Kill Switch Read online

  Kill Switch

  William Hertling

  liquididea press

  Copyright © 2018 by William Hertling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  People, places, and events are fictitious or used fictitiously. The Bureau of Research and Intelligence in the novel has no connection whatsoever to the real-life organization bearing a similar name.

  If you enjoy Kill Switch, please sign up for my mailing list at www.williamhertling.com to find out about future book releases!

  Contents

  A Summary of Kill Process

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Author’s Note

  Additional Notes

  Credits

  For Tasia

  * * *

  “In the future, all clubs are S&M clubs.”

  —Shane Brody

  * * *

  Note: This book contains depictions of consensual BDSM relationships and activities.

  A Summary of Kill Process

  Angie Benenati was once the teenage hacker known as Angel of Mercy. After college, she worked in cyber security under Repard, one of the great former criminal hackers turned white-hat computer security expert. When Repard was later arrested for one of the most profitable and secretive hacks of all time, Angie made a break with the hacker community, just in time to join a new social media startup, Tomo. Tomo eventually grew to become the largest social networking company in the world.

  This period should have been the most glorious time of her life, but Angie fell under the sway of the man who would first marry then viciously abuse her. After years of increasing mistreatment and isolation, Angie, desperate for escape, killed her husband. Eventually exonerated of her crime, Angie returned to work at Tomo with a new, covert agenda. No longer would she sit idly by. She would use her access to Tomo’s data, now the largest repository of information on nearly everyone in the world, to profile domestic abusers, hunt them down, and kill them.

  Years went by, and one-by-one, Angie eliminated abusers, but there were a million more for every one she killed. She grew to realize Tomo itself was an abuser: by holding people’s data and relationships hostage, and manipulating what people read and hence thought, the social platform was exploiting its own users, while making itself inescapable.

  Angie could serve a greater purpose by eliminating Tomo.

  Working with cofounders Amber and Igloo, Angie launched a new company, Tapestry, founded on principles of privacy, security, and personal ownership of data. Tackling the normal challenges of a startup would be challenging enough, let alone taking on the world’s largest social networking company as a direct competitor.

  At the worst possible time, a shadowy operative working for the super-black government agency, BRI, took a personal interest in Angie. Soon the resources of this agency were focused on Angie and her activities as a computer hacker.

  With the aid of Igloo, Angie defeated the government agent and uncovered a link between the operative and the CEO of Tomo. When the revelations became public, Tomo fell into disrepute, and Tapestry surged ahead.

  Now, two years later, Tapestry is winning the social networking war. Angie has gradually become buried under the crushing load of executive management.

  Igloo, Angie’s protege in the hacking realm, feels increasingly adrift. What is the purpose of it all? Why is Angie ignoring her? Her only solace is her relationship with her new girlfriend, Essie.

  Little does Igloo know that the largest, most pivotal battle to be fought for control of the Internet is just a few months away, and she’ll be front and center. Will she be pawn or queen? Will she, or anyone she cares about, survive?

  * * *

  Learn more about Igloo and Angie’s history in Kill Process, the exciting prequel to Kill Switch.

  Chapter 1

  Igloo stopped short when she heard the bagpipes. The unicyclist came into view, dressed in a kilt, Darth Vader mask, and playing a flame-throwing bagpipe. She waited until he’d passed, then crossed the street to her office. Everything was weirder in Portland. That was why she was never going to leave this town.

  Igloo rode up to the fourth floor, trademark white hoodie pulled up over her head, ignoring her coworkers on the elevator, none of whom she recognized beyond a basic vague familiarity to their face. Tapestry, the world’s second largest social media company by number of active users, was now over three hundred employees. She’d lost track of individuals somewhere around ninety. So much for Dunbar’s Number. Maybe that was just her social awkwardness. Other people didn’t seem to have such problems.

  She swiped her phone. An article at the top of her notifications had a headline about Judge Lenz being arrested. Igloo’s heart thumped. She clicked on the headline knowing the article contents were cached and there’d be no click trail showing her interest in the Judge. She smiled as she read, a small knot in her stomach releasing. Evidence pointing to Lenz sexually abusing staffers had come out, and suddenly a chorus of women had come forward to share their stories.

  Igloo held her phone close to her heart. She had followed razor-thin trails of suspicion over months of effort before finally discovering Lenz’s photos on a heavily encrypted hard drive, then anonymously turned over those photos to officials. Lenz wouldn’t be bothering anyone else. Finally, those who had been affected would at least receive the closure of a monster getting what he deserved.

  The elevator door opened, and she tucked the phone in her pocket. No extracurricular activities here at work. She tried to mentally put it aside. She had to keep her ethical hacking compartmentalized. Like everything else in her life.

  She headed down a corridor lined with glass-walled conference rooms. Many people nodded or said good morning to her, although she didn’t recognize most. She mumbled a good morning back, and they’d look away quickly. They seemed as eager to get past th
e awkward encounters as Igloo. What was the point? If everyone said the same thing, it was meaningless. They might as well grunt, or better yet, ignore each other.

  She wished people came with labels: their online handle, a tag cloud describing them, and a list of their prioritized personal needs. Hers would have a big red warning: Do Not Interrupt.

  She slowed to a stop in the middle of the hallway as people flowed around her and wondered if she could build the labels she’d imagined. She visualized Tapestry’s data scheme as a structure in her mind, a directed, cyclic graph. Here, the user name. There, unique word analysis providing a tag cloud. That only left user needs. Trending interests was the closest they had, with upward trends indicating increasing interests.

  “Hey, Igloo.”

  The fragile mental image disappeared, replaced by the face of Amber, who bent to peer directly into Igloo’s hoodie. Igloo sighed. Her mind could visualize code of incredible complexity, but all it took was one interruption to make her lose the picture.

  “We need to get to the all-hands meeting.”

  Igloo brushed Amber’s hand away. “I’m coming.”

  Igloo trudged along after Amber, now the VP of Engineering. She dressed like it, in some sort of pant suit thing. How’d she get so corporate?

  Igloo looked at her own black jeans, picked up from a thrift store in high school. Twelve years later, they were still going strong. Well, maybe the threads around that hole could be trimmed.

  Amber rambled on about an agreement with NPR to distribute their shows on Tapestry. Unlike competitors, Tapestry supported WebTorrent and IPFS, so content didn’t have to be loaded from centralized servers. The files would be served up by topographically-near peers. Other users. The more people that used Tapestry, the faster the network ran.

  Amber’s words faded into the background, and Igloo visualized the data graph again. Her mind grasped both the logical structure, which was clean and neat, as well as the actual implementation, which was considerably messier. That complexity wrapped her like a familiar warm, fuzzy blanket. At least it did until they reached the main conference hall, where there was far too much chaos to think any more. Igloo headed toward the back, where the stadium seating would give her a bird’s eye view of the entire room.

  Angie was here! As Tapestry’s CEO, Angie had become busy and remote as the company grew. They got together only rarely for their ethical-but-still-criminal hacking, and when Angie did show, she’d be hopelessly distracted by Tapestry business. There was little of the comradely mentorship Igloo loved.

  Igloo tried to catch Angie’s eye, but Angie was deep in conversation with the VP of Marketing. Her blood boiled, because they were probably discussing the acquisition of new content providers. Igloo had signed on to change the world, to make a difference in people’s lives. She didn’t give a damn about making more money. But that was all that seemed to get the executives’ consideration these days.

  Tapestry was founded on the principles of end user data ownership and privacy. The company was supposed to be different from the rest of the corporate web. But somehow all the leaders of the company had gotten their heads up their asses. They were focused on the wrong thing.

  Igloo was head of the company’s chat AI, the only thing that still seemed socially relevant. The seemingly sentient automated bots befriended users on Tapestry and talked to them about almost anything. They’d completed a year-long study of over ten million teenagers, finding the suicide rate was thirty percent lower for those who friended a Tapestry personality. For people who had no one to confide in, Igloo’s AI became their friends, close confidants, even life coaches. That was worthwhile work. Not acquiring more content to feed the masses.

  While Igloo spent her days coding stuff that mattered, Amber and Angie squandered their time in meetings or traveling. There was no way she was going to follow in their footsteps, but she hated the distance that had grown between them. When was the last time they’d had an all-night coding marathon? Or even eaten dinner together, the three of them? Or discussed anything of substance? She had a pit of unease in her stomach. She was losing the only friends she had, aside from her partner, Essie.

  Essie was the one bright spot in her life lately. A shining star, really. She knew that was part of the reason she resented being at work.

  Igloo sighed and gazed up front to find Angie still chatting with the other execs.

  Despite all her frustration with the distance between them, Igloo yearned to hear Angie say something exciting and relevant this morning.

  As important as the AI chat was, Igloo’s contributions had plateaued. Now they had teams of psychologists working on the personalities to make them more effective—better able to console someone in grief, better able to engage a teenager in distress. Somewhere along the line, Igloo had realized the personalities were no longer hers. They were Tapestry’s.

  Part of her frustration with Tapestry stemmed from the whole CTO debacle. When Amber had become the VP of engineering, it had left the Chief Technology Officer position open. Igloo wanted that position. She walked into Angie’s office with the intent of asking for the job, and that was when Angie said she was going to be both CEO and CTO.

  The decision still pissed Igloo off. She deserved that role. But the desire to be CTO also warred with the part of her that resisted hierarchy in all forms. She wanted the company to be like it was when she started: a true democracy where everyone was equal, more or less, and they could all get together in a room and make decisions as a group. Life was complicated.

  Angie stepped up to the microphone.

  “Thanks for coming, everyone,” Angie said. “If you look around, you probably see some new faces. Let me say welcome and thank you to all the new employees. We’re here to change the world, and we need your help.

  “Hiring, of course, also brings challenges. We brought on thirty new people last quarter, and we have plans to hire fifty this quarter.”

  Good grief. Igloo fidgeted. Please let it not be a discussion of hiring plans.

  “Less than ten percent of our employees were with us at launch. Nearly half joined after we hit a hundred million users. We’re in danger of losing the culture that got us here. We’re so focused on the end goal that we sometimes forget why we’re doing what we’re doing, or that how we go about our work affects the outcome nearly as much as our explicit objectives. I’m going to let Maria take over here.”

  Maria Alvarez, the Chief Operating Officer, walked up to join Angie.

  “Thanks, Angie.” Maria smiled.

  Igloo shrank into her hood. Something bugged her about Maria. Maybe it was that she wasn’t here at the beginning. Or maybe it was that Igloo had overheard one of Angie’s conversations, and knew they’d spent a million bucks to hire her. Such a ridiculous way to spend money. Maria represented everything that was wrong with Tapestry today.

  “It’s often said that ‘you can’t motivate people, you can only create a context in which people are motivated,’” Maria started. “Culture is one of the largest components of setting that context.”

  Ugh. It was worse than a discussion about hiring. A talk about culture, and by Maria, who wasn’t even here in the beginning to understand what that culture was! Did she even grok why employees had SHA keys instead of sequential employee IDs? The essentially random unique numbers generated by the Secure Hash Algorithm were the perfect antidote to the hierarchy associated with an employee number that ranked one employee above another by their time on the job.

  Angie smiled and nodded as Maria talked, as though she was the best thing to happen to the company.

  Fuck. Engineering culture comes from engineers working together, not executives. Why did they need bosses to tell them how to talk to each other?

  Igloo fumed. She was wasting her time here. She stood, pushed past two people blocking her path, and left the room in a rush.

  The air in the hall was cooler, but stale. She made her way back to her office. Her suite really. By far and away
the best perk of being employee number three.

  The outer room was full of abandoned music gear, punctuated by empty spaces left behind when the rest of the band had taken their stuff. Guitar, drum kit, keyboard, all of it seemed purposeless now. She hadn’t played since the band’s last practice session, just before the breakup. Not really a breakup, was it? No, her expulsion. They still performed, just without her.

  A few months ago, she’d swapped out her white hoodie for a black one and checked out their show for the first time since she’d been kicked out. She’d been replaced by a preprogrammed synth track.

  The thought was depressing. She pulled out her phone and sent a message to her partner.

  Igloo > I miss you.

  Essie > I miss you too. Love you.

  Igloo > Work is killing me. Watcha doing?

  Essie > Editing blog posts. At least we have Deviance to look forward to tonight.