Leah Cassini

Tell you a little about myself? No way, I've data scraped enough matchmaking sites to know where that leads. Anyway, I'm busy tonight. Security review, compiling, benzodiazepines on the rocks.

Sure, it's pretty cool down here. You probably wouldn't understand, but out behind the soundproofing and the two-way mirrors and the chemical deterrents in the guts of the Labyrinths...I feel like a kid on a sleeping giant. Dreaming the traffic of the world. It's not like I'm power tripping. It's mostly running numbers and server calls, and you know really voyeurism loses its edge after about 20 minutes of your first Illuminati office party. I'm about challenging myself with solutions for data management, and in this place I get to manage, like, all the data. Also my therapist said I could try to ease myself slowly into enjoying human interactions through observing them. I wouldn't usually come straight out with something like that, but... on current projections it's 50/50 we won't see each other again because you get killed anyway. The beauty of our system is that you're still indelibly recorded, think of it as your fifteen terrabytes of fame. You will always be part of the Illuminati. In some data warehouse.

Yeah, the "secret" world, with more major air quotes around the secret every day. I was already over it - if you want to see the most fucked-up things ever, just go online. Real talk, don't act like I haven't got access to all your chat logs. Because we grew up alongside the Internet. We were the first desensitised generation, with our machine god-given ability to see everything wrong with the world, all the time. Even back in the 1980s the Illuminati had predicted the Internet would change everything. Not just gonzo conspiracy theorists being able to barf all over Usenet, but that in thirty years anyone could record an exorcism on their mobile phone and upload it to YouTube. No more secrets. So they had to control it. They planned out the networks like bonsai, a nip here, a tuck there, always a backdoor access. Blowing then pricking the dot-com bubble, for which I am super thankful because it was a really shitty gig. And we have the killswitch for the whole thing. In case of emergency: break world.

Let me guess, rockstar, you want to know where the party's at. It's underground, and no, I can't spoof you through the security gates if you don't already have clearance. When you were headhunted, did they run that whole "work hard, play hard" spiel? Heh. Exactly, so because we choose the young and hungry, new hires always see this gig as slam-dunking a few deals, getting loaded and dancing badly to those rap videos we seed with All-Seeing Eye imagery. Don't get me wrong - it's not like that doesn't happen. They call it teambuilding, or sometimes teambuilding means waterboarding just to keep agents guessing. You really want to make the VIP list at the Pyramid, I recommend finding something that makes people afraid of you, then getting really good at it. My talent is having admin-level access to all the Board members' hard drives. Basically what I'm saying is noone even invites me out anymore, it sucks ass.

The Templars really do have a direct line back to Babylon, yadda yadda, which coincidentally is pretty much where their computer literacy peaked. Millions in old money, heavily armed goon squads across the world, but security vulnerabilities like you wouldn't believe. I'm talking plaintext passwords. If they roll up and tell you they're going to save your soul, you say: guys, I wouldn't trust you to save my credit card info. They got hit by rapid modernisation really hard, clocked on their asses hard, and never really recovered enough to stop us from climbing over 'em. I can't sympathise, but I can understand it. Imagine your institution is built on knowledge being power, and now everyone with a web browser can be like, here you go, boom, cover to cover scans of the Key of Solomon. That sound you hear, like breaking china - it's the sound of a thousand little oligarch dreams collapsing around them. History isn't written by the victors anymore. It's rewritten by the Wikipedia vandals.

Oh, I love these guys. Really fun from a predictive security perspective, trying to guess what they'll come up with next if even their agents don't know. They've always gone hard on the "secret" part of secret society. I wouldn't call them really web-facing, but they're pros, naturals, at weaponising the Internet. See, back when information was precious and travelled slowly, the Dragon worked silently. Now we have so many sources that can be triggered immediately, they can be as loud as they like in the information chaos. The world being how it is and people being how they are, it just takes one scare gone viral, one tweet, to set it off. In the hysteria of "heightened awareness", our chances of isolating the event that's actually happening are like zip. So we become as paranoid as those numerology conspiracy nuts who think math is an Illuminati plot, and we jump at everything that goes wrong. Sometimes it really was the Dragon, sometimes your day just sucked. Lose-lose.

Right, right, the happy self-improvement church of the apocalypse. Fastest-growing web presence of the decade - because their new followers drop out of other social networks. The networks are freaking out, offering Morninglight the metrics they sell to advertisers, it's wild. Average global response time for a Morninglight representative to hit a forum thread discussing trigger topics like unemployment, depression, economic uncertainty, is forty-five minutes. We looked into it, and there's no spambots, no automation. That means thousands of manual searches and responses. Hello, crazy cult. And still Morninglight are filed under "not an issue" on our grand plan, even though are spooks are all hello, red flag, red flag. It's like we've got a game of Internet-chicken going on to see who blinks and commits an atrocity first. Maybe the situation right now is where that's got us. Well, you know it's not my place to talk policy unless it's IT policy, not like anybody pays any attention to that either. I'm wasted here. No, I mean I really am wasted.