The general nodded. “That’s good news, Colonel.” He turned to Johnston. “Apparently the blackout has affected the bandwidth of these local operatives.” He turned back to the speaker. “Once we finish up Operation Exorcist, Colonel, I want you to prepare a counterattack to wipe out these local militias.”
“Understood. Do we take prisoners?”
“No prisoners. Now’s our chance to get these bastards out of the way.”
The line clicked off.
Johnston took a seat nearby. “Which brings up the code injection. Now’s as good a time as any to let the Weyburn folks see if they can control the Daemon.”
General Connelly’s face was unreadable. “Our secondary objective is just that. Let’s achieve the primary objective first.”
“But a modification of the Daemon’s code base needs to happen, General.”
“Once we’ve solidified our beachhead, Mr. Johnston.”
The control board operator looked up, frowning. “General, we’re getting some strange reports back from the data center strike teams.”
Connelly cast a look at Johnston. “We’re not done yet.” He then turned to the board operator. “What sort of reports?”
“There don’t appear to be any people in the target data centers, sir.”
Connelly pointed to the monitors on the big board. “Put up some video, goddamnit. I want eyes.”
Board operators started working switches. Images of the white snow on major news channels and the lull in fighting outside on the ranch grounds were replaced by head-mounted cameras on distant mercenary strike teams. These images were variations on a theme—racks of servers that appeared damned near identical all around the world. The grainy video showed heavily armed soldiers in black body armor and helmets moving through aisle after aisle of computer racks.
The screens showed hundreds of soldiers. There were Asians, Latinos, Africans, and Caucasians—mercenaries from a hundred different global firms. But none of them were finding human targets.
The board operator looked up again. “I think we found something you should see, sir.”
“Put it on this screen.” He pointed to the closest one on the control board.
The board operator nodded and clicked a few switches. Suddenly a grainy video from a soldier’s head-mounted camera appeared there. It showed commandos milling about a fifty-inch plasma television sitting atop a Romanesque pedestal. The television displayed the logo for Daemon Industries, LLC, and the message:
Click to play . . .
Johnston frowned. “What the hell is that?”
The board operator looked up again. “They’re finding them in a lot of the data centers, General.”
On the big board they could see more and more of the small monitors displaying strike teams arriving at the center of each data center and finding a similar plasma-screen television. All of them showed the Daemon Industries, LLC, logo with the message “Click to Play.”
Johnston closely studied the bank of monitors on the wall. Soldiers half a world away were pulling up their masks and giving the all-clear signal. “General, were we expecting to find these?”
Connelly ignored him and spoke to a nearby Weyburn Labs analyst. “Is our data still intact?”
“Well, the Destroy function is still looped for these companies.”
“What about the corporate data, damnit!”
The analyst shrugged. “That’s going to take some time to determine. We’re running on the proven evidence that invoking the Destroy function destroys a given company’s data. Blocking it blocks the destruction sequence.”
“But can’t we just check these servers?”
“It’s hard to tell where code is executing nowadays, sir. With a global blackout in place, we won’t be able to use the public Internet to connect.”
“Jesus Christ.” Connelly studied the screen.
Suddenly sections of the world starting coming back to life on the large center screen that displayed Earth from space. Lights across Europe, Russia, and Asia were clicking back on in sections.
“Goddamnit! Why is the blackout ending? I didn’t order an end to the blackout!”
The board operator looked up. “We’re not doing it, sir.”
“Then who is?”
Just then they could see video on the distant plasma televisions automatically start as the Daemon Industries, LLC, logo was swept away in a colorful animation.
“Bring one of those onto the big board! Now!”
The board operator spoke into his headset and suddenly grainy video of an Asian Korr Military Solutions special forces captain moved into view and saluted into the camera. “Sir!” His image pixelated momentarily by the satellite delay. His voice came through fuzzy with satellite distortion. “Overlord, we’ve secured objective four-thirty-nine.”
“Get the hell out of the way, damnit! Let me see the screen. Have that soldier focus his camera on that television screen!”
The captain dodged out of the way and the helmet cam focused on what looked to be an infomercial already in progress. Cheerful music accompanied a montage of images showing darknet operatives working together. Smiling young faces, wearing HUD glasses, working with fab lab equipment, fiber optics, agriculture, and alternative energy.
“Bring up the sound!”
The distant infomercial music crackled as it filled the speakers in the big command center. The montage faded out and to everyone’s horror dissolved into a familiar face—Matthew Sobol. He was sitting in a wing chair next to a roaring fireplace and looked healthy. Words appeared at the bottom of the screen:
Matthew A. Sobol, Ph.D.
Chairman and CEO, Daemon Industries, LLC
Sobol nodded to the camera as the music came to a close. “Hi. If you’re watching this video, it means you just tried to take over the world. Now, you all know who I was. But until now, I couldn’t be certain who you were. Thankfully, your recent actions helped to clarify things.” He took a moment to place another log on the fire, and he stabbed at the flames with a poker.
Connelly, Johnston, the Weyburn Labs team, and the entire data strike force watched the video playing in every data center in simulcast.
Sobol looked up again after putting the fire poker away. “I knew it would only be a matter of time until you broke into the darknet. No system is completely secure. Of course, you would scour my code for flaws. So I gave you some good ones.” Sobol smiled amiably. “As we sit here, the companies you attempted to harm are perfectly safe. However, the Daemon is deleting your personal and business wealth, and is, in fact, destroying all the data and backup tapes of the companies you sought to protect.”
He held up his hands reassuringly. “Now, please don’t get agitated and head for the doors because it’s already too late. Your greed caused you to concentrate your investments in a very specific way among a handful of companies—companies that someone just tried to defend with a lame-ass formatstring hack—even while the rest of the corporate world was targeted en masse with the Destroy function. That’s what we call an anomaly, and it has a signature that can be detected. The private individuals who were involved in this activity are now known to the Daemon. And what’s more, most of your wealth, the source of all your power, no longer exists. Money, after all, is just data, and yours has been erased.”
Connelly looked up at the network analyst. “Damnit, if the power’s back on, get on the phone with our people and find out if this is just nonsense!”
The network analyst got busy, but a lot of the other people in the room were looking concerned.