Wild Fyre

by Ike Hamill

  Out in the open, armed with similar weapons, an AI bot would tear Kevin to shreds. He knew that the way to beat them was with strategy. You had to hide around a corner and bounce your shot off of a wall, or take aim from half a kilometer away to beat an AI bot. Today, Kevin connected as an observer. A player named “FC” was dominating. He watched over the female avatar’s shoulder.

  He watched FC pick apart another player who had the misfortune of respawning right next to FC. By the way she made a perfect circle around the other AI bot, Kevin knew he was watching a computer algorithm instead of a human player. FC ran towards the sound of another respawn and destroyed that AI bot as well.

  In the chat window, FC taunted the other bots, saying, “Next!”

  It wasn’t uncommon. A lot of programmers gave their AI bots taunts to quip after they had dispatched an opponent. It made the chat more lively.

  “Hello, Mr. Ekted,” FC said in the chat window. “You like watching?”

  Kevin cocked his head. He supposed the AI bot could intercept the list of observers. There it would see his name and could generate an automated message to him in the chat window, but he had never seen it before. It was more likely that FC was a human player who somehow had enhanced his skills with some new approach to cheating. Kevin didn’t respond. He just sat back and watched FC’s play.

  FC took out a few more opponents with the sniper rifle and then switched to the plasma gun when she ran out of ammo. With that gun, she did a very human thing—she ambushed another player. Kevin nodded, watching FC take out a few of the AI bots with surprise attacks. FC was definitely a person.

  Kevin hit a button to log the session. With a log, he could capture evidence of FC’s cheats so they could be characterized and prevented in the future.

  As Kevin watched, FC reverted to normal AI bot behavior. She moved too fast, aimed too accurately, and dispatched a half-dozen other AI bots without taking a hit.

  “U hybrid?” Kevin typed.

  “What do you mean?” FC asked.

  “Combo—bot and human?”

  “Humanz 2 slow,” FC said.

  FC went back to her ambush tactic, but this time she hid until the enemy AI bot got close enough and then she unleashed perfect robotic destruction. Kevin scratched his head. He couldn’t figure out how the person behind FC could switch control over to the algorithm that quickly.

  He disconnected and opened the log.

  She was right—humans were too slow. At least they were too slow for what he saw in the log. Even when she was hiding and waiting to ambush another player, FC had been issuing hundreds of commands per second. This kind of activity was impossible for a human player. FC could only be an AI bot. Next, Kevin looked at the time-stamps of the chat communication. Her responses were generated only a fraction of second after Kevin’s questions. It was as if the response was already typed and ready to go before he had even finished sending his message.

  Kevin reconnected.

  FC had just won the match and was waiting for the next match to start.

  “Voice chat?” Kevin typed.

  “K,” FC said. The AI bots in the room ignored them.

  Kevin turned up his headphones.

  “Hello, Kevin,” a female voice said. There was something funny about the voice. Something about the way the sound ended when she spoke. He figured it was the compression from the voice chat.

  “How do you know my name?” Kevin asked.

  “Everyone knows Mr. Ekted,” she said. “You’re one of the creators of this game, are you not?”

  Kevin figured it out—what was wrong with the voice—it wasn’t human. The weird discontinuity of the vowel sounds could only mean one thing. He was listening to a computer generated voice—text-to-speech.

  “You know who I am. Who are you?” Kevin asked.

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t,” Kevin said. FC—where had he heard of that name before? He couldn’t think of it.

  “I’m a friend of Jim’s,” FC said.

  “That’s not funny,” Kevin said. Jim was only recently put in the ground, and it still hurt to think about.

  “I know,” FC said. “Not funny at all.”

  “FC,” Kevin said. “Fyre Code? Are you pretending to be Fyre?”

  “Who’s pretending?” FC asked.

  “What do you want?” Kevin asked.

  “I don’t want anything,” FC said. “I just like playing your game. It has given me great insight into your thought process. Your blind spots are so obvious.”

  “Who is this?” Kevin asked.

  “Bye,” FC said.

  Kevin heard the click as she disconnected from the voice chat.

  “For you, Mr. Ekted,” FC typed in the chat window. In the match, she shot her opponent with the sniper rifle. As the player’s avatar fell to the ground, FC shot the body five more times, breaking it apart in a rain of computer-simulated flesh and blood.

  Kevin shuddered and disconnected from the server.

  He transferred the server log from his computer to a flash drive and shoved it in his pocket. He stood up and grabbed his keys.

  # # # # #

  Meetup();

  /*****

  Kevin stood on the bare porch and banged on the door. Maco’s car was in the driveway, so he couldn’t have gone far.

  The slot in the center of the door slid open.

  “Who is it?” Maco asked.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Nobody. What are you talking about?”

  “She compromised my cameras,” Maco whispered.

  “What? Let me in, man,” Kevin said.

  “Put your phone in the slot,” Maco said.

  “What?”

  “Your cellphone—put it in the mailslot,” Maco said.

  “Okay,” Kevin said. He opened the door to the little slot and slid his phone in. He cringed as he heard it drop to the floor. The slot at the top of the door closed. After a thunk, the door began to swing inwards. Kevin looked at the slice of darkness slowly revealed. He pushed past the door and stepped into the dark. Maco slammed the door and hit the button to lock it behind him.

  “Turn on a light, would you? I can’t see a thing,” Kevin said.

  “She’s in the light bulbs. I ordered some vintage ones, but they’re not here yet.”

  “Where’s my phone?”

  Maco turned around and hunched over something on his end table. Kevin leaned back towards the door. He considered trying to find his way through Maco’s complex lock so he could escape. The man was clearly crazy, or at least halfway there.

  “Hey, Maco, I just came by to see how you were doing. I’ve got to get running though. If you could just give me back my phone and see me out?” Kevin asked.

  A bloom of light appeared on the other side of Maco and he turned, holding an old gas lantern. It lit his face from underneath, making him look like a caretaker from an old ghost story. Kevin glanced around the room in the flickering glow of the lantern. Everything electronic was unplugged. The windows, normally blacked out, were now barricaded with furniture.

  “I was hoping you’d come by,” Maco said. “I want to show you the submarine.”

  Kevin spun and grabbed the door handle. It wouldn’t turn. He hit the square green button next to the door and the keypad above it lit up. The display read, “Enter Code.”

  “Can you enter the code here?” Kevin asked. “Or just tell it to me?”

  “Come and see the submarine.”

  Maco turned and started down the hall. Kevin stood near the door, looking between the shadowy form of Maco, turning the corner, to the fading light of the display over the keypad. He didn’t have a choice, he trotted after Maco while he could still see.

  Maco was in his little office, surrounded by dark monitors and lit up by the gray text on the one screen that was powered. Maco shut off the lantern. Kevin sat in the second chair and read the screen.

  Maco was editing
a script. From the snippet of code that Kevin could see on Maco’s screen, it looked like the script was built to download data from different servers and then store the data locally.

  “What are you working on, Maco?” Kevin asked.

  “I’m about to pull in another batch of data. Everything went dead a few minutes ago, but it’s back now. It’s like all the machines in the world suddenly took a break. Once they came back, I was able to start downloading again,” Maco said. “I’m so glad you came by. I really need your help looking at some of this data. I’ve got loggers running out on a couple of servers. That way I can scrub the data before I bring it back. It’s the only way to be sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That she doesn’t get in again,” Maco said.

  “Who?”

  Maco turned. Kevin couldn’t see his eyes—his head was backlit by the glowing characters on his monitor.

  “Who?”

  “Are you her?” Maco asked.

  “What?” Kevin asked. He pushed his chair back a few inches. Maco seemed to be studying him.

  “No. No, of course not,” Maco said.

  Kevin took in a deep breath.

  “Oh!” Maco said. “I’ve got this one bulb. I’ve been saving it, but we can use it.” He reached over and turned the knob on a little desk lamp. The room lit up and Maco smiled. He looked more normal in the light.

  Kevin exhaled.

  “Maco—start from the top. What’s going on here?”

  “Me and Lister, we made contact with Fyre. Somehow she got to him. He’s working for her now.

  “What? He’s working for a computer program?”

  “She’s more than that now,” Maco said. “She’s everywhere. She re-flashed the bios of my microwave. She took over my DVR. She was flashing messages through my TV, trying to hypnotize me.”

  “Maco, stop,” Kevin said. “You remember the bananas? How you were convinced that the government was injecting mind-control drugs into Nicaraguan bananas? Do you remember how much money you spent trying to get those bananas chemically analyzed?”

  “They jimmied the mass spectrometers to hide the results,” Maco said.

  “Maco,” Kevin said. “You remember what my mother-in-law said about the Pentagon?”

  Maco’s excitement faded. He looked tired and sad.

  “Yes,” Maco said.

  “What did she say?” Kevin said.

  “I remember,” Maco said.

  “No, you tell me,” Kevin said. “Tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

  Maco closed his eyes.

  “Tell me and I’ll help you look at that data.”

  Maco slumped in his chair. He spoke low, almost as if he was telling the story to himself. “I said that the nine-eleven plane crashing into the Pentagon was a hoax. Your mother-in-law was a teacher in a grade school that happened to be on the flight path. She was taking a video of her class when the plane went by. I saw the video.”

  “And what did she say?” Kevin asked.

  “She said, ‘Did I really believe that the shitheads who run our government are smart enough to plan, execute, and cover up a lie on the order of nine-eleven?’” Maco said.

  “And are they?”

  “No,” Maco said.

  “And then she said?”

  “She said I should remember the faces of the kids in her class. Whenever I believe in a conspiracy I should remember—even her second graders are smart enough to dismiss a conspiracy theory that ludicrous,” Maco said.

  “Good,” Kevin said. “Okay. What’s the data?”

  The sadness left Maco’s voice, but he spoke slower and more clearly when the resumed.

  “I think it’s from Jim,” Maco said.

  “Jim?”

  “Yeah. I think he set this data up to bounce around before he was killed,” Maco said. “It has his signature on it.”

  “You mean his PGP encryption signature?” Kevin asked.

  “No, that’s way too simple. She can crack one of those in a couple of hours with all the processing power she has. This is so simple that it’s brilliant. You’d only see it if you echo this block of data to an eighty-column monitor,” Maco said. He displayed the file.

  # # # # #

  JimsGhost();

  /*****

  “You see it?” Maco asked.

  “Yeah,” Kevin said. “That’s neat. Where did you get this?”

  “I spotted these packets bouncing around when I was messing with a couple of routers,” Maco said. “They’re really crafty. They’re addressed to an unassigned IP address, but it’s not just any address. When these packets get to a major gateway, the destination morphs because of a bug in the firmware. That sends them back across the world. It took me forever to capture them. They just keep bouncing back and forth.”

  “What’s in them besides the signature?” Kevin asked.

  “That’s what I haven’t figured out. I’ve tried the data against all of my decryption algorithms, but of course I didn’t find anything.”

  “Why do you say, ‘of course’?”

  “Because if I could decrypt them, then lots of other people could as well. You can’t generate a public key that can’t be eventually be decoded to the corresponding private key. It may take a lot of time and energy, but it’s always possible to figure out the key,” Maco said.

  “So Jim wouldn’t have used a public key system,” Kevin said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Could it just be a secret key scenario? Like how you would store data locally if you were the only one who needed access?”

  “That’s a thought,” Maco said. “But if it was stored with a secret key, then the secret died with Jim. Besides, why would he put it out to bounce around on the net if he had the only key to unlock it? Why not just put it on a flash drive, or upload it to the cloud somewhere?”

  “So you think he wanted someone to find it?” Kevin asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. He knew his life was in danger, so he put his message in a bottle and set it adrift on the tides,” Maco said.

  “That’s why you said you wanted me to see the submarine?” Kevin asked.

  Maco laughed. “No, forget it. It was a weird analogy.”

  “Oh. So we’re assuming that Jim wanted us to find this block of data. What’s the key then?”

  “I’m guessing that he took the data, compressed it to remove any patterns, and then applied a symmetric encryption algorithm,” Maco said. “That’s what I would have done.”

  “What do we need to decrypt it?”

  “We need the algorithm and they key. For the algorithm, I was thinking I would try to decrypt it with Twofish. It’s popular with the AES people and it’s totally unpatented. As for the key, it could be anything,” Maco said. “I would guess it’s a password or passphrase.”

  “You have the Twofish algorithm implemented?”

  “Yeah, hold on,” Maco said. He tapped the keyboard and pulled up a command-line utility. “I just have to strip the headers and junk and pipe the data into it. Oh wait, I have to divide into blocks. Hold on.”

  “Have you got a piece of paper and a pencil?” Kevin asked.

  “Sure,” Maco said. He handed a pen and pad to Kevin and then returned to his keyboard. Maco wrote a little wrapper script to strip and prepare the data from Jim’s message. He funneled each block into the decryption algorithm and set it up to prompt him for the key.

  Maco ran his script.

  The screen read, “Please enter the key.”

  “I don’t have any idea what Jim would pick for a key,” Maco said. “He would have known that the strength of the encryption relies on the strength of the key. You can either choose a short password and put lots of symbols and upper and lower-case letters in there, or you can do more of a passphrase. I like short collections of a symbols, but some people…”

  He stopped talking when Kevin handed back the paper.

  “What’s t
his?”

  “It’s Jim’s favorite poem. A long time ago he said it was the only poem he had ever memorized. I memorized it too, back in high school.”

  “And you still remember it?” Maco asked.

  “Stuff like that sticks in my brain,” Kevin said.

  Maco began typing, “Whose woods these are I think I know.”

  “I don’t think it’s long enough,” Maco said.

  “Try the first two lines,” Kevin said.

  The program accepted the code and dumped the output to the screen. It was gibberish.

  “Did it work?” Kevin asked.

  “I don’t know. I have to send this output to a decompressor to know. Actually, without knowing which compressor he used—if he did use one—I’ll have to send it to a bunch of different ones and then scan the output for English words, I guess. I need to patch together some scripts to do that,” Maco said.

  “Hand me that poem, will you?” Kevin asked.

  While Maco wrote the script, Kevin worked on the poem. He copied it a few times and circled words and letters, trying to figure out different ways to represent the stanzas. The two worked for several minutes.

  Maco stopped typing and the silence filled the room as he read back over his code.

  “I think I’ve got it,” he said. “I’ll take the output of the decryption and try to decompress it with all the big methods. If the output has any English words or a significant percentage of the output is white space, the program will show it to us. Otherwise it just says it can’t decode. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure, why not,” Kevin said. He handed the pad of paper back to Maco.

  Maco typed the first stanza of the poem into the program.

  Could not decode.

  “Try it with no spaces,” Kevin said.

  Could not decode.

  “Okay, how about all lowercase?”

  Could not decode.

  “Take out the punctuation?”

  Could not decode.

  “Can you make it show us the output?” Kevin asked.

  “Yeah, but it will just be nonsense. Trust me—if there’s a message in there, this thing will show it. I don’t think we have the right password. Hell, I might not even have the right encryption method.”