For the past couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned that I’m working on Feral, a prequel to DEAD BEEF that sets up the Our Cyber World series..

Why am I writing this story? Well, to be totally honest I first got the idea when a literary agent tweeted that he’d love to get a story about a female hacker. That provided the initial idea spark. Or it reminded me that I already had such a hacker character in my Our Cyber World series. I’ve also wanted to fill in some of Martin and Cynthia Spencer’s background, along, of course, with that other femme hacker, Sasha Javan. This story, then, will take us back to the beginnings of Martin Spencer’s Cyber-technologies company, InfoStream, and show us how key relationships that manifest themselves in DEAD BEEF emerged. You can read a brief story description here…

Whenever I’ve posted hints about this story, someone invariably says they can’t wait to start reading. Well, here is a glimpse to at least partially satisfy some of that enthusiasm…

Chapter 1 ~ In-brief

Martin Spencer knew everyone considered him a jerk. Right now, he didn’t care. He let himself slouch in the chair. He let his gaze drift into a dazed stare. He did nothing to conceal his boredom. He did give himself credit for stopping short of sighing or yawning to convey his lack of interest. Well, lack of interest only described a slice of it. What should a guy feel except offense at getting dragged into this conference room to swallow the room’s stale, frigid air so he could witness yet another useless chart parade to the rhythm of a lifeless, monotone voice?

The whole thing smacked of torture, his penance for getting caught dabbling in the hacker arts only to now serve the very people he once sought to embarrass and evade.

At the front of the room, the briefer droned on about something or other concerning financial markets, and time lags in stock trade transactions, and individual investors getting the raw end of the deal—like that was news—and brokerage firms competing for the fastest servers, the shorter fiber optic routes, and whatever gave them the edge to beat competitors to the cheapest trade. All about the timing and time lags involved. All about deriving marginal advantages to make fractional pennies of profit, which over millions and billions of transactions started adding to some real money.

Somehow this held great national security importance—of the down-low, secret kind. Why, Martin could not imagine. It sounded like something the Federal Trading Commission should look into. Nothing more than arm wrestling among fat cats. Yeah, the trickery involved a technological angle, but Martin didn’t see why he needed to hear about it. It had nothing to do with his area of expertise. Not that anyone in this room had the brains, much less the imagination to figure that out.

He let himself sigh only to realize the screen at the front of the conference room had turned black. The droning had stopped, too. And all heads had turned to him in unison. Someone at the front of the room had said something, and though Martin missed it all together, he could tell that something was meant for him.

“Thoughts?” Stan Beloski, sitting next to him said.

“Thoughts,” Martin said, feeling stupid, like the kid caught not paying attention in class.

“Yes,” the briefer said. “Given the higher than usual margin trade differentials, are we looking at foul play?”

“Foul play? Are you kidding?” Martin straightened in the chair. “The only people making money are the ones hitting and catching their own foul balls. The ones playing between the lines are just doing average. Everybody knows that.”

He said that last part feeling a tad less certain than he’d like about the truth behind it and his ability to substantiate his assertion. But still, it sounded true enough to him. The stock market amounted to nothing more than legalized gambling on a grand scale. Oh, they used cute words for it, like speculation or risk averaging or hedging, to name a few favorites. But it all boiled down to a massive, unpredictable random process grounded in the uncertainty, fears and hopes the human mind conjured. And Martin hated random. You couldn’t control random. You couldn’t plan or engineer it. It just came when it felt like it, and went the other way on similar whims.

“We would like you to take a look into it,” Stan Beloski said to him. His voice came cold, calm, like it always did, and measured. No need to panic or get personal about things.

“What exactly am I to look into?”

“See if anyone is doing more than beating the clock.”

Martin allowed himself a grin. “More than beating the clock. So you guys do know this happens all the time.” Martin waved at the black screen as if it still displayed that one and only graphical chart showing two data paths, one longer than the other, and the milliseconds one gained by using the shorter leg. “You guys know this happens, and you let it.”

The briefer took one step sideways, as if to avoid blame. “Jurisdictionally, that’s an FTC matter.”

“And this isn’t.” Martin waved at the black screen again. “Something concerning manipulated trades that involve more than time lagging—they wouldn’t care about that.”

Stan patted the table with his hand. “Once we have something concrete, we’ll inform them, let them run with it. Until then, the investigation is ours. A potential Cyber matter.”

“Because some nasty overseas hacker might be behind it.” Martin waited for Stan or anyone else to reply. No one did, so he pressed with, “Maybe Koreans. Or Iranians. Or some Ukrainian dudes.”

“That is speculation until you conclude your assessment,” Stan said.

Martin leaned back as far as the chair would let him and crossed his arms. Whatever. All his complaining wouldn’t change a thing. Besides, it all paid the same. It might even prove a little fun, getting his hands into some code and real world snooping for a change. They didn’t let him do this often. Who knew? If he go this right he might parlay it into next steps and future opportunities. Maybe they’d give him a little more latitude to extend beyond dreaming up breach scenarios or conducting boring firewall stress tests. Maybe he’d show them what he could do, enough that they might see the value of his ideas to go on the offensive and prevent attacks rather than running fancy diagnostic and forensic scans.