Ghost Ping

Arizona, United States of America, 2044​

. . .

He definitely didn't bring in that wire.

But where it came from, and where it has been. Did someone else connect to Harts? The thought of such things scared [one/the] John Smith more than undead corpses and nuclear fallout. Smith gave off an involuntary shiver as the bunker door sealed behind him.

The senior agent would struggle with sleep tonight. And not because of jet lag or because of a makeshift office bed. Smith had a lot on his mind.

The net noise tonight almost felt like a fever.

. . .

Far away, but on the same continent, another restless mind was lost in her own thoughts. Artificial indigo-violet eyes stared upward into a grand sea of stars illuminating the darkness with the majesty of the Milky Way galaxy. A small, day-old fire smoldered its last embers in the background, illuminating the backs of her military compatriots as they camped out on a desert canyon ridge.

The night animals remained silent in the dark at her presence as she was scarier than any organic human. A lithe, artificial form of plastic and metal made with careful code and precise 3D printing into the likeness and hyper real reflection of the human form. A twisted mirror, a perfected human. A creature separated from nature, yet surrounded by it in the fire light.

Her separation from nature wasn't the subject of tonight, rather Kusanagi Motoko wondered who pinged her from halfway across America. She was far away from anything important, caught between hours of driving along abandoned, state-farm roads in the hilly Arizona back country.

Tonight, her mercenary team set up camp overlooking the banks of the Colorado River. Motoko couldn't see the sloshing banks of the wide river below against the reigning dark. At least not without turning on her artificial night vision, but she could easily hear the river's quiet, endless roar.

Something else woke her up. A strange war dial call in the middle of the night, a bolt fired from the black. The network trail led back to a mom-and-pop phone server farm in rural Kentucky. No message or detail, just a simple ping protocol. Motoko set aside the minor embarrassment of leaving traces of her cyberbrain address across the United States. This one was almost three years old now.

She punched through the server farm's SIEM monitoring, masking herself to the overworked one-man security team who wandered away for a coffee break. Motoko uncovered the data ledger for the war dialer only to find disappointment. There was a definite attempt to ping every IPv6 address in the server farm's database. Nothing about it was strange, she should just ignore it. Motoko sighed at the amateur recon attempt and her own carelessness to remain on an old address routing table. But her disappointment didn't last long.

Motoko's physical body jolted a little, shifting on the hard stone she used as a cushion as the not-so-gentle giant Batou shifted in his sleep and grumbled about stinky candles. Inspecting the dialer’s data ledger, someone broke the encryption all the way through and blanked the ledger with multiple formats of junk data. No other ledgers in the specific, public-facing server looked like this. Just the call ledger which included her person.

A worthless trail. But an amateur recon attack turned into a wizard-class hacker feat. Nothing about the person who called Motoko was an amateur. She gulped. Apparently, she stumbled on another ghost story in the Net. Someone across the digital sea calling to her, but refused to leave a call back option.

She eventually let herself drift back to sleep, unable to address the issue in the current time with the limited bandwidth. But she did wonder, "Alright. You've found me. Now, what are you looking for?"