by Lee Bond
Chairwoman Doans raised her hands in apology. “There is nothing I can do, sa. The action is under Vasily’s direct command. Advisors tell me that Ashok Guillfoyle’s duplicity has made such things unfeasible at this time. It is a difficult situation all around.”
“He said the same damn thing.” Harry grunted. “Shit.”
“I assure you,” Alyssa responded boldly, shifting in her seat, “that nothing you do will matter. You will die. If it makes it any less tragic, Sa Bosch, your death is not your own fault. Provide for me the names of the men or women who have given you the proteus you use, and I will see what I can do. Is it Garth Nickels?”
Harry feigned ignorance. “The Offworlder? Why would I talk with an Offworlder? The one who blew up the spaceport? You think he built this prote?” he laughed.
“Then who?” Alyssa pressed. “Who? Tell me and you’ll live. Otherwise, you will die with the rest of your brothers and sisters. You cannot hope to survive.”
“Doans, if I were you, I’d start watching News4You.” Harry smiled, revealing a mouthful of desperately needed dentistry. “Bet your powerful Sigma Protocol can’t stop me, either.” The Sheets flickered and went black.
Alyssa rose and planted herself right in front of Ashok. The humbled businessman flinched. “Did you design his proteus?”
“No.”
Alyssa frowned, her eyes turning into blazing pinpoints of fury. “Do you know of anyone capable of building a proteus able to override my Prometheus Device?”
Ashok’s eyes flicked to the powerful prote on the Chairwoman’s arm. “No. No one. Not even in Trinityspace. The … tech is … unexplored. Possibly beyond The Cordon someone … I …”
“Did you design an avatar capable of stopping a Sigma Protocol?” Alyssa clenched her teeth to keep a shout from escaping.
Ashok shook his head, squirming under the light of the Chair’s eyes. “No. As far as I know, nothing can stop one.” He felt the truth as he saw it escaping his lips before he knew what was happening. “But if anything could, it would be Harry Bosch’s proteus.”
xxx
“Naoko.” Garth whispered. They were in the long slow line to get their guns and although the terrorists didn’t seem to have any issues with chatting, there was chatting and then there was chatting.
“Yes?”
Garth looked around him. Both the spiritually deflated Latelians and the gun-toting kidnappers were paying them zero attention. “If you had to, could you … can you hack a Sigma?”
“What! What … what makes you think I …” Naoko thought about all the things Garth had promised to tell her, and vice versa. She didn’t know how it could be, but he knew she was Lady Ha. She narrowed her eyes shrewdly. “Possibly. Why?”
“Well,” Garth took a step forward as another person took a gun, “that kind of depends on whether you can also hack into News4You’s netLINK servers.”
Naoko plucked at her lower lip thoughtfully. Garth’s question was a much-needed distraction from the horror going on around them. “It can be done, yes, but I must tell you, all of my equipment was … I don’t have it. It will be next to impossible.”
Garth flashed his A-#1 super smile, wondering what that lady-killer of a smile looked like coming off Harry’s ugly mug. “Not if I ‘LINK your prote to Odin here.” They both took another step forward. Now that the crowd was thinning, he took a good, long look at the weapons crates. A sinking feeling filled his gut.
They were fake.
Cunningly designed, to be sure, but fakes nonetheless. Vilmos Gualf wasn’t a nice man. It made the foolish risk he was about to take all the more important.
He shuffled forward. “Odin’s packing four times the power of a regular prote. Hell, I just talked to Chairwoman Doans. It can do darn near anything I ask it to.”
“Including,” Naoko took the rifle handed to her, holding it at arm’s length like a bad piece of fish, “generating a solid hologram.”
“Yeah, well.” Garth sniffed deprecatingly at the gun he was handed. He gazed at the terrorist, who trembled slightly at the sight of a ten-foot tall, three-foot wide man’s distinctly unimpressed gaze. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Sa?” Brad had no idea what was going on.
Garth pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger four times in a row. The hollow clicks seemed to racket off the far walls. Everyone around him –Naoko included- shrieked and started panicking all over again. Satisfied the weapon distributor’s attention was rock solid, Garth leaned in to whisper. “If you open fire on the people in this museum, little man, you and everyone else here will get your asses handed to you. Got me?”
Brad blanched -and before he could control himself- looked nervously around for the first man to threaten him with such fear-inspiring skill. It took only a moment to locate the terrifyingly pale Offworlder with the bizarre accent; in a virtual replication of his own recent experiences, Sa Oiof was that very second going through a rough patch.
Garth grabbed the terrorist by the head, doing his best to ignore the faded tactile sensations now coming through the solid array of lights. He didn’t have time to panic over what Odin's inexplicable connection to ex-dee was doing to him. Brad’s head twisted easily.
“Who in the hell is that?” He pointed his fake gun at the eight foot tall FrancoBrit, a hostage who was clearly not Latelian, a hostage ardently squabbling with his arms dealer over the quality of fake weapons in a market driven towards realism.
What was going on? Naoko wisely maneuvered herself into a position where she wouldn’t get splatted by blood if things went sideways
“I … I … I don’t know.” Brad stammered, sick to his stomach.
Nothing could’ve prepared him for this level of violence. Now that he thought about it, he’d been utterly ignorant of that fact, as well as the possibility that today was likely going to be the last day of his pathetic life. If someone had told him that morning that he’d be dead before eight o’clock that evening, Brad was pretty damned sure he’d’ve at least had a better breakfast before clocking in at the terrorist factory. Vilmos hadn’t said or even implied the likelihood of nightmarish albino-like cyborgs and hideously ugly ex-God soldiers visiting The Museum on their day of days.
Brad swallowed the sudden surge of hot bile, wishing he were dead. “He…he’s … he added the bigger bombs. Y…you should let go. Sa Vilmos is coming this way.”
Garth saw that Vilmos was indeed on his way, looking for all the world like a snoopy librarian coming to check on the whisperers in the Ancient History section of the stacks. Garth let go of Brad’s head, nodded once to Vilmos –who glared suspiciously but said nothing- and made his way to Naoko. He held his gun as loosely as she did, and for much the same reasons; he just didn’t have it in him to hold a fake gun properly.
“Do you do this sort of thing often?” Naoko asked as they made their back to their seats.
Garth shrugged. “Honestly, yeah. Almost explicitly.” He opened his mouth to pass his usual lie about coming to Latelyspace for a vacation and the Game, but shut it. “I… I came here for a very specific reason. Now isn’t the time to talk about it, though.”
They arrived at ‘their’ seats. With all the commotion, they could’ve parked themselves anywhere, but there was no way he was letting anyone else near the mace.
Garth gestured gallantly to Naoko’s chair, taking his only after she’d gotten comfortable. “So. Sigmas and News4You. Can you do it?”
Naoko propped her bogus rifle against the back of the chair in front of her and nodded hesitantly at first but with more confidence as she started looking through her prote. With everything that’d been going on, with all of her work ensuring the Spaceport was handled properly, she really hadn’t bothered to see what avatars remained on her prote. Luckily, she had some decent infiltration avatars that could possibly do the trick, but only if Garth’s proteus truly was the monster he claimed. All her seriously designed avatars, which would’ve required little outside aid, h
ad been on the Port’s main servers, and were thus lost until she could re-encode them.
Naoko tried once more to scan Odin for open ports and, again, was rebuffed for her efforts. She sent a request for access, and received an encrypted list instead. An avatar attempted to read the encryption protocols. It was routinely erased by, if she read the log properly, an automated function. Not even an avatar! Her onboard avatars might not be the best she'd ever used, but they were a notch above anything else in the room. Naoko grumped but said nothing.
“You will need to open the following access ports if I’m to have unrestricted access to your system’s resources.” Naoko flashed the data over to Garth, complete with steps on how to disable protocols he probably knew nothing about, and began compiling an avatar that she hoped would be able to stop a Sigma in its tracks.
Rationally, even the idea of blocking such an all-pervasive avatar was a death sentence. No one would stop Doans from wreaking havoc on the life of the hacker plus the family and anyone remotely familiar with the concept of hacking.
Irrationally, the notion was thrilling. Though many had tried down the centuries, no one had ever managed to hack a Sigma. People believed that whatever machine hosted the Sigma avatar was similar in ways to the Chair’s unique –and more importantly, ancient- proteus, and was therefore in and of itself immune to attempts at compromising its integrity.
That being said, the Sigma didn’t have its own netLINKs. It was a predator designed to rip and howl through every proteus, main, server, ‘LINK and Sheet in the system, tearing loose whatever resided in it’s ‘erase’ parameters and making that information vanish.
She might not be able to hack a Sigma, but she might be able to stop one. It was bold, daring, and ... lethally suicidal.
It would be Lady Ha’s magnum opus, and she was going to do it on the fly.
“Are you ready, Garth?” Naoko asked absentmindedly, her fingers a blur.
“Hold on, hold on.” Garth groused. The illusory prote attached to Harry’s bogus arm was the same bloody size as the real one. His fingers were too fat to work quickly, and Naoko’s modifications were complex enough to need his full attention. “This won’t, uh, blow up or anything, will it? Only my first one already blew up and … well... that one almost took my arm off. This one is quite a bit bigger and, um, the … power it’s using would be … bad if it was suddenly … released.”
How big would an ex-dee explosion be, he wondered, his stupid brain filling up with the math behind plotting such things. He grimaced.
Naoko shook her head. “No. Well, yes. It can happen. Does happen. Autonomous avatars inside the operating subsystems for an individual proteus will automatically deregister a ‘LINKed prote demanding an ‘unfair’ amount of processing power. If it happens continually, the assaulted prote ordinarily contacts the authorities, but there are ways around that, too. Since I personally have no reason to make your ugly proteus explode, we have nothing to worry about.”
Garth nodded, ignoring Naoko’s gentle barb with perfect aplomb; Odin was doing its job. “Uhuh. Now, what are you doing?” His prote screen showed an awful lot of data moving in ways he didn’t understand.
“I am scribble sanf into the gobmern samaafras.” Naoko replied casually, fingers still flying across her screen. Every now and then, she’d stop, look up, scan the room, and then resume her work. People were far too busy arming themselves. “When that is done, I will need to gobble the hillinzans in order to spaggle the comfostino.”
Garth blinked slowly. “I’m sure that somewhere in there you said ‘I’m going to hack News4You and relay everything that happens in here to the outside world.”
Naoko didn’t look up this time. “Actually, yes. But first I have to make sure that that Sigma doesn’t get out.”
“How you going to do that?” Garth asked, hurriedly adding, “And … try to keep it to three syllables or less.”
Naoko dialed herself into one the old netLINK lines she’d used before using the Spaceport’s systems for her own purposes, marveling at ‘Odin’s’ power; she knew that all the ‘LINK repeaters in the area had to be broken by now, but Odin reached those old lines with absolutely no problem.
The genius hacker was astonished at the speed and flexibility of Garth’s laughably named ‘Odin’. His claim that the brute possessed four times the processing power of the best available proteus was something of an understatement. The fact that she couldn’t comprehend how an outsider, an Offworlder, had landed and grasped the depth of protean science so quickly and fully was only a further testament to the reality of his impossible claims. It shouldn’t be possible, and yet Garth Nickels was not only thirty thousand years old, but it also seemed that somewhere in that handsome head of his were answers to questions all of Humanity had been hungering for since they’d leaped to the stars.
Flying through the trips and traps she’d left behind after deciding to abandon the old ‘LINKS in favor of the Spaceport’s netLINK with superlative ease, Naoko concluded that ‘Odin’ –she doubted she’d ever get used to a proteus with a name- was easily twice as powerful as her now-destroyed setup. All contained in a single proteus.
Finally through the time-consuming process of convincing her sentinel avatars that she was who she said she was and that she was using a ‘LINKed proteus, Naoko began tracking down relay stations nearest to the Chairwoman’s office, saying, “Rumor has it that there are two ways for the Chair to activate a Sigma. The first, naturally, is through the First Prote. People have been saying for thousands of years that it’s ‘LINKed to an ancient main, which is where the Sigma originates from. All of our netLINKs –if you believe the rumors, which I do- connect somehow to this First Main. This is how the Sigma can literally erase anything a Chair demands. Allegedly, each main, prote, and system in use today is outfitted with a tiny chip that allows the Sigma access. To destroy or modify that chip brings swift death. Everything is ‘LINKed to sectional mains, the sectional mains are connected to regional mains, and regional mains all feed into Central, into this so-called First Main, and through it to the Chair and the First Prote. When the Sigma hunts, it accesses everything simultaneously, erasing everything within its parameters and modifying the chip to ensure that whatever it erases can never be stored or commented upon again. It is the perfect Regimist tool. Even if you are seeing something horrible, if it is covered under a Sigma, it is not happening.”
“Sounds … complicated.” Garth eyed the lanky FrancoBrit. He was the guy who’d shot him with the ceramic gun. No doubt about it.
“You don’t know the half of it.” Naoko said seriously. “Our best option is to keep the Chairwoman’s prote busy. If I keep her buffers full of this and that and dominate the bandwidth for the relay stations in her neighborhood, there is a decent chance she will not be able to remote issue the Sigma Protocol.”
“But she still has this ‘First Main’, right? She can do it from there?” The FrancoBrit locked eyes with Garth and waved cheerily, tipping an imaginary hat and actually –actually! - bending his knee. He lost his shit. “Motherfucker! Sonofabitch is the one who shot me, all right.”
“Absolutely.” Naoko, still intent on her work, missed Garth’s cursing altogether. Armed with her knowledge of netLINK systems and Garth’s awesome proteus –loaded with every black operation avatar she’d ever heard of and then some-, each of the relay stations identified by her electronic agents were quickly and effortlessly ordered to begin process each packet of information three times. Every relay station between The Museum and the Chairwoman’s office would scan every jot of data as it arrived, as its destination was recorded, and again when it ‘left’ the station.
Since many stations were still covering the day’s Game announcements –much of it high definition, high-resolution Game footage- those systems would already be groaning under the strain. Her ‘check it three times’ protocol commands would bury everything.
Naoko smiled at the simplicity of the solution, realizing that even as she
applauded herself that on any other day, such an attack wouldn’t work. Everything she planned on doing relied on everything that’d already happened. “If the Chairwoman gets to the main and enters her code manually, nothing can stop it all.”
“But you can do something about that, right?” Unsure of what in the hell he was doing, Garth returned the cyborg’s wave. In response, the weird looking maybe-assassin in the cape grabbed his fake rifle awkwardly, aimed it his head and pulled the trigger a half-dozen times, making everyone in his neck of the woods moan in soft terror. The weirdo slapped his knee a few times in mock laughter and shook his head.
“Who in the hell is this guy?” Garth muttered to himself, wondering how in the goddam hell he’d managed to miss a nutbar like that. Sure, he’d been busy dealing with terrorists and then turning into a solid hologram, but still; an eight-foot tall probably albino cyborg maybe-assassin should’ve been kind of hard to miss!
“Presumably, the location of this Sigma Engine is on her proteus. If not the physical location, then the netLINK access ports. How else would her prote know where to send the commands to?” She ignored Garth’s look of confusion. “Odin is quite a piece of machinery, sa. The conversation we must have grows longer and more complicated every time I push a button.” She smiled impishly. “Anyway, as I was saying… if I can locate either the memory address or the physical location of her main, maybe.”
Naoko did not add that she thought it would be relatively unlikely, even given Odin’s supreme configuration. The Chair’s First Main was as old as the system and they'd built their entire protean network on its back. No matter how powerful his unwieldy prote was, the legendary First Main was something else altogether. Naoko's ‘maybe’ was in the three percent chance of probability.