To top it off, he’d been scheduled to brief General Ellis on the computer problem at 7:30 A.M. at the Pentagon Annex. Why so early? Why couldn’t they do it in VR? Because the military said so, that’s why. Screw ’em all. Jay liked being the honcho at Net Force, he’d gotten to match himself against some sharp players, but this military crap was for the birds. Maybe it was time to start thinking about changing jobs.
Jay hadn’t met General Ellis before, and was curious to see what his boss’s boss looked like, although he wished he could have been a bit more rested.
Although if what Thorn was saying was true, he was about to be a general, too. Couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of those these days. Jay wasn’t sure he liked any part of that.
“Sir, the general will see you now.”
Jay stood up and followed the far-too-fresh-looking secretary through a short, dark hallway, and then into the general’s office. Jay’s personal guard and escort stayed in the waiting room.
A picture of the President hung on the wall, along with several photos of an older man shaking hands with various dignitaries. Books cluttered dark-grained bookshelves, and small trophies occupied those areas that weren’t held by books: ammunition, models, and other pieces of hardware. A painting of a bayou that could have come from one of Jay’s own VR scenarios hung on one wall, cypress trees thick with Spanish moss crowding a red-hued waterway, itself tinted by a setting sun.
Eclectic.
Behind the desk sat a man in his mid-fifties, fighting the battle of the bulge and losing. He was pale, and had hair going from gray to white.
“Mr. Gridley.”
The words were stretched out: “Mist-uh Guriddleeee.” A song of the South. Texas? Louisiana? Somewhere down there.
“That’s me,” said Jay.
“Your boss tells me you’re the best bug-squasher we got.”
Jay couldn’t help but grin. He’d never heard that precise phrase put to it before, but it fit. Always nice to hear the word “best” associated with his name, anyway.
“I guess you could call it that,” he said, “although I don’t think that’s what we’ve got here.”
“So, tell me, what do we have here?”
“Well, sir, basically someone has put together something that I call the ‘Archimedes Effect.’ ” Jay saw the blank look on the general’s face. “From Archimedes’ quote. ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world’?” The general still looked blank. “It’s technically called a Distributed Computer Project, or DCP, a piece of software that runs on thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of different computers. The program hunts for answers, or, in this case, scenarios, for how to crack Army base security, and when it gets them, it spits them back out. Those are the ‘lever long enough,’ if you see what I mean.”
General Ellis nodded. “Tens of thousands?” he asked. “How does it do that?”
“The software is distributed by a server. After it gets run on the host computers, it sends partial work-packets until the job is complete. At that point, the server redirects the packets back to the server, where pieces of the solution are put together.”
The general frowned.
“The idea was first used in the late nineties. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence sent out a DCP that worked to search streams of radio-telescope data they’d collected for signals. They’d send out a block of information that was a portion of the search area, and the software on the host machine would process it whenever it wasn’t busy doing something else.”
The general was still frowning. Better reset the listening clock here, Jay, or you’ll put the man to sleep. “The result was like having a huge supercomputer, but broken up into lots of small units.”
“Okay, I got that part—but where are these machines?”
“All over the world. The way it works is the attacker put the thing on the Internet, and people who thought it might be amusing downloaded it. And the interesting part is, whoever did it put it out in the open, disguised as a computer game—a science-fiction scenario called The War Against the Bugs. Only, the designs of the alien bases, in a galaxy far away, were the same as those of Army bases on Earth.”
“How did they get the specs of the real bases?”
“That’s the real question, isn’t it? I’m working on that.” Which was true. He still didn’t have a clue, but he was working on it.
“Um. Anyway,” Jay continued, “the computers sent their information back to the originator, automatically taking advantage of their Internet connection. With most of the civilian high-speed cable and dedicated phone lines, you are linked to the the net all the time. Firewalls stop stuff coming in, but not a DCP going out. That’s the beauty of it.”
The general nodded.
“Since the game is pretty high-tech, it appealed to hard-core gamers, people who have fairly powerful machines, and people who are used to playing games where cracking security is part of the, um, fun.”
“Go on.”
“This is how you set it up: Okay, here is an alien military base on the planet Alpha-Omega Prime. Here are the specs for its computers, security devices, the timing of its patrols, all like that. You are the leader of the terran underground forces on this world, and they are getting ready to attack Earth. Your mission is to bypass their security and delay their plans by crippling their bases. How would you do it?”
“You tellin’ me our Army base was cracked open by a buncha video-game geeks who know jackshit about military procedures?”
Jay gave a little cough to cover a grin. The general seemed to be forgetting that Jay himself was a video-game geek. “Well, yeah, basically, that’s it. The average game player might not be too knowledgeable about such stuff, but give ten thousand of them a few dozen cracks at something? A solution, if it’s out there, is apt to come out eventually. Whoever ran the program had the stats on what was most likely to work, and exactly how to do it.”
General Ellis shook his head again and looked at Jay. “Game players are breaking in the Army’s bases for fun. Crap. What next?”
Jay nodded. He had to admit, it was brilliant. And the attacker who came up with the idea? He had to be pretty sharp. This was the first such DCP Jay had seen used this way. Once word got out, though, there’d probably be others.
Jay continued: “The bad news is, half-a-dozen other ‘alien enclaves’ are in the game, so I’m guessing maybe some or all of those are cloned from real military bases, too. The Army better change security protocols on these before anybody makes another run. I don’t know which alien base corresponds to which real one, or even if they are all real, but somebody needs to work that out.”
“You talk to the Army’s computer security so they can do that, PDQ.”
“ ‘All your base are belong to us,’ ” Jay said.
“What”
“Sorry. It’s an old joke, from my college days.”
“Son, there ain’t nothing about this is remotely funny.”
“No, sir.” Jay kept a straight face, even though he thought it was pretty humorous. But then, it wasn’t his ox getting gored. . . .
“So, son, is there any way to figure out where these games were sending their answers?”
Jay gave the general a little shrug. “It’s tricky—if this had been Real World, it’d be kind of like a bloodhound trying to follow a convict who jumped into the river, then split himself into a thousand pieces the next time he came out onto land, spewing red pepper behind him all the while. He wasn’t making it easy.”
Ellis nodded.
“Plus, he sent the incoming signals back to other gamers to cross-check the results before they were eventually routed back—so, basically, they go back and forth like balls at a championship tennis match. I’ll take a closer look at the code, and we’ve got folks already trying to track ’em, but if I had to guess, I’d say somebody smart enough to set this up was probably smart enough to use cutouts and bounces—leapfrogging from one server to another, changing comsat repeaters, and winding up on a private server that is shut down by now anyhow. We might not be able to untangle it, and even if we do, the physical location could be a rented apartment in Boring, Oregon, that’s been empty for a week. Might have to go at it another way.”