CHAPTER 14
Dances of Gatekeepers and Intruders
Third Friday of September
To restate something mentioned previously, Kazari Uiharu was not superhuman.
“?”
As she was munching on a cookie after school in the offices of Judgment Branch 177, she glanced at the laptop on her steel desk as though she’d just noticed something.
Mrfh?! A bother has arrived!!
An intruder.
Not one worming into Uiharu’s computer or one breaking into Judgment Branch 177. Uiharu had been tasked with countering the recent string of electronic attacks on the data banks, which managed all the information networks in Academy City. As part of the new security measures, changes had been made to direct all data requests to route through a large Judgment server first, forcing them to take a roundabout path.
Now, some data was ignoring the detour and making a beeline for the data banks.
The flow of the data was absolutely impossible via normal control.
It was clearly a hacking attempt.
And it wasn’t any regular hacking attempt. It wasn’t, for example, trying to take advantage of security holes to go through unintended routes and gain access. Uiharu had already closed up any silly holes.
Which meant…
A young lady from Tokiwadai Middle School, famed for its esper Ability Development, sat on a bench at a station. She was none other than Mikoto Misaka. The tablet in her hands was currently connected to the network via wireless LAN.
She was one of only seven Level Five espers in Academy City.
The Railgun.
She was ranked third in all the city but first among her peers when it came to manipulating electricity.
Though she was directly touching the screen with her index finger to control it, the actions playing out on the display were undoubtedly happening much faster and in much larger quantities than her finger movement would suggest. Rows of symbols and characters scrolled by so fast it was hard to follow them with the eye; Mikoto wasn’t paying attention to every single one. All she was doing was transferring the ideas in her head into the machine—the computer took it upon itself to do the work, almost like it was simply a natural consequence of her thinking it.
Mikoto was trying to access Academy City’s data banks.
She’d infiltrated them several times in the past, but she’d yet to be stopped by anyone higher up the ladder. It seemed they, to their credit, had suspicions they may have possibly been hacked, but it had never resulted in her suddenly being cut off from the network entirely and blocked.
…Well, that’s a rough decision for them to have to make anyway. Everything would suffer, right down to the timing of trains having to make emergency stops.
Blip-blip-blip-blip-blip-blip-blip-blip-blip. As she looked at the windows appearing and disappearing, one after the next, she sighed quietly.
She wanted to use her full power to get this over with already, but she didn’t want to do anything that would wreck her own device, either.
…Hmm. Uiharu returned the half-eaten cookie to the plate as she watched the intrusion trying to directly access the data banks. This kind of thing happened before, too. It looks a little more advanced than last time, though.
As she looked at the information on the screen, she sighed.
What was happening before her eyes was a phenomenon that was absolutely impossible with regular computer usage.
Which meant the hacker was using an ability.
Academy City was a city of espers. Plenty of them could do things like this, of course. Some could read minds to steal passwords; others could manipulate electrons to gain control over computers; and worst of all, there were even some who could directly manipulate the data itself.
It was nigh impossible to take down hackers like that through normal tech-based countermeasures alone. The difference between the average user and hackers simply came down to how much of the system’s interface they could access, and how much they could ferret out from behind the curtains. However, people relying on their ability for access were basically going one layer deeper than everyone else.
Of course…
This was Academy City—a city brimming with espers.
I can’t protect peace and order if I let something like this scare me off!!
Renewing her resolve, Uiharu checked the flow of data one more time. If they weren’t using the “shortest route” that Uiharu had set up ahead of time, then they weren’t reading her thoughts. The spike of data wasn’t slipping through the barriers themselves or ignoring them completely, so it seemed likely the system itself wasn’t being directly manipulated.
Which means…
This was probably the type of esper who could control electrons. And since that was a relatively common esper variety, it was pretty much impossible to narrow down who the suspect might be with just this information.
“……”
Uiharu’s brow furrowed as her eyes followed the intrusion’s movement patterns.
With that tiny bit of data as a point of reference, she conceptualized the system as a flower.
What Uiharu was looking at now was the tip of its roots. From there, she would mentally map out things like the stem, the petals, the flow of water and nutrients—and eventually, she assembled the image of a complete flower in her mind. This method of calculation—envisioning a single mechanism from a variety of angles—was the key to Uiharu’s hacking prowess.
If she had been especially talented, her mind might have constructed a staggeringly formidable personal reality and manifested it in the form of incredible power.
However…
…Urgh… Uiharu chewed on her lip.
Her mental image, which had started with the tips of the roots, suddenly blew apart once it reached around the stem. Her opponent must be using a very advanced method of calculation—she couldn’t draw the connection between what was happening before her eyes and the personal reality that was causing it to happen.
And if she didn’t understand her opponent, she couldn’t devise a proper countermeasure.
What should I do…?
For a moment, Uiharu’s fingers wandered in front of the keyboard.
The movement was like holding chopsticks aloft, but not knowing what food to reach for—and it perfectly symbolized her distress.
“All right, here we go,” murmured Mikoto as she watched the swift developments flash by on the screen.
Currently, she was performing a typical password break.
Just because she was an esper who could control electricity didn’t mean she could rely on that power alone to break through every security system. In fact, given how many espers resided in Academy City, the development of barriers against irregular attacks like that was actively being honed all the time.
But no matter how it was reasoned or rationalized, someone with an ability would always have the advantage over someone without one.
Of course, she wasn’t going to use her ability alone to concentrate on a single point and bust through that way.
She didn’t have to stubbornly cling to one method, after all.
She could take advantage of her electricity control to overcome difficult-to-unlock security on normal computers and use a normal computer to deal with security systems specialized to act against espers. By using both options efficiently, Mikoto was more than able to infiltrate various targets.
It didn’t take long before her work ended without issue.
Mikoto tapped a few more keys, which brought her past the final line of security.
Now, then. Where could the data I’m looking for be hiding…hmm?
And then she froze.
She stared at the screen—her eyebrow was the only thing that twitched.
What she saw displayed there was…
…clusters of data from the data banks all being encrypted at an insanely fast pace.
No way…
As far as she could tell from the rows of characters switching randomly over to sequences of symbols and numbers, this was most likely Omega Secret being deployed to the Academy City network: that incredibly singular random-number encryption that had received the highest accolades from a certain little Absolute Encryption Contest.
No way, no way, no way!
The Absolute Encryption Contest was a major competition with no material prize, pitting humans and computers in the highest form of chess matches. But for all that, it was also famous for getting conspicuously sharp results. Omega Secret had been born there and it was famous for being unbreakable: After all, with the data encrypted randomly, even the programmers themselves couldn’t read the perfectly protected data. It was a beast, the most advanced system available, with no actual practical use; it was said even Academy City supercomputers would take two hundred years to decrypt something like that.
What kind of complete idiot would bring out something like this?!
The troubling point about Omega Secret was that once something was encrypted, it didn’t matter how small or how big a file was: They’d all take equal time, two hundred years, to decrypt. And since it used different random processing on every single file, a a single decryption key couldn’t be applied to all of them even if one had been cracked. It would still take two hundred years to decrypt the next file.
The entirety of the data banks was being encrypted, and the contents were impossibly numerous, so Mikoto didn’t know where the data she was after would be. She couldn’t pick some to steal; the only method that was sure to get her the data she wanted would be for her to prepare an entirely new super-large-scale data bank equal to the data banks’ storage server and literally copy everything over, but…
Well, she definitely couldn’t do anything about this.
Even acquiring such a large server alone was practically impossible. If she somehow managed it, how long would it take to copy all the data in the data banks over to it? Despite their lenience in the past, those monitoring the situation were not about to ignore such a massive data exchange.
However…
…This is insane. They’re encrypting everything—right down to the data banks’ server management and deleted maintenance files!! Wouldn’t that render their OWN high-capacity server totally useless?!
The cost of machines that used the data banks was so high that even Mikoto, a seasoned, upper-class young lady, would pale at the sight of the price tag. And they’d just thrown it all away without a second thought. It made her wonder if opening up the physical server and throwing a bucketful of water over it might have done less damage.
If their counterattack was this crazy, they must have a backup of the data banks’ stored somewhere else. If I can attack that, I might be able to get the data I want, but…
Mikoto looked at the catastrophe on her screen again.
She got the feeling that her opponent was operating under zero limitations. She couldn’t help but think that even if it was the very last copy of the data, they’d mercilessly use this method again if it meant bringing Mikoto down.
Hackers operate best undiscovered.
After hesitating for a few moments, Mikoto finally mussed her hair in resignation.
…I’ll go by the book and withdraw for now. A desperate fight with this massive idiot would destroy us both. Makes me shudder.
“Well, I suppose that does it for today,” murmured Kazari Uiharu as she watched her screen.
If the intruder had stuck around a little longer, she might have been able to try a reverse trace, but she’d accomplished plenty already this battle. Rather than chasing too doggedly, she’d be better off analyzing the hacker’s attack patterns and using what she learned to prepare the data banks’ defenses.
One might wonder if such normal methods would have any effect against a hacker who could control electricity, but of course they would. The opponent was still only taking advantage of a back door—their ability. It only looked like they were all-powerful because they were freely using that exception to travel about.
In concrete terms, they were doing nothing more than sending and receiving electronic signals. Because of the nature of that interaction, she could search out where that exception was happening and plug the hole, thus blocking an esper hacker with normal methods.
Well, everything’s a new experience to be studied. That was a pretty good display of skill, so hopefully this ends up benefiting me, too.
And then it happened, just as Uiharu was thinking about this and reaching for the cookie on the plate.
“…Uiharu,” came a low voice.
She turned around and saw Kuroko Shirai, her Judgment colleague, standing in the doorway. She was looking down at the ground. Uiharu tilted her head in confusion. Her twin-tailed job friend jabbed her thumb, pointing out the door, and said in an even lower voice:
“You went too far. And now they’re going to lecture us, you moron.”
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