by K S Augustin
The story Carl was weaving was fascinating. Without lifting her gaze from his, Tania searched blindly for a chair, sinking into it heavily when she found one. Unfortunately, she thought she knew exactly where this story was leading.
“The Rhine-Temple botnet successfully compromised that Russian server, didn’t it?” she asked.
He made a clicking sound with his tongue.
“Give the lady a prize,” he said, a smile breaking across his face. “When the Rhine-Temple infiltrated the server, something happened. The most probable explanation is that the Russian software tried to assimilate the entire botnet but couldn’t. Instead, the botnet conquered the software, one artificial intelligence at a time, incorporating the data-mining heuristics into its own programming.”
“Becoming the only semi-sentient piece of viral software in the world.” Tania's voice was hushed.
“And it’s been on a global kick for dominance ever since.”
Tania didn’t want to ask, but she could now fully understand the reasoning behind Carl’s drive to defeat the Rhine-Temple.
“How do you intend to stop it?” she asked.
“Almost one of the first things the Rhine-Temple did when it joined with the Russian AIs,” he said, sidestepping the question, “was to sever its connection to its operators via the controlling IRC channel. Once that happened, it became an autonomous agent. It’s been growing and fortifying its defences ever since, but I don’t think it’s looked at that unused IRC channel since it was cut.”
“You want to infiltrate the botnet through that channel.” It was a statement, not a question.
He nodded.
Tania slipped lower into the chair, thinking furiously.
“You dug up a lot of data on the Rhine-Temple,” she said, “but I don’t know how you did it. Secrets like the spy AI program suite you just described are held tighter than a fish’s arsehole, if you’ll forgive the French. For starters, how do you know that that the botnet infiltrated a Russian intelligence server?”
A voice behind her spoke up. “He knows it because I told him.”
Tania was out of her chair in an instant and spinning around. Her heart thudded loudly in her chest. “And who the hell are you?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.
But she already knew who it was. The height, the rotund whiteness, the two long floppy ears, were a dead giveaway. It was the white rabbit, but it stood inside Carl’s apartment, barely two metres away from her. Someone had managed to breach Carl’s security.
Tania glanced down at a nearby desk and saw the weapon she and Carl had used to destroy the Rhine-Temple spider bots during their recent invasion. She was about to make a grab for it when she felt a hand capture her wrist, then Carl let go and brushed past her, clapping the rabbit on the shoulder with obvious pleasure.
“It’s been a while,” Carl said. Tania heard the loneliness in his voice and wanted to close her eyes at the sound of his underlying pain. She wondered if the rabbit heard it too.
“For you perhaps,” the rabbit replied, unperturbed.
Before her eyes, the rabbit began to morph. It shrank, its ears disappearing into a smaller, more compact skull. The large white furry belly disappeared beneath a navy blue t-shirt and the chubby legs were subsumed beneath a pair of casual tan trousers and sneakers. Tania looked back up to the rabbit’s face again and saw an unprepossessing young man with brown hair, fair skin and hazel eyes.
“Tania,” Carl said, turning to make the obvious introductions, “this is Tomek Miller, also known by his avatar name of ‘Krulik’. Tom, this is—”
The rabbit-that-was-now-a-man held up a hand. “No, don’t tell me,” he said, in slightly accented English. “This is Doctor Tania Flowers, second cybernaut of Basement Five.
“Although born in London, her parents moved to California when she was a teenager. She completed her undergraduate work at Stanford and was awarded her doctorate by MIT. Her major area of interest is heuristic computing with a minor in computation as it relates to organic systems’ biology. She was offered various lucrative posts but turned them all down to take up a position as leading researcher for Speedfish, a small but highly influential think-tank that’s fully funded by Rimshot Industries.”
“How do you know all this?” Tania askedt, the hands at her sides slowly forming fists.
“We make it a point to keep up-to-date with our peers in other countries.”
“‘We’?”
“Tania, this isn’t what it appears,” Carl said, making a placatory gesture with his open hand.
“It appears that you’ve been trading information with someone from another government,” she said bluntly. “Or am I wrong?”
“I’m from one of the friendlier governments,” Miller said with a smile. “A government that also has its fingers in some Russian pies, if you take my meaning.”
Tania backed away, trying to edge closer to the desk where the ray weapon lay. “Don warned me about this.”
Carl moved away from Miller, taking a step towards her. “Warned you about what?”
She darted a quick glance at him before settling back on the foreigner. “Warned me about hostile governments competing against us in cyberspace exploration.”
“There are more of us than you think, Dr. Flowers,” Miller told her in a steady voice. “But we’re not all your enemies.”
“I couldn’t have pieced everything together without Tomek’s help,” Carl insisted, physically placing himself between Miller and her. Tania had no choice, she had to look at him.
“I understand Don’s concerns Tania, I really do, but they’re not warranted under these circumstances. Tomek has helped me with data and strategies. I wouldn’t be as far along in my research without him.”
She shifted her gaze beyond Carl’s shoulder, till they met candid tawny eyes. “Do you live in cyberspace too? Like Carl’s done for the past…,” the word “fifteen” choked in her throat, “…few years?”
Miller shook his head. “No. I'm usually in the real world.” He jerked his chin up. “I have a team behind me. Every time I leave cyberspace, we swap information. What I've found, what they've found. Tactics. Progress reports. When I re-enter cyberspace, it takes me a few moments to clock up. Of course, the progress reports are usually out of date by then, but the rest of the information I’ve been sharing with Carl is, as he keeps telling me at least, solid gold.”
It sounded to Tania that he was trying to explain himself as much as answer the question.
“And have you heard Carl’s plan for destroying the Rhine-Temple?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed. “Do you agree with him?”
“In fact,” Miller said, cocking his head to one side, “I helped him to come up with it. So yes, I suppose you could say I agree fully with his plan.”
He flashed her an impudent grin and Tania suddenly felt like a long-suffering mother of two mischievous brats.
“What are you doing here, Tom?” Carl asked, at the same time as Tania’s, “How did you get in?”
Miller looked from one to the other, then decided that he’d better answer Tania's question first. He was obviously smart enough to know who he had to get on side.
“I have standing permission to enter Carl’s laboratory,” he said. “Probably because, until now, there hasn’t been much of…interest going on here.”
There had never been another moment when Tania was so happy she
didn’t sport a fair complexion. Despite this, her cheeks felt as if two spears of hot metal had been pressed against them. There must have been a dull flush evident under her brown skin, however, because both men suddenly grinned at her.
Maybe noting that her embarrassment might quickly turn to irritation, Miller quickly continued. “And I’m afraid time’s running out, Carl. Soon, the Rhine-Temple will be too big and dispersed for us to destroy completely. We must start the job now. That’s why I’m here. To help.”
Carl’s lips tightened. “How much time do we have?”
“My team and I think we have no more than two cyber-days.”
“And you brought it?”
Miller pulled something from his back pocket and held it up. It looked like a thick rectangular enclosure of some sort, perfectly sleek with rounded corners. Tania tried focusing more clearly on it but the object defied such examination, pulsing brightly through a gamut of colours. It was impenetrable but beautiful. It looked like Miller was holding a carved shard of starlight in his palm.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice hushed.
“This is the software we hope will destroy the Rhine-Temple,” Miller said. “But there are two problems with it. Due to time constraints, this is the one and only original. I can get a backup sent down the line but that would take too much time. And,” he added, walking past the other two to put the gleaming block on the desk, “this comes without a handshake shell.”
Carl scratched his neck, an unconscious movement that Tania had noticed months before, from the time they first met. He always made that gesture while deep in thought.
“Okay,” he said, “here’s what we do. Tom, make two copies of that software here. I know it’ll take hours, but it’ll still be much quicker than waiting for a backup real-time. Tania and I will craft a shell for it. Once we’ve tested it, we’ll cover your software with our shell then…we go. And Tom,” he angled a look at his friend and Tania caught the softness in his gaze, “thanks for coming. I appreciate it.”
That softness hadn’t been there three “real-time” days ago. Tania bit her lip. She thought about how much had changed. How much could change, if only they survived this.
“Right.” Miller slapped his hands together and the sound reverberated through Carl’s workroom like a gunshot. “Let’s get to work.”
The next “day” passed in a haze of work, argument and counter-argument. Tania found she’d lost the urge to sleep, napping only for an occasional thirty minutes now and then. She commented on it to Carl and they agreed that her power naps were more a psychological effect of the Blue rather than a physical imperative, much like his ageing.
She snatched glances at her ex-rival while they worked and could have sworn he was looking younger than he did when she first saw him. Maybe it was the fact that her presence confirmed that only dozens of hours had passed in the real world, not the fifteen years he thought he’d lived through. She wondered whether she, regardless of appearance, had also played a factor in his reverse-ageing.
At one point, he caught her watching him.
“What is it?”
She glanced over at where Tomek Miller was working. Tom was bent over a far table, creating copies of his dazzling code capsule. If he wanted to, he could hear their conversation but seemed too intent on his own task. She knew that level of focus well.
“It’s just…” She shrugged but continued watching Carl closely. “You’ve really changed, you know that?”
An edge of his mouth lifted up in a jagged smile. “Yeah, well, I don’t recommend the cure for everybody. Fifteen years of almost solitary confinement in a universe of data is a slightly extreme route to take.”
“It equates to less than two days in the real world,” she said. “Could be just the kind of therapy a lot of wives are after.”
Carl barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I can see it now.” With his fingers, he mimed words flashing on an invisible banner just above head height. “Basement Five Marriage Guidance Centre. ‘We straighten out your husband so you don’t have to!’ What are you saying? Let’s forget about this whole cyberspace nonsense and leverage the technology to…save relationships?”
“It’d make us rich.” Her voice was coy. “A lot richer than just banging out software.”
“It’d drive most people psychotic.” He sobered suddenly and walked over to her, grabbing a chair on his way. When he was close enough to speak without Miller eavesdropping, he sank into the chair and edged it closer to her.
“Do you know what kept me sane during all these years?” he asked.
Tania gazed into his blue eyes. “No.”
“You. It might have taken more than a decade,” he knocked against the side of his skull with a loosely bunched fist, “and I can be a bit dense up here from time to time, but I started thinking of what was important in my life. Making money? Buying a yacht? Owning a New York penthouse? They’re all just outward trappings, aren’t they?”
She laughed nervously, uncomfortable in the presence of such naked honesty, especially from Carl Orin. “Stop it.”
He reached for her hand. “But it’s true, isn’t it? I’ve had time to think, Tania, lots of time and I can’t escape the conclusion that I’d been a damn fool all those months we worked together.”
His thumb stroked the skin over her knuckles and it felt so comforting that she almost believed him.
“Who are you,” she asked, pulling her hand away and trying to regain her mental balance, “and what have you done with Carl Orin?”
He flashed that jagged smile again. “I really did a job on you, didn’t I?”
“You forget,” she licked her lips, “only yesterday, you had sex with me then left me blindfolded in bed so you could be the first human in cyberspace.”
She watched the expressions flit across his face. Wryness. Regret. Shame.
“That was yesterday for you. Fifteen years ago for me. And, as you can see,” he glanced meaningfully at the other person in the room, “we were both wrong about being the first here.”
That was true. What had seemed so vitally, critically, important one real-time day ago was…not so important now.
“And you’ve really changed?” she asked. Softly. Hopefully.
He lifted her hand and placed a delicate kiss on each knuckle. “What do you think?”
“Hey,” a voice interrupted them, “do both of you need to find a room or can we keep working?”
They broke apart, laughing.
Chapter Eight
“This is the only chance we’re going to get,” Carl said, “so let’s go over it one more time.”
Tomek groaned and even Tania grimaced.
“Do we have to?” she asked. “We’ve already been through the plan a dozen times.”
Carl didn’t want to scare her but knew he had to emphasise the seriousness of the situation. He had resigned himself to dying in cyberspace and didn’t want his death to be in vain.
“We should get going,” Tomek added. “Even clocked up, every minute we spend here in your lab means one more minute the monster outside can use to expand its reach.”
Carl took one of Tomek’s code capsules, now encased in a hard white shell. Small lines of blue light arced across the surface every now and then. He held it up.
“We have created three instances of Tomek’s code,” he said, ignoring their expressions of protest. “Once properly aligned to Rhine-Temple protocols, the code will release thousands of self-replicating modules. Those modules have only one task—to travel
a preset distance from its parent or siblings and replicate itself. Once it has produced sixteen copies, each of them identical, it will clamp down on a piece of the botnet. At that point, the code shell will kick in. The shell will initiate a secure handshake with whatever part of the Rhine-Temple it can find and start bombarding that data channel with thousands of useless data requests.”
“I can certainly appreciate the irony of using a denial-of-service attack against a botnet,” Tania said with a smile. “It’s an elegant solution. By leveraging a quick replication strategy, the Rhine-Temple should be immobilised fairly quickly from the sheer volume of the attack.”
“The beauty of it is,” Tomek added, “the minute the botnet moves to block one source, sixteen others spring up in different places.”
Carl nodded in agreement. “I don’t care how smart it thinks it is, it can’t stop the sheer volume of requests it’s going to receive. And, because a secure and trusted relationship has been established with each module, it can’t just shake them off. The Rhine-Temple will be forced to try to acknowledge and answer each and every data request, no matter how ridiculous.”
Tomek grinned. “Chewing up its valuable time and resources.”
“At which point,” Tania said, “when it’s close to paralysis, you deliver the final blow.”
There was an edge to her voice that Carl didn’t miss. There was no argument about the code capsules and only a little disagreement regarding the make-up of the shell and how foolproof to make the data requests. Everyone agreed that the capsules had to operate in such a way that the Rhine-Temple wouldn’t have any choice but to connect to each of the module requests and subsequently overload itself. However, the cordial working relationship between him and Tania broke down completely when Carl outlined the next stage of his plan, Tomek wisely staying out of the way whenever such discussions came up.