The Sapporo Outbreak (27 page)

Skinner looked up from his blood-stained shirt and turned to see the shaven-headed man try to scramble through the hole in the shattered window. It was a couple of inches too small. Ignoring his shredded hands, the man grabbed at the sharp edges and peeled away some more.

Itou's commanding voice boomed over the chaos, snapping Skinner back into focus. "They will be through in a few seconds and they will attack. You must follow me now. Do not stop." With that, Itou grabbed hold of Sakara's elbow, spun her around and started sprinting for the lobby.
 

This time there was no hesitation.
 

Harper and Hill turned and ran, Skinner and Santos followed. Adrenalin coursed through Skinner's body as he ran shoulder to shoulder with Santos. Out of the corner of his eye, Skinner could see chaos erupting from every room. Dazed and wounded people stumbled in the corridors stretching to their left and right. Screams of agony and the anguished cries of victims echoed through the cold, hard hallways. As they sprinted past the last set of parallel corridors before entering the lounge area, Skinner turned to see a small group of young men and women beating two middle aged men. Acting as one, they stamped, punched, stabbed and bludgeoned the hapless victims. Even with a fleeting glance, Skinner could tell the victims were already dead - lying silently in thick pools of their own blood.
 

Skinner caught a glance at Harper watching the same awful scene with a look of detached fascination. He seemed intrigued, almost ... excited ... by the violence erupting around him.
 

A few seconds later they burst into the third floor open lounge area. Tables and chairs were upturned, and several volunteer testers were dotted around. Dazed, confused - some were clearly injured while others wandered slowly around in shock. Moaning and intermittent cries for help drifted through the large space, mostly drowned out by the vicious howls drifting in from all directions. The vast majority of people they'd seen when entering the area had disappeared. In the distance, Skinner watched as an old man carefully placed cheese and crackers on his plate - as if the chaos around him didn't exist. Skinner could see the man's grey jacket had a large dark stain on both shoulders. Without thinking, Skinner put his left arm over Santos and pulled her in tight. He felt her warm body lean in close as she wrapped her right arm around his waist.

Ignoring the devastation all around, Itou held Sakura firmly by her left elbow as he turned to address the group. The beautiful young woman looked terrified, frozen in fear.
 

Lowering his voice, Itou spoke firmly and calmly.
 

"I will take you to the NOC on the 5
^th
floor. It's the most secure area of the building. You will be safe there while these problems are resolved."

Skinner shook his head wryly at Itou's understatement.
 

A loud, savage scream echoed up from the corridor they had just left. A large group was closing in. Skinner had no doubt it would be led by the same lunatic who'd used his head as a battering ram.

Itou looked past the group toward the sound rising from the corridor. He turned back to the anxious faces around him and barked out in broken English "Everyone. Follow me immediately." He turned toward the elevator well as the doors opened.

Then everything went dark.

#

A lean athletic man in an expensive suit walked into the fifth floor NOC and quickly took stock of the situation. Like the old trading room floors on the day of a crash, the area was filled with people shouting to and over each other. Arms waved in the air, screens were filled with ever-changing numbers, charts and video.

In the dead centre, standing on a large steel raised platform housing two banks of technicians, stood a fairly short, thin man with a striking mop of blond hair. Eyes closed and motionless, Doctor David Tait seemed completely oblivious to the confusion and panic around him. For a few seconds, he stood there, unmoving as the bodyguard eyed him impatiently.

Suddenly his eyes sprang open. He dismissively waved a hand in the air.
 

"Yes, yes - it's perfectly safe for Mr Tanaka to come in. Please hurry. I need to see him immediately."

With that, he closed his eyes and froze once again.

The man nodded, whispered quietly into the air and seconds later Tanaka appeared. Ignoring the chaos swirling all around, Tanaka strode forward, stepped up onto the knee-high steel platform and stopped an arm's length from Tait. The doctor's eyes sprang open, and the men exchanged the faintest of nods.
 

Although most of the world regarded Tanaka as a reclusive, outlandishly wealthy entrepreneur, he considered himself first and foremost a software developer. He had started coding before he was a teenager, and quickly discovered he had a talent for it. By the time he was 20, he'd already amassed a small fortune by developing a suite of mobile augmented reality games which sold in the millions. He had been a vital member of the original iSight coding effort, and - to Tanaka's great pride - much of his original code remained in the revolutionary iSight 3 game.
 

Tait was a genius. By almost any measure, one of the most talented software engineers of his generation. And he knew it. Tait surrounded himself with the most brilliant, most credentialed developers money could buy - and looked down on all of them as inherently limited. The only coder he ever listened to, the only one he considered a peer, was standing right in front of him.

Tait started talking. A high-pitched rapid-fire discourse.

"Mr Tanaka. I am still working through the layers on this, but at this stage I believe rogue, self-replicating code has been inserted into our systems. It's clever and extremely ... sophisticated. It appears to have disabled all the behavioural controls and is now generating an enormous number of new, random virtual players. None of whom have any social controls."

Tanaka's gaze never left the enormous screen over Tait's shoulder.

"Have we tracked down the source and shut down all access?"

"We have tried, but every system we access immediately shuts down and - it appears - relaunches with a modified version. Once relaunch is completed, we are locked out. At this stage, we have access to almost no security or control systems."

Tanaka's eyes widened. "That's impossible. Switch over to a redundant system here or in one of the other centres."

"I'm sorry sir, but every one of our centres appears to have the same issue. I say 'appears' as we haven't yet been able to confirm."

Tanaka shook his head angrily.
 

"Doctor Tait. You are not thinking clearly. What you are describing is impossible. There are simply too many layers of security for any attack to fight its way through. And even if it did, every single module has multiple copies in other parts of the world."

Tait nodded. "I understand sir. My first reaction was very similar. However, I can assure you it's true. We are under attack. It's coordinated, extremely sophisticated ... and it's replicating."

Tanaka stared at the massive digital wall, a graphic illustration of the baffling array of problems unfolding before them. Tanaka watched in disbelieve. How could it be? How could a virus from some anonymous hack get through the layer upon layer of security he'd built over the years? How could some no name hacker corrupt his life's work?

A sudden thought struck Tanaka, and he spun back to Tait.

"What about the players in the game?"

Tait sighed. "Mr Tanaka, I'm afraid it's a disaster. All iSight 2 players that were in the game - around 300 million at the time of the attack - were transported into iSight 3. The vast majority probably don't realise what's happened yet. And even that's not the biggest issue."

Tanaka looked horrified as Tait continued.

"The attack disabled all social and behavioural controls as its first act. The virtual players appear to have responded to the new conditions by rapidly evolving to survive in anarchy. They are attacking others. The human players can't react as quickly, they can no longer differentiate between the real and the new anarchic iSight world. Violent attacks are spreading everywhere and are multiplying. At the current rate of replication, within an hour every player will be immersed in a violent new iSight 3 world."

The colour drained from Tanaka's face. He looked as if he might pass out.

"We have no choice. Shut it down Tait. Shut everything down."

Tait stared at Tanaka. Two, three, four, five seconds passed before he replied.

"Sir, I don't think you understand. We can't shut it down. We no longer have control - and the attack has been copying the stripped down iSight 3 to thousands of public domain servers around the world. All we can do now is try to slow things down and warn players to stay out of the game."
 

For a brief moment, Tanaka stared incredulously at Tait before springing into life.

"Doctor Tait, your first and most urgent priority - without exception - is to ensure that my daughter Shou is off the game before the infection spreads. Use every resource you have and inform me when you have completed this. Do you understand?"

Tait was aghast.
 

"Mr Tanaka. We have 300 million people at risk, and another 700 million who may choose to join iSight 3 for free as it leaks out to the world. Surely we should focus on stopping that before ..."

Tanaka screamed at Tait, so loud and furious that silence fell across the room, and his bodyguard took a step forward.
 

"Mr Tait. You will do exactly as I say, or I will find someone who will. Is that clear?"

Tait looked at Tanaka. The brilliant, slightly eccentric man he knew was gone, replaced by a man twisted by rage and fear. Tait glanced to the side and saw Tanaka's two protectors staring into his eyes. Tait saw them as pit bulls, straining at the leash and ready to attack at Tanaka's command. They were part of the thug Itou's team, and Tait was well aware of how far Itou was willing to go to ensure Tanaka got what he wanted.

Tait lowered his voice and replied.

"I am sorry to have questioned you sir. I understand. Rest assured we will focus on Shou's safety as our first priority."

As he spoke, Tait's attention was drawn back to a monitor to Tanaka's right alternating between live footage from the building's security cameras. Something was happening. People were running, shouting,
fighting
, throughout the building. Waves of fear shuddered through the small man. Forgetting Tanaka's presence, Tait bent over the monitor and swiped hurriedly across the screen. The monitor divided into six windows, each showing alternating footage from one of the building's six levels.

Tait looked on in horror as Tanaka turned to watch.

There were signs of violent struggle on almost every screen. Victims lie still on the ground, others stumbled in a blood-soaked daze. Occasionally, the camera picked up groups roaming the halls and corridors.
 

They watched the footage from a second floor research lab, as a powerfully-built player pushed past a nasty fist fight that had erupted between two professorial middle-aged men. He picked up a chair and hurled it at the two-way mirror separating the room from the corridor.
 

On another window, a group of around a dozen younger men howled and snarled through the level one reception area before spotting a young man and woman huddled behind the large oval reception desk. They cheered and laughed as they sprinted toward the pair. Strong hands reached over the desk and pulled the struggling pair out. Then, without any warning, a frumpy middle-aged female member of the gang held up a steel armrest from a dismantled chair and crashed it sickeningly down on the skull of the young man. The man crumpled to the floor and, howling with laughter, the group pounded on the young man's body. Another three young men split from the group, jeering and smiling as they made their way toward the whimpering woman cowering on the floor.

Suddenly, the whole room seemed to flicker. A second later, every electronic device in the room blacked out, to be replaced by dim emergency lighting and the eery glow from a few battery-powered tablet monitors on either side of the room.
 

His eyes struggling to adapt, Tanaka peered through the twilight.

"What's happened?"

Tait's eyes flickered for a moment before he replied.

"Sir. It appears the snowstorm outside has escalated into a full scale blizzard. The main power supply to the building has been interrupted. We're now working from the emergency power supply. It's enough to keep the core gaming systems live while we try to fight the attack. However, I'm afraid all other building services including security are no longer operating."

#

Seconds earlier the group of six - Skinner, Santos, Hill, Harper, Sakura and Itou - were running through the brightly lit rest hall on the third floor and toward the glass elevator bank. Directly behind them an open corridor stretched out into a maze of white and glass research rooms.
 

And now all hell had broken out.

For some reason, the lights had gone out - and the large communal space plunged into darkness. To both their left and right, in the distance tiny sky blue LED strip lighting traced an outline around an emergency exit door. Other than that, the area was pitch black.

Itou barked, "Everyone down. Now!"

Skinner reached out to his right, his hand thudding against Santos' elbow. They eagerly grabbed at each other's hands and huddled close together in the darkness.
 

The distant glow of emergency LED lighting drifted out from the corridors behind. The sudden darkness seemed to amplify the sounds all around. Screams of terror and anger, the slap and thud of flesh pounding flesh, the crunch and snap of bones breaking.
 

Skinner could hear Sakura sobbing softly in the dark.

Itou whispered. "Everyone hold at least one other. We will stay still and silent for a few more seconds. Does everyone have their iSight lenses on?"