Viral Spark

by Martin McConnell

  My head drifts left and right, as I inspect everything. At the end of the hallway, the soldier leading the group taps a small circle on the wall. The circle lights up, turning into an glowing orange ring. A matching inverted triangle symbol appears at the center.

  “What is this place?” My words bounce of the walls without anyone hearing them. The steel wall marking the end of the hallway opens. It’s an old-fashioned lift, and a large one at that. The soldiers shuffle us inside the steel room. Old fashioned buttons form a matrix near the entrance, and with another tap, and another glowing ring, we descend into the belly of the building.

  When the doors open, we’re led down another long corridor, past numerous offices, and finally the soldiers in front stop by a door. One of them keys in an access code, and a loud crack sounds. He pushes on some kind of lever attached to the door itself, and it swings open instead of sliding.

  The room smells like the morning after I forget to clean my tea infusers, times a hundred. The offensive odor sets the mood for the dark basement room. We funnel into the space, giving us room to breathe. Despite the open floor plan, bodies run every which way, carrying paper and tablets. Most of the creatures in the stone cave sit in front of massive glowing boxes, each has a single display facing them, or rather a box with a display on one side. They hammer away at physical keyboards, focused intently on whatever they’re staring at.

  Some are staring at larger versions of Tom’s tablet, braced upright on plastic stands for hands-free reading. A thin cloud hangs overhead, and permeates the space. Wisps of smoke shine in the light of the sparse overhead lamps. Even the lights are odd. Instead of flat glowing adaptive surfaces, they are constructed of plastic or metal housings with bright tubes inside.

  Another man dressed in a soldier’s uniform, sans helmet, approaches those who led us in. “Fresh meat?” he asks.

  “Yes, sir. Bunch of civies. Have fun.”

  “Gents,” his head pivots at the shoulder, ducking and turning to scan the group. “And ladies. As I’m sure you know, we’ve got a little problem we’re dealing with. You’ll call this place home until we’re done, so get comfortable. There’s cots in the back, and coffee and snacks on the wall. Follow me, and I’ll get you signed in.”

  The room is a giant rectangle, but he leads us to a small section of the back corner that is walled off from the rest. While the room itself is bordered by gray blocks, the tiny office is wrapped in pure white, like the hallways above.

  Scott is the first one in. Another soldier scans his ear with some kind of archaic device that looks like one of the police shock sticks. I half expect to see him zapped. The soldier passes the end of the stick close to his ear, and drops it to the side after it beeps.

  The soldier without a helmet speaks with him quietly for a moment, and then points into the room. Most of the others pass through, and finally I’m the next in line.

  The black rod swipes near my ear, and my implant broadcasts a soft, repetitive noise into my conscious mind. The rod beeps, the implant quiets, and he directs me into the tiny room.

  One man in a black uniform with trimmed hair and dark skin sits behind and old-fashioned wooden desk, staring at another propped up tablet.

  “Robert Graham?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “I’m Max. I’ll be your C-O while you’re here.”

  “What’s a C-O?”

  “Your commanding officer. You’ll get all of your assignments through me or one of my subordinates. If there’s a problem, then you come to me with it. Clear?”

  “Clear?”

  “Good. You’re a market employee? What the hell are you doing in my unit? I told them to send me the best. Not children.”

  “I figured out the signal codes coming from the Wi-Fi.”

  “Well hoo-rah.” He grunts and clears his throat. “I ask for coders, and they send me kids. Take the terminal all the way down on the left.” He points toward the wall behind me.

  After tapping a few buttons on the tablet, he looks up at me again. “Go on, we have work to do.”

  “What do I do when I get there?”

  “You need written instructions to walk across the room?”

  “No. Back corner. I got that. But––”

  “Then get your ass moving. We have a lot of work to do. Next.”

  I step back, and turn. Max is obviously having a bad day, but wandering through this maze of bodies is like crawling through a dungeon. I suppose I did come here to kill a monster, so it’s fitting, but I have no idea where to start. I thought I’d be writing code, not listening to grumpy soldiers.

  I stroll along the back wall, glancing at the various screens as I pass. Code on every single one is being analyzed by the warm body sitting before it. They’re like drones, or machines, hammering quietly at typewriter style keyboards that resemble the data entry pads on adaptive surfaces, but with clunky mechanical keys, filling the air with clicks.

  As I sit on the cushioned chair, it doesn’t adjust. I examine it to see what the problem is, stand up, and sit again. The cushion compresses under my butt, but the frame doesn’t reshape or flex. The back tilts slightly with pressure, but returns to its normal shape when I angle forward. I look under one of the plastic arms to see if there’s a switch or control panel of some type. Everything else here appears mechanical, so why not the chairs too?

  “They don’t move,” says Tom.

  I look at him, and sit up straight. “What do you mean they don’t move?”

  “Everything down here looks like the old junk that I used to fiddle with as a kid,” he says. “Chairs used cushions in the old days. I didn’t think any like this still existed. Now I know where stuff goes when you throw it away. The military takes it.”

  He plants himself in the seat beside me.

  “What are we supposed to be doing?” I ask.

  He stares at the screen in front of him for a moment. His fingers carefully find their place on the keypad. He moves the little oval shaped bubble beside it, and then taps the gadget a few times. “Hmm. Learn how to use outdated machines, I guess.”

  He clicks and types on the mechanical keys for a moment. “I’m supposed to be optimizing a subroutine to work faster.”

  I turn to my screen. There is a plain looking box in the middle loaded with a green typeface that’s hard to read. I swipe at the glass, but nothing moves. I try the bubble, and a tiny arrow zips across the screen. The text instructs me to try typing something on the keyboard, and then use what it calls a mouse to click a button that reads “Okay.”

  After a few minutes, I have the hang of the controls, and I’m directed to another screen. I recognize the code from school. It’s a sorting algorithm, and it asks me to optimize it for faster searching. It’s exactly like one of the tests from my programming classes. I finish the exercise quickly, and there’s another bit of code that requires a simple fix.

  I turn to Tom, “Why do they––”

  He’s tapping away, another zombie lost in the same delusion as the others, following the on-screen instructions without question. I turn back to the computer and work through the exercises.

  The more I type, the faster my fingers get. The controls are actually easier when there is a mechanical button versus a touch pad that only buzzes as you tap. Soon enough, I’m zipping away with the rest of them, another monkey pushing buttons.

  After one of the coding examples, the screen displays a new message. “Good job. Get yourself a cup of coffee and wait for further instructions.”

  You forgot a comma, dopey. This is the room that will be assigned the task of saving the world, and I start mentally nitpicking every detail that doesn’t contribute to that cause. If they had left Tom and I to finish our project, we’d probably know where Bee was by now, and what to do about her. I glance up at the miniature clouds of stringy smoke, wondering if the smell was placed intentionally as some other kind of training regimen.

  I look to Tom, who is still typing away, and my
eyes scan the room to see several others imbibing fluids at a small table. There’s no reason to resist. They’re training us to be button pushing monkeys, so I might as well play along. The pointless nature of my “training” gives Bee a chance for world domination. The best way for her to survive might be by putting her destruction in the hands of bureaucratic troops. I stand up, and navigate toward the table with the rest of the buzzing drones.

  “What are we supposed to be doing?” I ask. “They’re just going to test us to see who can optimize code the fastest?”

  “I don’t know,” says one of the men, holding a coffee cup inches from his lips. “I just know they dragged me out of my office, brought me here, and put me in front of a machine. Maybe they want us to make these trashy old computers run like something that actually works, so they’re having us rebuild the code base one nugget at a time.”

  “I think they’re just keeping us busy till they figure out what to do with us,” says another.

  After figuring out how to work the push-this-button-to-pour coffee machine, I sample the hot cup of fluid that tastes almost completely unlike anything I would actually want to drink. The bitter tones of a single sip force a defensive recoil of my tongue. As the liquid titrates into my stomach, an odd burning sensation starts. The acidic sludge transforms my gut juice into a new digestive fluid that might melt my stomach. I wonder who in their right mind would drink it without orders.

  Tom approaches the counter. “How’s the coffee?”

  “It’s miserable,” one of them says.

  “It’s pretty bad,” I say.

  “Great. Good way to get settled right in then.” He pours of cup of the vile black muck, and sucks it down. He frowns. “I’ve had worse.”

  “Where?”

  He winks at me, and walks back toward our stations. I follow, wondering if he knows more about what’s going on than he’s telling.

  The screen is displaying the same congratulatory message as before. Perhaps the coffee is some kind of trap.

  Max emerges from the back office, and I track him across the room. His hair is solid black. He has no facial hair, and he’s robotic in every movement. About halfway across the room, at the front, he meets with a handful of other soldiers who must have just walked in. He chats with them for a moment and turns to address the rest of us.

  “Ladies and gents. I hope the coffee isn’t too bad. They keep us on field ration because it’s cheap and it doesn’t let us get soft. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

  Funny, you don’t sound apologetic.

  “But this isn’t about convenience,” He continues. “You aren’t here for a holiday weekend. You’re here to find the bug, track it, and kill it.”

  A hand goes up in front of me, and the man attached to it stands up.

  “Not taking questions right now,” continues Max. “Sit down. People. I want to make one thing very clear right now. You’re going to be here for a while, so you better acclimate to the situation. Washouts will get charged with a non-conformance, and that won’t look good on your record. Especially a government non-conformance. To put it bluntly, I own your ass until this thing is done. You think you have it hard? Try watching your best friends die right in front of you. I don’t care about your complaints.

  I want to make something else clear. Restricted network access and using these ancient DCDs are requirements. The virus has the ability to utilize anything connected to Wi-Fi, or any other kind of receiver. It can crash planes, and it can hack your brain.”

  His head cocks sideways, focusing on someone in the crowd. “You think this is funny?” He turns to one of the soldiers. “What’s her name? Get her out of here.” Two of the men detach from the uniform line standing before the room, and those guns they are carrying become more than decorations. You always expect to see soldiers with guns; that’s how they look on the feeds. But seeing aggressive movement with loaded weapons is unsettling in real life.

  “What?” asks the lady standing up. Her straight blond hair waves from side to side as each troop takes an arm. They guide her toward the front of the room and out the door.

  “That’s how fast it happens,” says Max. “Are we laughing now?”

  I swallow hard, and my body turns to stone.

  “The virus is exceptional with mind hacks.” His voice raises again, as Bee chirps and bubbles in my pocket. “It can attack using subliminal sound technique, or by subtle effects on your nervous system. I’m not happy about being a test rabbit for that, but I can tell you without doubt, that it can screw you up, and it will. I’m sure you’ve heard about the fighting lately. The sudden rash of bad blood? It’s not coincidental.”

  Bee farts.

  “It happens that fast,” says Max.

  I rip the device from my smock and whisper into it. “Shut the hell up.”

  “Grab that retard,” barks Max, and the soldiers charge in my direction.

  “It’s not me, it’s this tablet,” I say, as if the mechanical monsters would care. They stop on either side of me. My shoulders drop, and I stand slowly, tablet in hand. It mimics the sounds of great timpani drums, composing its own kind of music. They grab my arms and walk me through the room.

  Max continues his speech. Tom stares straight forward, and I can’t say I blame him. Interrupting these guys in the course of their duty probably isn’t a very smart idea, as much as I could use his help. I can feel the end of my career approaching as fast as it appeared. Perhaps faster.

  “The virus has infected every device, every console, and although we have some leads for tracking it, we need to act at a distance. These terminals can remotely access other devices that have access to the network, so they can work on the virus without being attacked directly. At least we hope.”

  His voice fades as I’m escorted through the doors, down the hall, and into a bare room with a steel table and two plastic chairs. The door latches, and I examine my new home, thinking about the risks I took trying to land a better job. This bare room is my reward for trying to do a good deed. Bee continues to drum onward.

  “What are you doing, Bee?”

  Silence.

  “Go ahead,” I say. “Sing. It doesn’t matter now.”

  Vivaldi’s symphony starts.

  A large mirror runs along one side of the room. The table is bolted to the floor. Everything else is as bare and white as possible, even the overhead lighting. I have no idea how long I’ll be here, so I walk around the table and take a seat in one of the uncomfortable chairs. They’re even worse than the ones at the ancient terminals.

  I spot a single fiber of hair resting on the surface of Tom’s tablet, and as I reach for it, Bee lets out a buzzing noise that simmers to a gentle hum. The hair follicle floats a few centimeters off the screen, and the tablet speaks directly. “Robert, where are you?”

  TWENTY THREE

  “Oh, you’re talking now.”

  “Yes, yes, talking now,” says the tablet with staticky overtones.

  “Bee, how are you making that hair float?”

  The hum disappears, and the fragile tendril winds through the air, falling back on the surface.

  “Bee?”

  “They’re coming.”

  A loud clack signals the opening door. Max walks in, and I catch a glimpse of Tom in the hallway behind him before the room seals. “You’re the one. I thought I recognized your name. Is that the famous analyzer?”

  “Famous?”

  “Don’t play with me, kid.” He slides the other chair back and sits. “You’re the kid that found the signal code that led us to that cursed apartment. Thanks for giving all the intel on the mind control, dick.”

  “Cursed?”

  “What else have you found out about the virus? The guy out in the hallway seems to think that you’re the necessary link in this process. I want you to tell me everything you know. Right now.”

  I lay out the whole story, from misbehaving robots to the scan codes that I found. Bee sits eerily silent, and I w
onder how much she’s picking up. I leave out the parts about the daydreams, or Bee suddenly learning to speak.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you.”

  “Nope,” says Max. “There’s something sinister about this bug. That kind of malice can only come from something that thinks.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You get me those codes, and find a way to scan the network for them. I’m breaking the group into teams. What do you need? A couple programmers? Or can you do it all yourself?”

  “Find the virus? At this point we need a miracle. I might be able to trace the data back, but I still need to figure out how the program is morphing over time. Then we need to scan each device, figure out what other machines are feeding it, and scan those. I imagine the closer we get to the source, the more webbed the signal will be.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I told you. It uses an evolving set of hashes to deliver the code across the network. The transmissions closest to the source will all be finding each other. It’s like, the main program sends a signal to, let’s say five routers. Each of those routers broadcasts an almost identical signal, to each other, back to the source machine, and wherever else they can reach on the network. The flow of information goes every direction, so the closer you get, the denser the pattern gets. The source machine might not be recognizable.”

  “Then we’ll shut down everything around it too.”

  “I’m not sure how long that list will be.”

  “You need to narrow it down for me. What do you need? How many people?”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Well you think about it while we’re walking back. I need to assign some people to kill that device once you find it. Maybe they can rectify a list of MAC addresses to figure out a probability for where the source might be. Obviously it isn’t programmed on a router, or any other device that doesn’t allow that kind of programming.”

  “It can broadcast from any wall.”

  “Yes, but the program doesn’t stay there. It’s on a networked machine somewhere.”