So I set it off to do its work -- I had no idea how long it might take so I knew there was no point in just sitting around waiting.
But I had other things I could do. I grabbed my phone and ran another program I'd built to transfer the data from it to my 'burner' phone -- just another smartphone without a sim card; it didn't need one. Then I used that phone to 'clone' Harriet's phone contents; text message, phone call logs, apps, gallery the works. Anything password-protected on her phone was still off-limits unless she had an active login that she never refreshed but I could pick and choose what I wanted to access later and try to brute-force those passwords one at a time.
Seeing as it was downloading stuff from Harriet's phone to my phone and then to my burner phone this would also take for
ever
though. Luckily tomorrow was a Saturday so I had all day to go through it all. With everything running I went to sleep.
"Look, he rises." Mom said as I entered the kitchen the next morning. I knew she was just back from her night shift and was making herself a light dinner before heading off to bed. I grumbled in return and she put a hand to her ear.
"I'm sorry what was that, Frankenstein?"
"I said 'hi mom'."
"Morning, honey. How was school?"
"Fine."
"You doing alright in your classes?"
"Fine."
"Good. And you're enjoying them alright?"
"Fine."
"What's the weather on Mars like today?"
"Fine." Mom sighed and went back to scrolling through her phone. I felt a twinge of guilt, she was just trying to be nice but I could tell she was trying too hard to be 'mom-y' and it often annoyed me.
I should tell you about my mom, to explain.
Mom came from a normal, boring middle-class family and joined the army when she was 19. She qualified to become a helicopter pilot and went to Iraq in '03. She met my dad there while he was working as a flight engineer, and the way my aunt tells it they fell instantly in love and had an intense love affair. I have no idea what the truth is because mom won't talk about him. Anyway, mom got pregnant in '04 and got shipped back to the states, dad was supposed to join her just before she was due.
Then my dad's truck ran over an IED and that's why I've never met him and never will.
So mom had to raise me herself. And I think we would have been okay if it weren't for one thing: She didn't raise me. She gave birth to me and when I was five months old she placed me in my aunt's care and went back to the Army. This time she got shipped to Afghanistan and apart for a few months when she was back home on leave she spent the next five years there until one day her helicopter developed a technical fault right after lift-off. It was fifteen feet up in the air when the rotor suddenly sheered clean off and the whole thing dropped straight down like a stone.
Her copilot was paralyzed, and mom broke both hips. She spent three months recovering and then they sent her home with a medical discharge and a pain killer addiction.
Back in the states she stayed with us at my aunt's place for a few months before she left again. She spent two years doing I don't know what before returning. At some point during those two years she'd cleaned up, gotten into a veteran's program for dealing with trauma and was doing much better, though she had about a hundred dollars to her name. This time, finally, she actually stayed and tried to play mom to me.
It took a really long time -- I was seven years old and I had practically only seen pictures of her. But to her credit she really did try. After a while we got along and eventually I came to love her and started calling her mom. When I was ten we had a long talk where she finally gave me a genuine, honest apology for leaving me with my aunt. After that I started spending more time with her and eventually I moved in with her.
We were happy. Sort of. Mom was poor and really couldn't afford to take care of me, but my god did she try. She worked herself to the bone taking late shifts at the airport as an air traffic controller for years to keep me clothed, fed and comfortable. She was making up for past sins.
Remembering this I drew a deep breath and apologized.
"Sorry mom, I don't mean to be grumpy. School's okay, I'm just a bit frustrated with some classes." Her face lit up as I actually engaged with her.
"Well if it's not hard work someone's probably playing you for a fool." She said and I nodded and pulled a juice out of the fridge and looked over at her.
I often tried to imagine my mom the way she must have been when I was little -- a badass helicopter pilot - but couldn't quite picture it. I'd seen photos of her of course, but they were usually pretty crappy. And years of reduced physical activity had taken its toll -- she used to love running but her legs didn't heal right after the accident and if she tried more than a light jog around the neighborhood they would start hurting her and not stop for days. She wasn't in terrible shape, though; she did yoga and tried to keep to a diet -- but she carried more weight than she liked and her belly poked out over her waist no matter what she wore. She usually had bags under her eyes, too and rarely put on anything except professional make-up and wore her hair in a tight bun. I ate breakfast and she finished her dinner while we talked a little about nothing in particular.
"Okay, well I'm down for repairs." Mom said. "But we're still on for that movie tonight, right?"
"Yeah we are. Sleep well, mom."
"See ya. Love you."
"You too, mom." I finished my breakfast and then went back to my room. We lived in a three bedroom apartment; a rental. My mom would never own her own home -- for all her hard work that would never happen.
My program to break her Wi-Fi was still working, but at least her phone was done copying. I started going through the phone contents.
I'll admit this was mostly for my curiosity -- I didn't expect to get anything from this -- but there was always a possibility she'd used her phone to log in to the teacher network. I read through some of her text messages and found a few messages for my mom, mostly just the two of them setting up lunch dates and alike. After maybe twenty minutes I'd found nothing so I put it to the side for now and thought about going out for a swim or something when my program cracked her Wi-Fi password.
I'd honestly expected for it to work all weekend and maybe longer -- I must have gotten lucky.
With access to her home network I could now see all her connected devices; apart from her smart watch and phone her laptop was accessible to me now, as well as her home computer. I hadn't entirely expected to see a home computer to be honest, but there it was. A little curious, and already a little warmed up from snooping around her phone I decided I'd have a quick peek in there.
Nothing special at first glance. She used her personal computer for emailing her parents, keeping a diary, storing photos etc. I perused dozens of folders containing different personal documents and looked at one or two but I was just messing around -- I wasn't all that interested.
That is until I found a folder called 'Vacation snaps 2000s'. What caught my eye about that, you might ask? Nothing, until I glanced at the folder info: Fifty-four gigabytes.
Unless she'd gathered tens of thousands of photos from vacations over the 2000s something was up. I opened the folder and found not tens of thousands of photos but several hundred video clips. Old video clips. They were all untitled and I opened one at random.
Yes, I'd be lying if I hadn't expected -- or rather hoped -- to find what I found as soon as I saw the size of this folder. But even so, my heart leapt and my throat ran dry as the video started playing.
The video was pretty low-quality, probably filmed on a camcorder. I hastily fumbled with my headphones and made sure my door was closed and locked before putting them on. There was a poorly captured techno beat in the background as the scene started out; Harriet was in center frame wearing a simple, black bikini and laughing and dancing in the middle of some garden party. She was younger but I honestly couldn't tell much difference- Harriet had aged beautifully, plus the quality was so low it probably made it less obvious. The cameraman walked up to her, said something that I couldn't make out and Harriet nodded eagerly, then dropped to her knees and engulfed the cameraman's naked penis with her mouth. Two other guys in the background watched and high-fived each other while drunk people milled about behind.
I watched in rapt attention as my Economics Professor performed fellatio until the guy popped and shot ropes of semen all over her face. Harriet laughed and waved at the camera, one eye closed because of the semen running over her eyebrow and down her cheek. The whole video was less than three minutes long.
I sat in dead silence for a moment, thinking about what I'd just found. I looked at the file count. Two hundred and twelve videos. They were all named only dates and stretched from 2003 to 2010. The later ones were on average much larger in file size, either because they were longer or because they were higher quality, I didn't know yet.
I clicked on the next one. It seemed like it was from the same party, or maybe another one in the same place and Harriet was wearing the same bikini. She danced around, her modest boobs jiggling around in beat with her dancing. Someone walked up behind her -- a woman in a red bikini. They leaned in to each other and kissed and then the kiss turned more passionate and they undid each other's bikini tops and pressed their chests together while they kissed and drunken frat boys hooted and hollered.
"Should we go upstairs?!" The cameraman said and Harriet looked at the camera. 'What' she mouthed and the cameraman repeated his question, this time shouting over the noise and Harriet laughed and said sure.
There was an edit and the next shot the camera was on a tripod facing a bed. Harriet, the girl in the red bikini and, I assumed, the cameraman. Harriet and her friend both went down on their hands and knees and gave the man a blowjob together for a few minutes before Harriet whispered something to him. They changed position and I watched as Harriet, one of my mom's few friends who'd stuck with her through all the bullshit and was now a college professor got railed from behind while her drunken friend watched and played with herself.
The video ended with the man coming on both of their faces, though with the camera as far from the bed as it was you could barely see anything.
Holy shit.
I thought to myself. I've struck fucking
gold
!
I spent most of that day thinking. I watched two more videos before I realized I had to stop: My head was spinning with ideas and what to do next.
The first thing I did was take a copy of the entire folder and move it over to my own secure storage. I figured odds were really slim Harriet would discover I was doing anything but just in case she did now I had the goods.
Next I asked myself what the hell I was doing?
Listen, if you think I was behaving terribly from the start I get it, but let me explain to you in detail what my plan was:
With access to her internal school account I wouldn't actually need to do anything in
her
name. See, I happened to know something about our school's IT system -- because it was a college that featured a major and pretty well-regarded computer science department they had, as you might expect, pretty robust security. But the college also featured a bunch of computer science teachers who knew better than some stupid twenty-something IT administrator and so they had insisted on being given admin rights within the system. And the IT administrator, not really caring, had not given just the computer science teachers those rights but
all
teachers. Including Harriet.
So, once I was in I could use Harriet's account not to change my grade but to create a new user, give that user rights to change grades and then use that user to change my grade. Except obviously I'd change a bunch of other peoples' grades, too, and not just in her class but in a bunch of classes; ones she had nothing to do with. Yes, there'd be a record saying that she was the one who assigned that user the admin role, but I felt certain I could delete that record or at least muddy the waters.
She wasn't going to get into trouble. And even
if
it got traced back to her she hadn't broken any rules. There were no campus rules about smart watches or not having Bluetooth turned on (never have your Bluetooth on in public settings, folks), she hadn't acted careless or told someone her login details or anything like that. I had used a method that only required close physical proximity to one of her smart devices, something no teacher at the school had any realistic way of avoiding.
I hadn't wanted to get her into
trouble
.
So what exactly was I thinking about right now... what, blackmailing her?
I tried the thought on for size. I won't deny it excited me. I saw myself in front of Harriet, holding my phone up to her with a video of her playing.
