Page 70 of You Had Me at Hello World
“Who?” I assumed it was some horny loser at camp. Which could be, like, half the people here.
“Lucas van den Berg.” She sniffles.
“Lucas… your boyfriend Lucas?”
“I broke up with him on Monday. After he stole your boyfriend’s Adderall.”
“Khoi’s not my…” I decide to let it go. She’s clearly not trying to hear about my situationship status. “Hey, it was nice of you to return it. That took courage.”
“Fat lotta good that did me,” she mumbles. “I should’veknown Lucas would be nasty about the breakup. I heard that after he got dumped by this other girl, he spammed her with scary anonymous texts formonths. She had to get a new phone number. But I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, since she couldn’tproveit was him…”
“Lucas is a bastard,” I say.
Stella covers her face. “I’m scared he’s going to send more stuff. Or send it to people at Andover, or my parents.” She does this shaky gulp for air. “He always gets away with everything. He has that slouchy bored-skater-kid aesthetic, but he’s rich. There’s a building at Yale with his family’s name on it.”
“Well, it’s only Yale,” I say. “Not even Harvard.”
She doesn’t smile at the joke.
I switch tactics. “Stella, if you expose Lucas, Alpha Fellows willhaveto kick him out, even if he’s rich. You aren’t powerless here.”
“Do you actually think so?”
I’m not confident, but I nod anyway.
She sniffles some more. “How are we going to do that?”
We?Looks like I’m part of this now. Let’s be real, as soon as I knocked on Stella’s door, I was going to be part of this. And even though there are a million other things on my to-do list, I’m kind of living for the chance to take Lucas down.
I say, “We need to prove that the email came from him.”
Chapter Thirty-One
For the next hour, we brainstorm ways to nail Lucas’s ass.
No way tracking his IP address helps. Like, congrats, bestie, he’s on the MIT network. So is everyone else at camp.
“I could pretend to get back together with him?” Stella suggests. “Act apologetic and get him to confess to making the deepfakes. Secretly record the whole conversation.”
“Do you think Lucas is gullible enough to fall for that?” It’s a genuine question. She knows him way better than I do. If she truly thinks he could be tricked by this, then so be it.
She considers, then sighs. “No.”
What if we track down whatever deepfake service he used and force them to fork over the user data? Thing is, there’s no watermark on the image, so it would take serious detective work to determine exactly which pervy hellhole it came from.
A quick Google search reveals that there are a million apps out there that allow creeps to produce this stuff. I hate the world.Maybe technology was a mistake. Things were better when we all lived in caves.
“Could we steal his phone?” I ask. “Do you know his password?”
Stella shakes her head. “I’m certain he’s changed it by now. And he’s superglued to that thing. Sleeps with it beneath his pillow. We’d have to pull a heist.”
For a few seconds, I fantasize about how awesome it’d be to do anOcean’s Elevenon Lucas. But I’m not trying to get expelled here.
“What if we run a man-in-the-middle attack?” I suggest. “Trick him into connecting to an insecure network and intercept his data packets?”
She wrinkles her nose. “That’s a pretty sophisticated cyberattack. Can you pull that off?”
“Probably not,” I admit. I know the theory behind this stuff, but I’ve never done it for real.
