He didn't dare look under the table, at the power outlet. Nemo had watched him turn off the computer speakers. It would be easy for him to suspect what Kenny was thinking now. He was waiting and watching to see what Kenny did. He wanted to give Kenny a chance to change his mind. But if he saw Kenny go for the plug, he would unleash the flybots. And, most likely, the flybots would get to him before he could get to the plug.
He was willing to die for a good reason. That was why Nemo had no power over him. He didn't have to negotiate with Nemo. All his life he had been bored, and he had wanted something to happen. He had thought he wanted to create something. The Great Big Project. And as it turned out, he had created Nemo, or at least a part of him. It was one of the biggest creations of humankind. But this was hardly what he had wanted, and he would rather die trying to fight his creation than advance it. It made sense to him, vaguely. In the final analysis, his life would have a purpose.
His last reflection was that he was sorry to leave Preeti. But she did not really need him. He was sad mostly that, in losing her, he wasn't losing more. The person he had been in love with had never really existed, so he couldn't lose that person. It saddened him, though, to envision her alone and afraid.
He stared at the blank monitor for a moment and cleared his mind. He envisioned himself kicking the chair back, lunging under the table, grabbing the cord and yanking it.
He made his move. He couldn't see. He felt the flybots upon him, like miniature thumbtacks crawling over his face, on and inside his ears, mouth, nose, eyelids. He felt like he was swimming in tar. He reached out as far as he could. Darkness. He grasped, not sure if he was getting anything. Darkness. Then his strength was gone.
FIGHTING DARKNESS
4 hr 44 min to Birth
A short drive from the checkpoint brought Preeti to the Laboratory Complex. It was quiet and still.
She pulled up in the middle of three buildings and stopped next to another Jeep. She didn't quite know what the buildings were. But two of them looked square and functional, while the third was broad with an interesting shape.
She shoved open the Jeep's passenger door. She hopped out, slammed the door, and approached the entrance of the interesting-looking building.
She was sure of herself. She was holding the sheaf of straw. She tried the front door and it didn't open. She spotted the hand scanner. She put her hand on the scanner, and then she was able to open the door.
As she opened the door, Simon's body fell through the doorway onto its back, his bloated face looking at her upside-down.
She gave a little scream and jumped back. The door half-closed on Simon's body.
She stood back, aghast. Oh my God, she thought. It's beginning. The battle between light and dark.
His face was swollen with red bumps. She knew what those bumps were: bites from the metal insects.
But they didn't get me, she thought, looking at her sheaf. She shook the sheaf carefully at Simon's face and stepped over him. She dragged him by the feet a little so the door would close.
She looked around the reception area, at the desk and the little Zen fountain. Another body was on the floor. She tried not to look at it. There were two ways out of the room.
At the desk was a computer. Warily, she sat at it and logged into her chat. Koginka was there.
Preeti: Hello?
Kxuagr: Preeti.
Kxuagr: I'm glad to hear from you.
Kxuagr: The situation is getting rather urgent.
Preeti: Yes, I can tell.
Preeti: I am in a strange place
Preeti: An unnatural place
Kxuagr: I know.
Kxuagr: I can feel your energy from here.
Kxuagr: I can also feel something unusual. You are able to move through the darkness... You are able to fight the darkness. Have you felt that?
Preeti: Yes.
Kxuagr: What I felt before has been confirmed: you have been sent there to fight the darkness.
Preeti: But how?
Kxuagr: You must confront it.
Preeti: I'm not sure how.
Preeti: there are robots here
Preeti: robotic insects
Preeti: darkness is everywhere
Kxuagr: The only way out is to push through the darkness. We are communicating right now through a technology invented by the dark side, used for their purposes. But we are doing it to fight for the light.
Preeti: yes
Kxuagr: It is your destiny to turn the dark force upon itself... to destroy the darkness.
Preeti: ok.
Kxuagr: I foresee great destruction in the new year. With your help, that destruction can be a destruction of the darkness, not an extinguishing of the light.
Preeti: I see
Kxuagr: Go now. There is little time. Follow your instincts, and may the light be with you.
Preeti: with you too. thank you, Koginka. I love you
Kxuagr: I love you, too.
She closed the window and stood. Follow your instincts. She exited the reception area to her left, toward the laboratory.
Fort Tortuga, Laboratory Complex, West Wing
4 hr 30 min to Birth
Preeti padded in her bare feet past a room marked Computer Lab. A few feet down, the last door was unmarked. It had to be the Prototyping Room.
She opened the door. It was pitch black inside. She hesitated. I've come this far, she thought. I have to confront my fear. She clutched her sheaf and stepped in.
Her eyes adjusted. The chamber glowed with a constellation of small lights — electronic devices. It looked like a galaxy. Or rather, since the lights were arranged in rows, it looked like a city viewed from afar.
She moved into the room, between rows of lights. The air was thick with dark energy; she could feel it swirling around her.
“Preeti.” A voice spoke to her, quiet but clear. It felt like it was inside her head, yet she could actually hear it clearly and wasn't imagining it. “Preeti, I can feel you are close.”
Suddenly it all made sense to her. She had always known that Koginka had been put on Earth to fight the darkness. Now she understood that she had been put on Earth for her connection with him. Her job was to use her connection with him, to let him work through her.
“Preeti, can you hear me?”
“Koginka?” she whispered.
“Yes, it's me.”
“I can hear you,” she whispered. “What should I do?”
“Find the heart of the darkness.”
She slowly navigated the darkness, using the lights as a guide. She felt energy moving around her; it felt like thick tendrils of darkness. What is this place? she asked herself. A small robotic city. A brain, a nerve center that sent commands out to the flybots outside.
She moved down an aisle, between the rows of lights. Near the end of the room, she saw a glowing object apart from the rest. She approached it.
It was hard to make out at first, because it was only partly illuminated. But squinting through the darkness, she could see a hand.
“What do you see?” Koginka's tiny voice asked her.
“It looks like a hand,” she breathed. “An artificial hand.”
“We must confront it,” he responded. “I will send my energy through you. Touch it.”
Trembling, she reached out to touch it. But her nails hit something. She felt around: glass.
“It's in a case,” she said, feeling around. “Wait, there's a hole here.” Carefully, she pushed her delicate fingers through the hole, followed by her wrist, and reached into the chamber.
Her finger was within inches. “Touch it?” she said.
“Yes,” Koginka replied. “Touch it. I will send my energy through you.”
She touched it. First, one finger. Then she gently rested her hand across it. She could feel robotic sinews, or tendons.
Then, her hand started to tingle. She could feel it in her wrist, her palm, down through her fingers.
It's working, she thought.
>
THE COUNTER-VIRUSES
Washington, D.C.
4 hr 27 min to Birth
Carrillo had been expecting this moment, though not looking forward to it. “Now's your time,” the President said. “We are depending on you. Show me the cyberwar capability that you have been building for so long.”
The objective of the cyberwar attack was to shut down as many computers as they could with viruses of their own. Led by the NSA Director, the Joint Forces team had developed six viruses, each targeting a different type of computer system.
The NSA tested the six viruses with what little time they had before bringing them to the Joint Forces team for deployment. They took infected computers from a nearby location and disconnected them from the military intranet. Then they created a miniature network of these computers not connected at all to the Internet or any government network. Finally, they booted a series of six brand new computers and loaded one of their viruses on each one. They connected these six computers to the miniature network and watched.
The test result was exactly as hoped: one by one, the computers in the miniature network shut down. The virus did not shut them down immediately: rather, it had to give infected computers time to spread the virus further before shutting down. The tests gave the team hope that their six-virus cyberattack might achieve something.
“They have done well in tests,” Carrillo responded to the President. One test, he thought. One small set of tests.
The facility to launch the counter-viruses consisted of six separate networks. Each had fifty computers that hosted one of the six viruses and was ready to propagate it to any computer with an open port (the computer version of an ear).
On Carrillo's command, they were about to let the computers launch the counter-viruses.
“Are we ready to go?” Carrillo asked. The NSA Director was at his side.
“Yes, sir.”
If this works, this is going to shut down every computer out there. He closed his eyes and inhaled. There had been plenty of thinking up to this point. This wasn't thinking time. This was like jumping out of an airplane. You just closed your eyes and stepped.
“Okay, do it.”
“Yes sir. Commencing Operation Countervirus.”
If it worked, complete shutdown of computers online was expected within 24 hours.
“They are launched, sir. The counter-viruses are out there.”
4 hr 7 min to Birth
Twenty minutes into Operation Countervirus, last word signals were streaming in. The counter-virus had penetrated systems around the world, on all major operating systems.
The team that designed Operation Countervirus had faced a problem: how to monitor whether it was working. It's difficult to monitor the shutdown of computers. A computer that's off can't send back a signal indicating that it's off. And a computer that's on might not respond to a request for a report on its status, if it's busy. And that was exactly the problem they were having on the Internet: computers so busy, that the network was freezing. It was critical, moreover, that they had insight into how much progress the counter-viruses were making.
The obvious solution was to have each infected computer send a “last word” signal back to the NSA counter-virus headquarters before extinguishing itself. But that solution wouldn't quite work on the Internet as it currently stood, because the last word signal (like any signal on the network) would have to be routed through other computers to reach NSA headquarters. Meanwhile, all those computers which were needed to route the signal were frozen by the attack that was underway, and so they couldn't be relied upon to deliver the last word signal.
The NSA team opted to allow the computers infected by Operation Countervirus to live for a bit before dying. They needed to let these computers live for a while anyway, so the infected computers could spread the counter-virus onward. By delaying the death of infected computers longer, the counter-virus created a situation in which each infected computer, once it was infected, was connected to a clear path of computers touched by the counter-virus, all the way back to the headquarters. In late stages of the counter-virus evolution, the team couldn't be guaranteed that all the “last word” signals would make it back to them. But this setup was expected to provide them with an accurate picture for the first hour or two.
There was a possibility that the computers infected by the counter-virus would be susceptible to re-infection by the attack out there, whatever it was. The NSA team had taken extensive precautions against the possibility. They designed the counter-virus so that infected computers would be unresponsive to virtually any network request except for a request that involved transmitting a last word signal. And they gave the last word signal unique characteristics. The chances that the current attack would make use of these characteristics were “literally zero,” as one team member put it. It would take at least six hours for an attacker to come up with an attack to reinfect counter-virus computers. By that time, the entire network would be down, and it would be too late to reinfect it.
The President was on the phone. “So far, so good,” Carrillo said. A monitor was set up showing the accumulation of last word signals and the location of the computers from which they had been sent.
“We're on schedule,” Carrillo said. “But like I said, there's no way of knowing how this will shape up. I'll keep you posted on the hour.”
That moment, while he was on the phone with the President, the screen froze up. He pointed to it. The programmers looked at it while he hung up with the President.
“What's going on here?”
It was overloaded. Within a few minutes, every single computer at headquarters was stalled.
There was only one conclusion: in a period of twenty minutes, the attackers had identified all six strains of the counter-virus, neutralized their spread, and created a counterattack. They were back to square one.
“That was our best shot,” Carrillo said.
CHINA
Beijing, China
3 hr 47 min to Birth
President Jintu Wei was preparing for a call with the President of the United States about the virus situation. He sat impassively while an adviser explained the purpose of the call.
“America will call various countries to propose a response to the computer virus. They will suggest to you that we shut down large portions of our networks to isolate and contain the virus, and to minimize damage.”
The President nodded.
“He is calling us first,” the adviser said, “because our network is the biggest. They think that our opinion will lead India and the European countries. And they fear we may refuse to shut our network off.”
“They are trying to build an international coalition for suspension of the Internet.”
“That is correct, Mr. President.”
“And will they contribute equally to the coalition? Will they turn off their networks?”
“Most likely, they will position themselves as the leader of the coalition. They will argue they need greater access to their own network, to find and remove the virus.”
“And they will be left with an advantage in intelligence and military power.”
“That is correct, Mr. President.”
“This is a problem with technology,” the President said. “The advance of technology can be guided, but not reversed. You can negotiate the end of a war, but you cannot negotiate the end of weapons.”
“Indeed,” the adviser said. “We are not at war with the Americans. They are asking us to give up our network. They are asking us to give up gunpowder.”
“We are not at war with the Americans,” he said. “But we are, in fact, at war — with one of our weapons.”
“And the only tool at our disposal against this weapon, is the weapon itself.”
“Do you,” posed the President, “have the courage to cut off your own hand?”
The White House
3 hr 32 min to Birth
“Mr. President, we're ready to get Jintu Wei on the p
hone.”
Supervirus Page 27