by D. B. Goodin
“Such details are not for a simple guide such as me.”
Jet took one last glance at the magnificent room before her. Then she examined the great seal the old man was referring to. She didn’t see it at first, due to the bright ball mere feet behind her. As she gazed upon the golden pattern, she realized the seal was a series of four inverted triangles.
The seal is a magical barrier, it’s another test of the Magi.
The spaces near the intersection of the points had circles with some kind of runic inscription Jet realized the runes were familiar.
It’s a spell ward. Those runes are the incantation. I must learn its significance.
As Jet traversed across the great seal, she realized she was shivering. Her teeth rattled together, reminding her of that frozen coyote in those old cartoons. The feeling passed as soon as she passed the seal. She turned to wave at the old man, but she only saw a curtain of light behind her.
I guess there is only one way to go now.
A short passageway led her to a gigantic, cavernous room with no apparent exit. A wooden crate just large enough to admit one person was in the center of the cavern.
This looks out of place.
“I bet this is a test,” Jet said to the empty room.
She heard a slight echo as she spoke. The walls were as smooth as the marble she had stepped on earlier. She touched it, and to her surprise the surface was coarse. Then her eyes were drawn to the center of the box. Then examined a triangular-looking device made of metal with two holes. Surrounding it was a silver plate about the size of a gigantic serving platter. Upon further examination, Jet realized two wooden dowels running through its center held the crate in place.
This looks familiar, the silver platter is a compass!
The platter around the triangle-shaped device resembled a compass, but instead of the usual directions she was used to, she saw five textured slices engraved onto the platter connected to a point in the middle.
I bet I can travel to the council in this contraption.
Jet examined the slices. She recognized the symbols on each slice. A series of pillars and a giant eye represented the Timemaker’s Terrace. She recognized a series of rivers with a gnarled hand pointing to the water as the symbol for the Garden of Light. The slice that represented Darkow was as black as pitch. The stony slice she knew as Strombach. A ruddy, reddish slice with slimy-looking creatures carved into it she knew all too well as the Kingdom of the Mad Queen. In the center, where the tip of each slice merged, was known as the Nexus Circle.
How do I activate this thing?
She touched the Nexus Circle. The device vibrated. She thought she could hear a low humming sound. The center of the triangular device opened, and the dowels retracted. A black rectangular box raised with four prongs on top of it. It looked like a ring missing its diamond.
I wonder if I need to activate this thing, just like the keys to a car?
The crystal attached to the end of her staff glowed. She examined it for a moment as it became brighter. She removed it from her staff, then placed it in the four-pronged clasp. Nothing happened at first. Then the cavern shook, and the top of the crate opened. It was like a giant opened a box and found her inside it. She saw several stalactites fall into the opened crate. Other rocks and debris peppered the box from above. The sound was deafening. A small chair-like bench raised from the floor. She sat in it without thinking. Then the vehicle jolted, like she had just shifted a car into the wrong gear. Moments later there was a snapping sound, then darkness.
“In-Por-Ot-Bem,” Jet said, the crate illuminated.
After a few moments and a little more tinkering around, she realized the slices could be controlled. When she touched the Darkow slice, the crate seemed to change directions. Jet did not know for sure, but she surmised it was traveling toward Darkow. She pressed the Garden of Light slice, and was jolted in the opposite direction.
Now where am I going?
She thought about it for several seconds as the device powered down.
She touched the crystal, and the device turned on again. From the glow of her light spell, Jet noticed there was a blank gray area in the center, that bound all slices together. It had no symbols or anything carved on it. When she pressed that slice, the device roared into motion. After a few moments, the crate stopped, and an image of a box with a beam of light shining on it appeared.
What the hell is this?
When she did nothing for several seconds, instead of the device turning itself off, the sides of the crate opened, revealing a starry darkness. The next sensation was most unusual; a pulling force. It was like she was being sucked out of the crate by a giant vacuum cleaner.
What the hell?
Then a menu overlay appeared:
<<>>
System Message: Solve the equation
What is your answer?
You have two clues available.
<<>>
A shaft of light shining on a three-dimensional cube appeared to be floating in space. She brought up her menu overlay, then hovered a virtual hand over a green button labeled “clue.” When she pressed it, the following message appeared:
<<>>
System Message: It is the world’s most famous equation.
What is your answer?
You have one clue available.
<<>>
I hate math! Does it have something to do with light?
She examined the light shining on the floating cube. After giving the problem some thought, she typed the following into the box provided:
E=hv
Nothing seemed to happen.
That is the equation for photon light. Why didn’t it work?
Moments later, two giant fists appeared and seemed to be heading in her direction. They didn’t seem to have an arm attached, but they were massive. She barely avoided getting pulverized.
Time for a new hint, Jet thought as she selected the “clue” button again.
A portrait of Albert Einstein appeared, floating in midair. Then it all came to her. She typed in E = mc2 into the game interface. Then the crate jolted into action. Jet grasped onto the nearest object: the compass. She had no frame of reference, but she anticipated the crate was going much faster than it had when she first entered. The sides of the crate evaporated. She gasped upon an expanse of stars.
The crate seems to be able to fly through time and space—I didn’t know this was a part of the game.
Moments later, rays of light shot across the starry field. As the stars faded, the beams of sunlight replaced them. The crate picked up speed as it shot through the void and into the light beyond.
Sometime later, Jet awoke on an engraving in the floor. Further examination revealed the engraving was a mirror image of the seal she saw before the encounter with the crate. Jet noticed the runic language was backward.
The seal is the same, but different. It’s like I’m looking at it in the mirror.
She took a moment to get a frame of reference, pulling up the in-game map. She appeared to be in the middle of a void. Nothing was visible, but yet she appeared to be standing in the middle of an enormous library. Around her, arched staircases led to an upper mezzanine area she couldn’t see. She heard voices coming from above. They sounded almost musical.
Sounds like a debate, or an opera.
Jet ascended one of the enormous staircases. As she climbed, the distance was misleading; what appeared to be thirty feet was like three thousand in this realm. After a considerable amount of climbing, she made it to the level above the seal. Jet looked toward the area where she’d started her ascent; the seal the old man had warmed her about was engraved on the floor. It looked more magnificent from her current vantage point.
Is it glowing?
The voices were getting louder. She couldn’t make out the words, but she followed their captivating and melodic song. Jet traveled deeper into what she thought was the inner sanctum; she didn’t know what else to call it. The hallway narrowed,
then opened up into a chasm lined with every book imaginable. She became dizzy as she tried to find the bottom of the crazy bibliotheca. The voices were louder here.
I can’t understand what they are saying.
Jet couldn’t find a way down into the chasm of books, but she caught a glimpse of a reflection. She strode toward the reflection. She maintained a laser focus on whatever was causing the light to reflect. Moments later, the old man appeared from nowhere.
“Congratulations, JetaGirl, you have passed the final test,” the old man said.
Where did he come from?
“A test of what?”
“Faith. Now come, the council awaits.”
The old man appeared to be walking on empty space ahead of her. Then she looked down; she hadn’t noticed she was no longer standing on the ledge, but rather seemed to be floating—no, gliding—over a chasm. She decided to walk normally, as the last thing she needed was to fall to her death then have to restart the level—or worse, lose in-game progression.
“This way,” the old man urged.
Jet followed the old man into a vast chamber. Many rows of seats were arranged in a semicircle. Nine figures sat around a gigantic chair.
“Soon you will be judged. I’m here to answer questions you may have. But choose wisely, as you only get two,” the old man said.
“Why am I being judged?” she asked.
“You are the only player who hath made it past the puzzle of the ancients and onto the encounter with the dungeon master. You are worthy of being elevated to the position of Grand Magi.”
Jet’s heart was beating so fast that she had a tough time forming another question.
“How many Grand Magis are there?”
“If you succeed, there will be two.”
The old man let Jet take in the splendor of the judging chamber.
“Now I must leave you.”
“Wait—you never told me your name!”
“My name is Icarius, and I’m the dungeon master.”
It was six a.m. when Nigel got back to his hotel room. He had only gotten a few hours’ sleep, but was rested enough. Jet was stepping out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her.
“Are you hungry?” Jet asked.
“I can eat,” Nigel blurted.
Seeing Jet with just a towel to cover her stirred up something in Nigel. He didn’t want to do anything except be with her.
Snap out of it, Nige!
“Give me a few minutes to get ready,” he said.
“There is an interesting crepe place a few blocks from here. Let’s try it,” Jet told him.
Two hours later Nigel and Jet were finishing breakfast at a cafe near Bryant Park. Nigel had just finished paying when his phone chirped, and he looked down as his lock screen filled with dozens of texts. Most of the texts appeared to have nonsensical patterns of alphanumerical strings. Nigel recognized some information as part of a root certificate, and he recognized the format. He caught glimpses of other texts from some of his contacts, but they got obscured by the dump of other information.
What’s going on?
Nigel showed his phone to Jet. “Did you get any of these?”
Jet checked her phone, then shook her head.
“I don’t know what any of that is, but Melissa has been texting a lot. I had my phone on silent during breakfast,” he said.
Nigel sorted his texts and every message had the same timestamp. After a cursory check of the metadata for the messages Melissa sent, he noticed his phone seemed to have been lagging, since her last message was more than an hour ago.
“I got Melissa’s messages at the same time as these others, so perhaps my cell phone provider is having trouble?” Nigel asked no one in particular.
“Let’s get back to the hotel, I have a strange feeling about this,” Jet said.
Nigel paid the bill, and then the teens ran the seven blocks back to the hotel; it took them longer than Nigel was expecting, due to the sheer amount of people on the street. He thought about going around some slow pedestrians, but that would require entering the street, and judging by the way these drivers were behaving, he didn’t want to risk getting run over.
“Let’s cut through here,” Jet urged.
Nigel followed Jet through a narrow alley. They dodged several cardboard boxes with sleeping bags and blankets strewn about. His legs shook as people crept out of boxes, crates, and dumpsters. He stared in stunned silence at the homeless hoard as it prepared for battle. The alley seemed to get smaller, and Nigel was beset by many hungry faces. Grimy hands extended toward Nigel, who reached into his pocket for spare change. They swarmed him as he attempted to give a homeless person some coins.
“Come on, Nige,” Jet said.
Nigel pushed through the crowd. Moments later they entered Seventh Avenue, just south of Times Square. He could see the hotel nearby. Despite being less than a block from the hotel, it took more than five minutes to reach the entrance. Melissa and George, her driver, greeted them at the hotel entrance.
“We have a situation—I’ll explain as we drive,” Melissa said.
“I need my stuff,” Nigel said.
“No need, my men packed for you.”
An enormous balding man that didn’t seem to have a neck held out Nigel’s suitcase and backpack.
If my newly crafted interface is damaged . . .
Nigel, Jet, and Melissa filed into the back of the limo as the man who resembled a Neanderthal dressed in a suit loaded their luggage into the trunk.
“Why the urgency?” Nigel asked.
“Something has happened to Brody,” Melissa said. “He’s been attacked.”
“Is he alright?” Jet said.
“I don’t know the full extent of the damage. Jensen did not give many details. But I do know is last night, after we left, our medical facility was raided. Brody was injured and Treeka is missing, along with her sister.”
“Just before we saw you, I received hundreds of text messages,” Nigel said.
“Like these?” Melissa said, handing her phone to Nigel. The messages looked similar to Nigel’s but were different.
“What about you, Jet, any messages?” Nigel asked.
“Nothing! What could it be?”
“I’m not sure, but it looks like a core dump.”
“A core dump?” Melissa said.
“When a server crashes, it creates diagnostic files and writes them to disk. The purpose is for programmers to analyze it to figure out what’s wrong,” Nigel explained.
“Will it help if you fetch the messages from my phone?” Melissa asked.
“Yes, but I’ll need to connect it to my laptop to retrieve them. I’ll need the phone and some time.”
“Let’s do that, but we need to secure our facility first.”
Moments later, the limo dropped them off at the rear entrance of Melissa’s new medical facility. It looked like the intruder kicked the door out from the inside. Blood was smeared on the walls, and it pooled in several areas on the floor. Brody was on the floor holding his stomach, bleeding from his wounds. A broken and bloody cellphone appeared nearby.
“What happened?” Jet asked as she hurried to Brody.
“Attacked by Meeka . . .” Brody trailed off as he lost consciousness.
Later that morning
Nigel was working in the office while Jet helped Melissa. He had been trying to decipher the fragments of code on his cellphone for hours.
“Back to help me?” Nigel said in a playful tone.
“I’ve been up to my elbows in blood, cleaning up after Brody’s attack,” Jet snapped.
“What’s wrong?”
“Sorry for snapping. While you’ve been here, I’ve been helping Melissa with the cleanup. Aren’t you concerned about Brody?”
I don’t feel anything for that man. Besides, he’s with a doctor now—there’s not much I can do for him.
“When you’re ready, I’ll show you what I have so far.”
“Just
give me a minute to clean up,” Jet said as she headed toward the bathroom.
Nigel downloaded the mysterious code from Melissa's phone first. It looked like a series of functions and methods from a popular programming language known as PSnake.
It’s almost as if the sender dumped an entire ProgHub repository and texted it to us. Is it related to Delta somehow? Nigel wondered.
“Figure out the code yet?” Melissa asked.
“The code looks like it is part of a much larger program. There are different modules of it scattered about, so I need to examine everything before I can figure out the code’s purpose,” Nigel said.
“Like a puzzle?”
“Exactly like that. We just need to find the hooks that connect these pieces. For example,” Nigel pointed, “it looks like this part of the code is referencing contacting an external server—the IP address is not hard-coded, and there is no name resolution, which means something will need to update it via another mechanism. Such as passing a value via a variable,” Nigel explained.
“That’s not standard. Someone obviously wants to hide it, or the server’s name changes so often it needs to be a variable. Either way, that is suspicious,” Jet said.
“Yeah, or the function is getting updated by another module. We need more time to decipher this.”
“Can I have my phone back now?” Melissa asked.
“Oh, yes—I’ve already downloaded everything off of it, so here you go,” Nigel said, handing her the phone.
I need to check the ProgHub server. Perhaps there will be additional clues there.
Nigel checked an online scanner called ShowALLD, checking its database for a compromised ProgHub server. The scanner was useful for finding compromised sites because it routinely scanned every program on that server connected to the internet. It reported information about each scanner, and if it responded with information, it would log it. A lot of security researchers used the data to help companies close security holes. But the bad guys also used the service for malice.
“Judging from the preliminary ShowALLD scans, it looks like this code is linked to the code egress from the Edinburgh facility,” Nigel said.