Drifting…
Slowly, I become aware of the packets of information floating around me. The information moves at the speed of light but flows with an almost lazy lack of intention.
I reach out and touch my body, pulling myself into it.
A dim, pinkish glow from the street lights and lit signs nearby filters through my eyelids and the stench of the alleyway fills my nostrils. My body aches and I open my eyes to see everything mostly the way I left it. Er is sitting in the corner opposite me, watching over our little domain. Scum-colored water trickles down the cement steps into the drain by our doorway.
I sit up, my coat draping over my shoulders with the motion. Er adjusts an optical receptor cluster as I move, keeping watch.
I shift my weight, pivoting on my knees, and crawl on my sleeping bag. An empty Fersin’s Food container is laying on its side about a foot away, a single chopstick sticking out its top. I normally like to keep my area clean if possible. Maybe I was just too tired last night to take care of it?
Grabbing the trash, I get to my feet and start walking toward the doorway out to the alleyway. Er shifts and sends me a question, the contents of which roughly translate to: “Should I follow?”
“It’s ok Er, I’m just going to go say hi to Fersin; see if he has anything he needs me to do; maybe get some food.”
I walk up the stairs, past the leaking awning and out into the rain and wind. I push long, messy hair out of my face and readjust my coat, following the path out into the alleyway and onto the street.
The streets in the city always have traffic, the majority on foot. The streets this time of day are quieter, but that doesn’t mean the bustling crowd is gone completely, only somewhat diminished.
The wind and rain harry the pedestrians, despite the complete lack of a sky this far below the city’s surface. I look up, seeing the city lights hung from the city-cavern’s ceiling, what seems like a mile up. Gargantuan stalactites of towers hang from the structure acting as the roof to this part of the city, just barely visible between the twisted and melding forms of sky-scrapers jutting from the ground around the street.
“Hey Fersin!” I yell the greeting over the den of Fersin’s kitchen when I get to his shop.
“What! Oh hi Pas!” Fersin yells from the bowels of the food-prep area behind the counter at the back. “Just a sec.”
Sitting down on a stool at the counter, I look around Firsin’s shop. Just like just about every other building this part of town, the shop has a floor, walls, and ceiling composed of some sort of dull metallic compound, resistant to rust and general wear and tear. The room is lit in dim shades of blues by light-strips along the ceiling, tables, and counter, accented by the yellow light from the kitchen, giving it an aura of cool fire. The shop’s 3 tables are scattered near the door, bulted to the floor, and its stools lined up in a perfect row along the counter. Every piece of furniture here is built in a boxy, angled style reminiscent of industrial machinery.
“How’s it goin? You want something to eat or just wanted to get off the street?” A tall, slightly greasy-looking, middle-aged man emerges from behind some cooking equipment. Fersin has black hair, a loose goatee, and a slightly baggy, yet spotless chef’s outfit.
“What’ll it be?” Fersin asks, leaning on the counter with the palms of both hands.
“Just some breakfast.” I reply, “Not many customers today?”
“Yeah, today’s been kinda quiet, but it always picks up soon. Just you wait an hour or so. This place is going to be so packed even a kid like you would have trouble squeezing their way from the door to the counter. Breakfast you said?”
“Yeah.” I nod.
“Anything in particular? Oh! I have this new recipe I’ve been working on. You want to taste-test? You’ll be the first person besides myself to try it.”
“Sure, what is it?” I ask.
“Haven’t come up with a name for it yet. Thinking something like Bread Bubbles or something. It’s breakfast food; something sweet.”
“Yeah, I’ll try.” I say, grinning.
“One uh, Bread Bubbles coming right up.” Fersin says, skipping back into the kitchen area.
Minutes later, Fersin re-emerges from the kitchen, a plate in his hand, and slides it across the counter to me. On the plate is a piece of puffed, fried bread, with sweetening powder on top.
“Don’t rate it ‘til you’ve tried it.” Fersin says.
I pick up the piece of fried bread and bite into it. As soon as I bite, bubbles of a sort of tart sweetening syrup burst in my mouth as well as chunks of a slightly sour, slightly salty, slightly sweet thick cream.
“Mmm. This is good!” I say, my mouth full as trickles of purple syrup run down my chin.
“I’m glad you like it.” Fersin says, beaming. “Here, let me get you a napkin.”
“This is so good.” I say, “I’ll pay you back when I can.”
“No. Trust me, it’s fine.” Fersin says. “You’ve fixed practically all my stuff. You do that, you get to eat at Fersin’s Food for free.”
“Thanks Fersin.” I say. “Speaking of that, I was wondering if you had anything that needed fixing.”
“No, I don’t think so. No, wait. My niece’s mobile’s been acting funky. She thinks it’s a virus, I think she’s been too rough with it. You think you could have a look at it?”
“Sure! I--” My sentence is cut off as the lights go out.
I lose my focus on the real world as my brain and everything else around me in cyberspace is bombarded by a torrential hail of viruses. My defenses activate reflexively, some parts of me splitting off to strike the particularly virulent packets out of the air completely, others tightening my mental defence barrier, scanning incoming packets for malicious intent. My virtual body emits spikes and a fantastic show of laser lights, blotting harmful packets off the network, cutting a swath through the maelstrom of retransmitted viruses.
In the real world: “Pas! Pas! You ok? What happened?” Fersin is shaking my shoulders.
“I… Yeah. I’m alright.” I say, my lips moving sluggishly.
“What happened?” Fersin asks again. “Everything went out and you sorta went real quiet and kinda glassy-eyed.”
“Everything in the area just got infected with more viruses that I can count.” I reply.
Sounds of motors and fans humming back to life come from around us and the lights come back on slowly.
“Viruses, you say? What kind?” Fersin asks.
“I don’t know yet.” I say.
In cyberspace, I reach out and grab a virus-laden packet in a protective barrier and bring it inside myself where I can have the most control over it. I create an isolated, emulated computer in my mind and send it a copy of the virus as an emulated network packet. The computer recognizes the packet as something completely different and attempts to process it. When the virus packet gets to a certain stage of the computer’s process, it splits, some parts gumming up the machinery designed to keep it in place, while other parts move to specific parts of the computer, copying their contents and overwriting some of the computer’s seemingly unimportant functions. Before the computer can begin unclogging the systems affected by the packet’s gunk, the previously unimportant pieces of systems begin malfunctioning, creating packets very similar to the one I just sent the computer, but ever so slightly different in seemingly random ways. Within a millisecond of simulated time, the emulated computer is transmitting infected packets to my emulated network.
I stop the simulation and the computer I just infected ceases to exist.
“The viruses seem to be mutating whenever they infect a computer.” I report.
“Can you do anything with that?” Fersin asks.
“It will make the viruses harder to combat.” I respond. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get some of this virus cleaned up and set up some better defences, though.”
I take an AI I’ve been incubating for the purpose of targeted virus cleaning and christen her Sylvia. Making some slight modifications to Sylvia’s targeting system, equipping her with protective-barrier wrapped copies of the various viruses filling the air around me, I set her loose.
Sylvia’s tendrils flash out in all directions of cyberspace, lightning fast, destroying virus packets in transit and removing and repairing the damaged portions of the computers nearby. Once the nearby computers are cleaned and their barriers reinforced, Sylvia moves on to more distant systems, emitting little status-packet chirps of joy at being able to perform her job.
“Ok, I’ve got a simple AI protecting the area.” I say. “The mutation shouldn’t be too difficult for her to stay on top of, but it does mean that if I can track the virus’s common ancestors, I can figure out where they originated from and try to keep this from happening again.”
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“Is that a good idea?” Fersin asks.
“Whoever the people who made this virus are, they just unleashed one of the strongest virtual attacks I’ve ever seen this part of the city take.” I say. “I can’t let them let something like this loose again. I at least need to find out who they are and why they did this.”
“Ok.” Fersin says. “Take care of yourself, ok?”
“I will. Don’t worry.” I say, finishing the Bread Bubbles and hopping down off the stool in front of the counter.
Heading back out into the street, I pause for a moment to get my bearings in the already significantly denser crowd. Many of the people here were using networked cybernetics at the time everything got flooded. Most of the people affected seem to be in a state of recovery now that Sylvia has cleaned up the systems here, but many still look shaken.
I trace the remaining viruses Sylvia hasn’t gotten a chance to eliminate yet, noting their variations and commonalities. When I compare the viruses’ internal workings, I can begin to tell which viruses descended from which. The viruses seem to have a linearity to their age and I begin to follow it in my mind, virtually tracing computers emitting older and older variations of the viruses.
Following the viruses’ age progression, I come to a set of network nodes that seem to be emitting only a single version of the virus, implying either that somehow they all got infected with the same virus at exactly the same time and somehow managed to keep from getting infected with any of the other viruses, or more likely, that these nodes are the source of the virus attack. On closer inspection, it appears that the viruses buzzing all around these nodes are ignoring them completely, as if they were designed not to infect these servers.
I pull up my rough node-to-location map of the city, filtering the map for identifying traits similar to those of the virus origin’s node cluster and various proximity beacons in its area. As the search completes, the queried locations for the nodes appear in a slightly more industrial section of the city, only about 6 miles north, in a warehouse in the ceiling of a cavern below this one.
Quickly planning out a fast route, accounting for transit times, I head off in the direction of the virus origin nodes.
About a block over, an elevated train heading north runs above the street with stations every few blocks. I wait on the platform and in under a minute, a long smooth black-steel cylinder with windows on its sides and grooves on its top and bottom pulls into the station. The train hovers in between its top and bottom rails, each sliding through the train’s grooves. The train’s rails, though linear, are covered in rows of yellow electromagnet blocks, making their edge jagged.
The train’s doors emerge from its flat surface, sliding apart as a crowd washes out of the doorway and onto the platform to find its way down the station’s stairs. I make my way on, sliding between standing passengers and push myself into a corner. In less than 30 seconds after its arrival, the train’s doors close and the train silently accelerates away from the station.
The elevated train has stations every few blocks, resulting in several stops every 30 seconds or so before it can leave this part of town. In less than 20 minutes though, the train passes into a tunnel at the edge of my city-cavern, its light-strips reflecting on the side of the tunnel. Every now and then, sets of windows appear in the side of the tunnel, flickering past faster than the eye can track. Some windows peek into office environments, others into lobbies, and still others into residential areas. A gym flashes past in the blink of an eye. Stops inside the tunnel are slightly more frequent, partially due to the fact that the tunnel is cutting directly through dense city-building structure. Still, in less than 5 minutes, we’re back out into the open, but this time flying along the ceiling of a city-cavern. Tendrils of buildings whip past us, dangling into the void like a reflection of the buildings reaching up from the floor of the last cavern.
Before I can spend too much time staring out the window at the ultra-urban scenery, the train pulls into my stop. Disembarking with the flow of people, I am greeted by an enclosed lobby with a sleek, minimalistic design, sporting silver-metal highlighting. A white and silver tiled floor stretches away from the platform, lit by cool light-panels in the ceiling laid out in rows. Following the foot-traffic out of the station takes me to an open-air street hung between buildings. Here the ceiling is significantly closer, on average about 10 stories up, but only a couple in some places. Visible in the gaps between buildings is the vast glittering abyss below. Recalling my mapping of the cityscape to my target nodes, I place my destination a short walk away from my current location.
I make my way away from the train station, following the network of streets toward the warehouse. Just like in my part of the city, the crowds on major streets like these never go away completely, but I do find the herd of pedestrians getting thinner and thinner as I continue to distance myself from the station.
Reaching a narrow alleyway, I stop. My map of the nodes and structures in this area tells me that the warehouse can be reached from this corridor off the main street. The alley is appealing to me partly because it is one of the more obscure paths to the warehouse, allowing me to make my way without having to worry about being spotted.
Stepping into the alleyway, I take conscious control of my peripheral sensor-data gathering and manipulation systems. I pull the feeds from all the sensors and security cameras in the area into a bundle, sifting through it at supercomputer speeds, watching the area around me for anyone who could spot me while also editing myself out of those same feeds. I am, to anyone monitoring the sensors and cameras nearby, completely invisible.
As I begin to near my destination, new types of feeds and sets of sensor and computational data start seeping into the peripheral data bundle I’m collecting. The data seems to be that of low-level SI, or Simulated Intelligence, robots patrolling the area directly around the warehouse. These people must be serious about their security.
Before I can see the warehouse, I stop and sink to the ground behind a large container. In my relative safety and concealment, I shift my focus to the digital landscape around me. The virus source nodes are impossible to miss, looming over every device in the area, their computational weight casting a shadow in cyberspace. Virus packets continue to drift from the nodes’ ports, bouncing off and perpetually infecting the nearby computers. Bracing myself, I shoot toward the virus node’s digital border, set on finding a way inside.
The anonymous barrier blocks my path: a wall perpendicular to my line of systems-penetration extending in every direction. Its parts move in an intricate dance, clipping, flipping, twisting, shaking, and sliding, repeated as far as the eye can see. I form an arm out of a string of packets and protocols, adjusting it as I memorize the movements of the wall’s components.
With a call, my systems-penetration AI, Exxo, appears beside me wrapping my arm in a gauntlet of shiny, black chrome. Adrenaline rushes through me with the reminder of Exxo’s sheer codebreaking abilities. Exxo is one of the most powerful, resourceful, and creative barrier-penetrating AIs I’ve ever encountered, everything I created him to be.
Without so much as a hitch, my arm smoothly slides inside the barrier, momentarily integrating into its clockwork dance of defences and messages. The barrier becomes transparent and I can see the virus nodes' inner workings.
A set of servers submit packets to the barrier to be transmitted to the outside world. Other servers maintain and control the nodes’ defence barriers themselves. Still other servers manage the patrol robots around the warehouse’s perimeter and monitor physical security systems. Finally a barely noticeable set of sub-nodes control miscellaneous functions like the building’s power distribution and lights.
I try to touch the systems responsible for transmitting the virus packets and find them unreachable. They seem to only be capable of sending packets, completely oblivious to anything trying to connect to them. Someone trying to access their storage would likely need to be connected via a wired terminal. Any attempt I plan to make at disabling the initial virus distribution systems, will need to be made in person. The only issue being that as soon as I destroy the servers with the original copies of the virus on them, it would be impossible to hide my presence without a distraction.
I start by inserting small undetectable weak points into every system I can access, paying special attention to the security systems and the system controlling the robot guards. Next, I pull the building’s internal maps, matching them up with the available security-camera footage. Then I start my actual assault.
Bracing my virtual arm, I twist and pull, ripping a hole in the external node barrier and as many of the other systems as I could weaken. From the outside, Exxo spreads into a giant black cloud, tendrils lashing out and plows through the remainder of the nodes’ external barrier. The systems crumble like dry dirt, billowing out in a cloud of broken code and confused sub-processes. This is my chance.
I get to my feet behind the container and sprint toward the warehouse, making sure to continue filtering my presence from the feeds of any and all sensors nearby. As I approach, I can see the building. It sits as part of a larger complex, raised above a small courtyard, overlooking a railinged hole into the abyss. Its dull-gray, thick, steel roof slants from the side of the larger structure, hanging over the courtyard in front of the building. A lone robot guard stands in the middle of the courtyard, slumped. Another robot stands in the entrance to my alleyway, also slumped, shuttering slightly as its control server sends a stream of spasmodic, random requests.
Emerging from the alley, I jog along a raised platform extending from the alleyway entrance to an upper door in the warehouse structure, making sure to stay in as much shadow as I can. As soon as I reach the door, I induce electrical currents in the magnets in its locking mechanism, pulling bolts out of the door and allowing me to pull it open.
The inside of the building reflects its dull exterior, with square metal hallways and rooms lit with cold white arc lamps. Pulling up the feeds from the security cameras, I can see the building’s maintenance staff in a panic. Techs frantically restart their terminals only to have them crash again immediately. The buildings few human security staff run in circles, trying to watch malfunctioning doors and alarms while keeping an eye on the remains of the building’s security monitors. Three cyber-security technicians sit in a hot room, pulling their hair out as their terminals function only marginally better than those of the general technicians.
Based on the map of the building, the server room is one floor down and just to the right. I find a stairwell near the building’s pedestrian-elevators, unlocking its doors the same way as with the building’s external door. Double-checking the security feeds from the server room to make sure none of the human security staff is inside, I backtrack to its door. Inside is a 100 foot long room filled with 8 rows of server racks. I need to make this fast.
Sprinting down to the end of the room between the left-most two rows of servers, I run my fingers along the servers’ chassis on either side of me. As I pass each server, the physical contact allows me enough control to electromagnetically read, dycrypt, parse, and copy its active and long-term memory in under a millisecond. In the same motion, I send an electromagnetic pulse through the server’s internals, frying it.
After having performed the same action for every other pair of server rows in the room, I make my exit the same way I came in. Monitoring the security cameras, I see that the security staff are still completely focused on all the malfunctioning systems. The cyber-security staff however seem to have made a little headway. I direct Exxo to focus especially on hindering the progress of the building’s cyber-security team and immediately one of their terminals crashes.
“Damn it!” I hear from a security microphone in the cyber-security room, punctuated by the sound of someone beating his fist on the table. “My terminal is completely frozen.”
“Here. Try mine.” another man says.
“This isn't like anything I’ve ever seen before.” The first man gripes.
“This attack kind of reminds me of something one of my buddies back at ForeStar mentioned once.” the third man comments. “He said this attack came in the middle of the night on an outpost he was watching. His computer’s defences were completely obliterated by what he could only guess was an AI due to its attack pattern, but it was more creative than any AI he’d seen before.”
Once I get a decent distance from the building, I begin to ease the attack. Even then, it will still take them at least a few hours if not a couple days to get their security systems fully functional again.
On the train ride back, I review the data I’ve gathered. Disappointingly, the group sending the viruses, were not responsible for their creation. Instead, they are purely an, albeit shady, information distribution service responsible for sending users spam messages and way-too-personal advertisements. Annoying, but not masterminds in any respect.
Back in Fersin’s Food, Sylvia has cleared out almost all the viruses from the area.
“Everything seems to be back in working order.” Fersin says over the den of the now packed shop. “What happened?”
“Turns out the place sending the viruses was just redistributing them as a service.” I respond. “They won’t be redistributing any viruses anytime soon though. I made sure to leave a mess of their systems.”
“That’s good I guess. You hungry?”
“Yes! Can I have some more Bread Bubbles?”
“Sure! One Bread Bubbles comin’ right up!” Fersin says stepping back into the kitchen.