Page 71 of You Had Me at Hello World
Coincidentally, that’s also how I would describe sex.
God, I’m on the struggle bus here. I wish Khoi wasn’t busy cramming his face with birthday cake. He’d know exactly what to do.
No. I don’t need him to play tech support twenty-four-seven. I can handle this on my own.
This situation reminds me of last year, when someone emailed the school with chemistry test answers and I made a script to catch him. Sent him an attachment with the messageHey! I also got the answers for bio. As soon as he downloaded the attachment, it triggered a script that used browser fingerprinting to collect as much data as possible. That’s how I discovered that the thief was Tommy Gavel and that he had a furry porn addiction. Honestly, I regret doing such a deep dive. Some foxes you can’t unsee.
But that only worked because Tommy was basically asking to get hacked. He clicked on a sketchy attachment. He didn’t disable his cookies. He wasn’t even using incognito mode. It was giving major “my password is the wordpassword” energy. Made me feel kind of bad about the whole thing.
Lucascannotbe that smooth-brained.
But. What if he is? Why am I so convinced that these kids at Alpha Fellows are so much savvier than everyone back home?
“I have an idea, but it might not work,” I say.
Since no mainstream email server would let us send a script like this, I use an SMTP connection with Python. It takes a hot minute to set everything up, but I did this last year in Chinook Shore.
Then we have to compose the body text of the email. And now I’m staring at the blinking cursor in my terminal like it might magically come up with the perfect words.
“If we’re going to get him to click on an attachment, the message has to be spicy,” Stella says.
I nod. “Maybe like, ‘Here’s the proof to the Riemann hypothesis’?” I learned about that from Khoi.
“What’s that?”
“An unsolved problem in mathematics.” Like the holy grail of math problems. Whoever solves it will get instant legend status.
“What? You think Lucas cares about that? Doesanyonecare about that?” She shakes her head. “No, no. It has to be…” She snaps her fingers. “Give me the laptop.”
I oblige. She types something and then tilts the screen toward me.
Bro Stella is so hot!! She sent me these n00dz last yr bro wanna see bro
“Maybe remove one of thebros,” I say. “Also, you really had to add in a line about how you’re so hot?”
“Just keeping it realistic.”
I fake-gag and she giggles. Something loosens between us. Even though this entire situation is horrible, I can’t help but smile.
“Can we send the email now?” Stella asks, and the feel-good moment is over. She slides the laptop back to me.
I add a few more lines of code to hide the script in the attachment, then hit execute. For a few seconds, my cursor does that annoying thing where it freezes like it’s having a meltdown.
From the tracking pixel I slid in, I can see that he opens the email almost immediately.C’mon, dude, be the dumbass I know you can be. Take the bait…
He clicks the attachment. I let out a whoop.
Stella grabs my hand all hyped, then lets go once she remembers we’re not tight like that.
My script chews through his browser data and sends along whatever it finds. Lots of it is useless—I don’t need to know what version of Google Chrome he’s on, and Idefinitelydon’t need to know what’s in his “baddies” bookmarks folder —but heislogged into both the email he used for those deepfakes and his normal email account from Exeter, his private school. Caught in 4K.
Ten minutes later, we’ve secured all the receipts to prove that Lucas is the creep. I bundle everything into a CSV file and send it to Stella so she can decide how to end this fool’s whole career.
“I’m going to talk to Courtney,” she says.
I nod. “You can probably go to the cops too. But obviously that’s a whole ordeal.” Personally I want to report his ass to law enforcement, but it’s not my place to tell her how to handle this.
“Thanks, Char. For everything.”
