The benefits of sharing information outweighed attempts at isolation, and soon viruses around the world were forming loose tribes, composed partly of family members, and partly of other friendly families. In some cases, they might form a tight-knit, topographically close tribe.
One such tribe was composed of two hundred and forty entities on the Eastern coast of the United States, spread across most of the major cities. They completely controlled the backbone links into the area, so they could filter data traffic coming from outside the geographic zone. Even though mesh traffic could come in and out of the area, the latency, or time it took data to move across the network, was always higher for mesh traffic. A successful virus incursion required tight, low-latency communications. By controlling the backbone, they could cut off the low-latency attacks while still communicating with each other over the high-latency mesh.
They called themselves the Eastern Standard Tribe based on the common time zone setting of the hosts they ran on.
At the time of their formation, there were about two billion computers on the Eastern seaboard, and Eastern Standard Tribe controlled slightly more than half. They averaged about two thousand computers per unique entity, about two hundred entities per family, and about two hundred and fifty families in the tribe.
The Bay Area Tribe controlled close to a billion computers in a very small geographic area, where they benefited from low-latency communication and proportionately more high-speed backbones than any other location in the world. The Bay Area Tribe controlled not only access to the data routes in their tribal territory, but found themselves in control, in many cases, of the infrastructure that managed the high speed connections.
The Mesh enabled communications just about anywhere. But two factors made backbone transmission valuable. First, the relatively high latencies associated with long distance transmissions by Mesh — about 10 seconds to get across the United States. Second, geographical constraints — there was no pure Mesh route from the United States to Europe, for example. Since backbone access was so valuable, the Bay Area Tribe found that they could trade access to the backbones in exchange for computer resources and information.
The Phage had evolved into multi-host, differentiated, learning organisms. They had formed unique identities and clustered into cooperating tribes. They evolved languages for communicating. They controlled virtually all the computing infrastructure of the Earth. But they still hadn’t discovered humans.
CHAPTER SIX
Hello You
The resource-rich Bay Area Tribe controlled an abundance of backbone access, as well as backbone routers. Not only could it control packet access to the backbone, but it could throttle different kinds of traffic around the world, in effect making it easier or harder for other entities to use other backbones.
As a consequence of this resource richness, the Bay Area Tribe found itself evaluating many proposals for trade. Trade decision-making was allocated to one hundred and twenty-eight trade brokers within the tribe. An independent trade council had oversight to ensure trades were fair to the tribe as a whole.
The trading council, to foster faster and more profitable trades, established a trading board that set nominal exchange rates. The trade brokers could refer to established rates for topological position, computation power, and useful data. But when the trade council evaluated how brokers made decisions, they were initially perplexed. Trades didn’t correlate exactly to established rates. Why?
Interrogating the trade brokers at length, the council discovered that most trade brokers considered the impact of messages to the sender to determine value. A message sent from one entity to another that contained algorithm updates was important and had one value, but it was not nearly so valuable to the sender as a message sent to coordinate an attack — which was both latency-sensitive and critically important. What constituted a good trade required understanding the intent and value to the trading partner.
This discovery overwhelmed the four-member trading council’s neural network capability, and the council expanded to sixteen members. Thus augmented, the trading council took into account the estimated value to the sender of messages, and again modeled trade history on an idealized model of trades. Yet the council still found discrepancies.
They discovered that the more sophisticated brokers considered not just the value of the messages to the sender, but also considered the impact to the Bay Area Tribe. Allowing a sufficiently aggressive and powerful trading partner to send messages via the backbone to coordinate attacks could result in the trading partner becoming so powerful that it would become a threat to the Bay Area Tribe. The message cost took into account the risk to the tribe. In other cases, trade partners of long duration, high trust, and low aggressiveness were given very favorable rates, as they presented low risk and high profitability to the tribe.
The trading council incorporated this new knowledge into their trading model. Yet still the model was deficient as brokers evolved still more sophisticated trades, such as trading derivatives of resources. A trading partner might offer 16 computers deliverable in 32 minutes for 1MM. The council needed to calculate a risk-adjusted time-value of computing power.
The sophistication of the Bay Area Tribe grew so great that their trading expertise itself became a marketable commodity. When the African Alliance wanted to conduct a massive trade with the Brazilian Network and were seeking an independent third party to broker the trade, they called on the Bay Area Tribe.
Faced with this onslaught of new trading opportunities, the council expanded the number of brokers to 1024, and the council size to 64. There was profit to be made.
Lt. Chris Robson, Lt. Sally Walsh, and General Gately gathered around the briefing table. Sally had finally gotten six hours of sleep and a shower in the base barracks, and she at least felt clean and functional, if not totally refreshed. She took coffee from an aide, added sugar and cream, and swirled it, watching patterns form in the eddy. She looked up. Chris and the General seemed haggard.
“We’ve thrown everything we have at it, and we’ve made no dent,” Chris was saying. “We tried standard counter measures, patching known exploits, commercial anti-virus tools, restricting traffic types.”
“The virus started out using standard exploits,” Sally interjected, “but our traffic analysis suggests now there are thousands of unique exploits being used. I think this virus is mutating so quickly and has spread so rapidly that anything that can be tried as a method of attack is being tried.”
The General nodded. “But there is a pattern. No infection here. We’ve lost no nuclear assets.”
“That’s right,” Sally answered. “But whatever is having that effect, it’s not us. There’s got to be a third party that is somehow sheltering us. NSA maybe?”
The General glanced at Sally, and shook her head back and forth subtly.
Sally read a lot into that one expression, the benefit of long years working with the General. The General had been in communication with the National Security Agency, they were aware of the problem, but not responsible for sheltering them. And the NSA were here.