Connect

by Julian Gough

‘Mmmm,’ says Sasha. ‘Nice, for big attacks; but what if they do a pinpoint takedown, on a single node? It would hardly affect the wind. You mightn’t even notice the notification.’

  ‘You’re right,’ says Colt.

  ‘Basically,’ says Sasha, ‘you’re not paranoid enough for this job.’ She grins. ‘I can definitely help you with that.’

  ‘So what should I do?’

  ‘Well, if you’re running simulations here, and coding while you’re inside the game . . . You need a visual interface, ingame, that shows every individual node, live, constantly.’

  ‘OK,’ says Colt. ‘How about . . . this . . .’

  And he assigns all the major nodes of the network their own individual identities, and maps them onto buffalo, ingame, so he can see at a glance how they are doing, communicating, interacting.

  A simple visual interface, using assets that are already ingame, it only takes a few lines of code.

  ‘Oh, I like that,’ says Sasha.

  He hears them before he sees them. The lazy thunder of their hooves.

  An immense herd of buffalo.

  They pour out of the valley between two hills, trot towards him, skirting a crater, then break into a gallop, snorting, kicking up dust.

  ‘Look,’ says Sasha, pointing.

  One calf is sickly, trailing.

  Colt homes in on it.

  Oh yeah. The new data centre in Iceland. Some problem with the cables to the European mainland . . . Wow, great interface.

  ‘Well, that worked,’ says Sasha.

  ‘Yeah . . .’

  And now Colt moves rapidly back and forth between the gameworld and the code, analysing, diagnosing . . .

  Holy guacamole. Must be some kind of robosub . . . They’ve tapped into the cables, a mile under the water. Nothing I can do.

  Bullpoop . . . this is . . . this is . . . fucking . . .

  Mustn’t swear. Mustn’t swear.

  But that’s not good. The immune system is using overseas assets now. NSA naval intelligence robots . . . It’s growing. It can commandeer almost anything it needs. Colt shivers in the warm air. It does have infinite ammo . . .

  Colt reassigns the new Icelandic data centre’s tasks to the huge old secure centre in India.

  A bull buffalo wanders over to the sickly calf. They grunt and groan, nuzzle each other.

  ‘Oh,’ says Sasha approvingly, ‘Mapping the data transfer ingame . . .’

  The data is transferred. Colt, about to take Iceland out of the network, hesitates.

  ‘If the NSA are intercepting its data anyway . . .’ he says.

  Sasha smiles. ‘We may as well give them something interesting to digest.’

  They rapidly create a fake data stream, full of malware.

  The big bull trots back to the protection of the herd.

  The sickly calf wanders away from the herd, into the desert.

  ‘There,’ says Colt, pointing.

  ‘Where . . . ah, there . . .’ Sasha spots the coyotes.

  The coyotes circle. Bring it down . . .

  ‘I was right,’ says Colt. ‘NSA . . .’

  Colt and Sasha watch happily as the coyotes kill. Eat.

  The malware is on a timer. The NSA won’t notice anything until after it’s swallowed the lot . . .

  OK, now the hard work.

  121

  Colt prepares a bunch of simulations.

  First up, a way of attacking the immune system that looks very promising.

  Second, another way, that does not look at all promising, but which would be amazing if it succeeded.

  Third . . .

  On he goes.

  Strategy after strategy.

  What might work? Defence? Attack? Diversion? Camouflage?

  Well, the immune system launched early. There could be coding holes in its defences. Flaws . . . Sure, it’s designed to check its own security, to self-repair weaknesses; but perhaps it’s still vulnerable . . .

  He’ll try the most promising attack strategy first.

  He launches his attack.

  Colt has done everything to shield his identity, his location; but as soon as he issues commands, sends information out into the world, the immune system uses it to find him. It’s astonishingly quick.

  An eagle sweeps down – unnaturally large, unnaturally fast; tweaked by Colt to map onto a Gorgon drone missile system – and slams into him, its claws out. It strikes his head in passing, rips open his clothes, his side.

  It’s only an ingame event; but Colt has forgotten that he overrode all the inbuilt safety software when he customized the helmet, the micromesh skinsuit.

  His helmet and suit transmit the full force of the blow, unfiltered. The impact is far harder than he expects.

  He is shocked, and screams.

  Ingame, the eagle rips out Colt’s liver through the wound.

  Feeds.

  As the game fades to black, Colt, his sight fading, hits reset.

  *

  Colt respawns in place, still lying on the ground where the eagle’s impact flung him; his eyes still screwed shut in pain.

  He gets reports on the simulation delivered as raw data straight to his new, rebuilt visual cortex. Reviews them without opening his eyes.

  Wow wow wow. Its defences are amazing. It blocked things he didn’t think could be blocked. Tracked him down with incredible speed, and cunning. The immune system outthought him. Outfought him.

  That hurt.

  He opens his eyes.

  Sasha is standing over him.

  ‘Well, that won’t work,’ says Colt weakly.

  ‘Jesus, Colt, reset your skin.’

  ‘Yeah. I should.’

  But he doesn’t.

  Why not? Because . . . because I should be at risk in these simulations. There should be a risk of damage. Or it’s not . . . it’s not real enough.

  OK. Another simulation.

  So, let’s try hiding this time . . .

  He runs it, and dies.

  When he opens his eyes again, Sasha is bending over him, holding his head up. Looking into his eyes.

  His face hurts. Ingame, the eagle caught his cheekbone, broke his eye socket, ripped out his eye with its claw; and the safety-disabled helmet has done its best to map the broken cheekbone, broken eye socket. It did a pretty good job. Nothing is broken, in the real world; but he’s going to be bruised.

  Putting off the moment when he will run the next simulation, Colt says, ‘How do you know so much about men, and ah . . .’ He can’t think of a word to express what he wants to say, and trails off.

  ‘I started young,’ she says.

  ‘OK,’ says Colt.

  ‘I made all the mistakes.’

  ‘That’s how you learn, I guess.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’ve got this weird feeling,’ says Colt.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ says Sasha.

  Is that a sarcastic remark, or a request? Colt puzzles over it. Can’t work it out.

  I’ll tell her about it, anyway.

  ‘I think my . . .’ What’s a good word for it? ‘. . . Damage . . . makes a good fit with your damage,’ says Colt. ‘Like two halves of something broken.’

  ‘Jagged edges,’ says Sasha, ‘that don’t fit anything but each other.’

  ‘Yeah! But they fit each other really, really well.’

  ‘Like the two halves of a sorb apple,’ says Sasha.

  ‘What’s a sorb apple?’ says Colt.

  Sasha runs a finger down Colt’s bruised cheek.

  Following the path a tear would take, if he were ever to cry.

  ‘It’s a kind of weird little apple,’ she says. ‘See, Zeus was jealous of human beings, we were so great, and so he cut us in two, like sorb apples, and scattered the halves. And, ever since, people have wandered the earth feeling incomplete.’

  ‘Looking for their other half?’

  ‘Yep. And if they’re crazy lucky, they find it.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He stares
into the eyes of her accurate avatar. ‘We fit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  OK. His face has stopped hurting so bad.

  He runs the next simulation – an attempt to fool it into attacking itself – and the immune system sees through the deception straight away, and kills him.

  Colt and Sasha look into each other’s eyes, and talk, as he runs simulation after simulation, different approach after different approach, again and again.

  He speaks to her, she speaks to him, each avoiding the implications of what is happening, as again and again the ravens call out to the eagles high above, and the lazy eagles peel free of the sky and plunge, and rip out his liver, kill him, again and again.

  122

  ‘Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.’

  — Francis Bacon

  He has exhausted every likely option.

  There is no solution, thinks Colt. There. Is. No. Solution . . . From the corner of his eye, Colt spots a flash and puff, as a gunshot echoes off the nearby hills.

  It came from the rim of the nearest crater . . .

  A buffalo drops to its knees on the parched earth. Its huge horns touch the dusty ground.

  ‘What was that,’ says Sasha, looking up from coding.

  Rifle, large calibre, thinks Colt. So, not a subtle attack. And from very nearby.

  ‘Immune system just took out a big node,’ says Colt, already working on fixing it. ‘It’s not dead, but . . .’

  Can’t fix it. Damn.

  ‘Which one?’ says Sasha.

  ‘Rio de Janeiro.’

  Sasha studies the buffalo herd, which is already splitting up, nervous, skittish.

  She sees the implications.

  ‘That’s not good,’ she says. ‘All the South American nodes must be vulnerable, now . . .’

  Colt nods. ‘I’ve got to pull everything out of there.’

  ‘You could still let the nodes in Brazil, Argentina, Chile draw landscape, do the less important stuff.’

  ‘True.’ He swaps some tasks around. Makes another attempt at recovering the Rio node.

  The wounded buffalo tries to stand up. Can’t. Drops back onto its knees.

  Damn. OK, he’ll run the real attack on the immune system from just the nodes he can defend.

  They both go back to coding, but stay ingame.

  This is . . . companionable? thinks Colt, glancing across at Sasha’s avatar, frowning over her code. It’s not a word he’s ever used before, and he’s not sure if he’s using it right. What would his mother say?

  It’s cosy. This is cosy.

  Sasha looks up and catches his glance. ‘I think I can blind the immune system,’ she says.

  ‘How?’

  She shrugs. ‘Snow . . . I’ve been working on some fractal defence code that expands infinitely inside an attacker’s system.’

  ‘What, kind of a denial-of-service attack from within?’

  ‘Yep, exactly. It’s incredibly minimal, a tiny piece of code, so it’s easy to sneak it in. But it expands like crazy, commits them to resolving infinitely complex snowflakes. Sucks their resources dry from inside . . .’

  Another shot, and this time Colt hears the impact of the bullet in the thinner bone just below the wounded buffalo’s ear.

  Oh, not good, not good.

  The buffalo moans, and topples over onto its side.

  The hills lose texture.

  Colour drains out of the sky. The Rio node is gone.

  ‘It’s picking off the nodes, one by one,’ he says, and he notices his voice is trembling.

  He tries to deepen his voice, stabilize it. ‘Killing my network . . .’

  No, it’s deeper, but it still trembles. Damn. He goes back to his normal voice. ‘I have to launch an attack, while I still have the resources . . .’

  ‘But you haven’t found an approach that will work,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve found a couple that might work,’ he says. She looks at him. Her eyes widen. ‘Well, one that might work,’ he says. ‘If I tweak it.’

  His best model says the chance of success is only 25 per cent. And it failed on the simulation.

  But if he does nothing, his chance of success is zero.

  He reviews the model, tries to work out how to improve it. Another gunshot, from another crater rim; another buffalo falls.

  No, there’s no time to perfect this. He’s losing nodes and resources far faster than he can improve the plan.

  No more simulations.

  No time.

  He launches the attack.

  123

  ‘Any evolving species must look with misgivings on those of its members who first show signs of change, and will surely regard them as dangerous or crazy.’

  — Alan Watts, The Book

  As soon as he’s unleashed the gameworld on the immune system, he knows he has made a mistake.

  The gameworld is big, it’s fast, it’s smart, but it’s not an offensive system. It wasn’t designed to take out other networks. It can try and jam the immune system, overwhelm it, with targeted attacks; but the immune system . . . well, it’s an immune system. Attacks are what it feeds on. It grabs data from the attacks, works out where they are coming from, and goes after those servers, the control nodes . . .

  The gameworld has amazing cyber defences, sure.

  But the immune system has cyber defences, and missiles. Lots of missiles.

  It’s not a fair fight.

  The game system labours, ingame, to map what’s happening out in the real world.

  But the visual metaphors are beginning to break down.

  ‘Colt . . .’ It’s Sasha, but she doesn’t look right. The lines, the details of her face still look real, but the colours have destabilized. ‘I can’t stay ingame, there’s problems with connection where I am in the real world . . .’

  Her eyes turn green, then brown.

  Her skin turns a yellowish red, then pale tones of blue. He knows it’s an illusion, caused by the colour failure, but she looks cold, frozen.

  ‘I’ll finish my code outgame and come back . . .’

  ‘Sasha . . .’

  But she’s gone.

  He has no time to react to that.

  The gameworld is being damaged faster than it can show Colt the damage.

  The buffalo get nervous, very nervous, mill about, rounding up their calves, then they bunch together for protection.

  The clouds are thickening. Moving lower, closer.

  The matted coats of the buffalo generate tremendous static as they rub and push past each other under the low sky, and a sudden electric blue light wavers across their backs, ripples up their horns.

  Overexcited ions.

  St Elmo’s fire.

  What the heck is that mapping? Nothing good . . .

  Colt switches back and forth, from the ingame overview to the raw code, rewriting it, fighting the counter-attack.

  And now rapid, rhythmic gunfire comes from the crater rims.

  Gatling guns, thinks Colt. Oh crap.

  The immune system has worked out the gameworld’s physical architecture. Worked out where everything is.

  The buffalo herd are mown down methodically. Collapsing in pools of electric blue light.

  124

  The fact that this world is ending is not obvious, yet.

  The game deals with processing shortages without breaking the frame. No warning alerts. Just a long, slow closedown that makes sense inside the story, inside the logic of the game. Blizzards, fog, a dust storm . . .

  But Colt can feel the shutdown coming, can see it. Visibility in the game is getting worse. The clouds lurch closer, lower, darker, as the weather continues to map the activity of the NSA, the NDSA, the immune system itself, as it takes over more and more resources.

  Soon they will reach the sun.

  The wind rises to a howl.

  Colt throws more processing power at defending the surviving nodes. Which takes away more resources from the actual game.
<
br />   All over the world, players are bounced out of the game, for lack of resources. Complaints are normally processed smoothly by a huge open-source AI; but tens of millions of angry players overload it, and it glitches.

  Oh man, this is terrible . . .

  Having tens, maybe hundreds of millions of angry players trying to chaotically get back into the game is going to rob him of an awful lot of power.

  No, he’s got to do it.

  Node after node is being crippled, killed.

  Less and less of the surrounding territory is being rendered.

  Colt sends a top-level admin note to all players worldwide.

  ‘We’re experiencing some unexpected downtime. There’s a security breach that needs to be patched, immediately. All players not actively coding will, unfortunately, have to stay outgame till the problem is fixed. Apologies. We will notify you as soon as the gameworld is back up.’

  He takes a deep breath, and locks out all players, worldwide. Immediately, the resources available to him surge, and he gets the defence back under control.

  Wait; got to let Sasha get back in . . .

  He exempts her.

  OK, now defend . . .

  But the immune system responds immediately to his response.

  My god. Coming towards him, from the north. Driving the existing clouds out of the way. Absorbing them. Making them look like nothing.

  An immense pale wall.

  Pulsating.

  Closer . . .

  Dust storm?

  Something touches his face. He reaches for it, but it’s already gone.

  His cheek is wet.

  Here comes something else, floating down, a flake of . . .

  He catches it on his fingertip, brings it up to his eyes.

  Holds his breath. His warm breath.

  A snowflake.

  He studies its crystal lattice, until the heat of his fingertip causes the delicate fractal fringe to dissolve, and then the intricate hexagonal crystal core collapses too, and it’s just a drop of water.

  It begins to snow, in the desert, all across the test range.

  Of course.

  Sasha’s snow.

  Her normal code is so elegant, taking up so little memory. Fractal snowflakes, looking infinitely complex, but taking up no resources at all.

  These snowflakes are profoundly different.

  Not fractal.

  Nothing repeats.

  Each crystal heads towards infinite complexity, infinite difference.