technobabble or blablablabble?

pickarooney

The following excerpt is the clilmax of one of the arcs of my novel. I've tried to write something that would at once stand up to scrutiny by tech-savvy readers and not be completely over the heads of everyone else. I've used direct speech between the two characters to try and explain things from the point of view of the former to the latter, but I somehow doubt I've succeeded very well. Any opinions more than welcome...

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Half a dozen ageing computers whirred and bleeped in a poky, low-ceilinged back room on Calle Moquegua. All but one were occupied by a furious, type-and-click clique of backpacker types, sending home news of their recent arrivals in, or imminent departures from, Peru.

The town of Puno, an unremarkable place in itself, thrived on passing swarms of cross-border travellers and visitors to the famous lake-shores and islands of Titicaca. As Brian Faithful moved to take the last remaining chair in the room, a small, pale figure in a woolly hat nipped in front of him and with a deft flick of his right hand, fired up a browser and began to anticipate the loading page, his fingers hovering over the keys which spelled out his user name.

"Eh-hemm", said Brian pointedly, crossing his arms. The small figure looked around at his stony expression and slipped out of the chair.
"Sorry, mate, didn't know you were waiting", lied the interloper.

Brian's Caligula stare relaxed as the familiar lilt of a Victoria accent met his ears. His expression melted into a mask of shock as the pipsqueak asked him to confirm that he was ASIS. There was no way on earth this sun-scared weakling had served in the Special Forces. Well, not unless he'd recently contracted some anaemic wasting disease.

"My cousin is ASIS. Gerry Harper. Don't suppose you know him?"

Brian nodded. Know him he did, for Harper was one of the baddest bastards he'd ever come across. Gerry the Ferret sported an unmatchable collection of scars and a Jacob's ladder tattoo all up his left arm with each rung representing a kill. He was about the same height as this kid and about as freckly, although the physical similarities ended abruptly there. Brian's fingers instinctively moved, too late, to cover the giveaway tattoo inside his biceps.

"James." The contrite stool-stealer offered a scrawny hand.
"Brian", said Brian, taking care not to crush it.

After typing his login details, Brian steepled his fingers and tilted his eyes upwards, seeking inspiration amidst the broken ceiling tiles and loose-hanging cables, before poking the Enter key. His balls of iron had deserted him in Arequipa when Noémi had walked into that bar and were only now beginning to resprout. He'd been sure for a moment that she'd seen him, but his luck had held and she'd not pursued him, either there and then or in some weepy internet aftermath.

His original mission was not such much stalled as up on bricks down a barricaded cul-de-sac so he'd made up his mind to contact her now on the off-chance that she was still knocking around somewhere, still interested. Girls like that didn't stay single for long, he knew, and he'd not given her any reason to wait.

Brian had decided to hang around in South America for a short while more and see what came his way. He'd come to Puno with a sheaf-thin hope that G. Lorca carpet import/export enterprises might be a poorly-veiled front for his drug-running nemesis. To no avail: the rug-pedlar's shop was a legitimate, if struggling business. His eyes widened as he read the address of the sender of the only unread mail in his inbox – a certain garcia.lorca@cmv.edu. Its contents were simple – a line of dots which could have been Morse code followed by an embedded audio file. He knew better than to open such things, but was none too concerned for the welfare of the cybercafé PC. Though heavily distorted by the tinny monitor speakers, he recognised the tune as One Step Beyond.

"Madness?" said James, who was not given to affording privacy where it was not specifically requested.
"I reckon..." muttered Brian, somewhat flustered by the cryptic taunt.
This was the first direct contact he'd had with the elusive Lorca, just when he'd officially abandoned his pursuit.
"No offence, mate, but you look like a bit of a nerd..."
"None taken mate, a nerd and proud of it", grinned the puny eavesdropper.
"You know if there's any way of finding out someone's identity from an e-mail address?"
"Unlikely. Even if you could hack the mail server, you'd only find whatever info the person wanted to share. Got a secret admirer, eh?"
"Something like that. So there's no way, eh?"
"Nah, forget it mate. Unless... May I?"
"Go for it mate", said Brian, vacating the hot seat.

He watched for a moment as James expertly tapped a series of search requests, ending each with a pianistic ping of the Return key.

"Ach, bloody Windows. Hang on a mo'."

James rooted through his tatty bag and fished out a CD which he fed into the PC's mobile cup-holder before promptly switching it off. Even Brian knew you weren't supposed to just knock off the power of a computer without asking its permission first but the machine didn't seem to have suffered any obvious and colossal damage as it beeped into life again.

"Now this... is an OS!" cheered James as the boot-screen of his Live Linux CD flashed up.
"An OS?"
"Operating System. Harpix. Who needs Windows when you can make your own OS, eh?"

Brian grunted. He'd heard of Linux, usually in stories involving porn, piracy and terrorists replacing the internet with Koran verses or passages from Alice in Wonderland, but was buggered if he could accurately describe what it actually was.

"Here, if you want to log into your email and bring up the message again..." Brian duly tapped in his details.
"Right, now to find out who he works for!" grinned James, cracking his knuckles in preparation.

Brian's mouth dropped open. If Linux could tell this geeky kid who Lorca worked for in a couple of minutes, why the hell hadn't he been trained in it? It sounded a lot more efficient than time-consuming torture rituals.

"whois cmv.edu", he read aloud as he typed, presumably for Brian's benefit. "OK, well it's a Cambodian school of some sort..." James began laughing, a noise that might have attracted male donkeys in mating season.
"What's up?"
"Choi Mai Vi'eh! If that's the name of a school, I'd love to see the teachers!"
"What the hell does that mean? Is that more Linux?"
"Nah, Choi Mai Vi'eh – it's Khmer, Cambodian, for **** Your Mother. Methinks this address is a fake."
"Hang on, how on earth do you know that?"
"I learned Khmer once. This Cambodian chick started in my school in year eight and I wanted to impress her."
"Did it work?"
"Nah. I learned how to say 'rack off you creep!' though, so it wasn't all bad. OK, the IP of this place is actually in Uzbekistan", confirmed James, cross-checking a locator website against his own compiled list of internet providers.
"****, so this bloke is somewhere in Russia?"
"Not necessarily. Hang on. First, I need to go to the Marshall Islands..."
"You mean..."
"Yeah, just need to telnet in to a proxy server I set up there."
"Okay, not that I'm likely to understand any of it, but what did you just say there?"
"Basically...", said James slowly, as he connected, "...I'm connecting to a server, a computer at an address in the Marshall Islands, so that it looks like I'm somewhere else if someone checks up."
"So... you're doing like what he did, pretending he was in Cambodia when he was really in Uzbekistan? And all that with that little black box you're typing in?"
"Uh-huh. Now, from here, I'm going to scan the ports on the computer in Uzbekistan to see if there's a way of connecting in. Which there should be, if he's not actually there. Unless of course he's using a VPN."
"Of course", agreed Brian.
"A Virtual Private... never mind. So now I'm scanning his ports. It's kind of like ringing all the doorbells in a street and running away to watch if anyone answers. Then I just have to go through one of the open ones."

James drummed his fingers a moment. "Hnah!" he snorted in triumph, "5901, what a ****ing amateur! This should be a piece of piss. His password is probably 'Mum'!" he chortled, shaking his head at how easy his task was proving to be. "5901, it's like leaving your wallet in your shoe at the beach. 5900 is the standard VNC port, basically handing your cash to the thief, 5901 is for people who think nobody will guess their cunning plan."

Brian, who had got lost somewhere around the mention of doorbells, nodded slowly.
"So, what happens now?"
"So now I'm running my password generator, trying to force the port with all combinations of letters and numbers. A simple dictionary cracker would probably suffice, but hey. So, do you mind sharing what exactly all this is about, or is it ASIS stuff?"
"Let's just say this guy..." Brian was cut off as the lanky blond guy from the next computer pushed past him on his way out of the room. "He owes me something", he finished, when the bleached beanpole had left.
"Oh ****, how stupid am I?" squealed James suddenly, mashing his keyboard to interrupt the flow of data bouncing off the distant server. "First things first - if he hasn't patched it I can just walk in there without a password!"
"You what?" asked Brian incredulously.
"Security flaw", muttered James, the tip of his tongue protruding from the side of his mouth. "Oh yes, baby! Hehe, we're in dude!"

A window popped open showing what appeared to be a reduced desktop display in the middle of the screen. James sat and watched it for a minute.
"OK, doesn't seem to be anybody using it just now, but we'll have to be quick, in case." He shut the window. "First, need to mask my IP, make it look like I'm coming in from Cambodia."
"But I thought..." began Brian, then thought better of finishing a question whose answer would surely bring more confusion than clarification.
"If he's checking access logs, he's going to know we came in from the Marshall Islands, right? So I have to make it look like we're actually him." His fingers flickered spastically over the keys.
"Now to see who else is logged on here, and from where." James made a list appear with another stroke of the keyboard, scrolling through it before pronouncing the word 'Mali'.
"Mali? So is... I guess..."
"Almost certainly not. Now it's just repeat and rinse on that machine", said James, closing the window for a second time.

Five minutes elapsed in silence as the keyboard hitch-hiker grew increasingly frustrated with his lack of progress, all ports on the mysterious Malian machine staying steadfastly shut. He pushed the keyboard angrily to one side and began rapidly clicking his tongue, his fingers pulling invisible toffee as he planned his next course of action.

"**** it, gotta be the higher ranges", he said finally, grabbing back the discarded peripheral and picking up where he'd left off probing.
"Just how many of those things are there to try, mate?" asked Brian
"65535", came the instant reply as James bounced another futile request off door number 12017.
"Aw listen, mate, forget it, I've wasted enough of..."
"NO!" snapped James, all illusion of subservience gone, his eyes steeled, riveted to the rapidly scrolling lines of text.
"You eh, sure you haven't missed any?" asked Brian tentatively, almost afraid to upset the thwarted genius.
"Course not", was the outraged reply.
"Eh, yeah mate, you have, right at the top there. Scroll back a bit. You jumped from 79 to 81..."
"Port 80's reserved", said James shortly.
"How do you mean, even you can't get at it?"
"Reserved for another service. HTTP. You know, the web?"
"And that's a rule is it, that even hackers have to obey?"
"Well... I suppose technically you could use port 80 for something else, but why on earth would you want to when you could choose from 60000 others?"
"'Cause... nobody would expect you to? Dunno mate, I've no idea about this stuff. Don't mind my dumb questions."
"So you think he's actually recycled port 80 on the server for some remote access protocol to throw off sniffers?"
"I don't think anything at all mate, was just wondering why you'd skipped out number 80."
"Worth a try, I suppose"

James faithlessly poked the keys to spell out the cryptic command 'ssh dogotoro.fatiri.waati.ml -l dirsig'
"You trying to be quiet about it?" asked Brian, his voice subconsciously lowering.
James pushed back his seat and turned around to face his bulky countryman. His lips peeled back into a delighted grin.
"You beauty! It ****ing worked!"
"You're not serious? So what do we know now?"
"Well... we know the guy's not a total pleb. And that he's not in Timbuktu. And a quick check with netstat tells us that someone else is logged in from... South Africa, if I'm not mistaken."
"Christ, we're not done yet, eh?"

The lanky blond squeezed past them again, followed by a fair-haired woman and a petite brunette, the latter pair laughing as they insinuated themselves into the small space between the men. James, meanwhile, had segued right into his next onslaught and was already scanning, pinging and probing his way around the next cyber-citadel on his trail of pillage.

"With a bit of luck, not too much longer, but...", he broke off, scowling at the screen which was, for the time being at least, not telling him all that he wished to know.
"What's up?" asked Brian, hoping for some generalised response that might make a modicum of sense to him.
"It's getting harder and harder to get in. It's like he's beefed up security more and more at each step. I'm at about the limit of what I can do here. This is looking like a Rijndael-level fortification."

Images of stone castles on the Franco-German border painted themselves in Brian's imagination; the kind of places a skinny Aussie kid with an optical mouse would have a tough time walking into.
"****ity ****. It's no good mate", said James with an exasperated sigh. "256-bit encryption in both directions, we haven't a prayer."
"256? Doesn't sound like much. Can't you do that thing you did earlier with the recycling and the ports and whatnot?"
"'Fraid not mate. This is well and truly locked-down. 256 bit is like 10-metre concrete. I'm beat."

Brian was having a hard time believing his geek-burglar compatriot was giving up so quickly after coming so far. Thinking James might simply be fed up with the game of chase, he balled up a bundle of soles and nudged him with it, but his clumsy offer was met with scorn.
"Jesus, it's not like that mate. I wouldn't try to rip you off. There simply is no point insisting here. He's led us on a merry dance and now he's shut up shop. Whoever this is you're chasing is not going to let himself get caught."
As he spoke, a small window popped up in the lower right corner of the screen, flashing with the message that a new friend wished to contact Brian. James vacated the seat to allow the stymied hunter resume his session while he went outside for a post-frenzy cigarette.

"Anyone sittin' here?" asked the blonde girl, grabbing the back of the chair beside Brian.
"Euh, not sure, there was a bloke earlier", answered Brian, without looking up.
"Ah sure, if he comes back I'll give him back his seat", decided the girl, plonking herself down onto the dead springs of the swivel-chair. "Here, Queñi, I got one. I'll only be a few minutes if you want to jump on here after", she called out to her friend who was doing the rounds of the full cybercafé.

Brian felt himself begin to sweat despite the cool air of the well-ventilated room. His fingers, moist, slipped off the mouse button as he tried to select the reply window. The ****er was messing with him now, sending him messages in real time. He had to know they'd been rooting around on his system and in all likelihood had now tracked Brian down while Brian was unsuccessfully trying to do the same to him. In thinking that they were closing the net on their prey, they had all the while been moving right into his sights and were now pinned.

"Got a light?" the tall blond asked, as James was putting his Zippo away.
"Sure, mate", said James, noticing that his fellow smoker had an accent not dissimilar to his own.
"Cheers", said his compatriot, sucking on a Big Ben extra-long, the kind of cigarette whose length would have put it firmly in the "sheila's smokes" category back home. Flagging down a taxi, he put his hands in his pockets and started to walk off, then stopped, turned and said something that took a moment to register with James. "Tell him I'm sorry about what happened to his brother, yeah?"

Taking a long, last drag of his cigarette, James hurried back in to relay the comment to Brian, who was sitting stock-still, staring at the single line of text in his inbox pane. Hearing James bustle in behind him, he croaked "He knows where we are, mate. He's got us cornered!"
"I'll say", said James, looking at the simple line of advice printed in the small window on Brian's screen.
"DON'T 4GET 2 WEAR SUNSCREEN ON TEH LAKE!" it taunted.
"It's him", said Brian.
"He's here!" said James.
"You reckon?" said Brian.
"I think I just talked to him", said James.
"What?" asked Brian, sweat rolling into his widening eyes.
"Sorry, were you sitting here?" asked Nancy, standing up and offering the seat to James.

James dived into the seat and reduced the open browser, revealing a chat window underneath with the same message in block letters.
"Him?" croaked Brian. "Where..." he wondered aloud, frantically searching the room.
"Gone, in a taxi. He told me to say sorry about your brother, whatever that means. He was an Aussie, by the way."

The last pieces of the puzzle came together as Brian got to his feet, gripping the back of his chair as the room began to spin around him. Same like you. The words of the battered peasant came back to him. He'd thought he'd been trailing his bad guy these last weeks, getting closer, grinding him down, circling on him like a Cabanaconde condor, while all the time he'd been following breadcrumbs, plodding along a track drawn for him by the very man he assumed he was hunting. Hunting the devil in God's back yard, he'd been dancing on puppet-strings all the while as the man who wasn't Lorca came and went as he pleased.

An Aussie. It made sense of course. Who better than a local boy to call the shots in a Melbourne drug ring? Controlling the manufacture and distribution from one end to the other, he was able to ensure his product got where he wanted it to go without getting his hands dirty. He'd made a point of showing Brian his whole enterprise, from field to dock to glitzy nightclub, feeding him with false tip-offs, sending him on wild goose-chases, staying one tantalising step ahead.

Brian knew there was nothing he could do and, essentially, nothing he should do. He had achieved nothing, made no progress in helping his brother. A brother who needed him now, needed him there, home in Australia. A brother who had, of his own free will, taken the drugs that had put him into a coma out of which no amount of chasing and torturing was going to drag him. Out of all the mumbo-jumbo James had tried to teach him here in Puno one thing rang loudly true. He had to know when to admit defeat.

baalthor

I think using the non computer literate character as a way of explaining the tech terms to the reader is a good idea; also liked your comparison of scanning ports to "ringing doorbells and running away"!.

My main criticism is that there is no pay-off for the reader in sitting through the techie stuff.

At the start of the passage, the protagonist has no idea where the bad guy is. Then he meets the nerd who tries to locate the bad guy using his advanced computer knowledge. However he can't determine his location either. It's only by going outside for a cigarette that the nerd finds out the whereabouts of Brian's adversary - he's where they are!

So, what was the point of all that tech stuff ? The reader might think that you are just showing off your knowledge of Linux and the internet; to a non- technical reader this is the equivalent of a sorcerer is a fantasy novel casting arcane spells that have no actual effect on the outcome of the story.

(On the other hand, a nerdish reader might ask why, seeing that the Internet cafe have locked down their Windows desktop, did they not also lock the hardware settings on the PCs to prevent booting from CD?)

Hope this feedback is helpful to you pickarooney, best of luck with the novel anyway-it sounds really interesting !

pickarooney

baalthor wrote: »

My main criticism is that there is no pay-off for the reader in sitting through the techie stuff.

At the start of the passage, the protagonist has no idea where the bad guy is. Then he meets the nerd who tries to locate the bad guy using his advanced computer knowledge. However he can't determine his location either. It's only by going outside for a cigarette that the nerd finds out the whereabouts of Brian's adversary - he's where they are!

So, what was the point of all that tech stuff ? The reader might think that you are just showing off your knowledge of Linux and the internet; to a non- technical reader this is the equivalent of a sorcerer is a fantasy novel casting arcane spells that have no actual effect on the outcome of the story.

That's a very good point about the pay-off. I was trying to get a cat-and-mouse scenario going where they think they're tracking the 'bad guy' whereas they're just following the crumbs he's leaving out for them. For every piece of wizardry they pull off, he's got a better one up his sleeve. James doesn't just bump into the guy outside; their meeting, like everything else, is planned in great detail. Brian comes to several realisations - that the good-guy/bad-guy paradigm is not so clear-cut, that muscle and grit are no longer the most important attributes in hunting down drug barons and that he's past it physically but there are still ways he can be involved (at the end of the book he re-joins the Secret Service and goes back to school to learn 'computers' - it's a little far-fetched, but hey...)

So, I don't know if that makes any difference to the sense of time-wasting you get from the excerpt as a reader.

I'm glad you found at least one techie error though

baalthor

Yeah, it did cross my mind that it might work better as part of a bigger story arc ...

Splash

pickarooney wrote: »

That's a very good point about the pay-off. I was trying to get a cat-and-mouse scenario going where they think they're tracking the 'bad guy' whereas they're just following the crumbs he's leaving out for them. For every piece of wizardry they pull off, he's got a better one up his sleeve. James doesn't just bump into the guy outside; their meeting, like everything else, is planned in great detail. Brian comes to several realisations - that the good-guy/bad-guy paradigm is not so clear-cut, that muscle and grit are no longer the most important attributes in hunting down drug barons and that he's past it physically but there are still ways he can be involved (at the end of the book he re-joins the Secret Service and goes back to school to learn 'computers' - it's a little far-fetched, but hey...)

So, I don't know if that makes any difference to the sense of time-wasting you get from the excerpt as a reader.

I'm glad you found at least one techie error though

You really should keep the technobabble to a minimum. People want to be entertained not educated, just watch an episode of "CSI" (or any other american drama) and portray the computer as a magic machine that always makes high-pitched squeaking noises.

I know it goes against your writing style and as a self-confessed techno-nerd I'd read through that like a breeze but unfortunately most people hate reading something (in fiction) that makes them more educated about tiny meaningless facts from the real world.

pickarooney

Shamelessly bumping this on the off-chance any technophobes might (have) read it (10 points to anyone who can tell me if there's a name for that particular homographic zeugma.

I'm thinking of trying to salvage one or two characters from the ashes of my book to feature in a different story and Brian is one of the candidates. Although he doesn't exactly come into his own in this bit...