Jack slowly climbed back to consciousness from a deep sleep. The familiarity of his bed left him with the feeling that all his recent experiences had just been a bad dream. But when he opened his eyes and saw that he was in his room in his soul space. The tension that had left him returned, and he was once again suffused with an arctic rage.
Checking his Interface, he and found that Madison had lowered the time ratio to 2:1 and was using her parallel self. He got up and headed towards Madison's office. But stopped when he felt the typical morning pressure in his bladder.
He didn't have a bathroom in his soul space, so he exported all his physical changes to his physical-world self, then left his soul space before enabling parallel self. While his physical self went in search of food, his parallel self headed towards Madison's office. He found her furiously typing on her keyboard and glaring at a monitor.
"Hey," he said. "What's the news?"
"The bastards are trying to frame me!" she declared angrily.
"How?"
"They wiped one of the servers I could have accessed."
"Could have?"
"Yes. I provided them with proof that there was a vulnerability that would grant me remote code execution on several of their servers. The proof of concept I sent them didn't actually access those servers, it just proved that it was possible."
"The bastards wiped one of their own servers and are now claiming that I did it on purpose!"
"If you could do it, so could someone else. What proof do they have that it was you?"
"That's the thing! They don't have concrete proof. They have the logs showing when the server became non-responsive, and they have the timestamps I provided them, but they don't have proof it was me that wiped the server. It could have been someone else, but I know it wasn't."
"How can you be certain it wasn't someone else?"
"Because any hacker that could gain access to their systems wouldn't just wipe a server for the hell of it. They would root the server and use it as a pivot point, or encrypt the drive and send a ransom request."
"Ah, okay." He had only a vague idea what a pivot point was, something about using that server to hack other servers or something. He thought for a moment, then asked, "What about a competitor?"
"Huh. Okay, yeah, that's a possibility. A competitor wouldn't want to leave a trail, just destroy shit."
"Are you still in the FIS building?"
"Yes. They've been grilling me for hours. It's insane the bullshit questions they keep asking."
"Okay, great."
"What? Why?"
"Because that gives you a rock solid Alabi."
"What? Oh, shit! You want me to hack their servers in a simulation, then export the changes?"
"Yup. If another server gets wiped while you are being held, it will make it really hard to claim you did it."
"But that won't work."
"Why not?"
"They could just claim I planted time-delayed malware on the server that wiped the server days after I planted it. And we can't plant fake or real access logs because of that problem you described where the changes that get exported are physical, not logical, so it would just corrupt their filesystems."
"Didn't you say there are ways to get code to execute the moment you plug in a thumb drive? We can make a thumb drive just appear in a server, and if you start with a blank thumb drive, you could avoid the filesystem corruption issue."
She jumped up and grabbed him in a hug while saying, "You're a genius!"
He rather thought it was more likely she was the genius, but he wasn't going to reject her compliment.
"I'll crank up the time ratio to 10:1, so we have as much time as possible to carry out whatever plan we come up with."
"Okay," she said.
After increasing the time ratio and feeling himself lose contact with his physical self, he asked, "So, what's the plan?"
"I'm going to make a plant-box that automatically does the full hack as soon as it's turned on. Then we just need to get it planted in one of their competitor's servers. They're all scummy MLM marketing companies anyway, so I don't care if another one gets implicated. And I have just the victim in mind. I know they have some on-prem servers, so it'll be easy to locate the server we need."
"Great. So, how long will that take?"
"Not long," she said in a suspicious tone.
"Madison," he said sternly.
"What?" she said guiltily, her face still buried in his chest.
He just stared down at her, saying nothing.
"Oh, alright," she said. "I was already plotting my revenge when you walked in. I figured, if I'm going down for this, I might as will do it for real and have my revenge while I'm at it."
She paused, then added, "I wasn't going to actually do it, at least not before telling you about it. I just...I needed something to occupy my mind and coding a righteous revenge hack seemed like a great way to keep occupied."
"Okay, as long as you don't actually do anything destructive without talking to me first, that's fine. If you really need to vent, you can always ask me to create a simulation for you."
She nodded, "Okay, I understand. And...Thanks."
She release him and went back to her desk. "While I work on this, can you try to locate the servers for Essential Oils Emporium?"
"Sure."
"Oh, I also need to locate a hack berry three. I'll need to test it here first before we try it in a simulation. I think Stelte Electronic Supply might have some. They have practically everything."
He need to do some web searches and couldn't do them in the physical world, so he started a Nominal detail sim using the same snapshot he had used when he and Madison were test driving cars. He didn't need a recent snapshot just to locate some businesses, and once he knew the locations, he could use a more recent snapshot for templates and object teleportation.
When he finally located the server room for Prism Partners, they found it was just an office with one rack of computers and several tables with computers stacked on them. They were able to locate a network switch connected to a larger switch, but not connected to anything else. This was fortuitous because otherwise there was no way to connect a thumb drive to a server without risking filesystem corruption, or connect the hack berry to a network switch without causing the device to glitch and reboot. If the switch is rebooted, someone might get alerted. It was unlikely given the state of Prism Partner' server room, but it was a possibility they wanted to avoid. But, since the little switch wasn't connected to any computers, no one would notice if it glitched and rebooted.
The first thing they did was templatize and link the little switch, toggle its power button, then export the change. Next they connected the hack berry to the switch. The hack berry had two thumb drives connected, one for receiving instructions, and the other for recording logs. The hack berry was configured to mount and unmount the two thumb drives on a schedule so they would know when it was safe to push or pull changes from the thumb drives without risking filesystem corruption.
After exporting the changes, they waited. Then Madison pulled the thumb drives, extracted the data, then plugged them back in. She had configured the hackberry so that it would mount the thumb drives once every thirty seconds. That translated to every five minutes inside his soul space because of the 10:1 time ratio.
She examined the logs from the output drive, grunted in disgust, then began typing furiously. After about thirty minutes of typing and muttering increasingly violent curses, she repeated the thumb drive pulling, data transfer, then plugging them back in. After which he pushed the changes out to the physical world.
They repeated this process several times over the next three subjective hours before Madison finally yelled, "YES! Take that, you slimy bastards!"
"Did it work?" he asked.
"Yes. I trashed all their servers. And I made sure to leave a trail that leads back to Prism Partners."
The Prism Partners building had a closet with cleaning supplies, including a bucket and a bottle of bleach. So, after she pushed a command to the hack berry to cause it to wipe itself, he used linked templates to teleport the hack berry and thumb drives to the bucket, then teleported bleach into the bucket. They did this for misdirection. None of their DNA would transfer because linked self and linked templates didn't work together. And they used nitril gloves when handling the devices so the acid in their finger oils would not etch the plastic.
When they were done, they went out into the white room and Jack sat down on his, still intact, couch. Madison climbed into his lap and pressed her face into his neck.
"Thanks you," she breathed. "This would have been a nightmare for me without you. This Genesis Heart is amazing. It's scarry to think how easily you could destroy someone's life and they would never understand how it happened."
Remembering the sight of his destroyed living room, he thought, Yes, that's exactly what I plan to do, destroy someone's life.