flux
There is work to be done.
Ther eis a video that is still floating around the web, being slowly copied and shared and disseminated in a fashion that all things do. It is a slow moving virus, but a virus none the less. Something that replicates and moves along because people are digitally making out and swapping data and there is a chance that slowly, ever-so-slowly, it's gaining popularity and becoming another one of those urban legends on the deep web.
There is a chance that there are offline copies, now, but those are unreachable. The online copies though, the things people are most readily accessing, are still out there. Because seriously, who burns CDs anymore?
Grace
There's something not quite right about removing data from the internet. It's possible, right? For someone like Grace, especially. But there's something about the internet itself that refuses to be silenced. The Streisand Effect is a thing. People don't like to be told no. It's something that resonates deep in the recesses of Grace's very heart, that. And yet, here she is, saying no. At first, she decided not to, but Angela was right. There are other people out there who will understand exactly what happened to Lydia.
Sometimes, people's lives are more important than ideology.
She's got her hack on in the parking lot outside a Carl's Jr, leeching wifi and prepping a small hen-and-chicks plant for its moment of glory -- being the processor in her quantum computer.
[Life 2, Entropy 3, Forces 2 and Corr 3 -- Plant-Based Quantum Computing. Diff 6 - 1 (personalized instrument) - 1 (taking time)]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Grace
[Extends!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
Grace
[Computers, Diff 7 - 3 (Chloe) -- Accessing Sasha's botnet]
Dice: 9 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 5, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )
Grace
[I should have double-10'sed that, but hey.... Overkill much?]
flux
(Yeah, no, you got in just fine. LOL)
Grace
The first step is to go back to the root -- Sasha. From there, all the branches and leaves of video virus sprout. The fact that he built a botnet into the video makes things so much easier. The first few steps are going to be nicely easy. The next -- tracing which places the video has been uploaded to afterwards? Not so easy.
She finds it to be simple, really. Surprising, how many people out there had access to Mortis Cafe. Even more surprising how many of those decided to download a video from the site and let it infect them. Works out in her favor though.
In order to avoid too many questions, she goes for a less obvious route than erasure. Corrupted hard drives happen. Make it look like a consequence of that virus that went unnoticed so far. It's not like these people have much worth keeping on their computers anyway, right? Fucking snuff porn enthusiasts...
flux
This is the kind of network that should have been hard to access. Sure, Grace was a Goddess with a computer. She could have broken into the NSa's records right now and seen the cell phoen record of every global citizen with the kinds of skills that she had- the woman has successfully hacked the Technocracy before and got away relatively unscathed.
There were a lot of stupid whales out there, and there were a lot of easily found copies of that file that Sasha put out there. Corrupting the people's hard drives shouldn't have been a problem in the slightest and she could find computers from across the globe- some real and some virtual and some with genuine IPs and some with spoofed ones, all available for the pickings.
Only a moron would keep this thing on their connected hard drive.
Grace is just culling the herd.
Grace
[Computers, Diff 8 - 3 (Chloe) -- Trimming off the first branches of the tree of suck!]
Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 9 ) [Doubling Tens]
Grace
Not everybody is so dumb as to access the dark web without a prophylactic. Some people surely did not fall for the Trojan Horse, and these are the ones that Grace goes after next. Mirror sites, shared resources, places where the file sits waiting for some other rube to download it and get ensnared. For these, she corrupts the file. It is no longer accessible. It errors out. It might as well be gone.
For all their security, Grace susses them out and cracks their hashes with the help of a computer that can try every possibility at once. Thanks, Chloe.
Again, not too much of a problem, for her.
The next step, though? May be a little tough. The real pros like to hide, as she does, behind trails of dead ends and multiple proxies. They like to encrypt and encrypt and encrypt again, in chains and shells that you only know are empty until you get to the core and have to backtrack. People with real time on their hands can slip between all the cracks in the dark.
They're also going to be the ones asking the most questions when their shit goes missing. Well. Life is tough, isn't it? Viruses are sneaky things...
[Computers, Diff 9 - 3 (Chloe) -- Trimming off the second branches of the tree of suck!]
Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]
flux
This comes from the simply curious. The people who clicked on something because someone said it was a real WTF video. This is the work of users who found something interesting and kept the tradition alive. Sometimes,t hese people are information hoarders. Sometimes, these people hoild onto the knowledge they have like precious treasures but not precious enough. Hold onto it because it was interesting but, usually, this stuff goes the way of the original Mr. Hands video. Sure, you could find it, but mostly can't nowadays. Grace is working along to make it more like some of the lost footage of the internet. The things that people saw once but can never really pull up again.
If you destroy the data, did it ever really happen?
Real pros like to hide, yes, and she's hunted down a real pro before because she is one. These are the kinds of people who were on par with the young man who started this mess, the one who decided to upload the video and take it out of people's hides for the sake of revenge. Sasha isn't an isolated young man- there are worlds of people who are like him. These are the people who understand that you win some you lose some.
Eventually, over the course of several weeks, Grace is fairly certain that she got the existing copies of the file off of the web, perhaps a little disturbed by how easy it was. Perhaps a little disturbed by the fact that it appears she had an easy task ahead of her.
No, the only copies of this video that exist are the ones that she can't touch without specifically knowing who has it and specifically being able to teleport the specific offline storage space out her way.
Grace
It's the making of a myth, at this point. She'll keep an eye on it, watch to see if the offline becomes online again. But mostly, people should forget, in time. They might not forget that it happened at all, but what did they really see? A "Red Room" video that gets conveniently edited as soon as actual damage is about to be incurred? I mean, it's an obvious fake to begin with.
This is what Grace hopes, anyway.
The next thing on her list (it is a long list, by now) is to ensure that Vivid Xxxtreme isn't a business anymore. She's called Mike, by this point. Told him about the worst of the lot, in hopes that he takes care of good old Doc Brad. She has faith in him. He kills people quite well. And she is turning out to be quite the killer of organizations, herself.
Let's take another one down.
flux
Vivid Xxxtreme is a business that had the unfortunate fortunateness of having a lot of enemies and a very good IT support team. After the little break in that Sasha and Grace pulled, it would seem that security got an upgrade. Nothing that she couldn't handle, of course, but enough of an upgrade that it was a bit of a headache for her to deal with.
Well, a headache if she were drunk and had two working fingers.
She's found some pretty prevalent shell companies before, little offshoots and sites that all worked under the Vivid Xxxtreme brand name. The Leather Library Archives was one such company that was bought out as of late, specializing in vintage BDSM that was actually 100% above board before being taken over. Hijab Hotties, which ran out of Pakistan according to the website (which actually ran out of Pakistan, Ohio), was another shell that seemed to exist only to launder money.
With quite a lot of digging, the name Grant Kherrington Jr. came up.
Grace
Grant. Lydia had mentioned a Grant, hadn't she? Someone, perhaps the only one, who was nice to her during her ordeal. It's not exactly a common name either.
Who is Grant Kherrington Junior in this scheme? It deserves a bit more poking around, doesn't it?
Grace
[Investigation 0 / Int 4 = poking around about Grant Kherrington Jr. Diff 7 + 1 (because 0 Investigation). Spending WP because...]
Dice: 4 d10 TN8 (1, 4, 8, 8) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
flux
What Grace finds is a little bit of interesting information while she is digging.
Grant Kherrington Junior (Independent film director)was married to scream queen Elizabeth Bartlett- an actress who was pretty prominent in the indie horror scene in the 1980's and early 90's who also did some documentary work herself. She was cast to play Gia Carangi in the movie Gia and filmed some of the initial scenes before she got pregnant with her son- Grant Kherrington the third- and backed out of the movie
She was set to play Satine in Moulin Rouge and had some of the scenes filmed before she and her son died in a rather violent home invasion. Grant Kherrington Jr went from indie film production to working in the porn industry. Even then, he bowed out a few years later and became artistic director of vivid Xxxtreme in 2014.
Oddly enough, around the same time that Mortis Cafe came into being.
Grace
Elizabeth Bartlett. Sasha mentioned that Nomz's mom was a scream queen... someone who isn't around anymore. Bunny. Elizabeth 'Bunny' Bartlett? A rather morbid thought comes to mind. A violent home invasion sounds like the perfect cover-up for what typically goes down at Mortis Cafe.If that's who we're dealing with -- they say her son died, right?
Maybe that was just an excuse to keep him out of school?
There's another name on her list, then. Perhaps another who needs to be.... recycled.
Grace
[Computers, Diff 8 - 3 (Chloe) -- Kill the beast that is Vivid Xxxtreme. Strip accounts and steal identities, woo!]
Dice: 9 d10 TN5 (3, 4, 4, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 8 ) [Doubling Tens]
flux
It's done, easily enough she knows that it is only a matter of time before the company falls apart, before the money making beast is dismantled and the employees revolt. Once people realize it's hemorrhaging money it'll be too late. They won't be able to maintain their servers and assets will be sold off.
People who took their money and ran may have disappeared, but there's always a trail for that. Not everyone in this Hellish operation knew the extent of its depravity.
In a month's time, nobody will remember that the company existed save for videos saved on their hard drives and a twelve dollar refund for people who bought lifetime subscriptions.
Grace
Once the hit is done, it looks like nothing's happened at all. It'll continue looking like that, until the finance guys catch on, and then... Well. There's nothing they can do, really. A lot of their funds were illegally sourced. Crying about losing will only bring questions they can't answer, and by then they won't have the money to successfully buy their way out of justice.
There is no justice, really. None that can be found in the so-called 'justice system' at least. There is this, though. And this feels... close enough. The wretched business will die off, and perhaps some of the corrupted-to-the-core people running it along with.
Speaking of which.... What is Grant Kherrington Junior up to these days, she wonders?
Grace
[Computers, Diff 7 - 3 (Chloe) = Now that we have all the info on the finances, what is Grant Kherrington Junior spending his money on?]
Dice: 9 d10 TN4 (2, 3, 3, 5, 5, 5, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 7 ) [Doubling Tens]
flux
It doesn't take a lot of doing. Someone may have set up other accounts for him that aren't in his name but, for the most part, it would appear that whoever did that did such a good job that even Grant doesn't know where all of his things may be. Maybe his assets exist physically, but it would appear that the digital ssets are pretty impressive.
His last purchase it would seem was a check for two thousand dollars written to a private investigator- Evan Michaels. He's spent a few things on gas receipts and fast food. It would appear that he's moving his way out of Montana and towards Texas by way of Colorado.
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