Mad Crab Mojave: Chapter 38
In which Jones spots an opportunity to do a hacking
Jones woke up sixteen hours later. His hands and lips were dry and cracked, but he felt rested and refreshed. The Deluxe rate was really an incredible thing. Jones had no regrets. He opened the blinds and looked outside. The motel parking lot was empty. Marvin wasn’t there.
Jones assessed the facts. The outdoor temperature was still unfit for human survival. Mad Crab still had the quantum supercomputer. He still lay in an unmanned motel in Needles, CA. Except for his scrap of cryptography, he still had no real clues.
Jones decided that the only thing he could do was to take advantage of his isolation and boredom and teach himself, at last, how quantum supercomputing actually works. He needed more context to solve this case. He called Agent Moss, and when she didn’t pick up, left her a message asking her to send him some textbooks.
Agent Moss called him back. She sounded tired. “There’s a printer in the Business Center. Can you find me the IP address?”
Jones walked around the side of the building and found the Business Center, which was unmanned. A printer sat on an old particleboard desk, covered in dust. Over it hung a sign that read, “For Business Customers Only.” Jones texted Agent Moss the address displayed on its cloudy utility screen. A few minutes later, the printer began to burp and hum. It spit out a title page. Jones lifted it up, and read it.
“Modern Quantum Mechanics: A Complete View.”
Jones looked at the progress bar on the printer. It was the first of 532 pages. There were three jobs queued after that.
Jones decided to go for a walk to get the lay of the land. Cautiously, he left the motel and crossed the road. He trudged up a gravely embankment, and found himself standing next to a set of train tracks. Peering down the rails, he saw that they followed Route 66 as it cut through the roadside town. A few yards down, Jones spotted a utility box with the door hanging open, padlock ajar. He walked over to check it out.
It was a control panel. Various codes and numbers streamed across a small monitor. They seemed to contain diagnostic data for the switching equipment. In what seemed like a recent soldering job, a USB port had been wedged into the control interface.
“Do I dare?” Jones murmured to himself. It didn’t seem very secure. He decided to hack it. It had been a long time since he’d hacked anything. Scanning the horizon, Jones noted a gas station a few hundred yards down the road. He headed over to see if he could get a thumb drive.