Viral Spark

by Martin McConnell

  “They found me and Amanda pretty quick.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something happened upstairs. I didn’t have time to tell you. There was a confrontation with her ex, and they showed up before even we knew what happened.”

  “Tell me the story later. The point is that these glitches have been intensifying for too long. When a jet running under government control crashed this morning, the military officially got involved, and they probably already had some teams looking into the matter. They are sending task forces to large corporations that deal with programming and security. They want the problem fixed, now. I guess you haven’t dealt with them before, but when they want something done, you drop what you’re doing, and do whatever they say.”

  “Okay?”

  “Is that good enough? Is it clear enough? I don’t really have time to explain all the details to you, but that guy standing behind you? He doesn’t have the patience to just stand there while we discuss it.”

  “Okay, I got it. What do you need from me?”

  “Please tell me that those hashes you were looking at are on your personal account, and not the company drive for the market.”

  “I saved them, so I can work from home.”

  “Good. Take a seat.”

  A couple empty chairs are scattered about the office. I grab one, and slide it next to his.

  “Pull up those hashes, and copy every repeating stream that you can find into a file. Make a composite list.”

  “So we can trace it to a source?”

  “Exactly. If we know what it’s broadcasting, then we can narrow the list of computers that it’s using to spread, and maybe find the source program. Then we can shut it down. Do you have the analyzer?”

  “Scott has it.”

  “Okay, I’ll get it. Make that list, and be quick.”

  He rushes out of the office, and I’m left staring at a blank wall. I activate my console, and scroll through the files I saved. To my surprise, I can still access my workbench, too. Paul must not have taken me out of the system yet, and the experiment is still running.

  What seemed so clear earlier becomes riddled with mystery and distraction. The hashes look like slop. I wonder if Bee has evolved, knowing that she’s being hunted, or if there’s something wrong with my head.

  I highlight the bit of code referring to the router access, and search it in the stream. Several instances are immediately highlighted. My head is the part of the equation that isn’t working. The data is there, I’m just having trouble seeing it.

  Instead of fighting against myself, I start a compiler program, and begin coding a new search algorithm. I can feed the raw data in, and it will spit out Tom’s list. Sometimes it’s easier to write the program than it is to do everything by hand.

  The walls hum a symphony. Beethoven, I think. As crazy as it feels, I can sense Bee in the room with me. She’s watching my every move. According to Tom’s sonar theory, she’s watching everything everywhere. I type faster, and then get stuck on the length of the hashes I should be looking for.

  Tom enters with the tablet. “That damn virus is fixated on you. No wonder they’ve been asking questions.”

  “Who?”

  He finds his chair and looks over my display. “What’s that you’re working on?”

  “Trying the automate this pattern searching thing. My mind isn’t up to sifting hashes through this mass of crap.”

  “Not that,” he reaches over, and opens another program that has appeared in the background. “This.”

  My eyes widen, and I lean back in the chair, dumbfounded. The code on the screen in front of me looks identical to the neuron code I pictured in my head, but the labels aren’t defined as neuron, fire, and potential. The variable names have been replaced with strange character strings.

  “What is this?” asks Tom.

  “Something stupid I was working on. I must have opened it by accident.” I click back to my present project and push forward. I spot a way to make hash length irrelevant. I can set a minimum and maximum string length to search. I set the minimum to six characters, and the max to evolve when enough matching instances are located.

  “My experiment at the maintenance shack is still running,” I say. “Paul hasn’t updated my access permissions yet. I can stream directly from there into this program, and it should spit out a list pretty quickly.”

  “How quickly?”

  I look away from the screen, and smile at him. He immediately projects a call on the wall. Paul’s face appears, and Tom blasts an order at him. “Do not take Robert off of your system files. We need access to his work bench to finish an experiment. And don’t touch anything at his station.”

  “And stay away from my torque driver,” I add.

  The screen closes, and Tom stares my compiling program. “You’re on.”

  I look back at the display. The program is finished and ready to run. I set the inputs and start it up. A separate file is created, and it fills with repetitive code. I save the other code snippets in a dark corner of my profile to examine later, while wondering where they came from. The lights flicker as it closes, and the music grows louder, then stops, and transfers to the speakers of the tablet, which is now laying on the desk in front of Tom.

  “What did you mean about someone asking questions about me?”

  “The military is running their own investigation, but their methods involve tracking people more than code. Speaking of which. We have a meeting in a couple of minutes.”

  He glances at the stream of incoming data. “We need something we can use as a signature for the virus. Something they can search for.”

  “This is the signature.”

  “But there’s no way to trace it back to a source.”

  “The airwaves are flooded with the signal. A lot of these codes are similar. They––”

  I hesitate for a moment, considering the nature of the hashes. “The signals are multiplying. It’s sending out the code in packets. Open a portal to a Wi-Fi device, and then give it a code fragment to repeat, which hunts for other devices.” My eyes squeeze shut, and I pinch my nose.

  I scan over the code bits in my mind again, picturing the world the way that Bee might see it. Wi-Fi routers and other devices are individual nodes. They’re everywhere, linked together in a complex web of transmitted and received signals. She’s managed to flood those pipelines with her voice, without physically installing any programs onto the gadgets themselves.

  Through the matrix of interlinked devices present in the mind’s eye, something else appears, as if out of nowhere. I see another code snippet.

  The top of the function reads LinkFire, and the code itself is a simple loop that runs quickly, sending an array of hashes out to all the surrounding nodes. The source code then listens for a return signal.

  My eyes open. “I got it.”

  “You what?”

  “I think I got it.” I grab the display on the wall and drag it to the edge of the desk, then slide it toward myself. I open a keyboard and look at the diagnostic data coming from my test robot core.

  “The only way to transmit data bursts from one cell to the next is for each burst to carry the necessary code to fire again. The signal flares out, not just one chunk of code, but a whole series of instructions, which beget other instructions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I look over a longer time line of the data transmitted from the bot. “We can’t find it by tracing back, but we can see where it’s going by tracing forward.”

  “I don’t think that helps,” says Tom.

  Thinking is the enemy. I continue punching out the data, until a stream appears, much like the real-time graph on his analyzer. The data looks fussy, showing a large spectrum of ones and zeros on a graph. I zoom out a bit, then a little further. The fuzzy line closes together into a blob, and as I continue to zoom out, I see it. A break where the signal goes flat for a moment.

  “That’s it.”


  “That’s what?”

  “The virus isn’t sending little bits of hash code. It’s sending an entire program that can be run by the next device without actually being installed. It finds its way into the circuitry, and tells the device to resend the program code. Over time, the entry addresses change, and the code adapts by itself, but it doesn’t leave anything in the actual device memory.”

  “You’re making my head hurt.”

  “Hey, my headache started this morning. I don’t want to hear it.” I drag a box around and entire section of transmission between two breaks, and print the output to a file. The result is a series of pre-compiled code. “There’s your signature, and it modifies itself every time it transmits, but most of the essential elements are the same. If we can figure out how it’s evolving, then we should be able to trace it back to the source, by searching for the previous iterations. I couldn’t see it by searching the actual values because the program changes every time it’s sent out. It’s a gigantic evolving packet.”

  “And I’m assuming you know how to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “How to do––the whole evolution thing, and knowing what the previous iteration looks like.”

  I look to my right, and Tom’s cheek is resting on an open palm. His eyes are glazed over, and slightly crossed. He has no idea what I’m talking about.

  “I don’t know exactly, but I can reverse engineer this code fragment. It should have everything that we need included. From there we can figure out how it mutates, hopefully, and run it backwards to figure out where the signal came from. Unfortunately, that might mean scanning every device within Wi-Fi range of the previous one, which will could take a long time.”

  “We’re out of time,” booms a voice from the door. Tom and I lean back in our chairs simultaneously and look left to see Mr. Jackson, the general manager, standing in the door.

  Tom asks, “What’s going on, boss?”

  “It’s time.”

  TWENTY

  Several people are gathered in the conference room where I filled out my paperwork. The back wall, behind Mr. Jackson’s seat, is lined with three soldiers in their black combat uniforms on the left, and another man on the right, who appears old for a soldier. He is wearing a loose fitting, buttoned black shirt with a small, brass plaque adorning one of his front pockets. His collars are spotted with gold stars.

  I find a spot beside Tom, wondering if I should even be in the room. I’m still wearing a smock, and everyone around me is in fancy clothes that didn’t come from a wall printer.

  “Is that everyone?” asks the older man.

  “Yeah, that should be it,” replies Mr. Jackson, still scanning over something on the desk. He rolls his chair out of the way to the left, and stands up.

  “Everyone. Sorry to break you out of your routine, but as you well know by now, we aren’t the only ones having virus troubles.” He turns to the man on the right. “You want to play the tape?”

  The man nods, and an ocean background appears on the wall behind him, with a spot of black floating near the division between sea and sky, growing larger, and moving very slowly from the horizon toward the bottom of the screen. Green text covers the right and left edges, and some kind of target is overlaid on the center, also in green. Most of the text is numbers that don’t make any sense.

  “This morning,” continues Mr. Jackson, “something unprecedented in modern times happened. A military aircraft was compromised, and crashed into an aircraft carrier.”

  The dot in the picture becomes a rough diamond shape, then a long boat with a tower on one side.

  “The incident didn’t result in loss of life, but the damage to the craft was irreparable. The ship is still on guard this morning, and repairs are underway.”

  The ship grows larger and larger. The green numbers on the display begin to flicker and blur, and as the runway approaches, the screen turns sideways, and runs straight toward the end of the carrier before flickering to black.

  “As you can see,” says Mr. Jackson, “Not something that we want happening to our aircraft, or the rest of our military vehicles. The government has reached out to us to help figure out where the virus is broadcasting from, and what we can do about it. We’re one of the largest tech companies in the world, with a permanent presence on six continents. Some of you have been flown here today because of your history of coding and design expertise. Some of you are new to the company, but hold a unique connection with these problems.”

  His eyes stop on me for a moment, before continuing their drift from one person to the next. “All of you are here for a reason, and your purpose is simple. The complete elimination of this electronic threat before it causes any more serious disruptions to the network, military or otherwise.”

  Another video appears on the screen. It’s a hallway, and the camera pans between several soldiers. There’s a door on the right, just in view. The first person camera view catches a glimpse of black gauntlets holding a rifle.

  The man in black with the stars on his collar takes over the discussion. “Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Colonel Vall. A few hours ago we launched a raid on the apartment of a man believed to be either directly or indirectly responsible for creating the virus. A certain Dr. Waite.”

  Tom gasps. In the video, one man standing directly alongside the door waves his hand toward it.

  “We’ve been monitoring all communications from his apartment and lab for key search terms, to find all of the perpetrators involved.”

  The door slides open, revealing a dark room, and something black zooms across the display. The camera turns away, and a white light flashes on the screen. The camera pans back as soldiers rush inside, rifles drawn.

  “Dr. Waite sent a private message to a group of neurologists early this morning, mentioning some kind of experiment, and its failure. The data stream coming from his apartment showed a high amount of strange activity, and I sent a squad to investigate.”

  The camera man draws the rifle into view, and aims into the strobing apartment, at an old man slumped in a chair. He’s familiar, as if I’ve seen him before. As one of the soldiers pokes him with their rifle, it hits me. It’s the same man from my daydream earlier.

  “When the squad arrived, Dr. Waite appeared to have already committed suicide by ingesting poison. Toxicology revealed high levels of alcohol in his system, but not enough to kill him. The complete autopsy and tests are still ongoing.”

  The doctor’s body slumps on to the floor with more prodding, and the soldiers in the footage appear to relax, even to the point of horseplay, tossing small items at each other. Then they become irate. It’s very different from how I’ve seen agents act in person, and even the black suits standing along the wall like drones. It’s hard to believe that they could ever act in any human fashion, especially the recklessness that follows on the footage. Shoving, yelling, and even aiming their rifles at each other.

  Whoever is holding the camera rushes to the center of the room past them, and begins searching something on a private console. One of the others hands him a tiny white object, and Dr. Waite’s personal data appears on the screen.

  “Something happens right here,” comments the colonel. “And please understand that everything you are seeing is of a sensitive nature, and not to be discussed outside of this room.”

  The camera pans recklessly, followed by orange flashes and blood.

  “The assault team lost it, and only one of them made it out alive. This is not something that happens to units under my command.”

  The camera view turns into the hallway and races toward a lift at the end of it.

  “Data from the suit sensors shows several disturbing anomalies. Servo malfunctions, communication disruptions, and most importantly, medical anomalies in the troops.”

  The camera zooms into the lift as black holes appear all around it. It turns again to the hallway, the bearer’s weapon drawn. The person with the camera takes aim at another soldier on the team,
standing by Dr. Waite’s door. The lift doors close, and the feed goes black.

  “Heart rate to catastrophic levels, blood pressure high enough to burst capillaries all over the body, nervous system and liver failure, and EEG off the map. We studied the signals in the room, both sound and electromagnetic. Dr. Waite had several dangerous toys in his apartment. We’re now pulling all the data from his file to find the physical location where the virus code is hiding, but the results so far are inconclusive. Of the men he contacted with his message this morning, half of them are suicides, and we took the others into custody.”

  “So you are already on top of this.” interrupts the GM.

  “We thought. The prisoners have given us all of their information, including program code from earlier versions, but they failed to tell us how Dr. Waite may have uploaded the code. This apparently started as some kind of game to study artificial intelligence through neural network experiments. It looks like he secretly distributed the code to the network outside of his personal profile. We’re scanning his hospital connections, but there are a lot of them, some with government clearances.”

  “How can we help, Colonel?”

  Without interrupting his steady gaze on the room, he continues. “We are pulling all possible assets to eliminate this problem quickly. As the virus is causing this company, and others, a lot of problems, we’ll use your help to track and eliminate it. I expect everyone in this room to be on a transport in half an hour, and we’ll move you to a secure location to work on the problem until it’s resolved.”

  “Half an hour?” The words slip out without consideration, and everyone in the room is now staring at me. “Sorry.”

  My heart picks up speed. I didn’t sign up for this.

  “Let’s not make any mistake,” continues the colonel. “You are all now officially recruited for this assignment. You don’t have a choice in the matter, and I can’t have you running around talking to anyone about the project until it’s all over. You’ll receive another briefing when we arrive at the compound. That’s it.”