DEF CON 31 Short Story Writing Contest
https://media.defcon.org/

Tunnel Vision - by Rex



It’s been quite awhile since a job interview made me sweat like this, or since I’ve had to walk into a waiting room cold. With my experience and age (and pay grade), in fact, I don’t remember the last time I actually _had_ to interview for a job at all; My leaning on connections made at DEFCON to set this up was just as much about being out of the mix as it was about needing an in. I’m probably just nervous about the next steps despite the nepotism win. Or maybe it’s the decor of this place. Approaching the stark, concrete, monolithic tower from the outside, as well as the full-body pat down and metal detector, set me up to be surprised by the carefully curated, all glass interior design. The designer gray denim couches look chic and uninviting but are far too expensive to be uncomfortable, however uptight I feel right now. Despite my best dressed I feel distinctly out of place. Their glass walls allow me to peer through rows upon rows of identical office layouts and cubicles that stretch off into the distance like seeing infinity in dueling mirrors.


When I think back, though, I suppose a lot of pivotal life moments in my life happened at DC; From meeting lifelong friends, confidantes, and co-conspirators, to streamlining the path to a lucrative career as a government contracted pentester. DEFCON is definitely a cheat code in the game of life. The thought helps me steady my nerves just as the receptionist approaches. I sit up straight and make small adjustments to the seams of my suit, the position of my tie, and a little fancy multi-faceted broach I brought especially for the occasion.


I find it a bit difficult to keep pace. She absent-mindedly paces the labyrinthine hallways like an afterthought while I - had I no prior knowledge - would be sure this was a maze built to obfuscate. I keep my head on a swivel, taking in every bit that I can while feigning confusion - camera, janitors closet, camera, elevator bank, etc. So far everything as expected. I make a haphazard attempt at small talk - “How do you find _anything_ in this place? Looks like it goes on fooor-ever”. Without missing a beat she retorts “Honestly I use the people as landmarks since you can see right into their offices. The legal department is this way “, as she gestures gracefully to the left, ” but if I see Billy here in the blue blazer I know I’ve wandered into accounting. If things work out with you, the other devs you’ll be working with are up one floor and to the right”, she said almost exactly as we came up on the elevators. After exiting one we settle on an isolated room and she wishes me luck as she hands me off to the interviewer.


Quickly I survey the room: there’s a laptop, a few pieces of furniture and not much else. It’s obvious this isn’t someone’s personal office. The first problem, I think to myself, as the interviewer’s footsteps begin to echo down the glass hallway. As he enters my view he doesn’t strike me as a dev - being far too well put together and accenting his suit with cufflinks, a tie clip, an actual expensive pair of dress shoes, and an ever more expensive set of designer frames that reflected light like everything else in this office. I can recognize these things on others but details like that mostly escape hackers. It’s not quite what I’d hoped for but I’ll make it work.


“Welcome!”, his bass-y voice boomed as he outstretched his handshake in a friendly yet authoritative show of dominance. “I’m Mark Rogers, Head of Product”. Knowing what this gesture meant and him being a much larger man than I, I gave him the death grip and an unwavering stare but also a smile; I wouldn’t have many chances so it remained paramount that he not dominate the conversation. He continued, “I hope this isn’t too weird but I’ll be starting you off today. We like to have someone from each team speak with potential hires but our lead dev is in another meeting. Our coding aptitude tests are mostly standardized so we figured it wouldn’t be a big deal for me to kick things off.” “Oh not one bit” I said - needing him to know I wouldn’t rattle because, from an access perspective, this might really work out. He cited a programmatic problem from rote memory with all the enthusiasm of a high-school student taking a calculus quiz. A recursion-based graph problem I could easily ace in my sleep if I hadn’t every intention of bombing it worse than an alcoholic at a Crash and Compile competition.



—



I open the laptop and begin to click-clack at the keyboard, pleased with the tactile feedback. Having an hour in which to look busy and challenged, my mind wanders; This feels exactly like the kind of place Casey and I would’ve ran amok in in our late teens, and similar to the sort of place that would’ve clamored to hire us years ago once we became more known in “hacker scene” through released tools & talks. This situation would even feel like some of our oldschool shenanigans if the stakes weren’t so high, and shenanigans were definitely something he had a knack for. He also kept charisma in his back pocket like a get out of jail free card, something he definitely needed because I fucking _hated_ the guy the first time we met face to face.


That year he debuted the “Wairship”, an RC controlled blimp capable of hacking wifi, bluetooth, LTE, lora, & zigbee, and also came with a payload of weaponized exploits including some zero days. He managed to brick mine and about 85 other people’s phones that year and might’ve gotten away with it had his opsec not been crappy enough to forget that a dirigible made for an easily followed target. I silently stalked the blimp around the event halls of the convention center till he landed it for retrieval in a chill-out area. I confronted him but he was so in his own head that all he could say was “Cool right?!” while grinning ear to ear.


The fact that I might be pissed hadn’t even crossed his mind or - if it did - his superb poker face gave nothing away. Hard to stay mad at someone who won’t engage you on those terms but that was Casey, or Capsaicin as he’d introduced himself - able to disarm nearly anyone. I told him his hacker name had one too many syllables and wasn’t quite edgy enough. I mean I had to dig at him at least a little, even if we did wind up being best friends. He said its origin had something to do with a PepperCon, which I’ve heard stories of but in all these years have never stumbled across.


As we stayed in contact over the next few years, the genesis of his personality - the people pleasing and the charisma, the cantankerousness - revealed itself. He was an orphan. Ok wait, can a 20 year old be an orphan? I’m not sure what the semantic age cut-off is there but the point is he was alone in the world. For a long while it was just him and his mother; She had a debilitating illness that kept her bedridden and oftentimes unable to move. So bad - in fact - that he was homeschooled so he could assist with her care as they couldn’t afford a private nurse. At some point she enrolled in a program IBM launched to teach disabled people how to architect and develop software before offering them jobs. She took to it very well, almost having a knack for it, so it made sense that she’d pass the skill set onto him. I can’t imagine what that loss must’ve felt like but between that know-how and some luck he’d had with early Bitcoin investments, at least he’d always be able to take care of himself. I’m sure knowing this gave her some peace in the end.



—



The tap of Mark’s rings on the handle of his office door as he approached snapped my focus back to the present. He stepped out to let me finish the coding challenge in private but now my time was almost up. Before me probably lied the worst code I’d ever written. Casey, or Cap - as I started calling him - would’ve given me so much shit, as would anyone else from our crew, but I copy pasted the same code dozens of times instead of writing a for loop so I can’t say I'd be surprised. “How ya doin’, champ?”, Mark inquired, somewhat condescending. I inhale and audibly and say “I’m having a little trouble.” He puts his massive mit of a palm on my shoulder in an attempt to connect and announces “Don’t sweat it man, not everybody finishes” which feels like an extremely awkward double entendre. He lets me know the lead dev’s wrapping up his prior meeting shortly and will review my code before joining us. We continue with an interview, touching upon all the standard job questions:


“What’s your worst trait?” “Greatest passion?” “What project are you most proud of?”


Bingo. I come alive. I mean I really fucking sell it. I tell him a fictional aggregation of about four interesting research projects I’d recently heard of at infosec conventions. I mean of course _I_ have an endless bag of tricks and accomplishments I could pull from but I need him to not be able to tie anything back to me. Besides all I needed was the enthusiasm for the setup:


“What about you, what’s a project you’re really proud of? I’ve always admired the ability of some Product Designers to convey the essence of a tool through the artifacts they create.”


“WELL” Mark bellows - “We doo have designers on staff…but you’re right, I do bring a certain type of quarterbacking to the rest of the team”


“Anything you could show me that wouldn’t violate NDA?”


He places his jewelried hand over his mouth in a contemplative motion, for what feels like a suspiciously long time, brings his hands together with a deafening pop, and shouts “LET’S GO!” before storming out of the little glass fish-tank of an office and down the hallway to his own. I adjust my broach as I take up a brisk walk to chase him. Before I could even step into the room he’d opened several mockups, both static and low-fidelity interactive, on an obnoxiously large screen.


I squint a bit from the brightness, but realize a few choice things: one, he’s so excited he hasn’t even turned his office lights on yet (or maybe he hasn’t because his screen’s so goddamned bright), which - two - means he won’t notice my reaching around the back of his screen like a pickpocket to drop a USB implant. In fact the screen’s so large he actually has to turn his head to scan the whole thing, this might be perfect! I subtly rifle my hand around my pocket till I can feel the sliver of a dime-sized pcb sandwiched between my middle and index fingers. I latch onto whatever phrase is emoting from this sound-system of a man - something about a new feature - and excitedly grab at the bottom left corner of his screen fingers wrapping around back, thumb touching the screen: “You mean this component right here?!” I insert something so short into the back facing USB slot you wouldn’t even see it by looking straight at it. And not a moment too soon; Just as he cranes his head to meet the subject of my question, his phone vibrates. The dev tells him I did terribly on the assignment and that he can end the interview and get home early. Mark’s poker face is terrible, but he speaks with the same exaggerated earnestness as before. “Ah, bad news buddy. Unfortunately my guy says you didn’t get far enough along in the assignment. No hard feelings but we’re gonna have to cut it here.”


But things fall into place exactly as I wish. I feign a knee-jerk, emotional, almost curt response before briskly turning tail and running. Normally I wouldn’t bail in such an immediate way when Social Engineering but in this case it’s imperative I beat him to the elevators, and I _know_ this Mark character will be making haste to get to his fantasy football, beer pong, or whatever kinda novelty league he’s in. When I turn the corner out of his sight, I sprint a little faster towards the elevator bank, probably looking like a frantic fish in this giant aquarium. I literally knee slide into home base - the final elevator in the bank (and besides, these floors are squeaky clean anyways). The elevator I know for a fact lacks a security camera. An oversight born of contractor miscommunications and organizational laziness that took some of the more silent partners on our hacking team days of OSINT to verify.


Though I quickly snatch the hidden ceramic elevator key from my lapel, I carefully slide it in to avoid noise; I hear Mark coming, I’m sure he can hear me. I command the doors to close and disable the elevator. Mark presses the elevator button none the wiser, summoning another. A weight lifts from my shoulders as I hear his elevator creak further and further away. I re-enable the elevator, punch in the first floor, and disable it again once there. I feel like a conductor with a train now out of service. I sit on the floor, legs folded, grounding myself to slow my heartbeat after narrowly making it. I set up my earbuds & favorite playlist to pass the time while I wait for the team to give me notice of a dropped payload.



—





Everything changed after the 3rd DEFCON Cap and I went to. The blimp stunt his first year turned a few heads in his direction, but after the c2 framework with integrated key management I wrote and open-sourced on a drunken dare (and a number of similarly drunk pranks) all eyes were on us. Every talk we gave that year, no matter how informal or how large or small the room, was packed, and the stars on our Github repos shot up. High on the wave of recognition and probably delirious from the midnight Vegas heat, we met up with a handful of other close Hacker Summer Camp friends on a hotel rooftop overlooking the city to celebrate over drinks and joints, and decided to give some structure to _this thing of ours_. In this light and in light of our love for puns we named our group “La Code Nostra”, then we argued for twenty minutes over whether people would silently swallow or needlessly emphasize the “e” in code.


Another breakthrough that year? The proliferation of Large Language Models. We’d won a few LLM based CTFs and the military made a large show out of recruitment with the goal of building an end-to-end pipeline for machine learning models that could generate offensive war-time strategy in near real-time based on up-to-date info. We were all nervous about the feds hovering around us, but Cap - naive as he could be sometimes - dove in head first, enticed by a sense of belonging, more money than any of us had ever seen, and the ability to pursue any of his whims.


And if that year was breakthrough, the next was absolutely SEISMIC. By this point all of our team had been recruited by one or another three-letter agency, or by some military contractor. We were all suddenly rich beyond our wildest dreams. After realizing the similarities between the Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine - the mechanism allowing the brain spatial reasoning via neurons - and the Attention Transformer and Neural Net setup of LLMs, a team of computational neuroscientists and medical doctors managed to successfully run a Large Language Model on living neurological tissue! A _Living_ Large Language Model, so to speak, that outperformed even GPU-based LLM matrix multiplication by several orders of magnitude. One of the first places they broke the news on their speaking tour was the Biohacking Village at DC. It wasn’t long before independent researchers like Thought Emporium and a few others had nearly perfectly replicated the effects with much less expensive setups. It was finally something next level that Cap _hadn’t_ a hand in designing or helping code, but he made damned sure his company was first in line to utilize this technology, unfortunately - in retrospect - paving the way for the military to lock down an exclusive use of said tech.

The year after brought in catastrophe. Cap called me one night, frantic, out of breath, and barely able to string his thoughts together. I thought I’d a decent idea of what he was working on but as I started to grasp the full scope and scale I became a bit sick to my stomach. The initially ideated tools were said to do things like managing logistics pipelines during wartime, or for effectively planning evacuations of civilians and military personnel. The system he described, however, rang much more powerful and much darker, able to plot a violent - albeit elegant - coup in any country of your choice, knowing exactly which “Humint resources” (military speak for blackmailed or otherwise manipulated people as assets). Sure, sometimes his naivete won out but Cap was nothing if not a man of his principles; He simply couldn’t stand by while his work was being explicitly used to tear down governments and murder dissidents. That year at Skytalks he spilled _everything_ , to immense applause. It didn’t even take a full week before he wound up in a nearly fatal car accident one night, leaving him nearly immobilized.


—


My phone vibrates and it brings me back to the moment. I remove the inconspicuous radio earpiece from my broach, the dimly lit elevator now eerily illuminated by it’s lone LED; Sheila - or Shade as we’ve called her, since that night on the roof - dropped the payload via our USB keyboard implant and now had admin access to the building’s control plane. The next steps were at hand. I parkour up the side of the metal box using the elevator handrails, unlatch the service door, and shimmy my way into the dark, cavernous elevator shaft, pressing myself to the side of the shaft and supporting my bodyweight by outward side pressure against two concrete columns. The metal elevator creaks loudly, slowly sliding mere inches from my face as Shade remotely moves it to a higher floor.

At the bottom of this shaft lies a maintenance box responsible for, among other things, this building's connectivity to the company's overall intranet. We could control local facets of this building with the USB implant alone but this junction box would give us the same access to _all_ the buildings, including the medical research lab. My handmade dyneema-enmeshed ceramic lockpicks made short work of the lock, Shade having already disabled the remote sensor. I attach another, more involved implant this time (a raspberry pi) to the correct networking cable, and cover the LEDs with a bit of leftover electrical tape I carry in my wallet.

I climb back into the elevator, re-activate it, and find a back exit out of the building, making sure to take a beat once outside. I inhale deeply, not realizing how cooped up I felt sitting in an elevator for over an hour. But the home stretch draws near. I double tap my broach and though you can’t see it, the same dazzling, twinkling infrared light show as I had running while in the building began to dance. Its importance carrying even more weight now as I’d no idea the distribution of cameras throughout the campus grounds. Shade , probably hearing the chains and spokes of the bike through our radio, chastises me for wasting time. For my head not being in the game. I tell her this focuses me even more, and that I need to be in my best, most playful spirits for the delicate partnered dance of mantrap entry - both the security kind and biological - we're about to orchestrate. Revenge for our fallen friend was closer than it had ever been.


(To be continued.)