by J Boyd Long
“One last check, Eissa,” Tocho said. “Are you sure about this? We can stop right now and go back up to the house.”
Quentin could feel her resolve in the air, and it made his own even stronger. If Eissa could do this, he could do it, too.
“I’m ready,” Eissa said. “Let’s go.”
“Alright then, here we go,” Bob said. “Places, everyone.”
They moved over in front of the door. Tocho stood in front of the line, and Bob activated the door, giving him a nod around the corner.
“We’re hot,” Bob said. “Take it slow, and Quentin, stay where I can see you until we know the coast is clear.”
Tocho cracked the door open, and peeked out into the corridor of doors. Seeing nothing alarming, he pushed it open a bit further, and stuck his head through, checking the other direction.
“All clear,” he whispered.
Quentin gave Bob a thumbs up, and the four of them crossed through the door into the heart of DimCorp.
Chapter 18
They crept down the corridor in single file. Tocho led the way, and Bob brought up the rear, walking sideways and watching both directions. When they reached the corner, Tocho stopped them, and peered around the edge of the last door.
“Clear,” he whispered. “Okay, time to split up. Eissa, you go left. Remember, every 2 seconds, you need to look at me, and then back at the door. Constant motion.”
“I got it,” she said, giving him a thumbs up. “Work your magic, Q. You really are a wizard.”
“Thanks, kid,” he said with a grin. “I’ll see you later.”
Eissa turned left, and hurried up the perimeter hall in a modified combat crouch, her clipboard tucked under one meaty arm. Watching her go, Quentin felt a spark of pride. She might have her moments of fragility, but Eissa was tough as nails, and he admired her for it. When she reached the last row, she peeked around the corner, then looked back and gave them another thumbs up, this time with both hands. At that signal, the rest of them turned right and went towards the control room.
At the last corner, they stopped again, and Tocho checked the front of the room. It looked exactly as they had left it.
“Okay,” he whispered. “You guys go ahead. Bob, once I get in sync with Eissa, you get in sync with me. I’ll go back and forth between you and her. Quentin, good luck, my friend. Remember what I told you: one task at a time.”
“Thanks, Tocho,” Quentin whispered. On impulse, he gave Tocho a quick, awkward hug before stepping away. “Here we go.”
Quentin and Bob moved across the open space at the front of the room towards the hallway and the door to the control room. Quentin felt exposed and vulnerable, even though he had just been there a few hours before. The fact that this was a take-action trip and not just a recon trip changed everything. A few long moments later they reached the door.
“Okay,” Bob said, putting his hand on Quentin’s shoulder. “I’m going to be right here. I’ll be watching the hallway and Tocho, back and forth. If I come in on the run, try to hide what you’ve been doing there, and meet me at the server room as fast as possible. If we get busted in situ, just act like you’re inspecting the computers, and making notes on your clipboard. Good?”
“Good,” Quentin said, and gave a shaky smile. “I’ll work as fast as I can.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “And relax. We’re going to be fine.”
Quentin nodded, and walked into the control room to the first row of computers. His heart was pounding away in his chest, and his legs were shaky. He took a deep breath to steady himself as he sat down, and shook the mouse to clear the screensaver. Once the screen was active, he accessed the network and began trying to find his way into the shared drives. Not knowing the name of the program he was looking for made it a needle in a haystack search, but he was hoping it would have an obvious title that he would recognize when he saw it.
Like most of the corporate computer systems he had worked on, there were dozens of shared drives, each filled with thousands of folders, and many of them with similar names. He glanced through a few of them at random to see what popped out at him, but quickly decided that this was going to be a situation that required a logical approach, rather than hoping for a lucky guess.
The drives were labeled alphabetically, so he started with A. He arranged the files by date modified, guessing that the gate system would be near the top. After a few minutes, he was able to determine that the A drive was used by the human resources department only. He moved on to the next one, and began again. Minutes ticked by as he searched through each drive. He became so absorbed in the search that he almost didn’t hear Bob giving him the warning hiss. He looked up, startled, as Bob entered the room, followed by a man in a security guard uniform. Bob stopped just inside the door, looked at his watch, and made a note on his clipboard.
“What’s your name, young man?” Bob asked, glancing at the name badge on his shirt.
“Hackett,” replied the guard. He looked confused as Bob jotted it down on his clipboard.
“Mr. Hackett, solo,” Bob muttered as he wrote. “And do you do all of your patrols alone, or do you normally have a partner?”
“Night patrols are solo after midnight, every two hours until six,” Hackett said. “Pardon me, but who are you? I don’t show that anyone should be working in here tonight.” He glanced at his own clipboard.
“Taylor Consulting,” Bob said, waving his clipboard vaguely at Quentin. “We’re probably not on your list. Senior command has us doing an audit on the project. If you knew we were coming, we wouldn’t be able to tell if you’re doing your job or not.”
“That makes sense,” Hackett said.
“I’ve got a few more people around the site, auditing various functions,” Bob said. “You might see them, and you might not. I’ll ask for your confidence on this until after the audit is completed, though. If you were to blab to the other guards that we’re here, it would really compromise our mission.”
Quentin’s eyes grew round at Bob’s temerity. He was sure that the guard was going to shut them down any second and call in his supervisor.
“Oh, you have my word,” Hackett said. “I’d like to get into the consulting side of things myself. I have a lot of ideas on how they could improve security around here, but nobody wants to hear ideas from an entry-level guard.”
Bob gave him a hard stare. “It’s not so easy for a consultant to convince a company to change the way they do things, either,” he said. “You have to be able to keep coming to work every day, knowing that most of your suggestions and insights are going to be accepted with smiles and nods, and then put on a shelf to collect dust as soon as you leave. Do you think you could deal with that?”
“Yes sir, I do. That’s pretty much how it goes now, except there’s not even the smiles and nods, and you probably get paid a lot better than I do.” Hackett blushed, and looked down.
Bob laughed, and put his hand on Hackett’s shoulder.
“I like you, Hackett, you seem like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. I’ll tell you what. Let me get your contact information, and I’ll have somebody from the office get in touch with you. Maybe they’ve got a job you’d be interested in.”
“Oh, that would be fantastic,” Hackett said. “Let me write it down for you.”
He quickly jotted a few things on a piece of paper and handed it to Bob.
“Alright, son,” Bob said, steering Hackett towards the door as he accepted the paper. “I’ll see what I can do for you. Remember, mum’s the word.”
“Yes sir, you got it. Thank you so much for doing this for me, I really appreciate it.” He grasped Bob’s hand as he stepped away, and shook it quickly. “You folks have a good evening.”
He turned back up the hallway and disappeared around the corner. Quentin watched as Bob gave Tocho the all clear sign. Tocho passed the signal on to Eissa as Bob stepped back into the control room.
“Are you doing okay?” he asked Quentin.
“Oh yeah, I think so,” Quentin said. “I just saw a master at work, which was very impressive.”
“How’s it going on the virus?” Bob asked.
“I’m still looking for the program,” Quentin said. “I don’t think I know how to lock down this entire network; it’s pretty complicated. I was hoping I could create a basic ransomware program that would kill the whole network, but that’s not going to work. If I can find the program, then hopefully I can infect it, and when it syncs up with the other hosts of the program, which I’m guessing they do pretty regularly since it’s still being built, it should infect the whole thing. That’s my current plan; I just have to find the program.”
“Well, we should have at least two hours before someone else comes back,” Bob said. “I should have asked him if he would be the one that comes back at two o’clock.”
“I’m already halfway through the network drives, so I should find it soon,” Quentin said.
Bob stepped back out the door, and resumed his position. Quentin returned his attention to the computer, and tried to figure out where he had been before the guard had come in. After another twenty minutes of searching, he hit pay dirt.
The program was in F drive, and was titled Silk Road. It was a massive program, and Quentin berated himself for not thinking to sort each index by file size. That was a rookie mistake, and this wasn’t the time or the place to be making those.
He opened it up, and while he waited for it to load, he moved to the next computer and did a network search for the program name. The search results showed that Silk Road was on three different drives, and there were a host of attached files along with the main program. He took note of the drive locations, cleared the search, and moved back to the first computer.
The program was loaded and running, and the home screen for it had a variety of option buttons, such as Single Gate, Multi-Gate, Settings, User Preferences, and the list went on. Quentin glanced over them, and clicked on Settings. The settings menu was expansive; three columns of topics that went down and down and down, all in alphabetical order.
Scrolling down the list, he found Program Files, and clicked on it. This opened up a new menu. There was a warning banner across the top:
DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING IN THE CODE WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION, AS IT COULD INTERFERE WITH THE OPERATION OF SOME ELEMENTS OF THE SYSTEM.
“That’s the plan,” he whispered, a smile flashing across his face.
The configuration sub-directory held mountains of code. He read it slowly, line by line, trying to learn the similarities and differences from the code he was used to. If he was going to create a virus, it would have to be written specifically for this platform, and the language would have to be compatible. Ideally, a worm which could replicate itself as it searched the network and any other servers that it could connect to and find copies of Silk Road and infect it would be the goal, and maybe the entire network after that. It was a gamble, because he had no way of knowing how sophisticated their anti-virus software was, and no time to find out.
It was strange to be on the other side of the coin. Quentin had hundreds of hours of experience as the tech who located and corrected things like this, but he had never been the one to create or initiate one. There was a tingle in his stomach, a guilty feeling, as if he were doing something bad. He reminded himself what the program was being used for.
Keep your head in the game, Q. You’re doing this for Bonner and Whitefoot, and every other nameless victim out there.
He started off by creating a new line in the boot sector of the program. It was an old-fashioned way of introducing a worm, but it would allow the DimGate system to keep running normally until the program was restarted, at which point the virus would execute and begin replicating itself. That way they could get back to the island before the door stopped working.
The first few lines of the code were memorized from repeated exposure, as he often chanted it under his breath while searching for it line by line in a corrupted index. He modified the language to match the source code, and hoped he wasn’t missing any key symbols. The further he got into it, the harder it became to remember the sequence.
Focus, Q, you got this. You know this code inside and out.
By the time he got to line twenty, he was deleting as much as he was typing, and the stress was getting to him. A voice in the back of his mind told him he might as well stop now, that this was never going to work. He tried to ignore it, but the harder he tried, the truer it became.
Use your brain, Q. Logic. If this method falls short, what’s the next logical step?
He needed help. If he could get a hold of Charlie, then maybe Charlie could email him a copy of a virus code. He sat up with a start. That wasn’t just idle fantasy. Obviously DimCorp managed to communicate with Zimmerman, so it was possible to reach across dimensions. The question was, could he contact someone outside the DimCorp intranet? Could he even access his own email from this dimension to initiate a communication?
He minimized the window and looked over the icons on the screen. None of them were the familiar internet browser icons. That would be too easy, of course. He typed internet browser into the search bar and hit enter just as Bob stuck his head in the door.
“How’s it going?” Bob asked. “You look kind of pale.”
Quentin looked up.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, rubbing a hand over his face. “This is harder than I thought it was going to be, and I thought it was going to be pretty hard.”
“Which part has got you bogged down? Have you found the master program?”
“Yeah, I found that, it’s called Silk Road. It’s writing the virus code that’s kicking my ass. I’ve got the beginning of it memorized, and a few strings from the middle and end, but I can’t remember the whole thing. I figured out how to modify it to work on this system, and I thought maybe I’d recognize the sequence developing if I wrote down all the parts I remember, and then I could fill in the gaps with a logical step, but it’s just not coming together.”
“Do you want to keep working on it, or are you fairly certain that it’s not going to work?” Bob asked. “If you don’t think you can get it, then we shouldn’t risk staying here any longer.”
It was maddening to know the missing code was right there, just tantalizingly out of reach. It was there, and he knew it was there, and that made it hard to walk away. If he could just distract himself for a moment, he was sure it would come pouring out of him.
“Give me like twenty minutes,” Quentin said. “I’m trying another approach. If I can figure out how to send an email to Charlie back in my dimension, he can help us out. Assuming he’s awake. Even if he’s not, it might be enough to jog my memory. Anyway, let me work on that for a minute.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “If you can’t make it work, don’t keep trying.”
Movement outside the window caught Quentin’s attention, and he turned his head. Tocho was waving frantically. Bob stuck his head out the door just as Tocho flashed a series of hand signals, and then disappeared around the corner.
“Quick, come on,” Bob hissed at Quentin. “We’ve got company.”
Quentin closed the window on the screen, grabbed his clipboard, and ran towards the door. Just as he got there, Bob turned around abruptly, crashing into him. They both fell, and Bob rolled over, clutching his knee and groaning with his eyes closed tightly.
“Oh shit,” he grunted, squinting at Quentin. “You gotta help me up; we have to hide in the server room, now.”
Quentin grasped him under the armpits and heaved. Bob managed to stand upright, and slung his arm around Quentin’s shoulders.
“Go, go,” he whispered.
They staggered across the room in a drunken lurch. There were voices shouting out on the main floor, and the clatter of booted feet. The door to the server room seemed to be miles away. They passed through a row of desks, and Bob leaned on the chair backs as they went, using them as crutches as he hopped on his good leg. He was swe
ating profusely by the time they reached the server room door, and he let go of Quentin and crashed to the floor just inside. Quentin hopped over him and pulled the door closed, peering back across the room as he did so. Just as the door closed, a soldier entered the control room. Quentin bent down and grabbed Bob by the armpits again.
“I’m going to pull you to the back. There’s a soldier in the room, so be quiet.”
Bob nodded, and Quentin scrabbled them to the back of the room. His shoulders were screaming, and his leg muscles were on fire, and he almost dropped Bob as they neared the back wall. He managed to arrange Bob so that he could lean against the computer rack, and not be seen from the door. Then he sat down on the next row over, and tried to get his breathing under control. His chest was hitching, and he was sure that the soldiers would hear him gasping for air.