GUD Magazine Issue 0 :: Spring 2007
Page 11
But even after she was warm and dry, she hid in her room with the door closed, and over dinner she said, “Andrew is really weird."
Andrew glared at her. She was going to tell. The sick feeling settled deep into his stomach, sending tendrils up and around his heart and throat. He put down his fork.
"Tessa!” said Mom. “What a thing to say."
"But it's true!"
Andrew scowled. It was . “Shh!” he hissed at her, and she fell silent. At least that worked.
But Father pushed her—"What d'you mean, Tess?"—and for the first time since he had learned to speak, Andrew felt helpless.
"Well,” Tess said, “he makes up words that sound like stuff. And make things happen.” She flushed, and glared in turn. “They do. He made the rain stop, for a while. Actually, he probably made it start, too. He would."
Father laughed. Tess shrugged uncomfortably and Andrew lower in his seat. Nobody nobody nobody laugh at his words. He felt the strain on their delicate, crystalline forms in his mind. They trembled. He trembled.
"That's called onomatopoeia,” Father told Tess, amused. “It means using a word that sounds like what it describes. The doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign says that most words don't sound like what they mean—but every language has some that do, and all little kids like them. You know, words like ‘pow!’ and ‘squishy.’ Andrew's just a little more inventive about it than most."
"Onomatopoeia,” echoed Andrew. It sounded random. A dissonance. Inventive meant making things up, not making things happen. He winced. Doctrine meant something that had to be, even if you thought it was silly.
"Yeah, well then how did the rain stop when he said to?"
Father replied with perfect assurance, “Coincidence."
"Coincidence,” Andrew mouthed in turn. Things happening together for no reason. No reason at all. No world that listened when you said things the way they should sound. Nothing. “Shh,” he tried. He could feel a crack in the crystal, a fissure. Crack and fissure sounded totally different, but they meant the same thing. They were arbitrary.
Father continued, oblivious, “Chances are Andrew still plays with words because he's creative. Imaginative.” He gave his son an indulgent smile.
Creative. Creative meant making things; but what could Andrew make when his words meant nothing?
The ethereal, fragile part of his mind, the source of his creation, shuddered—
Imaginative. Making up. Things that never were.
—shattered—
Never were.
—was gone.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Media Hype by Jamie Dee Galey
(art)
* * * *
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Infinite Monkeys by Lavie Tidhar
To Sarah Gordon
A man came to see Master dav as he was practising the Art of Creating Polymorphic Virii.
'Why do you do these things?’ the man asked Master dav.
'There are no innocent users,’ Master dav said.
As the man thought on that, Master dav continued. ‘But I do it because the idea of creating a program that would travel on its own makes me happy. I think of a program that could go where its creator never could, and that makes me both happy and sad.'
The man then bowed before the Master and, saying nothing more, departed quietly from the Master's presence.
* * * *
She chased him from one empty shell account to another, tracing phony netmail nodes, weaving through PABXs, through telephone exchanges, through backdoored commercial servers that shut down as she tried to pass through them, leaving the trail cold, forcing her to retrace her steps, to try again; but always he disappeared in the looping path that he had created for her through the networks, a path that seemed to spell out her name before at last it disappeared.
Sarita sat back in her chair and pressed her hands to her eyes. Her eyes felt loose in their sockets, like marbles made of biological tissue and left to float in a jar of formaldehyde.
She reached for her coffee. It was black and sugary and cold, and when she drank it, it was like being hit by a slow-moving tractor—an unpleasant experience, perhaps, but one that jolted her into a more involved awareness. She put down the coffee and picked up a copy of the Mutation Engine's code. She had looked at that code every night now for the past four months and thirteen days, admiring the writing—it was what computer programmers would call elegant—but mostly she looked at one line of ASCII text which had been left there almost, one might say, unnecessarily.
It was not part of the code; it was a message. It said, ‘To Sarita, who wanted to have a virus named after her.'
* * * *
One day, Master dav was working in his garden when a man approached him.
'How can I protect myself against virii?’ asked the man.
Master dav straightened up and wiped dirt from his hands. ‘The first law of computer security,’ he said, ‘is don't buy a computer.'
As the man pondered this, Master dav raised two fingers in the air. ‘The second law of computer security,’ he said, ‘is if you ever buy a computer, don't turn it on.'
The man then bowed his head to Master dav and left him to his work in the garden.
* * * *
Sarita had once said she wanted a virus named after her.
She hung out at the Ceti Alpha Five BBS, a board that carried both Fidonet and NuKEnet as well as other VX and warez networks. The BBS was situated in the bedroom of a forty-five-year-old man whose handle was the somewhat unlikely Cowboy Bootstrap and whose real name was the even unlikelier Jonathan Boot. He had created a couple of boot viruses, Duke-1200 and MarlboroMan.2. The BBS was situated in America, but Sarita accessed it through a local Delhi PABX that belonged to the First Bank of India; she didn't think they'd miss the money.
It was a good board. It had three dedicated lines, which meant three users could be online at the same time; sometimes Nowhere Man from NuKE hung out there, and also Dark Angel from Phalcon/ SKISM.
Cowboy Bootstrap, Sarita understood, was what in America they called an ‘ex-hippie'. On the introductory screen of the BBS, Bootstrap posted a manifesto for virus writers.
Elegance, it said, is the number one criterion for any piece of code, particularly virii.
It also gave the three rules for the origin of life (as we know it):
One. Reproduction
Two. Mutability
Three. Heritability
One meant that an organism had to have the ability to reproduce.
Two meant that offspring were subject to change or alteration.
Three meant that those changes would be passed on in turn to another generation.
Virii, Bootstrap pointed out, fulfil two of these criteria. The second criterion is the one that is missing. As yet.
In her post, Sarita simply said, ‘I'd like a virus named after me.’ She signed it ‘Sarita', which was both her handle and her name.
And then, six months later, while she was sitting in her small room with its peeling yellow paint and small window that let in a little cooling wind from outside, she received a message, sent to her personal Fidonet address, that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
She opened it, and inside was the source code, which she printed out, waiting as the tractor moved on the printer and the head ran over the lines and the sheets tortuously came off the spool, and she tore off the punctured sides and let the strips of paper drop down from her hand to the floor.
And the message inside said, ‘To Sarita, who wanted to have a virus named after her.'
She knew who had written it. Of course she knew. Because he had signed it, as he had the ones he had released before: ‘This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988-89,’ with a signature. ‘dav.'
* * * *
Infinite Monkeys Theorem n. The hypothesis that an infinite number of monkeys each punching keys on a typewriter will be able to
produce, for example, the complete . The term here refers to a brute-force mode of attack, but the theorem has engaged at least one hacker with an idea closer to the original.
* * * *
She tried to contact him.
Sarita didn't know much about Bulgaria. She knew it was somewhere in Europe, that it was Communist, that Sofia was its capital. She also knew—which not many people did—that the Bulgarian VXers used computers called Pravetz, which Bulgarian scientists had developed by reverse-engineering IBM PCs. She had heard the Bulgarian VXers hung out at a BBS called the Virus Exchange, which was in Sofia and had been the first such BBS, though it was now only one of many. It was still, however, the best known.
She dialled the Virus Exchange BBS via a local PABX, rerouting the call through a second PABX (this one at the offices of a minor corporation in the U.S.) for added security. It was remarkably easy to hack—or, more correctly, phreak—PABX systems. The most difficult thing was getting the number in the first place. Sarita used a basic war-dialling program she ran at night, calling ranges of numbers until the computer hit a data line. Data lines usually picked up after two rings, whereas sleeping people took longer, so the program terminated the call after two.
Getting into the exchange (PABX stood for Private Automatic Branch Exchange) was easy once she knew the codes the particular system accepted. She dialled through to the U.S., into the Cornell & Co. Import & Export Company offices, and from there—and making sure to remove the entry afterwards from the log file—she dialled Bulgaria.
It took her several calls to become a registered user on the board. To have access one had to demonstrate her abilities, and this particular board demanded a new virus be uploaded into its files section before it allowed her access. Sarita had never considered writing a virus before, and she didn't dare execute the code dav had sent her. So instead she modified one of the viruses in her small collection, changing its signature, removing its tiny routine for destroying sectors of the hard drive and adding an amusing graphic effect that rearranged the letters the user typed on the screen into obscenities. It was rather large at nearly 4K, but the BBS did not a good ; it only demanded a . She uploaded it, and the next time she logged in, she was finally granted access to the board's main menu.
The Bulgarians carried NuKEnet and the other VX networks, and of course Fidonet, which was the biggest of all the mail networks. They also carried their own Bulgarian network.
Sarita noticed dav's name amongst the posters on the Bulgarian network. She didn't hurry. She began frequenting the board when she could and chatting to the sysop or other users logged in, most of them Bulgarian.
Two days later another e-mail came, from the same anonymous source. ‘Why are you following me?’ it said. ‘Leave me alone.'
Sarita took it as a good sign. ‘Why did you dedicate the virus to me?’ she posted into his local Virus Exchange BBS mailbox.
'You said you wanted it,’ he replied.
'I need to talk to you,’ she wrote. ‘About the code you sent me.'
'You should see a doctor.’ This message to her Delhi account, source untraceable. ‘Normal women don't spend their time talking about computer viruses.'
'I do not want to be a normal woman,’ Sarita sent back to the Bulgarian mailbox. ‘At least not in Bulgaria.'
She stopped when she wrote that. She thought about what it would mean, to be a normal woman. She hoped to go to university in the States. Her father would want her to marry, but he was a modern man and wasn't going to arrange a husband for her. She didn't know if she wanted a husband, or children. What she wanted was a new 386 machine with 16MB of RAM and a 9600bps modem. At the moment she was using a 2400bps modem, which meant it could only transfer 2.4kb a second at best.
'Why do you want to talk to me about the code?’ dav wrote to her. ‘It is only a stupid code. You are behaving like a girl.'
'I am a girl,’ Sarita said. And, ‘What should I do with it?'
'I don't care,’ dav said. ‘It is not a very good virus. It will not survive in the wild.'
'How do you know?’ she asked.
His reply was almost instantaneous; Sarita guessed he was logged in to the BBS at the same time as her, though she couldn't see him. ‘Too vulnerable. Too small environment. Rate of infection too slow.'
'But it isn't a normal virus,’ she said.
'No,’ dav said. ‘It isn't.'
* * * *
Mutation Engine n. added to a regular program or virus that can:
—encrypt itself and the program it is linked to
—create a decryptor to be run before the main program, where—each decryptor created will have a different signature.
* * * *
'Mutation engine is stupid idea,’ dav said. ‘It is the same virus, it just looks different. It doesn't really change.'
'And you don't like that?’ Sarita asked.
'It's boring,’ dav said. ‘First, I wrote it for fun. I couldn't care less for all the suckers who see/use it. They were not supposed to make such a big mess.'
'So what you sent me is not a mutation engine,’ Sarita said.
'Is just an idea I liked,’ dav said. ‘To make virus that always change. But with rules. Very simple rules. Small, random changes. And it has to meet other viruses, to exchange bits of code with them, and make new viruses. So this virus is like a baby, easy to find, easy to kill. Maybe if there were more computers, and they were all connected, and they all had bad security, then it could work. But not now.'
'But viruses spread all over the world!’ Sarita said.
'That is true,’ dav said. ‘For example, the three viruses I released in the wild went to America. Because people steal computer games, and don't buy programs, so they get a virus. But these are dumb viruses, and anyway the a-v people find them and three, six months later, nobody has them anymore.'
'Will it work?’ Sarita asked. ‘That's what I need to know.'
'Maybe,’ dav said. It was a single word in the middle of a page full of spaces, left like a goodbye letter in her Delhi mailbox. ‘Maybe.'
* * * *
He refused to make any more contact with her. She lost access to the Virus Exchange, and after that dav fell silent all across the networks. He had simply disappeared, no longer posting messages, nor sending new viruses into the wild.
Time passed. At the Ceti Alpha Five BBS, Cowboy Bootstrap began collecting new mutation engines, from people like Nowhere Man and Dark Angel. But they didn't make new viruses, they only made old viruses look new.
Sarita still had the source code, and still she didn't execute it. It was like a baby, dav had said, and Sarita felt protective of it, as if it were a seed for an unknown plant, one that she had to guard until it could be planted safely.
She finished school and went to university in America, first encountering the academic network, the Internet, that scientists used to talk to each other. It was interesting, but not many people used it and the security was almost non-existent.
Operating systems changed. On the PC, DOS was supplemented by Windows 3.1, then replaced entirely by Windows 95. Unix was still used to run networks, and networks began to connect to each other more.
Modem speeds went up. The 9600bps was replaced by the staggeringly fast 14,400bps and finally by a 36kb modem.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented a hypertext system to be used on the Internet. In 1990 Communist rule fell in Bulgaria. In 1993 Marc Andreesen released version 1.0 of Mosaic, a graphical user interface for hypertext.
Over the years, Sarita made small changes to the source code, just enough so it could function in the new computer environments, under the new operating systems. She also customised it several times, so different versions of it could run on almost anything and still talk to each other.
In 1995, Sarita married.
'You will never hear from me again,’ dav wrote to her, effortlessly tracking her to her new mail account. It was the only correspondence from him since his ‘Maybe', and he
stuck to his word. She never heard from him again.
In 1992, the number of hosts on the Internet reached 1,000,000. In 2001 it was suggested that over half a billion people were using the network.
A year later, Sarita accessed the old hard drive that held on it the seeds she had modified. She put three programs on the otherwise clean disk: a shareware game, a freeware utility, and a screenmate program that had a stripper walking up and down the screen.
She compiled the code and executed it.
'To Sarita,’ the message on the screen said. ‘To Sarita, who wanted to have a virus named after her.’ It flashed on the screen, then disappeared as the seed finished running.
Sarita looked at the directory contents. The files she had left there were seemingly unchanged. Their size was the same, the date of last modification was still thirty days ago, and the permissions and attributes were all the same.
She looked at the program, thinking of children sleeping.
Then she uploaded the programs onto three different file servers in three different physical locations on three separate continents.
They were popular programs, and they would be downloaded fast. And they would work, and whatever was inside them would also work, and make more copies of itself.
They might be caught, but they were slow and scared and easily hidden. They might last a while in the wild.
'In American movies, at the end, always the good guy gets the money, the girl, and the applause, and the bad guy gets in jail or something,’ dav had said to her once. ‘But in real life, it's not clear who is good and who is bad, and who gets what. It's not black and white. The only thing that is for sure is that good people always lose.'
She thought of a program that could travel on its own, and all the wonderful places it might go and see. She thought about dav and wondered who he really was, and what his real name would be, and what he was doing now, and if he even remembered the seed he gave her—if he even remembered her.
Maybe.