woebetide
Thus did man become the architect of his own demise.2023 September 30, SaturdayRandal’s mum was out of town for the weekend — her college ‘friend’ who she generally hated was having her third hen-do, convinced that this one was ‘the one’ — Randal grunted at the thought again. There was no such thing as ‘the one’, just an endless series of people who you tolerate rather than being completely alone, and in Randal’s experience, being completely alone was the best. Eventually, his mum would kick it, and he’d get the house, and hire all the care done rather than doing the chores himself because she was too cheap to — and she didn’t know how much money he’d made.
He was frustrated about money, though, a major donor for the site had disappeared off the face of the internet two days ago. Wallets had been emptied, the anonymized email rey bounced back when Randal sent a message asking what was up. It wasn’t an immediate concern, the site’s accounts had enough funds to keep it up and running for a considerable amount of time without them. The budget without the regur payments, however, wouldn’t allow Randal to put away as much aside for the future.
But there were others out there who appreciated the jokes the site had on it, it just meant reaching out and convincing them the site really needed their funding. That Randal required their funding. The family’s accounts weren’t what they used to be, but the name still meant something to those who cared, and Randal wasn’t about to be the one that let it die like that. Producing an heir wasn’t particurly a problem, there were plenty of women out there who wouldn’t care so long as the money was good, and the name wasn’t notably — publicly — tarnished.
So what if some freaks online hated his guts, they had no more idea who he was now than a month ago when that photo got posted — he’d cut all outside contact after that. Gd he lived in a time of delivery for everything under the sun, no one ever needed to see his face — things went in a box that he could retrieve things from without being visible from the road.
His stomach rumbled and reminded him about his half finished order for some dinner — he’d gotten distracted by someone messaging. His site’s users were upbeat — they’d found someone new to joke about. He switched tabs and right as he did, all of his screens went bck — but the fans in his computers and status LED’s all showed as on. A green cursor appeared on his central monitor and text started typing:
Knock, knock, NaN_
He frowned, it wasn’t like his online handle was a big secret — he refused to be reduced to a number in a database somewhere — but no one should have been able to be in his system like this. He quickly tried various escape sequences on his keyboard, but none of them worked, and he screamed in frustration and smmed his balled fists against his desk, wincing at the pain. Randal knew what he had to do, and he quickly reached for the emergency button for his network, which worked completely independent of his other systems, and flipped the safety cover.
It would set off some rather unpleasant to undo safety measures for his site, but right as he flipped the cover off, he heard a literal knock on his suite’s door. He hadn’t heard anyone come inside, and his mum wouldn’t be back for days. He gnced towards a screen that typically had security cameras, but that too had gone bck. Randal grabbed at a cricket bat he kept by his desk instead — not that he ever pyed, or even liked the game, but if some script kiddy shithead had pranked him, they probably wouldn’t be any trouble to take down with a bat.
Home invasion was something he’d never really expected to happen, but he found himself relishing the idea. Would serve whatever little pissant script kiddy had decided to fuck with him right. He approached his door slowly and opened it inward such that he was mostly hidden behind it, his bat raised to give whoever it was a good walloping.
If he listened closely over the whir of the fans of his computer, he could hear someone wandering around in the house, he slowly stepped out from behind the door, and into the hallway. He made furtive gnces around as he exited, but whoever had knocked had moved on elsewhere. Maybe it was just a regur burgry, and they did the hacking to scare anyone at home.
But his security had been good, right? He’d barely made it out of his bedroom when he felt two sharp things stick him at once, followed immediately by pain. He crumbled to the ground as he saw someone’s feet approach him. Randal wanted to fight back, but the pulse continued until whoever it was injected him with something.
***“Christine?” Maria asked as she stood from the crumpled form. If it hadn’t today would get more annoying before it got less so. “Did it work? Did he trip the fail-safe?”
“It worked,” she said. “Network is still intact, little shit acted exactly as we predicted, a physical knock drew him away from it. I’ll have everything I need within half an hour.”
“Good,” Maria said. “I’ll start making it look like he ran away in a panic after someone found him.”
Christine walked over to the computer to do whatever it was she needed to do to take his nasty little site permanently offline. Something about needing his authenticated tokens. Meanwhile, Maria busied herself, tossing various clothes into a duffle, and taking the ptop and other devices that Christine handed her to make it seem like he’d left in a hurry. They’d managed to obtain some writing samples via various means and crafted a note to his mum that looked like it’d written by him in a hurry.
Mum, have to leave in a hurry, people with a grudge against me for jokes I’ve made online found where we live, and made threats to harm the both of us over it
I’ll contact you if and when it’s safe
They will likely tell you I did horrible things — but it was all just jokes, honest
Randal
Abby would be by in a few weeks after word got out about his disappearance and the site going offline to interview the mum for a very real article. It would also let Abby gauge how she was doing after her son being exposed as being the worst person, and what kind of help she might need that the Hall could arrange for quietly. It was often the hope that families of their victims also grew from the experience, but Mrs Stevenson had been abused by her husband and ter her son for a long time.
She’d tried to write it all off as jokes in the past, and she’d need a lot of help — but so would the crumpled form of Randal before her. Maria had her work cut out for her — and a part of her was nervous about what she’d gotten herself in for with him, but regardless of Randal’s fate, his site was offline for good. One of the Peckinville men entered and picked up the crumpled form of Randal Stevenson to haul him off towards the van before returning.
“The site’s offline for good,” Christine said, breaking Maria out of her thoughts. “The domains have been transferred to our control, and directed to a honeypot. I’ve got a complete export of the database and code. Hopefully, that will provide us some additional levers in addition to the ones we already have.”
“You think Stephanie will find that trans girl from Consensus she’s after?” Maria asked as she zipped the duffle shut.
“She texted me right before we left asking for help,” Christine said. “I should be able to find her, she’s not got the kinds of skills needed to hide from me — Randal here didn’t, and he was considerably more paranoid and orders of magnitude better funded.”
“Good,” Maria said. “And you think there’s a connection there?”
“Pretty sure,” Christine said. “This piece of shit’s cousin was on that same server as Hopeless, and she killed herself right around the time a photo of her appeared on her thread.”
“Good,” Maria said, frowning. When they’d pieced that together a few weeks ago, there’d been another hour long argument about whether he should be included. Maria suspected based on the threads Christine had directed her to that he was… afraid… of that being known. It was one of a few threads that it felt like he’d disavowed them, whether for fear of reprisals or whatever, that too was a lever.
“You ready for me?” the soldier asked as he returned. He’d been chosen for his unwavering loyalty to the NDA, bonus, and for his general height, build and coloring matching that of Randal Stevenson.
“Yeah,” Maria said, gesturing at the bag and an extra set of outer clothing that was close to what Randal had been wearing when they drugged him. “Put on these clothes take this bag, his wallet, wait fifteen minutes after we leave, then follow the pn. Act as nervous as you can without getting fingered, and don’t forget to leave the front door unlocked.”
“Got it,” the soldier said, grabbing the clothes and quickly exchanging his outer yers for them, and shoving the wallet in the back pocket of Randal’s jeans. “I’ll check in when I’ve made the rendezvous point, and gotten his electronics shielded.”
“Good,” Maria said. “Let’s move out.”
“Right,” Christine said as she did one st thing before leaving, with the site down and destroyed, there was one final step to make sure it couldn’t be brought back up from recovered data locally. She walked over and quickly tripped the fail-safe Randal had failed to hit, wiping all local devices, keys, and backups for the site. Christine had wanted to ‘sg it’ with thermite, but it would be too obvious, they wanted to make it look like he fled in a panic, not burn his mum’s house down.
“Where do you think he stuffed the backups for the backups?” Maria asked.
“Oh, they were in his mum’s safe deposit box he had access to,” Christine said. “Got those yesterday. Their security was a joke — and she didn’t know what he kept there, so she won’t miss it. It’s now 100% dead and buried — but the forensics folks should probably be able to recover enough to kill any hope of escape without winding up in prison.”
“Good,” Maria said. “Now for the hard part.”
Christine ughed as they got in the van, and their driver pulled out towards the first transportation change. Christine pulled her ptop out and quickly reenabled the exterior cameras at Randal’s pce, since they were on a separate system to the fail-safe. They wanted to be certain they caught the soldier leaving in a hurry, looking all the world like Randal fleeing the country in a hurry.
