by Diane Duane
“Something intended to compromise one of the main game structures,” Tau said. “Early indications suggest that it won’t be anything crude, like a distributed denial-of-service attack. Or not merely a DDOS. The focus of the main attack is most likely to be player management, but that’ll probably just be a blind for an attack on the financial structures.”
Doris te Nawhara shook her head. “Why bother with player management?”
“Massive identity theft?” said Alicia.
“That’s what I’ve been worrying about,” Dev said. “Even if they fail at the money theft, it would still be incredibly damaging to us as a company if they made off with the credit card data and banking and personal profile info we hold for millions of players. The subsequent lawsuits would destroy the company in a matter of months.” Dev let out a long unhappy breath. “Fortunately, one of the main purposes of the Conscientious Objector real-time proxy implants in our users’ machines is to prevent that kind of data theft. And I take it—” he looked over at Tau “—that the CO routines are functioning normally.”
“They were the very first part of the old game substructure to be migrated into the new servers,” said Tau. “They’re operating exactly as they should. But you should know that as well as I do.”
“Well, yeah, I should,” Dev said, “but I haven’t looked at them yet today.”
Everybody around the table glanced at each other. “You haven’t been online today?” Alicia said incredulously. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dev said. “It’s just been busy. Anyway. We need to continue to keep the data about the expected attack exactly where it’s been—under wraps, confined to the most senior people in the departments involved, and only those people and departments. There are entirely too many ways for this to leak out into the public domain.”
“Any of which,” Jim said, “could damage our share price badly.”
“We’ll get back to that,” Dev said. “Now, the news will leak, of course. Sooner or later that’s more or less inevitable. But the longer it takes, the happier I’ll be. Meanwhile, we’re not just going to sit around and wait for this to happen. We have a fair number of options open at our end. Tau?”
“Offense,” Tau said. “The best defense, after all. System security has spent the past ten days doing heavy interactive port scanning on all our user accesses, assembling profiles on users who seem to be changing IPs or Internet gateways unusually frequently. We’ve assembled a list of some eighty-six thousand suspect gateways and machines that are reporting open relays or other similar vulnerabilities that can be exploited by the attackers. With machine assistance, we’ve been erecting ‘trap-door spider’ logic sieves around all of those gateways. Kosher logins slip through with no trouble. Dodgy looking ones are rerouted into barbed-wire extended loop structures that never allow them access to the Omnitopia servers. Or else the inbound dataflow in those connections is frozen, and they’re then locked open so that we can feed them grenades.”
Alicia gave Tau the kind of look a little sister gives a braggy older brother. “Could these geekspeak idioms get any more militaristic?” she said.
“I didn’t make them up,” Tau said. “Don’t blame me! But this is going to be at least a series of skirmishes, if not a war, so logic bombs, Trojan horses, and virus attacks are all perfectly in order. The machines that attack us are going to find themselves coping with a wide spectrum of very nasty bugs. Some of them are quite simple keystroke loggers that will embed in the attacking machines, record a few days’ worth of data, comb their hard drives for more, and then report in to our security staff as to the whereabouts of the machines and the people using them—login times, genuine IP addresses if we’ve been dealing with aliases, phone company account info, you name it. If those routines fail, our people monitoring the attack processes will let loose tailored command viruses geared toward burning out the brains of the machines trying to attack us. Wipe their drives, fry their chips . . .” Tau got one of those slightly feral looks that Dev had seen over the course of many a late-night programming fest. “Surprising what you can do to a motherboard by just telling the operating system to turn off its processor’s fan.”
“Some legal implications there . . .” Doris said, scribbling on her tablet.
“Considering that the people who’ll be attacking us will be attempting to destroy private property and proprietary data,” Tau said, “it should be fun watching them try to sue us, don’t you think?”
“Not arguing the point,” Doris said, still scribbling. “We just need to start planning what our countersuits will need to look like.”
“How many personnel have you got assigned to this?” Dev asked.
“More than five hundred right now,” said Tau. “As I said, the attack instrumentalities proper are very self-driven, but they yell for help when they need it, and we’ve got a lot of very smart on-the-fly programmers worldwide who’ve signed up to do kamikaze duty where needed—‘riding’ the programs in and directing the routines to where they can do the most damage.”
Dev nodded. “All right,” he said. “If you need more people, borrow as necessary from security worldwide. Or other departments.” He scrolled down his to-do list. “Anything to add to this right now? Then let’s move on. Media?”
“I heard from Mikal in PR a little while ago,” Tash said. “He said Joss has picked up your Time magazine journalist and passed her on to his staff.”
Dev raised his eyebrows. “Any word on how she was?”
“A bit prickly, Joss said.”
Dev shrugged. “To be expected, I guess. An article about how wonderful and shiny-sparkly we are isn’t going to sell them a lot of copies. They want dirt.” He smiled, but the smile was thin. “Who owns Time this week?”
“G.E.?” Alicia suggested.
“Warner?” Cleolinda said. “I mean, it’s TimeWarner, right?”
“I know! Bertelsmann!” Doris said.
“You’re all behind the times,” said Jim, leaning back in his chair and tapping idly at one of his laptop’s cursor keys. “It’s CBS.”
“Just as long as it’s not Phil,” Tau said under his breath.
“Not this week,” Jim said, “or any other. Which is of course part of the problem.”
“Not ours,” Dev said. “Or at least not today. Other media?”
“The new prelaunch commercials are rolling out nicely worldwide,” said Tash. “All the major broadcasters are showing good over-nights. The new streaming ads on the major search engines have been getting good hit percentages—better than the last batch.”
“Okay,” Dev nodded, hitting the scroll key on the laptop again. “Meanwhile, the reaction over in our competitor universes. . . ”
“The reaction consists of attack ads,” Jim muttered. “And it’s a pity you’re not running for office so we could call them that in public.”
Dev gave Jim the don’t-start-this-one-again look. Every now and then Jim suggested that Dev was wasting his talents merely running a virtual country and should try his hand at participating in the management of a real one. On days when he felt like arguing about it, Dev would suggest that Jim needed to find out how to make him some more money, and he would simply buy a country rather than go to the trouble of campaigning. Today, however, he didn’t feel at all like arguing. “Tau?” he said.
Tau raised his eyebrows. “Game Dynamics has started a big push on Visions of Otherwhere: The Burning Moon.” He shrugged. “It’s gonna be a wet firecracker at best. The magazine and Web site critics have already been all over it for being more of the same but different. And the new game engine is a wash too. The whole thing’s a dud—I could almost feel sorry for the development teams: it’s their reputations that’re going to suffer. But their boss made them push the boat out before it was ready to do anything but sink. Typical: Ross Lyman has never been a big one for giving a damn about his employees.”
“Or anything else,” Dev said under his breath. “WonderWorlds
?”
“Lots of TV ads for Terminus VII,” Tau said. “And a lot of static stuff all over the blogs and dynamic Web sites. Not to mention a ton of astroturfing with about a million commenters doing fake grassroots stuff pumping Terminus’ new character system and running down our new product, despite the fact that no one’s seen it.”
Dev’s smile felt a bit crooked. “Well,” he said, “that’s entirely Elaine Shannon’s style. Never use a clean trick when a dirty one will do.”
“What is it with that woman?” Tau muttered. “Did you turn her down for a prom date or something?”
“I truly wish I knew,” Dev said, shaking his head. “Are we likely to be at the same trade show or something in the next six months? I really ought to set up a meeting and ask her what her problem is.” And now that he thought about it, it was a little strange that two major players in so small an industry had never met physically or even had any business dealings with each other. Though is that it, I wonder? The gaming world’s so little and inbred. Maybe Shannon thinks I’ve been shunning her for some reason? There was no telling. But WonderWorlds’ CEO seemed to consider Dev her very own personal archenemy, and Elaine Shannon’s famous temper flared up spectacularly when anybody brought up the subject of Omnitopia in even the most bland or banal context. It wasn’t that her company wasn’t successful enough in its way, and the fan base of the Terminus game series was famously noisy and loyal. Unless for some reason she feels that the loyalty might start slipping. He glanced over at Jim. “How’s her stock doing?”
Jim shrugged. “Up a little this week.”
“Because of that rumor that Sony was sniffing around them with an eye to a buy?” Cleolinda said.
Jim shook his head. “Don’t think so. More likely there’s something to the theory that big news for any one game floats all the other boats a little higher.”
“Not that she’ll like that, either,” Dev said, resigned. “Any success that she hasn’t personally achieved just seems to make her madder. A concept which brings us, more or less inevitably, to Phil.”
“Infinity Inc. is going full steam ahead with the publicity for the Infinite Worlds: Threefold multiple-expansion launch,” Cleo said. “Exactly as scheduled, directly opposite us.” She shrugged. “A wasted spend. It’s like Phil wants to poke his own eye out.”
Jim threw Dev a look that said, It’s your eye he wants to poke out, but he’ll split the difference as long as you get the message.
Dev grimaced. “More attack ads?”
“Yes indeed,” Cleo said. “Nasty stuff.”
“How nasty?”
“He doesn’t quite accuse you of child abuse,” said Cleo. “But there are veiled references to the Playground incident. A lot of buzzwordloaded stuff about ‘player safety.’ ”
Dev shook his head. “How long are his attack ads going to run?”
Tash glanced at her notes. “Joss spoke off the record to a couple of the agencies, and they said two weeks with an option for three.”
Dev sat playing with his pen for a few moments, staring at his laptop’s screen. He could just hear Phil’s voice, a long time ago. Where were we at the time? he wondered. Probably it had been yet another of those late-night beer-soaked student union bull sessions that they’d both loved so much in the ancient days. After class, after work, night after night, they had stayed up to talk about anything and everything way into the wee hours: their hopes, their dreams, the company they’d start, how life would be when they were rich and the world was at their feet. But those days seemed as far away now as the other side of the world, and as long ago as the Cretaceous. And Dev had been warned, and had ignored the warning. I’m a good friend, but a bad enemy, Dev, my boy, Phil’s voice said in that particular dim-lit memory. The voice had been almost resigned, sounding as if this was a problem that Phil would really have liked to do something about, but couldn’t figure out how. Give me a reason for a grudge, and I’ll hug it to me until the last trump blows. The phrasing had been curiously antique, and Dev had laughed at it, way back when. As if we would ever be enemies . . .
Dev looked up out of the memory. “Well, keep an eye on their numbers,” he said. “And tell Joss to keep an eye on anything that needs handling in the press. And as for legal . . .”
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” Doris said. “If he steps over the line, he’s going to wish he hadn’t.”
Dev rubbed his face. “Okay, any other real-world stuff that merits our attention?”
“Just this,” Doris said. “The Journal of the American Medical Association is about to come out with an editorial on the RealFeel system. Their experts don’t think we gave it enough beta.”
Dev rubbed his head. “I thought our experts said we did.”
“You want a laugh?” Doris said. “Some of them are the same people.”
“Now that’s just wrong . . .”
Doris shrugged. “Are you kidding? You put ten medical researchers in a room, you get fourteen opinions, three-quarters of them paid for by somebody besides whoever owns the room.”
“Yeah, well, we paid for ours,” Dev said. “Question is, were our researchers following the money or the science?”
“As far as I can tell,” Doris said, “the science.”
“Dev,” Jim said, “at the end of the day, you know that everything we do is about risk. We’re all sliding down the same razor blade together: without risk there’s no growth. Nobody held a gun to our players’ heads and made them buy this technology.”
“Their lawyers are going to say we did,” Dev said, “when they get around to suing us for some obscure cognitive disorder they come down with after using RealFeel. Or because they spilled boiling coffee in their lap one morning in the drive-through after they were up gaming late.”
“As far as we can tell, the technology’s safe,” Doris said. “Don’t forget, the military was testing it first.”
“I am so vastly reassured,” Dev said, “to have the results of the low bidders in a potentially slanted testing regimen to rely on.” He leaned back in his chair, looked at Jim. “We need to be doing something to protect the corporate side of things.”
“We have,” Jim said. “There’s a heading for this kind of issue under the general contingency fund in the conglomerate insurance arrangements.”
“Ooh, corporatespeak, Dev said. “Translation please?”
“Wait till someone sues us, and handle each case on its own recognizance. But the insurance company judges the risk of suits as only marginally higher than that of suits from players using more standard input/output software, so the underwriters have rolled it into the broader coverage for this premium period. Additionally, RealFeel is only on offer in the United States and Canada at the moment, so our exposure’s limited. The situation will be different when it goes on release in the UK, as then EU regulations come into play. But our legal reserve has about five hundred mil in it at the moment, so . . .”
“Okay,” Dev said, “we’ll see how it goes. But let’s be clear: this is a game we’re selling here. It’s supposed to be for people to have fun with, not for them to get hurt. If lawsuits start, there’ll be no jerking our players around. If they’re harmed, I want them compensated.”
Doris nodded.
“And my last real-world thing,” Dev said. “Or at least, something on the interface between the real estate and the unreal. Tau, the bug list . . .”
“And bug number three,” Tau said, sounding profoundly unhappy.
“It’s something going on in Conscientious Objector,” Dev said, “isn’t it? That’s the only conclusion I can come to.”
Tau nodded. “Without starting to spew code all over the table,” he said, “I’m pretty sure the bug is something to do with the way the basic CO structure and routines are interacting with the new hyperburst memory.”
Dev swore. Tash tutted at him. “You keep talking like that,” she said, “you won’t have anything left to say when you hit your thumb with a hammer.”
> “If we don’t fix this in two days,” Dev said, “it’s gonna be exactly like hitting my thumb with a hammer. About twenty million times. Dammit, we were promised that the memory was going to be a hundred percent backward-compatible.” He scowled at the table. “And it’s not like we can just unhook the CO routines from the game until we work out what’s the matter. They are absolutely vital to the security subroutines that, theoretically, are going to keep the incoming attack on the game from succeeding.”
He started playing with his pen again, considering possibilities. “I would ask if we can set aside an ‘island’ of the old legacy memory, move the core CO routines onto it, and attach the island to the main body of new memory with a logic causeway. But already it sounds too risky.”
“There are fifteen ways that could blow up in our faces,” Tau said. “Now never let it be said of me that I’m not willing to defer to superior experience—”
He glanced at Natasha. Like everyone else at the table, she was now gazing at Tau with an expression of total incredulity, as no one there had ever heard Tau defer to anybody but Dev about anything. But seeing that he was serious, Tash thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “I think your first instinct’s right,” she said. “It’s a recipe for disaster. Besides, it would mean migrating the CO routines back onto this theoretical island, and that would take time that we don’t have. Especially since if it doesn’t work, we’d have to migrate it right back. I wouldn’t dare try holding both versions in memory at once, even if we could.”
Tau looked unfocused, then shook his head. “Impossible. Forget about it.”
He joined Dev and Natasha in looking grim and unhappy for a moment. “At least,” Tau said then, “the ways the routine have been failing aren’t serious ways. In fact, they’ve almost all been in Microcosms so far.”
“I don’t find that reassuring,” Dev said. “Even though I know what you’re thinking: the Microcosms are more likely to show peculiar symptoms than the Macros because they routinely have more nontypical things done to them, and by people who don’t always understand what they’re doing.” He sighed. “And I hate not knowing why the Conscientious Objector is misbehaving, because if it starts doing it somewhere else, somewhere much bigger, it’s likely to blow up in our faces.”