T3rm1n4l C0d3 was browsing the dark net, looking for ideas to jumpstart his creative process. He was white hat hacker and was hired to test a program for security issues and to patch them up if he found any. And he found quite a few. Now he was looking around to see if there was already someone who already has the code he needed to fix some of the issues, so he didn’t have to write it all from scratch. That is when he found himself somewhere new, a place that wasn’t there a few days ago when he was exploring the dark net, a place he had to work hard to get to.

Welcome to the Well of Wisdom.

What kind of wisdom are you looking for?

The place didn’t look like much, but it peaked his interest because of the level of security needed to enter it. Maybe the people behind it could have what he was looking for. He started typing an answer to the question.

-I need to fic the security holes in a program.-

He didn’t write he needed the code for the fixes or what fixes needed to be made and maybe because of that, the next moment on the screen appeared a request for a file attachment. To help him out, the Well of Wisdom first needed to examine the program. T3rm1n4l C0d3 attached an archived file with the program and all its files and clicked upload, then he waited, expecting to hear from the mysterious people behind the Well of Wisdom after hours or maybe day. That is how long he expected to take for them to review the code and provide the needed fixes. That is why he was surprised when 10 minutes later he received a message with a file attachment named ‘Fixes’.

The white hat downloaded the file a little suspiciously. He isolated it to a clean computer and then ran every scan for malicious code he had, then looked at the code itself. It took him hours to trace and compare every line of code with the one he had sent and with a surprise found every place he had marked as needing repairs, fixed. There were even a few places he had missed, but would lead to problems down the road. He opened a text file attachment explaining all the errors and weak spots that were fixed, how and why they were fixed that way.

For the next two days the white hacker tested the program, trying to find any vulnerabilities or back doors that could still exist, but once it was compiled and started running, it was tighter than anything he had ever seen. Was the code perfected to such a degree? It was true he wasn’t the best hacker in the world, but he was pretty sure there were no more vulnerabilities in the code that could be exploited. The only way someone was hacking the program was with social engineering or stealing the login credentials of the user from somewhere else. T3rm1n4l C0d3 wasn’t planning to turn lazy, but from then on when he had trouble finding a solution to a problem, he visited the Well of Wisdom for help.

The white hacker wasn’t the only one who found the strange new place hidden in the dark net. Hundreds more were able to pass through the security measures and enter, but not all of them were law abiding citizens.

Someone asked how to build or buy a bomb and after the Well of Wisdom confirmed he was seriously asking and not just testing or joking, they tracked him down, searched his computer for incriminating evidence and send the logs and the evidence to the local police. The next day the arrest of a domestic terrorist was on the news.

Another asked about a recipe for drugs, but instead of throwing him to the police, the Well of Wisdom send him ways to refine legal hallucinogenic plants and extract their active chemicals and how to mix and control their effect on the body. If they weren’t illegal there was no harm in teaching their use.

Soon people who learned from others how to access the Well of Wisdom from someone else started visiting and throwing their own questions. Help with the design of a new building at a problematic place, security weak points at certain places, which was answered, but the answer was also sent to the place which security was inspected, one chess grandmaster even used it to play games of chess by sending moves in the chat window. He lost every single game. The real truth about the place was implied, when a mathematician asked the Well of Wisdom to calculate one of the Millennium Prize Problems as a joke. 24 hours later the answer was returned with hundreds of pages with explanations about the process, logic and reasons for some of the math. The mathematician spent weeks verifying the results, even putting a request to use a supercomputer to check the data. When everything returned confirmed he was left speechless. The one on the other side was either unparalleled math genius, had the most powerful quantum or supercomputer on the planet or was the first digital super intelligence in the world. Either way, he was going to use it to solve some of the hardest math problems in history.