Hackers and a Vault

     We arrived at our location in Chicago on August 3rd. It was an older looking bank, possibly abandoned, and looked like something was wrong. It felt like all of the rituals we had bee taught for our entry wouldn't be needed. This place was dead. We checked the front door, and found it held shut with a chain and a lock. I suggested we cut the lock and go in anyway, but Silas had a smoother suggestion: check the back door. I was beginning to like Silas. We walked around back, and found a door painted black, even over the glass. The shadow from the building's dome hung over us both, as we pushed the door in. It was a very small room. You could tell it was longer, but a makeshift wall had been erected out of scavenged 2x4's and chain-link fence. There was a button on the wall with a sign that read "Push with the sequence". We had been told what to do, it was a math nerd thing. We had to tap it in a certain order, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and then we waited as some sounds buzzed in the distance. we waited another three minutes before hearing an uncomfortably high and childish voice ask, "Are you still there?" We answered yes, and the wall hinged forward allowing us into the building. It was incredibly uncomfortable. These people were hackers, a bunch of nerds who all collaborated on crazy computer jobs, and loved a good challenge.
     We were greeted by a woman, let's call her Liza, who acted as sortof a nest mother for the lot of them. If the hackers were the lost boys, she was Peter Pan. She walked us through an old bank building, jumbled with Ethernet cables across the floor. They had kept the old cubicles and desks, but piled them high with computer towers and monitors. It seemed like most of them had their own workstation, or desk, or lounge chair and laptop. I feel like I'm describing these people poorly to you. They were all well-dressed, very comfortably, most of them seemed in pretty good shape, and well groomed to boot, but there was an air of... nerdiness, I guess. It's a bit hard to describe, subtle things, Super Mario paperweights, even though they didn't have papers, tetris blocks painted on the brick wall, the way cables hung from the ceiling, in an almost careless manner, you could just tell that this was a nerd's domain. Even Liza seemed a bit nerdy, although not as much as most of the others, just comfortable, you could see the rim of her contacts, and the Katamari charm on her bracelet ( I asked, she told me).
     After several introductions to her members, she told us what we were here for: The Vault. See, they built their hacker den in an old bank for two reasons; firstly, the ban had been abandoned for years, so it was for sale at dirt cheap, and secondly, the vault was a perfect place to stash their servers. They had to re-build a bunch of the hardware in the place, but after some tinkering, the entire vault was climate controlled, and completely impenetrable. As long as their software security was solid (and oh my god, was it ever) there was almost no way to get at all of their data. What Liza told me was that the flash drive had transmitted terabytes of data over a secure wireless network, like the 3g in my phone, and they had been securely stored in the bank vault. It took a long time for her to explain it to me, her bobbing back and forth between normal speech and techno-lingo, then back to normal speech so that I could understand what all she meant. But two cups of coffee and one very bad drawing later, I finally got it. Silas made sense of it way before me, and tried to help, but he was a bit sarcastic about it.