💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › shorts › defcon › 24 › DEFCON-24-Tyler-Rosonk… captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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Consumed By Tyler Rosonke (@ZonkSec)
"Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to McCarran International
Airport. Local time is 11:32pm and the temperature is 78 degrees
Fahrenheit", a monotone voice carried a bit muffled over the
intercom. A skinny white male wearing a white shirt and an
unbuttoned plaid jacket stared out the window. "For your safety
and comfort, please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened
until the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign", chimed a
different but similarly muffled voice. The man quickly reached
into his pocket and pulled out a smartphone and proceeded to
power it on. He looked out the window through his thick black
framed glasses and was greeted by the Las Vegas strip, blazing
below shooting neon lights skyward. His phone, now active,
buzzed repeatedly from all the missed notifications, but there
was only one he cared about. He opened a SMS message and it
read, "Hey Garrett, I just checked into the room. Hit me up when
you land!". He quickly responded, "Just hit ground. Grabbing a
cab and will be in the lobby shortly." As the plane made its
final taxi to the gate, Garrett thought to himself, "It's
amazing how after 3 years passed and thousands of miles apart,
old friends can just snap back together like nothing ever
happened." The plane stopped and its passengers shuffled out in
an orderly fashion, except for a man with a white stripe in his
bangs. That man, as if the world owed him something, shimmied
through the aisle and past the other passengers. Pushing and
shoving he made his way out before anyone else. Annoyed looks
accompanied him; however, the only clear glimpse Garrett managed
to get before the man slithered out of the plane was a patch on
his backpack, which read 'Omega Industries'. Garrett grabbed his
things and got off the plane.
A yellow cab arrived in front of Bally's Las Vegas Hotel, and
Garrett stepped out. As he paid the driver, a short man with
long blonde hair in a ponytail snuck up behind him. His short
round face began to grin as he stalked his prey. He grabbed
Garrett's waist. "Holy shhiii...", Garrett exclaimed as he
whipped around to meet his violator. "Jasper!". The two men
laughed, smiled, and hugged. "Howdy doodly Garrett! How's my
favorite firmware monkey?" Jasper asked, rubbing his knuckles
against the top of Garrett's head. Garrett's smile faded briefly
but crept back. He had missed his old friend, even his annoying
name calling. "I'm doing great. Man, it feels good to be back
here. I'm surprised you stayed up for me. What floor we on?" "No
worries dude. We are on lucky number 13! The room is pretty meh,
but it will do, especially considering the price we snagged."
"Rad. Well, lead the way! I'm tired as hell and ready to crash."
Garrett said as he grabbed his bags. Garret and Jasper walked
into the hotel, proceeded to their room, and promptly fell
asleep.
DefCon was alive and underway. Rooms and even the hallways
hummed with commotion. Talk of computer security nuzzled in
every crevice. As usual, there were large lecture halls with
experts presenting, smaller conference rooms with ongoing
workshops, and a massive vendor area. Garrett and Jasper roamed
the various rooms and absorbed every bit of information they
could. They were hackers at heart, loving nothing more than
learning what makes their cyberworld world tick. Shoulders
relaxed and faces lit with excitement, it was obvious they felt
at home at this place. As they passed the vendor area,
something was stirring. Garrett noticed first. He watched
several DefCon organizers, also known as Goons, rush into the
vender area as if there were some sort of emergency. A large
commotion was starting to bubble out of the vendor area. Without
exchanging words, the two friends scurried into the vendor room.
As they entered the room, a series of metallic clanks and deep
electronic hums broke out for the far corner of the room,
accompanied by a fanfare of cheers and applause from an amassing
crowd. The two friends were not the only ones to stumble upon
this anomaly. Word quickly spread throughout the convention and
the vendor area became increasingly crowded. It became harder
and harder for the two friends to stay together as they
attempted to ninja their way to the epicenter of the discord.
Garrett, cut off and separated from Jasper, caught his friend's
eye over the crowd and called as he waved him on, "No worries.
I'll catch up." More and more conference goers flooded into the
vendor area, all cramming towards the humming, grinding, and
clanking. Garrett was jostled farther and farther from his
friend as Con goers seized any open gap in the crowd. However,
Garrett noticed a split between two booths. It seemed like some
sort of channel used for various cabling and as storage for
vendors. The channel appeared to run parallel to the direction
of all the commotion. Garrett slipped into the channel and let
out a sigh of relief. He was no longer being smashed into
oblivion. Garrett's relief quickly turned into panic. He froze
as he noticed a group of Goons convening in the same channel.
Garrett, as every good perpetrator knows, acted as if he was
supposed to be there and carried on. He approached the group and
caught the eye of a singular Goon, deep in conversation with the
other Goons. Garrett's heart was leaping; the scene had become
oddly unsettling, but he gave the Goon a sturdy and respectful
nod of the head. The Goon nodded back and resumed his
conversation. "This is insane. I don't give a shit if it's
outside of policy, we need to get these guys on a stage."
Garrett overheard. "What if it turns into some lame sales
pitch?" "It won't. We'll make sure to get one of their engineers
up there; someone who is passionate about this damn masterpiece
they just unveiled." "Alright, I'm not in love with breaking
policy, but if we don't do something, we might have a hacker
riot on our hands. One hour from now, Track III." The overheard
conversation fueled Garrett's anticipation. "What the hell am I
about to see." he thought. The clunking and humming increased in
intensity as he came to the end of the channel. Nothing could
have prepared him for what he was about to see.
Robotic humanoids.
The humanoids stood about seven feet tall and appeared to have a
steel outer casing. They had no skin or hair, but their pose and
form was both human in nature yet decidedly not. Long narrow
faces housed two cameras for eyes. Con goers were captivated.
The humanoids' internals hummed and buzzed as their motors spun
to perform movement. Loud clanks as they moved across the
concrete floor made it apparent they weighed a significant
amount. As Garrett scanned the area, he saw convention goers
and a handful of humanoids playing chess, critiquing a painting,
tossing a football, discussing poetry, deliberating computer
security, and most impressively debating philosophy. These
weren't some junky Japanese toys playing soccer. These seemed
intelligent. "Impossible", Garrett thought to himself, "It just
can't be". He watched in disbelief as various convention goers
interacted with the humanoids. It seemed that many of them were
trying to stump the machines, seeking to diminish their
existence by quizzing and prodding at the humanoids' intellect,
hoping for a crack and for the seeming magic to disappear. But
that crack never came. Garrett spotted Jasper conversing with
one of the humanoids. He wrestled his way through the crowd, and
as he approached them, he saw Jasper whisper something into the
humanoids ear. "Howdy doody, Garrett! How's my favorite firmware
monkey?" said the humanoid while rubbing his cold metallic
knuckles against Garrett's head. Jasper laughed hysterically.
Garrett skeptically ignored the humanoid's words and actions.
"Can you believe this?" Garret asked Jasper. "Believe what
Garrett?" the humanoid asked using spot-on diction, "Believe
what you are seeing? I know it's crazy to believe man, but we
VX-2052 models are damn impressive compared to previous
versions. My name is Cody, by the way; it's nice to meet you!"
Garrett turned and looked in wide-eyed disbelief at the humanoid
as it fired off a casual conversation, slang and all. "Nice to
meet you too..." Garrett hesitantly offered. "Ummm, yea. You
guys are pretty phenomenal. Do you mind if I have a private
conversation with my friend?" Garret asked. "By all means! And
Jasper, if you want to chat more about buffer overflows, let me
know. See you guys later!" the humanoid politely replied, moving
to another group of Con goers, interacting with them as
vibrantly as the cheeriest person alive. "This is amazing. Like
it doesn't even feel real. They are brilliant. How in the hell
did they create these?" Jasper inquired. Garrett was still
skeptical, but was starting to come around. "I have no idea. I
have to admit, they are incredible. But I'm baffled as to how
this happened all of a sudden. I mean, this sort of artificial
intelligence seemed light-years away and �boop� of all sudden we
have this? It just doesn't add up..." But Garrett broke-off
noticing a slender man sitting at the booth responsible for the
humanoids. It was the annoying airplane passenger, the same guy
wearing all black, black hair slicked back with a white stripe
in his the bangs. There were several other people managing the
booth, but it was apparent that he was the technical expertise
of the bunch. He sat hunched over his laptop typing away.
Looking up briefly from time to time, he surveyed the humanoids
and tracked their actions. With each glance, he grinned and
giggled as he watched the convention goers' disbelief become
belief. Garrett looked up and saw the banner: 'Omega
Industries'. Garrett watched as the same Goons whose
conversation he had overheard in the channel approached the man.
As the Goons and the man conversed, the man became excited,
stood, nodded in agreement, and lastly shook their hands. The
man leaned over to his laptop, typed for a few moments, and then
resumed the conversation with the Goons again. As the man
finished typing, the cluster of humanoids began to wrap up their
various interactions and began to congregate in the front of the
booth. Garrett grabbed Jasper by the wrist, dragging him out of
the vendor area. "What the hell, Garrett? We are gonna miss it!
Something is happening." Jasper protested. "I've got something
better" Garrett called back rushing them forward. "I overheard
some Goons when I got lost in the crowd. They are allotting a
stage and some time for Omega Industries to give a talk. They
haven't announced when or where yet, but I happen to know."
Garrett smugly smiled as he towed Jasper along. Jasper's eyes
began to squint as he puzzled together Garrett's plan. He smiled
and broke his wrist free of Garret. They both rushed out of the
vendor area.
The pandemonium in the vendor area had depleted all other
activities in other convention areas. The previously buzzing
halls and rooms suddenly felt like a ghost town. Garrett and
Jasper walked into the Track III lecture room. The room was
still nearly empty, so they found seats near the front. A man
had recently taken the stage and was wrapping up his
introduction. "So that's who I am and a bit on my background.
Well I'm not quite sure where everyone is," the man said,
saddened, "but they are gonna miss out, 'cause it's time for the
fun stuff. For the last 8 months I have been researching Saturn
Solutions load-balancers. My company wanted to make sure that
these devices would do as-advertised in both an efficient and
secure manner. For those of you who aren't familiar,
load-balancers are basically devices that distribute network or
application traffic across a number of servers for both
efficiency and redundancy. I set up the Saturn Solutions
load-balancers in a lab environment and simulated varying levels
of traffic. It was actually quite remarkable, I was super
impressed with the availability metrics under load. But being
the curious beings we are all, I wanted to see how it was being
done. This is when I reversed the firmware and found something
quite interesting". The lecture room began to flood with
people. Garrett winked at Jasper. The man's face began to light
up as the scale of audience he had hoped for was now arriving.
His excitement was short lived. Several Goons approached the
stage. The man stepped away from the podium for a word with the
Goons then solemnly nodded. Returning to the podium, he
announced, "Well, unfortunately this Track is being repurposed.
Long story short I found a backdoor. If you use Saturn Solutions
load-balancers at your organization, I highly recommend checking
out my blog for my findings and remediation.
GhostShellSecurity.com is where you can find it and my other
works. Thanks." the man lowered his head and walked off stage.
The room now flooded with Con goers. A Goon approached the
podium saying, "Sorry for the change of plans folks. Up next we
have Chet Goldstein from Omega Industries. As some of you are
probably aware, this is likely going to be one of the major
highlights for DefCon this year. Without further ado, I..."
Before the Goon could finish his introduction an all familiar
symphony of humming and clanking broke out behind stage. Six
humanoids in a military-like formation took the stage. The still
amassing crowd cheered and roared. The colossal pack of metal
and tech took center stage. The pack synchronously side stepped
in opposing directions, dividing down the middle to reveal Chet
Goldstein, the man from the booth with slicked-backed hair and a
blonde stripe in his bangs. The crowd applauded loudly and faded
slowly. Chet, with his chin high, basked in the attention. The
audience fell silent, anxiously awaiting the technologic voodoo
that was about to be unveiled. Meanwhile, Chet stood, somewhat
awkwardly, somewhat endearingly, frozen as if the applause had
never ended. He stood there for a few moments and eventually
broke his pose and said, "What's going on kids?! You like my
sweet toys?!" The crowd laughed, clearly ready to buy what he
was ready to sell. He continued, "It's amazing what gobs of
money and the best education in the world can give birth to." A
few sparse laughs came from the crowd. Chet paced in front,
while the towering humanoids remained frozen in the background.
"I have been dreaming of this moment my whole life. I have been
working my ass off and it's finally paid off! Look at me now!
Marvel in my genius!" Chet yelled continuing to pace. Garrett
and Jasper looked at each other and Garrett mouthed, "What the
fuck." The crowd was baffled, confused as to what exactly was
happening. "You losers have ridiculed me and laughed at me for
years, but who's laughing now!" Chet called as he gestured a
punch to one of the humanoid's guts. The crowd was more confused
than ever; mumbles and whispers broke out. Chet began to laugh
uncontrollably and asked, "Is this real life? Am I really
standing in front of DefCon right now?!" An impatient audience
member stood yelling "Are you going to talk about the robots or
what?" Chet's laugh halted; he turned to lock eyes with the
accuser. "What the hell did you just say to me idiot? Have you
not seen what I've done? Show some damn respect." Chet fired
off. The crowd began to rumble and several boos rattled the
room. Visibly frustrated, Chet ranted "Oh come on! Are you guys
not impressed with what I've built? These things are badass! You
all need a reality check. Bunch of incompetent idiots." The
crowd exploded with booing and hurled slurs. Three Goons rushed
the stage to confront Chet, but they cautiously minded their
distance from the humanoids. One Goon grabbed the microphone
from Chet and said "That concludes this talk and umm... yea...
check out one of the other tracks!" As the curtains began to
close, two other Goons attempted to console Chet. His face was
now red with anger, he shrugged off the Goons, and stormed off
stage. The humanoids remained on the stage, inert but eerily
watchful. The show which had promised much was unaccountably
over. The two friends made their way back to their hotel.
"What in the actual hell just happened?" Jasper exclaimed as he
unlocked the door to their hotel room. "Beats me. I guess we
should have 'marveled in his genius' more, maybe then he
wouldn't have short circuited." mocked Garrett. "I'm mean how
the hell does a guy like that even build something as amazing as
those humanoids?" Jasper continued as he shuffled through the
doorway of their room. Garrett stopped in the doorway and
pondered for a moment. "Maybe he didn't. Maybe somebody else at
the company did. Wouldn't be the first time someone higher on an
org-chart stole a lower someone's success. Either way, if Omega
Industries' powers-at-be managed to let that shitshow go down,
then it's only a matter of time before something else happens
and their secrets are revealed." "Especially considering they
just pissed off a room of hackers." Jasper said laughing.
"Honestly, I won't be surprised if their organization gets
compromised tonight. If someone pulled it off, they would be
hailed like kings at the con tomorrow." "Are you feeling royal?"
Jasper joked. "Lolz. Good one." Garrett laughed. "I'm serious.
My consulting gig isn't much of a consulting gig anymore. I
haven't gotten my hands dirty in so long." "Yea, I know the
feeling. Sorta in the same rut at my job too. But, I don't know.
We aren't kids anymore, I've sorta grown out of those
shenanigans." Garrett sighed. "Do you remember the pastry
shop?" Garrett burst with laughter. "How could I forget? That
vulnerable loyalty-card system, all the donuts our young bodies
could handle." "There's a piece of me that misses those days.
Seemed like we could do anything with no risk or consequences.
Anymore if feels like I'm on a track and can only go one
direction." They both looked down a bit as they realized what
fun they used to have and how they hadn't felt that rush in some
time. "Fuck it. Let's pop this asshole." Garrett exclaimed.
The two friends furiously started setting up their gear. Garrett
cleared off the one desk in the room and opened his laptop.
Jasper leaped to the entertainment stand and scooted the TV to
one end of his soon-to-be desk. He promptly pulled his laptop
out and connected it to TV to act as a second display. "I'll
start looking at external system exploitation, you take social
engineering." said Garrett. "Roger Roger." Jasper said in a
robotic voice.
Garret first looked up what IP addresses were registered to Omega
Industries. He then started to cross reference the addresses against
various Internet scanning services.
"I'm checking out what Shodan's got before I start doing any
active scanning." Garrett announced. "I just fired up Harvester
and Recon-ng. Gonna start aggregating employee data." Jasper
confirmed. Garrett's screen filled with server after server
belonging to Omega Industries. FTP server, SMTP relay, and HTTP
server were some of the major targets he found. He took the
banner and versioning information provided by the Internet
scanning services and started looking for disclosed
vulnerabilities. "Found some juicy targets and checked them
against CVEs and ExploitDB, but nothing is obviously vulnerable.
I'm gonna keep digging." Garrett reported. "Damn. I was hoping
we'd get lucky. I just gathered up a couple hundred names and
emails. Gonna see what metadata I can scrape off hosted files,
might get a username schema." Jasper replied.
Garrett went back to Internet scanning services and started analyzing
once again. Much time passed, but the friends had not yet caught a
break.
"I'm gonna go for a walk outside, I need to clear my head and
get some fresh air. I'm starting to get bogged down. Care to
join?" Garrett asked. "Good idea. But I'm making some headway
with mangling email addresses and usernames, so I'm still
feeling pretty good. I'm gonna pass" Jasper said without even
looking at Garret. Garrett left the hotel room heading for the
elevator bank. He rode the elevator down to the ground floor.
Even though it was late, the casino floor was like a subway
station during rush hour. He hated all the smoke in the casino,
but it was the cost of getting fresh air outside. He finally
made his way through the casino maze and saw the front entrance.
He walked outside and found a bench to sit at. He sat down and
let out a large sigh. He was out of steam. He began to wonder if
they should just call it a night and let the whole thing go. He
began to watch the various people on the street. He chuckled
when he saw the 150 foot long taxi line and all the poor souls
waiting in it. He watched as the taxi clerk evenly distributed
people into taxis. Group by group they were all balanced and
loaded into a taxi. Garrett's eyes widened. He stood up and
yelled, "The load balancers!" The people in the taxi line jumped
at his outburst and stared at him awkwardly. He sprinted back
into the hotel and up to his room. Sitting back down at his
makeshift desk, Garrett began to investigate the load balancers
used by Omega Industries: Saturn Solutions. He quickly opened a
web browser and his cursor pulsed in the address bar as he
banged his head with his fist. He tried to remember the blog of
the person who presented right before Chet. Jasper then noticed
his partner's irritation. "Calm down Turbo. What's eating you?"
Jasper asked. "Saturn Solutions load-balancers. They are
running Saturn Solutions load-balancers." Garrett replied. "That
guy said he found a backdoor, what the hell was the name of his
blog?" "I think it was called GhostShellSecurity."
Garrett quickly typed GhostShellSecurity.com into his web browser and
found the post regarding the Saturn Solutions load-balancer backdoor.
His eyes zipped left and right as he drank every ounce of information on
the page as if he had been without water for days. He laughed as he saw
that the backdoor was simply a set of credentials on the administrative
portal that allowed anyone to login and have full administrative access.
He fired up an anonymizing proxy and configured his web browser to use
it. He typed in the IP address of one of the load balancers. The page
loaded and he was promoted to login. He entered the backdoor credentials
and the administrative dashboard was presented. He smiled.
"We're in." Garrett proclaimed. "The backdoor credentials
worked." "Oh hell yes! Nothing like a fresh exploit being abused
in the wild." Jasper proclaimed. "Looks like I have enough
privilege to flash some new firmware on the device." Garrett
said. He looked at Jasper and grinned. "Looks like you're
favorite firmware monkey gets to build some a custom firmware
preloaded with some hacking tools." "Won't the new firmware kill
their configuration and take the device down? I'd think they
notice if one of their load-balancers dropped off." "That's why
I'm going to rip their configuration off and make sure my custom
firmware is preconfigured with it. There will only be a
momentary blip in service while the device reboots." Garrett
answered with a satisfied smile. Garrett pulled down the
current configuration and grabbed a clean version of the
firmware from the Saturn Solutions website. He began back
loading various hacking tools and install the current
configuration.
Chet Goldstein sat alone at a desk in dark hotel room. The only
light visible was that of Chet's laptop screen. The white light
of the laptop screen revealed his face in his hands and
wallowing in a river of self-pity, he wailed, "I don't
understand why it happened." "I just wanted to show them what I
had been working on." "I've been working so hard on this." "I'm
the good guy." "What I do is to impress them." "Why do they
always pick on me?" Chet's face contorted with anger. "Why is
it always me?!" "What do I have to do to prove I am better?!�
"Show them. I have to show them!"
He quickly tapped the keys. His laptop screen was a black background and
green text was flowing on the screen as he kept typing. The screen
wasn't displaying any sort of graphics or interface, rather it some sort
of coding language. He typed for quite some time, stopped, and then
saved the file. Chet stood up and walking out of the light. All that was
left on screen was a prompt which read, '[+] Saved proof.hmnoid'.
"Alright, my custom firmware is ready to go." Garrett said, "Let's flash
this puppy."
Garrett once again logged onto the Saturn Solutions management
interface via an anonymizing proxy. He browsed to the "Update
Firmware" portal and uploaded his firmware. He sat there
bouncing his left knee as he watched the progress bar grow to
100%. It finished uploading and he moved his cursor over the
"Finish Update (Reboot Required)" button. He looked to Jasper
and said "Here goes nothing" and clicked the button. Jasper
browsed to the Omega Industries homepage, which he assumed was
one of the applications behind the load-balancer. His screen
displayed, "503 - Service unavailable". The rebooting
load-balancer made the homepage, and likely other applications,
inaccessible, as expected. The friends sat in agony. Every
second of inaccessibility made them that much more vulnerable to
being caught. "It's back!" Jasper exclaimed as the homepage
finally loaded. "If all went well, I should be able to SSH
directly into the load-balancer now." said Garrett. Garret
opened his terminal, configured his anonymizing proxy, and
remotely logged into the load-balancer via the SSH protocol. He
quickly did a file directory listing to confirm the tools he
loaded into the firmware were still there. "All the tools are
here, we are ready to roll. I'm going to start with
responder.py." Garrett said. "I'll get my machine ready to crack
any hashes you catch." Jasper responded. Garrett fired up
responder.py and watched as it harvested authentication
credentials off the network. His terminal exploded with stolen
credentials. Garrett was excited as he didn't expect to get this
many credentials so quickly. Unfortunately, these credentials
were in the form of hashes, which are a cryptographical
fingerprint of a password. Luckily, the hashing algorithm was
known and the friends could take a list of known common
passwords, pass each one through the hashing algorithm, and then
compare the common password hash and a stolen hash. If the
hashes matched, they successfully guessed the password and had
it in a cleartext form, a process known as cracking. Garrett
quickly saved all the stolen hashes to a flashdrive and then
gave them to Jasper. Jasper loaded them onto his computer and
started cracking them. Within moments the cracking was
successful on several hashes and the friends had cleartext
credentials to use. Garret used the first set of stolen
credentials to log into the Omega Industries online employee
phonebook though his anonymizing proxy. Oddly enough, each
employee's workstation information was listed in the phonebook.
Garrett looked up the user whose credentials he just used. The
credentials belong to a Human Resource employee named Marsha
Brown. Garrett identified her workstation and then proceed to
use Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to log into Marsha
Brown's desktop. Garrett made sure to tunnel his traffic through
an anonymizing proxy and the load-balancer, that way the traffic
was stealthy and had access internally. The RDP connection
worked and Garrett was greeted with a messy desktop with a
picture of two orange kittens as background. He chuckled at the
kittens and began pouring over the various Human Resource
databases and in no time he came across something peculiar.
"So this is strange," Garret said, "their entire R&D team disappeared."
"What do you mean?" Jasper asked.
"So I came across the humanoid project and initially it had 147
engineers assigned to it. Now there is only one person... Chet
Goldstein."
"What the hell? How does that work? Where did the rest of them go?
Reassigned? Fired?"
"I don't know. I can't find any records of termination or reassignment.
I'm mean, I can't even find their names. All I know is, wherever these
engineers went, they definitely didn't want anybody to find them. Enough
with employees though, I want see what technical details I can find
about the humanoids." said Garrett.
"Here start with these." Jasper said, handing Garret a flash drive, "I
compiled a list of executives from the employee data I gathered earlier.
I was able to crack some of their passwords, which are included as well.
I think with these accounts I cracked, you should be able to get access
to anything you need."
Jasper was right. The list of compromised high profile accounts gave him
access to all the systems he could ever want. He immediately connected
to a research and development workstation via his anonymizing proxy and
began reading all the documentation he could find. He came across a
document called the "Consumption Process." As he read the documentation,
his stomach became unsettled, but he leaned in on his chair and kept
reading. Each word he read made him more and more uncomfortable. Garrett
reconnected to the HR databases and began frantically flipping between
them and the R&D documentation. Eventually he could no longer bear the
knowledge and he stood up from his desk. He began pacing around the
room.
"What the fuck do we do? What the fuck do we do? Garrett rambled.
Jasper, recognizing his friend's panic and anxiousness, asked "Dude,
everything alright? What the hell is going on?" Garrett paced around the
room, mumbling frantically. Jasper stood up and grabbed Garrett's arm
and sat him down on the bed. Jasper sat down next to him. "Take a
breath." Jasper said. Garrett began to calm down, and he explained to
Jasper what he had found.
"So I found this documentation called 'Consumption Process.' I wasn't
really sure what to expect and almost didn't even read it. It outlines
where they got their artificial intelligence, well I guess I shouldn't
use the word 'artificial'. They discovered a way to tap into a brain
stem of a sentient organism and derive a programmatic representation of
its consciousness. The sentient organism is killed in the process, hence
the name 'consumption process'." Garrett began shaking and tears began
to form in his eyes. "The term 'consumption' rang a bell with me, and I
remember reading it once before in the HR databases. So I went back and
found a hidden directory within the database that I missed the first
time around. It contained two files. One was a letter from the previous
R&D lead, or at least that's the title it had on the signature. It said
that he was proud of their accomplishments, but he could not condone
human trials. He threatened to go to the police. The other file was a
listing of the 146 missing R&D engineers, all of which had the status
'consumed.'" Garrett, still sobbing, looked up and across the room as
his laptop. His sobbing stopped and his eyes grew wide.
"Oh fuck."
His heart sank and his gut churred as realized that when in his
eagerness to reconnect to HR database, he didn't connect through his
anonymizing proxy. There was a knock at the door. The friends sat on the
bed frozen like two deer in the headlight of hurling semi-truck. He
stood up and before he could take one step towards the door, it was
kicked down and three humanoids stormed in. Garrett dashed to his desk,
slammed his laptop shut, and swung it at an assaulting humanoid. The
humanoid blocked Garrett's blow with its forearm and moved forward
unfazed. His laptop shattered and threw plastic and electronics into the
air. The humanoid shoved Garrett and he caught the corner of the bed
causing him to fall. The side of Garrett's head smashed into the
nightstand near the bed, and he blacked out before he hit the floor.
Hours later, Chet leaned in and read his monitor.
'[+] Consumption Job #147 complete.' '[+] Consumption Job #148
complete.'
"And now for the rest of these assholes." Chet mumbled.
'[+] Execute proof.hmnoid'