Overclocked (14 page)

“How long be­fore it takes down the en­tire thing?” she asked.

Carl watched the shift­ing col­ours of the Rhine-Temple. Quickly, he fo­cused on the im­me­di­ate levels above and be­low them. With sat­is­fac­tion, he noted that the Rhine-Temple ex­ten­sions also ap­peared to be suf­fer­ing the same fate as their par­ent.

“I’d say a few minutes should do it,” and there was a touch of pride in his voice.

The three of them sat, si­lently count­ing down the time in their heads.

From a dis­tance, the de­struct­ive power of Carl’s virus was even more spec­tac­u­lar. As if suf­fer­ing from creep­ing sub­sid­ence, the re­main­ing data pipes star­ted crum­bling and col­lapsing. Seg­ment by seg­ment, the en­tire struc­ture began dis­solv­ing into clouds of black dust that were mi­ra­cu­lously siphoned away into noth­ing­ness. The en­gulfed net­works and data­bases star­ted crum­bling as well, re­veal­ing the bare floor of that layer of cy­ber­space.

“What hap­pens to all that data?” Tania asked. She was watch­ing as clouds formed around the bot­net then cleared, leav­ing noth­ing be­hind but a large ex­panse of empty space.

“Everything goes,” Carl replied. “That’s the beauty of it. Noth­ing sur­vives to spawn an­other bot­net.”

There wasn’t much left to do after watch­ing the Rhine-Temple self-de­struct. Search­ing up and down through sev­eral levels, the three cy­ber­nauts saw ex­panses of flat blue where there used to be gi­ant stores of data, in­vaded by red writh­ing tentacles.

“It won’t take long to re­build,” Tomek said, when they con­greg­ated back at the ledge. “If I come back to­mor­row, I’m sure I’ll see tall build­ings again where, right now, I see noth­ing but empti­ness.”

“It’s the nature of data,” Carl replied. “And backups.” He grinned.

The man who some­times ap­peared as a gi­ant white rab­bit re­garded both of them gravely. “I must say good­bye at this point. My team, and my gov­ern­ment, will be very happy with the out­come of this. I add my thanks to theirs.”

Tania rose as well and shook his hand. “Maybe we’ll meet again?” she asked. “Per­haps at a con­fer­ence?”

“I’ll be sure to wear a dis­guise you re­cog­nise,” he said with a wink. He pressed a but­ton on his wrist­watch and dis­ap­peared.

Carl pursed his lips. “I haven’t ever seen him do that be­fore. Whatever he’s us­ing to exit cy­ber­space seems to be ahead of our tether tech­no­logy.”

They both stared at the space where Miller had been only a mo­ment be­fore.

“We could do some re­search on it,” Tania said, tug­ging him off the build­ing.

They drif­ted down to the pave­ment. “To­gether?”

The traffic swirled around them but they avoided the vehicles with ease. “How else?”

“Which brings up an­other ques­tion. Now that I’ve sur­vived my un­sur­viv­able sui­cide mis­sion, how
do
we get back?”

Tania smiled and kept walk­ing. “I made an ar­range­ment with Don be­fore I left. An in­sur­ance policy, if you like. You said earlier you had vis­ited the Base­ment Five net­work. All we need to do is go there and find Server Three in its DMZ. I re­ques­ted that port 27014 be opened for a lim­ited amount of time every thirty minutes, con­nec­ted dir­ectly to the two in­ser­tion rooms.”

“So we sneak in like a couple of teen­agers after a night out on the town and slip back into our beds?”

“More than a dec­ade in your case,” she said, “but yeah, some­thing like that. I’m sure there’ll be some fil­ter­ing be­fore that point, but if Don’s smart, he would have trans­ferred the re­trieval pro­to­cols across to Server Three. With any luck, in­put into our bod­ies shouldn’t take much time.”

They walked in si­lence for a while.

“Tania?”

She didn’t turn around. “Hmm?”

Carl swal­lowed. “About what I said in the Rhine-Temple con­trol room.”

There was no need to ex­pand on that. He was sure both of them knew ex­actly what he was talk­ing about.

Tania paused for a bit longer this time. One of her steps faltered. “Uh huh?”

“I just wanted to tell you…” He licked his lips. “I meant it.”

She stopped sud­denly, twist­ing to look at him. “Meant what?”

Her ex­pres­sion was a mix of bravado and ap­pre­hen­sion. He knew he would need to work on that, to gradu­ally ease the anxi­ety out of her and re­as­sure her of her own worth. Of what he felt for her.

“I meant what I said. I really think I’m fall­ing in love with you.”

Her dark eyes were scep­tical. “Wasn’t that a rather quick change of heart?”

He shook his head. “Not for me. I’ve had fif­teen years to think about it, re­mem­ber? It’s not a strategy I would re­com­mend to any cy­ber­space psy­cho­lo­gists,” he hastened to add, “but it worked in my case.”

An eye­brow quirked. “Fif­teen years to just think you’re in love with me? I won­der how long it would take for you to make sure, Carl Orin?”

She was a pro­voc­at­ive witch, all right.

Carl pulled her to­wards him and kissed her full lips, ten­derly part­ing them with his tongue and ex­plor­ing the moist cav­ern be­neath un­til she pressed her body against his and shuddered with de­light.

When he fi­nally re­leased her to speak, his voice was low and husky. “I don’t think that bit will take long at all.”

Then he paused and had the grace to look em­bar­rassed. “Uh, there’s just one thing.”

She waited.

“I, er, don’t own any­thing any­more,” he said. “Back when I thought I was about to lose my life, I made sure I trans­ferred all my as­sets. To you.”

“To?” Tania’s eyes widened. “Me?”

Carl shrugged, feel­ing un­com­fort­able. “I thought it was the least I could do. Be­sides,” he said, look­ing away for a mo­ment, “there really wasn’t any­one else I…felt strongly about.”

She put her hands on her hips. “So, let me see if I’ve got this right. That toy plane that whizzes you to your beach­side villa in Ber­muda? The one you men­tioned on the first day we met? That’s mine?”

Abashed, he nod­ded.

“And that fancy Italian place I kept hear­ing about over the past few months?”

He nod­ded again.

Tania’s voice deepened. “And I sup­pose that in­cludes your Swiss bank ac­count too?”

He pulled her close, a smile tug­ging at his lips. “Well, not ex­actly Swiss.”

“But it’s all mine?” she in­sisted.

“Every dol­lar and franc of it.”

Mov­ing her head back, she avoided his lips, but Carl saw a spark of dev­il­ment in her dark eyes.

“Does that mean you’re en­tirely at
my
mercy and char­ity, Mr. Orin?”

“Whatever you ask,” he said, “I’ll do.”

“Hmmmm. Let’s make sure.”

She took his hand and they star­ted strolling again in the dir­ec­tion of Base­ment Five’s server. “I be­lieve you left a couple of suede ‘per­suaders’ at my apart­ment the last time you vis­ited. I’ll get you home and then maybe you can start earn­ing back your as­sets. Deal?”

He grinned. “Deal.”

Au­thor's note

The wire­less neural head­set is already a real­ity, aimed primar­ily at gamers. But while the cur­rently avail­able com­mer­cial ver­sion (as of 2012) con­tains six­teen sensors, the Base­ment Five head­set con­tains sixty-four sensors and is a much more sens­it­ive in­stru­ment.

In case you were won­der­ing, port 27014 is one used by Valve Cor­por­a­tion, the com­pany that brought you the games
Counter-Strike
,
Half-Life 2
, and
Zero Clash
to name three.

Bot­nets also ex­ist, al­though they haven’t achieved the status of semi-sen­tience that I’ve out­lined here. I’m sure that the data min­ing op­er­a­tions that scour every­body’s emails and so­cial me­dia ac­counts use very soph­ist­ic­ated heur­istic al­gorithms that mimic ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, so it seemed a nat­ural pro­gres­sion to use the same kind of gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance pro­gram as a kick-off for true AI. And I have the ut­most re­spect for the abil­it­ies of Cent­ral and East European pro­gram­mers.

DMZ stands for “de-mil­it­ar­ized zone” and refers to the part of a com­puter net­work where the com­puters (or serv­ers) in­ter­face dir­ectly with traffic com­ing from the in­ter­net. The serv­ers in the DMZ are the first line of de­fence against in­ter­net-based se­cur­ity at­tacks as they are the ones that au­then­tic­ate and au­thor­ise the re­quests of in­form­a­tion that come to that par­tic­u­lar net­work.

TLS, as Tania and Carl know, stands for “Trans­port Layer Se­cur­ity” and is a cryp­to­graphic pro­tocol that su­per­cedes the earlier SSL (Se­cure Sock­ets Layer) pro­tocol that was used when, say, buy­ing on­line goods or ser­vices or do­ing some in­ter­net stock trad­ing or bank­ing. TLS is – and SSL was – used to en­able se­cure com­mu­nic­a­tion between two parties over the in­ter­net. I sup­pose I could have writ­ten the pro­tec­tion as a per­sonal fire­wall in­stead but, to me, that con­jures up an im­age of a metal suit of ar­mour that could still be pen­et­rated and I wanted some­thing more flex­ible for Tania and Carl to es­cape in. The TLS (men­tally to me, at least) seemed to fit the bill.

And, lastly, I’m sure there’s a PhD wait­ing for any­one will­ing to do re­search into the dy­nam­ics of data or­gan­isa­tion in semi-an­archic en­vir­on­ments, where “semi-an­archic” can be de­scribed as con­texts which con­tain both re­lated and un­re­lated data ele­ments across dis­trib­uted loc­a­tions. Think of it as the next step up from the cloud.