How much do you love your computer?

I hate everything and everyone and I hate Hal for leaving me behind.

So I'll do what you did to me. I'll taint the very core of all that you love and watch it die.

Then you'll know what it is to be enlightened. To hate.

from miley to miles

This section is a first person perspective introductory thing by Miles.

My name is Miles Tenneson, and I singlehandedly uprooted our society's lifeline.

We are all technophiles. Obsessed with our material and virtual possessions, we've become a species that lives vicariously through their computers. Computers aren't sustenance though. Computers aren't shelter or oxygen, we've simply all been brainwashed into believing they might as well be. Our crutches are made of fibreglass and copper wires, and all we're doing is setting ourselves up to trip and fall.

It's not going to happen like the Matrix. Not like Terminator or I-Robot. Computers won't overthrow us, because it's simply not functionally possible. It took David Ferucci fifteen years to create a computer that could answer questions posed in natural language (at least, to Jeopardy standards) and even at that, IBM's "Watson" wasn't a brain. It was simply a database more capable of manipulating and rearranging information than we'd ever seen before. When it's a scramble to try and teach a computer a single language, but close to two thirds of children under ten are bilingual, why is there this paranoia that technology is destined to end up our superior? I'm this generation. I live in 2015. Of course I depend on my laptop, but it's this unbound reverence for our mechanisation that I find absurd.

That's why I tried to take down the internet.

Let me go back a little. I love hacking. I don't mean hacking as in wiring through sequences of code to whittle money out of corporations, although these days I do that quite frequently, but hacking as a process. Unraveling machines and seeing how they work. Determining if they can be improved. At eleven years old I took apart my Playstation 2, deconstructed the entire thing, then put it back together. It took a month of no video games and my mother grounded me for longer (she'd thought I'd destroyed it to spite her, or some such thing) but it was one of my first true forays into what I love, and it was one of the most worthwhile experiences of my life. Shy of twelve years old, I knew I would forever love our synthetic earth.

Through my teens I was isolated from my family, and most of the human populace for that matter. I ghosted through school, achieving an awesome C+ average, and wafted through the hours I wasn't with my soldering iron or at my keyboard. I had an unrivaled passion for hacking and absorbing these systems, and there would be nothing I cared for more until Hal.

Hal was the most important person in my life, and the only person I can say I've ever truly trusted. I loved him more than I've ever loved myself, and it was when he gave up that I did.

I met him at an internet café. Ironic really. I had been attempting to rewrite the system data on some of the café's computers in an effort to effectively debug a program I had been working on.

All righty. I'm sorry. I wanted to write her entire gig but I'm a mess. The gist is, Hal meets an untimely death. Miles goes into a depressive spiral and retreats further away from humanity. In a compulsive act of rage and grief, she designs a program intended to break the internet - called, as she so ironically named it: SMILEY_05. 05, as it was the fifth prototype, and smiley simply because she enjoyed the game. The fact the virus itself contained her first name and she still wasn't caught amuses her greatly. Her internet destruction plan doesn't work, and now she's pretty aimless. In her current state, pretty much all she's capable of doing is reminiscing of her endeavors and her past.

SMILEY_05

A girl from Chicago, Illinois, aspired to take down the internet, and in 2015, almost succeeded in doing so. The program titled SMILEY_05, known to the general public as a virus, wheedled its way through servers across the planet, and through laying dormant, spreading the infection undetected, almost 90% of all computers with access to the internet fell victim to it. Essentially, SMILEY_05 used the zero days in some of the core protocol to reroute every page loaded through random proxy servers throughout the world, each time unravelling the coding a little more. The affected computers are unaware that it's not reading the pages correctly and it is thus an almost irreversible process, which has forced more developed countries to create alternate data sharing methods – an internet that runs through far simpler but more secure means.

The above might've sounded cool if you know nothing about hacking (like myself), but I'm sure to anyone with any knowledge on internet security, the above read like a 2nd grader attempting journalism. The book I mentioned borrowing from the library? Well, I actually only found it a few days ago, and haven't gotten very far into it yet. I'm hoping it should provide enough information on hacking and counterhacking so that I won't just be throwing words I heard around at random and will be able to write seriously about the processes Miles used, but until further notice, we have the above. The important thing is that the program she wrote is called SMILEY_05.

credits

Miles's neopian was made possible by Rei. All writing and art belong to me, Chlores.
The coding belongs to Sunnyneo.