June 30, 2010 (4pm)
“Of
course. I sent him an email that contained a hidden link that can lead back to
my computer. I’m gonna hack into his computer.”
Chalano
abruptly stood up to leave, saying, “I’m not involved in that! That’s illegal!”
“We
have no other choice,” Kim pleaded. “You know me; you know that I’m a good
person. I’m doing this only once in my life; I promise, and I’m doing this for
all of us. We don’t know who he’s going to kill next. He already tried to burn
our whole school. He already killed John. We have to do whatever we can.”
Chalano
sat down again, and said, “Alright, whatever.”
Kim sat
down on the revolving chair. He suddenly exclaimed with joy, “Oh, great! The
fool has replied! I sent the email only a few minutes ago, and he replied
faster than I thought he would.”
Kim
opened one of the programs in the computer. He clicked a button that had the
words “load code.” A dark, horizontal bar in the middle of the screen turned
red. Chalano asked, “Where did you get this program?”
“I
created it,” Kim said, and began to chuckle as he spoke. “It could make my
whole family rich if I sold copies of it, but it could also get me imprisoned.
I don’t want to go to prison, because that would be a shame to my father. So I
will crash this program after I get enough information from John Doe’s
computer.”
“A
serial killer who replies to emails?”
“I sent
him an email that he could have never received before. It’s from a young,
beautiful woman who’s claiming to be his former
classmate in high school, and hoping that she could be his friend, or
more than a friend.”
“Gee,
nice one,” Chalano grinned.
“The
program is connected to my email account, but its settings coordinate with only
one email: the ‘bullet email.’ Once he responds to the bullet email, the
program uses the connection as a bridge to absorb the files from John Doe’s
browsing history and flash drive. Now, the program is taking screen shots.” Kim
kept on talking as screen shots of John Doe’s computer activities kept
appearing on the screen. “He’s on Facebook, and he ‘liked’ the fanpage of 4th
Project Town. He’s been reading the profiles of different residents from our
town. He even watches over the whole town from Google Satellite. Oh, I think
that we got the killer.”
A page
of another social networking site appeared on the screen; John Doe had posted
the victims’ web pages on it, including Rella, their school, and more. “Looks
like he had no plan to kill John. John is not here. I’m not surprised. He
planned to burn our whole school, but John foiled the plan by sacrificing
himself. Um … what’s this? The Facebook profile of one of the victims … from
the inside?” Kim and Chalano were looking at a screen shot of the Facebook
profile of one of the victims.
“He
hacked into the account of his victim,” Kim observed. “He was impersonating his
victim. I think that I’m right; he takes the identities of his victims. But he’s
using his victims’ Facebook accounts to observe your Facebook account.” Kim pushed himself and his revolving chair
away from the desk, and told Chalano, “Go to the browser, and log in to your
Facebook account.”
“I don’t
think that my account would be of any use to anyone. It contains nothing,”
Chalano argued. “The last time that I logged in was last year, which was the
day that I created it. I created an account only because you told me to,
telling me that Facebook was all the rage, but I wasn’t really that interested.”
“The
fact that your last log in was a year ago really suggests that you should log
in now. You shouldn’t leave such things unattended. You should have deactivated
your account if you wouldn’t be back for long.”
“’Deactivated’?
What does that mean?”
“Long
story. Just log in to your account. We’ll see how the arsonist works. He’s been
checking up on you. Maybe you’re his next victim. Maybe his reasons are
something else.”
Chalano
moved his stool closer to the desk, and reluctantly logged in. There were lots
of friend requests. Kim took the mouse, and clicked on the friend requests tab.
Rella, Aylyn …
“He
took over all of his victims’ Facebook accounts, and uses them to send you
friend requests,” Kim said. “He’s trying to frame you up! He’s going to make it
look like all of the victims were your Facebook friends! You don’t have any
other Facebook friend except me, right?”
“Yeah …”
“Dismiss
all of these friend requests! Hurry! Click ‘Ignore All’!”
Chalano
clicked “Ignore All,” and the friend requests were gone.
Kim
asked, “Do you have email notifications allowed on Facebook?”
“W-what’s
that?”
“Just
log in to your email account,” Kim ordered.
Chalano
logged in to Yahoo! Mail. “I have new spam mails,” he said when he finally
opened his inbox. “From Facebook.”
“Delete
all of them,” Kim said. “They are notifications about those friend requests
that you dismissed a while ago, and you must delete them to keep the arsonist
from setting you up with the victims.”
Before
Chalano deleted the spam mail, he read it. He asked, “When did Rella’s house
get burned?”
“June
14.”
“This
mail states that I received the friend request from Rella on June 16, two days after her house got burned.”
Chalano
clicked on the other mails one-by-one. “Even the other victims sent me friend
requests after they died. That’s
impossible. I think that I should not delete these emails to prove my
innocence.”
“What?!”
Chalano
turned to Kim to explain. When he turned his back on the computer, a small,
pop-up window appeared on the computer screen. The window read, “Folder Photos
to remote device.” None of the friends noticed it. They were arguing.
“I
believe that these spam mails are the evidence to the fact that I’m being
framed up,” Chalano explained.
“But
---“
“Wait,
let me explain. The mails state the dates on which the victims sent me friend
requests. The dates are after they died. That’s impossible. It means that someone
took over the accounts, and tried to frame me up. If somebody ever tried to
accuse me of being the murderer, these mails will prove my innocence.
Therefore, I shouldn’t delete them.”
“I told
you, you’re intelligent,” Kim sarcastically said. “Let’s proceed to the next
screen shots, um … hey …”
Kim
stared at the screen, and Chalano turned to look at what Kim was looking at.
Kim asked, “Did you mess up with my files?”
“Your
what? I wasn’t doing anything with your computer. I just did what you told me
to do: log in, ignore all, log in, but I didn’t delete the spam mails.”
“No,
not that,” Kim said as he moved back to the desk. “I think that you
accidentally moved one of my folders to an incomplete target.”
“Huh?”
Kim
waited for the pop-up window to fade, but another pop-up window took its place.
“Folder My Videos to remote device,” it read.
Kim
abruptly stood up in fright. “John Doe tracked my computer. He found it! He
found it! Oh, my God! I didn’t know that this was going to happen!”
“W-what’s
happening?!”
“John
Doe has his own hacking program! And he’s stealing my personal files!”
“Your
personal files?! He’s going to use them! He might frame you up if he failed at
me! What are we going to do?”
“I don’t
know! This is horrible,” Kim said as he kept pacing back and forth in panic. “I
shouldn’t have hacked him in the first place. I shouldn’t ---“
“We
have to do something, Kim,” Chalano interrupted, also starting to panic. “There
has got to be a way!”
“I don’t
know a way,” Kim yelled at him in frustration.
“There
is!”
Chalano
grabbed the computer, carried it outside Kim’s room, and threw it outside an
open window. The computer crashed into pieces behind their house, but the two
friends were no longer there to watch it. They were already running downstairs.
Chalano grabbed a thick piece of wood, and Kim took a baseball bat. They ran
outside to the broken computer, and smashed it into smaller pieces. “There’s
only one way to prevent him from getting your files,” Chalano said as they
destroyed the server.
“Yeah.
Only turning it off wouldn’t be enough,” Kim agreed.
Somewhere
in 4th Project Town, a man was sitting before a computer in a very
dark room. A more sophisticated hacking program suddenly stopped operating, and
a message flashed across the screen in red letters: “Data source unavailable.”
He
stood up, took his handbag, and left.
Chalano
and Kim stopped smashing the computer. They were panting as they stared at it.
Chalano suddenly asked, “Did you see the other
picture on the killer’s photo collection of his victims?”
Kim
nodded, and asked back, “How many hours had it been since his last kill?”
The
question didn’t have to be answered, because both of them knew what was next.
They abruptly left the broken computer, and started running toward Chalano’s
former school, 4th Project Town High.
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