen. The white light of the laptop screen revealed his face in his hands and wallowing in a river of self-pity, he wailed,
“I don’t understand why it happened.”
“I just wanted to show them what I had been working on.”
“I’ve been working so hard on this.”
“I’m the good guy.”
“What I do is to impress them.”
“Why do they always pick on me?” Chet’s face contorted with anger.
“Why is it always me?!”
“What do I have to do to prove I am better?!”
“Show them. I have to show them!”
He quickly tapped the keys. His laptop screen was a black background and green text was flowing on the screen as he kept typing. The screen wasn’t displaying any sort of graphics or interface, rather it some sort of coding language. He typed for quite some time, stopped, and then saved the file. Chet stood up and walking out of the light. All that was left on screen was a prompt which read, ‘[+] Saved proof.hmnoid’.

“Alright, my custom firmware is ready to go.” Garrett said, “Let’s flash this puppy.”
Garrett once again logged onto the Saturn Solutions management interface via an anonymizing proxy. He browsed to the “Update Firmware” portal and uploaded his firmware. He sat there bouncing his left knee as he watched the progress bar grow to 100%. It finished uploading and he moved his cursor over the “Finish Update (Reboot Required)” button.

He looked to Jasper and said “Here goes nothing” and clicked the button. Jasper browsed to the Omega Industries homepage, which he assumed was one of the applications behind the load-balancer. His screen displayed, “503 – Service unavailable”. The rebooting load-balancer made the homepage, and likely other applications, inaccessible, as expected. The friends sat in agony. Every second of inaccessibility made them that much more vulnerable to being caught.

“It’s back!” Jasper exclaimed as the homepage finally loaded. “If all went well, I should be able to SSH directly into the load-balancer now.” said Garrett. Garret opened his terminal, configured his anonymizing proxy, and remotely logged into the load-balancer via the SSH protocol.
He quickly did a file directory listing to confirm the tools he loaded into the firmware were still there. “All the tools are here, we are ready to roll. I’m going to start with responder.py.” Garrett said. “I’ll get my machine ready to crack any hashes you catch.” Jasper responded.

Garrett fired up responder.py and watched as it harvested authentication credentials off the network. His terminal exploded with stolen credentials. Garrett was excited as he didn’t expect to get this many credentials so quickly. Unfortunately, these credentials were in the form of hashes, which are a cryptographical fingerprint of a password. Luckily, the hashing algorithm was known and the friends could take a list of known common passwords, pass each one through the hashing algorithm, and then compare the common password hash and a stolen hash. If the hashes matched, they successfully guessed the password and had it in a cleartext form, a process known as cracking. Garrett quickly saved all the stolen hashes to a flashdrive and then gave them to Jasper. Jasper loaded them onto his computer and started cracking them. Within moments the cracking was successful on several hashes and the friends had cleartext credentials to use.

Garret used the first set of stolen credentials to log into the Omega Industries online employee phonebook though his anonymizing proxy. Oddly enough, each employee’s workstation information was listed in the phonebook. Garrett looked up the user whose credentials he just used. The credentials belong to a Human Resource employee named Marsha Brown. Garrett identified her workstation and then proceed to use Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to log into Marsha Brown’s desktop. Garrett made sure to tunnel his traffic through an anonymizing proxy and the load-balancer, that way the traffic was stealthy and had access internally. The RDP connection worked and Garrett was greeted with a messy desktop with a picture of two orange kittens as background. He chuckled at the kittens and began pouring over the various Human Resource databases and in no time he came across something peculiar.

“So this is strange,” Garret said, “their entire R&D team disappeared.”

“What do you mean?” Jasper asked.

“So I came across the humanoid project and initially it had 147 engineers assigned to it. Now there is only one person… Chet Goldstein.”

“What the hell? How does that work? Where did the rest of them go? Reassigned? Fired?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find any records of termination or reassignment. I’m mean, I can’t even find their names. All I know is, wherever these engineers went, they definitely didn’t want anybody to find them. Enough with employees though, I want see what technical details I can find about the humanoids.” said Garrett.

“Here start with these.” Jasper said, handing Garret a flash drive, “I compiled a list of executives from the employee data I gathered earlier. I was able to crack some of their passwords, which are included as well. I think with these accounts I cracked, you should be able to get access to anything you need.”

Jasper was right. The list of compromised high profile accounts gave him access to all the systems he could ever want. He immediately connected to a research and development workstation via his anonymizing proxy and began reading all the documentation he could find. He came across a document called the “Consumption Process.” As he read the documentation, his stomach became unsettled, but he leaned in on his chair and kept reading. Each word he read made him more and more uncomfortable. Garrett reconnected to the HR databases and began frantically flipping between them and the R&D documentation. Eventually he could no longer bear the knowledge and he stood up from his desk. He began pacing around the room.

“What the fuck do we do? What the fuck do we do?” Garrett rambled.

Jasper, recognizing his friend’s panic and anxiousness, asked “Dude, everything alright? What the hell is going on?”
Garrett paced around the room, mumbling frantically. Jasper stood up and grabbed Garrett’s arm and sat him down on the bed. Jasper sat down next to him. “Take a breath.” Jasper said. Garrett began to calm down, and he explained to Jasper what he had found.

“So I found this documentation called ‘Consumption Process.’ I wasn’t really sure what to expect and almost didn’t even read it. It outlines where they got their artificial intelligence, well I guess I shouldn’t use the word ‘artificial’. They discovered a way to tap into a brain stem of a sentient organism and derive a programmatic representation of its consciousness. The sentient organism is killed in the process, hence the name ‘consumption process’.” Garrett began shaking and tears began to form in his eyes. “The term ‘consumption’ rang a bell with me, and I remember reading it once before in the HR databases. So I went back and found a hidden directory within the database that I missed the first time around. It contained two files. One was a letter from the previous R&D lead, or at least that’s the title it had on the signature. It said that he was proud of their accomplishments, but he could not condone human trials. He threatened to go to the police. The other file was a listing of the 146 missing R&D engineers, all of which had the status ‘consumed.'” Garrett, still sobbing, looked up and across the room as his laptop. His sobbing stopped and his eyes grew wide.

“Oh fuck.”

His heart sank and his gut churred as realized that when in his eagerness to reconnect to HR database, he didn’t connect through his anonymizing proxy. There was a knock at the door. The friends sat on the bed frozen like two deer in the headlight of hurling semi-truck. He stood up and before he could take one step towards the door, it was kicked down and three humanoids stormed in. Garrett dashed to his desk, slammed his laptop shut, and swung it at an assaulting humanoid. The humanoid blocked Garrett’s blow with its forearm and moved forward unfazed. His laptop shattered and threw plastic and electronics into the air. The humanoid shoved Garrett and he caught the corner of the bed causing him to fall. The side of Garrett’s head smashed into the nightstand near the bed, and he blacked out before he hit the floor.

Hours later, Chet leaned in and read his monitor.

‘[+] Consumption Job #147 complete.’
‘[+] Consumption Job #148 complete.’

“And now for the rest of these assholes.” Chet mumbled.

‘[+] Execute proof.hmnoid’

 

 

Thanks for reading my story!

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