DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (13 page)

Chapter 19

Martin woke up to the smell of chili. When he asked what time it was, Sasha said it was chili time. When he asked again, she said, “8:30 PM, sleepy head.”

Outside it was now pitch black, and feeling the urge to go to the restroom, he asked Sasha if she thought it was too late. She shook her head and handed him a flashlight. “Take this and make lots of noise,” she said.

Martin made his way down-trail and found the outhouse without much trouble. On his way back he breathed deep, taking in the crisp pine-scented mountain air.

“Better?” Sasha said. She was sitting at a folding table, a bowl of chili in front of her, and another across the table.

Martin took his seat and said. “You know, it occurs to me that on this our inaugural roommate evening in the High Sierras, chili might not have been the wisest choice. From a gastro-intestinal perspective, I mean.”

Sasha shook her head. “Boys and their jokes. They seldom fail to involve private parts or excretions from the same.”

For the first time in how long he could not remember, Martin laughed. Sasha grinned back at him. It so seemed like old times, and it so wasn’t, he thought.

He remembered Julian. “Have you heard anything in the news?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she got up, went over to her bed, lifted a plank underneath it and retrieved a laptop computer. When she opened the screen, Martin saw the CNN website headline: “Los Angeles in full blackout, other areas affected.”

Martin looked down, shook his head and took a spoonful of chili. “I’m worried about Julian,” he said.

“You should be.”

“What do you mean?”

Sasha turned the laptop to face her, brought up another window, and turned the screen back for Martin to see. “This is where he’s been the last two days.”

Martin saw a map of the ocean just west of Southern California. On it a trace with time stamps at selected points showed him the meandering path Julian’s sailboat had taken over the past 2 days. The last few hours seemed particularly erratic.

“How did you get this?” Martin asked.

“Julian forgot to sweep his boat for bugs before he went sailing.”

“A bug on Julian’s boat? How do you know?”

Her face hardened and she looked down at her bowl. “Did you forget how we met?” she asked. “I believe you fell head over heels for the girl that hacked into your previously secured computer.”

“You hacked into us?” Martin asked. “That would be a violation—.”

“My nose is quite clean. In this case. Well, by the letter of the law clean, though arguably not in spirit. That trace doesn’t come from a U.S. system.” Sasha looked up at him. “Not us, Martin.
Them
. The
them
that cost me my clearance, my job and so much more, remember?”

“The Iranians,” he said. “They’re after Julian.”

“They almost got him. By the way, Julian crashed the L.A. power grid, in case you were wondering.”

“Julian?”

“Why the doubt?” she asked. “Mr. chaos was bound to roll the dice, or as his luck would have it, bet on the wrong poker hand. He was supposed to stay away from gambling, like you begged him, but you know how many times you bailed him out long after he was out of InfoStream. Still there’s this one poker hand he never told you about. A poker hand that led to more than principal plus interest payments.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Julian is brilliant. To the point of utter and complete idiocy. He thought that if he helped them just this one time, with this one little problem, and if he left just enough smarts on his side of the ledger, that they would leave him alone. But these people, my people, aren’t that way. Julian still owes them, and he’s going to pay in full as soon as they grab him.”

“I’m sorry, I just need to be clear on this. Julian’s been helping the Iranians?”

“Yes, with the little gift you left behind for them. What did you guys call it?”

“The stranded payload,” Martin said.

“Ooh. Yes, that one. What a nice name. The stranded payload. Almost sounds like a lost poodle.”

“You’re sure about this.”

“I believe embedded in its code is its own official name: payload I-Q-019.”

Martin swallowed.

Sasha said, “Whether Julian realizes it, ignores it or goes on ahead with full awareness, he’s been tweaking snippets of the code for the Iranians, or as he likes to think of them, his creditors. The second mod he gave them they promptly tried out on San Onofre. Remember that little incident? The nuclear plant didn’t quite go into full melt-down like they hoped, but it showed promise.”

“Why do you then say Julian blacked out Los Angeles? How do you know the Iranians didn’t do it themselves?”

“The same way I know many other things, Martin. Besides, why would they be wasting valuable time and resources chasing Julian if they already had the capability to bring down Los Angeles? To neat up a lose end? What lose end? These people fade into the shadows. Julian couldn’t point them out if his life depended on it. Besides number two, these folks don’t want to use this... tool themselves. They’d much rather hand it to terrorist cells currently at the ready in a public library or Wi-Fi equipped café near you. Let them crash L.A. and New York and Paris and Tokio and Shanghai.”

“You have intel on all this?” Martin said. “Confirmed intel?”

Sasha set her bowl aside and took a sip of water. She looked at Martin over the rim of her glass.

“Confirmation is here," she said. "We’ve been worried about exploding shoes and dirty bombs like any of that would produce real terror. Major population centers without electricity, crippled industrial facilities, misbehaving weapon systems, compromised financial markets in exuberant chaos. Now that’s Western Civilization paradigm-shifting of the quantum leap kind. That’s terror.”

Chapter 20

“I’m only getting a partial read,” Martin said. “Not all nodes are online.”

“Which at the moment means not all nodes have power,” Sasha said.

“Right.” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Or their network servers don’t have power. Same difference.”

Martin sat back and looked away from Sasha and the computer, letting his gaze drift out through a window and out to the forest. He had completed step 7, having achieved full connectivity that let him monitor what anyone might be doing with the technology he helped create. He now had full access to the Internet and full scanning and probe capability to hit any node in the world that featured his software, and if he wanted, to switch over any node that didn’t. Yes, he had completed step 7, but he had no more steps because he hadn’t wanted to look that far ahead.

“Everything alright?” Sasha asked.

“You know the answer to that.”

“And you know you have to get involved,” she said. “You can’t just look the other way and hope it won’t keep you up at night.”

Truth was Martin had hoped he could do just that. He had hoped to find Sasha and live happily ever after, with step 7 just there to know where the goblins were, what they were doing, and to keep them away.

“This is your code doing that,” Sasha said. “I’ve been in hiding myself, believe me, and I’ve hoped against hope that my past will stay in the past. But here you are.” She pointed at the screen. “And there it is, the baby you left behind, the one you and I created and Julian mutated into his chaotic mess.”

Martin looked back at the computer and said, “I would say ‘OK, I'll do it just this once.’ But I won’t be such a fool as to believe that.”

He typed the couple of commands required to do a hex dump on one of the payload fragments he’d downloaded. He pointed at the screen. “Julian put that in there into his versions of the payload. Always.”

Sasha reached over his shoulder, brushing the side of his face with her hair, and she clicked on the option to also display the binary information. Martin recalled. She always wanted to see the ones and zeroes. The binary numbers appeared on the left, with their hexadecimal equivalents on the right.

“1101 1110 1010 1101 1011 1110 1110 1111: DEAD BEEF”

Martin scrolled to the bottom, past the first thirty-one lines that read the same to let her see the thirty-second and final entry in that block of code.

“1101 1110 1010 1101 1011 1110 1110 1111: 1D0A BABE”

“Should I take that personally?”

He looked up at her, and as disheartened as he felt at the moment, he had to laugh at that.

Martin and Sasha spent the better part of the next hour methodically scanning and probing each section of the Los Angeles power grid control system. In Martin’s estimation as soon as the first scan completed, it was digital carnage. About half the monitor nodes were responding at the firmware level only, which meant only their local hardware controllers survived, and all software code had been shredded. The other half of the nodes stood somewhere between fully operational, but blocked by other failed nodes, and partially back-morphed, which meant rather than adapt to fend off the attack, the controller had itself miss-adapted to become an attacker.

“The more I look at this, the more I think you’re right,” Martin said now. “This is Julian’s work. It’s messy, it’s chaotic, and it worked.”

“So how do you fix it?”

“That’s just it. I don’t.”

“You’re not just quitting, are you?” Sasha asked.

“You don’t get it. At this point, other than taking each node offline and manually rebuilding it, in situ, there’s just not much you can do.”

Sasha sighed. “You’re giving up too easily.”

Martin could tell she also wanted to say he was reacting emotionally, which he was, that he wanted to walk away from it even if the whole world went black, which he did.

He looked up at her.  “OK, but help me here. I’m just not seeing straight.”

“Well, let’s look at the easiest nodes first. Can we just take them back to state zero.” She tapped the screen to show him the nodes in question.

Martin thought about that. State zero referred to the way things were before the Ouroboros code was deployed nationwide to protect key government and civilian infrastructure. He wanted to go back to state zero and never start the progression of directed and morphed updates that had taken place over the last decade.

Martin turned to her and said, “OK, I think we can do that. That would leave those nodes unprotected, and it would only be a matter of time before they got re-infected. But you’re thinking that’s better than them being inoperative?”

“Not totally,” Sasha said, now putting her arm around his neck and drawing closer, until she was whispering in his ear. “What if you bring it up to a state 1, your original code.” She paused. “Our code. Except, this time, knowing what you know now about Julian’s chaos-based self-adaptive algorithms, how would you bulletproof your state 1 to make a, let’s call it, state 1-prime, new and improved.”

Martin’s chest tightened. “God, Sasha. How I’ve missed this.” He swallowed. “Thank you,” he said.

Sasha kissed him on the cheek. “Throw in a little indicator that it’s you,” she said. “Let them know you’re saving their sorry, incompetent, unimaginative asses.”

“Will do,” he said and started typing.

One hour before midnight, Robert Odehl was summoned to the war room. A new development in Los Angeles required his immediate attention. Agent Thompson came in as well.

Steve Royce, now head of the analyst team for this emergency briefed the team. “Sir,” he said, “We are happy to report that a little north of twenty-five percent of the nodes in Los Angeles are recovered or recovering. The recovery procedure is focusing primarily, at least at the moment, on master controller nodes. It’s working pretty well.” Royce pointed at the large projector screen, where a large number of nodes where now shown as green dots. Master controller nodes had an additional green circle around the dot.

Odehl couldn’t believe it. An hour ago, in a briefing chaired by the secretary of Homeland Security, Odehl had stated that it would be days, maybe weeks before anything resembling stability could be reached.

“Well, good work, team,” he said. “How did you do this?”

“Actually, sir,” Royce said. “That’s just it. We didn’t, or to put it more plainly, what we’ve tried has either gone nowhere or back-fired.”

“Martin?” Odehl said.

“Possibly. We are getting a message with each node as it comes up.” Royce flashed a sample message on the screen. “In each instance it reads, 'Switch-out: Node recovered courtesy of Sasha Javan with help from Martin Spencer.'“

“Can we verify it’s him?” Odehl asked.

“Right now we have our hands full. It would be hard to tell, anyway.”

“Fine. I don’t care if a resurrected Osama Bin Laden himself is cleaning it up. Thank God someone is figuring out this mess.”

“They’re holding,” Martin said. “They’re actually holding.”

“Of course they are. You’re calculating the hell out of chaos right now.”

“Yeah, but we probably have to move fast. The chaos-based self-adaptive code may find a breach eventually.”

“Eventually and maybe. That’s OK. If we get there first, there will be no chaos-based self-whatever vermin left. So let’s work on case B, those nodes with back-malformed code. What can we do about those?”

“Go in through the hardware controller, straight to RAM, load our new version, except we add an adaptation to replace key kernel code in the OS, reboot, and now we have state 1-prime plus. Then we come in and we replace it with 1-prime and we’re done.”

“Sounds genius,” Sasha said, and she kissed him again.

Odehl and team kept watching the dots turning green. When monitor to monitor connections required to bring power to a section of the grid were established, a line from one dot to the other appeared on the screen. First there were eight, then 16, then 32 and soon there were too many to count. One of the analysts modified the display to show the total count of connections.

“Do we have confirmation that power is coming on?” Odehl asked.

“Not yet, sir,” Steve Royce replied, “But we’re on the phone— wait.” He checked his laptop screen. “OK, we have power in El Segundo and in Downtown L.A. and portions of Riverside.”

Applause erupted around the room, and some could even be heard over the phone. Back in InfoStream, engineers were seeing the same thing. “Mr. Odehl,” someone was saying over the phone, “we’ve analyzed the recovery controller node code. It appears to be a modified, and we think improved version of some of our earliest code, post state 0.”