Terminal Connection

by Needles, Dan

  Steve shook his head.

  “If it makes you feel any better, this is nothing new. In World War II, the English cracked the Germans’ secret code. Yet when the British found out that one of their cities, Coventry, was going to be bombed, they did nothing. They realized that if they did anything the Germans would know they had broken the code. Their only choice was to sacrifice Coventry.

  “Yet by sacrificing a few citizens they kept the Germans from discovering their secret. In the end, knowing where the Germans were on D-DAY was the beginning of the end. The sacrifice of Coventry allowed them to win the war and save their nation. You see? I’m afraid we have no choice,” Ed said, glancing at the time. “Vinnie should have been here by now. I’ll have him contact you about tracking down Syzygy. Do you have any questions before I let you go?”

  “No questions, just a statement. Your organization dug its own hole when it bent the rules and stole my invention. If Syzygy gets out of hand, I will sacrifice a few Islands to save lives.”

  “Lets hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Steve exited VR. He still sat at his desk, but morning had become night. The whole house was dark and cold. Rain pattered on the roof. Something banged in the hallway. What was it? Ah, the busted front door. It swung on its hinges and banged against the door jam.

  He removed his Nexus and saw Allison, still online.

  A flash of lightning illuminated her. He could not mistake the contortions, her shoulder hunched, arms rigid at her sides, hands curled inward at the wrists. “Allison!” He ripped her Nexus off.

  She lashed out, swinging her arms as she regained control of her body.

  “It’s okay!” Steve grabbed her wrists.

  She tore them free and pushed him away.

  He put his hands up just in time to block a kick. “Allison!”

  She stopped. “Steve?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Steve!” She reached out and hugged him tightly.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “I found him. It’s Ron. Ron’s the one.”

  “What?”

  “He attacked me; took me to the beach where Syzygy killed Camille. How did he know about the beach?” she cried.

  “It can’t be. Syzygy attacked Ron and I this morning.”

  “You don’t understand … they …” Allison’s voice trailed off.

  He looked down. She lay still in his arms, her skin blanched and clammy, and her breathing shallow. He gently shook her.

  “Allison?” She did not stir. Grabbing her Nexus, he pressed 911.

  Apocalypse

  “Technology is a two-edged sword, enabling progress while fostering dependence. The two go hand in hand. They cannot be extricated from one another. Technological advances make everyone in society vulnerable, dependent on the same umbilical cord. And anyone can sever this link. Thus, if a society does not operate with truth and integrity, faith and trust are lost and the dependence cannot be afforded. The technology will extinguish itself and the dependent society will disappear.”

  —Michael M. Collins. Portal Sphere Architect, 2005.

  44

  Monday, June 15, 2020

  Steve entered Allison’s hospital room. She sat propped up by a couple of pillows, watching television. He awkwardly held out a collection of yellow roses, baby’s breath, and fern wisps arranged in a small vase.

  “Um, these are for you,” he said, placing them next to her on the nightstand. She turned and smiled, glancing first at him and then the flowers.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve done anything like this. I hope they’re okay.”

  She smiled. “They’re beautiful.”

  He sat down next to her at the head of the bed and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “Are you okay?”

  She leaned forward into a sitting position. “I’m perfectly fine, you know. They’re just keeping me cooped up here until the MRIs come back.”

  He nodded.

  “Did you find Ron?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think he’s involved. I’ve known Ron almost a year and …”

  “How can you say that? He attacked me and changed into Syzygy!”

  “Syzygy must have used his alias and framed him. You met Ron. You saw how technophobic he was. There’s no way he could be involved in this.”

  Allison remained silent.

  “Up to this point Syzygy has been very sly. He’s covered his tracks. He isn’t stupid enough to give himself away that easily. Think of how he used Xi Quang.”

  She shook her head. “But there is something else. I found something … something in the log … I can’t remember.”

  Steve became worried and placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll come back to you in time. Why don’t you rest up today.”

  She grinned. “Nice try.”

  “Why are you doing all this?”

  She met his gaze. “You, of all people, know why. My career is my life. If I catch Syzygy, Davis will have to hire me back.”

  “Can’t you let it go?”

  She shook her head.

  “Allison …”

  “I can’t, not yet anyway.”

  He rubbed his jaw line, thinking of how to dissuade her. Finally, he sighed. “Just don’t use your Nexus, okay?”

  She laughed. “Steve, are telling me not to use your product?”

  “I’m serious.”

  She frowned. “I have no choice. I left my Portal Sphere at home in Southern Cal.”

  “Then use Brooke’s.”

  She nodded. “Okay, I will.”

  Her gaze melted him. He leaned over and kissed her. As he wrapped his arms around her, his Nexus vibrated on his hip. He glanced at the LED readout. Vinnie was paging him.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “You be careful,” she said.

  “I will.”

  He walked to door and turned back. “One more thing. Tell your mother to meet me at the Children’s Hospital for the Nexus Healer announcement.”

  She cocked her head. “Why?”

  “I might have a story for her, depending on how things go.” He left the room.

  She withdrew a rose, closed her eyes, and breathed in. The scent soothed her frayed nerves. She hoped Steve was right about Ron. Everything would be fine.

  Steve walked through the portal into Vinnie’s virtual office, a plain, twenty-foot cube with the word Microsoft® stenciled into the floor. Vinnie had not customized the room at all.

  “So your modified Signal Amplifier will protect you?”

  Steve spun around, startled to see Vinnie. “Uh, yeah, except for his secondary attack.”

  “What secondary attack?”

  He remembered being stuck inside Syzygy, a pod of muscle flowing around him. He shuddered. “He can spike the sensory levels.”

  “Is there any way to defend against it?”

  “Not currently, and it would take several months to develop a fix, but I don’t think it’s lethal.”

  “That’s reassuring. When can I get the new hardware?”

  “Another two weeks.”

  He laughed. “That’s great!” He pulled out the copy of the phaser, the one Steve had used to try to commit suicide. “Does this work against Syzygy?”

  Steve thought for a moment. He never did finish the code.

  “Yeah, but I’ll need to make a modification so it takes out Syzygy instead of the victim.”

  “Computer, display the phaser’s source code.” He scanned the code and found what he was looking for. “Computer, recursively follow the link to the end before initiating the overload program.” He turned to Vinnie. “Now it should work.”

  “Can you find him in cyber space?” Vinnie asked.

  “I don’t know. We need to find his persona to use the weapon. Somehow, he is hiding within the network links. Last night he impersonated Ron Fisher and attacked Allison at Nexus Corp.”

  “Maybe this will help.” Vinnie opened a file.<
br />
  Several orbs popped out and levitated in front of them. On each was the face of a Nexus’ victim.

  “I downloaded the logs from each victim’s Nexus. Can they tell you where he is?” Vinnie asked.

  “Maybe,” he said, opening the orb, displaying Skip Harvey. A wall of platinum three feet wide and two feet high materialized, levitating in front of him. It was molded into a three-square grid, each representing Skip’s Nexus Site Log, Core File, and System Log. Glancing at the grid, Steve pressed the Site Log. His gaze gravitated to the last entry. It was jumbled, a random collection of letters, numbers, and symbols: s#@~#d$f9e*r8*.

  “The last entry is garbled, just like Camille’s Site Log. Syzygy’s attack must be corrupting the log when he kills off the user. He’s probably aborting the portal program before it can finish writing the entry to the Nexus’ flash memory.”

  “So the Portal program opens portals to other Internet sites?” Vinnie asked.

  Steve nodded. “Syzygy uses it to hop from Nexus to Nexus. And he covers his tracks by trashing the log.”

  “Are you sure? Did you check all of the logs?”

  It was a fair question, Steve thought. He opened the Site Logs from the other orbs. Each case was the same; the last entry was garbled.

  “Appears so …” Steve said as he leaned forward to close the logs.

  “Try putting the last entries of the Site Logs next to each other, ” Vinnie said.

  Steve shrugged. It was a waste of time, but he did not feel like arguing with a technophobic detective.

  “Computer, rearrange these logs, placing them next to one another in one row, aligning them on their last entry.”

  The Site Logs disappeared, one by one, replaced by a wall of water. The wall broke into five sections, displaying a Site Log on each.

  Steve sensed something. He looked from one garbled entry to the next. He saw it. Although it appeared garbled, the last entry was the same in every case. Shit! How could he have missed this? The entry was not garbled at all. It was the site’s name. An unconventional name, but a valid one nevertheless!

  “Not bad, eh?” Vinnie said.

  “Computer, does the last site in the log use another name or alias?” Steve asked.

  “Nexus Corporation.”

  Steve stepped back. “What? Please repeat.”

  “Nexus Corporation.”

  He remembered the attack on the Nexus site and what he told Ron: “An undetected virus is like a spy in an organization. Once accepted as one of the fold, you cannot find him without making everyone a suspect.” A flood of other images came back to him, connecting bits of information. Allison’s warning about Ron. Ron’s comment about how Brooke slowed him down. Syzygy’s attack of both Camille and Brook out of the millions of Nexus users. He remembered Ron’s prediction of Austin’s death and how Ron had known the definition of the word syzygy. Perhaps Ron was the spy.

  “Computer, open a portal to Nexus Corporation.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Finding a killer.” Steve stepped through.

  Steve quickly scanned the lobby’s iridescence walls, marble floor, and high, domed ceiling. Too much territory; the backdoor could be anywhere.

  “Charlie!”

  Charlie came running from around the fountain, tail wagging, his nails clicking against the marble floor.

  Vinnie came through the portal and walked to Steve. He pointed to Charlie. “What the hell is that?”

  “An Internet guide, sort of a portable interface.”

  “No, I mean is it a cat on steroids or what?”

  Steve shook his head. “I had a dog like this once.”

  Charlie barked incessantly.

  “Shut up!” Vinnie yelled over the high-pitched shrieks. He turned to Steve. “This has got to work. I hate this case.”

  Steve pulled out his copy of the phaser. “You should switch to your Portal Sphere. You’re not safe in here.”

  Vinnie shook his head. “I need the mobility.”

  Steve nodded. He closed his eyes and remembered the lobby after the hackers had vandalized it. He walked to a spot near the wall.

  “What is it?” Vinnie asked, following him and pulling out his copy of the phaser.

  “Charlie, enable speech and expose the data stream.”

  They stepped back as a line of marble floor tiles dissolved into sand, exposing a stream of water.

  “Charlie, do you detect any new ephemeral branches in the stream?”

  Wagging his tail, he ran up and stuck his head into the torrent. Pulling back, he turned to Steve. “There’s a recent branch, a week old.”

  “What is it?” Vinnie asked.

  “He’s here.”

  “Syzygy?”

  Steve nodded. “We’re too big to fit through. Computer, reduce our size ninety-five percent.”

  In an instant, the room expanded around them. Steve stared into the raging river and then glanced at Charlie. Charlie had grown to the size of a mammoth. He rolled on his side so they could reach his back. Steve grabbed Charlie’s mane and turned to Vinnie. “Hop on!”

  “God, I miss reality,” Vinnie muttered, taking up a position next to Steve.

  They held on as Charlie rolled onto his stomach and dove into the stream. The current carried them through a cement trench. Marble tiles zipped by above them. Suddenly, the wall, floor, and ceiling disappeared. Only the cord of water remained, surrounded by pitch black. The cord diverged into four glowing streams. They took the left branch.

  The stream turned, flowing straight up. Seconds later they emerged in a pool. Above and below Steve saw at least twenty other streams. Charlie swam forward. The water glowed a Tahoe blue. Lines of light danced at the edges of the pool where water touched void.

  Steve adjusted his grip on Charlie’s mane. “Charlie, find the new link.”

  Charlie swam into one of the streams. The water turned salty. Moving forward, the stream broadened and the void beneath the stream turned into small, white rocks. A surge carried them the rest of the way in, depositing them onto a tropical beach.

  “Computer, restore our size.”

  Slowly, they returned to normal size. Steve scanned the beach. Sun and salt had cleansed the sand and bleached it white. A few meters above the beach palm trees and tropical plants swayed in the wind. The sun hovered just above the horizon, stretching streaks of red and orange across the sky. Two monolithic pillars of rock offshore cast long shadows across the beach.

  Vinnie spun slowly around. “Is he here?”

  “Charlie, do you detect Syzygy?” Steve asked.

  “No.”

  Steve put the phaser back in his pocket.

  “He probably knows we are here, but I think I can hide us. Charlie, I need you to run these codes on each of our Nexuses.”

  Steve handed Charlie a sheet of paper. Charlie took it in his mouth and opened a number of windows on Steve’s Nexus. The page contained a short series of codes:

  VirtTerm::PhysicalAppearance::sight=>Set()=filter(CURRENT);

  VirtTerm::PhysicalAppearance::sound=>Set()=filter(CURRENT);

  VirtTerm::PhysicalAppearance::scent=>Set()=filter(CURRENT);

  VirtTerm::PhysicalAppearance::feel=>Set(NERVE ARRAY)= filter(CURRENT);

  VirtTerm::PhysicalAppearance::taste=>Set()=filter(CURRENT);

  VirtTerm::PhysicalAppearance::gravity=>Set()=filter(CURRENT);

  After he was done, Charlie moved on to Vinnie.

  “The VR server requests information from our Nexuses each time someone looks at us. This block will prevent other people from seeing us,” Steve said.

  Vinnie nodded and sat down on the sand. “Let me know when he arrives.”

  45

  The map looks fine. I don’t see any problems,” Scott said, turning to Wayne. The flicking lights from a hundred virtual screens reflected off their faces. Wayne ran a hand across the black marble counter that stretched between them and the stacked consoles.

  “The response c
enter was emphatic. All of Southern California has lost connectivity to the Internet.”

  “I don’t see it,” Scott said, searching the images on the screens. One of them displayed the time: 5:08 p.m. EST.

  Wayne chuckled. “Like clockwork, eh? Eight minutes earlier we would’ve been off the hook.”

  Scott nodded. They handled all after-hour calls.

  “So what do you want to do boss?”

  He smirked at Wayne’s ‘boss’ comment. In reality they were peers, Network Consultants working for the Internet Regulatory branch of DARPA; however, in order to justify the positions, one of them had to take the title of supervisor. Scott had picked the short straw and took the title, along with the longer hours and the administrative workload.

  That was two years ago, and in the fast-paced networking industry, two years was an eternity. It was time enough to teach Scott to question everything that came out of the response center. “Well, bloody hell! Did you apply the three prefab solutions?”

  “Of course.”

  Scott referred to the three prepackaged solutions that worked for almost any network problem. The first solution was to wait. Most network problems were short-lived, caused by flaky equipment or by an inept engineer pulling the wrong cable. These problems resolved themselves. All they had to do was wait.

  Some issues did not simply go away. For these, a second, equally brainless solution existed—turning off and on whatever equipment experienced the trouble. Resetting the equipment in this fashion forced everything to resynchronize. This solved an additional nine percent of the problems. That left the pesky final one percent. These problems did not die easily. They required research. Yet transferring them to the response center could solve even these. Bureaucracy would swallow the problem and hide it forever.

  Scott liked these three rules: wait, reset, or pass the buck. They solved everything, and you never had to understand what was actually going on. These three rules alone could have skated him through a government career. Unfortunately, like Wayne, Scott was an expendable contractor, not tenured employee. Of course, that is why DARPA had hired them in the first place.