The Edge

Adoette: Part Nine

Out of everyone in her family, one would think that Arian was the hacker of the bunch. He was the one with an actual criminal record and a habit of doing morally questionable things. But it was actually Adoette who had taken up the helm of person who was really good at getting into digital spaces she shouldn't be.

It started with a middle school history lesson about a hacker named Winter Zimmerman. Winter had exposed the corruption plaguing the early space settlements outside the Milky Way. Adoette had been completely fascinated by her at the time, and wanted to be just like her: cool, smart, and always helping people. Adoette liked to think she'd ended up being all three herself. She was pretty cool, quite smart, and helping people was literally in her job description.

Thing was, she had taken to helping people by making sure their personal information stayed safe and secure. Exposing information was a bit out of her usual M.O. That wasn't to say she hadn't done some questionably-legal information exposure. She'd had some fun times blowing open the mystery of the cult that had held Tola back in the day. She'd also exposed some grading bias at her high school, a security flaw at an insurance company that had been in denial about said problem and lied to consumers, and helped pull off the Greatest Senior Prank Of All Time (okay, that one only kind of counted, but people had enjoyed the prank).

If you'd told baby her that she would hack a hospital one day, she probably wouldn't have been happy about it. Winter Zimmerman wouldn't hack a hospital. Even with the context of the place being a front for drug running, it felt like a dick move. It was a hospital. Some places were just sacred, like doctors' offices and non-cult churches. You didn't mess with them.

Then again, maybe that made the lack even more vital. The sacredness of those places meant they had a higher level of trust associated with them. Misusing that trust to exploit addicts—or maybe even make new addicts to exploit further—was wrong in all kinds of ways.

Assuming she wasn't being lied to right now.

Only one way to find out.

A lot of hospitals had garbage security. It wasn't as bad as it used to be; apparently, there had been a time when they ran on decades-old software and were infected by ransomware and all other forms of nastiness on the regular. But even now, when that kind of thing was less common, people liked to cut corners. She almost understood the logic: pending money on medical research and treatments was more important than the cutting edge security tech on paper, and besides that, who would hack a hospital? Again: some places were sacred. Hospitals seemed to rely on that. What kind of asshole goes digging around in the information of sick people?

Me, apparently.

Though, to be fair, she wasn't really looking for specific patient information. She didn't need names, addresses, social security numbers. She just needed to see the prescription information, and maybe the conditions they were being treated for. Just to make sure everything was on the up and up.

It took her a moment to get into the system—long enough that someone had set a drink in front of her and glass had started gaining condensation without her noticing. "This had better not be alcoholic," she said.

"Just soda," someone answered to her surprise. It was Frogger. She quickly realized why he was called that when she glanced up at him. He really seemed to like the color green (not that she had any right to judge from how monochrome and specific her getup was). "How are you doing?"

"Decently enough. Don't think anyone or anything has noticed me poking around yet." She took a sip of the soda. Something fruity; her siblings had chosen well. "How does this planet have two different groups that are up to something shady in this close proximity to each other without interacting?"