Author E.C. Myers on Going Dark to Research Cyber Thriller Silence of Six

Research is a vital part of my process, whether it’s a science fiction story set on another planet or something a little closer to reality. For The Silence of Six, I wanted to try to see situations the way a hacker might, and I needed to be comfortable enough with the technology and terminology to write about it faithfully and “fluently” without seeming like I was trying to teach people something. (Yuck!)
Before I began writing the SØS series, I honestly didn’t give much thought to computer security and online privacy. I thought I had secure passwords (I didn’t), and while I had the good sense not to share too much personal information online, any information might already be too much. But as I began reading about computers, hacking, phishing, social media, surveillance, and politics, I felt like I was waking up and finally seeing the truth about the world—just like pretty much every young adult novel protagonist ever.
It wasn’t long before I was changing all my passwords, placing electrical tape over my laptop webcams, and scrutinizing my social media practices. I warned my wife to make sure she heard the car doors lock when she pressed the button on the key fob, because criminals could jam or spoof the signal and get into vehicles easily after you walk away. I advised her to cover her webcams too. (She did.) I studied all the potential security weaknesses at my workplace that could be exploited by social engineers, and I began telling my friends and coworkers not to post pictures of their ID badges or walk around in public with their work IDs visible just in case someone wanted to forge one.

One day when I was writing The Silence of Six, in a coffee shop like your stereotypical author, a stranger at a nearby table asked me if I worked in InfoSec. Surprised, I said no and asked him why he thought I did. He was an information security consultant, and he didn’t usually see other people with their webcams covered. He had taped over his webcam, too, and I knew he was legit because he took his laptop with him when he went to the bathroom.
You might think all of this is a bit paranoid, and it definitely is, but a little awareness goes a long way toward protecting yourself. And frankly, most people don’t think about this stuff nearly as much as they should. I could still be doing a lot more.
The daily news headlines were both an inspiration and a frustration, especially when they seemed to be stealing my plot points, such as the revelation that Facebook was running experiments to influence its users’ emotions. Fortunately The Silence of Six was on a fast development track! I originally imagined it as a near-future, cautionary story, but it ended up being much more contemporary than I like. And although I didn’t intend to lecture readers about examining their own behavior, I’ve heard from plenty of people that the book frightened them—and then I tell them that I’m glad, because everything in it is all too real. That makes them even more paranoid!

Readers often ask me if I’m a hacker. Of course I’m nowhere close to having those kinds of skills, but I did try many of the techniques I wrote about: trying to hack into my wife’s Macbook, accessing the configuration settings of my coffee shop’s wireless router, loading up a TOR browser on my computer, learning how to set up public key encryption. I Googled “how to hack a car” and “how to avoid surveillance cameras” and way too much about Silk Road and the dark web—assuring my place in the NSA’s database.
Astute readers may notice several references to George Orwell’s classic science fiction novel 1984 in The Silence of Six series. It was only natural that I had it on my mind while writing it; it turns out 2013 was the year we all learned Big Brother is, in fact, watching. And today many people are still contemplating the reality and implications of government conspiracies, political shenanigans, mass surveillance, and “fake news.” It seems the troubling future Orwell warned us against arrived nearly thirty years late.
What will the world look like in 2050? Perhaps the book that correctly predicts that future is being written right now, and I’d be honored if the SØS series ends up on another author’s reading list.
1985: Stories from the SOS Series hits shelves May 15, and is available for pre-order now.