Week 4 Storytelling: A Tale of Two Brothers

The CEO was named John Hedj.  He was the leader of a multibillion dollar technology firm that specialized in keeping a variety of people’s money secure.  He had a state of the art building in New York City, enclosed in glass and full of steel and humming computers.  The facility was the most secure building in the world. 

The money of the richest clients was actually secured on a computer in Hedj’s office on the top floor.  The money codes could be downloaded to any bank computer in the world for instant access.  This included the riches of Hedj himself.  However, two of the programmers, brothers in fact, contrived a backdoor into the program.

A few years later, the brothers’ mother was dying of cancer and they did not have the money to pay for the hospital bills.  They went to a wireless café in NYC and hacked back into the computer system, transfer a small amount of money into a secure bank account.  When they had their money, they ensured that they had left no trace of their presence.

Hedj was furious when he discovered some of his money was missing.  Again and again, the hackers returned and stole more and more of his money.  Finally, Hedj decided to hire a new programmer to create a Trojan horse in the system that would attack any foreign entities. 

A few weeks later, the brothers returned, needing yet more money for their mother’s hospital bills.  As they had planned, one brother hacked in to secure the system and the other held back to steal the money.  As the first brother hacked into the program, the Trojan horse struck.  It locked up his computer and activated his webcam, sending the image and information to Hedj’s security firm.  He knew it was too late for him and that he would spend his life in jail, but he was able to save his brother from the same fate. 

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Years later, the brother was finally put on trial for his crimes.  He would surely receive life in prison for all that he had done, especially since he had stolen money from such powerful people. 

Meanwhile, his recently recovered mother grieved in secret.  She knew that her son had only stolen the money to pay for her hospital bills, and she knew her other son could free him with the use of his skills. 

The free brother set up a system of computers that would constantly jumble the IP addresses, throwing off any people trying to trace him.  He then hacked into the computers of the attorneys and Hedj’s company, erasing all copies of the evidence against his brother.  In the modern world, he knew that there were no hard copies of the data and that this would cancel the trial and free his brother.

Hedj was furious that the hacker had escaped.  He knew then that he must have had help to hack into his company.  He hired a female hacker, the best in the world.  He told her to send out feelers for a pair of hackers who had accumulated vast sums of money. 

She talked to many people in the hacker community and at length she found them.  The hackers knew someone was looking for them and they set up a meet with the woman.  The brother who had remained free was the one to approach her.  She said that she would help him hack into the company again if he told her how he had done it in the first place.

He told her, but when she tried to seize him and take him to Hedj, he got away.  Any attempts to track the brother were thwarted.  When the woman returned to Hedj and told him how the hacker had erased all traces of himself online, the CEO was impressed.  He sent out a proclamation online, offering a pardon and a reward if he turned himself in.

The hacker went readily, certain that there was no evidence of his activities. Hedj was so amazed by the hacker’s abilities that he gave him a job within his company.  There is no one more creative than a hacker, but this man had no equal in the world.

Computer Hacker. Source: Wikipedia

Author’s Note: 

I chose The Tale of King Rhampsinitus for my story this week. In the original story, a King built a chamber to house his treasures but one of the builders left a removable stone in the wall.  The sons of the builder later broke in, until one brother was caught in a trap.  The remaining brother cut of his head to protect his identity and later impressed the King so much that he was pardoned. 

For my rewrite, I decided to place the story in modern day.  I took the idea of digital money from the movie The Losers.  In my version, the brothers are hackers who steal money from a CEO whose security program they wrote.  The word Hedj is actually the ancient Egyptian word for silver or money.  I thought it was appropriate for the setup of the story.  

“The Tale of King Rhampsinitus” from Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald Mackenzie (1907). Web Source: Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook.