Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 21

  Kings Gorge Dam, Colorado

  October 26, 2121

  2200 hours

  Liam Winger figured his bot army could breach the Cyber Fence around the Discharge Control System in another hour. The Normals were good but not that good. His bots had the right config. The fortress walls were strong but not impregnable. It was just a matter of time.

  He drifted up to examine their work. The Cyber Fence had already been breached in dozens of places. The underlying structure was exposed. Now, his bots were busily disassembling the remnants of the Fence, pulling apart the packets, burrowing into the core of the barrier. Inside, the memory arrays and control algorithms of the Kings Gorge dam gates and valves would he stacked like ripe fruit, ready for the picking.

  Liam found his new arrangement as a swarm entity more and more to his liking. Getting to this point had been hard, hell it had been a pain in the ass. But the end state of assimilation was like a dream come true. You could go anywhere, be anything, just by changing configurations. You could be invisible or not. You could drift like dust, sting like a bee and a few moments later, sit down a café and have an aperitif with good friends.

  No doubt about it…being an angel was the future and Liam was almost giddy with the possibilities. Sure, there was the Central Entity and the mother swarm. Always looking out for you, like any good Mom. And there was talk of what was to come…how the Old Ones would arrive decades from now and absorb everything into the mother swarm. But that was decades away. Now, it was party time and Liam Winger intended to make up for lost time.

  He wondered what was going on inside the Kings Gorge control center. Liam had no way of knowing just what kind of chaos had erupted when the on-duty operators realized the system was under full-scale assault. He had a mission to complete. Symborg had given him the mission and promised great things if he completed it. Liam had never been one to duck responsibility. No less a troglodyte than his own Dad, General John Winger, had often remarked that ‘you could always count on Liam…give him a job and he’ll bite anyone who gets in the way of doing it.”

  Maybe it was something in the blood.

  Just beyond Node 3C557 in server rack 4B, where Liam and his bot army were hard at work breaching Cyber Fence, the Kings Gorge control center was in an uproar. Three operators were in a state of panic as they realized someone, some thing, was chewing away at their defenses and if they didn’t regain control of the valves inside the diversion tunnels soon, the full impact of the Kings River would come slamming through the tunnels and spillways and likely drown thousands of acres of land downstream in a matter of minutes.

  Danielson, shift supervisor, was frantically cycling the valve switches on his control board, scanning the displays left and right for any indication the huge valves hundreds of meters away were responding.

  “No dice, Kenny,” said Sykes, 3rd shift tech, a few feet away. “Penstocks are jammed. Intakes are wide open and we got us a boney fide disaster in the makin’. I got nothing.”

  Danielson felt his heart pounding in his chest like a pneumatic hammer. Why did this crap always have to happen on his shift? And he was up for a merit raise in a month anyway; now you could kiss that goodbye. No swing set for the kids; no new engine for the truck. “I’m trying everything I can. Emergency protocol 2 says this should work…cycle Bank A and switch to Bus B…it’s clear as day and I’m doin’ it but nothing’s happening. Lonny, you got anything else on that bug?”

  Lonny Bierman was the other Tech 2 on duty tonight. It was Lonny who had seen the scan alarm from Cyber Fence…the anti-virus system had flagged some suspicious files being downloaded in Server Rack 4 a few minutes before and shortly after that, the whole network had gone haywire. Something had gotten past the Fence and was multiplying like crazy, overwriting critical algorithms, making hash out of control instructions and main memory, bollixing up the gates and valves up and down the diversion tunnels. For a few moments, Danielson and Bierman were certain a ghost had gotten into their network: Plug Valve Banks A and B wide open…that hadn’t happened in twenty years; Emergency Override Circuits A and B offline; Spillway Monitors and Sensor Banks offline; pumps everywhere going red then flat-lining. It was like someone had just yanked the plug on the whole dam discharge control system.

  This can’t be happening, Danielson told himself, over and over again. But his displays said otherwise.

  The magnitude of the impending disaster could not be understated. Sluices were cycling open. Valves were failing. Emergency alarms and fail-safe systems were being defeated. Already catastrophic levels of water were cascading through the diversion tunnels and spillways of the dam and rushing in a roaring crescendo downstream, trapping and imperiling hundreds of thousands of people in southern Colorado, northern New Mexico and eastern Utah.

  And nothing the 3rd shift operators did had any effect. Something beyond their understanding had seized control of the dam’s operating systems and was now running the show. Danielson rubbed his hands raw, flinging them at one bank of controls after another, eventually pressing buttons just to make something happen. Bierman and Sykes were equally frustrated, sliding on their castered chairs back and forth from one panel to another.

  Danielson watched the water pressure rising steadily in the diversion tunnels with a growing sense of dread. Finally, the decision was unavoidable.

  “Better get the Governor’s office on the line, boys. We can’t stop this now. It’s gone too far, all the way to Level 1.”

  Sykes made the call.

  Solnet Special Report

  Breaking News…Kings Gorge Dam Disaster…Breaking News

  “This is Ellen Wong, reporting from outside the Kings Gorge Dam in southern Colorado. It’s a beautiful late October day here in the southern Rockies, but a major disaster is now in the making. Solnet Special Report has just learned that the Kings Gorge Dam, which you see behind me…” (“drone cam altitude two hundred meters, wide angle, establishing shot and be sure to get the water coming out of the spillways…that’ll attract some eyeballs….”) has suffered a catastrophic failure in its control system and water is being released uncontrollably through the dam as a result. You can see the huge volumes of water coming through the spillways and tunnels now…unofficially, we’re hearing from background sources that some kind of computer bug has infected the dam’s control systems and that operators can’t close any of the valves and gates…the entire flow of the Kings River impoundment is now coming through the dam.”

  “Special Report has managed to snag one of the Kings Gorge senior engineers…David Jung is his name…Mr. Jung, could we have a few moments with you?—to give us a rundown on what’s happened and what engineers and operators are trying to do. Mr. Jung, thanks from stopping by—“

  Jung is a hefty, sandy-haired man, with the build of a one-time fullback now inexorably turning soft. He constantly shoves an errant lock of hair out of his eyes. The wind is gusting hard along the catwalk above the coffer dam pools just upstream of the dam itself. The water below them is fuming, hissing and steaming in the pressure drop as the impoundment churns a hundred meters below them.

  “My pleasure, Ms. Wong…I wish the circumstances were better.”

  Wong presses a button on her wristpad, directing the dronecam to come in tight on Jung’s face. The ornithopter chitters down from altitude, hovering like an enlarged gnat two meters over Jung’s head. He flinches involuntarily, but recovers his composure.

  “Mr. Jung, what exactly is happening here at Kings Gorge?”

  Jung pushes back the lock of hair. “Two hours ago, a particularly malicious computer bug began infecting our control systems. Somehow, the virus bypassed all our security and defensive measures and caused damage to our valve controls inside the spillways and diversion tunnels. The result of that damage is that the valves have come open and millions of liters of water have come through uncontrolled. We’re working hard to regain
control of our systems but unfortunately, the initial damage has already occurred.”

  “Solnet understands that the Governor’s office has been notified…is that correct?”

  “That is correct…it’s normal practice in an emergency such as this. Also, the National Guard and other emergency responders have been notified. There may be isolated settlements or towns downstream affected by the floodwaters where rescues and the like have to be done. We’re trying to be cautious and conservative about all this.”

  Ellen Wong took a quick peek at the display on her wristpad and used her thumb to tweak the dronecam’s position, capturing more of Jung’s harried face. Wong thought she saw some kind of tic at the corners of Jung’s mouth. Maybe I imagined it, she told herself. Still, it made for dramatic vid.

  “What about this computer bug? Have you encountered anything like this before?”

  Jung’s face darkened. “Not like this. Of course, our systems are probed all the time and hackers are an ever-present threat. But Kings Gorge has a pretty robust security screen, the latest in firewalls and barriers. Plus we’ve been working with Cyber Corps on a new fence around our most critical systems.”

  “Yet you were still hacked.”

  “We were and by a particularly aggressive form of bug. This virus…we’re not sure if it’s actually a virus, or a Trojan or what exactly, but it replicated fast once it was inside…seems to have entered through one of our sensor monitoring channels…we may have an unknown vulnerability in some of our sensor software. Our engineers and techs are looking into that now. And Cyber Corps is working with us, as we speak, to patch around the vulnerability and get those valves closed. By the way, we also have a tiger team inside both diversion tunnels right now, working on cycling the big valves shut manually. Because of the force of the water in those tunnels, shutting the valves is an involved, somewhat ticklish process.”

  Wong nodded. “I can imagine. Do your engineers have any concerns that this virus is related to what we’re seeing around Solnet worldwide? Part of the same global infestation, the same phenomenon?”

  Jung chose his words carefully. “While I can’t comment on the details of an ongoing investigation, our Chief of Security has authorized me to say this: the insertion of this bug into the Kings Gorge control system network is a criminal act of the most despicable kind. With the help of forensics experts at Cyber Corps, we will track down whoever did this and bring them to justice, you may be assured of that. My personal opinion is that the hacker or hackers are opportunistic thugs who are taking advantage of the problems Solnet is having around the world to try some copycat hacks and see what damage and chaos they can create.” Jung’s mouth tightened to a thin line. “We will not rest until these criminals are brought to justice and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

  Wong had one question more to ask. “Mr. Jung, of course we share your sentiments about all this but what if the attackers are part of this same global threat, this so-called MARTOP pandemic that’s made such a mess of the Net?. There are some who even theorize that the Net is somehow waking up, that some kind of sentience is growing inside the Net and events like this are evidence of this sentience flexing its muscles, sort of like a six-month old baby kicking over a lamp. How do you respond to that?”

  Jung shrugged. “Our own security people don’t put a lot of stock in those theories. We intend to go where the evidence leads us. That’s all any investigator can do. My own opinion is this: if there is any truth to these theories…and I’ve heard them too…then valve failures at Kings Gorge Dam will be the least of our problems.”

  “Mr. Jung, thank you for stopping by and speaking with us here at Special Report.”

  “My pleasure, Ellen.”

  Solnet Special Report Ends