RWD: 5.02

5.02

"To know your enemy’s plans, you must hear the unsaid, see the unseen. My spies are my shield against treachery."

—PAUL ATREIDES, DUNE

The GED certificate, a flimsy rectangle of cardstock, felt absurdly insignificant in Greg Veder’s hand. For many, it represented a hurdle cleared, a box checked in the tedious bureaucracy of this decaying world. For Paul, however, the exam had been trivial—a pedestrian exercise in demonstrating competencies that any moderately educated citizen of the Old Imperium would have mastered before their twelfth birthday. Mathematics that barely scratched the surface of what the tutors then called elementary computation, literature analysis that would embarrass a first-year student at any respectable academy, and scientific principles so rudimentary they might have been etched on cave walls. Paul had completed the entire battery in less than two minutes but had to linger in the halls for another five hours to avoid suspicion.

"You sure you don't want to review your answers?" the testing coordinator had asked when he had submitted his answers two hours earlier than expected, her voice carrying that particular strain of bureaucratic concern that infected all institutional functionaries when confronted with deviation from expected norms.

"I'm sure," Paul had replied, sealing the examination booklet with the same finality he might have used to close a coffin. The woman's uncertainty had rippled outward in micro-expressions—a tightening around her eyes, a barely perceptible shift in posture—but she had accepted his submission without further protest.

The drive home with John had been pleasant enough, as the older man had beamed beside him throughout, radiating paternal pride that washed over Paul like lukewarm water. They arrived home to the scent of baking bread—a celebratory dinner. Martha greeted them with smiles and questions of her own, all of which Paul navigated with the same placid economy. He ate dinner with the family and listened to the recitation of their days—John’s frustrations with a client, Martha’s news from a neighbour—before filling it all away. Soon, however, dinner concluded and as the family dispersed—John to his study, Martha to the kitchen, Tom to his room—Paul retreated to his own sanctum. 

He sat, the worn chair creaking. Now, settled before his computer in the dimness of the room, Paul allowed himself a moment of preparation. Inhale, the universe expands. Exhale, the self contracts to a single point of will. The prana-bindu exercises centred him, honed the edge of his mind until it was a razor.

A tap on the spacebar roused the monitor, the screen blooming with a cascade of terminals and dashboards on a stark, command-line interface rendered in deep green text. Lines of code rolled across a black void—tmux sessions tracking system stats, htop graphing CPU threads spiking as processes stirred, a wireshark window sniffing packets on the local subnet.

The groundwork for tonight’s operation had been laid nearly two weeks ago, a silent infiltration threading through the digital veins of his targets. Phase 0, as he’d labelled it in his mental ledger, was pure reconnaissance—silent, passive, invisible. He’d started with the low-hanging fruit: unsecured Wi-Fi networks bleeding SSIDs and MAC addresses into the ether, Bluetooth devices broadcasting discoverable pings, cellular towers leaking IMSI numbers from every phone that brushed their range. Several Raspberry Pi Zeros tucked in a backpack, rigged with a high-gain antenna and running Kismet, had mapped Brockton Bay’s wireless sprawl during the many seemingly aimless bus rides in the vicinity of high-value targets he had instructed his more disposable subordinates on. From there, he’d scaled up—custom OSINT tools scraping public records, social media, leaked pastebins, anything that sketched the outlines of his prey. The US and Canadian governments were the primary targets, their sprawling bureaucracies a treasure trove of misconfigured servers and careless users. Secondary infections would ripple outward—Russia Respublika, GRU, India’s Garuda, the CUI’s cyber divisions—each a domino waiting to fall.

His entry point had been the PRT’s systems, a backdoor inherited from Coil’s fractured network. The villain’s empire had been subsumed and with it, its digital tendrils—VPN credentials and SSH keys Paul had pried from the dead man’s servers, now repurposed as his skeleton key. He’d spent days probing the PRT’s perimeter, a Fortinet firewall with a firmware version two patches behind the latest. A known CVE—Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures entry—lurked there, a buffer overflow in the SSL VPN handler, unpatched and ripe for exploitation. He’d crafted a proof-of-concept in Python, a tight 200 lines that spoofed a legitimate user session and dumped him into a low-privilege shell. From there, it was a patient crawl—enumerating users with net user /domain, sniffing Kerberos tickets with mimikatz, escalating to a domain admin via a misconfigured service account. The PRT’s Active Directory was his now, a “Golden Ticket” forged with stolen NTLM hashes granting him godlike persistence. Their trust in centralised auth was their weakness, he assessed, a Mentat’s clarity cutting through the noise. A single point of failure, and I’ve turned it into a fulcrum.

He leaned back, eyes narrowing as the screens pulsed with activity. The next step was to weaponise that access. Off-the-shelf malware was beneath him—too noisy, too fingerprinted by commonly available EDRs. Instead, he’d built his own, a bespoke payload in C, compiled to a lean 32KB binary. It was polymorphic, its code morphing with each run—obfuscated with XOR loops and junk instructions, then encrypted with a one-time pad seeded from /dev/urandom. Detection signatures would slide off it like water on oil. He dubbed it Fremen—silent, enduring, born of the desert sands of his mind.

Isolating a suitable attack vector, the initial compromise began with a spear-phishing campaign, surgical and tailored. He’d harvested email addresses from LinkedIn scrapes and FOIA leaks—cabinet staffers, NSA analysts, CSIS operatives—cross-referenced with breached datasets from HaveIBeenPwned. Each lure was a masterpiece: a PDF attachment spoofing a classified memo, its metadata scrubbed, embedding a zero-day in Adobe Reader’s JavaScript engine. He’d found the vuln himself, a heap overflow in the app.execMenuItem() function, fuzzed out within minutes with AFL on a virtualized sandbox. The exploit dropped Fremen into memory, fileless and fleeting, pivoting to a PowerShell one-liner that pulled a second-stage payload over HTTPS from a compromised WordPress site—a burner domain he’d stood up on a bulletproof host in Moldova.

Persistence was his next layer. Fremen burrowed deep, hooking CreateProcessW in kernel32.dll to survive reboots. He targeted firmware too—Intel ME exploits were out of reach without physical access, but he hit network gear instead. A batch of Cisco routers in the PRT’s supply chain had shipped with a debug SSH key, which Tattletale had been able to provide over a phone call. A quick scp planted a custom OpenWRT image, backdoored and beaconing to a Tor hidden service. They’ll wipe endpoints, he knew, but they won’t think to reflash the switches. Data would bleed out through DNS tunneling—subtle TXT queries to a sinkholed domain, 64 bytes at a time, throttled to dodge anomaly detection.

Downstairs, the house was still. His family had finally settled. Come morning, they’d assume he was lost in some new project of his, a harmless quirk and for a time leave him to his devices until the inevitable probing came. 

Morning finally came the next day, and Paul’s reach was starting to grow substantial. The data mining operation that followed was exhaustive and methodical; his algorithms combed through years of digital communications, financial records, medical files, and surveillance footage. They mapped social networks, identified extramarital affairs, catalogued financial irregularities, and documented a thousand different varieties of human weakness and corruption.

Senator Patricia Williams, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, maintained a Swiss bank account filled with contributions from defense contractors. General Marcus Chen, the Air Force's liaison to the PRT, had been conducting a two-year affair with his aide-de-camp. Even J Thimm, the Deputy Director of PRT New York, had been skimming money from the PRT's discretionary budget to pay for his daughter's private school tuition.

Everyone had secrets. The powerful simply had more interesting ones.

The clock hit 07:12 when Martha finally knocked, her voice muffled through the door. “Greg, breakfast’s ready. You okay in there?” He forced a smile into his reply—“Yeah, just having a bit of trouble with a program I was experimenting with. Be down soon.”—and waited for her footsteps to fade before descending to the living room below a minute later. There, he had breakfast with the rest of the family and bid warm goodbyes when they began to fill out for the day’s activities, leaving him behind, alone in the house to his own devices.

Back at his desktop, Paul resumed the delicate process of establishing his control mechanisms. Financial systems were corrupted to allow some degree of market manipulation. Communication networks were modified to include hidden monitoring and disruption capabilities. Power grids and transportation infrastructure were mapped and digitally prepared to be used as potential blackmail against the state.

The most sensitive operation involved the identification and vetting of potential political assets. Using sophisticated data mining techniques, Paul began analysing the private communications, financial records, and personal habits of politicians across the American political spectrum. The 2012 presidential election was still months away, but the groundwork for influence operations needed to be laid now.

By three in the afternoon, Paul had identified seventeen politicians with the combination of ambition, flexibility, and exploitable weaknesses that would make them useful assets. Three were current members of Congress, two were governors, and one was already positioning himself for a presidential run. With his short-list of candidates in hand, Paul began plotting the ideal scenario to put his preferred candidate in the seat: a series of 'fortuitous' events, media leaks carefully framing opponents, orchestrated displays of 'strong leadership' during minor, manufactured crises, and clandestine financial injections laundered through a dozen shell companies. The path to the 2012 nomination, and potentially the Presidency, for one Governor Frank Caprio of California began to form in Paul’s mind.

Dismissing that matter, he turned to another, more pressing issue involving some more transnational problems. The Elite's corporate structure made them relatively easy to infiltrate through their business connections. The Fallen, however, who were of a greater priority to Paul—given the rumours of Simurgh’s visit to them—were more challenging. The intelligence he had gathered in the meantime gave some cause for concern, particularly the increasing intensity of their activities down south. 

As he pondered the matter, he stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. He looked out at the quiet, peaceful street. A neighbour was getting their mail. A car drove past; The world blissfully unaware that with a single keystroke, he could trigger a blackout across Canada and all 48 contiguous US states or ground all air traffic over Europe. The thought brought him no satisfaction, however, no thrill of victory.

It was simply a necessary step. Relevant actors were behaving erratically. Leviathan was still a risk. The world’s governments, with their petty squabbles and bureaucratic inertia, were a liability. He had simply disarmed them. He had taken their power, not to rule, but to ensure that when they eventually came after him, they would be limited in how they could act against his interests.

The PC thrummed behind him, a quiet hymn of power. Paul exhaled, slow and deliberate, panning his gaze back to watch as Fremen spread—NSA subnets blinking red, CSIS file servers yielding hashes, a DOD SIPRNet gateway teetering on the edge of breach. 

As he stared at the lines of code, Dragon flickered in his thoughts like a spectre. Her AI could parse significant amounts of data in short periods of time, her heuristics tuned to spot the faintest ripples. He’d cloaked his traffic—Tor, VPN cascades, a proxy chain hopping through botnetted IoT cams—but she was the one variable in this domain he couldn’t fully contain. A worthy adversary, he conceded, rerouting a C2 channel through a hacked smart fridge in Manitoba. She’ll be able to counter my incursion eventually. The question is when, not if. 

Paul’s only option—hence—was to find a way to get her off the board before the inevitable attempt finally emerged.