| Warning Express | ||
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| Author | Lars Washington | |
| Language |  English
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| Editions | One (1st) | |
| Genre | Fiction > Fantasy, technology, mystery | |
| Preceded by | The River of Oto | |
| Followed by | none so far | |
Warning Express is a Lovian short story by Lars Washington, based on the 1932 book by James M. Jackson. This version is modernized and is all about Wikipedia and modern digital technologies.
Plot[]
The Skeleton
Mother Earth
The gravestone
A man went to the train, where he saw a ghastly skeleton. Then the train driver suddenly whispers Warning Express, because of the skeleton laying across the rails. Nobody seemed to know how the skeleton had come there. For sure, it did not arrive there on it's own, because skeletons usually do not move, unless ...
The police and the forensic team were brought to the scene and all train traffic was halted till further notice. Pictures had been taken and the skeleton had been removed and brought to the laboratory for further forensic examination. Meanwhile, hundreds of curious villagers from Train Village and surrounding areas had been gathering, hoping to catch a glimpse from what whas going on.
Already on June 23, 2008, the forensic team had discovered the Skeleton was that of a male in his early thirties, cause of death: drug abuse. But the skeleton revealed something else, something very important. The forensic team had also found DNA from a male in his early twenties. The next step would be to find the owner of this DNA...
The story is the following:
A couple of years ago, a naïve and goodmeaning Wikipedian had been banned from all wiki's because of different crimes he allegedly had committed:
- Abuse and inappropriate use of Huggle, a tool for dealing with vandalism. Use of Huggle is subject to Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Abuse or inappropriate use are dealt with by removal of access or blocking the user account. Responsibility for edits rests with the owner of the account with which they are made. Use of an automated tool is not an excuse.
- Identity theft
- Copyright infringement with Creative commons templates
There was hardly anything the faithful Wikipedian, listening to the username: Yme could do about the lies that had been spread about him all over the internet. Hackers had been able to retrieve his identity in the real world and had been setting up different crime scenes where our poor Yme appearently had been involved in. It took a while before Yme found out the guilty suspects.
In an effort to dismantle the whole setup, he soon found a lot of information on the different hackers and decided to follow the steps of the White hats. Soon after, he joined a Tiger team and started working on his rehabilitation.
It took him and his team a couple of years to find out what really had happened and what the hackers had been looking for in his PC. After having archived the files of all hackers involved, the Tiger team now had to track down the guys that had paid the hackers to do what they are good at: hacking...
A solution for what in the beginning looked as an unachievable task, was in fact brought to Yme by a fellow member of the Tiger team who had informed Yme about Mäöres and the image on Oostwesthoesbes', userpage.
That would be it!... Yme decided he would chase the individual(s) that had paid the hackers to find out what he thought they needed to know.
Now, the delicate search for possibilities began. The Tiger team digged into the history of the different individuals and started attacking simultaneously. The goal was to get the guilty ones out of the shade by committing another crime, in their search for answers.
That is why the skeleton suddenly seemed to be omnipresent. The guilty one(s) saw it appear on different occasions, in different places. They started searching for it and hoped to have found the answer to their many questions when suddenly a sculpture appeared next to the skeleton.
It was quite easy to find the origin of the sculpture. They went to the cimetary looking for a grave where they thought the skeleton could be hiding.
Upon opening a grave with the inscription SPQR, which reminded the guilty one(s) of something else they had seen quite frequently on the internet, this one individual took the skeleton out of the grave and laid it on the railroad in Train Village, to make sure the train would override it and nothing would be left to remind him to his former life.
The guilty one(s) then ran off as fast as they could, waiting for the big moment to come. And it did come, but not as expected and hoped for:... at that moment of time, Pierlot spotted the skeleton laying across the rails and the mistery of the hacked computer from Yme was solved!
The tomb with the stone engraved S.P.Q.R. was part of the trap set-up by the Tiger team. The skeleton had been laid in the grave to materialize the virtual skeleton haunting the hacker mob.
The End