A yellow glow illuminated the surroundings from the right rear of the car window. In the dusky dawn light, the Camry sped past the blue sign. [Medellin 18 km]
After nine hours and 27 minutes of driving, the rattling Camry finally arrived in Santa Elena, with Medellin in sight.
The small neighborhood of sleepy white cottages was bathed in half darkness and half dawn.
Lee Young-jin passed a small supermarket that hadn’t opened yet, a small park, and a police station.
The quiet countryside faded into the distance.
The city, bathed in a fiery golden dawn, drew closer and closer. Fiery skyscrapers rose up out of the dusky fog and greenery. A line of metro cables ran along the eastern foothills, bathed in a purple and golden hue of dawn.
Lee Young-jin turned into an alley through a park before hitting the highway that cut through the city center. A few cars were parked on the quiet road, which was lined with foothills and greenery, but no one else was around. He pulled into a shadowy corner. He gathered his things and got out, leaving the keys in the ignition.
He walked for about an hour, carrying his bag in each hand.
The sun was now fully behind the mountains to the east, lighting up the entire city.
People and cars passed by on the road.
At the end of a street corner, densely planted with short palm and mango trees, stood a dilapidated two-story wooden building painted in alternating shades of red and green. Even the tattered sign was too worn to make out the name, but it was clearly a motel. Lee Young-jin headed there. A young woman sat at the front desk, looking at her smartphone. She greeted him as he walked in. He paid cash and was given a room. She didn’t ask for any identification.
Once inside the room, Lee Young-jin took off his shoes and crumpled into bed.
The quilt and pillows smelled old and stale. The floorboards creaked and the carpet was old and dusty. None of that mattered, though. As soon as Lee closed his eyes, he fell into a dazed sleep. It was a long, restless sleep of seven hours.
Exactly seven hours later, he woke up with a headache. His throat was dry. He went to the bathroom and drank from the tap. The water had a fishy odor. He took a long shower. As he wrapped himself in a towel and left the bathroom, the cold air licked his naked nape and shoulders with anticipation.
It was dark outside the window.
His head felt dull and his eyes blurry as if he’d been punched in the face. Lee Young-jin dried his hair and picked up his clothes again. His eyes caught sight of the aluminum bag he’d left on the bedside table. He lifted it with both hands, placed it on the bed, and carefully fumbled with the lock. After a moment, he lifted one side of the mattress, slid the bag in, and pulled the covers over it.
He put on his coat, pulled on socks, and crumpled his feet into lightweight sneakers.
He took the heavy brass key and left the room. The door didn’t lock automatically, so he had to fumble with the key in the doorknob for a while. Rattle. He finally managed to turn the key, lock the door, and leave the motel.
The sun was in the center of the sky, tilted about seven degrees to the west.
The sunlight was soft.
The slopes of the mountainside were densely populated with faded houses and buildings.
He walked about five blocks.
He came to a small hardware store with nippers, gardening shovels, and battery-powered lights and walked inside. The store smelled of musty metal and rubber. He approached the shelves. Copper wire for conductors, rubber tubing for sheathing, an electric iron and pointed iron tip for soldering, tweezers, solder and solder paste, nippers, Phillips screwdrivers, and several types of cable gender…….
With my purchases in hand, he returned to the motel.
There was a small supermarket in front of the motel, so he bought a chocolate bar and some water.
The room was a bit damp.
The moisture from the bathroom had been trapped in the room due to the lack of ventilation.
Lee Young-jin took off his coat, threw it on the bed, walked over to the window, and opened it. Not thirty centimeters away from the window, a brown brick wall with a withered rose bush clinging to it stood tall, blocking his view.
Returning to his bed, he pulled out his laptop and plugged in the charger. He laid out all the items from the hardware store on the carpeted floor and fired up the iron, his pink fingertips furiously twisting copper wire and rubber tubing. His hands didn’t move very fast, but he never stopped or hesitated. His nimble fingers set down the multi-stranded, rubber-covered wires and picked up nippers instead. He cut the cable gender to expose the wires then twisted the copper wires together to connect the cable to the homemade wire. Then he picked up the iron. Without hesitation, the red-hot, pointed tip of the blade touched the metal wire. It smelled of burning rubber and copper. Lee Young-jin squinted at the graying hair, and with a flick of his hand, he soldered the wire.
It took him less than ten minutes.
When he was done with the basics, he stretched his arms up in the air and stretched lethargically. He crawled on his knees across the carpeted floor and reached for the chocolate bar he had set aside. Fingertips covered in gnarled copper-and-rubber fibers ripped open the plastic wrapper and popped the chocolate bar into his mouth. The bar broke with a crunch. Lee Young-jin popped the hard bar of chocolate and nuts into his mouth and chewed for a long, long time.
The short, nutritionally insensitive meal was over.
He went back to work.
He pulled the aluminum bag from under the mattress.
After removing a few screws with a Phillips screwdriver, he opened the flap to reveal wires and a tiny integrated circuit, barely two centimeters wide. Lee Young-jin pressed the tip of a wire connected to a cable to a transistor on the circuit and stuck the iron in. It took less than a second for the lead and copper to melt and stick together.
Every move was clumsily perfect.
He plugged the cable from the integrated circuit into his laptop.
The laptop screen lit up.
Lee Young-jin sat down on the floor, leaning back against the bed, and propped the laptop up on his thighs. After tossing and turning a few times to find a stable, comfortable position, he placed his hands on the keyboard. The TB-172A type lock had been cracked twice before. Within minutes, the lock on the aluminum suitcase popped open with a click, revealing two silver buttons protruding from the side of the bag. He pulled it open, pressed the buttons with both hands, and pushed the cleverly connected clasp with his toes. The lid of the bag popped open. A panel of transistors and inductors emerged. This huge, giant panel of integrated circuits was shaped slightly differently than the ones he’d seen before. Lee Young-jin looked down at it and shook his head briefly.
He put the nippers inside.
Cut a few wires and soldered new ones to them.
The smell of melting copper and tin filled the room.
He then connected the panel to the computer. It was generally believed that these types of panels were impossible to disarm without manual intervention, but the circuitry contained a critical security flaw. And apparently the manufacturer hadn’t updated the security flaw yet (or maybe they hadn’t realized it). With a few source code tweaks, the panel’s capacitors hummed and current flowed through the wires. Tick. The locks, made of hardened aluminum and carbon fiber-reinforced plastic, made a clicking sound.
The bag opened.
Inside the silvery-white aluminum bag lay a black rectangular lump. A nondescript entry-level laptop. Of course, that’s all it looks like. Inside was information worth a hundred billion, a few hundred billion, a trillion, maybe even more.
Lee swallowed hard and slowly lifted the laptop.
The laptop was fully charged. There was no charger. He booted it up, and a black CLI screen appeared. Vivid fluorescent green alphabets flickered across the blank screen.
PING TIGO.COLOMBIA (invalid user) (177.252.255.252) 00(00) bytes of data.
— TIGO.COLOMBIA ping status —
7291443 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 0ms
— WARNING invalid.user —
ENTER VALIDATION CODES . . .
Lee Young-jin slammed the laptop lid shut in anger.
His heart was pounding wildly.
He booted it up, but without connecting to anything, wired or wireless, and in a matter of seconds, it revealed his location and the network he was on. Togo, Colombia. 177.252.255.252, which was clearly the Medellin wireless network used by the motel.
Furthermore, the laptop didn’t have a charger.
Lee Young-jin searched the aluminum bag just in case, but couldn’t find anything resembling a charger. The laptop’s surface was perfectly soldered without any marks, and he couldn’t find any access ports. At first glance, it looked like a generic entry-level laptop…. His mouth went dry. At the same time, a memory fragment that had been spinning slowly along his memory circuitry slowly began to float to the top of his frontal lobe. Each time it made a circuit from the hippocampus to the papillary body to the thalamic bundle to the prethalamic nucleus to the entorhinal cortex and back to the hippocampus again, the brainstem flashed, pulling up words that had sunk to the depths of his memory.
Shanghai Auction.
Easter Egg.
The code Seo Seung-hyun ordered him to solve.
The code that was obviously part of some other, larger program.
The second item.
A program that automatically connects to the network as soon as it boots up and determines whether the user is valid or not.
A laptop with no connectivity ports and no way to charge it.
Lee’s eyes blinked slowly three or four times.
Ah.
He slowly lowered his eyes to stare at the shiny black surface of the laptop.
The code was the first auction item.
And the first auction item was the key to unlocking this second one.
By itself, it meant nothing.
Besides, there was a time limit on this.
He didn’t know. He wondered if it’s a prescription for someone to break into this laptop by ripping out all the security programs installed on it.
The laptop times out when the battery dies.
Seo Seung-hyunacquired the code at the Shanghai auction, and he tried to crack it before the second item was even in his possession. He knew he didn’t have much time, after all, that’s why he’d lured Lee Young-jin into the deal. He wanted to save time by cracking the code before the second item was in his hands.
Lee Young-jin muttered softly to himself.
“So even if I had this now…….”
His lips curled into a smile.
He could have forcibly removed the laptop’s surface to check the battery. But what if it’s a primary battery that can’t be recharged in the first place, and it’s embedded with a data wipe or factory reset function just in case you happen to remove the case from the outside?
So what is the performance of this battery?
How much time does it have left?
If he take this to Teacher without the first item, will he still be able to make it in time since the first item is still with Seo Seung-hyun?
His mind was racing.
He was slightly out of breath.
Tick, tick, tick, tick. Suddenly, the sound of the clock’s second hand woke him up. Lee Young-jin barely raised his head. His gaze went to the desk clock on his bedside table. The hands were centered between VI and VII.
It was almost time for his appointment.
Regardless of the time he was given, things continued to happen.
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