“Indeed,” Monroe laughed.
“All right everybody,” Doctor Faust spoke up. “We are ready to begin, so until he’s engaged, everyone needs to be silent. This is new territory and I won’t have anyone interrupting his concentration.”
The silence was immediate and all eyes turned to Jon, but the man had already closed his eyes. Doctor Faust locked her gaze on a small computer screen showing his vitals. For almost a minute, nothing happened. Then Jon’s fingers began moving over the keypads, making a soft tapping sound. After a few seconds, they stopped. Almost immediately, Jon’s voice was the first to break the silence, only now it was originating from the hub and had a somewhat robotic sound to it. “I’m in,” he said.
“Can you hear me okay, Jon?” Kat asked as she looked at the machine.
“Loud and clear, Kat,” he answered.
“Remarkable,” Monroe said quietly under his breath, looking from the unmoving body of Sherrard in the chair and back to the machine, where Jon’s voice was sounding from. “His lips do not even move.”
Kat smiled and explained. “They can’t. The voice you are hearing is Jon’s thoughts, being read into the hub and translated into speech. I apologize for the robotic sound, but we haven’t been as concerned with aesthetics as making the actual technology work.”
“Understood,” Monroe said, taking it all in, his face eager.
“I’m ready when you are,” Sherrard said from the machine. “Let’s get this party started.”
David Rivers looked up from his place at the head of the machine, keyboard on his lap, fingers poised.
Kat hesitated for only a moment, knowing this was it—the moment of no turning back. And there wasn’t. They had come too far. “Proceed,” she said quietly.
“Roger that,” Rivers replied, his fingers flying over his keyboard. “Opening the internet gate now, Jon.” A moment later: “You’re free to navigate to the honeypots.”
There was silence in the room as all eyes focused on Jon.
“Jon?” Kat asked tentatively.
“Still here,” his voice sounded from the hub. “This is all new, so it’s slow going. Bear with me. The vastness is incredible.”
“What do you see?” Monroe asked breathlessly.
“Nothing. But then again, everything,” came the cryptic reply. “I feel it all around me. It’s like it’s alive. Wow. I just…I just can’t explain it.”
“Never really was the poetic type,” Rivers chuckled as he placed the keyboard on the table and then began manually checking connections along the hub.
“Jon, remember what your task is,” Kat said, suppressing a smile. “You’re not being paid to go sightseeing.”
“Oh right, virus checking time.” Another few moments of silence. “Okay, I’m here. Down and dirty with the hard drive.”
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” he answered quickly. “Are our guests still on board?”
“Right here,” Michael Monroe said.
“I’m in machine number three,” Sherrard went on. “You have a listing of the active worms?”
“I see them. They’re right on the screen,” Monroe answered, looking at one of the monitors as Rivers pointed out the data. “There are six of them showing.”
“That’s what I’ve got,” Jon agreed. “Shall we get to it?”
“Certainly, but go after the fourth virus on the list first,” Monroe said slyly.
“Yes, sir,” Sherrard laughed.
All eyes went to the monitor and the real-time readout of the viruses that were currently infecting it. As they all watched, the fourth one suddenly went from red to green and then disappeared. The game was on.
There was a murmur of approval from the Systemtech representatives, and Monroe then began directing Jon Sherrard through the repairs of the other five viruses. When he had completed that, Monroe sent him into the other two machines and occasionally between the two of them, picking his targets at random. Each time he did, Sherrard cleaned it up. For nearly fifteen minutes, Sherrard performed flawlessly, and when he was done, Monroe clapped his hands. “Phenomenal work,” he said with a smile. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“Aww, twarn’t nothin’, sir,” Sherrard’s voice deadpanned in its computer-generated monotone.
“Now tell me, Mister Sherrard, how exactly did you do all that?”
“Well, it’s a simple matter of accessing the information directly from the hard drive or the boot sector, wherever the problem might be found. I then recode things from the hard drive on up,” Jon’s voice answered. “In this case, I simply deleted the malicious coding, in effect killing the worm.”
“So you can affect other repairs as well, besides just dealing with viruses?”
“Sure can,” Sherrard answered, knowing this would be part of their presentation. “Kat?”
Kat Hale reached out and picked up a flash drive they had prepared earlier and then handed it to Monroe. “This thumb drive has been purposefully damaged, having some of its information stuck in damaged sectors. It’s not a total loss, but should provide an adequate challenge. Jon will move the data from the damaged sectors into an undamaged one, thereby recovering it. He can then isolate the damaged sectors and render them inert. That way, additional data cannot be placed in them at a later date.” She turned and was almost ready to place the stick in one of the many ports on the hub when Monroe touched her hand to stop her and held out his other hand.
“May I?” he asked politely.
Kat hesitated only for a moment and then turned the drive over to him. “Certainly,” she said, wondering what the man was up to. “Standby, Jon,” she added.
Monroe took the disk and then turned and handed it to Dan Hyde, who immediately reached down and picked up a laptop computer that he had brought with him. With deft hands, he popped the computer open and then placed the stick in its own USB port. In a matter of seconds, he had a diagnostic running on the damaged disk. A minute later, it confirmed what Kat had said.
“You understand, Miss Hale, that it’s not about trust,” Monroe said easily. “I simply want to see how Mister Sherrard adapts to a curve ball.”
“I understand completely,” Kat answered flatly, but her nerves felt on edge. There was nothing about their presentation that was dishonest, but she was understandably nervous about any possible glitches popping up with the unknown.
“Excellent,” Monroe said and motioned to Hyde, who reached into his bag and produced a linking cable. The security specialist plugged one end into his laptop and handed the other end to Rivers, who cast a questioning glance at Kat. After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded and Rivers plugged the other end into one of the hub’s USB ports. “Mr. Sherrard,” Monroe went on, “I would like you to repair this disk, but do it on Mr. Hyde’s machine. Can you do that?”
Kat started to say something, but Monroe quickly held up a hand to silence her, while waiting for Sherrard’s answer.
“Well, it might take me some time to locate it, but yeah, I should be able to do that,” Jon’s voice finally said hesitantly after a long pause. “I think I will probably need….”
“We have hard-linked Mister Hyde’s laptop to the hub this time,” Monroe cut him off, a bit too smugly. “So you should be able to go right to it. Perhaps in future demonstrations, we can see how good you are at wireless hide-and-seek.”
After another pause, Jon answered. “Sure,” he said. A moment later, he added. “I see it.” Hyde’s laptop started working and they all watched in anticipation as the flash drive began to boot.
“Accessing the drive now,” Sherrard’s voice continued. On screen, the drive went through a number of failed boot routines, each time followed by various error messages. After several minutes, the drive rebooted and this time, the disk contents popped onto the screen. “Finished,” Sherrard’s voice said with his own trace of smugness.
“Remarkable,” Monroe breathed in amazement.
“Would you like me to display so
me other files for you? There’s some large files on the primary hard drive here that are likely pics or videos, if my guess is correct.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” Hyde interrupted and quickly lowered the laptop’s lid.
“Well, I have to say, I’m truly impressed,” said Monroe appreciatively, casting a sour glance at his security specialist before turning back to face Kat. “That was a most convincing demonstration. You understand, Miss Hale, that we needed to ascertain the feasibility of this new technology operating correctly under less-than-controlled circumstances.”
Kat nodded, quietly breathing a sigh of relief that it had worked out as well as it had. “I understand perfectly, Mister Monroe.”
Sherrard’s voice came back through the hub, a note of concern in it. “Hey, Kat?”
“What is it, Jon?”
“Take a look at number two, will you? What do you guys make of that?”
Immediately, all eyes turned toward the monitor, which still showed all three machines clear of viruses.
“What am I looking for?” Kat asked, somewhat confused.
“You don’t see it?”
“No,” she replied. “Our board is green.”
A pause. “There’s something going on in here, Kat.”
“Jon, I don’t see anything. The read is clear. Nothing in the honeypots...” Her voice trailed off as the display suddenly blazed with colors, then went into emergency diagnostic mode. “Jon? What just happened?”
“Pull the plug!” his robotic voice suddenly screamed from the system. “Pull it! Pull it now!”
“Jon?” Kat pressed, panic rising within her.
This time, there was no answer.
“Jon!?” she asked more insistently.
Silence.
“What’s going on?” Monroe demanded, his smile gone.
Kat ignored him and threw herself into the chair, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “David! Isolate the honeypots!”
Even as she was speaking, Rivers ran around the table, manually tearing out the hard lines to the three machines.
“Jon!” she nearly screamed in frustration this time.
“Honeypots are offline!” Rivers shouted, true horror in his own voice.
“Jon, talk to me!” Kat exclaimed, pulling up several diagnostic screens, her fingers flying as she scanned the readings.
“What’s going on here?” Monroe demanded again.
“I don’t know,” Kat snapped. “Looks like something is in the system.”
“What about Mister Sherrard?”
Kat ignored the question and paused for just a moment, looking at the computer screen. The changing diagnostic readings told her all she needed to know. She spun out of her chair and ripped the wires out of the back of the hub.
“What are you doing, Kat?” Drew yelled, looking at her with a wild look in his eyes.
Kat spun back to the system and quickly powered it down. Then she sat back with a devastated sigh and stared blankly at the now-dead screen.
“Kat?” Rivers asked, his voice shaking. “What just happened?”
She shook her head.
“Kat,” he pushed, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Where’s Jon?”
She continued to stare at the dead screen. “He’s in there,” she finally whispered.
“There’s no power to the computer,” Monroe snapped angrily. “You just killed your driver!”
She shook her head again. “No, Mister Monroe,” she answered quietly. “A power outage is harmless. We’ve already tested it. He’s still in there. We just need to think this through before we go retrieve him.”
“Then what just happened?” he demanded.
She paused before answering, her voice a whisper. “It’s the Horde.”
Chapter 5
St. Peter’s Hospital, Helena, Montana: The soft beep of the heart monitor was the only sound in the room as Jen Sherrard sat by the hospital bed where her husband lay. The official medical diagnosis was coma, but Jen knew there was more to it than that. She knew what her husband did with FutureTek and now, as he lay motionless on the hospital bed, all her arguments had come roaring back to her. She wanted to shake him, to scream at him “See what I mean?” But Jon would never hear her, because he wasn’t there.
“How’s he doing?” asked a soft voice from the doorway.
Jen turned her tear-stained face toward the door and forced herself to remain calm. The woman standing there was the obvious target for her simmering anger and frustration, but she wasn’t yet ready to unleash it on her. “He’s alive, Kat,” she said simply, before turning back to watch her husband’s unmoving face.
Kat stood in the doorway for several moments before entering the room and quietly pulling a chair over to sit next to the other woman. The two women had been friends for years, all the way back to their college days. Their paths had diverged after graduation, when Kat had thrown herself into her career and stayed single, while Jennifer had worked her way into government contract work, eventually catching on as a field agent with the Agency. Jen also married one of their college friends, the very man who lay motionless in the hospital bed in front of them, who was also a one-time flame of Kat’s. It had never been a point of contention between the two of them, but Kat would be lying if she claimed she never thought about what might have been between her and Jon if she had pursued things.
“He’ll be okay,” Kat said quietly, though her voice wavered and she knew she was lying. She simply did not know if he would be alright or not. She studied Jon’s face for any trace of movement, but she knew there would be none. Jon Sherrard wasn’t in there.
Jen picked up on her apprehension right away. “How can you say he’ll be okay, Kat?” she questioned, an edge coming to her voice. “You don’t even know what happened in there, do you?”
“Only a hypothesis right now,” Kat admitted, shaking her head helplessly.
“How could you let this happen? He was your friend.”
“Look, it’s not like that at all, Jen,” Kat replied, trying not to be defensive, but knowing she was failing. “We’ve been so very careful with this project and Jon’s done this numerous times with never a glitch.”
“This was the first time he was out of the box, though. You had to know it would be dangerous.”
“New and unexplored, yes,” she countered. “But dangerous? Jen, we’re talking about computer viruses in cyberspace. They’re nothing but lines of code. Jon’s been working with them for months.”
“Except for this one.”
“Except for this one,” Kat agreed gloomily, thankful to have something else to vent her own anger at and hoping Jen would steer the blame away from her and FutureTek. “Everything had gone so well up to this point that maybe we were too confident in our abilities to handle viruses in general. The Horde is…well, it’s different.”
“But why would this one be a problem?” Jen asked. “Despite all the doom and gloom about it, it’s still just lines of code, right?”
“We’re still trying to figure out why this one is so different, but we think it has something to do with its makeup,” Kat explained. “Most other viruses or worms are preprogrammed to do a certain thing. They have well-defined parameters, even the extremely complex ones that are designed to cause physical damage to systems and equipment. That gives our technology a considerable advantage to combating them because we understand the reason for their existence. This one, however, appears to be well beyond that.”
“How so?” Jen asked. As a computer science minor in college and then wife to FutureTek’s version of a test pilot, she was very familiar with technology and the makeup of viruses. She had heard a little about the Horde virus, but it had only been in passing as it was a relatively new challenge to the high-tech world and she hadn’t taken the time to study up on it. It was, however, a pretty big deal to the people who had to deal with it.
“Well, for starters, it has no defined parameters. It’s a free-range virus and actually
learns as it goes. Some experts have floated the hypothesis that it possesses a crude form of A.I.”
“Artificial intelligence? That’s absurd.”
“Normally, I would agree with you,” Kat admitted. “Now, I’m not so sure.”
“But what does all that have to do with Jon?”
“That’s what we don’t know yet,” Kay answered after a weary sigh. “It all happened so fast and Jon simply disappeared before we even knew it was the Horde that was attacking the honeypot.”
“Could he be dead then?” Jen dared to ask, her eyes going back to her husband’s face. He looked so peaceful; it was hard for her to believe he was doing anything but sleeping.
Kat shook her head again. “I don’t believe so,” she answered truthfully. “Jon’s conscious is no more than electrons in the system, able to manipulate code and software. So he doesn’t actually exist on a physical or a coded level. In essence, he exists outside the effectible realm of the virus.”
“So he’s still out there?”
Kat nodded.
“Do you truly believe that?”
“I have no reason to believe otherwise,” Kat replied, looking her friend in the eyes. “But we just don’t know where. We’ve run tests in the past where we’ve shut down the test bed while Jon was plugged in and we’ve never had a problem. So we know that being separated from the hub isn’t harmful.”
“Then what happened this time?”
“We just don’t know,” she admitted helplessly. “We’re not even sure he’s in an active state. If he’s dormant somewhere, we could have looked right at him a hundred times and never saw him.”
“What do you mean by being dormant? Is that something he can do when he’s inside?”
“We discovered it by accident, really,” she explained. “During one of our closed system tests, we were playing around with external stimuli and trying to see if there was any way Jon could access his body while remaining in the system. During the test run, Jon accidently sent himself into a dormant phase. When he did, we lost all track of him. He was effectively invisible.”
“Wow,” Jen breathed as she quickly understood the ramifications of that discovery. “The military applications of that in cyber warfare could be astronomical.”
Antivirus (The Horde Series Book 1) Page 3