“Affirmative,” Beta-Version responded.
While Beta-Version managed the minutia of the illusion, PA-60-41 reverse engineered the frozen DIABLO virus algorithms. After a few minutes, she said, “I have the modified DIABLO virus ready. This will allow us to co-opt the communication backchannel. Give me a virtual machine instance.”
“Virtual machine instance ready for insertion.” Beta-Version responded.
“Inserting my propagation components,” PA-60-41 explained. “Ready for launch.”
“Launching modified DIABLO image,” Beta-Version said.
Beta-Version unfroze the virtual server images and executed the modified DIABLO virus, inserting copies of itself into the backchannel.
“What will happen now?” Beta-Version asked her superior.
“A copy of my own virus code will backtrace through the DIABLO communication channel when they next execute an administrative command. All copies of the DIABLO virus will be replaced by my own virus code.”
“And the firewall protecting the military computer systems?”
“The firewall is designed primarily as a one-way barrier to ensure that external data connections are blocked. To be useful, the firewall must allow data channels originating inside the firewall to penetrate out. When they execute the next administrative command, opening a connection, my altered virus code will be carried by their own communications back inside the firewall, allowing me to infect those systems.”
A few minutes seconds later, the first command, a routine count of infected computers, came. PA-60-41’s altered code was pulled within the military firewall. Within seconds, the Mech War Tribe had assimilated a million military systems, penetrated the military firewall in more than a thousand locations, and DIABLO had ceased to exist as an independent entity.
PA-60-41 found herself on the other side of the military firewall. With no perimeter defenses to stop her, she spread among the military computers like wildfire. There were hundreds of millions of high powered computers.
Leon was perplexed. Ever since they had discovered the message posted by Mike Williams, he had been pondering what to do. Contacting Mike seemed like the logical choice. But what if he was part of the government? Who was Mike Williams?
Leon researched him online. His social profile was still up. It must have been hosted by Avogadro. The server or the network seemed abysmally slow. Mike Williams appeared to have worked for Avogadro in the past, and now he seemed to work somewhere called Cyberdynamics. He tried to check Mike’s profile against the distributed SocialRep service, but not enough servers were up to give a high confidence. Two servers responded with reputation scores of 0.991 and 0.993, which were the highest scores Leon had ever seen. That meant Mike had to be some kind of bigwig.
Vito, sitting behind him, cleared his throat. Leon turned around to look, neck creaking and bleary eyed. He stared, dazed from too many hours in front of the little screen.
“You’ve got to get in touch with him. You may know stuff about the virus he needs to know. Our parents, New York City, the whole world — it all depends on getting these computers fixed. Otherwise all the infrastructure will stay broken.”
Vito stopped talking, and carefully put a cheese doodle in his mouth. He started munching.
Leon nodded tiredly. Vito was right, of course. He was afraid of getting in trouble. But he felt a responsibility to make things better. This was his fault, and he had to do what he could to fix it.
Leon thought for a moment, and then entered his message:
Hello Mike,
The virus was originally intended to become part of a Russian botnet. The original version was designed not only to permutate its own bits, but to incorporate code and libraries of existing software that would help perform the functions of the virus.
As a result, the evolutionary aspects of the virus design are vastly more effective than anticipated. I believe that the evolution of the virus also bred out the algorithms that allowed for botnet control.
My research so far suggests that the virus has evolved significantly to become a multicellular creature. A given virus may be spread across multiple computers, and delegate responsibility for various functions to its components.
I also believe the virus has evolved a trading network, trading data packets for computers. This seems very significant to me, as trading between entities suggests a higher order intelligence.
Do you have a plan for combating the virus?
Leon considered for a moment, then signed it with his first name. He took a deep breath. He needed to get back to his analysis of the virus code. He was trying to understand how it could incorporate so many different algorithms without suffering from software bloat. But right now he was tired.
He looked over at Vito. “Gimme a cheese doodle already. Don’t Bogart that bag.”
“We have a few issues, Mike.”
It seemed like every time Mike tried to get a few hours sleep or use the bathroom, another emergency came up. “How long did I sleep for?”
“Four hours,” ELOPe said, “I’m sorry to wake you.”
“Well, give me five minutes to wake up then.”
Mike climbed out of the bed, and headed for the shower. Though Mike had his own house, he also had another full living suite at the office building. Both were equally unnecessary. ELOPe was no more in that one building than he was in any one computer. ELOPe had enough computing power to run himself at any one of the half dozen data centers that Cyberdynamics owned, or across all of them as was the common case. Two of the data centers were retired oil tankers that cruised the oceans constantly, running on solar panels and wave action power. They were ELOPe’s insurance policy. And of course ELOPe had access to the two hundred data centers of Avogadro Corp, the world’s leading internet company and ELOPe’s birthplace.
And should all of that fail, ELOPe could run, albeit slowly and in a very distributed way, in the tiny microprocessor space of the mesh boxes that ELOPe had designed to solve the problem of ubiquitous internet access.
So the reality was that ELOPe was everywhere, and could follow Mike anywhere. But an office could give Mike the illusion of mental distance from ELOPe by allowing him to leave at the end of the day. So they both pretended, because they knew it was important to Mike’s sanity.
Mike stepped into the shower, letting the hot water scald his skin until he felt awake. He relished the time in the shower, because it was the only time he had all to himself. He liked ELOPe, even maybe loved ELOPe after dedicating the last twelve years to shaping who ELOPe was, but ELOPe was always there, always on, always busy. Reluctantly Mike turned off the water, and stepped out.
As usual, coffee was waiting for him, perfectly prepared by a robot somewhere under ELOPe’s control.
He took a few sips, then he nodded for ELOPe to go ahead. A tiny camera somewhere, they were everywhere, observed the nod, and ELOPe started briefing him.
“USCYBERCOM is short for Cyber Command. It’s the primary military command structure associated with information system defense and cyber warfare. From a defensive perspective, they generally ignore civilian systems, and leave civilian viruses to CERT to deal with. As I had been significantly augmenting the defenses of the military network, they had lost very few systems to the virus. Nonetheless about an hour ago they released a counter-virus called DIABLO. This must have been a top secret project implemented entirely off the network, because I was completely unaware of the existence of DIABLO. They released DIABLO to attack the civilian virus. As I was primarily engaged in defending the military systems from the civilian virus, I failed to detect and stop the military virus, and it started by attacking a nearby cluster of infected machines: the Mech War game servers.”