Maeng has never called Baekhyun before. Maeng, as a principle, only ever really called Kris, you, or Kai. But he never called the rest of the pack. Not really. It was only normal that Kai, Kris and you were his first choices, seeing as he worked with Kris, Kai was the city’s Alpha, and you had the knowledge he needed if something weird was going down.

So Baekhyun was more than shocked when he saw his name flashing on his phone’s screen. He had Maeng’s number saved, of course, they all did (and they sometimes used it, because even though Maeng didn’t call them, they called him), but he never really expected him to call.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Amber says, tugging slightly at Baekhyun’s sleeve. Baek jerks a little at that, as if torn away from some very deep thoughts. “Not gonna pick up?”

“Yeah,” Baekhyun says, still surprised. He finally punches the green button and watches as Amber stares into a fish tank, immersed with the tiny fish swimming around the green water. They’re in a pet shop. “Hello?” he says, picking up.

“I need your hacker friend to come to the station immediately,” Maeng says. They’re all just too cool for saying hello to each other, Baekhyun decides. Manly men don’t do greetings. “Is she with you right now?”

“You mean Amber?”

“Yes, blonde, tomboyish, trapped Azazel in my body with a—stamp, or something. Rings a bell? You girlfriend, Jesus. Is she around?”

Baekhyun deflates a little at that. “I don’t recall my girlfriend being Jesus, but wow, I must’ve surely hit the jackpot with that one if it’s true.” Amber cackles next to him, listening in to the conversation.

“Byun,” Maeng almost growls. He’d make a good werewolf, Baekhyun decides, and grins. “The girl. Is she with you?”

“I sincerely hoped you were calling me, but I guess my dreams just got crushed. Yeah, she’s with me. The girl’s name is Amber. What happened?”

“Someone is trying very hard to hack us.”

*

“It’s a DDoS attack,” Maeng says the second they walk into the station. Baekhyun has never made a more confused face, and he never thought that’d be possible after he saw that chimera one time.

The whole station is in uproar. Everyone seems to be calling someone, trying to do something on their computers, or just in outward panic. There’s a guy in the middle of the room, typing away on a computer, and Amber can see that he’s trying to fight off the attacks, so she heads towards him.

Kris shows up on her side a second later. “I don’t get why they’re attacking our base out of all of them,” he says. “We’re just a small town—“

“Do your servers connect to your NIS servers?” Amber asks, taking off her coat and handing it to Baek. Maeng’s jaw clenches when she asks the question, and she doesn’t even need to hear the answer.

They finally reach the main computer, where a bulky, balding man is typing away, fully focused on the task. Amber leans over his shoulder, staring at the screen, taking in the letters.

[Connection Rejected]

“Still nothing from the tech department?” Maeng asks someone. Amber’s mind turns off after that, frowning deeply at the black screen.

“Did you reconfigure the DNS?” she asks the tech guy.

“I did,” he replies after a beat, realizing she’s speaking to him. Amber glances down at the name tag on his chest, but his name is way too long, so she settles for calling him Qwerty in her head. “I stopped the services. I tried to reboot the servers but they’re not coming back up just yet. It’s like they’re trying to fry the entire network right now.”

“Did they get inside yet?” Amber questions.

“Yeah, they’re inside alright, but didn’t get to the top secret documents just yet,” Qwerty replies, fidgeting in his seat.

destination unreachable [time out]

The screen says.

“Let me sit,” Amber says distractedly. The man doesn’t move, just keeps on typing in useless commands, so she shakes the chair a little. “Let me sit.”

“Hey!” Kris calls, making both Qwerty and her jump. “Let her sit!”

The man shakes his head like he’s about to throw a fit. He moves from the chair, visibly mad about the decision, and glares as Amber as she sits down in his place. Baekhyun hears him whispering something about junior league and Maeng, but he’s way more interested in Amber right now. The girl is so focused on the screen that she doesn’t as much as blink. Her fingers fit over the keyboard easily. He doesn’t understand a single thing that’s happening on the dark pixel-screen, but all the numbers and big letters seem to scream into his face, and all the policemen running around make him nervous as hell. Before he realizes, there’s like ten of them piling behind him, eager to see what Amber is doing.

“This is worse than I thought,” Amber mutters.

“I thought you set additional security protocols,” Maeng says to Qwerty. The man doesn’t reply, visibly flushed now, and probably worried about his job at this point. “Do we know where this is coming from?” he asks Amber then. He stands right next to her. Now there’s Maeng and Kris on her right and Baekhyun on her left, and more than ten cops watching her every move.

“Hard to pinpoint,” Amber replies. “Seems to come from all over the country.”

“What?” Kris hisses. He leans towards Maeng and Baekhyun focuses his hearing on him as Kris whispers, “Am I the only one that thinks it’s not a regular attack?”

“Has there been any other security breaches? Anywhere else?” Maeng asks somebody. A few voices answer him, stating that no, only their server is under attack, or at least that’s what they know for now.

“Listen, this is not just a DDoS attack,” Amber speaks up, her voice loud. She has Maeng’s attention at that. “There’s a rootkit inside the servers.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Baekhyun says.

“You’re not helping,” Kris replies, pointing an accusing finger at him.

“It can delete files,” Amber says, completely ignoring both of them. “And stop systems—“

“How do we delete it?” Maeng asks, his voice growing restless. Everyone is worried at this point, and it doesn’t help to be in such a big crowd of people. Panic always spreads faster in a big crowd of people.

“We can’t delete it,” Qwerty snorts. “It’s freaking invisible.”

“Every time we restart the server, the virus replicates itself during boot up and crashes the host,” Amber adds. “So we can’t restart the servers. Meaning, we can’t bring up the network. This is exactly what they wanted.”

“,” Maeng swears, walking away for a short moment, restless on his feet. “Then what?”

“We spread the virus everywhere by defending ourselves,” Amber tells him. Her voice sounds so soft and so peaceful under that much pressure, Baekhyun finds it incredible. He’s never seen her as focused.

She stares at the screen for the next five seconds, fingers frozen over the keyboard. Everyone is staring at him, the police station quiet as ever.

“Okay,” Amber says finally. “We gotta take the whole system offline, wipe the infected servers clean, and bring them back up. Qwerty, you start taking everything offline. Maeng, you need to show me the server farm.”

“Who the is Qwerty?” Changmin asks, speaking up for the first time.

*

“You should buy yourself a fish and name it Qwerty,” Baekhyun says as they jump into the backseat of the cruiser. Maeng shuts the door violently, turning on the engine, and Kris is calling someone to let them know they’re coming. “It’d be cute.”

“I was thinking about a betta fish,” Amber replies. “They’re pretty. And don’t need much stuff. We need to find a bowl that’s not round, though, because I’m not trapping any poor fish in a round bowl.”

“Why?” Baekhyun asks. “Oh, wait, you told me about that! They go crazy, right?”

“Pretty much,” Amber shrugs. “I’m not surprised some of them get exopthalmia.”

“I think that’s actually genetic,” Baekhyun says with a laugh.

“Shh, let me act smart for a moment,” Amber tells him, nudging him with her elbow.

“I’d say you’re smart enough as it is,” Baek smiles, and then yawns, stretching out.

“Are we going to ignore the fact that someone – a few someones, actually – choose to attack our server out of all possible servers in the country?” Kris interrupts them, turning in the passenger seat to look at the two of them. “It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Maybe they just knew we weren’t well-protected,” Amber rolls her eyes. “You can’t blame everything on the supernatural. Believe me, not everything is—“

“In our life?” Kris asks, frowning at her, and making a face. Amber shuts and deflates.

“Well, okay, it’s possible, but not necessarily true,” she says, raising her arms a little, as if trying to calm him down. “I’ll see what’s up. Don’t worry.”

They reach the server farm in record time and Amber outwardly giggles when she sees rows and rows of beautiful servers, screens, all the machine stuff she always wanted to lay her hands on—

“Jesus, Amber, chill,” Baekhyun tells her as he walks in a fast pace behind her. There’s a guy wearing a red shirt that’s working at the farm, leading them into the right section. “I can hear your brain sizzling from all the joy.”

“And I can hear the computers working, and it’s the most beautiful sound on Earth,” Amber gasps, mock-swooning. Baekhyun isn’t really judgmental of that; the computers do make a very distinctive, smooth sound, and he feels like he’s in a sci-fi movie. Again.

They finally stop after turning a few corners in-between flashing machines and rows of computers, and before he knows, Amber is typing something, the screen in front of her is flashing colors and numbers, and apparently everything in a server farm is a transformer, because things just seem to materialize out of walls and floors.

The Red Shirt guy goes to stand behind Baekhyun.

There’s a lot of dots on the screen in front of Amber.

“Tell them to stop downloading the logs,” Amber says. “They missed one. There’s an infected server running. Cs46.” She types something in after that. “Is the backup server running?”

“It’s not configured for auto switch,” Red Shirt says.  

Amber jumps away from the screen, head help up high, and she stares up at the shelves filled with various computers, colorful wires running up and down, and all the things Baekhyun can’t even name. Maeng hands her the laptop and she opens it up, connecting it to the one of the bigger computers.

“I need to switch the DNS,” Amber says. She sits down on the floor, putting the laptop onto her lap. She does something and the dots on the screen that used to be yellow turn green. Baekhyun peeks at her laptop screen, seeing a long sequence of numbers.

“Amber, it’s almost in the back server,” Maeng warns, staring at the main, big screen that’s still flashing dots at them.

astsu – ifconfig* - enable

“We still up?” she asks calmly.

They all look at the big screen. The green dots start flashing, and judging from Maeng’s face, they’re up.

“Yeah,” Maeng says. “We’re good.”

Amber doesn’t tell them, but when she goes to see if the hackers have left a mark or something like that, she finds something weird in the midst of all the code.

mabeob00.dat, it says.

*

They’re at the station again. Baekhyun can still hear the cops running around inside the building, trying to restore all the information that was lost (thankfully the hackers only managed to scratch the surface, didn’t even get to get as far as NIS servers, and Amber restores some respect for their security), and him and Amber are leaning over Kris’s cruiser, waiting for the Alpha to come out of the station.

“Red or blue fish? I’ve seen some white ones, too,” Baekhyun says.

“I think I’ll just pick the one that looks saddest,” Amber replies. “And make it super happy. It’ll have the best house in the world.”

“A bowl, you mean.”

“Yeah, a bowl. An angular bowl.”

“There’s no such thing,” Baekhyun reminds her. “But I just googled and there are rectangular fish bowls. Did you know there’re also fish bowls called ‘barrel fish bowls’? They have round sides, but flat front and back, and they look very pretty.”

Amber opens to answer, but she sees Maeng exiting the station. He's taken off his tie and looks very relieved. He walks towards them in long strides. 

"Amber," he says, "do you want to work for us?" 

Amber gapes. "What? As a...?" 

"Cyber security specialist," Maeng replies. "Apparently, we could use some help." 

"Do I get to hack anything?" 

Maeng's lips twitch. "Maybe one day. You can start today." 

"Wait, wait," Amber says, shaking her head. "You want me to work for you? For the police? As your hacker?"

"The one we have now turns out to be not enough, so yes, I'm proposing you a job." 

"A paid job?" Amber asks, making sure. Maeng rolls his eyes.

"Yes, a paid job. Are you in or no?" 

"Of course I'm in!" Amber says, happy as ever. 

"Then get your over there," Maeng says, nodding at the station, and turns away from them, walks back to the building. Amber stares at him for a while, looks at Baekhyun, who raises a brow and shrugs, and hums.

“If I choose a blue fish, I want it to have little white little rocks in the bowl," she says. "And a pink plant."

“Sure,” Baekhyun nods. “Maybe Siwon could boost the water a little so that the fish doesn’t age? That seems to benefit him a lot.”

Amber whistles. “That’d be one happy fish.”

All my hacking knowledge comes from Mr Robot.
Kidding, I'm secretly a hacker myself. 

Mabeob means Magic in Korean.

So I really wanted to write some hacker!Amber at some point. Here it is. Sorry if it's boring. I still hope you liked it XD

Thanks for reading chocolate ice creams! Next week someone you like very much is gonna visit the pack! :D Oh, and if you're on your phone and you missed the link in the text regarding server farm, here's how a random server farm looks like (it's kinda badass, you gotta say, and it's totally not from the future):

The one Amber and the rest went to was a little bit less advanced, though XD