by Andrew Ives
It was just too complicated. They had to understand everything, just to find out which parts they needed and which they didn't. These modules were the most awesome and intricately-crafted programs anyone at Dreamland had ever seen, let alone worked on. It looked as though it had come from outer space - and hadn't survived the journey.
The project manager promised to find out more from the mystery 'donor' of this fantastically complex equipment.
In the meantime, the software modules got broken up and copied all around the internal system, specialists in every area were being consulted and asked for their opinions and input.
It really was by far the biggest project Dreamland had ever undertaken; the project which would take Dreamland back to the top - once and for all.
* * *
Infiltration
A greying nightwatchman sipped at a mug of tepid tea, his feet resting on the nearby bench as he pondered over his crossword. He was enjoying another quiet night; few late-workers, no phone calls, no alarms, nothing much at all really. Pixel fireworks decorated his monitor while it stood idle.
An electronic beep soon interrupted this peacefulness. He pushed up his reading glasses with his pen and answered the incoming videophone call.
As he picked up the handset, the screen flicked on to show a man in a suit, sitting behind a desk in an office, some distance away from the camera. It was not immediately apparent who he was, but he looked sufficiently important to catch the watchman's interest fully. He squinted at the screen as the caller spoke.
"I'm sorry to interrupt you at this time of night, but we think we've had a security leak here at VRD." The caller jerked somewhat unnaturally as he spoke.
"What makes you think that?" asked the nightwatchman, his question was received with some unexpectancy at the other end.
"Errr... I've got some important notices in my directory and someone has changed my password... errr... effectively locking me out of my own files." stumbled the caller. His face remained steady belying the unease expressed in his voice.
"I'm afraid you'll have to wait until morning when the SysOp..." The older man was interrupted before he could finish this unwanted answer.
"But there's no telling what this hacker could do between now and tomorrow morning. The files might not be worth protecting tomorrow. You can obtain SysMan clearance, so either find out this new password or allow me to enter a new one. My user ID is Trelheaven, Charles. " The caller further bulldozed his own way.
"I don't really think I should be doing this." queried the nightwatchman, hesitant not only in changing the password but also unsure of his own ability with the computer that he always avoided whenever possible. The caller assured him that there would be no problems and that he would himself take any blame for any consequences.
The nightwatchman relented after a short while and told the caller that his password had now been deleted so that he was free to enter a new one when he next logged on. The caller thanked him and quickly put the phone down.
"Yes!" Simon clenched his fist, as Jeff replaced the handset. Simon reset his computer, clearing away his Trelheaven digital alter-ego now that it had served its pernicious purpose. The computer rebooted while Jeff and Simon congratulated each other.
"I thought he wasn't going to let us have it for a moment. He never realised quite how important we were pretending to be and he wasn't keen on any extra work." stated Simon as he took the videophone's camera from in front of his monitor and replaced it back inside its casing.
Jeff was pleased at how he handled the voice while Simon operated the cyberpuppet simultaneously. They never expected the two to really marry together, but they had seemingly done so, giving a satisfactorily convincing image at the other end. Simon knew how they really managed to pull it off though.
"I chose that nightwatchman because he wore glasses, coupled with the videophone's low-resolution screen and slow update rate, any old blur should have seemed convincing. I put the puppet some distance into the picture so that any non-synchronisation of mouth and sound would be hardly noticable. You were a convincing vice-president though, I will give you that." Simon turned round on his chair back towards the screen as his comms program finished loading.
Jeff smiled at this rare compliment as Simon continued:
"What I'm going to do is... not set a new password at all. I'm going to leave it as whatever it is. That way, the genuine user won't notice or report any leak. While his ID has no password attached to it, he can enter his normal password (which won't be checked against anything) and continue as usual."
"At the same time though, we can access his files without giving any password as it is expecting us to set a new password."
"I just have to set the preferences so that there are no alert signals. These alert him to incoming Email, or directory overload or more importantly, no set password." Simon mumbled away as he typed.
He tapped away for a short while before the time came for his first foray into VR Developments' vice-president's personal directory.
Molehill
Much to Simon's chagrin, he found the directory to be filled with dozens of useless files. It took some time to rifle through them all, but they were mostly old emails and letters that the vice-president had neglected to delete or else more recent trivialities. No mention of any new hardware in the pipeline apart from the odd reference to some codenames, none of which he understood. This promising mountain really had turned out to be just another disappointing molehill. He copied some of the letters to his own hard disk just for proof that he ever managed to break in.
Simon turned his computer off in dismay and after his initial annoyance, apologised to Jeff for getting him involved. Jeff went home.
Afterwards, Simon opened a computer magazine at the page Jeff was looking at earlier and stared at the photograph of Charles Trelheaven. The only useful thing that had transpired was that Trelheaven never seemed to delete his email. Any new letters or files would be lost amongst the old without giving rise to suspicion. But they were all full of useless rubbish anyway; managerial stuff, rather than the kind of hi-tech information Simon was seeking. Trelheaven's last log-on time was almost a week ago, so it seemed even he never found it compulsive reading.
How could Simon make any use of any of this? He couldn't bear to see his hard work go to waste like this. There had to be some answer.
Simon flicked the pages of the article back and forth, his mind wandering occupied with his hacking rather than the pages in front of him. The answer had to lie in the letters. They were all he had to go on.
It soon dawned on him that it was not so much what they said that was important, but who they were from. Yes - that was it!
If he read a letter and then used 'REPLY' afterwards to send a reply letter back to the original writer, then he could ask them questions without knowing who they were or their real-life address. The computer knew who they all were, so Simon didn't need to worry. Trelheaven had authority and he would be able to ask most of these people anything he wanted.
Simon turned his computer back on at this glimmer of hope and read through some of the letters again. They seemed even more boring second-time around and it was some time before Simon found a reference to a 'black-hole budget' which he took to mean a secret channel of funds, probably into Trelheaven's own pocket.
Surely Trelheaven wouldn't let other employees in on such a scheme, so it was unlikely that he could mean this. It seemed this letter-writer, 'JJ', knew a thing or two about the company's goings-on and could be an interesting person to reply to.
Deciding to do exactly this, Simon dialled up VRD again and replied to this letter asking JJ if he knew of any way in which this 'black-hole budget' could be reduced, say by five per cent or more.
A few uncomfortable minutes passed with Simon wondering whether he had asked the right thing, before the beep of incoming email ended the suspense.
JJ explained that this 'black-hole budget' project was running behind time and that
more should be spent if it was ever going to 'see the light of day.'
Simon replied, asking in what way exactly was it running behind schedule.
JJ answered that the 'whole caboodle' was too complicated to explain as a single entity and that Trelheaven should ask each member of the development team how exactly their respective tasks were being delayed, in order to assess where cutbacks could be made. JJ was apparently from Dreamland and VRD's future software work depended entirely on any new hardware coming from them.
Simon asked, somewhat cheekily, if he could be allowed access to their main system, in order to copy some of the source code files over to VRD 'to give their own programmers an inkling of what to expect from Dreamland in the near (distant?) future?'
To his amazement, JJ answered with a low-clearance visitors' log-in ID and password, informing Simon how to get in and what was there. Simon would have read-only authorisation, but this was fine by him. JJ also joked about Simon not leaving a copy of 'that virus that's going around.' Simon thanked him and rubbed his hands with glee.
'Rumpelstiltskin!'
...typed Simon and Dreamland's online welcome appeared. Simon felt like kicking himself, never thinking of 'Rumpelstiltskin!'. The most famously unguessable password was actually perfectly guessable due to its own infamy. The password prompt gave sixteen letters space and Simon never imagined that they would all be used. The only passwords he had of that length in his password database were two football teams. Simon would soon add 'Rumpelstiltskin!' to this short list.
Simon's fingers could barely type fast enough to see all those beautiful, forbidden files, ripe for the picking.
The list scrolled; hundreds of files, just asking to be read and copied. How the other hackers on his BBS would envy him, if they could see him now.
The first file he chose to read, titled 'Warning!', intrigued him. Dreamland's underhanded approach to the whole videogames industry was encapsulated in this one document. It was a warning from those upstairs to the developers of any future virtual reality helmets.
It stated that they 'should tread the fine line between making the wearing of the headgear merely addictive, without making it frighteningly compulsive. The user should enjoy the sensation to a point of wanting to go back for more but not to the extent of being afraid to use it often or for long periods.'
It went on to elaborate on how this should be achieved, 'by ensuring the eyes are focused at a comfortable focal length, that there is no or negligible time lag between action and image, and that the separate images in each eye should effect a true and comfortable three-dimensional illusion.'
Simon understood this to be an effort towards resolving complaints amongst users that after leaving virtual reality, their eyes had difficulty in readjusting to actual reality. There had also been complaints that the separate images for each eye overlapped unnaturally and left users feeling nauseous, or that time lag between head movement and image update gave a feeling similar to seasickness.
At a time when Dreamland had been accused of cost-cutting in development at the expense of users' safety, Dreamland had dismissed these effects as 'experienced only by a minority of users'. It seemed that they had taken complaints of shoddy merchandise serious enough to covertly mend their ways, although not seriously enough to reimburse unsatisfied complainants' money.
There was also a mention of 'Tetris twitch' which was a symptom caused by playing any game where the action becomes so frantic that purely adrenaline-inspired reactions and instinct are necessary to succeed in them. It first appeared around the time of Tetris from which it gets its name and manifests itself as an involuntary twitch which affects the player during sleep. The brain becomes accustomed to reacting super-quickly in rotating or moving the blocks, and after prolonged periods of play, this reaction is difficult to subdue, even when play has ended.
In the days of ordinary two-dimensional videogames, this effect was tolerable and after a short spell away from the game in question, Tetris twitch evaporated. But now, in the days of three-dimensional, virtual reality games, where the player is immersed in much faster action, this twitch becomes more prominent and in some cases is actually frightening to the player. The player experiences severe twitching, often coupled with nightmares which afflict even the most hardened of players. If one imagines a very realistic 3D image of being eaten by a shark or dinosaur, crashing a helicopter, or being hit by some incoming missile, it is not difficult to see how these nightmares are caused.
This had been publicly dismissed by software-house-employed psychologists as just a different manifestation of the experience 'many people get when they dream they are slipping on snow or tripping up, when our subconscious reactions kick in and take over our conscious motor movements momentarily.'
Journalists had swallowed this cover story for long enough and Dreamland knew there would soon be more questions. They were intending to 'steer clear of potential Tetris twitch causing games and keep the pace of games down for the time being until all this fuss had blown over.
Simon found this inside information fascinating and was itching to print out all of this and anonymously grass Dreamland up on the Internet as the money-grabbing liars they really were. Simon just wanted to look at a few more files before loading the paper for less-exciting printing.
He never knew that what he read next would be so captivating that he would forget all about reading this earlier incriminating information.
Shock To The System
Simon browsed around for some more interesting reading matter - something with a mildly meaningful name. When he stumbled across 'ThinkPlunger.notes' he imagined he had found news of a yet-to-be-released wonder game, so he quickly opened it up. It wasn't quite what he had expected.
Simon had imagined some kind of mission briefing for the programmers or designers outlining what Dreamland wanted included in the game's contents. A plain English description of the storyline, layout, aim etc.
What he actually got were technical notes; notes on how PsiNapse worked and what tasks its constituent parts performed, the component specifications, processing speeds, everything that the Dreamland hardware developers could fathom out about the internal workings of this complex military machinery. There were even notes about the parts they couldn't understand, details of which just blew Simon's mind. He was knowledgable about computers, and even electronics to a lesser extent, but these performance figures were out of this world. He wouldn't have believed them had it not been in such a context. This really was state-of-the-art stuff.
Simon scrambled to get his printer loaded up with paper and online as quickly as possible. He had to get this down quickly. He set the printer to fast-draft mode, scrolling up and down some more while the pins screeched away on his aged printer.
Wow. This was cool. He couldn't wait to tell Jeff; and his Internet hacking rivals. He would become the coolest of their gang by far.
Simon wallowed in the glory brought by such a scalp, before it dawned on him he should be careful. After spending as much on development as they apparently had done, Dreamland might not appreciate some spotty teenager telling all their competition what plans they had in the pipeline. Having their thunder stolen for their grand launch might not appeal to them either. They were big time players in the video game industry and they certainly had the money to cause him to 'have an accident.'
He couldn't keep all this secret though, could he? He'd spent ages on devising this plan and now it had come to fruition he was supposed to just let it go. No, he wasn't having that.
If he blew the whistle on Dreamland, anonymously, quickly and thoroughly, maybe they wouldn't be able to trace the source of the leak.
But if he used his codename, one he had used for a few years now, it may be too well known and word would get around it was him. If he used a different name, he would not be credited with such a fine piece of hackmanship.
Perhaps selling the information to someone, how to get in and what was there, would be a more rewarding
option. There were always industrial espionage agents touting for information on the Internet. He should check out this avenue first - maybe he would even earn something from this and offload the information onto someone else, then destroy all evidence that he had ever snooped around Dreamland's system.
If he restored the phone wires back to how they were, that might be a good start towards covering up his tracks. He would do that in the morning on the way to school.
Whilst Simon was daydreaming, his printer neared the end of the document, a message flashed up and the keyboard locked.
Where I come from nobody knows,
Now arrived, your data goes;
I linger silently then replicate,
'Til on a certain calendar date -
I stalk and slash and then mutate,
Eating up everything on your plate;
I keep myself dormant for small-time users,
My revenge is wreaked on industrial losers;
Multi-national and military foes,
Who irradiate and pollute 'til nothing grows;
They can hunt me, they can track me -
I won't be stopped!
Even as my home of trees is chopped;
Earth's forests perish so now I hide,
In your computer, deep inside...
Masked Avenger - Orange and Green.
To Simon's horror, he understood this to be the virus that JJ warned him not to infect the system with. Up until now, Simon may have had it present on his reasonably small capacity machine, but as the poem stated, it remained 'dormant for small-time users.' He may have just passed this on to Dreamland without knowing it.
They were a big 'multi-national' almost 'military' even. If he cost them any important data, they would be after him for certain. He had delivered it right to the nucleus of their research, with important data all around. Wasn't 'plate' a European hackers' term for hard disk? If so, eating up everything on it might not be at all desirable.