“Push the smekking button.”
Tol scrambled around in the other pocket and found the device. He pulled it out and frantically stabbed at it as the immense derriere closed in. At the last possible moment he found and pressed the correct switch. The rapidly narrowing gap between him and the huge butt abruptly stopped narrowing. He held his breath and continued to cringe for a few seconds for good measure. When it became apparent that gluteal demise was not so imminent after all he crawled out from underneath the now inanimate beast and peered at it with a mixture of trepidation and relief.
“Wow,” he remarked, turning the remote over in his hand, “this thing really comes in handy. Maybe I should carry one all the time.”
“I hasten to remind you that the device is merely a remote controller. The actual functionality is provided by the null magic unit down in the warehouse, the construction details of which render it rather unsuitable for portable use.”
“Too smekkin’ heavy to carry around, you mean.”
“I believe that is what I said. You are, in fact, extraordinarily fortunate that the power supply was present and armed. I suspect it was meant as a demonstration unit.”
“So anyway, what happens to Rover, here, now?”
“Eventually the null magic burst will dissipate and the Guardian will return to its native state. It would be best if you were no longer in the vicinity when that occurs.”
“Not a problem. As it happens, I have a date with a balrog.”
Chapter Fifteen:
Seize() the Day
Aspet winced. The review program he’d established was just short of impossible to carry out in the short time he had left to study, but he felt as though he owed it to himself and to his potential subjects to give it his best shot. It wasn’t a review of computer hacking techniques or esoteric network architectures, however: it was the social and political history of Tragacanth, along with a ponderous volume titled The Precepts of Governing by a well-known political scientist of a past generation. Hacking he knew a lot about—it was the process of ruling a nation where he felt woefully inadequate. The fact that no previous contender for the throne had worried about that aspect until after he’d won would have been irrelevant to Aspet even if he’d known about it. That wasn’t acceptable behavior in his world view. He knew he couldn’t hope to become any sort of expert in policy-making in less than three days, but he nevertheless had to give it his best effort.
The hardest part, he soon came to realize, was staying awake. Most of the material was a little…dry. He found it useful to bang his head against the table every so often to renew his focus, although he also discovered that too much enthusiasm in this activity led to headaches, fuzziness, and a sticky tabletop.
Cranial abuse notwithstanding, Aspet stuck to it like the trooper he aspired someday to be until he decided he’d better wrap things up and realign his brain with the technical challenge ahead. Besides, all this political theory was generating weird cobwebs in his mind. He was beginning to feel a strange compulsion welling up to draft an election committee or organize a fundraiser dinner. It creeped him out.
There would be a total of four candidates for the throne, including of course the present monarch, Trellior I, who had assumed the kingship six years previous. He had been a first-rate hacker prior to his ascension, but it was widely believed he had grown rusty in the three years since his last challenge. It isn’t easy to keep your mad skills pumped while playing lord over all you survey, after all.
Still, Aspet wasn’t harboring any delusions about the challenge he faced. The king had the ‘home field’ advantage and was defending his regime, not to mention the lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed, so there was little doubt he would put up a fierce fight. Also, two previous challengers, both of whom Aspet had known, had mysteriously vanished after failing in their royal bids. This was especially worrisome to him, but he didn’t know what, if anything, he could do to prevent it happening to him—apart from winning. A complete transcript of that challenge and the one which gained Trellior the throne would prove useful, if one could be had. Fortunately, he had one right here, supplied by the mysterious but ever-useful Boogla. It was weird having a powerful fan you’ve never met and really haven’t done anything to deserve. Weird: but oh, so useful.
It was clear from the outset that Trellior was a search-and-destroy hacker. He wasn’t concerned with finesse or elegance, just brute force and aggression. The transcripts showed a predictable pattern of reconnoiter/decoy/attack/dodge that Aspet found rather simplistic, although obviously successful. It was a tactic he’d seen and defused before; he could only hope His Majesty’s strategy hadn’t evolved any since the most recent transcript. That seemed pretty unlikely, given that all candidates for the throne came under extremely intense scrutiny by the king’s personal staff. They probably knew just about everything there was to know about him, Aspet mused, and that meant they’d studied his tactics at least as closely as he’d studied Trellior’s. That was all right, though, because his personal strategy was nothing if not fluid.
The morning of the challenge dawned overcast and drizzling. Aspet was up before the light, readying himself mentally and going over fine details of the Royal Network one last time. He was so absorbed with his preparations, in fact, that he almost missed the message that popped up on his screen.
To: Asp37!cholinergia!goblinopolis
From: boogla!boogla!boo
Subject: Good fortune
Be wary of the unexpected.
Seize() the day.
All things come to those who wait().
Aspet rolled his eyes and chuckled. “Another cryptic communiqué brought to you by the great and mysterious Boogla.” He stared at the words a moment longer, but could wrest no more meaning from them and went back to his review. A few minutes later he looked up and realized it was time to leave for the Arnoc. He closed his notebooks, shut down his computer, and said a little goblin prayer for luck.
He had an escort to the challenge site from two Royal Protective Corps agents, as was normal procedure for all aspirants to the throne who made it this far (to ensure they arrived safely at the Arnoc and, he suspected, in order to discourage last-minute cheating). They weren’t a very talkative pair, so the trip was made in silence. That didn’t bother him; he needed to concentrate, anyway.
Challenges to the throne were a rare occurrence overall, and this combined with the monumental nature of the contest made them quite important to the Goblinopolis social calendar. The South entrance to the tournament hall was secured and reserved for official personnel only, but the area surrounding the North, public, entrance took on a carnival atmosphere in the days leading up to a challenge. There were barkers, biters, jugglers, jongleurs, illusionists, delusionists, contortionists, extortionists, daredevils, dust-devils, acrobats, fruitbatters, and a whole host of other entertainers and profiteers. Just about every semi-sentient race on N’plork was represented in the teeming throng.
Aspet had witnessed this spectacle once before during the last Royal Challenge, but not being willing to mingle very long in such a vast assemblage he hadn’t really comprehended the full scope of the event. This time he only saw the crowds from afar, as the RPC kept everyone back a considerable distance from the disembarkation area for official vehicles. He felt a little strange being hustled up the carpeted runway surrounded by goons in RPC tactical gear, but it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant experience.
Inside the Arnoc tournament hall, Aspet was taken directly to a security station where he was searched, given a lecture on security measures in the presence of the Royal Personage, and required to sign the formal Intent to Occupy the Throne documents. Then it was off to the Master of the Tournament for a briefing on the rules and expectations for candidates. Finally, there was an all-too-short interval where he was allowed to familiarize himself with the equipment he’d be using and the secure network partition established for the purposes of the challenge. Very soon it was show time and the o
rnate curtains were drawn aside.
His opponents, including the current king, were lined up every five meters along a semicircular console with a huge four-way split screen placed out in front so the audience could see what all the candidates were typing but the participants themselves could not. Between each pair of candidates was a read-only network traffic monitor/recorder with a judge at it. Each kept a separate copy of all packets passing across the net and allowed that judge to replay any exchanges for analysis, looking for suspicious activity. The system had been fine-tuned by every challenge that went before, as something new and unanticipated occurred with every contest. Cameras, other than those belonging to officially-sanctioned and thoroughly vetted commercial media, were strictly forbidden in the audience to discourage elaborate cheating scenarios that had taken place in the past. Several highly-trained RPC agents with optical reflection detectors were stationed on a platform overlooking the crowd, watching for traces of the illegal devices.
The spectators were a seething pie wedge splayed out within line of sight of the giant display boards. With a growing population of computer geeks in the kingdom, hacking had become rather a popular pastime, even to the point of being considered a bona fide sport. The Tragacanthan Royal Challenge was the de facto World Championship of hacking on N’plork. There were many other competitions, but none with stakes this high. This one was for all the marbles: absolute (more or less) ruler of the largest and most prosperous nation on the planet. For a split second Aspet sat stunned in awe and terror at being part of something far beyond his station, but he quickly reverted to his long hours of training and focused his thoughts solely on the task at hand, shutting out all distractions. He could never forgive himself if he did anything less than his absolute best here today, no matter the outcome.
There was a bit of ceremonial hoo-hah involving the Loca Magineer and various court officials, mostly for the benefit of the crowd, that allowed the contestants a bit more opportunity to become intimate with the physical and logical layout of their workstations. At length Cromalin II waved his Scepter of Office in a blessing-like gesture and the challenge was on.
The objective of this particular challenge was a form of capture-the-flag scenario. Each contestant had an encrypted token in a randomly-chosen location on their local system known only to him. They were charged with protecting this token from the other challengers, while capturing and holding as many of the other tokens as possible. Points were awarded every time you captured an opponent’s token and deducted every time your own token or one you had captured was taken by someone else. The contestant who possessed all of his opponent’s tokens or, if no one had achieved that, with the highest number of total points at the end of one hour was declared the winner.
Aspet started by building some stout walls around his token. He changed the name of it, hid the properties by embedding it in a deceptively constructed shell that looked like an incidental system file, and set up reactive sensors throughout the system that would warn him if anyone got close while at the same time relocating the token automatically, giving him valuable time to take active countermeasures.
Next he ventured out into the network, looking for easy targets. He found one almost immediately. It was so blatant, in fact, that he knew it must be a trap. He could simply skirt around it, but first he crafted a little time bomb of his own and tossed it into the mix.
A little further on he found a remote process being advertised that he knew had a couple of old vulnerabilities. He pushed against the first one and nothing happened. The second, however, proved to be incompletely patched and he slipped smoothly in through the resultant hole. Knowing a conventional system search for the token was probably both pointless and dangerous, he dumped the raw directory tree with full file attributes directly from the kernel and sorted it three times: by date created, date modified, date last accessed. Most hackers were skilled enough and had the presence of mind to change all three accordingly when fabricating file metadata, but under the intense time pressure of the challenge mistakes will be made.
Aspet did some quick further refining of his sort algorithm and narrowed the pool of likely candidates down to about a dozen files. He created a new directory and tried to copy all of them there. One of the files refused to be copied. “Target acquired,” he chuckled softly. Unlike all other files on the system, tokens could not be copied—only moved. He snagged it, erased his tracks, and beat a hasty retreat.
Just then an alert message popped up to advise him that an intruder was closing in on his own token. He sighed. There just wasn’t time to plug all the holes, several of which he suspected had been left on the system intentionally. He slammed out a script that created a dozen encrypted decoys and shotgunned them throughout the file space. That ought to slow him down a bit. He kept one eye on the intruder’s progress—better to let him waste time poking around fruitlessly than simply kick him out—and slid back out into the network, on the prowl for another token.
Almost immediately one, then another of his decoy tokens disappeared. Aspet chuckled. Those two would probably leave him alone now unless they discovered his deception in time to do something about it. He followed one of the data trails back to its origin, and found his counterfeit token in the same directory as the owner’s genuine one. Shaking his head at the lack of defensive structure, he snagged the real token and beat a hasty retreat. Two in the bank, one to go.
The remaining token belonged to Trellior. The king had spent his time well so far, first erecting prickly defenses of his own, then building a sort of armored vehicle for invading and hijacking other candidates’ tokens by brute force. Once His Majesty entered the field of combat in earnest, it didn’t take him long to realize that he only had one real opponent here: Aspet. The other two had already lost their tokens to him, and the fools had even fallen for the old counterfeit token ploy. Clearly they weren’t worth expending any additional effort on.
Trellior moved without any attempt at stealth onto the network and began to hammer away at Aspet’s defenses as hard as he could. Aspet had expected this, given the king’s predilection for direct action, and waited until his opponent was fully committed to the attack before playing his hand. He intentionally weakened his barricade at one specific point and hung back until Trellior found and exploited the hole. As soon as the king was through the opening Aspet snapped it shut and trapped the intruder in a ‘jail’ that appeared to be a root-level account but was actually an isolated user with no real access to system resources.
He knew Trellior wouldn’t be held up long in there, but his brute force approach would actually work against him in these circumstances and prolong that time sufficiently for Aspet to do a quick search for the king’s token. Knowing Trellior’s style, Aspet simply looked for the most heavily defended area. It didn’t take long to find it.
He circled the bastion warily, admiring the multiple layers of alternating passive and active defenses. It was beginning to dawn on him that no one, least of all a rusty coder like Trellior, could have thrown up such sophisticated barriers coding from scratch in the amount of time that had elapsed since the start of the challenge. There had to be prefab code blocks in use here, something that was strictly against the rules. At least, against the rules for everyone but the sitting monarch. The only person who could overrule him in this case was Cromalin, and the Loca Magineer would have to see concrete proof of the infraction in order legally to intervene. No, better to use the Sovereign’s own duplicity against him in a more...direct way.
His Royal Majesty Tragacanth was peeved. The canned attack code he was deploying did not operate as expected, and as a result it was taking too long to break out of that snot-nosed little brat Asp...whatever’s pathetic attempt at a trap. He pounded impatiently on his keyboard as he waited for a new process to fork and spoke quietly. “If you can hear me, Snarlox—and you’d better be able to—this tactical software you wrote is a load of rancid rok excrement. It’s not properly pipelined, the processor overhead i
s bollocks, and the system footprint is far larger than you promised. When I get through here we’re going to have a little chat about what it means to serve one’s king.” He smiled as he imagined his gnome accomplice sweating in the secret room above and behind him.
Snarlox was worse off than that, in fact, because he’d just come to the realization that the problems His Majesty the Boss was experiencing were not actually his fault. Somehow, the software he’d surreptitiously stashed on Trellior’s computer had been modified by parties unknown. The security had been airtight—unless—there had been someone else on the inside...no time to worry about that right now, regardless. He had to figure out some way to get his neck off the chopping block.
His audio communication with Trellior was one-way, to minimize chances of discovery by either the judges or some smartass in the audience with an RF-triggered scanner. He did have an illicit encrypted data tunnel into the king’s box via a network control channel, however, although use of even that ran a certain risk of being picked up by the Arnoc traffic anomaly sensors. Part of Snarlox’s job here was to serve as scapegoat if the cheating scheme was discovered; toward that end an elaborate series of fabricated clues had been planted, all of which pointed squarely at him and exonerated the king of any complicity. Snarlox himself had been conditioned to resist the standard interrogation methods employed by the Special Investigations Branch of CoME, who would be responsible for investigating any such allegations. Trellior had gone to great lengths to ensure that he did not lose this challenge.
Meanwhile, back on the playing field, Aspet was chinking away at Trellior’s defenses. The king was employing a rather clever ‘sandtrap’ technique that filled in any gap as soon as it was opened. As he tried different approaches, Aspet began to realize that not only was the Royal strategy clever, it was darned effective, especially as a delaying tactic. Of course, Aspet could probably win the challenge now just by holding onto the tokens he already possessed, but he had a burning desire to bring Trellior to his knees for being such an utter turd. He strongly suspected that the king hadn’t even written the code he was using to cheat. That was much less forgivable, in Aspet’s eyes, than the mere act of cheating itself.
Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 Page 20