Doggy Day Care [1/8]

Your scan beeps.

A little surge of dopamine, trickled in, that frisson of excitement and curiosity. A smile only just flitters across your lips. Another hit.

You've been doing this for a few months now. You've always been good at computers - better than interacting in real life anyway. Real life, where everything happens once and lasts forever and you never get a chance to try again, and people look and judge and you can see in their eyes how they choose their words and never say what they're truly thinking and...

No. No, the computer world is comforting. It fits, like an old T-shirt. You dance along the threads of web in silence, an invisible figure leaving not even a footprint. You slip into houses that aren't yours, closing doors behind you that others never knew had been opened, so you can sit on their couch and browse their bookcases, all while they look right through you...

And as for why? Because people are so fascinating. Do they even realise how many masks they wear? How many masks others wear? Do they not notice that every conversation is a dozen layers of lies, conforming to social norms that no-one can explain?

If only there was a way to see when those masks to fall away...

Of course, there is. Webcam surfing.

'Cause that's the thing. You wanna see how people really are? Get into their webcams. Look, home computers are small fries. Companies? You need the big guns to hack them. The hot new zero-days. But Jo Bloggs' laptop? Hell, man, there's an exploit right now in the world's most common OS that leads right to the webcam. Sure, it got patched months ago, but when was the last time you hit the 'Install Updates' button? So it's simple; get the right tool, start a simple scan for IPs still using that old OS version number, and...

Ping. Like this one.

You hammer out the new IP address into a bash script, and execute it with a lazy tap, fingers wandering across the keyboard like they've done a hundred times before...

Here's the thing about 'how people really are'. No-one's running multi-million dollar ponzi schemes in their bedroom. Your local bible-licker ain't selling their nudes on a gay porn site. Not commonly, at least. Nah, when you want so see 'how people really are', you just want to see the makeup off. People talk to themselves when they're alone, and you just wanna hear those conversations. You want to see how they get dressed in the morning. Where they hide their diaries, how long they leave the bed unmade. All the little things. Remove the masks, see the person, in their simple, unassuming reality...

So when the webcam opens up, it takes you a few moments to realise what you're feeling.

A bedroom, neat, with all the domestic trappings of normality. The door is already half-open, and a red-haired woman is checking the room. She glances out of frame. She goes back to the door, and checks the corridor. Her shoulders are tense, her steps, light and hurried. She holds the door open, making some unseen gesture.

A dog - a huge dog - pads into the room, having to shoulder past the girl and her bed. She's ushering it in. She's checking the corridor again. Then she's turning, and her gaze lingers on the dog - and in that look there's a intensity, a genuine focus, a hunger...

You realise that this isn't going to be one of those little things.

Time to see what happens when the mask really comes off...