Securing the Border

Alex smiled to himself as he looked over the edge of the railing. One of the great North-Eastern waterfalls was only a few feet away, the water roaring as gravity brought the particles over the edge. The sound was a bit intense, but he didn't mind. Such sounds were often the best way for him to meditate, lost in the soothing tranquility of the white noise. He stood on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, carefully probing the Canadian internet and discreetly looking for security holes or other information.

Though he carried no computer, Alex was able to connect with and in most cases hack into any computer he wished. He would have conducted his investigation into the Canadian system from his home in New York, but international information transfer was a bit slower than he liked, and the possibility that someone could accidentally catch sight of his digital trail made the whole thing inconvenient. That, and who could possibly argue with such a view? Most villains had better things to do than look at the waterfall, and aside from someone looking specifically for him, there was next to no reason to stage an attack in the area.

After verifying and properly protecting the networks he penetrated, Alex planned to continue north into the wilderness of Canada. There was a lot of open, uninhabited space that he could use to discreetly continue testing his powers. The suburbs was not very conducive to electromagnetic projections after all. He could take some steps to ensure no passing satellite would notice his activities, then get down to some real limit testing. He could feel the ambient waves, some ultraviolet, most lumenal, just a touch of radio, all being stored within his body or redirected safely into the ground. Though he had tested his endurance with a series of small shots, he had yet to test his power's full limits, that peak where he was simply incapable of storing more energy without releasing some of it. He had already determined several failsafe values to work toward, but even he was unable to predict what might happen, and so the seclusion was necessary.

Alex's thoughts turned to the work he was currently doing. He had connected to one of the local bank's servers and successfully managed to authenticate himself as a manager. The manager had been naive enough to keep her security codes in an unencrypted file on her computer, and hacking that took a few minutes but didn't set off any security alarms. His AI program had taken the keys and then covered itself by modifying the system logs, but due to the nature of the system it had paused for authorization before proceeding to test the keys. All of his software automatically encrypted its own actions and required an extremely precise, complex electromagnetic key before any potentially damaging actions. The use of the security key, to attempt to send five cents to a dummy off-shore bank account, required one such key.

The most brilliant thing about the keys is that they were also part of a one-time pad system, theoretically unbreakable. Alex's ability to remember everything, absolutely everything, meant that he could remember one-time pad codes composed of any number of sequences, load them in, and be able to generate the correct pass-key whenever necessary. The software was even capable of detecting nearly any kind of eavesdropping or hacking attempts, notifying Alex, and then disabling the intruder with a counterattack. Although he had yet to encounter such an attack, Alex was already taking steps to ensure his system could virtually never be broken into by an unauthorized entity, though the hardware and software were still, for the moment, theoretical.

Alex authorized the attempt which, when successful, he would report to the bank anonymously after triple-checking to ensure his actions were untraceable. He had already closed several possible loopholes for this particular bank, but he didn't have the time to run a full analysis. He stood by the waterfall for another few minutes before turning, contented sigh on his lips, and walking back toward his car.