No! he sent her. You don't have to hate! No!
It was too late. She was gone. This clone body had died.
Feng was on his feet, yelling in Thai. His mouth was red with Shu's blood. More blood had splattered his white shirt. There was a tiny hole in the shirt where a neurotoxin dart had struck him, but still he lived.
Kade couldn't understand the words the man yelled, but he got their drift: Spiders! Spiders! Assassins! Find them! Destroy them!
Kade was still in the chair, in front of the fire, Su-Yong Shu's gray, lifeless body slumped on his lap, his stump of an arm tourniquetted in Feng's belt, when Sam and Ananda found him.
BRIEFING
Nexus's ability to satisfy widespread human desires, combined with its innocuous perception, suggests that were the technology to ever enter the mainstream, the genie would prove very difficult to put back into the bottle.
Nexus: A Risk Assessment (2033),
ERD Library Series, 2039
[Classified: SECRET]
50
GOING VIRAL
The battle over distribution of the Nexus 5 files lasted just under thirty-one hours.
It began at 2.21pm EST on Sunday April twenty-ninth. An anonymous slate connected to an ASIACOM net access satellite began uploading large compressed packages to file-sharing services around the world, posting them to bulletin boards, distributing links to prominent news sites and scientific paper exchanges worldwide.
Automated censor daemons in the United States detected the new files, noted their linkage to terms on the daemons' watch-lists and the speed with which the files were spreading. They alerted their human operators and instituted temporary blocks of the files at the North American Electronic Shield firewall.
Fifteen miles south of Baltimore, at Fort George G. Meade Army Base, inside a twenty-story cube of steel and black reflective glass, National Security Agency on-call supervisors started seeing alerts from their daemons.
Someone was distributing files that claimed to show how to synthesize Nexus 3, and how to convert that into Nexus 5. Daemons were instructed to disrupt transfer of the files worldwide.
A supervisor flagged the event and forwarded it to the International Clearing House on Global Technological Threats.
Systems in Europe, China, Russia, Japan, India, and eighty other nations received bulletins instantly. Many of them were already aware of the outbreak and had initiated their own measures.
Across two-thirds of the Internet nodes on the planet, propagation of the files halted. Supervisors congratulated themselves.
Fast action and international cooperation had saved humanity from a posthuman threat once again.
At 3.38pm EST, a teenager in Portland, Oregon – who'd downloaded the files before the interdiction – repackaged and reposted them to a peer-to-peer sharing site with a new name, "Badass Neuro Shit You Should Check Out from Axon and Synapse".
The name referred to the credited authors of the neural software contained in several of the files.
Other users of the peer-sharing service began downloading it, distributing the files to their computers, which in turn offered it up to others.
At 4.08pm EST, the files were cross-posted to a San Francisco music fanlist with the comment "Is this the same as DJ Axon? Is this really how you make Nexus?"
Daemons that had found no new copies of the files in more than an hour took notice of this new distribution.
The daemons logged the new file signatures, used emergency privileges to access the internal systems of every bandwidth provider in the United States, added the file signatures to the block list. The signatures were broadcast immediately to cooperating agencies worldwide, all of which invoked similar powers. Spread of the data was once again halted. At least four hundred and fifty computers, slates, and phones around the world had downloaded the files, and possibly more.
Supervisors paged managers, picked up the phone to confer with their peers in other countries. Emergency staff were called to the office. Other filtering and blocking priorities were lowered to make room for more CPU cycles and more human eyes on this issue.
Access to neuroscience papers and health articles mentioning the synapses or axons of neurons became spotty. Emails, texts, and online posts mentioning those terms and others began to bounce mysteriously, or disappear silently, never to reach their intended targets.
At 6.11pm EST an adult film star sunning herself in Miami, in the late stages of what had been an epic weekend bender, posted that she'd always wanted to experience what her lovers felt when they fucked her, and maybe this would do the trick. She posted a link to the banned files. In the next three minutes, forty-eight thousand of her fans clicked the link, only to find their requests denied. A few hundred continued to search, found other links to a claimed Nexus 5 download, found that absolutely none of them worked, and began to speculate as to why. Their speculations in turn began to be rejected by their net providers or to disappear from the net soon after posting, fueling more and more speculation.
At 9.44pm EST, conspiracy sites hosted in Mexico began to post that US censors were blocking a new set of terms and files on the net. Civil libertarians forwarded on the posts aggressively.
By 10.30pm EST, daemons and supervisors at the NSA had identified and put down more than eighty new distributions of the original files, each of them using a new name to describe the contents and changing compression or file length to change the file signatures in an attempt to confuse automated censors. Daemons were given broad discretion to filter first, ask questions later.
NSA officials were cautiously optimistic. The files were spreading, but slowly. It had not gone viral. They could contain this.
That optimism lasted nearly nine hours. At 7.28am EST Monday morning, daemons began reporting suspected new hits, dozens of suspected new hits at various confidence levels, hundreds of suspected new hits, thousands of suspected new hits, each with a different file name and signature.
A previously unknown hacker named Mutat0r had taken the original package and mutated it into a plethora of new variants, adding new and irrelevant files, reordering the existing files, padding out the beginning or end with texts from the Bible, the Congressional Register, random sites on the web, recompressing the package using thousands of different combinations of parameters.
Each member of the new generation had a new name, sometimes nonsensical, often misspelled, new characters inserted, characters deleted, synonyms and slang and numbers substituted for original terms, words reordered. Each had a new file signature.
Tens of thousands of compromised machines began to spew the files out, emitting more than a million unique packages. They hit peer-sharing sites, media sites, news sites, scientific paper repositories, sent emails to anyone who'd posted on various science or drug related sites, and more. Filter daemons caught well over ninety percent of them. Tens of thousands got through.