Dangers - Mysterious Friend

The following scene continues the chapter "Dangers" from my last post.

Dangers - Lantashi's Visit

Lantashi, a computer science professor at a local university, has fascinating friends. She reveals one of them to her friend Lee. This is part of our story that takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan!

Mysterious Friend

Lee looked uncomfortable.

"Kish said that we weren't in the same place. Not only that, he said that it was like you were in a different land, the way his life in a big city in India feels different than living in Houghton. That sounds weird, doesn't it?"

Lantashi smiled. She shifted her position on the couch, looking a little uncomfortable, and finally stood up and walked around the living room a bit. She shifted moved the coffee table, lost in thought.

Finally Lantashi turned back to her friend, a determined look on her face, a decision made.

"I know some people," Lantashi said. "I have contacts in the security industry that are not, well, conventional."

Lantashi put one had to her chest, tapped her finger against her breast bone.

"I met someone at a security conference, back when I was still going to college here in Houghton. He lives in Illinois, but we hit it off because he grew up in the Upper Peninsula, over in Marquette. We've kept a friendship over several years now, and he is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to computers and security. He's the type of guy that would be impossible to hack, but also very hard to find. Kind of shadowy if you know what I mean."

Lee stood up, a confused expression on his face. He approached Lantashi, peering intently into her eyes. "What you are saying is making me wonder if you are good friends with a criminal or something."

Lantashi looked down and shuffled her feet. Her long red hair fell forward, hiding her face.

"No, no, umm not exactly," Lantashi stammered slightly. "He's not a black hat hacker. More of a gray hat guy. Companies hire him to test their security, you know, like when they want to discover any loopholes in their systems. But he is not someone that officially appears on their books, if you know what I mean. And he has a hobby, well, like all hackers I guess, to find things out. He is insatiably curious!"

"What is his name?" Lee asked. "You never know, if he's from the UP, I might know the guy."

"I'd rather not say right now," Lantashi admitted. "But, well, I told him about your ghost story. About how you, Sammy and Kish ran across that ghost girlfriend in the woods."

"She's not a ghost," Lee challenged. "I never said that."

"No no no, I know you didn't say that. But you don't know that either. Why not be a ghost? Still, I told him, and he was curious, you know, like he gets, and he decided to look into it."

"I don't like the sound of that," Lee said, annoyed. "You didn't tell him who we are, did you? You didn't use our names."

"No, of course not!" Lantashi protested. "But, well, he found out anyway."

"That's impossible! How?"

"The internet," Lantashi said. "Kish, well, I kind of warned him against searching about the experience you and your friends had. But he used a search engine anyway, and he was logged into that search engine when he did it. And that search was recorded and the date and everything. And then both you and Kish are on social media, you know. You are friends with Kish there, and you mention Samantha. All the connections are there."

"Are you telling me that your friend hacked the search engine, and hacked social media sites too, and put all this together? How does he do all this?"

Lantashi hesitated a moment. How do you explain computers to someone who doesn't really understand how they work?

"I don't know, exactly. My guess is he already had the information, and just had to query against it. My friend is an amazing programmer, and has scripts scraping the Internet all the time. Not just the web, that's just one protocol. Other protocols are things like POP3, SMTPS, - you'd call that email - Gopher, Gemini, Activity Pub... then there is Matrix. All of that, and more. And what most people would think is just disparate information, well, then you put it all together and run machine learning against it to find relationships in the data, and you can query the data. There you go. That's what Artificial Intelligences do. They have a huge dataset - parameters - and when you ask it something it looks at its data, and then uses statistical models to figure out how to present the answers it finds in plain English. That is a huge simplification, but that is what they do."

Lee laughed despite himself.

"I understood almost nothing of what you just said. Except that your friend is a guy who wields black magic and the magic tells him things. Is that right?"

"Um, sure," Lantashi said, a bit embarrassed. "That's another way to say it."

"That probably would have meant more to me."

Lee laughed again. The tension was broken. He didn't like the idea of people researching him and his friends, but Lee was somewhat fascinated that Lantashi knew these people. He was learning more about her, things had hadn't suspected.