REMINDER - Today is the deadline for the Special Mayan Tribute Anthology "End of the World." If you have any issues posting/etc with the anthology, you can contact Cia, who is the temporary anthology coordinator.

So, after you finish posting your anthology story, come on back here to try out one of our new writing prompts, courtesy of Prompt-Guru Comicfan. Please share what you come up with in our Writing Prompts forum!

Prompt 192 –Creative
Tag – List of Words
Use the following words in a story – baseball, handcuffs, torn pants, dollar bill, and a nun.

Prompt 193 – Creative
Tag – The Rain Storm
A huge storm has brought down buckets of rain flooding the area. However, as the storm leaves the rainwater has uncovered something completely unexpected. What was found?

One of last week's prompts, #190, gave the following scenario: "You came home to find a note that listed everything about you, including your last lover, and where you hide your toys. There isn’t a thing listed in that note that is wrong. The bottom line tells you to meet the sender tonight at a very private and expensive club. You are even told what clothing of yours to wear. Do you go?"

So - how did jamessavik play it out?

What the f*ck is this? Blackmail? Extortion? Whatever. I can't let this stand.

 

I immediately swept my house for bugs and found three: phone, broadband connection and a acoustic trap. Rather than destroy them, I put a white noise generator on all three and went to my backups. A burner cell phone and a cellular modem with a broadband connection.

 

I look at the address and got on my laptop. I used a back door to the city network and got into the City Clerk's network. I was able to pull up the plans for the meeting site. It's a private place called the Yacht Club. Definitely not my kind of place. As I looked at the plans filed with the city, something seemed odd about it. There's a hell of a lot of square footage. Some of it looks like office spaces and lots of back rooms.

 

My next hack is the phone company. The building is serviced by four standard voice trunks and an OC-3 broadband circuit. That looks interesting. What's a yacht club doing with that kind of broadband capability?

 

I do a google search and find their web site. Pretty splash page. Party rooms, catering, yadda, yadda and of course yadda. It's not hosted at the building. A couple of pings and a sweep and the Yacht Club's web site located in a server farm in Denver.

 

Using the IP address from the p-hone company I go right to the building router. Nice. Cisco 35000 series and a Watchguard Code Red firewall. Great. A Yacht Club with $100K worth of gateway network equipment. That's interesting. I backed off. That Firewall was way beyond my skills to penetrate.

He's got more here - but trust me, the last three words of his response are gonna have you glaring at your computer screen...

Enjoy!