Anchorpoint
Mark "Tiger" Baldwin
05/04/25

	Las Vegas is freaking hot in August. If you're not used to it, it can be dangerous. Being from the Southeastern US, Dylan was NOT used to it. He was used to sweating when he was hot. He was used to his body TELLING him he had had enough. In Vegas, you didn't know the heat was too dangerous until it was too late. Of course, he was prepared for it. Not being used to something didn't mean he didn’t know about it. Dylan was many things, but stupid was not one of them.
	It was nearly time to act. All the pain and terror from the past year was nearing fruition. Dylan had been watching the Las Vegas Convention Center for two days now. From experience, Dylan knew that the most important part of any engagement was the information gathering stage. Boring, but essential. Most of the enumeration stages had taken place remotely over the past year, but he could never be too careful. Especially when his life might be on the line. It was cooler in the shade of the dumpster in the parking lot of the hotel across the street from the venue, if he didn't get too close to the steel walls which radiated heat. Thankfully, the most extreme heat of the day was over, and Dylan only had an hour to wait until the sun went down.
	The past 48 hours of periodic surveillance had paid off, and Dylan knew exactly how he would get into the venue. The rest of his plan had been thought out meticulously, and if he could get into the convention center, Dylan was sure he could finally get some answers about his father’s death.
*    *    *    
	Dylan didn’t even realize he had fallen asleep until a loud BANG! woke him. His eyes flew open, but he didn’t move a muscle. He knew he was hidden from any casual observers, but still didn’t want to make any noise. Dylan sat quietly for a minute and listened as the sound of voices which initially seemed to be right on top of him got quieter and farther away. He assumed the noise had been construction workers throwing things in the dumpster at the end of their shift. When it seemed he was alone again, Dylan knew it was time to move.
	Dylan quietly unzipped the zipper on the threadbare blue denim Jansport backpack he had hauled across the country with him and checked to make sure his antennas were inside instead of sticking out of their custom-stitched holes. While he had the bag open, Dylan removed a hardhat and hi-vis workmen’s vest. He had “acquired” these two items the first day in Vegas after monitoring the construction workers putting the finishing touches on the new west wing of the LVCC. Dylan knew that the best way to sneak into any place was to appear as if you belonged. Most people didn’t ask questions of someone who “looked the part.” For an office building, that might be a tie and an RFID badge; but for a construction project, a hardhat and a vest were the uniform of the day.
	As Dylan donned his costume, he smiled to himself as he thought about the theme for this year’s DEFCON: “Access Everywhere.” Really the easiest way to get Access Everywhere was to pretend like you belonged. Even though he was 18, Dylan knew he didn’t look like an adult to most other adults. He still looked the same as he did when he was 15, simply taller. An adult-sized child was how one teacher had referred to him condescendingly in the past. But that part of his life was over. Dylan pulled the hardhat down a little so that it would hide some of his youthful features and then walked confidently over to the site of the nearly complete construction site, and walked right in as the day shift was walking right out. No one questioned him.
	Online maps and county permit records had allowed Dylan to create a very rough map of the new area. Walking quickly with his phone held up to his ear, and his brow scrunched together in concentration ensured that only the most determined person would dare to bother him. Dylan moved with purpose and intent and was quickly and completely lost.
	The inside of the part of the convention center that was being refurbished was like an ancient labyrinth. The twisting and turning of the hallways made little sense but thank God for GPS. Whenever he found himself in a hallway alone and curious, Dylan would look at his position on his phone’s map application to get reoriented. He only had to turn around a few times to get near his destination when he started looking for some place secluded.
	Eventually, Dylan saw some white plastic visqueen hanging from a higher ceilinged hallway that sectioned it off from the rest of the building. He stopped near the plastic sheet and listened for a while to make sure he was alone before confidently turning around and ducking under the bottom of the sheet.
	The atrium area behind the plastic was nearly perfect dark, so he turned the flashlight on his phone and looked around. The large room was in the middle of having its walls re-faced, and in places there were exposed metal studs where he could step through the actual walls. After searching for about an hour, Dylan found a little nook that looked as if it might end up being dead space or a closet between two larger rooms. This void had been finished on three sides, and the open side gave him a good vantage point from which to see and/or hear anyone coming.
	Dylan settled down to wait. It was Tuesday night. He would have his chance the day after tomorrow, if all went according to his plan, to meet and relay the information he had to WhiteTiger. His entire trip revolved around that. He needed to talk to Eli Ward. He had to know if Eli knew anything about what had happened to his father. And, more importantly, what could be done about it.
*    *    *    
	For the second time that day, Dylan woke with a start. Again, he opened his eyes only, afraid of drawing attention to himself. At first, he saw and heard nothing and was just about to close his eyes again when there was a brilliant flash from somewhere else in the room outside Dylan's cubby. Simultaneously, there was a beep followed immediately by a loud electrical hum that slowly ebbed away. The noise had seemed to come from his left and outside Dylan’s point of view. Dylan was very familiar with the typical 60 Hz hum that American power gave off, and this was not that. It was this incongruity that kept Dylan awake and stock still for the next minute or so waiting for any other sound, during which time, of course, his bladder’s tension made itself known. Always when he was hiding! Why? But no sound came.
	Finally, Dylan’s bladder would no longer be ignored, and he got up as quietly as he possibly could. He grabbed the empty liter plastic jug he had in his pack for just this occasion and crept quietly away from his sleeping area to avoid accidental spillage. Dylan had gone no more than 5 steps when he stopped dead in his tracks. He had not brought his phone with him to use as a flashlight, yet he could see just fine. Where was the light coming from? It was fading, but the half-complete walls of the room seemed to be slightly fluorescing! Dylan stayed still, and after another five minutes of agonizing bladder pain he was again in a pitch-black dark room. Dylan used the bottle to relieve himself right there and then turned around to carefully make his way back the few steps he had come to his things.
	And then, Dylan froze once again. A footstep? A scraping on the floor. A rat? As quietly as he could manage, Dylan made it back to his nook. He groped around for a minute to find his phone, disconnected it from its portable charger, then pressed the power button on it with the screen pointed away from him to use as a dim flashlight. Dylan then stuck his phone and head out of his nook and around to his left where he saw a person standing against the wall about 15 feet away.
	The young man in the red shirt and dark grey hoodie looking back at him was both familiar and frightened. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and then the young man simply vanished. The light was incredibly dim at that distance, so maybe Dylan wasn’t losing his mind, but… He thought he had seen… No.
	The light on the face of Dylan’s phone went out, and he was once again in complete darkness. A few minutes later, Dylan realized he had been simply staring straight ahead into the blackness. His brain wasn’t braining. So, he blinked, took a deep breath and counted to ten as he slowly exhaled. Another slow blink, and he was back.
	As a part of his journey over the last year, Dylan had learned the Serenity Prayer. He wasn’t particularly religious, and the word “God” kind of gave him the creeps, but he could understand the value of worrying only about what you could control. What were those things now? What could he control? Dylan didn’t feel as if he was in immediate danger—even so, it took almost a full ten minutes for his heart rate to come down. He knew he probably wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon, so he decided to inventory. Another person had been around his things, and he should make sure he still had everything he needed.
	Dylan pulled out a sock and placed his phone inside the sock before turning on the flashlight on his phone as even the dimmest setting on the device felt like it would be too bright right now. He tied the sock to one of the exposed studs near him so that he could have both hands free and quietly emptied his bag in front of him on the floor. But as soon as he reached his hand in, he snatched it out again quickly with a strange device on a lanyard. It looked strangely enough like an electronic DEFCON badge. In his bag, Dylan had brought two laptops (one that would stay here and a burner he was planning on taking with him into the conference), several different types of antennas, a few external hard drives, some USB drives, a couple of rogue Wi-Fi devices, various sundry cables and batteries, and a couple of old DEFCON badges—but not this one.
	The front of the device had a 4-inch square screen on the front of it that had an odd shimmer to it, sort of like the back of an old CD and the case surrounding the screen appeared to be a translucent grey plastic, but it had the heft and feel of a metallic substance. There were two buttons on the front of the device just under the screen that had no labels, and just below and between the buttons Dylan could see through the case a chipset that he didn’t recognize. The chip was a bright gold color and was maybe 2 inches square. Dylan had seen plenty of chips in the past couple of years, but this one was unfamiliar to him. The object also seemed to “radiate” cold. Dylan knew that wasn’t how physics worked but he had no other way of thinking about the sensation of holding the device.
	This was obviously not a device that Dylan was familiar with, but the lanyard attached to the device said DEFCON 33 on it and had the logo and everything. Was this a DEFCON badge? It looked like it might even be a black badge. Where did it come from? Who had put it here? Was it the “person” he had seen earlier? None of this made ANY sense. But Dylan knew how to make things make sense. This was a puzzle, and Dylan knew puzzles. There would be no sleeping this night.
*    *    *    
	An initial physical inspection of the badge—Dylan was convinced that it was a black badge now—showed a seamless construction with no visible screws. Dylan looked at it carefully many times and found nothing. Not that he would need it at first, but what if he wanted to look for a JTAG point? The one accessible port on the device was a USB-C type port, and he had plenty of those cables. Dylan quickly slid his personal laptop with a custom image of Kali on it out of his bag and then powered it on. Once he was logged in, he fished a short USB-C cable out of his bag and plugged one end into his laptop and without hesitation, plugged the other end into the device. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he typed:
		```
		┌──(root💀kali)-[~]
		└─# dmesg | tail -n50
		```
	Amid the 50 lines of response, he saw:
		```
		[New device: /dev/ttyUSB0]
		````
	The device was not recognized as storage which wasn’t too strange, maybe he could screen over to it?
		```
		┌──(root💀kali)-[~]
		└─# screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
		```
	Dylan got a garbled response back from this command, which wasn’t a surprise, in fact, it let him know he may be on the right track. Maybe he had the baud rate wrong? After attempting a few different common baud rates, Dylan’s screen flashed brightly and then slowly faded leaving a new prompt:
		```
		>> ACCESS.MODE v0.7-β
		>> Enter command _
		```
	Dylan’s skin prickled so hard it almost hurt. Normally when he got a shell on a device, Dylan got a thrill, a rush of excitement, and though that had calmed a bit over the intervening years (he could still remember his first shell quite vividly), he still usually felt a thrill. This time was different. Dylan’s heart rate spiked, but more out of fear than excitement. Slowly, Dylan typed:
		```
		>> whoami
		```
	Dylan typed the above command out of habit more than anything else. It was typical enough when first landing in an unknown environment. One needed to know the privileges one was working with. The screen responded with:
		```
		# user: V0idRelay
		```
	Dylan froze. He looked carefully at the laptop he was using to confirm that this was indeed the new machine. Dylan had purchased this laptop computer from a Goodwill recently, wiped it and installed his custom image of Kali on it, then put it in his bag. This machine “knew” nothing about him. It hadn’t even touched the internet yet. Dylan rubbed his eyes and looked at the screen again. But it was still there - his old hacker handle. Dylan had stopped using that handle around a year ago after the debacle at last year’s DEFCON and the events that followed it. The great thing about an anonymous online handle was that if it was compromised, you could just burn it down and start over—painful but doable. He was “nullpath” now. “V0idRelay” was supposed to be dead.
	He was tempted to stop here and pull the plug on the entire engagement. However, not only was Dylan in too deep now, but there was no way his brain would let him leave this puzzle unexplored. Dylan continued.
		```
		>> help
		```
	The response came.
		```
		 AVAILABLE COMMANDS:
		  └─ access.grid
		  └─ target.set
		  └─ dwell.set
		  └─ relay.jump
		  └─ status.echo
		```
	For no apparent reason, Dylan’s heart started beating faster, and the goosebumps got bigger. It was relatively cold compared to the blasting heat of the daytime, so Dylan dug deep into his bag and pulled out a red T-Shirt that was pivotal to his infiltration plans. The shirt had the word GOON plastered across the front and back and had this year’s DEFCON logo screen printed on the front. On top of the shirt, he put on his “hacker” hoodie. And, yes, he was aware of the cliché. Every time he put it on.
	Back in front of the keyboard, Dylan continued working.
		```
		>> help access.grid
		# Open LVCC ASCII map and select target location
		>> help target.set
		# Set Target Time (in Epoch milliseconds)
		>> help dwell.set
		# Set Dwell Time (duration in milliseconds)
		>> help relay.jump
		# Initiate jump
		>> help status.echo
		# Display badge status and remaining lives
		```
	Dylan’s heart rate began to come down as he got deeper into the zone. This seemed like a game! When he queried the status, he got:
		```
		>> status.echo
		# ON – 98%
		# LIVES – 5
		```
	Dylan quickly set the dwell and target parameters after using his phone to check for the current Unix epoch time. He initially tried to set the current time, but he quickly got an error telling him that target time must be in the past. Since it was close to 1 AM, he set it to 1754457871000 and then set the dwell time for 5 minutes: 300000.
	When Dylan entered the `access.grid` command, the 4-inch screen on the device started glowing ever so slightly, and the screen on his laptop displayed an ASCII character dump that did indeed look like an overhead view of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Just below his command and just above the “map,” there was the number 3, and right about where he knew he was located, a 5 pixel-wide red dot flashed. The goosebumps returned. Dylan knew he was on the third level of the convention center but wondered immediately how the badge knew where he was.
	On his keyboard, Dylan typed:
		```
		>> access.grid 2
		```
	And the ASCII map updated with what looked like the second floor of the LVCC, but this time there was no red dot.
	There was slight hesitation before Dylan entered the next command, but he wasn’t certain why. This was just a game after all, and he was simply trying to figure out the mechanics of it. After typing `relay.jump,` Dylan let his finger hover for a few seconds over the return key as his heart rate increased once again. Then feeling quite silly, he smashed the key. And…. Got back an error:
		```
		Cannot jump to current position
		```
	This gave Dylan some pause. He re-entered the `access.grid` command and looked at the map with the red dot once again. Maybe he needed to move the dot? Looking back over at the device, Dylan saw that the same map that was on his laptop was also displayed on the 4-inch screen on the device, or rather a zoomed in version of it. The display on the screen was quite a bit more detailed than the terrible ASCII version on his laptop, and Dylan wondered how he had missed this earlier. Leaving the device plugged in, he picked it up and pressed the right button of the two buttons on its front. A new dot split off from the red position dot, this one green. He played around a bit with the position of the green dot and figured out that the buttons were actually some sort of directional pad. The right button moved the green dot around the screen, and the left button brought up the same menu he had seen on his laptop. After messing around for a bit, Dylan left the green dot against a wall not too far away and then called up the menu to make sure the settings he had entered on the laptop were reflected on the device. They were.
	Dylan navigated through the menu on the device until he was at the `relay.jump` command, and this time with no silly hesitation, he entered the command. And the world broke in half.
*    *    *    
	The view in front of Dylan began to fade along with the ambient sounds around him that he hadn’t noticed until they started to disappear. Then, when everything seemed to be going completely black, there was a brilliant flash. The light only lasted for the briefest moment, but its after-image seemed to last a long time. When the ringing in Dylan’s ears faded, he could still hear a fading, vaguely off-putting electrical hum. It was this hum that brought on the feeling of déjà vu. Dylan had no idea how long he stood there against the wall in shock, but then he slowly looked down at what he was wearing. Red shirt, dark grey hoodie. He heard a fumbling noise a few feet in front of him and when he looked up, he saw a dim light come on in front of him in a small nook facing away from him.
	Dylan could have run at this point; he could have hidden. But he seemed to be frozen in place, waiting for the inevitable. He watched in abject horror and shock, as a head and dim phone light peered around the corner and looked directly at him. Dylan was staring directly at himself from about an hour ago. And then the world broke a second time as Dylan returned to his normal timeline.
*    *    *    
	This was absolutely, bonkers-insane crazy. What was going on? And maybe more importantly, why?
	Dylan had no idea how long he sat staring at the back wall of his little nook, but by the time his thoughts slowly started to return, the increase in ambient light around him told him that the sun had risen. It was now Wednesday, and he had a plan to finish implementing. And this new “wrinkle in time” might very well be useful. But first, he had to know how it worked.
	The Serenity Prayer started up inside his head, and slowly, Dylan focused on what he could control instead of worrying about what he couldn’t. He decided to fuzz around with some of the parameters on the device to see what its limitations were. Could he use the device without a laptop? If so, how would he enter the Unix epoch target and dwell times? Since he could use his laptop for that, would the device accept junk data? Were there any buffer overflow or command injection vulnerabilities on the input fields? Dylan had some digging to do, and as long as he didn’t hit the `relay.jump` command, he was pretty sure he would be safe.
	Two hours later, Dylan knew a lot more about what was and wasn’t theoretically possible using the device, and he felt better. Most importantly, Dylan discovered that the `LIVES` parameter on the device now read `4` so it looked like he could only jump 4 more times. Dylan found that he could use the device without it being attached to his laptop, but that using the D-pad buttons to enter the times was clunky. He couldn’t figure a way out of the map, and he couldn’t jump within 5 feet from where he currently stood, even if he hadn’t been in that location at the time to which he was trying to jump. The jump time had to be in the past—a minimum of 5 seconds—but after the time he estimated that he had entered the building. The dwell time had a maximum of 600,000 ms, and a minimum of 1000 ms. Dylan remembered that when he jumped, the device itself had not come with him, but his clothes had. And, of course, with all these answers came more questions.
	Dylan could think of two very important questions for which he needed answers. Could he take anything he wanted with him on the jump? And would a change made to the timeline while in the past alter his normal timeline, or would that create an alternate reality to prevent a paradox? If he could take anything with him, and the changes held, then theoretically he could create a paradox by going back in time with a gun and shooting himself. Dylan decided to leave the question of “Why?” alone as it seemed beyond his ability to control and was therefore somewhat irrelevant.
	This is about the time when Dylan started to question his own sanity. He hadn’t slept, or eaten in more than 14 hours, and after spending a couple of days in the Vegas heat. Maybe he had simply lost his mind. Yet again, Dylan put this question outside of the set of things he could control.
	But the first two questions he could answer with a simple experiment. Dylan went and grabbed a hammer he had seen laying around yesterday on his way into the hallway with plastic sheeting then returned to his hiding spot. He sat quietly for around 5 minutes to make sure he couldn’t hear anyone, and satisfied he was alone—
	There was a flash of light that wasn’t quite as bright as it had been in the darkness last night, a fading, low-pitched hum and—
	WHAM!
	Even though he had been expecting both the noise and the light they still made his heart rate jump. Taking a deep breath, Dylan quickly programmed in a target time of 5000 milliseconds assuming there was no way he could get it wrong, and a dwell time of 2000 ms. Then before activating the device, Dylan gave it a moment for his heart to settle again and picked up the hammer and stood up, then he hit enter on the command `relay.jump` with the toe of his shoe.
	He had targeted his jump away from his current sitting position, and on the other side of a wall he could see. He had done this intentionally as he really didn’t want to see himself jump with his own eyes again. Last night was creepy enough.
	When he materialized and before the light of the flash had begun to fade, Dylan had a wide grin on his face as he swung the hammer back and—
	WHAM!
	Dylan had just enough time to see the hole in the wall he had just made before he returned to his normal timeline in a flash of sudden disorientation. The jump hadn’t affected his equilibrium that much, but for some reason, the return did. Quickly and quietly, Dylan got up and walked around to the other side of the wall from where he had been sitting and saw a hammer-sized hole in the new drywall.
	It was time to go. Dylan didn’t know if the noise of the hammer strike had alerted anyone to his presence, but he didn’t want to sit around and find out.
*    *    *    
	Dylan’s initial plan had been to dress like a goon with lots of flashing LEDs and electronic badges from previous DEFCONs hanging around his neck. He had planned on using his social engineering skills if asked where his badge for this year was, “Oh no! Where did it go?!?! D.T. is gonna be pissed!” Then he would turn around and walk quickly in the opposite direction. He didn’t know if people referred to WhiteTiger as D.T., but he thought it sounded familiar enough that it would at least give the person he was talking to pause. In the end, this wasn’t a problem.
	There were quite a few people walking around the venue already. Some were vendors, some were goons dressed similarly to Dylan, but they all had electronic badges around their neck that looked exactly like Dylan’s new toy. Well, almost exactly. The other badges were in various colors, but none were the dark grey of his badge. Dylan got quite a few raised eyebrows from people who noticed his badge, and even one full-on Elizabethan bow, with a hand flourishing and all! Everyone assumed he had somehow earned a black badge before the event had even begun. The attention was certainly not helping him blend in, but Dylan thought it was better than the alternative of possibly being thrown out of the venue before he could accomplish what he had come to do.
	As Dylan walked around the LVCC, he listened for any mention of WhiteTiger or the name Eli Ward. He knew that Eli was typically around before the event as he was the head coordinator for the Goons, but the Las Vegas Convention Center was HUGE! He needed to find the NOC. Dylan’s research had led to the discovery that wherever DEFCON was held, they brought in all their own networking and security equipment, and they had a fully operational Network Operations Center set up somewhere.
	Dylan sat down at a table in the lobby with a fair view of a relatively empty venue. Tomorrow this place would be packed with 60,000 hackers (and enthusiasts, and journalists, and feds) from around the world. But right now, there were only a few people wandering around wearing red shirts and some wearing ties and suits. As Dylan sat, he saw a group of people exit a stairwell all together, and—there he was! Eli Ward, WhiteTiger, in the flesh!
	Dylan’s father, Thomas "Darkline" Reid, had been his hero growing up. Born in 1975, Thomas had come of age in the era of the PC, and he had begged his parents for an Intel 80386 as a junior in high school in Canada. Thomas quickly found his way on to seedier BBSs and eventually ended up joining Platinum Net just before it all fell apart. Through this connection, Darkline was one of the attendees at the very first DEFCON in 1993 where he met WhiteTiger for the first time. Thomas had been circumspect when relaying this information to his son, and Dylan hadn’t been able to get much more than this from his father. That is until the last year of Thomas’ life.
	Slowly over that last year, Thomas slid slowly down a twisted hole of conspiracy and paranoia. Dylan had been certain that his father was losing his mind. Often during these times when Dylan would confront his father, he would get back only a cryptic warning:
	“Dylan, if something happens to me, you need to go and find WhiteTiger and say these words…”
	Of course, these events just confirmed Dylan’s suspicion that all was not well with his father. Thomas spent more and more time alone locked up in the basement where his rig and library were in the house. This area was, of course, off limits to Dylan and anyone else. Not that there was anyone else. Dylan was an only child whose mother had died in childbirth. Dylan might have had grandparents and aunts and uncles, but he had never met them if so. And all inquiries from Dylan had been met with stoic silence.
	One day, Dylan had come home from school to a quiet house, as usual. But unusually, the door leading to the basement was unlocked and ajar. 
	Dylan had a hard time remembering that day most of the time, but the sight of Eli Ward so close brought the image of his father’s body straight to the forefront of Dylan’s mind. The death had been ruled a suicide which had always struck Dylan as odd as he couldn’t remember seeing a gun. There was a gun in the police report, just not in Dylan’s memory. A counselor he had seen a few times told him he was probably just blocking the memory of the gun, but that made no sense to Dylan. If his stupid brain was going to block something out, it should have been the blank look on his father’s face with the small trickle of blood running out of the hole in the middle of his forehead.
	WhiteTiger broke away from the group of people heading for the doors and walked quickly over to the bathroom. Alone. Dylan didn’t think he remembered anyone else going in to that restroom in the few minutes he had been sitting there, so quickly, Dylan opened his phone, started a stopwatch, and noted the time Eli entered the bathroom. Then he waited. When Eli walked out of the bathroom 9 and a half minutes later, he looked directly at Dylan and winked!
	Dylan gathered himself up from the table and walked around the venue until he found an open and empty room. In no hurry, he pulled out his laptop and took the device from around his neck. In no time at all, he had the parameters plugged in and double-checked, then paused with his finger hovering over the ENTER button. He sat there for quite a while.
*    *    *    
	This year was going off without a hitch! For the first time in 33 years, it seemed like everything was in place and behaving the way it should be. Eli knew that could change at any moment, but as of now with less than 24 hours to go, it seemed like all was well! Eli’s third cup of coffee was filling his bladder to capacity, so he pulled away from the group and made his way to the restrooms on the first floor.
	When he entered the restroom, Eli slowed down and got a very nervous feeling. The walls of the restroom were still glowing faintly and there was a young man he didn’t know standing in the middle of the room wearing a fake goon costume. Eli narrowed his eyes and started reaching slowly for the special pocket sewn into the back of his hoodie, when the young man said:
	“DeltaLima is offline; root never forgets.”
	Eli froze. It was happening, then. He had been afraid it would come to this.
	“Sorry, kid. Your father was a great man, and no one will ever know that except you and me. But right now, we have work to do. I hope you’re ready for an adventure!”