Logs:Misdirectory

Misdirectory
Dramatis Personae Cerebro, Halim, Roscoe
In Absentia	2024-05-17 "You can talk to people. Directly. Did you know."
Location <XAV> Study - Xs First Floor / Phoenix Room - Xs Third Floor
Quieter than the neighboring library, the study actually is a retreat for those who want to sit and work. Lacking the larger social tables, this room has only single solitary chairs, individual soft lamps assigned to each. The high bay windows allow plenty of light, and the understated elegance of the room with its grated fireplace (often crackling, in winter) is an invitation to quiet work. With only one more week of classes before exams, the study is fairly busy even for a pleasant Friday afternoon, populated by students making stressed and frustrated faces at their books, their notebooks, their laptops, or in Roscoe's case a laptop and a notebook and his phone, charging and connecting cables routed cleanly out of his way. He's dressed comfortably -- joggers, tee shirt -- but curled uncomfortably in his chair, his back hunched and his chin propped onto one knee, wrists resting on the hard edge of the table. His phone is sitting innocuously face-up on the table; Roscoe is mostly ignoring it, far busier with his laptop, where he is fussing around with his phone settings, adding and tweaking one line of code at a time, working from a much larger file full of comments and notes and Well That Didn't Work (duconmemay.txt) -- right now he is making another attempt to manually route his phone location to -- perhaps this is inoffensive enough? -- the bowling alley in town. This doesn't work either. Roscoe handles frustration well -- he replaces that line of code with 'FML FML', deletes it again, and goes back to the drawing board (duconmemay.txt), his frown only a little pinchier. The grouchy technopath who has been residing in the guest wing is not in evidence here -- at least not immediately to Roscoe's keen vision -- not often seen physically where there are gluts of students. But it's not long after Roscoe's thwarting and back-to-the-drawing-board that one of the school's fleet of security drones (this one, a much older model, bigger and clunkier and less full-featured than some of the newer bugs; it's been out of service as a drone but here for decoration, an extraordinarily pretty orchid mantis that until it moves has resembled a flower ornamenting the mantle) tilts its head in Roscoe's direction. The code he's looking at is changing -- as is some code he isn't looking at, an unseen backdoor quietly tweaking itself before the adjustments. It's very nearly Roscoe's own work that is put back in place, next, although this time, the location signal is routed through the mantis drone itself. A line of text, also, has been added below to the code -- comment, here, not part of the coding: Your work was right. Something else was broken. Should work now. -H Roscoe's eyes flick fast back to his code at the blur of motion; he stares very hard at it, his head tilted curiously, before he picks up his phone and checks the location there, then hastily switches over to text messages to alert his mother that he is going bowling. Probably at Halim's processing speed it is an interminally long time before Roscoe adds another comment in the code, in the line below: whaaat thanks so much!! There's another brief tweak in Roscoe's code pretty immediately after he's sent that text -- fast enough it's probably not readily noticeable to Roscoe, code already altered by the time he switches back to that window. Simply changing the routing on the signal again (to another one of the usually-disused Old Model drones lying around school -- this one a luna moth that is, at this moment, casually taking wing to head at a walking speed toward the bowling alley in Salem.) Another line of comment: FYI I changed one thing. Routed it through an old school drone. That'll move around more naturally. In case they're looking close. Can go over it in more detail if you ever want. In case the same thing breaks again. I'm on the third floor. As if Roscoe did not already know where Halim has been installed at school. --- <XAV> Phoenix Room - Xs Third Floor The guest rooms at Xavier's are spacious and comfortable, well-furnished suites readied for visitors. This one is among the smallest of the available suites, consisting of a small sitting room, a bedroom with queen-sized bed, and a large bathroom. The windows look out over the side yard, with its playground and playing fields. The decor in here heavily favours rich reds and dark woods, and the artwork that graces the wall leans fiery in theme. There is a fireplace, here, stocked with wood in the niche beside it; on the mantlepiece above it, small glassworked figurines of birds in reds and oranges and yellow look half on fire themselves, when they catch the light. Roscoe is way more comfortable in this cushy-ass guest room than he was down in the study, sprawled on his stomach on the floor with his backpack flopped next to him and his laptop in front of him, scrolling through his code probably too quickly to actually be reading it -- "So are you a legit hacker?" he says. "Like in movies and stuff. What kinda stuff did you used to hack?" "X-Gene was a cheat code." It's fine if Roscoe's not reading it carefully, because he's getting an email very shortly from the very unexcitingly named h@tawadros.com with a concise summary of the things Halim has just gone over and first steps to look for in the future if his code isn't working as expected. The man himself is sitting cross-legged on the couch, in jeans and a plain grey tee shirt, chin propped in one hand and his elbow resting on the couch's arm. "Ran lab security for years. Legit. Don't know." One of the cleaning drones that had been docked in a charging station under the sideboard wakes up, its bandwidth usage spiking to absurd levels for what is essentially a (smarter) (cuter?) (weirder) Roomba. Halim probably knows what that means even before the pillbug bot comes rolling across the floor toward them. It unfurls into its cleaning configuration, not to do any actual cleaning but to climb up a leg of the coffee table. "Why the fuck," the sysadmin is demanding flatly -- probably of Halim, though it's hard to tell where the drone is looking, "are you fucking with my security." "Lab cybersecurity," Roscoe mutters, eyes flicking from the screen up to Halim on the couch -- perhaps this was a noteworthy distinction in Lassiter According to Roscoe. He recoils fast from the bugbot, shoving up onto his knees before he seems to deem this not an immediate physical threat, but he still keeps his distance, eyes wide at the drone. The flex of Halim's mind is immediate, sensible just at the edges of Cerebro's awareness where he starts to reach for the drone. Then pull back. He doesn't look at the bot, eyes fixed a bit blankly at absolutely nothing on the floor in front of him. "Don't like keeping prisoners." "Prisoners?" The pillbug drone rears up to not-very-intimidating effect. "Look, I'm sorry about your brainwashing, there was so much Chaz could do only, but kindly refrain from projecting your shit onto me. He --" The drone tips what passes for its head in Roscoe's direction, antennae waggling. "-- can leave whenever the hell he likes." Roscoe rises up on his knees, also to not-very-intimidating effect. "He's not messing with your security, he's messing with mine," he says to the pillbug irritably. "I know I can leave whenever I want, I want to leave without having my location broadcasted out to every adult I know. Ever heard of privacy?" "Is everything about you." Halim's eyes follow the waggling antennae, little though he seems to be looking at it, flicking short to Roscoe and then back to the floor. "Can leave. Then trouble. Can't hack his parents." "Who's broadcasting your location to every adult you know?" Cerebro sounds genuinely taken aback. "Our encryption is virtually unbreakable, your parents have no access, the administration by my leave only, and I look only if you've gone missing or called for help." The drone settles back down on all seven pairs of its legs. "If you can't deal with that, feel free to transfer to a school that doesn't give a shit about your safety." As kind of a grumbly afterthought, he adds, "Bet I could hack his parents, too." Roscoe settles back down too, onto his heels, still glaring at the drone mistrustfully. "What, are you from the Stone Ages or something? 'Course my parents have my location," he says. "Okay, bug boy, if it's so --" somewhere in this Roscoe seems to be realizing that maybe this is a reasonable amount of surveillance on Cerebro's part, and tumbling awkwardly to a halt, his mulish scowl twisting slightly with confusion. "Any idiot could hack my parents. I could hack my parents. What does that have to do with it, they're not their email accounts." "His phone," Halim says -- patiently? Is he being patient? His voice doesn't have a lot of inflection, still, but he is speaking just a little more slowly. "Tracks him. His parents track it. Do you pay attention to your students or just their accounts." "My students," Cerebro tells Halim, also (maybe) (definitely not) patiently, "value their privacy. Difficult concept for you both, I think." The pillbug balls up and rolls off the table, bouncing itself back open again, though it hesitates halfway to Roscoe's laptop. "I presume you parents are also not whatever crapware they're using to track you, which any idiot can hack. Especially an idiot who's already rooted his phone without getting busted by said crapware." There's a sliver of extremely grudging approval in this. "So, bork that, not your location services. You'll thank me next time you call an Uber, or get kidnapped by a cult, or whatever." "Must be nice for them," says Roscoe testily. He stares after the bug, somewhat hesitantly, then flops back down on his stomach with a frustrated groan, removing the line of code with a too-forceful jab at the delete button. His head settles lower between his shoulders when he gets back to scrolling, now at a more Roscoe-speed crawl. "It's not crapware," he grumbles, sort of defensively, though he doesn't take that long to find the right directory (though no borking is immediately forthcoming -- now Roscoe is scrolling very slowly, like he's actually reading it.) "I was only gonna mess with the location part-time," he adds, "I'm not an idiot." "You can talk to people. Directly. Did you know." Halim is bask to looking at the floor. "Difficult concept for you, I think." His mind is starting to reach for phone, but pulls back. Offers instead (aloud) (directly): "Piggyback that onto the current location signal. Should look the same. To them." "You think?" Cerebro's voice is dry, and his drone doesn't move beyond its idle animation -- antennae waving and carapace shifting at irregular intervals -- but Halim can feel him bristle, a spike in processing all the way back into the digital immensity of the school's network. "Fine, you're not an idiot." The pillbug rolls around to where it can watch Roscoe's screen, though it gives the boy a respectable berth. "You're a noob. But your work is good," he concedes. "Don't be afraid to dick around, I'm not gonna rat you out. If you're about to fuck anything up proper I'll yell at you." The drone doesn't look at Halim. "Directly." Roscoe ticks a glance up at Halim, then sideways at the pillbug; he is dutifully following Halim's instructions, mostly ignoring the rest of this arguing. "Do I just delete the other one?" (Before he does so, he is copying it back into his .txt masterfile, just in case. Maybe to study closer, later.) "Sure," he says gamely -- with his elbows propping him up he doesn't shrug so much as reverse-shrug, his head dipping down and then bobbing back up. "I'm cool with that, yell all you like. I learn fast."