Roo'd

by Joshua Klein

  The computer dinged.

  "What do we got?" said Cessus and Fed simultaneously. Tonx's face showed nothing, his eyes scanning a long list of odd-sounding acronyms and short chemical chains. He slowly shook his head.

  "Something's not right. This doesn't make sense" he said.

  Fed's gut twisted. His head ached, suddenly, a rising pounding heat across his temples.

  "What's not right?" he asked.

  "This is all wrong" Tonx said again, tabbing through his results. "Let me run it again. Give me the data. Maybe it got corrupted in the transfer."

  "I'll re-download the entire set. Maybe we got a little spike afterwards with corrections" said Cessus. He pushed Tonx's window behind his own and reconnected to the data Fed's code had returned. There were no new uploads, but he got all the data again anyway and pushed it to Tonx. The colored tabs and number chains processed, again, and they waited.

  There was a faint taste of metal in Fed's mouth.

  It seemed to take twice as long to process this time. The ocean roared distantly, the light suddenly tinny and cold. After a short forever the computer dinged again. They all stared.

  Tonx shook his head.

  "These results are completely incompatible" he said softly. "Something's fucked with the data set."

  Chapter 38

  They spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what had gone wrong. From everything Fede could tell his code had run correctly. Tonx couldn't make any sense of the errors he was getting. Huge swaths of the genetic recommendation fit perfectly, and then there would suddenly be a chunk that just didn't fit. There was no gradual combinatory degradation as he'd expect from a near-fit solution.

  Then, in late afternoon just as the sun seemed suddenly to cool, Fede found something strange.

  "Cessus" he said, nudging an elbow into his ribs. "Give me some screen room. Look at this."

  He pulled up a window on the laptop in front of them. He pointed at one of the sample chunks of RNA they'd posted for processing in one column, the genetically developed algorithm for processing it in another. The result was shown in a third column, an RNA combinate like all the others they had received from the virused machines. Fede took the numbers representing the RNA chunk and ran the algorithm on it. A second later a result appeared. It wasn't the same as the result they'd downloaded.

  "What the fuck?" asked Cessus.

  "Is your code screwed?" asked Tonx.

  "No, man. The code works fine. But we got a weird result posted" said Fed. His face tightened into a scowl. He copied the function again, jumped to a terminal window and ran a carefully worded search string.

  "What are you doing?" asked Tonx. Next to him Cessus narrowed his eyes. Fede thumbed his comm lightly and the screen suddenly filled with scrolling lines, all identical.

  Fede slumped backwards in his chair, head tilted, gazing upwards at the sky as the lines scrolled past his vision.

  "He searched for other instances of the same result or formula" said Cessus, his eyes scanning the screen. "Those are all the times a combinate was suggested that was identical to the first error."

  "What the fuck does that mean?" asked Tonx.

  "It means we've been cracked" said Cessus. "It means that our data got intercepted on the way to being posted and huge chunks of it were replaced with bogus results."

  The lines stopped, displayed a blinking cursor on an empty line.

  "Who?" asked Tonx.

  "We don't know" repeated Cessus.

  Fed's head snapped up.

  "You got the Rijndael/CTR encryption you used on the background image for the initial data set?" he asked.

  Cessus nodded. "Yeah, why?"

  "Run it on our results" said Fed.

  Cessus stared at the younger man for a moment, then began to drum his fingers on the tabletop. He paused a moment, watching the results scan over the back of his eyeballs. He wasn't synced to the laptop, so they couldn't see what he did, but they saw his eyes grow wide.

  "Anybody here speak Chinese?" he asked after a moment.

  Tonx jumped to find Cass and Fede pounded on his chord, syncing Cessus's view to the laptop. The murky background image of the Latin American Jewish Association of Hawaii homepage appeared, crisp white text laid across its middle. The top seven lines were each in a different language, followed by a long sentence in tiny Chinese characters laid across the bottom. The English sentence read:

  'What are you doing?'

  Chapter 39

  Cass confirmed that the rest of the text was contact info for an anonymous-sounding Chinese government address along with instructions. They wanted a full explanation of what the combinate results were intended to do. The message was businesslike, succinct, and final.

  Cessus thought that whoever had sent it was most likely in the Chinese governmental system and had seen the increased data load. Because all Chinese internet traffic ran through extensive proxies on the way out of the country he or she'd been able to sniff and replace all their recombinant sets on their way out. What was impressive was that whoever they were, they had distinguished Fed's results from all the other random noise and postings going out in the same direction, and had coded up a response right after Fed's had finished propagating. It was a neat hack.

  Tonx spun into damage control as soon as the news hit, contacting those people he'd pulled favors from to warn them that there was a delay. Fed's first inclination was not to tell anyone anything, but Tonx assured him that he hadn't got this far by hiding facts from his investors.

  After examining everything they had it was clear they couldn't rework the remaining data themselves - there was too much information lost and no way of confirming if any of the rest of it had been scrambled. Cessus told Fede to prep a sampling app to run random confirmations on what they had and disappeared into the back of the truck. As soon as he'd shut the door Fede got a message on his comm; "don't let anyone bother me" it said. Signed, Cessus.

  Around dinnertime a small Toyota sedan with tinted windows picked up a group of Japanese men. An hour later a tourist bus dropped off three hard-looking Italians in expensive looking suits. They pitched a tent farther down the beach and reappeared in shorts and Hawaiian floral-print shirts. Nobody talked to them. Fede coded, exhausted. What the hell was he doing here, on some weird Mafioso beach in Mexico, big players waiting for him to pay out. Friends waiting for him to deliver. Screwed.

  Somebody lit a bonfire between the chairs and the beach. Fede stopped to get a plateful of shirred pork chops and BBQ beans. He coded, eventually finishing his app. It would take days to run, but it would do the job. It was messy. Fede didn't care.

  After dinner Tonx reappeared, his shoulders peeling. Cass was with him, carrying their plates as Tonx wrote, fingers flying over his comm. His Hello Kitty glasses glowed and pulsed, his face hard behind them.

  "Where's Cessus?" Tonx asked.

  "Working" said Fed.

  "Doing?" asked Tonx.

  "Don't know. Probably trying to trace the guy who cracked us" he said.

  Tonx looked down the beach at the fire, noticed Cass and took his plate. He sat and ate.

  After a while a tall, beautiful boy with dark curly hair mixed classic operatic pieces with hip-hop tunes on his lapcomm; they'd patched him into the speakers mounted in the bar.

  Eventually Cessus reappeared. He looked like a black woolly octopus was eating his head, three-day scruff turning his face dark. His eyes shone in their hollowed sockets.

  "I got him" he said.

  They stared.

  "It's one guy. Or a small number of guys. Got to be an important muckity-muck in China's IT dept. Big into networking, but his security's got some holes. Small ones."

  "But big enough?" asked Tonx, his voice hopeful.

  "Big enough" agreed Cessus, reaching over and grabbing a pair of pork chops from Fed's plate.

  "So what do we got?" Tonx asked.

  Cessus chewed, grimaced as his lenses rolled back to the sides of
his head. His eyes were a bloody red.

  "Like I said, likely one guy. Not enough stuff done concurrently to be otherwise. He followed the data uploads until he had a good sample rate and spoofed the rest. Fooled us, though. No idea what the actual processing rate was like, but the boxes I owned were all done by the time I got to them. Looks like your code did about as well as we thought, Feed."

  "We just didn't get the results" Fede said.

  "So who is he? How do we get our data?" Tonx asked.

  "There's the rub" said Cessus. "He took the real combinate results and put them on a private machine in Beijing. A roach motel."

  "What's a roach motel?" asked Cass.

  "They were originally used for credit card numbers," said Fed. "E-vendors use them for making credit card transactions. When they want to make a transaction the vendor sends them a packet with an identifier, like 'ID #12345, $125.00, for Fuzzy Eggbeater' and they match the ID number with an actual credit card. Then the roach motel runs the transaction."

  "So why are they called roach motels?"

  "Credit card numbers check in, but they never check out" said Tonx.

  "Is that bad?" Cass asked.

  "It means we can't get at the data from here" said Cessus. "Roach motels only do one thing - you send them packets, and they run a transaction completely separately. In this case they're just passing it requests, and the roach motel is sending the recombinant information out some other way we don't know about. Since we can't see the packets going out, we can't intercept anything useful."

  Cass snorted loudly through her nose.

  "I thought you guys were uber-hackers. You're telling me you've got a machine that only does a single thing - only takes packets in - and you can't hack it?"

  "Kind of breaks the illusion, but yeah" said Cessus.

  "So how'd you find out he put our data up there?" asked Fed.

  "One of the people who was trying to look at the information screwed up. He'd set up an anonymizing proxy before making the request to the roach motel. The guy who got our data put it on a web site somewhere - probably the roach motel itself, but we have no way of knowing - and when the person using the proxy tried to access it his browser kept asking the roach motel for the data instead of the web server. I just listened to what his browser was asking for and figured out that whoever had our data had put up a web page with a bunch of DNA data. A recombinant."

  "He put the whole thing up there?" asked Tonx.

  "No, he didn't. That's the funny part. He put up half of it. The web page was extremely simple, but it took a really long time to load. The guy using the proxy kept pounding the reload button on his browser, which sends a new request each time. That gave me a nice sample set to figure out what he was trying to pull down. I compared the size the actual recombinant would be against the web page, and it comes to about half and change."

  "Who was asking for it?" asked Tonx.

  "The request I saw was run through an anonymizing proxy, like I told you, but the packets it sent out to make the original request were all signed with a user ID" said Cessus.

  They waited.

  "And?" said Fed.

  "The ID was C.Hintao" said Cessus. "The only person with that name that comes to mind is the president of China, and it was run through government proxies. The anonymizer is maintained by their equivalent to the secret service."

  "But then why didn't he put the whole recombinant up?" asked Fed.

  Tonx laughed. "The fucker's playing them" he said.

  "Probably" said Cessus. "Either he's claiming the full data set isn't done yet, or he's ransoming it until he finds out what it's for."

  "So does he have the correct data set somewhere?" asked Fed.

  "If it exists, he has it" said Cessus.

  They turned to Tonx. The ocean roared behind them, the gulf stream stirring its waves, winds from Brazil to Finland pushing its currents. Fed's brother tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and looked around at them. He reached over and put a hand on Cass's.

  "So you want to go to China?" he asked.

  Chapter 40

  Tonx insisted they split up onto different flights. They argued at length about whether to bring Marcus, but the big man had pointed out that he was under contract, and folded his arms and set his jaw, and that was that. It meant buying another ticket, but Tonx had found a line of credit from somewhere so Fede figured that wasn't the main problem. The other issue was what to do with Poulpe. When they'd finally found him, sleeping in the sun with a face smeared blue with zinc oxide, he'd just smiled and nodded.

  "I would suggest you take me with you. I am the only one who can readily determine the veracity of whatever data we obtain. You may need me on short notice" he said, pinching off the end of each word.

  Tonx hadn't moved. He ground his jaw as he thought it over.

  "You'll go with Cessus. And Fed" said Tonx. "Cass and I'll go first."

  "What about Pharoe's friends?" asked Cessus.

  Tonx looked down the beach to two the tiny specs that were Baby and Esco.

  "Last" he said. "If at all."

  Fede looked at Cessus, caught his eye. The bigger man shook his head slightly, slowly.

  "Pharoe?" asked Poulpe.

  "Never mind" said Tonx. "Just get your things together. We're leaving in an hour."

  An hour later everyone's stuff was piled into the truck or the station wagon, respectively. Tonx had had to bribe the German woman to keep their shorts and shirts.

  "Fucking robbery" muttered Tonx, coming back to where the two cars were turned and lined up on the road. "Okay, here's the drill. We drive to Mexico city. It's about seven hours. When we get there Esco, Cass and I get dropped off at the airport and Bay will circle around with the car."

  "Why is Baby driving?" asked Esco.

  "Because I want one of the both of you with some of us at all times, in case Disney catches up. The more communication channels we have the better" said Tonx.

  "Baby will meet you at a Denny's that's about a half hour off from the airport. An hour after they join up with you everybody except Marcus will catch a cab into the airport and get on the next flight after ours. An hour after that Marcus will drive into the airport, park the car, scrub it, leave the keys in it, and get the last flight of the day."

  He looked at the faces surrounding his. "Got it?"

  Everybody nodded.

  "I don't like getting moved around so much" said Baby. "Why doesn't Esco stick with your hackers here, and I'll catch the first flight?"

  "No" said Tonx. "We're going to need all the smooth we can get when we land. Esco stays with me."

  "What the fuck am I going to smooth in China?" asked Esco.

  "The people I have to secure us with are going to want to see business professionals" said Tonx. "Baby's not it, and you know it. We have one hour from the time we land until they arrive to make sure everything's kosher, and you're the only one here besides myself that can make that happen."

  He glared at Esco, reached up a hand to pull back a lock of hair. "You got my back, or what?"

  Esco pursed his lips. He nodded.

  "Once we arrive in Beijing we'll take separate cabs to the Hotel Paris. Meet in the lobby there. Marcus, you go into the restaurant. We're going to have enough trouble with you as is."

  "What do you mean?" asked Fed.

  "Marcus is a popular man" said Tonx. "Damn fool did a commercial there and now he thinks he's going to stealth mode it."

  "That was two years ago" said Marcus. "And it was in Japan."

  "For a Chinese product" yelled Tonx. He slumped back in his chair. "Whatever. Look, we have a lot to do. I've secured tickets and faked identity checksums, so make sure you sync your comms to Cessus here before we split up. Pull out all your munitions or anything else illegal by the time we hit Mexico city. We can store whatever we need in a locker on the way to the airport, but don't forget they're not deregulated. They're going to have armed security crawling all over that place. Don't do a
nything stupid."

  Everybody split up. Fede followed Cessus back to the truck. Marcus had spit-shined the whole thing, and everything that wasn't fastened down was stacked neatly in the back.

  "Pack what you need and put the rest in these bags" said Marcus, handing Fede a fistful of big black plastic.

  "What the fuck am I going to pack?" Fede asked. "I'm lucky I have pants."

  He scrambled up into the back of the freight container and collapsed on a futon. Cessus dumped out a thin plastic bag of components and wires and began sorting.

  "Going to be fucking awesome hitting the markets there" he said. "No idea how easy it'll be to get shit, but if it's anything like Japan there's going to be some slick motherfucking tech to be had."

  "Idiot" said Fede conversationally. "China's not Japan, you know."

  "That so?" asked Cessus. "Since when did you get to be the big expert, Feed?"

  Fede smiled. "Hey, I just ownzored over 67% of the country's computers. Looks like I know something."

  Cessus stared at him for a second, and then broke into a loud baying laugh.

  "Boy, you're coming along nicely" he said.

  Fede just smiled.

  Chapter 41

  Everything went according to Tonx's plan. They cruised into Mexico sometime late evening and found the Denny's no problem. There wasn't much room to park the truck in the lot, so Marcus ended up bribing a policeman to issue them a temporary working permit so they could park on the road. Once they got inside Cessus made them move seats twice. Eventually they wound up with their backs to the bathrooms, facing the door.

  "Are you always this careful?" asked Poulpe.

  "Try to be" said Cessus.

  They ordered dinner, Marcus ordering two, and dug in. It was good stuff, better than what Fede was used to at home.

  "Denny's is different down here" he said around mouthfuls of bacon burger.

  "Not as greasy" said Marcus. "They add too damn much up in the U.S."

  "This is less grease?" asked Poulpe.