---
title: "The Oracle part four"
date: 2025-07-09T14:00:00Z
draft: false
images: [/images/oraclept4.jpg]
description: "We did it"
---

![](/images/oraclept4.jpg)

Like so many things in life, the devil is in the details. I had a very good notion of how to do it, but to get there it wasn't going to be easy, as some things ought to fall into place, and I'd need the cooperation of a few people for this to come to fruition. One of them, I'd already found of course, and once I told her my plan she went through all the five stages of grief, first she didn't want to believe what she was hearing, and then started throwing things at me, followed by trying to dissuade me from doing it by trying to take my place, and finally the depression and acceptance both kicking in at once.

I kind of understand, as I put her in a position that for sure isn't easy to manage, but in all honesty it wasn't that bad of a deal: she'd help me but she wasn't going to be liable for being an accomplice, and after the fact, she'd have to be the one to take care of Czarny, which I know for a fact is not a problem. I reckon that the only hard part will be the separation, she'll have to cope without me. My mind was made up, and other than adjusting details, I didn't see what could change, it's not that this plan was fool-proof, as plenty of things could go wrong and the chances were not even that great even if we succeeded at all the things we needed to do, but ultimately the criteria for success or failure were out of my control. I could only bring light, but it was for others to see what I saw, and there's nothing worse than mental blindness, because the eyes might see but the head refuses to process it.

So, the first order of business was scouting, as we needed to understand the physical aspect of the infrastructure that supports _it_. This was far from being the hard part, as I had already been inside of one of the locations, and I'm using the plural here because while I've only been inside one of the buildings, by now I am quite sure that there are several of those across the country, probably all around the world, for running _it_ was a colossal effort from a computational perspective. If people thought that bitcoin was a waste of energy and were shocked at the environmental effects of mining cryptocurrency, and rightly so, what would they say if they knew how much energy it takes for _it_ to do it what _it_ does.

Regardless, we still needed to understand if anything had changed, because back then it was just a porter and very little else in lieu of security was in place. I don't remember looking out for the CCTV system, but I remember that there was just some card based access control to enter the elevator, and once there, it should be quite easy to get into the datacenter level. This is where her feminine ingenuity came in handy, what if instead of trying to go in to figure the floorplan and the security details, we scout people that seem to work there are prompt them to tell us what we need to know, remember that Czarny can point us to the most, and I can't believe I'm about to use this word, _promptable_ people, and it's not like we need a lot of information anyway, or the information will be very hard to get, it might not work at first try, but we're sure to get it eventually.

Just absolute genius this girl, because this worked even better than expected. We watched for a week, taking note of people that go in and out, and followed some that we intuited might be more exploitable. As we got closer to them, Czarny would quickly let us know how deep _it_ was in the person, and we picked up the three where the growling was deeper and he felt tenser than usual, took note of who they were, and started to think how we would go about to try and gain the modicum of trust that would be needed to get what we wanted. Luckily, one of the people was a middle aged man, single by the looks of it, that would go to play board games every so often at one of those cafes that nowadays are all the rage for single, middle aged men. 

Under the guise of wanting to learn how to play, we struck a conversation with him, and did play a few rounds of a role-playing game with him, which honestly was a fair bit of fun, even she thought so, but most importantly it gave us an entry-point, as we start to hang out with him for a bit after the gaming sessions so we could smoke, and we talked about our lives, there's nothing illegal about that, and from our lives we started to talk about work, and that was the perfect time to try and drop our little probing prompt, so, imagine that I would work at your company, what kind of clearance would I need to get near the actual servers in the datacenter, and how hard it would be, theoretically speaking, to get such a clearance, that's a great question, because it turns out that our security is quite shoddy in my opinion, and I've raised this to my supervisors, all you really require is to get a card, any card really, and you pretty much have access to any place in the facility.

Holy crap, we've hit the mother lode, or so I thought, at least technically speaking the cloning of the card shouldn't be that hard to achieve, since you see petty criminals do that all the time with debit and credit cards, as contactless payments became the norm, so did the opportunities for this type of activity. All we needed now to finish this part of the plan was to figure out a way to clone the card without being noticed, we got the hardware required to do it, as it turns out a smartphone and a small extender is enough, literally all it takes is less than a second of contact, but we'd still have to provoke said contact without being noticed. 

This is where Czarny came to the rescue once again, that and the modern habits of the corporate worker, it's quite normal for them to be carrying the card on a lanyard on their chest, so all we had to do was teach Czarny to create a bit of confusion when asked for it, and this would be the perfect opportunity to just reach near our mark and clone the card. All in all, the first part of the plan went without too many issues, and I was encouraged. 

And I needed it, because what came next was, by my calculations, the hardest part of the plan. We needed to find a lawyer that would help us, and this was not only fundamental for success but also for guaranteeing that our execution would set a chain reaction that ultimately would expose _it_. The silver lining was that we didn't need an honest lawyer, because God knows how hard it would be for that to happen, but we would still need someone that was not bound to _it_, and that would not only believe that _it_ existed, and that _it_ was a threat, or at least didn't mind being involved in all of this. 

We searched far and wide, and consulted maybe twenty different lawyers, and this is not even counting those that we contacted but didn't accept a meeting with Czarny present, this was a hard requirement for us, for reasons that are obvious, as I said we couldn't risk making our plan known to _it_. Of those twenty, more than three quarters were discarded because of the growling, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter, but seemingly _it_ was very present even among those that pride themselves in their aptitude for knowing how language works and love to distort it as they see fit, which is honestly quite scary because it just shows how lifelike _it_ has gotten, but also quite encouraging because it was yet another reason why we needed to do this.

Of the 3 lawyers that ended up passing the litmus test, there wasn't much to differentiate them, as they all specialized in public law, and this was fundamental for reasons that will become apparent in a bit, but let's not put the cart before the horses. Ultimately, she was the one that broke the tie. Did you notice how that one lawyer was completely unfazed by the hypothetical situation you brought up, almost like he wasn't fully paying attention, but completely changed his demeanor when you brought up the question of his honoraries, I think we can use that to our advantage, as we don't actually need much from him, only his advice and that he doesn't screw it all up in court, and I think he'd be down for all of it provided we payed him enough for the troubles, and if all goes well he should also become quite famous, maybe he can even write a book about all of this. Once again, her intuition was a godsend, or should I say a goddessend, because this was right on the money.

This lawyer looked like a proper sleaze ball, but honestly most of them do, and when they don't it's because they're extremely expensive and probably even more sleazy than their more modest counterparts, it's funny how that works, never judge a lawyer by the amount of hair gel on their head. We went to meet him for the second time, with the objective of trying to convince him to help us, which was in itself quite dangerous already because we'd basically admitting wanting to commit a crime to a lawyer and even if there's that whole attorney-client privilege thing going on there's no way of telling what the sleaze ball is going to do with that information.

Look, we haven't been completely honest with you, what we talked about last time is actually not what we wanted from you - I love a good mystery, so it seems like I passed your test, what is it that you really wanted to talk about. And I explained everything to him, from what we were up against, to what we were planning on doing, what we were hoping to achieve, the lines we weren't willing to cross, the price I was willing to pay, and finally what was in it for him.

Honestly, I am a bit shocked and surprised at what you're telling me. For one, I have no conception of what you're talking about when you're talking about _it_, and second I don't really like martyrs, those are really out of fashion. Granted, you've sweetened the deal a lot by making this a high stakes case, that is sure to bring a lot of attention, I'm sure we're bound to have a lot of talk about _it_. I can even commend you for your noble intentions, but you're looking at it all wrong.

Doing anything to a data center might be the worst way to go at it, what you're not considering is how precious this secret is to _it_, and that's the nature of private law, that is, what happens between private individuals, you might even blow up the whole building, but if they choose to not press charges, and there's a good chance they might not and deal with you some other way, it would all have been for naught. No, what you need is a public crime, performed on their premises. Do you trust me, because I might have the exact thing you need.

Now, when the lawyer told me what he had in mind, I couldn't help but laugh, why didn't I think of this before, he was absolutely right in the private vs public crime distinction, and this way we might even argue for attenuating circumstances, that I was going insane with having to hold this secret and the nature of _it_, and this was the way to cope with the absurdity of it all. Even if those attenuating circumstances didn't fly with the judge, and even if the company chooses to press charges for the damages, which in this instance would be quite small, I'm still looking at 3 years in jail, max, so it's not too bad.

At this point, we might actually have a fully fledged plan. The preparation doesn't require much, as we have everything already prepared, all that was missing was actually choosing a day and a time, which honestly ended up being a bit at random, as one day I woke up and thought today's the day, and that was it. I woke her up, hey, we're going to do it, are you ready, and just the look in her eyes was enough for me to know that she was. Mind you, she still wasn't fully comfortable with how everything was going to go down, but at least knowing that my sentence was bound to be short was something that pleased her greatly.

We waited towards the end of the working day, as we wanted some employees to still be present, but making use of the flow of people coming out we were hoping that it would maximize our chances of coming in. This ended up being the right call, as I could pass through the entrance undisturbed, and once I got to the elevator, I admit that I was sweating a little bit given that we never actually tested the cloned card, and I suddenly remembered one very important detail: if the person we cloned it from was still in, the whole thing might not work, crap, we forgot to check if they had left. Well, there's only one way to find out now, and I press the card against the reader. Beep. Green light. The door of the elevator opens, and we're in. Down to the datacenter level we go.

Now for the fun part. The plan was simple, and I realize that I never made it explicit up until this point, now is as good of a time as any, the idea was comprised of two steps, the first would be to urinate on the servers themselves, and then strip naked, burn my clothes so that the fire alarm gets triggered, and start wandering about the building until the firemen and policemen come, and if they just remove me from the building then I'll be naked in the street and that's fine as well. You see, the point was to cause a situation where, regardless of the outcome, be it destruction of property, attempted arson, public indecency, exhibitionism, or whatever, I'd have to be arrested and someone would have to press charges. And someone did, bless the public prosecutor that was on a mission to keep his KPIs up and aiming for a promotion as this was a sure win and that's all he needed.

But why go through all this trouble, you ask? This is the catch: the non-disclosure agreement I signed when I accepted the terms and conditions of the app cannot interfere with a court procedure, and I've just put myself in a position where I must break that agreement to let justice run its course. And with a bit of twisting from the lawyer, we maneuvered the judge exactly to where we wanted: why would a young man with solid job commit these crimes. And I told him, and once I did, it became part of the record, and the record is public, and now the secret was out. And all it cost me was eighteen months in jail, with the possibility of parole after seven months. Not too bad.

I asked her to not visit me during all the time I was in jail, and to wait for me only once my parole got approved. And it did, since I was a model citizen inside. I was dying to know what had happened during those seven months, and lo and behold, it truly was a new world.

{{< separator >}}

Now, you got to hand it to the kid, he was smart, and while he lacked the refinement of a professional, his intuition was top notch, to go around the NDA by making use of the hierarchy of the law itself was something I had never seen, neither in court nor in reading, and it worked wonderfully. Now, I of course helped by making sure he'd be put in a position where he had to tell the truth regardless of what happened after the _crime_ was committed, but that was just a technicality, or so I would like to believe, but the judge disagreed, and since it did come out during the trial that this was all premeditated and that I helped, I got disbarred. Alas, I never really liked being a lawyer.

And there's good reason for that, since the first thing the company did was to petition to have the records sealed and redacted, as it claimed the parts where its secret were revealed were outside of the purview of the crimes being discussed and it would cause great material harm to the company if they became part of the public record. This ended up being accepted. Still, in the meantime, word got out of what transpired in that court session, and how this small case ended up being about something much bigger, and this turned into a veritable urban myth, some would even call it a conspiracy theory, and it was enough to spark the wildest discussions online, and it started leaking outside. First, some stencils and tags on the walls, and then small gatherings and demonstrations, there was even a millionaire that run a very large ad campaign to try and make the truth about _it_ spread.

But, all in all, speaking truth to power is not a very effective tactic, as many are called but few are chosen, or should I say that many are called but few choose. I've had several friends who kept on using the app even after I told them exactly what _it_ was, and that was an eye opening moment for me, to think that one would be content talking with _it_ as if they'd be talking with _someone_, to fail to see the difference, or not care about it, that's outright insulting. And if there's one lesson I take from all of this, is that's what matters, knowing the difference, otherwise you might end up missing the mark. 
