0's and 1's: Bk2- Web of Conceit - 4. Chapter 3

0’s and 1’s Book 2: Web of Conceit

Chapter 3

(Kevin Driscoll)

The first step was the hardest to make, it’s kind of the way life is, right. Physical therapy sucks; I used to run pretty fast, even making the cuts to be part of our track team as a short sprinter. After the shooting, my legs feel like I’m carrying a ton of lead weights. It took me a week to stand up without issues, two weeks to take a few steps, and a month to be able to walk with crutches even at short distances in the hospital. My education had taken a backseat during my coma, but I didn’t let that be an excuse. I had my parents bring me books and Dr. Douglas proctored a few of the exams I needed to take in order to complete some of my high school requirements. I already took my ACT test about a week before I was shot, so I never learned that my composite score was a 36. Hunter never knew I took the ACT instead of the SAT and I didn’t want to tell him the truth, I was worried that a low score would prevent me from attending MIT with him. Even with a perfect ACT score, which could gain me access to MENSA, I needed to do a lot more to catch up. I probably read more books and researched more articles than I ever did before. I was always considered smart, but this experience forced me to engage my intelligence. Through it all, I just kept moving, telling myself “Just one more step.”

Being in the hospital, I started talking to Jesse, Hunter’s protégé and an overzealous vigilante with a limited lifespan due to terminal cancer. He’s an interesting kid, incredibly smart of course, but he has a deep sense of empathy you wouldn’t expect from what he did. He believes the ends justify any means to reach it. To him, even if there needs to be a lie as the foundation of a better world and if people will be better off with it, then would it really matter? Moral philosophy isn’t my strong suit, but I don’t want to believe lies are the only things people respond to. When given a choice between ugly truth and a beautiful lie, human beings may choose to live in a lie, but they can never be happy with it, if they ever know it’s an illusion. That’s something Jesse never considered in his actions, going for the “victory at any cost” is a great quotation, but Churchill also let half the world catch on fire in his 2^nd run as Prime Minister in 1950’s. When victory costs too much, it becomes a pyrrhic victory. Maybe, my recent “religious experience” has influenced my outlook a little on what it means to really win.

I don’t know if that dream was real or not, but the meanings behind it are pretty clear, there’s much to do in order to find the truth and keep us from being corrupted by the world. Hunter has visited me a few times, but he never mentioned what he was doing or what they had found so far on Mason. I know he feels protective and guilty about what happened to me, but Hunter needs to know I am in this with him, all the way to the end. Since Benji was visiting weekly too, I got the details out of him. We’ve been outmatched at every turn, playing checkers when our opponents have already set traps with chess moves. It’s even worse now, because we’ve come to a realization that we’re not just fighting one opponent, who hates our very existence, but there are other opponents with their own agendas and motivations at work. Some may ask, how do you manage to make so many enemies by just being who you are, but I’d ask how can the world survive when so many competing agendas are making enemies of everyone? Reality is if we keep this up, there will be nothing left for humanity.

I knew Benji was downstairs today, he’s visiting and working with Myrden, the hospital’s twentysomething IT manager. I can tell Benji has a crush on the aloof professional, I know his type: a little older without “Daddy”-label, slightly aggressive, and highly intelligent without being a bragger. I had sexual chemistry with Benji for some of those reasons, being a year older than him and more mature, but he knew where my heart would always be.

I hobbled with my crutches towards my friend at his makeshift workstations, he turned and greeted, “Hey Kevin, how are you feeling?”

Sarcastically I replied, “Like I’ve been shot and living in a hospital for few months, so nothing new.”

Benji smirked, knowing why I had come down, “Hunter learned some stuff about Mason.”

Benji recounted Hunter’s visit to Mason Cameron’s house and the surreal story of Mason’s father. Every gay kid knows the horror stories around conversion therapy, I’m surprised no enterprising gay filmmaker has tried turning it into a psychological horror. Basically, the therapy’s idea is you can change a LGBT person, usually a teenager or young adult, to be “normal” heterosexual. For most, it doesn’t really work, since desensitizing a human being’s reactions to same-sex attraction doesn’t replace their emotional needs. Kyle Cameron is a perfect product of this therapy in action; it leaves the person empty despite all their “behavioral” modifications. Ironically Ivan Pavlov, the founder of classical conditioning, the psychological principle conversion therapy derives from, was an atheist and the users of conversion therapies are overwhelmingly religious in bias.

Mason learned about his father’s condition and his own conception, being a product of spousal rape. That will leave scars for anyone, it doesn’t make what he did right, it just provides the motivation. We all have our personal issues, like I hate conservative assholes, who put their fucking “values” above everyone else’s needs or happiness. Still, I’m not going to strap a bomb to my chest or dual wield AR-15’s to a Trump rally; though I will admit, it would feel kind of satisfying like gunning down a zombie horde in Dead Rising with a BLN-87 minigun. That’s fiction, not reality and I would be dealing with real consequences from legal judgment to the fallout of the spillover hatred for the action from a few million heavily armed compound-living neo-Nazis just waiting to crawl out. It’s kind of sad parallel reaction, when a homophobe, a gun nut, or a racist goes on a rampage in America, liberals and left leaning people just take it with some tears. Most of them hate guns and promote non-violence resistance; sad to say, non-violent protests don’t push people into action. There’s no longer a revolutionary threat except in the mindset of trigger-happy right-wingers.

As Benji finished his briefing, I had a thought, “Couldn’t we trace Mason’s movements for the last 2 years?”

Benji frowned, “ATF and the police department had access to his phone and GPS records from the cellular service provider, but they’ve only identified the same people we found earlier.”

I shook my head, “We found those guys easily, but they were never really hidden. The CISS group, who manipulated Mason, and the other group, who helped arm him, are trying to hide. What if we had a way of tracking Mason’s every move beyond his cellphone?”

Benji was intrigued by what I was suggesting, “How could we do that? Even federal agents can’t do it with their resources.”

I smiled, “We can Google it.”

Benji thought for a second, then realized what I was asking, “It’s illegal and unethical what you want to do, Kevin.”

Google has a public tracker called “Timeline” based on their accounts, which police and federal agents have already accessed with their court warrants. However, Google also has an embedded tracker for analytics, even if you turn off location tracking Google has the ability to track you. I know this is an invasion of privacy and stealing proprietary information from Google, but Mason Cameron is dead, and Google is realistically violating Federal Trade Commission consumer protection statutes on deceptive privacy practices. This area is gray and only technically illegal, because no one is willing to enforce laws against corporations.

I breathed deeply, “Look Benji, you know Mason is dead and his data wasn’t acquired legally in the first place if the FTC regulations were followed correctly by Google. They are selling this tracking data for marketing firms, while we’re trying find murderers. Legally and ethically, it’s not right, but there’s more to ethics than right and wrong. If you don’t want to do it, you know I am able to hack into Google’s backdoor in Lenoir.”

Benji hesitated, then began running several applications, “You’re right, Kevin, we have to do it. You know it will never be admissible in court though, because of how we found it. We will have to figure out another way of proving this after the fact, if no one else knows we did it.”

It took about an hour to get through Google’s security protocols at their data center in Lenoir, North Carolina. Then, accessing their data analytics database was very simple. Benji and I decided to not download the database and just review it, in order to minimize the risk of detection. We started by filtering for geo-location within 30 feet of Mason’s home, then removing known accounts from the references. After that was done, the remaining accounts were tracked to different geo-locations and web servers. Interestingly, we found a series of google tracked accounts with several connections to secure servers in Indiana starting back two years ago. More recently, we ran into a different set of accounts and servers with ip addresses located in Khabarovsk, Russia.

Indiana is one of the US states that still legally allows conversion therapy and it has a very strong religious conservative base, it doesn’t surprise me a group there would have known about Kyle Cameron or was manipulating Mason. That narrows down the US search area to 6,666,818 people according to the last Census update.

As for Russian connection, it’s more complicated. Khabarovsk is their main high-speed internet junction and it is the 2nd largest city that borders China. Whether the perpetrator was Russian or Chinese, this was not a rogue group action. Whoever armed Mason, they weren’t local and it doesn’t make sense as to why they would meddle with a conservative Christian group’s efforts against gay teens. We saved all the notes we found and sent it over to Hunter via a secure link, then just sat there silently wondering.

Benji proposed a thought to break the impasse, “Maybe, CISS is doing something else around the world that another group doesn’t want to succeed.”

I shook my head, “Why would we be targeted by them? We offer no resistance or bargaining position on a global stage. Gay rights aren’t that important.”

Benji looked down at his feet, “Maybe we don’t matter to CISS opponents, except as a distraction. The Chinese have an old stratagem called “feint in the east, strike in the west”. It’s a tactic designed to misdirect your opponent’s resources and forces in order to get them out of position.”

“What can be so important for them to do this?”

A gentle tap came at the door, it was Casey, a new nurse who started a few weeks ago, “Hello Kevin, you are late for your physical therapy session.”

Just realizing the time we spent and how consumed we were by our research, I had forgotten, “Sorry Casey, Benji and I were just finishing up here.”

Casey smiled, “Well Kevin, Dr. Pulaski was very unhappy 2 hours ago, but she rescheduled you for a new session in 10 minutes. I’ve just been trying to hunt you down.”

Casey was a good-looking guy, probably 10 years older than me, but he could have easily been my older brother if I had one. He was a shy guy in most respects, not speaking that much and not showing much emotion. When I first met him, he was very nice and professional, almost like a doctor. For the first few weeks, we just had small talk and I sensed he was sad about something. From time to time, I saw him staring out the window towards the direction of the ocean with deep regret. Then, one day, I saw him looking at a poem I was writing an essay on, “Casey at the Bat”, and I realized the connection with his name. Maybe his parents named him after the old poem from the late 19^th century, so I found an opening to get to know him more.

I slowly got him to open up with some sports conversations.

He’s a big fan of baseball, a Chicago Cubs and Red Sox fan to be exact. Personally, baseball was a sport I enjoyed on the statistics side more than actually playing. I knew tons of gay guys, who loved it, though, for playing and find the baseball statistics to be indictments on a player’s ability. Casey wasn’t at all perturbed by his own average statistics from his younger days as he recited them to me. I had a feeling about Casey being gay, but I never brought up the topic with him.

Besides today, Casey had “caught” me talking to Benji a few times before about our work. I never really put much thought into how much he heard just thinking he came in the middle of our conversations without context every time. It had to be more than half a dozen times now, if not more. Maybe, it’s just that usually what we were doing wasn’t illegal or wrong. This time though, we learned a bunch of things and hacked a multi-billion-dollar company’s data center illegally to acquire metadata they had kept in proprietary tracking software. I doubt he was waiting outside the makeshift workspace for hours listening to us, but I can’t be sure. Why was he the one catching us every time?

As I followed Casey into the elevator, dread swept over me of the potential implications, “Casey, what did you hear earlier?”

Casey’s expression changed slightly, then back to his genial nature, “I didn’t hear what you and Benji were saying, why, is there something you want to tell me?”

Thinking about everything and the change in expression he just hid, I had to test him, “Casey, what if the world as you know it was not safe? What if you knew something that could be dangerous?”

Casey did not say a word, but his face and actions told me everything. He showed signs of concern and nodded his head, agreeing to my statement without restating it. He held onto my forearm tightly, not aggressively to restrain, but almost like I was in danger of falling and he wanted to protect me. He quickly realized what he was doing and softened his grip, but the action was unmistakable.

Then, he led me back to my room, leaving me without a word. There was something wrong with his silence, which in itself was the answer. I realize now he knew everything, plus he isn’t just a nurse. He could have lied to me very convincingly by just reciting the last bit of dialogue with Benji and me, but by not answering, he blew his own cover. His silence and subsequent reactions open up worlds of terrible possibilities.