Page 86 of Severed Rivalry
Angel
25
dance as they burn
Sariah
My phone is dead in the morning. So dead, I don’t even get the low battery sign on the front. Dead dead.
I learn this as Renée yells that we’ve overslept, and she’s late for school.
I’m over every day being an emotional minefield. I’m not made for these thrill rides. I’m meant for boring schedules and day-in, day-out routine.
Okay, that’s a lie. I’d probably lose my shit with boredom, but I could deal with the hits not coming every damn day.
I drop a frustrated and discombobulated teenager at school only to double back with her lunch. I triple back with her science homework by midmorning.
It’s been elementary school since I’ve been to a school three times in one day. Mostly because my jobs have never been so flexible that I could drop everything to make sure my girl has the sandwich she packed but forgot to carry, or because I was across town when it happened.
But I called in. I don’t know how they’ll handle four absences in a week and a half, but right now I don’t care. The day after Rosie was too important. Yesterday was critical. Today and tomorrow are imperative and if it takes longer, so be it.
They call it unlimited PTO. They don’t actually mean it, but sometimes they have to deal. Besides, they don’t have a backup for me, and I’ve delivered multiple vulnerabilities to the dev team to fortify. We cannot launch until the data can’t be stolen by hackers. And we’re not there yet.
I pour the world’s biggest cup of coffee and set up camp at the dining table to begin discovering the structure of the app that my daughter is being violated through. The disassembling and doxing will be easy as soon as I understand the backbone it rests on.
Language-wise, I speak them all. I could never imagine at Renée’s age that I would ever use a computer, much less be able to program them, build apps, or break them down. I still have no clue how I have an aptitude that allows me to do this, but I’ve stopped questioning how or why.
By mid-afternoon, I’ve penetrated the site and begun pulling data. I have a spreadsheet of usernames, registration data, and unique identifiers, including IP addresses. Seriously, how lax is their pen testing? Their data security is non-existent.
One of the key data components is the user birthdate. There’s a specific breakoff in the under eighteens and the volume of messages and data sent.
At the risk of my own sanity, I find my daughter’s birthday and download all the messages associated with her account. I’m relieved to see the volume of messages didn’t arrive months ago. But I am disheartened by how easy it was to reel in my less-than-tech-savvy daughter with a slow rise in images, in how much and how graphic they poured in.
I taught her better.
No, I didn’t train her at all for this onslaught.
Her innocent responses probably— I stop that thought in its tracks. No more. She’ll never be in this position again because I failed her.
Tonight’s going to be another one of those non-stop thrill rides where we both wish the conversation would just end already.
I pull the identifier of the accounts that contacted her and then start worming their profiles to see how many and who they preyed on. All under sixteen. Some under twelve.
My temper rises and my fingers fly.
The top two thousand data movers in the app are sending porn to kids. By the time Renée and Rosie get home from school, their accounts are locked from deletion. I allow the predators to incriminate themselves further. All the while, I send an apology into the universe to the parents that there’s another day of this shit on their kids’ devices.
Three quarters of these users are overseas, and I’ll dox them good. But that one quarter who are stateside? I’ll rain down hellfire on them and watch them dance as they burn.
I lock my computer and fight to clear my mind of the images I saw, the struggle it’s been to know my daughter was exposed, and the knowledge that I couldn’t stop it all today.
I cook. We eat. Renée does homework. Rosie looks a little worse for wear, but since I’m still in my pajamas from last night and the knot on the top of my head hasn’t been adjusted since first thing this morning, I have no room to talk.
I forego the conversation with Renée for tonight. I’ve got that vibration inside my chest that means anxiety is having its way with me. I know better than trying to stay calm and be moderate when it’s crawling inside me like a colony of ants on a gumdrop.
I would ground her from her phone—and I still might—but she’s present with me. Homework’s done. TV is on to a sitcom and both of us have our devices down. I also have no creativity left from my day to make an excuse.
She also knows that I have the right at any time to audit and review her phone usage, data history, and anything and everything I can dig into. That’s the deal we made when she got it. Neither of us wants that, so she’s smart enough to leave it at night and not push the boundaries at school.
