The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  “Meaning?” Azi has no idea where this is going, but he’s sure the destination will be unpleasant.

  “It’s analyzing us. Right now. It has its own network, so I can’t break in unless there’s some kind of access and—oh shit, oh holy shit.”

  “Oh shit what?”

  Before Ad can reply, the universe provides an answer in the form of a shrieking metallic nightmare rising above them. The sphere at the arm’s summit is rippling with light, the arm beneath it flexing with alien precision. Ad and Azi look at each other, look at the awakened beast, then start to run.

  They don’t get far. After thirty feet, Ad—unencumbered by weeping wounds, he’s leading the way—comes to a sudden halt and starts bellowing in fresh terror.

  “Azi. Shit! Help me, what’s this on my face? It’s sticking to me, I can’t get it off—”

  Azi is just behind. “What is it? Jesus, what’s happening, are you okay?”

  Ad claws at his face, yet there appears to be nothing there—until Azi steps forwards and feels some kind of sticky, twisting worm curl across his upper body. Ad is flailing both arms now, wielding the laptop like a weapon.

  “What the fuck, Azi? I can’t get these things off, they’re trying to choke me! Help—”

  “Ad.” Azi forces himself to stand perfectly still. “Ad! Stop moving. Stop. I can feel it. Holy crap, holy crap, I think they’re cables, wires, something like that. Just try to stop moving.”

  Using his body weight, Azi manages to drop away from whatever was grasping him and tumbles onto the eerily textured ground. He looks up, then wishes he hadn’t. Numberless fine tendrils hang from the glowing sphere, falling to within two feet of the ground. Ad is well and truly tangled, the writhing array snaring him as if by instinct.

  We’re under attack by a robot jellyfish, a small voice mutters in Azi’s head. We’re about to be murdered by an absolutely massive evil autonomous fuck-knows-what and, to be honest, I haven’t got anything in my repertoire adequate to stuff like this. Ad is still screaming, the sound sucked away to nothing after each breath. Azi looks at him for a moment.

  “Ad! Ad, drop the laptop. If you can, drop it on the floor. Now!”

  Ad manages to excavate some rage from inside his horror. “Fuck the laptop, I’m being eaten by Cthulhu!”

  Trying not to think about what may happen if he fails, Azi raises himself onto his elbows and lunges for the laptop. For a moment, it hangs in the tendrils’ grasp, their tips curling towards him. Then he and the computer tumble down.

  Azi opens it. Weakly, the screen-light illuminates a cloud of writhing filaments. Ad is no longer screaming. Azi activates a sniffer protocol across as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as the machine can handle, trying to identify any readable packets of data. He needs something, anything, that will let him access the system. If it’s a prototype, if it’s designed to be controlled, there may be something—a chink in its digital armor.

  There’s no sound whatsoever now. Ad twitches, obscenely, like a fish on a hook. The distant sphere is riddled with light and seems to be descending, the tentacles’ clearance above Azi’s head shrinking inch by inch. The thing is near the limit of its motion, he realizes, straining against the cantilevers—hungry to escape.

  Then he sees it. A simple routine surrounding the complexity, like a restraining pulse; a coordinate system for the arm’s supporting motion. Thirty seconds and he’s inside, overriding the sphere’s autonomy. The arm jerks upwards, the tendrils stiffen, Ad twitches one last time and falls to the floor. There’s silence, until…

  “Ha!” For someone who looked near-deceased a minute ago, Ad is remarkably chipper. “Take that, robot fuckface.”

  “What the hell? I thought you were being digested,” Azi exclaims.

  “Evolutionary biology, mate. I was playing dead. Also, I had a mouth full of tentacles. But it was my executive decision to pretend I was no longer living or breathing. And it worked.”

  “Well.” Azi decides not to quibble. “That was horrifying.”

  Ad nods, staggers to his feet and helps Azi do the same. They’re both shaking. Above them, the sphere continues to rise on the end of its arm, glistening like a false moon. The fine threads hung beneath it are almost beautiful: swaying between shadow and light, shifting each other’s reflections. Next to Azi, Ad has taken the laptop and started to explore the jellyfish’s systems, his eyes widening as he does.

  “The sensors on this monster are crazy, Azi. Evil-fucking-genius crazy. They’re taking in trace chemicals from the air, movements, sounds, magnetic fields. It’s like a deep sea predator. Like a weapon. Fuck knows what else they’ve got in here.”

  Azi doesn’t retort, because he doesn’t need to, that they now have fifteen minutes to find the source of the IP addresses—and that the likelihood of them achieving this and managing to escape with their lives is trending towards zero. They’re in a huge, hostile, inhuman environment. No one knows they’re there, no one is coming to save them—and Ad’s campus-wide meltdown clearly hasn’t affected the Institute’s tame atrocities. What can they possibly accomplish?

  “Ad,” Azi says, trying to focus. “How can a place like this be hosting a global darknet? They hadn’t even finished building this place when you were at the Institute, right?”

  Ad looks up from the laptop. “That’s right. All kinds of freaky construction was going on the whole time. Massive machinery, in and out.”

  “Right. Right.” An idea is coalescing inside Azi. It’s sufficiently ridiculous that he doesn’t want to think about it too hard before speaking. “Okay, I’ve got a…I guess you’d call it a plan. We are going to run several hundred feet away from this spot, back to the light boxes. We are going to take control of this thing’s movement. Then we are going to tell it to repeatedly smash itself against the floor.”

  Ad stares. “Not that I disapprove of killing the machine abomination, but we’re going to do this because—”

  “Because what we’re looking for isn’t in this room. It’s underneath.”

  By Azi’s reckoning, his logic is impeccable. At least, he has taken a selection of insights to their logical extreme, California-style. Ad says the IP addresses originate from this specific site. Yet this building was only finished last year. If the Institute has been operating a private darknet for years, it must thus be both very well hidden and older than this building. And the only super-secure site that fits the bill is directly underneath them.

  With a nervous grin, Ad sets a short time delay while they’re still in sensor range of the jellyfish, then he and Azi manage something between a sprint and a hobble towards the projection boxes. After a hundred feet, they pause. Azi is breathing hard and raggedly, pain coursing up his side and arm. Despite his tentacular encounter, Ad seems barely to have noticed the exertion.

  “What do you think,” Azi pants, eying the distant orb. “Is it going to have enough momentum to exceed its structural limits?”

  Before Ad can answer this attractively technical question, the orb descends at massive speed and vanishes. Then a wave of force hits them. The hangar’s cladding absorbs most of the sound, but its resonance arrives directly in their bones, hammering the air out of their lungs and sending them clawing towards shelter in one of the projection boxes. Dimly, Azi registers concrete and metal grinding, squealing and sundering as the immense arm strikes again and again.

  Even at this distance, the floor trembles with each shockwave. Lights flash across the edges of Azi’s vision. Azi tries to speak but he can’t make himself heard. That’s when he notices Ad soundlessly shouting in his face, gesturing them further from the impact zone. Without warning, a hunk of machinery the size and shape of a grand piano appears a foot to their left, demolishing half of the projection box.

  Azi gets up to run, stumbles and falls. Ad has already done the same. The world is nothing beyond the regular, ferocious percussion of a machine obliterating itself. Is that blood trickling down the side of his face, Azi wonders a
s he clings to the floor, or sweat, or tears?

  Not for the first time, it’s most likely to be all three.

  Forty-five

  Scrabbling around the ruins of a house-sized metal jellyfish that has hammered its way through a reinforced concrete floor is even less fun than it sounds. Partly because the light level is so low it’s a constant struggle not to trip over fragments of wire, concrete and fractured metal, but mainly because it’s unclear until the very last minute whether Azi’s plan has worked, or just created a hundred-million-dollar crater in the heart of someone else’s sinister research facility.

  Finally, with a triumphant shout, Azi summons Ad towards the trench that the body of the jellyfish gouged before reaching its final resting place. Light is emanating from a spot beneath its base, casting shadows through shards of machinery. A thick fluid stains the ground, which both men do their best to ignore.

  “Ad, look. Here!”

  They pick their way down and together heft a bent metal plate aside. The light streaming out of the trench becomes so bright that it takes a minute before they’re sure what they’re seeing.

  “There’s something down there.” Ad’s tone is pure wonder.

  They’re peering through a hole in the floor into a spotless, spartan concrete bunker. As Azi moves closer, he sees a heap of dust and rubble resting upon a perfectly smooth floor perhaps a dozen feet below them, its shine reflecting bank after bank of lights. Towards its edges, the distinctive dark metal mesh of server cages is visible.

  “It’s a data center! We’ve found it!” For the second time today, Azi considers hugging Ad, then thinks better of it.

  “Okay. Okay! Let’s do this,” Ad says.

  “Ad, what are you doing?”

  “Psyching myself up. It’s only ten feet onto that rubble. No time to lose, remember? Making myself useful.”

  “Wait! We need to talk about this. Wait, you—”

  Ad vanishes. There’s a crash and a scream, then a sheepish voice.

  “Er, Azi…I may have slightly fucked my leg.”

  Azi groans and peers down.

  “Is that blood?”

  “Maybe. A bit. Hang on, I’ll try standing up. No, not good. Okay, I’ll go for lurching. On the plus side, this is definitely a data center.”

  Eventually, Ad manages to lurch effectively enough to catch the laptop and clear a flattish area where Azi can drop down. The physical integrity of their expedition is not looking good. Azi’s arm and chest are ticking incrementally towards agony. Ad has a gashed hand and a twisted ankle. He can still walk, with Azi’s pained assistance, but their hopes of swift action and exit are becoming tenuous. Azi hasn’t been keeping perfect track of time, but they can’t have much of it left.

  Around them, the room throbs with air conditioning. Caged servers are racked in dark ranks, their fans and wiring exposed to the air, thick ropes of cable running between them. It’s a server farm, in all its brutal functionality: the apparatus behind what laughably tends to be called a “cloud.” Clouds sound so fluffy and weightless, Azi thinks, like they’re operated by angels in a realm of sunlight and harps. Yet most of the world’s data resides in reinforced bunkers like this, where hundreds of miles of network cable connect thousands of motherboards, packed as densely as thermodynamics permit.

  Despite the cooling ducts thronging the roof like the roots of a skyscraper-sized tree, the heat coming off the massed machinery is palpable. If everything they’ve found out is true, the information locked inside these wire-studded servers includes some of the most fiercely guarded secrets on the planet—and all that lies in their way is a few reinforced steel cages. At last, an obstacle that won’t try to kill them.

  With a businesslike nod, Azi presses the laptop back into Ad’s grasp and fishes out of his pocket one of the last toys Odi entrusted them with: a lock-picking kit. No hacker should be without one. It’s amazing, Azi reflects as he sets about opening the nearest cage, how much faith computer security types have in physical locks given how little use they are.

  The lock on the cage door is open within moments.

  Supporting Ad by the shoulder, Azi steps across the threshold.

  “Time check, Ad.”

  “Since you last asked me how long this was going to take, one entire minute. Until we run out of time, minus several fucking minutes and counting. So, you know, it’s been great to have this little chat. Because they’re coming for us, right now.”

  As is often the case with hacking, even the most dramatic and dangerous of assaults soon starts to feel like a tricky homework assignment. It’s just that, in this case, the best-case punishment for non-completion probably consists of death—while most other cases involve torture and mechanoid sea monsters.

  In other words, they’ve made it to the final hurdle—only for everything to go tits up in the most mundane way possible. The laptop is connected directly to the server farm, which is the gold standard for access. But the sheer scale and complexity of the system means that nothing is obvious, easy or quick.

  “Ad, come on! Can you see anything that looks like a master list, a lookup table, database, systems map—anything at all?” Azi isn’t panicking, he tells himself. He’s just speaking very loudly and very fast in order to save time.

  “Fucking hell, mate, I’m trying. It’s all over the place. It’s all customized: routers, protocols, switch chips. Crazy power, I’ve got no idea why they’d need it. How many people are using Gomorrah? How big can it be? This is an absolute shitting disaster, I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.”

  “The name itself, you’ve searched for that?”

  “Of course I have. Nothing. Just your ordinary massive, impenetrable server architecture hosting about a giga-ton of databases in parallel.”

  Azi pauses, willing his thoughts into order. An idea bobs to the surface.

  “Forget everything. See if you can find any reference to the name Jim Denison.”

  Azi has just remembered the agreement he signed in the guise of his alter ego: the details of Jim’s address and location and backers, alongside the elaborately unpleasant consequences he faced for abuse. What if this personalization went beyond the agreement into the fabric of the software itself? What if the darknet marketplace is tailored to each and every one of its users?

  There’s an agonizing delay, then Ad looks up. “Mate…I’ve found something! Here, see.”

  Azi peers at the screen.

  “What am I looking at, Ad? What’s all that data?”

  “It’s everything. Absolutely everything this guy Jim Denison did on his device, from the moment he logged into Gomorrah until the phone went dead. Plus a ton of metadata, references and messages. Facebook have got nothing on this. There’s routines here for snooping on whatever someone does, everywhere they go, anything else in their lives that Gomorrah even touches. It’s like, like…”

  “The world’s biggest phishing scam. It’s a trap.”

  “This is fucked up. If you were an admin on here, the things you could do, the things you’d know, the people you’d own…so that’s what we need. Right now. Details of an admin account. Then we can download its logs to the laptop, scarper the fuck out of whatever exit we can open. And not die.”

  “I love it! And I have an idea.” Azi pauses, waiting for his brain to do its thing and follow through. This time, it doesn’t oblige. He pinches himself, runs both hands over his shaven scalp, tries to massage his mind into motion. There’s nothing.

  “Shit, no. I don’t have an idea.” Azi is desolate. “I’ve gone blank. I need a moment. I need…What’s that?”

  Behind them, there’s the sound of a distant heavy door opening. They shrink back in the server cage, towards the towering rack of machines, close enough to feel their heat. Ad is still crouched over the laptop, Azi kneeling beside him, when there’s a nearer rattle of metal followed by footsteps. One person, walking fast. There’s nowhere to hide in the bunker’s caged light: just the humming machines, the ducts a
bove, the polished concrete below.

  Azi can’t believe it. To have come so close, to have touched Gomorrah’s heart. It’s unbearable. Not knowing what else to do, tracking the footsteps as they come closer, Azi half-stands as if to shield his friend. Then a woman’s voice echoes towards him, cold and clear.

  “Stop what you’re doing and show me your hands. I’m armed. Let me get a—”

  It breaks off. There’s an incredulous pause and then, its edges quivering with rage, the voice continues.

  “I do not believe this. Of all the people. You are like a disease, Azi Bello. The damage you’ve done, the trouble you’ve made…”

  Another pause.

  “I’m going to enjoy this.”

  Forty-six

  Turning, Azi sees what a part of him already knew would be there: the woman he called Munira, a gun in her hand. The color of her hair, her clothes, the amused contempt on her face—everything about her is different. Yet she is unmistakably the same. He knew that all that they had and did was a lie. But he wasn’t prepared for this.

  “Munira?”

  She inclines her head. “Not anymore. Don’t you remember, you left her to die?”

  Ad looks wildly between Azi and the woman standing motionless in the open door of the server cage. Azi takes a breath, then tries to shape what’s happening inside him into words.

  “Who are you? Why are you doing this…How could you do this?”

  “Azi, I don’t have time for questions. You are about to tell me everything I need to know. Right now.”

  “And then you’re going to kill us.”

  She flashes a faint smile “I expect so. You’ve seen enough movies.” She taps the pistol against the cage’s metal door. “But I can hurt you an awful lot first.”

  Something thickens in Azi’s throat—a constriction between horror and nausea. His body still wants to hold her, to feel the heat and safety of her hands. From a place far away, his mouth keeps speaking.