Читать книгу Island of Point Nemo - Jean-Marie Blas de Robles - Страница 25

XVI

A Dying Rat

Fabrice is a tall young man, thin, his shoulders a little round, with greasy hair under his sailor hat. This is a black woolen cloth cap that he wears a little back on his head and that makes him look a bit like a tramp. He found it at a flea market. The hat of a boatswain from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, with the letters CGT embroidered in silver thread on the crown. He only takes it off inside the factory.

Same with his orange flip-flops. The rest he couldn’t care less about. In any case, his overcoat covers everything else when he leaves his house. He’s a nolife, spending all his time in virtual universes. He has given all of his free time to them. Blizzard games—Warcraft and others—hold no secrets for him. He is still passionately devoted to them, but for several months now he has been venturing into more sensitive territory: hacking. Not because he is attracted by the danger or is in it for the rush, but in rebellion and out of a sense of commitment. Returning to his first love, viruses, he programs bugs to train himself, and tests them, dreaming all the while of working out an algorithm that would prevent the digitization of a given text. He knows strange things, like the name of the French village that is farthest from a McDonald’s. Occasionally, to relax, he goes on YouTube and watches a Congolese rocket fall: Troposphère V, he never gets tired of it. This Saturday, at the moment when we take an interest in his character, he is still in front of his screen after a whole night of battle. Along with thousands of nameless zombies, he relayed a new cyber-attack against Scroogle. A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) expertly orchestrated by Anonymous, which managed to block the site for nine hours. Sweet victory, but it was just a warning. The bastards who run that site said for years that they were digitizing the planet’s libraries so they could put their contents online for free. And then overnight, they had introduced a fee to access millions of books. It was disgraceful. Disgraceful and despotic. Fabrice is a member of the Resistance; the operations he leads are legitimate acts of sabotage.