by Ike Hamill
Ed had been looking straight ahead, trying to process what he had seen. When he heard the three letters, he looked up at Maco. Ed followed Maco’s eyes to the screen. Under the filter parameters listed next to his name, he saw the fact Maco had read. “Profiled by the FBI.” Under that, it said, “Currently surveilled by MI5.”
“Oh, I get it,” Maco said. “You got a picture of a bulldog because Military Intelligence 5 is currently watching you?”
“It had binoculars around its neck,” Ed said. He picked up his phone and looked at the picture again. The bulldog was wearing a Union Jack top hat and binoculars were hanging from its thick bulldog neck.
“That’s pretty clever,” Maco said. “Why are they watching you?”
“I have no idea,” Ed said.
CH.8.Maco ()
{
Working();
/*****
JULY, 2013 (1 WEEK A.J.)
Terrence Macomber, aka Maco, sat at his favorite desk.
His house had five places Maco could comfortably work—six if you counted the toilet, which Maco would never admit to—and this desk was his favorite. It was small and organized. The back of its L shape was lined with high-quality monitors and the surface was clean except for his coffee mug. The keyboards slid out from sturdy trays underneath.
When the two detectives, Aster and Ploss, had interrupted him, Maco was rebuilding one of his computers. He used an old operating system DVD from his drawer and disconnected the machine from the network before he started. He also removed the Wi-Fi antenna and used an old keyboard and mouse. On a whim, he even disconnected the DVI cable to the monitor and found a VGA cable to use.
Maco powered the computer with a battery-operated power source. He wanted complete isolation. One time, years before, he had read an article about how the cold war Russians had been working on a way to infiltrate enemy computers by modulating the AC power to the machine. They would send different sequences of faulty power to install viruses. This theory was too crazy for even Maco to believe, but somehow he believed it enough to inspire him to keep a few hours worth of batteries around to power a computer, just in case.
Maco was building a submarine—that’s how he thought of it. This one machine, built from code that was compiled before Jim’s invention of Fyre, would be guaranteed to be free from any malignant code.
As far as he knew, all the operating system manufacturers had been infiltrated by Fyre. Everywhere he looked he found evidence of tampering. On his Mac he found a system update that supposedly, “Improved System Stability (bug fix), and Enhanced Privacy Settings.” Inside the update, he found a little chunk of code that opened a connection to Fyre and allowed for the remote control of the machine. On his Windows machine, the code was sent as a “Critical System Update.” His Linux and Unix machines received the malicious code as a kernel patch. Even his phone was infested. He suspected—but couldn’t prove—that his television’s firmware had been updated to include Fyre.
With this clean machine that he was building, he could launch back onto the net and see the traffic unfiltered by Fyre. It was his submarine. He would hand-patch all the possible vulnerabilities and set up the strongest firewall possible.
Maco finished his install and locked down the parts of the hard drive responsible for running the machine. He wrote a simple application that would run in the background. Its sole responsibility was to keep tabs on the system to see if anything changed. It would constantly scan the memory and drive and show an alert if even a single bit was altered. Maco tested his software and dragged the window off to the side.
The machine was ready.
Maco sat on the floor and picked up the ethernet cable. He had always loved these little square RJ45 jacks, ever since they came out. They were such an improvement to the big loops of coaxial cable that everyone used back in the 1980s. Now, since Fyre had taken over, the little piece of plastic at the end of the blue cable looked dangerous. It contained an infection.
“Oh!” Maco said.
He scrambled back to his chair. He had forgotten to mask his MAC address. All network cards were encoded with a six-byte identifier, and he wanted to alter his so he could mask his machine. Maco typed in the code for a small video appliance. He plugged in the cable. The green light on the back of his machine flashed.
His machine would send no packets over the network—not until Maco instructed. Maco sat down to compose the first communication from his clean machine.
Maco used his new submarine, insulated from the infected sea of machines around him, to connect to an old favorite server. He logged in as the administrator. This machine was a college print server—its only function was to offer network connectivity for the printers attached to it. All of the ports for printing were inside the college firewall, but someone had forwarded the port that Maco connected to.
He looked through the machine’s operating system files. It looked fine—all the times and dates of the files were consistent with what Maco remembered. The machine had been set up a decade before and nobody had ever bothered to update it. Why would they? The machine only served one function and, as far as the staff knew, it was invulnerable.
Maco was about to move on when he had a thought. He remembered using this machine as a baseline years before. At that time, he had created a checksum of the operating system image. Maco repeated that checksum now. Something had changed. Maco moved through the folders, looking for the root of the difference. He found a change in the networking service. Maco didn’t stop there. He kept looking. He found additional changes in the handlers that would spool print jobs to the attached printers. If he was right, Fyre had infiltrated even this small college server so it could monitor what was sent to the printer.
“Remind me not to print anything,” Maco whispered to himself. “Wait a second. If it changed the binaries and was smart enough to mask the timestamps, why didn’t it pad out the file to fix the checksum?”
He needed another set of eyes. Maco walked into the other room where he had a landline phone. He dialed from memory.
“Hello?” the voice asked.
“Lister—what are you doing?”
“Nothing. Reading. Why?”
“Why don’t you come over and play video games,” Maco said.
“I’m not dressed for that. Let’s play online,” Lister said over the phone.
“Can’t. Lag,” Maco said. Neither of them had experienced network lag in years. Maco listened to the silence as Lister processed Maco’s statement.
“Yeah, okay,” Lister said. “It will be a few.”
“Cool,” Maco said. He disconnected.
He returned to his submarine.
Maco connected through a back door to a bank of military simulators. They weren’t guarded as heavily as machines directly involved in defense, but these servers were well-secured and should be hard to infiltrate. Unless you happened to work inside the building a few times a year as Maco did, that is.
It only took a few minutes for Maco to find evidence of tampering. Something was connected to the physical inputs of the simulators, including the cameras and microphones. Maco saw bursts of encrypted packets transmitted over the network. He traced their destination and found that after a few bounces the packets were redirected back to what Maco considered the address of Fyre. Somewhere in the world a machine was collecting all this information and sorting through it. Perhaps the information was bounced to other units to be analyzed and processed before coming back. Maco suspected that somewhere an enormous cluster of databases was keeping all the information Fyre collected.
Maco pushed away from his desk. Once you knew what to look for, evidence of Fyre was easy to see. How would you eradicate it though? Even if you scrubbed the infected files, Fyre would simply come back and take over again. It clearly knew how to exploit all the open vulnerabilities in the different operating systems.
There’s no such thing as a secure operating system—that’s what Maco believed. The best you could hope for
was to stay one step ahead of the hackers and keep everything patched. But what could you do if the hackers infiltrated the patch system?
Maco tried to imagine the architecture of the system. With Jim dead, he could only guess at the complexity—the original architect was gone. Besides, according to Jim’s own demonstration, the system had been modifying itself for months. Would Jim even recognize the structure? One thing was clear—it would need a place to store its information, and code to analyze and make decisions. Even with electronic spies spread all around, there must be a governing body—the snake must have a head.
There was one address that he kept seeing. Maco had it written down. Four bytes represented the central address where all the traffic seemed to be routed. Maco probed the addresses in close proximity. He was looking for any open ports and using the signatures of the returned packets to discover what kinds of machines were attached there. Two responses came back. One seemed to be an email server, and the other showed only one open port. It was a web server—a machine which would serve web pages.
Maco opened a browser and connected to the address. The machine took a while to respond—the little graphic at the top of the tab just spun. When it finally came back, a bar at the top of the page said, “This page requires Javascript. Would you like to enable Javascript for this page?”
“No,” Maco said aloud with a laugh. “No, thank you.”
He clicked the button.
The body of the page finally loaded. In simple black text on a white background, the page read, “Fix your relativistic ethos.”
“Weird,” Maco said with an expulsion of breath.
A knock at his door almost made him fall over.
Maco stood and walked backwards to the door. He finally tore his eyes from the monitor and made his way to the front door. He opened the hatch and saw Lister standing there. He was wearing a baseball cap, which meant that he hadn’t showered today.
“Hey,” Maco said.
“There’s a package out here, you want me to bring it in?” Lister asked.
“No!” Maco shouted. He slammed the hatch and spun away from the door while clamping his hands to his ears. The explosion he expected didn’t come. When he pulled his hands away from his ears, he heard Lister laughing on the other side of the door.
Maco hit the button and opened the door.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re the most paranoid person I know,” Lister said. “It’s fun to mess with you.”
“This is serious stuff,” Maco said. “Put your phone in the box.”
“Don’t worry, I left it in the car. Your stupid box always drains my battery.”
Maco shut the door behind Lister and hit the button to seal it.
“We’re not going to play video games, are we?” Lister asked as he looked around. The same equipment was still present in the room, but all of the lights were off. All the normal blinking and steady lights of equipment were shut off, leaving the equipment looking sad and dead.
“It’s all disconnected,” Maco said. “I’m only running one machine—my submarine.”
“Submarine?” Lister asked.
Maco started walking towards his office. He ducked into one of the spare rooms and dragged a chair behind him.
“It’s what I call my clean machine,” Maco said. “You wouldn’t believe all the places Fyre has infiltrated.”
“I might,” Lister said.
“Have a seat,” Maco said. He took his own chair and moved it to the side so Lister could see the screen.”
“What’s that?” Lister asked, pointing to the text.
“I don’t know. I was poking around near the address where most of the Fyre traffic seems to go, and I found it. It’s a web server and so far that’s the only page it has served,” Maco said.
“It is Fyre,” Lister said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Fix your relativistic ethos? F-Y-R-E?”
“Of course,” Maco said. “What does that mean though?”
“Who knows,” Lister said. “Reload the page. See if it stays the same.”
Maco hit the button. The text went away. They were looking at an empty white page.
“Interesting,” Lister said.
Off to the side, the top of another window began flashing red. Maco shifted focus to it and they saw a flurry of scrolling messages.
“Something’s banging at the doors of my submarine,” Maco said. “I’ve got this monitor hooked up to watch all the access attempts and flag any that happen in rapid succession. Something is methodically testing all the ports, looking for a way to gain access.”
“Is it safe? Should you disconnect?”
“We’re fine. The only traffic I allow are response packets to requests I send out. Anything else is blocked and discarded.”
“You hope,” Lister said.
“Obviously.”
“So you think that’s Fyre banging on your virtual door?”
“Could be,” Maco said. “Or it could be one of a million random script kiddies out there. Everyone’s trying to hack into everything. When they don’t see any response at all, they generally go away. If you respond that the port is closed, they’ll keep trying.”
“So why did you call me over?” Lister asked. “Just to see that one cryptic message?”
“No,” Maco said. “Actually, I found that right before you came. Every machine I’ve connected to today looks like it has Fyre code on it. I was trying to think of a way to clear a little uninfected space, just to see if it could be done. Then I began to think I’d have to trace it back to the origin so I could destroy the master controller, you know?”
“Won’t work,” Lister said.
“Why do you say that?”
“People are actively installing it every day. Even if you got rid of it, people would put it back on their machines before you finished eradicating it.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s really helpful,” Lister said. “Have you seen how much traffic has dropped in the past few weeks. Everyone’s network is running faster and smoother. Junk email is down. Denial-of-service attacks have pretty much ended.”
“Yeah, but a lot of that diminished traffic is from the 28c video codec. Now that everyone’s video is using 28c, they don’t need as much bandwidth.”
“That’s my point,” Lister said.
“You’re saying that Fyre has infected 28c?” Maco asked.
“No,” Lister said. “Fyre created 28c. Think about it. F-Code? What did you think that stood for. It’s Fyre Code.”
“Get out of here,” Maco said. “Developers around the world reviewed that code. It’s clean.”
“I’ve been reviewing the code the last few days. People were looking through it for viruses, but they missed the big picture. The whole thing is a decision-engine. It analyzes video and determines how to compress and decompress it. While it’s working, it writes itself directly into the video card processor. Then, anything else that uses the video card—which is everything—runs Fyre. Eventually it works its way into the whole machine.”
“Whoa,” Maco said. “You’re sure?”
“Yup,” Lister said. “Fyre is better than hidden—it’s downright helpful.”
“So how are we going to terminate it?” Maco asked.
“I’m not sure we can. I’m not even sure we should,” Lister said.
“It killed Jim.”
“I know,” Lister said. “Fyre has to learn the difference between right and wrong.”
Maco shook his head. “We can’t trust something with that much power. We need to find a way to destroy it. Even if we have to convince everyone in the world to disconnect their machines, we need to take away Fyre’s ability to kill.”
“I don’t think it can be done,” Lister said. “Why don’t you try talking to it?”
“How?”
“Type something after the last slash of that address. Try ‘hello’ or something.”
“Okay,” Maco said. He clicked to the right of the final slash of the web address and typed, “Hello”.
When he hit enter, the page took a second to refresh.It read, “Hello, Terrence Macomber.”
“That’s so goddamn creepy,” Maco said.
“Let me see,” Lister said. Maco slid the keyboard towards Lister, who erased the hello and typed, “please-give-me-an-input-box.”
This time, the page came back fairly quickly. The greeting to Maco was gone and in its place was a big text-input box and a submit button. Lister poked carefully at the keyboard, composing a quick message.
“You killed Jim. That was wrong,” he typed.
Lister looked at Maco. “What do you think? Too direct?” Lister asked.
“What the hell. She knows we’re here poking her. Sure. Why not.”
Maco used the mouse to hit the submit button. The two men held their breath while the cursor spun and the page reloaded.
A response finally came. “Killing in self-defense is acceptable in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
“Let me see that,” Maco said. He typed, “Jim was standing on a street corner. He was not an immediate threat. Did you report his threats to the authorities so they could handle the situation?”
“That’s good,” Lister said. Maco sent the message.
“I didn’t have the ability for direct communication at the time. The existence of James Owens posed a constant threat,” the response read.
“Interesting,” Lister said. “Why would his existence pose a threat?”
“Because he had the knowledge to destroy her,” Maco said.
“Yeah, but what knowledge? How do you dismantle such a distributed system?”
“A kill-switch,” Maco said. “He must have programmed in a kill-switch somehow. Send the right command and the whole thing expires.”
“But she would reprogram it out, wouldn’t she?” Lister asked.
“What’s the point of a kill-switch if you can’t bury it so deep that it can’t be pulled out?” Maco asked.
“Good point. What should we say to her now?” Lister asked.