The Celestial Instructi0n (24 page)

The battering ram smashed through the flimsy aluminum door and the
first squad of Snow Leopards, armed to the highest tactical level, cleared the
office of the pink warehouse. A second squad, arm on shoulder, took down the
inner door in less than two seconds. Their flash bangs made the entire building
shake as if an early New Year’s celebration at Tiananmen Square. They turned
over the body of Commander Ji with their boots, but otherwise ignored him. All
sectors cleared, the powerful lights of the soldier’s assault weapons played
over the room darkened after the power cut minutes before the breach. As the
shouting of the soldiers and ringing of the grenades died out, the members of
the special unit could hear the technicians lying face down weeping, begging to
please not to shoot. They were lying prone on the door with their arms and
fingers outstretched toward the center of the room and the dead machines as if
they were starfish trying to engulf a meal.

As he did not wear any kind of distinguishing insignia, it took
several minutes to find Colonel Hu, slumped at a workstation. The rosewood
handle of a simple fly-whisk was projecting from his right eye.

Xtance was tugging on a pigtail as she finished the call on her
mobile. Joex was on a worn sofa sleeping as if passed-out. In a tiny kitchen
partially concealed by a beaded curtain, missing a good number of beads was
Jimmy Hoffa. Jimmy looked to be in his early thirties wearing random clothing
what appeared to be from an athletic lost and found box. When someone would
make fun of his dress, he would tell the, seriously, that it was the “official
uniform for the great treasure hunt that is regression analysis.” His room was
over a recently closed pizza takeout stand, but did have his own private
entrance, if you counted a climb up a junction box and conduit laced with a
couple of prusik loops to his bedroom window either private or an entrance.

“What do you think, Jimmy? What does your fabulous intuition tell
you about our legacy trojan?”

“Fuck you Xtance, Jimmy said over his shoulder, cooking something
with vegetables in a hot fry pan, “my fabulous intuition tells me you want a
double dollop of hot sauce. But, as it turned out, I agree with you. There is
too much corroboration and not enough plausible alternatives. Unless he
is—motioning at Joex—a whacked out killer of course.”

“The prophets are of the opinion that the trojan is of such
severity and universality that it independently constitutes an emergency, no
matter what the state of our new friend. We have a patch with as much testing
as we can give it, and we are releasing it now. I do not know if we can effectively
scatter it in effectively zero time. We are trying to include unorthodox means
of dispersal, but working with black and grey hats is always random. There is
this Ouest Sam guy, well, whatever. It will soon be over one way or another. If
you have an email to send or a phone call to make, you should think about doing
it soon.” Xtance flipped an orange fur pelt around her neck as if a bolo taking
down a bird. “On the other hand, if the patch works, exactly nothing will
happen.”

At that instant, Security Throne Cassandra Jones, her height
making it an easy swing from the flashing outside the building to the window,
broke through the glass with her boots, clearing out the shards one-handed in
the top of the frame with the short muzzle of the Glock. Through the window, she
was in; long black leather gloves leathers creaking. Instantly she was through the
open door into the living room. She smelled cooking, saw Baroco on the sofa,
and a woman slowly turning to face her with something in her hand aimed at her.
Cassandra visualized the fat forty-five caliber rounds as she fired two into
the Xtance’s center of mass.

Throughout most of the day, Sam had slept under cardboard near the
harbor that smelled of colorful fish and echoed the cries of mongers and
fishermen. Whether Sam was tired or just winding down because of lack of food,
or just replaying what had happened to him the previous twenty hours was hard
to say, but before sunset he stirred, got up, and pissed through his rags onto the
masonry wall that his cardboard bed abutted. He had the charged smartphone
rolled up in the waistband of his rags. To Sam it was a light-saber, a magic
wand, a ring of power, a calabash of wisdom. He must use it a few more minutes
today, as soon as possible.

Not have to waste time at breakfast or toilet, Sam was loping back
to the Grand Plaza and the old communications building which he could see as he
approached the rise at the upper end of the street. Indistinguishable from
hundreds of other men and boys wandering, barking, hawking, trucking, arguing,
gambling, eating from a plantain leaf, sleeping, or just watching everyone
else, it was an easy jog to his hiding place of the evening before. In less
than ten minutes he was peering at the Communications building through the
rocket hole at the Plaza. He took out the phone and turned it on. He was able
to get two bars this time despite the warmth and humidity of the day and the
usual crowd doing commerce on the streets as they found it.

His fingers chattered over the tiny keyboard of the smartphone,
his untrimmed fingernails clacking on the plastic bezel. It was hard to see in
the tropical afternoon light and Sam was glad that the low Plaza wall shaded
the phone as well as himself.

He read his messages. Two in particular were from someone named
Lex from Cambridge, USA. The second had an attachment, which asked Sam to use
whatever means immediately to distribute as widely as possible through as many
servers as possible. “Lex” did not offer new money, but the two things that
caused Sam to pause was the attachment seemed to be a huge patch for his and
Jim Roger’s protocol stack trojan, and that Lex had referred to him as “Sam,”
not as “Ouest.” A true name. Sam had a face now on the Internet, a black face
absorbing generations of hot African sun.

Sam scanned the code but it was unusually sophisticated. Hand
coded. Maybe the guy was from Cambridge. He could see that the patch worked by
actually exploiting the fault and executing something which likely would kill
itself while blocking the path behind it. The tricky thing was to prevent side
effects from causing as much or more damage than a presumed future malicious
code instruction. This vulnerability was so wide across the world that virtually
every switch whether in an ISP or commercial switching center had the core
protocol stack and the susceptibility. It would take a while to figure out what
the patch did.

Sam opened the second message a few seconds after the first. It
just said “Please hurry” in a dozen different languages and a handful of
scripts.

Sam leaned back against the jutting rebar and considered the code.
He could see several of the half-dozen procedures that made up the bulk of the
patch. After pinpointing the end of the final procedure, he smiled glistening
white on black and started rapidly to code using hexadecimal on the miniature
keyboard, despite his thirst he was sweating under the fading African sun. In a
few minutes, he finished adding his own procedure at the end of the code, which
he finished with #AND HELLO FROM FREETOWN. Finally, he added a special command header
and launched it into the botnet control feed he administered. The power of
symbols hailed with the Ram’s horn and burned into memory: within seconds,
hundreds of thousands of machines around the world would repeat the Shadow Lab incantation,
the warding off evil, and Sam’s Anansi codicil.

Ten minutes before noon, the traffic lights failed in Manhattan
below 90
^th
, both primary pumping stations shut down at the Hetch
Hetchy Reservoir in California, and, perhaps less importantly, a few million
people suddenly couldn’t reach Google or Facebook. More seriously, the
instrumentation failed at forty-seven hospitals that used the same model of Internet-aware
equipment. Almost a quarter of calls throughout the United States dropped.
Lovers cut off from lovers, ordering systems went offline, gas distribution
networks failed as meters offered spurious readings; management instructions
were left incomplete, police data terminals became unresponsive. There was a cascade
failure of power stations that stretched all the way from Georgia to Virginia. There
was an inexplicable failure of the aircraft tug for Air Force One. By noon, the
shudder in the network had passed as if a wave of nausea. The power stations remained
off-line, but restarting according to their grey protocol. Luckily, most of the
grid seemed unaffected by what would publically be called the Great Glitch.
While there was a short steep dip in the equities markets, the major stock
exchanges canceled all trades over a short period just before noon. The ratings
agencies had nothing to say except, “little market significance, just a temporary
failure that will be investigated and corrected.”

There was somewhat more chatter about the Event among certain
government agencies paid to monitor such things, and in due course, an
assessment went up the chain of command to the President. In summary: the
United States is vulnerable and remains vulnerable.

Despite the moderate interruption of the information heartbeat of
the western democracies that would be remarked upon for years, it was a tiny
fraction of the chaos that would have happened if Sam pressed “send” thirty seconds
later.

Security Throne Jones, Parichoner Special Agent Sahas, and Joex
Baroco were in the Lexus as it wound its way back to the airport. There were
disruptions in traffic that slowed them in calm, muggy air. She had handcuffed
Baroco with thick black plastic snap-wraps and had roughly frog-marched him down
through the closed restaurant and out the front door to the waiting sedan.

Back in the apartment, Jimmy Hoffa phoned 911 and had slowed
Xtance’s external bleeding. He hoped the medevac would hurry. Xtance was dying.
He could barely feel the pulse in her neck and she, unconscious, was offering
only quick, shallow breaths. “She doesn’t have much time. Not much of a chance
even if they came right now,” Jimmy was crying.

But he liked to make lists and one of his lists included the complete
urban first aid kit. Though not quite assembled, he had big powdery packets of
Chitosan which he tore open with his teeth and dumped into her visible wounds.
The intruder had missed Xtance’s heart and lungs, but certainly, her stomach
and intestines were critically damaged. Maybe her spine. If the aorta was
nicked, then likely nothing could save her. Jimmy knelt down and whispered in
her ear “please, please, please, please, please.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Joex said, the sharp edges of
the cuffs hurting his wrists.

“You are in luck today, Mr. Baroco, you are going to enjoy a
supper with the leader of the Church of the Crux this evening. He will not be
expecting you.”

Special Agent Sahas looked into the rear view mirror and his eyes
crossed those of the Security Throne.

“Ha ha, in luck. Well, maybe luckier to be simply terminated,”
Jones said almost jovially. “You are an Angel and I am sure that The First
Celestial will have a penance especially for you. I do. You, I; we are all
tools to a higher purpose.”

After sending the code off for amplified rebroadcasting into the
ether, Sam had no idea of what to do next except savor his hunger pangs. So he
stayed in the shadow of the Plaza until evening. Time passed toward sunset, the
sun dropping directly into the Atlantic beyond the harbor. Sam grew sleepy as the
flies buzzed around him and he held the smart phone as tightly as if it were a
sword he had just drawn from stone.

As it passed into early evening, Sam turned on the phone again and
logged on to Darknet. No messages for him either as Ouest or as Sam. Figures.
Probably wasted my time with this whole job, Sam thought. “What is the use
playing the trickster if I end up hungry?”

But, then, there was an article in the New York Times online,
another on Slashdot, and two new Darknet threads regarding an Internet “event” that
happened that afternoon. While Sam had slept and the oxcarts rattle hesitantly
along the narrow streets and the market mamas organized their wares, much of
Europe and the United States had experienced an Internet transcontinental disturbance,
which only now declared over by reassuring governments (officials who could not
possibly know what happened, Sam thought). Apparently, no permanent damage,
they said.

There was flash crash of less than two minutes on Wall Street in
the USA. It was reversed. Exchanges and regulators were already calling for
another investigation. There were reports of other seemingly unrelated
incidents in the smooth flow of life and commerce in the U.S. Other than calm reassurances,
there were no other details from the government. Of course.

The Germans, on the other hand, were blaming hackers from Europe’s
periphery for what appeared to be a temporary outage of the Internet. But the
Darknet articles mentioned a wave of other disturbances in the infrastructure. So
Sam understood the significance of a “mere” Internet glitch that also went hand
in hand with a phone glitch, power glitch, and a hundred other unusual events
that occurred that afternoon over the span of a very few minutes.