Arif gazed at her in disbelief. ‘At this time of day, that’s less than one per cent of what’s running! We can shut those games down and give people refunds. It’s no reason not to salvage all the rest.’
He was right. Nasim said, ‘Okay, go ahead and try it.’
As Arif set to work, Bahador said quietly, ‘It’s disturbing, isn’t it?’
‘Being invaded by sheep?’
He shook his head. ‘The prospect of spawning a few thousand slaves like that.’
Nasim didn’t reply immediately. The truth was, she shared his disquiet to a degree, though it didn’t make much sense. She’d convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with the Faribas popping in and out of existence all over Zendegi, whispering advice to the scripted Proxies in dozens of games, whenever the Proxies’ behaviour was too difficult to humanise by other means.
‘They’re not slaves,’ she said. ‘They’ve learnt how to do a microscopic part of what a human does. If a factory worker guides a robot arm through a sequence of moves, does the robot become as human as the worker?’
‘No,’ Bahador replied, ‘and I don’t think the Faribas are human either. But it’s still eerie, churning them out by the thousands.’
Nasim said, ‘What difference does it make, whether it’s one or a thousand?’
Bahador spread his hands in an admission of uncertainty. ‘Maybe none at all; I don’t know. If I were sure that I knew the right way to think about this…’ He trailed off, but Nasim could guess where he’d been heading. If he’d been certain that the Faribas were conscious, he would have been out on the street with Shahidi’s followers. If he’d been certain that they were not, he would have applauded Arif’s idea without reservation.
Arif worked quickly; the necessary hooks to the Fariba modules were all in place already, he just had to tie them together with a few other systems. When it was done, he tried out the anomalyrecogniser on an instance of the Virtual Azimi game; the sheep all flashed red, and nothing else was targeted. Then he quickly added code to purge the selected objects.
He turned to Nasim. ‘Can I-?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Arif ran his program. The sheep vanished. The human players began to cheer and applaud; the Proxies looked around, found nothing unfamiliar, and decided to stop feigning injuries.
Nasim said, ‘Launch it on everything.’
Arif was taken aback. ‘Everything? No more tests?’
Nasim glanced at her watch. ‘We’ve lost at least three-quarters of a million dollars already. I’m willing to bet that this is going to make things better, not worse.’
Arif didn’t have personal authorisation to launch so many processes at once, let alone the kind that intervened in every single game across Zendegi. Bahador and Nasim both had to sign off on the move – and an automatic notification of their action would be passed further up the hierarchy.
As she waited to be summoned to the boss’s office to explain what had happened, Nasim took some comfort from checking a sample of the games on Khosrow’s list. Minions was back to its usual uninhibited gore-fest; the biplanes had fallen victim to their own blatant absurdity. Nasim didn’t ask for details of the symptoms that had afflicted all the other games, but as she flicked from environment to environment it occurred to her that some anomalies might have been subtler than sheep or treacle bombs.
Still, if they were subtle enough to be missed by the Faribas, maybe they’d be subtle enough for the players themselves to continue to the end of their session without even noticing that anything was amiss. As various games finished, the corrupted instances would be discarded; Bahador had had three people checking through back-up files, and he was sure they had reliable versions of all the major games. As new groups of players came online, they would start afresh with a safe copy of the program. There were a few games on Zendegi that ran continuously, supposedly 24 hours a day, but their fans were used to occasional reboots.
All in all, they’d been lucky. Arif and the Faribas had saved them from a crippling débâcle that could easily have been ten times worse than the losses in revenue and prestige they’d already suffered.
Nasim’s notepad buzzed; she was wanted upstairs. She knew that the good news wouldn’t be enough when she still couldn’t answer the hard questions: Who had done this and why? How had they broken through Zendegi’s defences and defeated all of the elaborate cross-checks that were meant to guarantee the integrity of every game?
And given that they’d managed to do all that once, how could they be prevented from doing it again?
It was after one in the morning when Nasim arrived home. She went out onto the balcony to refill the finches’ food trough and change their water. Her ex-husband had given her the original breeding pair as a kind of joke, after she’d told him she missed her old research. At least Hamid had had a sense of humour. Unfortunately, the same perennially light-hearted attitude had extended to his relationships with other women. Nasim certainly hadn’t wanted someone who’d smother her with possessiveness and earnest declarations of undying love, but with Hamid she’d erred in the other direction.
She sat in the living room, trying to organise her thoughts and unwind enough to catch a few hours’ sleep. The board had held an emergency meeting and approved her plan to bring in an external security consultant to analyse the day’s breach and try to prevent recurrences. Proud as she was of her staff’s response to the crisis, she knew they didn’t have the specialist knowledge required to find the source of the problem and permanently shore up the barricades.
As to whether the breach had been the work of Shahidi’s supporters, Nasim remained openminded. She had already underestimated them once, and it would be too glib by far to assume that they could not have resisted painting self-incriminating slogans all over Zendegi’s landscapes if they’d had the chance. As far as she’d been able to determine, they organised their protests with phone trees, where every direct link involved face-to-face friendships and genuine trust – a strategy that was invisible to SocNet’s analysis, but wasn’t wildly different from some of the techniques that had brought down the theocrats in 2012. Hacking into Zendegi would have taken much more than a dash of resourceful political recycling… but Nasim was making no more assumptions. Let the consultants work it out.
She had her notepad disgorge its latest news summary; she expected to catch still more flak, but before she could switch off for the night she needed to feel that she’d run the gauntlet and taken all the punishment on offer. As it turned out, jokes about the intrusion were still flitting around the globe, but most of them were remarkably gentle. Perhaps that wasn’t so surprising; the pranks themselves had generally been witty and good-natured, and while it was embarrassing to have been hacked at all, the swift response meant that Zendegi hadn’t been made to look spectacularly incompetent. A few hundred customers – out of hundreds of thousands in the affected games – had suffered some short-term nausea; a few dozen ghal’eha had needed scrubbing out. The company’s share price had fallen, but not dramatically.
When she’d fast-forwarded through all the variants of the ‘Sheep Stop Play’ story, her knowledge-miner served up something from a completely different vein. The Wall Street Journal had just published an article on Eikonometrics’ new product range: a set of trainable software modules for automating production lines and call centres.
‘One worker in a semi-skilled job of this kind – and across the globe, there are five hundred million jobs in this category – can teach the software everything it needs in order to take over the work of tens of thousands of his or her colleagues. Of course, we’re not talking about ambulatory robots gathering around your office water-cooler; the work must already be physically constrained, as in a suitable factory process, or entirely computer-mediated, as with call centres. An Eikonometrics spokesman declined to comment on the prospects for software able to climb the next rung up the skills ladder, but a source close to the company indicated that the financial services industry would be the likely next target.’