Master PC: Glitch

Martins life was a good one. After getting out of college with a degree in computing, he worked for a small name tech company for a few years. During that time he decided that the corporate world was too fast paced for him. He packed up his bags and left for a slower life in the small town of Rust Falls: pop: 20,233. Named so for the large deposit of iron that rusted over in the summer and fall the river flowed through. The rust layer was later washed away by the spring melt and gave the river that flowed through town a nice pumpkin orange color for a part of the year. He bought a small building just off the main drag of town that he turned into a computer repair center, something this small town desperately needed. It wasn't needed enough for him to live anywhere other than the small apartment just above the shop but, needed nonetheless. At the age of 25, Martin dates a waitress by the name of Melanie regularly.

It was another quiet day at the repair shop. Most people who came in just needed a short lesson on how to use their machine better or had some small operator error problem. Some came in with an actual problem that could be solved with an update or a reinstall of drivers. Very few ever came by with a real problem, Those who did were usually high school students that hadn't verified whether a site was free of malware or not. For them, Martin cleaned up their computer for them and told them to be more careful and install anti-virus.

Martin was just about to close up shop when the phone rang.

"Binary Repairs, How may I help you?"

"Martin, it's Janet. We have a laptop that was found on a John Doe that someone tried to smash with a rock. We have very few leads and were wondering if you could give us a hand. We will give you double the standard rate for the late call." Janet was one the local police. They called from time to time for help as Rust Falls wasn't large enough to support a permanent cyber branch. Most of the time they turned to Martin instead of having to send everything to the nearest branch which is six hours away by car.

"Alright, I will have look and tell you if I can help. Just knock when you get here."

"Thanks. ETA: fifteen min."

They both hang up. Martin sighs and puts on a pot of coffee in preparation for a long night. About fifteen minutes later Martin hears a knock on the door. He gets up to let Janet in. She walks in wearing her short sleeve uniform with the laptop in question under one arm.

"Thanks again for doing this. I don't know what we would do without you." she says as she places the laptop on the repair counter.

"No worries. Cup of coffee before going back out?" I say gesturing at the fresh pot. She eyes the coffee pot with longing.

"I am tempted but when people die other people get scared. I need to get back to it."

"I will call you tomorrow if I find anything." I say as she heads out the door, "Be safe out there."

She turns back with a small smile before walking back out into the night. Martin pours himself a strong cup of coffee and looks at the broken laptop. Whoever smashed it didn't have a clue where the hard drive was, the only thing really smashed was the screen. Martin pulled out the slightly dented hard drive and plugged it into a port on his debugging rig. After a few moments his rig recognized the new drive and started trying to read data off of it as evidenced by a low whirring noise coming from the dive. 'At least I don't have to muck around with binary data' Martin mused. Before anything could be read however, an error message popped up.

"Drive MPC:// locked. Please enter password."

'Well that's odd. most people don't know how to rename a whole drive or have a reason to, and who locks a whole drive?' martin wondered. He made a copy of the disk image just in case he screws up and started a simple password cracker on the drive.