‘Even on a trial period. I’ll be the best worker you ever had. I swear it.’
‘Could you — OK, I’ll think about it, right? I’ll think about it.’
‘You will?’
‘I said so, didn’t I? No. No. Stay the other side of the desk. Just — OK. I’ll think about it.’
Arjun left the office, and for five minutes existed in a state of minor but perceptible hope. Then a mail dropped into his inbox.
To: arjunm@virugenix.com
From: darrylg@virugenix.com
Subject: Boundaries
You are clinically ill. You cannot do this to people. There is a LAW. Also re: your request/THREAT there can be no change. What did you think? This is policy please do not discuss it further with me. THERE IS NO USE IN CRYING OVER SPILT MILK. I remind you of my EXTENSIVE security measures.
Arjun cradled his head in his hands.
The worm which became known as Leela02, or LeelaServer, was first reported on the afternoon of 13 June in the Philippines, where network traffic was slowed to a crawl as ever-proliferating copies of the organism scanned for new machines to infect. In the US the rate of spread was slower, but a series of high-profile security breaches conspired to give Leela’s second public incarnation a level of media visibility which its creator had never in his worst nightmares imagined possible.
At 08.45 a.m. MST on 14 June, some hours before Arjun’s attempted confrontation with Darryl, a water-treatment plant in the town of Guthrie, Oklahoma, was forced to suspend activities because the machines controlling its filtration process had crashed. In the hours after trading opened, major companies in several states, including a regional investment bank, reported trouble with database software running on public servers. At 11.10 a.m. MST an operations centre providing 911 service for three suburban police departments and fifteen fire departments in Boulder, Colorado, suffered ‘catastrophic computer-systems failure’. Its operators were reduced to using pen and paper to log calls and send out response teams. The Colorado state government sent a message to Washington, asking whether it had reason to believe the country was under cyber-attack. Washington replied in the negative, but, after hurried consultations involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Infrastructure Protection Center and the Central Intelligence Agency, the categorical denial was rescinded, and the President’s spokesman, Gavin Burger, famous for his double-breasted suits and unabashed comb-over, held a conference which described the administration’s assessment of the situation as ‘pending’.
During the next morning’s daily briefing, Burger faced a barrage of questions. The press, who had seen the international stories on the wires about the plant closure in Montevideo and the data-traffic brownouts in the Far East, wanted to know the worst. Was it emanating from a rogue state? Some hostile underground network? Had any government departments been affected? How would he characterize the economic impact? The New York Times wanted to know whether the administration could confirm or deny that the country was under attack. Burger responded by reminding the assembled journalists that ‘any attempt to compromise or mitigate our ability to function effectively in terms of our critical infrastructure, whether that be in the realm of telecommunications, energy, banking and finance, water facilitation, government operational activity thresholds or the smooth and unhampered running of our essential emergency services, must be viewed as taking place within a framework strongly suggestive of deliberate negativization, threat or hostile intent. We are in the process of investigating and assessing the current situation, and will move with the utmost alacrity and vigour to institute proportionate, reasonable and devastating countermeasures appropriate to the ultimate outcome of that threat assessment.’
The woman from the Times was not sure if this meant yes or no, but filed a story which made the situation sound very tense indeed. Across America, citizens started to look with suspicion at the computers on their desks. These machines which had always terrorized them in small ways — by crashing, hanging, demanding meaningless upgrades or simply scolding them in the persona of an annoying cartoon paperclip — were now revealed to harbour something more sinister, something with an agenda. This was it, the enemy within, a technological fifth column in the homes of ordinary Americans. By the time talk-radio got hold of it, a consensus had emerged that the attack should be avenged in blood. Calling into a nationally syndicated show, Bobby from Topeka summed it up for a lot of people.
‘Torture,’ he said. ‘That’s the only way we’ll find out who’s behind this.’
Torture who, asked the host.
‘Hell, I don’t know,’ said Bobby. ‘Whoever they got to, I suppose.’
At the boundaries of any complex event, unity starts to break down. Recollections differ. Fact shades irretrievably into interpretation. How many people must be involved for certainty to dissipate? The answer, according to information theorists, is two. As soon as there is a sender, a receiver, a transmission medium and a message, there is a chance for noise to corrupt the signal.
There is no doubt that legally and morally Arjun Mehta must bear responsibility for the outbreak, but actions have been ascribed to Leela, and hence to him, for which he could not possibly be responsible. There were rumours that the virus was ‘attacking the water supply’, and the claim circulated that the Colville plant shut-down was part of a strategy by a foreign power to contaminate drinking water with (depending on who you spoke to) Cryptosporidium, E. coli or LSD. Alarms, mostly false, were raised in various US government offices, at power plants, dams and military bases. Lack of technical knowledge contributed to the confusion. In Honduras, Leela was suspected of blowing lightbulbs in the Ministry of the Interior. A man in Ottawa papered his bedroom in silver foil, convinced that his son’s PC had started to emit harmful rays. In Bihar, police acting under orders from a regional politician conducted raids on various local markets, confiscating pirated VHS copies of Leela Zahir films which were believed to be ‘spreading disease’. Back in the US, when the administrators of the website for the Houston Airport System discovered that references to George Bush Intercontinental Airport had been mysteriously changed to George Bush is Incontinent Airport they issued a press release accusing the anonymous author of Leela of perpetrating the outrage.
Conversely, other events which may be attributable to Leela have dropped through the cracks. To this day much remains invisible to the counters and chroniclers, those whose function it is to announce what happened, to come to some conclusion about how it must have been. There were market movements, jitters and shakes, reconfigurations of money and confidence and power that for the most part were not discussed or even comprehended at the time. Leela was in the system like a quintessence, a breath.
Within twenty-four hours of Leela01 being identified and countered, variants were reported. Some were obviously the work of copycats, crude alterations to the subject line of the delivery email, superficial tweaks to the code. Others were more profound, and analysts were reluctantly forced to classify them as entirely new organisms. Leelas03, 04 and 05 were identified. Leela06 (the so-called RingtoneLeela), which programmed cellphone handsets to play a melody from You’ll Have to Ask My Parents, caused particular alarm. It displayed a knowledge of mobile-telephony systems which shocked the telecoms corporations, forcing them into a hasty security redesign. Ringtone is also one of several Leela variants which have never been conclusively linked to Arjun Mehta, a gap in the record that opens up vertiginous and troubling possibilities. Were other people out there dreaming of Leela Zahir?