Mind_Hack Exe Ch 02

"That is very entertaining science fiction man, but you didn't need to make up something that elaborate for an excuse to come and see me."

Adam Holland stared with wild eyed frustration at his tubby, balding, middle aged mentor, Daniel Stein. He was the only person Adam could turn to for help with his new program and was the closest thing to a friend he had despite the more than twenty year age difference. Dan was a computer engineer and had worked for some of the biggest tech companies back in his younger years. One of those had been a company that Adam's dad had worked at, and Dan had been invited over for a meal at their house.

It was there that Adam had shown Dan his talent for hacking in an attempt to impress someone who actually seemed to have some computer skills. Adam had quickly gained access to his school's records and changed grades of several students. Dan had not been impressed. When Adam upped his game by gaining access to one of the more heavily secured government sites, Dan conceded that this kid knew his way around a computer. Instead of telling him off or getting him in trouble with his parents, a bond was forged, and Dan took Adam on as his apprentice in what he called the war against the man.

Dan left Adam's city shorty thereafter for a new job that was in an adjacent government sector. The sectors were akin to the states of old, but each had been divided up by population to help create maximum efficiency in monitoring the citizens within. Each sector had its own large government facility that kept a close eye on an ever decreasing crime rate and closer eye on the money spending habits of each man and woman for the corporations that controlled it all.

Dan and Adam were now three hours apart, but it meant little as they communicated almost entirely online. It was through Dan's influence that Adam had become so inspired to perform his greatest hacking feat, gaining access to the government's most powerful tool in keeping tabs on the masses. It was known as Peace Of Mind, or POM, and until three weeks ago, it had been impenetrable. Then Adam used a program he had cobbled together off of websites of hackers that had tried before him, and added his own inspiration. He still wasn't entirely sure how it had been so successful, but it had also done something else that had been completely unexpected.

"I'm telling you, it's true!" Adam said, trying to keep anger at bay. "I don't understand it, but my program somehow let me gain access to, to Candace's body. My consciousness was inside of her and I was her."

"So you've said," Dan sneered. He shifted his weight in his plush desk chair and leaned his bulky frame back. "And I told you it was science fiction. Why would you go perv on your old babysitter anyway if you had access to POM? The goal for hackers worldwide had been for someone to break into it, then erase their existence from the system, or take it down altogether. Taking over some chick for an erotic adventure is where your story lost all credibility."

Adam clenched his fists, willing himself to be patient and reminded himself this was all uncharted territory. "That was my original intent. I wanted to gain permanent access to POM, which I did. I poked around a bit and saw how everyone with the implants is tracked. We all look like little red dots with names and everything we do is being monitored."

"And then you became a woman and had sex with a dude."

Adam flushed. "Shut up. I was trying to find out how to erase my existence from their database, but, I didn't want to spend too much time on there the first time. Didn't know if my program was visible to them and setting off any red flags. It shouldn't, but I was trying to be cautious like you taught me to be."

"So you logged off and banged a guy. Hey, we've all been there."

Adam pressed on. "Before I logged out, I just wanted to see if I could look out through someone's eyes, see what they see. I clicked on my dot and something, I don't know, happened in my head, but what I was seeing didn't show up on my monitor. I tried someone else, Candace's husband..."

"Who you have been harboring latent homosexual tendencies for, judgment free zone man. You do you."

"I hate you. But when I clicked on him, nothing happened, gave some kind of error message. Then I tried to see what Candace saw, next thing I know, I'm her. At least, I'm her in that I'm in her body, but everything else, my thoughts, memories, even my voice, it's still me."

Dan sighed but then smiled. "Plot hole number two there, Adam. Why would your voice be in her body?"

"I've thought about that more than anything else," Adam mused.

"Good. Moved right past the deep dick you received and focused only on the voice problem. Who wouldn't?"

Adam clenched his teeth and wanted to stop and begin the three hour drive back home. Dan was always quick to joke, but Adam needed him to believe he was telling the truth. The fact that he had come all this way, something he had only done once before, should be proof enough of how serious Adam was about this.

Dan sensed the tension building in Adam. "I'm sorry, that was the last one. Maybe. We'll see. I'll try to be serious. Pretend I believe you and this isn't some elaborate prank at my expense, you couldn't explain your predicament to Candace's husband because what you had done was incredibly illegal."

Adam nodded. "Right. And I was so disoriented from, well, having tits and being in a woman that..."

"You got distracted and fucked a big old penis. It's the natural order of things."

"You're a dick."

"I'm confused. Are you hitting on me right now?" Dan laughed and spun in his chair while grabbing his large belly. "I mean, I get it. Who wouldn't want a piece of this?"

Adam fought to get back on track. "Clearly there's a lot about POM we don't know. And I really don't understand why my program is running the way it is. There's a whole lot we need to find out and it's too big for me. I need your help."

Dan rolled his eyes and then looked at Adam in a way that conveyed he was humoring him right now. "And how would you like me to help you?"

Adam hoped he was getting somewhere. "I waited to log back on for three day. When nobody came to arrest me, I assumed it must be safe. But I didn't try to transfer myself into anyone again. Not until I can monitor what happens and make sure it's safe and can be done secretly. And I'm hoping to find answers to questions like the voice thing."

"Okay, I'll bite," Dan said. "What's your theory on the voice thing?"

"I think they added a lot more than just a few brain implants. My consciousness streamed into another person and let me maintain my thoughts and voice, without giving me access to Candace's. There's got to be some voice modulator inside each of us that mimics our original voice. Maybe it can be changed to the person you're in at the time? There's just so much I don't know but the information doesn't seem to become available in the program until consciousness is transferred."

Dan smirked. "So, you want to pretend to transfer into someone else, then they'll show up here, pretending to be you and then we all have a good laugh. Is that it?"

"No," Adam said, smiling for the first time, taking a computer tablet out of his bag. "I was hoping you'd let me monitor you?"

Dan's eyebrows came together in a state of disbelief. "Okay, you win the award for best commitment to a joke. What you're suggesting is impossible, and also, I'd never want to be a woman."

Adam was rapidly pressing the surface of his tablet. "That is unfortunate as your sister, Stephanie, who lives in the same house as you and is right downstairs provides a lot of convenience. Is there a guy that's close?"

Dan watched as Adam paused for a moment as if searching the contents of the screen, then seemed to find what he was looking for and gave the screen a few more presses. All of a sudden Dan felt a jolt in his brain, as if something had come alive inside his skull. "What the hell was that?"

"Just my program fused with POM giving me access to the inner workings of your brain," Adam grinned. "But you don't believe that remember? Now what guy is close by that you'd like to be?"

Dan shook his head wondering why he was still entertaining this fiction. "Jerry, next door. Nice guy with a hot wife and daughter."

Adam touched the screen, and Dan felt a mild buzzing in his head, then nothing. He'd need to reign in his imagination because he almost thought something would happen there for a second.

Adam shook his head. "Same thing as before. It comes back with an incompatibility error. So which one do you want me to try next? The wife or the daughter?"

Dan shot him a look. "How about neither."

"I agree with you," Adam said as his fingers danced across the tablet. "We're going back to convenient?"

"What's that mean?" Dan said, noting the tremor in his voice.

"It means your sister downstairs." Adam winked at Dan and then made a show of pressing something on his screen.

"I don't know why your playing this game?" Dan started. "This isn't possible and I'd never want to be my sis..."

Adam didn't hear the rest of Dan's sentence as Dan's eyes had rolled back in his head. His body shifted back in the desk chair, teetered precariously, then unceremoniously tossed Dan to the floor. A moment later, Adam smiled to himself as Dan's loud cursing could be heard from downstairs.

Dan was suddenly very disoriented. It was worse than being drunk and then spinning around really fast. This was way, way worse. Nothing felt right as his senses betrayed him and he fell to the floor. It was not the hard wood floor of his upstairs office, but the tile of the downstairs kitchen. One second he had been sitting in his office chair and talking to Adam. The next, he was standing on tile, losing his balance, yelling as he fell, and now could see underneath his refrigerator.

Dan put his arms out and pushed himself up but then noticed the curtly black hair in his line of site that fell from his head. He kept trying to stand but his balance was completely different. He felt like someone who had never walked before. He scooted over to a wall and leaned against it, allowing it to prop him up and keep him from falling again.

When he was upright, he looked down. Not being able to see his feet was nothing new to him because of his sizable belly. But this time, it wasn't a belly he saw, but two large lumps that blocked his view, protruding from his chest. His hands came up to see what this anomaly was. As each hand gave a tentative squeeze, he realized that they were attached to him, then fully understood several things at once.

Dan felt noticeably lighter, like someone must feel who was in shape. His fingers had long nails and were slim and dainty. But perhaps most troubling was, and he flexed that area to be sure, he could not feel his penis. "Adam! What the hell is going on?" He heard footsteps on the stairs and a moment later Adam entered the kitchen looking like the cat that ate the canary.

"I'm sorry," Adam said. "You were saying something about this not being possible?" He allowed himself to look at Dan's sister in way he had not before. He had only met her one other time but she left an impression.

He knew Stephanie was in her mid thirties and was still single. She still liked to party and Daniel complained to Adam that she brought too many guys over, sometimes all at once. With a very cute face, black hair and a sizeable chest, Adam didn't think she'd have any problem luring them back here. When Adam had visited Dan's house once before, Steph had hit on him until she found out he was underage at the time. He had crushed on her a little, and now he brazenly ogled her, knowing that she wasn't home in her body.

A stream of words left Stephanie's mouth all at once, but with Dan's voice. "Why does everything feel wrong and why am I a girl and am I my sister right now and if the answer is yes then I willing fucking kill you?"

Adam watched as Stephanie tried to lunge at him only to fall to the ground again. He carefully helped her up and put her in a chair. "Sorry, Dan. Forgot to tell you about the initial adjustment period. It didn't take long for me but I weighed closer to Candace's weight than you do your sister. Take it slow."

Steph's eyes blazed as they looked at Adam, causing him to take a few steps back. "Please explain yourself," Dan's voice seethed with unchecked menace.

" Uh, I'm guessing when your consciousness began streaming into a new body, in this case your sister's, it struggles to process new weight and height changes and..."

"That's not what I'm talking about! I'm... How did you do this?"

"You were paying attention upstairs, right? I mean, you must have been because you kept questioning my sexual preferences."

Steph's eyes darted to and fro as everything finally fell into place for Dan. "You actually hacked into POM! You have a program that hacked into POM and can... do this?" Steph's eyes gazed down again at her body. "This is amazing! This changes everything!"

Adam smiled. "Took you long enough. But there's still a lot of questions I have and I don't want to keep you in Stephanie for too long so, let's get to work."

Steph looked at him and noticed Adam's lascivious gaze. "Dude, stop eye banging my sister. Man, why couldn't you have put me into the neighbor's wife or daughter? I could be all groping myself right now but, my sister..." Steph's face contorted into disgust. "Yeah, I suppose I'll be able to focus though, because I ain't touching this body."

"That's too bad, because for the first time in your life, I'd say you got a body worth touching."

Dan's response was to amble very carefully to a kitchen chair and flop down into his usual slouched sitting position. "Grab my laptop from my office. I'm not ready to try to walk up stairs just yet."

Adam dutifully retrieved Dan's computer and set it before him on the table. "You've already got the program. I sent it to you earlier, encrypted of course. Let me just..." Adam punched some keys. "Voila, there it is. I call it Mind Hack."

Dan opened the program and then used it to gain access to POM's operation system. It was almost too easy. "Okay, several questions. I get that you exploited the only access you get to POM's servers when you turned eighteen, and that more or less let you bring Mind Hack in through the front door, but, well, let's see. How did you come up with the programming expertise for this? I mean, you're good, but this is, well it's something else. No one has been able to do what you have done, and the fact that it has the added bonus of letting someone hop into another person's cyber brain, well, now we're really back to the science fiction part? Did you know it would do that? You didn't seem to, and I doubt that's something that was a part of POM's original plans, so, what hell? Where's your source code?"

Adam picked up his tablet and went to his files. "Here's what I had near my final attempt. As you can see a lot of it has been cobbled together from other codes that people posted when they were trying to gain access."

Dan studied it carefully for several minutes before whistling. "This, right here. I'm guessing this is your addition."

"Some of it, yeah. There's more, but that's a big part of it."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but, you're not talented enough for this. This is, I mean, I've never come close to something this extraordinary. This program is designed to gain access, yes, but then it...it embeds itself in the original program and changes it. When Mind Hack is connected to POM, it becomes something more than what it was. It's almost like half the puzzle was missing, and your program completes it. It doesn't make sense. How did you conceive this?"

Adam thought hard. "I just, you know, I had thought about it a lot because of you. I didn't want the government to have complete access to my life unlike so many of the mindless drones out there. And after reading and researching everyone's work to take POM down on the net, this idea just came to me and, well, there it is."

Dan shook Steph's head. "Doesn't make sense. You're either a super computer genius that's been holding out on me, or got ridiculously lucky with this." He clicked some keys on his computer and began to examine POM's set up. It was just like Adam had said, hundreds, thousands of red dots, all with names attached. Some were moving across the map, others were stationary. All representing the lives of people in their sector. Every movement tracked, every moment recorded. "So can't believe I'm just asking this question now, might have something to do with the fact that I currently don't have a penis and that was a bit of a distraction, but, does POM know what's happening right now? Does it know my brain is streaming into my sister's?"

Adam gave a sheepish smile and shrugged. "That's kind of why I'm here? I don't know. I've only been able to see what you're seeing now. No one has come for me yet, but I wanted someone with more expertise to look at it."

Steph's face darkened. "Or you could assume that what happened that first time was seen as a glitch and if it happened again, they'll send the hounds and we all get killed real fast. Something like this isn't a discussion. It dismantles the entire framework the government and corporations have worked so hard to create since the uprisings. It would be, oh wow, congratulations on doing something amazing with our cyber ware and operating system and look you're dead now. The whole point was to get off their grid, not potentially paint a large target on our backs."

This thought had struck Adam too, but he really had assumed his program was safe. Now he had doubts. "Well, we can still do that, right? I mean, can't we just find our dots and delete them?"

Steph looked at him as if he were the dumbest person alive. "Okay, let's think about that for a second. These dots, along with your program that has to run to give us access to it, is representing what's happening in our brains right now, and maybe other vital organs. You want to select it and delete it, just like that. Do you think there might be some potentially fatal repercussions to that?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Maybe deleting our brains, wiping our minds, making us vegetables. This is your problem, Adam. You jumped into this without understanding it. Hell, I don't understand it and I've got way more experience than you do. No, we're going to do this right. We're going to do it careful. But I'm sure this is the key to taking down POM for good, as long as we don't get killed before doing it."

Adam hung his head ashamedly. "I'm sorry, I, I guess I didn't think it through. I did try to be careful, and it was an accident when I jumped into Candace's body."

Steph's face softened. "It's okay. Now put me back in my body and we'll try to dissect this thing."

Adam was disappointed. He wasn't sure why. He realized he had been half thinking with his dick when he put Dan in Stephanie's body. He didn't think he'd get laid or anything, but maybe get to cop a feel or something. Adam had become so horny when he found himself in a female form and it had overwhelmed him. This would clearly not be the case here. "Okay, sure. Uh, before I do, let me check one thing real quick."

"Real quick. I miss my dick."

Adam stepped behind where Stephanie's body was sitting, and gently brushed her long, black hair to one side so he could see the back of her neck. Dan felt Adam's fingers brush his sister's skin as he pulled the hair back, causing goose bumps to appear. It felt different, good actually, this delicate, feminine skin. Dan had not taken the time to fully appreciate how everything seemed more pleasant, much more so than his older, pudgy body. He pushed those thoughts back, still very much aware that this was his sister's body he was temporarily inhabiting. Adam's fingers brushed the back of his neck again, causing a new sensation to arise in his nether region. "What the hell are you doing back there?"