Overclocked (11 page)

“It equates to less than two days in the real world,” she said. “Could be just the kind of ther­apy a lot of wives are after.”

Carl barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I can see it now.” With his fin­gers, he mimed words flash­ing on an in­vis­ible ban­ner just above head height. “Base­ment Five Mar­riage Guid­ance Centre. ‘We straighten out your hus­band so you don’t have to!’ What are you say­ing? Let’s for­get about this whole cy­ber­space non­sense and lever­age the tech­no­logy to…save re­la­tion­ships?”

“It’d make us rich.” Her voice was coy. “A lot richer than just banging out soft­ware.”

“It’d drive most people psychotic.” He sobered sud­denly and walked over to her, grabbing a chair on his way. When he was close enough to speak without Miller eaves­drop­ping, he sank into the chair and edged it closer to her.

“Do you know what kept me sane dur­ing all these years?” he asked.

Tania gazed into his blue eyes. “No.”

“You. It might have taken more than a dec­ade,” he knocked against the side of his skull with a loosely bunched fist, “and I can be a bit dense up here from time to time, but I star­ted think­ing of what was im­port­ant in my life. Mak­ing money? Buy­ing a yacht? Own­ing a New York pent­house? They’re all just out­ward trap­pings, aren’t they?”

She laughed nervously, un­com­fort­able in the pres­ence of such na­ked hon­esty, es­pe­cially from Carl Orin. “Stop it.”

He reached for her hand. “But it’s true, isn’t it? I’ve had time to think, Tania, lots of time and I can’t es­cape the con­clu­sion that I’d been a damn fool all those months we worked to­gether.”

His thumb stroked the skin over her knuckles and it felt so com­fort­ing that she al­most be­lieved him.

“Who are you,” she asked, pulling her hand away and try­ing to re­gain her men­tal bal­ance, “and what have you done with Carl Orin?”

He flashed that jagged smile again. “I really did a job on you, didn’t I?”

“You for­get,” she licked her lips, “only yes­ter­day, you had sex with me then left me blind­folded in bed so you could be the first hu­man in cy­ber­space.”

She watched the ex­pres­sions flit across his face. Wry­ness. Re­gret. Shame.

“That was yes­ter­day for you. Fif­teen years ago for me. And, as you can see,” he glanced mean­ing­fully at the other per­son in the room, “we were both wrong about be­ing the first here.”

That was true. What had seemed so vi­tally, crit­ic­ally, im­port­ant one real-time day ago was…not so im­port­ant now.

“And you’ve really changed?” she asked. Softly. Hope­fully.

He lif­ted her hand and placed a del­ic­ate kiss on each knuckle. “What do you think?”

“Hey,” a voice in­ter­rup­ted them, “do both of you need to find a room or can we keep work­ing?”

They broke apart, laugh­ing.

“This is the only chance we’re go­ing to get,” Carl said, “so let’s go over it one more time.”

Tomek groaned and even Tania grim­aced.

“Do we have to?” she asked. “We’ve already been through the plan a dozen times.”

Carl didn’t want to scare her but knew he had to em­phas­ise the ser­i­ous­ness of the situ­ation. He had resigned him­self to dy­ing in cy­ber­space and didn’t want his death to be in vain.

“We should get go­ing,” Tomek ad­ded. “Even clocked up, every minute we spend here in your lab means one more minute the mon­ster out­side can use to ex­pand its reach.”

Carl took one of Tomek’s code cap­sules, now en­cased in a hard white shell. Small lines of blue light arced across the sur­face every now and then. He held it up.

“We have cre­ated three in­stances of Tomek’s code,” he said, ig­nor­ing their ex­pres­sions of protest. “Once prop­erly aligned to Rhine-Temple pro­to­cols, the code will re­lease thou­sands of self-rep­lic­at­ing mod­ules. Those mod­ules have only one task—to travel a pre­set dis­tance from its par­ent or sib­lings and rep­lic­ate it­self. Once it has pro­duced six­teen cop­ies, each of them identical, it will clamp down on a piece of the bot­net. At that point, the code shell will kick in. The shell will ini­ti­ate a se­cure hand­shake with whatever part of the Rhine-Temple it can find and start bom­bard­ing that data chan­nel with thou­sands of use­less data re­quests.”

“I can cer­tainly ap­pre­ci­ate the irony of us­ing a denial-of-ser­vice at­tack against a bot­net,” Tania said with a smile. “It’s an el­eg­ant solu­tion. By lever­aging a quick rep­lic­a­tion strategy, the Rhine-Temple should be im­mob­il­ised fairly quickly from the sheer volume of the at­tack.”

“The beauty of it is,” Tomek ad­ded, “the minute the bot­net moves to block one source, six­teen oth­ers spring up in dif­fer­ent places.”

Carl nod­ded in agree­ment. “I don’t care how smart it
thinks
it is, it can’t stop the sheer volume of re­quests it’s go­ing to re­ceive. And, be­cause a se­cure and trus­ted re­la­tion­ship has been es­tab­lished with each mod­ule, it can’t just shake them off. The Rhine-Temple will be
forced
to try to ac­know­ledge and an­swer each and every data re­quest, no mat­ter how ri­dicu­lous.”

Tomek grinned. “Chew­ing up its valu­able time and re­sources.”

“At which point,” Tania said, “when it’s close to para­lysis, you de­liver the fi­nal blow.”

There was an edge to her voice that Carl didn’t miss. There was no ar­gu­ment about the code cap­sules and only a little dis­agree­ment re­gard­ing the make-up of the shell and how fool­proof to make the data re­quests. Every­one agreed that the cap­sules had to op­er­ate in such a way that the Rhine-Temple wouldn’t have any choice but to con­nect to each of the mod­ule re­quests and sub­sequently over­load it­self. How­ever, the cor­dial work­ing re­la­tion­ship between him and Tania broke down com­pletely when Carl out­lined the next stage of his plan, Tomek wisely stay­ing out of the way whenever such dis­cus­sions came up.

Once the bot­net was frozen, Carl would des­troy it com­pletely with an eras­ure al­gorithm that would scramble then scrub every Rhine-Temple byte. He had cre­ated his weapon so it would be ruth­less and dev­ast­at­ingly com­plete. Any­thing that the Rhine-Temple touched, in­clud­ing it­self, would be des­troyed. That meant that, de­pend­ing on the nature of the data­bases that the Rhine-Temple had already as­sim­il­ated, per­haps thou­sands of tera­bytes of in­form­a­tion would be wiped clean along with the bot­net, but there was no other choice. It had to be done. Nobody ar­gued with the ba­sic plan.

The point Tania was dis­agree­ing with, was
how
it had to be done.

“I will go in through the old blocked IRC chan­nel,” Carl said, fin­ish­ing the brief­ing, “find an ap­pro­pri­ate spot and plant the al­gorithm. Then I’ll launch it.”

“And, be­cause you’ll be in the bot­net it­self, you’ll be des­troy­ing your­self in the pro­cess.”

Des­pite keep­ing the in­tric­a­cies of the plan to him­self, Carl knew that Tania would quickly de­duce what he was try­ing to do. It was un­for­tu­nate, but she wasn’t stu­pid.

Tomek prob­ably knew the con­sequences of the ac­tion as well be­cause, again, he looked away at Tania’s state­ment, in­tently study­ing a blank sec­tion of a nearby wall.

“If you have a bet­ter idea,” Carl said, rais­ing an eye­brow, “I sug­gest you make it…five cy­ber-years ago.” They had been over this same ground sev­eral times, time was run­ning out, and he couldn’t help the sar­casm la­cing his voice.

“Like I said be­fore,” Tania said, not budging, “once we’ve re­leased our counter-virus, we get the hell out. Leave it to someone else to des­troy the thing. If the Rhine-Temple freezes as much as you hope, we’ll all have plenty of time to come up with a way to des­troy it from a safe dis­tance.”

“You’re not listen­ing to your­self, Tania.” Carl felt a little of his old ar­rog­ance seep into his voice. “‘If’. ‘Hope’.” He poin­ted to the front door. “There’s some­thing real out there that can des­troy every piece of tech­no­logy-based in­form­a­tion hu­man­ity has ac­cu­mu­lated. Who knows what it will do to the real world once it man­ages to in­filt­rate it?”

“The bot­net could re­cover,” Tomek ad­ded and Carl shot him a look of grat­it­ude. “We don’t know ex­actly how ad­apt­able it is. And while it’s ad­apt­ing to our at­tack, we have to clock down, brief our gov­ern­ments, per­haps gather teams of de­velopers, all be­fore get­ting to the ac­tual work. We will be op­er­at­ing in real-time while our en­emy works in cy­ber-time. I’m afraid my friend Carl is cor­rect. If we are to des­troy the Rhine-Temple, then it has to be done now, in cy­ber-time. And here, while we’re all clocked up.”

Tania sighed heav­ily and threw her hands up. “Both of you made up your minds about this in­sane plan months ago, didn’t you? Be­fore I even set foot in this god­damned place.”

Carl frowned. “Tania—”

She shot to her feet. “Well, I’m not go­ing to be part of it,” she said, look­ing from one to the other. “I’ll help with plant­ing the code cap­sules but I won’t be part of a murder-sui­cide pact.” She swal­lowed. “Now if you’ll both for­give me, I’m go­ing for a short walk. I prom­ise it will only take ten minutes, no more, and I apo­lo­gise in ad­vance for delay­ing your de­mise.”

Carl and Tomek watched as she stormed out of the lab, slam­ming the door be­hind her. The pan­els shook.

“She’s a pas­sion­ate one,” Tomek re­marked to the air.

“Yep,” Carl said on a deep sigh. “She is.”

And, at that mo­ment, Carl didn’t know whether that’s what he most hated, or loved, about her.

“It’s grown.”

Tania’s voice was quiet, as if she was afraid the ma­lig­nant en­tity could hear her. She was sit­ting in between Carl and Tomek, on the rooftop of a build­ing that over­looked the Rhine-Temple.

“Soon it’ll be too big to take down,” Carl said.

Tania re­cog­nised the ledge as the same one she’d sat on when Carl first in­tro­duced her to the bot­net, but they were now closer to it. Much closer. Where be­fore all she could see were thin, dis­tant tendrils tin­ted a rich car­mine, the three of them were now near enough for her to see them as thick red data pipes. She could even see them dilate and con­strict to handle the chan­ging flow of data traffic.

“It’s either now or never,” Carl said, then looked past Tania. “You brought them, right?”

Tania kept look­ing at the bot­net, fas­cin­ated by how or­gan­ic­ally it seemed to move. Tentacles writhed in the air be­fore land­ing on an ad­ja­cent build­ing, grip­ping the smooth walls with un­set­tling firm­ness. Even as she watched, one such tendril sprouted sev­eral oth­ers and began the task of en­gulf­ing and in­filt­rat­ing an­other data­base.

She looked away just as Miller pat­ted a non­des­cript ruck­sack that res­ted on his lap. “The three code cap­sules plus your ex­tra-strength sur­prise.”

Tania blew air out nois­ily through her mouth, a clear sign of dis­pleas­ure. It sparked a sim­ilar look on Carl’s face.

“You know I have to do this,” he said. “Thanks to you, we al­most for­got to pack the IRC virus. What were you do­ing with it any­way? Try­ing to des­troy it?”

When she had re­turned from her walk, she had gone to a con­sole, pick­ing up Carl’s sui­cide al­gorithm along the way. There, she had worked in com­plete si­lence un­til Carl told them to be­gin pack­ing the equip­ment.

She faced him fully now, watch­ing him with a cold gaze. “It’s still work­ing, isn’t it?”

Un­like the bright dazzling code cap­sules, the al­gorithm was a gleam­ing black sphere. The light­est bowl­ing ball in cy­ber­space, she had thought to her­self while hand­ling it.

Carl looked a little un­sure, the skin un­der his eyes bunch­ing as if he was try­ing to peer into her. “Yeah,” he said. “It still works.”

Her re­sponse was pert and a little sar­castic. “Then I ob­vi­ously didn’t des­troy it, did I?”

She had known he wouldn’t trust her. Had known he would stop, take the al­gorithm from her hands be­fore they left and run some ba­sic dia­gnostics on it. But, des­pite his si­lent and sim­mer­ing an­ger, there was noth­ing he could do. Be­cause the al­gorithm cleared the checks. It was still func­tional. And they had run out of time.

Now, on the roof of an an­onym­ous-look­ing build­ing, Carl was about to at­tempt the de­struc­tion of the Rhine-Temple. The blade was about to fall. Tania hoped she looked a lot calmer than she felt.

After a heavy si­lence, Carl sighed. “All right, let’s do this. I’ve tar­geted three nodes where we can plant the cap­sules. The co­ordin­ates are on each of the shells. Just get as close as you can to a junc­tion at those co­ordin­ates and press the big green but­ton. We’ll meet back here af­ter­wards.”

Miller got to his feet. “When I was a child, I wanted to be a su­per-hero.” He flipped open the ruck­sack’s can­vas flap and handed out the large cap­sules. “I think this will be the closest I come.”

Carl smiled tightly as he took his cap­sule. “Re­mem­ber,” he said, os­tens­ibly to the both of them but his gaze res­ted on Tania, “we meet back here, straight after we set the cap­sules.”

Miller nod­ded and shot off, winging through the air in a burst of speed. Tania saw that he was head­ing for the cy­ber­space level above them.

“I’m tak­ing this level. You head down.”

Tania nod­ded.