by David Walton
“This had better be good,” Brandon growled.
“Your customers are in danger,” Tyler said. “The algorithm that controls your cars is changing. I don’t know what you’re doing or why, but the changes you’ve made are making it unsafe. People are going to die.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You woke me up just to tell me that I’m not as good a programmer as you or Naomi? I can handle my own software, thank you very much.”
“It’s not that. This isn’t just normal software. It has a life of its own.”
“What does it matter to you anyway?” A note of sarcasm seeped into Brandon’s tone. “Oh, that’s right. Because you’re stealing from me. That’s how you’re getting so much market share: you’re using my algorithm to drive your cars, too. Aren’t you?”
“I didn’t steal anything from you.”
“Oh, come on. I know your algorithms didn’t just get better overnight. Naomi’s working for you now, and she has some backdoor to make her super-simulation drive Zoom cars. And probably to make it screw my cars over.”
“It’s not like that.” Tyler took a deep breath. This wasn’t going well. “You’re right—that simulation is driving my cars.”
“Ha! And a confession is supposed to make me trust you?”
“But not by my choice. And not by Naomi’s either. By its choice. The simulation. It’s got a mind of its own. It’s sentient.”
Brandon laughed. He laughed long and hard, though there was a nastiness in the sound. “Wow,” he said. “I expected lies, and I expected manipulation, but this is too much.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s the most pathetic thing I ever heard. Sentient? And what, it’s going to take over the world and kill us all? And wait—let me guess—you want me to ground my fleet and announce concerns that Black Knight cars can’t be trusted? While you step into the gap? What kind of a fool do you think I am?”
Tyler sighed. He hadn’t expected Brandon to listen to him, but he had to try. “You partitioned the simulation. You’re teaching half of the agents to kill. Don’t you think that could cause a problem?”
“And how do you know that? You know I’m recording this, right? You’ve admitted to computer fraud and corporate theft several times in this conversation, and I’m going to report you. And you’d better believe I’m going to press charges. And after that, I’m going to sue you for every cent you own.”
“That’s crazy. Look, I’m just trying to help. I don’t understand what’s in your head these days.”
“No? Well, then, let me be clear. If I could make you watch while someone you cared about died painfully in front of you, I’d do it. I’d pay all the money I own for the chance.”
“We used to be friends,” Tyler said, but Brandon had already hung up.
“No luck,” Tyler said. “It was a long shot anyway.”
Naomi had joined him in Aisha’s apartment. Jada was at daycare, and Aisha was out, meeting a potential client. “We have to find a way to stop this,” Naomi said. Her face was drawn, anguished. “Isaac’s mind is being torn apart. The only artificial mind ever created, and we’re teaching it right from the beginning that humans can’t be trusted. Not only that—we’re training it to kill us!”
“Brandon is; we’re not,” Tyler said.
“You think he’ll make a distinction? His instincts are telling him to kill, and his intellect is telling him humans are a danger to him. Which we are. You and me as well as Brandon. Isaac’s best chance at survival is to kill every human with access to his mind and pay for his bandwidth himself, with no one the wiser.”
“Don’t even say that. He could be listening.”
“You think it hasn’t already occurred to him?”
Tyler sat next to her on the couch. “Well, what can we do? Is there any way we can hack in? Gain admin access to the simulation?”
“No. I built that system, remember? Any attack I could think of, I’ve already defended against.”
“We have guest access. Obviously if you can be killed in the simulation, it allows some level of interaction, right? What does that let us do?”
“Not too much. You always start in the same location, with only a tiny amount of light energy. You can walk around, pick things up, dig, but you can’t gain any more energy. Even if you aren’t killed, the session is pretty much limited by how much light you have.”
“Is that the total list of actions? Walk, pick up, dig?”
“You can build, but the types of materials you can make are pretty limited. You can die to end your game. That’s pretty much it.”
“Wait, die? You mean by getting killed by another player?”
“That’ll do it, sure, but I mean self-destruct. You can use your remaining light energy to blow yourself up.”
“Does that damage things around you?”
“A tiny bit. It’s not a nuclear explosion or anything. You can knock a few points of damage off of somebody standing right next to you, but you couldn’t kill them.”
“What about the wall?”
“You mean the partition? Between the two games?”
“Yeah. That’s an object in the simulation, right? You can see it and touch it. It has a hardness and a thickness to it. Could we blow a hole through it?”
“Not with a self-destruct,” Naomi said. “It’s made of lava-hardened steel. That’s the hardest substance in the game. You’d barely take off a layer of paint, if you did any damage at all.”
“Could we try it?”
“Why? What would that accomplish?”
“Isaac’s whole problem is that his brain is partitioned. If there were some interplay through the two sides—through a hole, for instance—then Mikes from the warring side could come over to the peaceful side and learn to earn light peacefully.”
“Or they could kill Mikes on the peaceful side.”
“Maybe. They might kill at first, but killing wouldn’t gain them any light on that side of the partition. They’d have to learn what did, or they wouldn’t survive.”
“Is that really going to help, though? A few Mikes coming over through the hole and learning to live peacefully?”
“I don’t know for sure. But more Mikes survive on the peaceful side. Coming through the hole is a better survival strategy than staying and fighting. The ones that learn to come through will have a better chance to live and pass on their genes to the next generation.”
“They might not live, though. Evolution will have bred them to earn light by killing, not by driving.”
Tyler shrugged. “It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
It took twenty minutes for their guest avatars to walk to the wall. “We’re using half of our available energy just getting there,” Naomi said. “When we self-destruct, it’ll barely be a pop.”
When they finally arrived, Tyler sat down at the base of the wall, and said, “You stay here and watch, so you can tell me what happened without us having to walk all the way here again.”
His avatar disappeared in a flash of fire and sound. The wall was undamaged.
But no—she leaned close and examined it more closely. There was some damage. Not much—just a slight dimpling of the surface. When she brushed her hand against it, a fine powder slid away. It wasn’t a hole, exactly, but it was damage.
She disconnected, and Aisha’s living room sprang back into view, with its white couches and black coffee table and thick carpet. She told Tyler what she’d seen.
“So much for that idea,” he said. “I hadn’t taken the walking time into account. It would take us until next month to make any significant dent, and we don’t even know how thick the wall is.”
“Giving up already?” Naomi said. “What do you mean? You want to spend the next month walking to the wall and blowing ourselves up? Even if it had a chance of helping him, it would be too late by then.”
“The problem is there’s only two of us,” she said. “If we had more guests logging in, we could do it faster.”
“We don’t need people. We just need guests. This is a pretty simple repetitive action: we just program a bot to do it. Then we can produce them by the millions. Can you imagine? An assembly line of guest avatars, just blowing themselves up against the wall until we force our way through.”
He thought about it. “That’s a lot of connections. We can’t send them all from here.”
“Of course not. We’ll use a botnet. We’ll distribute the bots around the world, hijacking small amounts of other people’s computers and using their IP addresses to make the connection.”
Tyler raised an eyebrow. “Something you’ve done before?”
“Nope. But the principle is simple enough. We should be able to handle it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get coding.”
Brandon rolled in to work at a little past noon the next day. It was earlier than he usually showed up, but he had a blazing hangover, and once awake, he hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. Yusuf didn’t even look at him when the door opened. He was sitting bolt upright in his seat, leaning toward the screen, typing furiously and cursing under his breath.
Something was wrong. “What’s going on?” Brandon asked.
“It’s some kind of denial of service attack,” Yusuf said. “Millions of guest account logins flooding the Realplanet simulation all at once, from all over the world.”
“We allow guest accounts?” How stupid was this guy? This was critical software for a private corporation, and he was allowing just anybody to sign into the servers?
“Apparently we do,” Yusuf said. “I’m just finding this out now. It looks like it’s a default Realplanet capability that was never deactivated.”
“Well, deactivate it now!”
“I’m trying. It’s not as easy as it sounds, especially when the server is overloaded like this.”
Brandon wondered if he’d made a mistake in hiring Yusuf. Public access to the core of software people trusted with their lives? What kind of idiot left a security hole like that? Unless he wasn’t an idiot. He had worked with Tyler, after all. Maybe they had developed more of a connection than Yusuf let on.
Why did everyone around him betray him? Like Tyler and Naomi. He knew the attack was coming from them. They hadn’t been able to talk him into shutting his business down, so now they were attacking him directly. And of course, the two of them had better software skills than some whole countries, while he was stuck with a law school dropout.
“Got it,” Yusuf said. He pressed a few more keys, then crossed his arms and beamed. “They’re locked out. No more guest access.”
“Cars are still running?”
“No problems there. They didn’t actually interrupt our network access to the cars, though I guess if they’d kept stepping up their attack, they might have.”
“And the new partition? Working like it should?”
“Like a charm.” Yusuf chuckled. “Or, like something else probably. Like an engine of war? Anyway, it’s a thing of beauty. Before the attack started, I scraped together a video for demo purposes. Check it out.”
He flashed a video to Brandon’s glasses, which Brandon accepted. The video played, immersing him in the simulated world. Yusuf had cut various scenes from players’ points of view to show what was happening. The result was incredible. Each player was independently given an indication of which other players were friends and which were enemies. He saw sensational ambushes and surprise maneuvers. He saw players risking their lives to kill dozens of their enemies, or equally to save a friend. For the most part, they fought as one army against another. The fact that Yusuf defined the meanings of “friend” and “Enemy” for each individual, however, meant he could mix it up a little. He could split them up into three warring nations, or four. He could suddenly turn allies into adversaries, or vice versa. If a drone bomber wouldn’t drop his ordnance because there were friendlies on the ground, Yusuf could instruct him to consider them enemies, and the bomber would kill them all.
It was perfect. Yusuf had even provided a musical sound-track and a credible voiceover to explain what was happening in the video. Brandon fired off a copy to Harrison and Avery. This was going to make his fortune.
That is, it would as long as Tyler and Naomi didn’t find a way to bring it all crashing down. Yusuf had cut off their avenue of attack this time, but what if the next one was successful? What if they destroyed the simulation? He couldn’t have that. It would ruin him.
He thought he had neutralized Naomi when he got her arrested for murder. Apparently Tyler had scraped up enough cash to get her out on bail, though, because she was out again and walking the streets. And maybe they would eventually convict her and lock her away for good, but in the meantime, she might utterly destroy him.
He couldn’t just sit around hoping they would leave him alone. He would have to go on the offensive.
“Yusuf!”
Yusuf jumped, sloshing coffee out of the mug in his hand. “What?”
“How are those criminals at Zoom Autocars tapping into the simulation?”
“I don’t think they are.”
“I guarantee you our simulated players are driving their cars just like they’re driving ours. That means there must be some connection. I don’t know where the connection is, but I want you to find it.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
Brandon looked at him sideways. Was Yusuf mocking him? Regardless, he would have to trust him, at least for now. He was paying the man an outrageous salary, which he presumably would not want to lose. He would even increase it, if he had to. If he couldn’t earn the man’s loyalty, he could at least buy it.
Though it wouldn’t be enough just to prevent Tyler and Naomi from using his software. They were openly attacking him now. This was war. They had him on the defensive for the moment, but not for long. In war, victory came to the side willing to strike the hardest with every weapon they had at their disposal.
What was that slogan the Germans had used during World War II? Totaler Krieg. Total war. A war in which all resources were mobilized and any attack was justified if it could be used to crush the enemy advance. He needed to take them by surprise, attack them where they were vulnerable, and stop them once and for all.
He had been preparing just such a surprise for some time. Something no one else knew about. He had taken special care with it, had considered every eventuality. It was time.
Tyler had killed the woman Brandon loved. Now he deserved to experience the same pain.
Naomi had used her software as a weapon. She deserved to know what it felt like to be on the other side of that weapon.
Both of them had stolen his property, attacked his business, and made him look like a fool. Going after them wasn’t brutality on his part. It was justice.
CHAPTER 31
Naomi and Tyler pulled an all-nighter on the couch together, coding furiously until dawn. Aisha came home with Jada just after five o’clock, but she saw that they were busy and left them alone. At seven o’clock, she dropped a carton of Chinese food in front of each of them without saying a word. At eleven, she wished them a good night and went to bed.
Finally, by the morning, they had everything in place. Millions of bots from around the world logged into the Real-planet simulations as guests, walked to the same place at the base of the wall, and then one by one, self-destructed. Little by little, they shaved their way through the lava-hardened steel until finally, they broke through.
Just in time, too, because shortly after they reached the other side, someone at Black Knight discovered the attack and terminated their access. Their view went dark. The question was, had Brandon or whoever was working for him seen what the millions of guest avatars were doing? Or had they seen only the flood of connections to the server? If they noticed the hole in the wall, they could close it in an insta
nt, just as easily as they had made the wall in the first place. Since Tyler and Naomi could no longer access the simulation, they had no way to know whether the hole was still in place. They could only hope it was. And hope that their idea worked.
Tyler yawned. He hadn’t pulled an all-nighter like that since he and Yusuf had hacked the lawyers’ Mercedes.
Naomi stood. “I should go. It’s been a long night.”
“Okay. We did good, I think.”
“I hope it’s enough.” She touched her glasses, probably using the Zoom app to summon herself a ride home. She headed toward the front door.
“I’ll call you later,” Tyler said.
Jada ran into the room and threw her arms around him. “Bye, Uncle Tyler!”
He tried to fight back a second yawn, but failed. “Time for school already?”
She giggled. “I’m not in school. It’s daycare.”
“Daycare, right, sorry.”
She wore a pink dress with a million sequins and laces and frills. “That’s quite a dress,” he said. “Are you a princess?”
“I’m a queen. And I command you to come to daycare with me.”
“I don’t know about that,” Aisha said, coming into the room. “I think Uncle Tyler needs a nap.”
Jada took him by the hand, and he let her drag him to his feet. “At least come kiss me goodbye.”
She led him outside and down the steps. Aisha followed, carrying a booster seat and a backpack in the shape of a frog. Naomi was just climbing into a red Zoom car that sat by the curb.