01100: The Blonde Girl

It was already late afternoon when I entered the ‘Café Broadcast’. A funny little name. Broadcasts were messages that were directed at all devices inside a network. It seemed like this café here was also meant to be a point for communicating with all sorts of different students. The building was rather small and stood right at the front row of the sea promenade. I could even see the catamaran I arrived with at the morning.

Nonetheless, I was running a bit late for the entrance test. It was already half an hour after the beginning of the mentioned timeframe, and I really hoped that this would not turn out to be a disadvantage for me. This was a practical test, and I therefore needed all kinds of software. Their installation and the configuration of my new laptop had taken quite a while. But now I had it all at my fingertips: sniffing software, exploitation libraries, software for penetration testing, you name it. Whatever I would need, I had it, even if the big instruments were required. Due to all that fuss I was not even able to empty my suitcase.

I had just taken one thing out: Lynx’s black Hoodie. It somehow felt right to maybe wear it myself on special occasions – as a kind of emotional support. I was much more nervous than anticipated, not knowing at all what would expect me. I’d probably never get used to tests.

But now I was here at least. A bit out of breath and a little late, but I was here. I looked around the inside. It was quite modern with curved benches and rounded tables. Not many guests visited at this time. I saw just a group of guys in the corner, they laughed over videos on one of their phones. Apart from them there also were two girls queued in in front of me. Certainly no one from the white hoods to supervise the test. It must be something I was able to do all by myself.

So, I ordered a cappuccino at the touch terminals at the entrance and waited behind the two girls. After retrieving it at the counter, I thanked the waiter and turned around to find myself a place. Something with the entrance still in sight, so I saw people approaching. Maybe a bit off from the other guys was also a good idea so no one was able to look at my screen. There was certainly the possibility that someone leaned over the backrest, but I would definitely notice it when someone sat behind me. With that I was safe to go.

I took a last look around, then pulled the black hood above my head and opened my laptop in front of me. I did not get a detailed description of what I had to do here. It could potentially be everything, but I was very certain that it had to do with an opened Wi-Fi Hotspot.

I looked into my network tab and searched for open Wi-Fi hotspots in the vicinity. One of them was the campus Wi-Fi. They had a complete Wi-Fi coverage of the whole campus, even the outdoor areas. The only exceptions were the uninhabited forests of the island.

I saw a few open access points of phones. Wouldn’t be a sleight of hand to break into them, but not impossible either. I did not care about them but rather about the Wi-Fi called ‘White Bunny out of the hat’. It sounded pretty much like a name Naoki-senpai would find absolutely hilarious.

I connected to it and started a network discovery scan. The architecture of the Wi-Fi slowly unfolded in front of me. Just a plain web server was to be found.

I opened the website behind it in my browser. It was completely white with nothing but a blocky QR-Code in its center. Well, this was easier than I expected. I took my phone out when I noticed something appear in my view from behind the hood. I twitched to the side when I saw someone leaning over the backrest of my bench. It was a blonde girl that struggled bringing her phone closer to my laptop screen as if she had problems scanning the QR code.

“What … are you doing there?” I snapped and shut my laptop tight.

Her eyes darted to mine and widened in shock. She instantly lost her balance in the same moment and fell over the backrest headfirst. I had already seen her. She was the little sister from this guy … the president of the black flags – a member of their elite task force. What was her name again … or more importantly: What the hell was she doing there?

She wreathed herself a bit in the upside-down position with her head dug into the seat. A little clumsy she turned herself upright again and looked at me with an opened mouth, now sitting right next to me. Her whole head quickly took the color of a tomato. “I- uhm … nothing!” she stuttered.

“You were just photographing my screen!”

“N-no … but I better should have!”

“What?”

She sighed deeply. “I wonder why the light doesn’t bend around you. A body as dense as yours should have a gravitational field powerful enough to diffract even that. You are obviously not the only one participating in this challenge.”

I eyed her closely. “I should believe you that?” I asked. “You’re this girl from the black flags, aren’t you? So, what are you actually doing there?”

She clenched her hands hard enough so that the knuckles came through. Her head became more read and small tears formed in the edges of her eyes. “Who … told you that?”

I laid my hand onto my laptop. Not that she came on funny ideas to get the QR-code I had to obtain. Was she spying on the application test of the white hoods to hijack the test? I swallowed. “If you wouldn’t have been too arrogant to not even look at us, you would have already seen me at the canteen.”

Her eyes grew wider, and she leaned much closer to my face than would have been pleasant for me. “You were with the white hoods! Akihiro gave you a card, didn’t he?”

“Isn’t it obvious that I wanted to join the White Hoods? Say whatever you like, but you won’t hold me back. I’m a friend of Naoki-kun.”

She blinked and slowly backed off from me, sitting in a kind of heel seat on the rounded bench right next to me. She tilted her head sideways and pulled the light jacket up that had worked its way down her arm. A black dress came forth underneath that highlighted certain parts of her figure very well and made it quite a challenge to keep eye contact with her. Her voice became soothingly soft. “I … don’t want to hold you back from anything. Not intentionally at least.”

“Not intentionally?”

“I heard that after the Kibansentou with my brother, they have only one spot left.”

“One place will be enough for me,” I said and grinned.

She exhaled shakily and gave me a bitter smile. “But not … for the both of us.”

I furrowed my brows. “What does that mean?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on … you’re not that stupid!”

My throat got dry. I understood her implication, but it was completely absurd. “You want to leave the black flags?”

She nodded lightly. “Please don’t tell any of them though. I’m still too scared to think about all the consequences and implications. But no way leads around it.” She massaged her temples.

My first impulse was to comfort her, but the second felt more like confronting her with the contradictions in her argumentation. Would a black hat actually change clubs? Wasn’t it much likelier, that she was just on a way of becoming a mole to spy and harm the White Hoods? My accusations wanted to get out of my mouth but died halfway. There was a humbleness and honesty in her voice that denied a sound to pass my throat.

“Listen …,” she began as if she had read my very thoughts, “I know how unrealistic this sounds and it is completely justified if you don’t believe me. We don’t know each other very well and after all it would be completely stupid to trust me. I just … I mean …” She sighed. “No, there is nothing I could say to change that. Trust must be earned.”

I eyed her for a moment while she stared off to the side. She had a point there. Trust should not be given away lightly, but what if she was actually fed up with the Black Flags? What if she really wanted to leave them? What if she looked away from us yesterday not because she was arrogant, but because she felt embarrassed for her brother? She could turn out to be a valuable ally. Naoki-senpai had already told us, that she was probably strong. Denying her request would leave her at the other side … not that I had a saying in this anyways. I was not a part of the White Hoods. Not yet at least.

“Okay …” I exhaled slowly. “I know that this is naïve and stupid, but I’ll trust you.”

She gave me a wry look. “Huh? Really?”

I nodded. “I see you as another contestant for the place at the club.”

She blinked at me, seemingly still unable to comprehend what I had just said. I just inhaled to start my next sentence when she fell into my word. “Why …,” she said looking up to me. As if she had taken a brisk decision, she slid closer to me and pulled at my shoulder to whisper into my ear. “Why don’t we work together then?” she asked. Her hot breath on my skin made a shiver run down my spine.

I was a bit taken aback by her straightforwardness and needed to order my thoughts.

She specified her idea: “You seem to be a clever guy. I’ve seen how you got to that code. You’re very experienced at it and you will definitely crack that next riddle. But what it comes down to is the final test that will probably be held tomorrow. Today should be doable for the both of us. Tomorrow will be the real decision. So why don’t we save ourselves some valuable time and cooperate today to have a fair duel tomorrow?”

She somehow had a point, but … I turned to her, even though she was very close to me. “What would this cooperation look like then?”

“You cracked the first riddle and I’m gonna crack the second one, maybe with a bit of your support since it will be harder. Doesn’t that sound fair?” She grinned.

Well … I guess this was already the point where it would become clear if trusting her was a bad idea. But I wanted to believe in the good. I wanted to believe that people could change. I wanted to be a naïve, delusional weirdo. I wanted to trust her, even though there was still the possibility that life would punish me for that. I didn’t fully know why I was being so stupid, but I wanted this girl to be on my side. Slowly I nodded to her suggestion. “But you’ll do it at my laptop, alright?”

A wide smile rose to her face. “Yes, of course.”

I gulped the last bit of doubt down, opened my laptop and pushed it to her. She slid even closer to me and adjusted the screen angle to her size. “Well first of all, it looks like a normal QR code. But I was unable to scan it just now even though it was clearly visible. That was why I had to make all these contortions.”

She took out her phone and tried it a second time. Again, it didn’t work even with different distances and locations of the camera.

“Can you try it as well. Just to make sure my phone isn’t broken or anything.”

“Sure.” I tried the same with my phone, but the same result occurred. This whole thing rendered me a bit speechless. “Hm … strange.”

“You know what I think? They invalidated it manually through changing a few of those blocks,” she said. “But it’s not that big. Let’s try reading it by hand.”

“By hand?” Was she insane? I certainly knew that reading a QR code by hand was possible. Afterall QR codes were a bit like a text that was much easier legible for a computer, but it was also a very complex task.

The blonde girl stood up and walked around to the bench behind me, from where she had surprised me and came back with a dark bag. She pulled out a tablet and came back to my side, gave me a wide grin. “Already intimidated? Don’t worry its not that hard. Could you please search for a QR specification? We’ll make it together, okay? So, I won’t make any errors.”

I nodded and googled an instruction on how to read a QR code by hand while she opened up an empty sheet on her tablet.

“Say … how did you even sneak up on me? Or why?” I asked her.

“It was quite obvious that you took the test for the White Hoods with a disguise like this. And the Black Flags have a very extensive basic training where a few things about spying on people are also part. And just as a general thing: A hoodie might be a good way to protect your identity, but it’s not necessarily improving your field of view.”

I grew a bit warm around the cheeks and slowly pulled down the hood of my hoodie.

She giggled a bit. “No worries. We’ve all made these mistakes. Maybe I can teach you a thing or another if you like.”

“Well, thank you … senpai!”

She started transferring the code block by block onto the digital graph paper on her tablet. She was legitimately fast and even though I watched her very closely, I could not find a single error.

“Okay!” She looked up at me. “Now the specification.”

It began with the format and the error correction. Both of us got lost deep inside the blocks, adding, and removing them to apply the specified formatting of the code. She drew all of it while I watched her. Even though she worked almost like a precise machine, with a work as monotonous as this, everyone was deemed to read or invert a block wrong. After all I noticed two mistakes which was actually negligible for the size of the whole code.

I shivered at the thought of having to do something so tedious myself. I would have probably written a program for me to do that and would have taken twice as long as her. My network scanning had actually been nothing in comparison to this.

The last step was reading and converting the binary numbers into the decimal number system. We actually split this task since the blocks at the end were quite easy to process each at a time. Then just converting the numbers into strings with an ASCII Table.

“20,” she said.

“That is … a space.”

“97.”

“A big a.”

“And 95.”

“That is …”

“… A big m, isn’t it?” She grinned wide.

I looked at her. “No, an underscore.”

She slid the tablet into my direction. “But it is supposed to be a m.”

Con__re_ce R_o_ B2.01 _4/02/20__ 8 A_

“I guess that is why reading it didn’t work. They changed a few of the characters to underscores. It didn’t match with the error correction and the code was unreadable for the software. But we are smarter and can obviously recognize with one look that the next appointment will be tomorrow at 8 AM in the conference room B2.01,” she concluded.

I nodded in agreement. “Will we … uhm … see each other tomorrow then?”

Her eyes wandered towards mine. She paused for a moment, then trailed off in thought. “Sure.”

“May I introduce myself properly then? I am Isato Kanaoka.”

She looked at me. A sudden stiffness spread through her body. She sat upright and started blushing lightly. “Well … I, uhm … I’m … Kayami Nakayama. But I guess you know that already, don’t you?”

Why did she suddenly act so coy? I observed her closely. She shoved the light blonde side bangs out of her view the way Tokiko often did.

“But you can just call me Kayami, if you like,” she added. “Most people here do that, so my brother and I don’t get confused with one another.”

I smiled. Better not tell her, that I had already forgotten her name after yesterday. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. “That is a really cute name. I’m Isato for you then as well.”