N3v3r!and E-Book

Nalle Windahl

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: M3rqrie
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 134

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The hacker M3rqrie is looking for the secret organization N3v3r!and, an organization that operates in the shadows of the dark web trying to expose the truth behind all global leaders and companies that are trying to cover up their real intentions and keep us unknowing sheep in the fold. As the hard work pays off and get M3rqrie closer to the organization, but will it meet the expectations? Or is there a shadow behind the shadow? Groll, a favorite character of M3rqrie often says: "There is always more than meets the eye", which indeed seems to be true for the N3v3r!and. The question that is raised, and remains, is what is actually true, and does the end goal always justify the means? Or are there lines that should not be crossed, no matter what? Follow M3rqrie along the path of the white rabbit, and see where this path leads.

Leseprobe

This book is meant for entertainment only. The organizations and operations are just a fiction of imagination.

Table of Contents

Part I: Finding N3v3r!and

The beginning

My path following my white rabbit

The secret organization

An obsession

Trader of secrets

The next clue

Going on a trip in the real world

Sightseeing in Paris

Cracking the code

Another trip

Private tour

Another clue

Copying the keycard

Review of the old clues

Breakthrough

The message

The wait

Unexpected request

The test

The improvisation

Pushing for more

From darkness to light

Was it a dream?

The phone call

The first meeting

The introduction

Part II: Exploring N3v3r!and

The overview

The soundtrack

The third day

The Batman and the second date

High on life (Muddhedd)

New-born (Muddhedd)

Seeing the heart

The security

The finances

Starting to contribute

The yin and yang of the world

Not yin and yang, opposite sides of the same coin

Part III: Fighting N3v3r!and

After Darkness (Muddhedd)

The structure of society is built on four founding pillars

Coming full circle

Part I

Finding N3v3r!and

The beginning

I am going to begin where I will end. You need to wake up. It is time! You need to find and follow your white rabbit!

Now, for it all to make sense, you need to come full circle. So let’s start from the beginning.

My name is M3rqrie, but that has not always been my name, it is my chosen name. I was born Anna. Grew up in an ordinary home, two parents, an annoying older brother, a cat and a dog. They are not part of this story, but for one aspect. I was always the little one, the one everybody needed to help. So frustrating. It alienated me and shaped me into who I am, an independent individual who can take care of myself and fix everything.

Early in my life I did not think much about everybody around me being either boys or girls. I just saw people. Most families contained one or two parents, and most of the families with two adults had a mother and a father, but not all. Some had two fathers or two mothers. By the time I was hitting puberty I had already discovered the love of my life. Computers. And as my body transformed from a girl to a woman, I kind of alienated myself from my body. It didn’t feel right. And from the digital world, without really knowing that it actually was a thing, I saw myself as non binary. Both in the perspective that

I am a human being, as in not digital, and that I do not consider myself either this or that. Not a zero, not a one. I simply am. Later in life, I realized that the whole sexuality thing was also something I could project my digital views on. A non binary binary person. Or bisexual as most people call it. I’m in it for the person, not the gender.

Now, from this you might think that this book is about sexual orientation and having a hard time growing up and being different. If that is what you expect, I am afraid I need to disappoint you. Hugely disappoint you. I only mention this because that is also another part of my childhood and growing up that made me different and strengthened my character as being able to take care of myself, developing into a lone wolf.

As for my name, M3rqrie, it is a mix between two of my childhood heros. Freddie Mercury (whom I share birthday with) and Marie Curie, who’s enormous curiosity and intelligence I highly admire. Not to mention her bravery in the male dominated world of that time.

My path following my white rabbit

Well, now back to the path I want to show you, the path that will lead you to the end of this book. But before we continue. Have you seen the movie “The Matrix”? About a guy called Neo, following a white rabbit to find out the truth?

This path is my white rabbit, the path I needed to walk to find my truth. It is this path you will follow. This does not in any way mean that this will be your white rabbit. But I tell you this because I want to show you that it is possible for you to find your white rabbit, and it is possible for you to wake up.

Growing up with digital gadgets I have always been curious as to how they work, and why they work, leading me to experiment with every single thing I could get my hands on. Trying to make a thing designed for one thing actually performing another task that it was not designed for. One of my earliest memories is, unintentionally, attaching a microphone to the headphone jack and being totally terrified by the sound that came out of the microphone. Thought for sure that I had broken it. But I hadn’t. Turns out it's just physics. Naturally, the next thing I tried was to connect headphones to the microphone jack, and to my surprise it worked that way as well, not that it was any good sound quality, but it worked. And on that path I have walked ever since.

The next gateway that I walked through was the digital world, through computers. Initially the computer was just a way to find information. Eventually it became the focus of my attention, wanting to know how it all worked and was connected. Gadget after gadget, function after function.

And at 27, before leaving the ordinary world and submerging underground, I already had about 17 years experience in the world of computers and various digital and electronic gadgets. My co-workers at the night shift in the security department of a big mall call me a gadget wizard. Mostly due to the fact that I built small gadgets for various purposes and tested them at the mall.

Sometimes they didn’t work and I accidently set off the alarm, but since it was me and my co-workers that took care of the alarm, it was no big deal and no harm was done. Our little nightly secret. And they even started a betting pool where they were betting on the next date I would set off the alarm. To my relief I had already advanced my knowledge so much that it was rare that I triggered the alarm those days.

Online I am mostly unknown, I stay out of the spotlight, even the doubtful spotlight on the dark web. If you are not familiar with the dark web culture or social structure, I can briefly mention, without paying too much attention to it, that there are three arch-types of hackers. Whitehat, Greyhat and Blackhat. The Whitehats are those who use their knowledge to help build security to protect information and technology from being used by others other than those who own it and for their intended use only. The Whitehats stay within the borders of what is legal. The Blackhats on the other hand do not. They use their knowledge and other peoples technology for their own purposes. Leaving the Grayhats somewhere in between.

Again, I do not feel like I belong in either of the definitions above, I see myself as a no hat hacker.

Ok, I think that is about enough about me. I believe you have a sufficient picture of who I am and where I come from. This is not a story about me, and I do not want to draw the attention away from what I really want to tell you.

The secret organization

This is all about an organization called N3v3r!and and the network behind it.

Let’s take it from the beginning. Or at least my beginning on this path, shown to me by my white rabbit.

At 13 I took my first dive from the internet down into the dark web. Horrified with what I found, I stayed out of it for almost a year, but my curiosity drove me back, like an iron ball is being pulled towards the magnet. Navigating around drugs, huge amounts of the worst possible porn, criminal activities and other more or less illegal stuff, I found a vast source of hack information that was simply not available on the internet. Now, the dark net being what the dark net is, it was like navigating a minefield, a rainy night, blindfolded, barefoot, cold, scared and dizzy. Not really the ideal environment for a 14 year old kid to be in. But I was fortunate. I found paths to follow. Not saying in any way that it was safe paths, but paths.

One of my first findings that triggered a curiosity that would lead me was, perhaps not surprisingly, a frame from a scene in the movie “The Matrix” after the main character Neo is told to follow the white rabbit, and the frame being when he lays eyes on it.

Now, perhaps you are thinking that a picture of a white rabbit might not be something special. And on any other day I might have agreed. But that day I thought it was strange that someone had gone through so much trouble having raised several layers of security around a small and simple storage area just to store a tiny image file with a frame from that movie. And not just any frame, the frame that sets Neo off into the first contact with events that would not only change his life but also change his entire view on reality and truth.

Call it instinct or childish stubbornness, but I knew there was something special with that image. Or perhaps rather, I wanted so badly that there would be something special with that image file. But it had to be something special. The location of the secret and heavy secure location was a back door on a server that is part of the digital silk road, typically one of the first things you find, or goto, on the dark web, as it is the biggest trading market for all sorts of drugs. Now, it is not unusual to find backdoors on servers, but this server in particular was reached through a tunnel called “the rabbit hole”.

Which to me meant two things. It was another reference to the Matrix where Neo is said to tumble down the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland, making it even more credible as a carrier of some kind of important, hidden and secret message. And that the name was not selected by accident, it had a purpose.

It took me almost a year to find the hidden message encoded in the file. It was hard to find and even as I found it, I was not sure that I actually had found anything, it all seemed too random. But then again, it seemed to have been placed there deliberately.

I found nine characters in binary code. It translated to:

N3v3r!and

By then, I was already nerdy enough to be able to say something about it that would make me stick with it.

Computer nerds often replace letters with numbers, in this case the 3 could represent an E, making the first half of the characters never. The second half could simply be the logical statement of ‘and’, but not being true by setting the exclamation mark in front of it making it “not and” or it could be another replacement, even if it was nothing that I knew was widely accepted, but the exclamation mark could be a replacement of the letter “L”.

Leaving me with either never-not-and or neverland. Neverland was familiar to me, from the Peter Pan story. Never-not-and was unfamiliar - but it was appealing somehow. Never. As in never gonna happen. Not and, a logical statement. Both this not being true and that not being true. If those conditions are met, it is true. Never both being not true is true.

Looking in the rear view mirror, I was too young to understand the complexity of it, and even now, years later, and with all the knowledge and experience I have, I still have trouble wrapping my mind around it, and I can still be amazed by the brilliance of it. A truly worthy opponent. Equally brilliant and dangerous.

An obsession

Needless to say, this hidden message became an obsession. I needed to find out more.

It took years before I found any mentioning of something that would cast a new light on my quest, and that would chase away any doubts that lay back in my mind, wondering if I made it all up, and that perhaps it was nothing more than a hacker prank, creating a tunnel called “the rabbit hole” and hiding a picture of a rabbit inside it… but that would not explain the hidden message in it.

But my next finding convinced me that it was real.

It was a document claimed to be stolen from a group of hackers that was said to have infiltrated various government and corporate systems, stealing secret information. The document in question was not really controversial, just a rotation schedule of the guards at the White House. Something that could easily be forged with a good amount of plausibility by watching the guards changes, noting time and routes. Just by being on site to observe and take notes. To make it more credible the document claimed to have the name of the guards, and the person who published claimed to have verified all the names as current employees in the security team.

But it was not the document itself, nor its content that sparked my devotion to find out more of what this was about. It was a file path stored in the metadata of the file, it pointed to a file server that was named N3v3r!and.

Of course, this was not proof in any way, but it convinced me that the N3v3r!and existed and that it was a group of people that was possible to find. I believed, correctly it turned out, that this odd combination of characters was not widely known and was unlikely to be forged or even added any value to the document or its authenticity.

What also puzzled me in the wake of this publication, was that the person who made the claim, and all the servers connected to the person all vanished from the dark web within a few days of the publication. Now, this was normal procedure by all means, precaution taken by several active users on the dark web to protect the true identity behind a username. Normally the user would pop back up with a new or similar identity, but in most cases they would want to keep their reputations from accomplishments made by one of their old aliases, so they tended to leak that information themselves. And this user was notorious for making claims to various things, including things that were not true. But this time, the user did not pop up again, nor did anyone ever make claims on the accomplishments by that username or any known older aliases.

Rumors spread that this hacker had been shut down by the government, perhaps by some secret branch because of the implied sensitivity in the document. To this day, no one knows what happened. Not publicly anyway. I have a hunch of what might have happened, but I will not rush in advance.

Trader of secrets