The Mom Identity (Case Files Of An Urban Witch Book 2) by Martha Carr & Michael Anderle

Author:Martha Carr & Michael Anderle [Carr, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Published: 2021-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

“Gather around, class.” Womack did her best impression of a proper teacher. Part of her wondered if it was even an impression anymore. After all, if she was educating these people, did that mean that she’d crossed the line and become the thing she was imitating? Where did fraud end and real teaching begin?

Probably somewhere past her plan, in which half of these fools would pay her for the right to go set up their schools on her “model,” unaware that it was all sham and improvisation, while the prime meat became recruits to work with her on other schemes. Every student here was a profit point for Womack, with a future as either a mark or a colleague, and all those colleagues were likely to become marks too. Even that part would only kick in after she’d milked them all for merchandise and information through their “homework exercises.” She should’ve done something like this years ago.

“I set you all hacking targets and the challenge of using your magic to carry out the hacks,” Womack said. “So, who wants to impress me with what they came up with?”

She looked around the class. Even after a few had dropped out or just disappeared, like Lotty and Hank, her numbers were steadily growing. Word was seeping out in the right circles to keep the recruits discreetly drifting in. It would have been even better without those losses, especially Hank, who had the potential to be talked into something dumb and useful further down the line. Like most of her work, this was a numbers game, and the aim was to come out ahead, not win every single time.

“I can already program malware,” said a shifter with a twitch in her eye. “I used performance-enhancing magic to speed me up, get the program written quicker and better. It let me hit my targets before all the other attacks made system admins jumpy.”

“Well done. It’s not the most original approach, but it’s one you can apply to other crimes. Transferable skills are always worth developing.”

She made a note on the whiteboard, a record of what the shifter had done. Things felt more official when she did that. Something about the smell of dry wipe ink and the squeak of the pen across the board made everything more convincing.

“Who took a different approach?” she asked.

“I created some adaptive magical code,” another student said. “The magical component let it get around the first few mundane countermeasures it encountered.”

“Very smart,” Womack said. “Remember, most mundane systems are vulnerable to magical code if you have the skills to write it.” She added that one to the board. “What did you get from the target systems?”

“Found some Bitcoin, so I stole that.”

“Bitcoin, huh?” There was a con Womack could respect, convincing everyone to buy into a currency you’d invented. She wished she’d come up with that one herself. It was so big that it was practically Wall Street work. “Is that worth anything today?”

The whole class laughed, including the bitcoin thief.

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