Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 18

  Buckland Data Center, Nanatuvik, Alaska

  U.S. Cyber Corps Watch Center, Herndon VA

  March 31, 2121

  2245 hours

  In Nanatuvik, Alaska, the Inuit believe their ancestors can be seen in the Northern Lights. They live in a world filled with spirits. Long winter months of waiting for caribou herds or sitting around breathing holes, hunting seals, have given birth to stories of mysterious and sudden appearances of ghosts and fantastic creatures.

  Some Inuit believe the Lights were more sinister and if you whistled at them, they would reach down to earth and cut off your head. That tale is still told to children today. Other Inuit relied on the angakkuq, or shaman, for spiritual interpretation. The nearest thing to a deity was the Old Woman, who lived beneath the sea. All the waters around Nanatuvik were believed to contain many great gods.

  Liam Winger scanned the Alaska State Department of Tourism website with a wry smile. Fantastic creatures. Old women in the sea. Ancestors in the Northern Lights.

  And now angels infesting Buckland Center, ready to do what their configuration and programming compelled them to do. Starting tonight.

  Liam had come to Buckland only a few weeks before, hired on as a network operations specialist, 3rd class and assigned to where all newbies were assigned: the graveyard shift. But he didn’t mind. It was quiet. The big honchos weren’t around. It gave him time to scope out the facility, especially its labyrinthine corridors of server racks and find places he could easily penetrate.

  Buckland was a Tier One server and data center, providing memory storage, routing and network services for customers up and down the U.S. West Coast and some of northeast Asia as well. The place was low-rise, situated in a rumpled valley outside Nanatuvik, a forlorn, grindingly poor Inuit village near the southwest Bering Sea coast of Alaska. Mountains surrounded the valley, always covered in deep snow. The air and the sea breezes made the Nanatuvik Valley perpetually cold and frigid, which helped Buckland with its enormous cooling bills immensely.

  The complex was laid out like a Tic-Tac-Toe board, with separate modules connected by tunnels; most of the place was sited fifty meters or more underground, for stability in the frequent tremors and for temperature control. And security too. Each square in the Tic-Tac-Toe board was a nearly self-contained complex of seismically-stabilized server racks, routers, hubs and switches, with UPS backup generators at two ends of the square, a glassed-in network control station and office suite at a third end, and cooling chillers, piping stands, other HVAC gear and forests of cabling and optical fiber at the other. Security was tight. E Module, where Liam worked, was entered through biometric scans, neural imaging, facial recognition and various other tricks of the trade.

  Buckland was a critical node in the North American data center network, a critical junction into WorldNet.

  “Hey, genius, we’re going on break. You want anything?” Hardy, one of the 3rd shift techs called from the door to the control station. Hardy was skinny like a post, with thick red hair and braids, long, ropy arms and a perpetual sneer. He liked to chew on cherry suckers. The other tech, Brindleman, was a gnome, bland face, ghostly pallor, never a smile, bald as Ping-Pong ball, which he faintly resembled and liked to play off-hours in the Buckland fitness center over in D module.

  Liam waved them off. “No, I’m good. Take your time.” The truth was he waited for times like this, even encouraged the other two techs to take frequent breaks. They didn’t need much encouraging.

  Liam’s shift was normally a quiet time for the center. Lately, he had been using this time to pinch off a few replicants, bang out a small swarm the way Symborg had showed him, and make small penetrations into WorldNet, even Solnet, from hub 22E-A787, halfway down Row 1 here at E Module. The address was Rack Five, Node Twenty-Five.

  During these penetrations, he had been installing assault bots at key nodes and switches around any part of the Net he could reach. He had also been gathering and coordinating the work of the MARTOP bots which were even now continuing to fall to Earth and finding their way into the Net. Their coordinated mission, downloaded to him by Symborg after he ‘awoke’ into his new condition, was to sabotage certain nodes and domains of the Net so the Normals wouldn’t have functioning computer or network service in critical areas.

  Tonight, Liam would be coordinating a probing assault on a control system that operated gates, sluices and valves of a large dam in the western U.S., the Kings Gorge dam in Colorado. If it could be made to fail on command, the valves would open all at once and millions of people would be affected.

  All part of the Prime Key, Liam noted. That’s what Symborg had told him.

  On his last penetration mission, though, he had encountered something a little different. Most domains and hubs on the Net maintained at least some level of security whether packet sniffers, firewalls, anti-virus cops, that sort of thing. But the last time, Liam and his bot squad had run into an adversary with a little more bite, a little more cunning. It didn’t act like an automated system.

  It was, in fact, Cyber Corps’ first packet sweeper. Liam had to be ready for that again. The MARTOP bots that Cyber Corps had stalked and attacked had barely been able to fend off that foe. He’d have to be a little more careful.

  Liam checked the time: 2252 on the display in front of him. Time to go to work. And he knew he could count on Hardy and Brindleman to take their sweet time coming off break.

  Liam went to Rack Five, found Node Twenty-five and concentrated as Symborg had instructed him, focusing on certain images downloaded to his processor. He lay the palm of his hand over several ports on the side of the server and watched as the bots of his fist began disassociating and swarming in a fuzzy sparkling ball around the ports. Now his hand looked like a ball of yarn unraveling, with pinpricks of light embedded. Slowly, bit by bit, the stream of bots gathered itself and entered ports A and B, slipping easily past filters, firewalls, through vaults and dungeons until after a few seconds, they accessed a trunk line onto the main backbone of E Module. From there, it was only a short hop to the Net.

  He was in, his little scout force, and now it was time to go hunting. Liam checked again the addressing data he had for the Kings Gorge server. The scout force of bots would have to make several switches and junctions, including a key one at Provo, Utah, before it would be close enough to KG-1, the off-ramp into the dam’s control system. From there, it would be time to start reconning access points, security features, firewalls, honey pots, packet traps, defender demons and other assorted ways of keeping unwanted visitors out.

  Liam knew that any packet consisted of two kinds of data: control information and user data, sometimes called the payload. Some operators like to think of packets as a form of Net missile, delivering a payload. The control information provided the data the network needed to deliver the payload, things like source and destination network addresses, error detection codes and sequencing information. This was usually found in packet headers and trailers, with the payload stuck in between.

  Liam’s ultimate job was to find a secure path into the control system servers at Kings Gorge, scramble packets going to and from the KG-1 node complex and obstruct or alter commands and data going in and out of the dam control system. Once that had been accomplished, more sophisticated MARTOP bots could enter the nodes at will and work on defeating its complex of valves and gates, working to mimic command codes used to operate the valves, spuriously cycling the valves, hijacking sensor information from the valves so as to take complete control of their operation remotely and leave the system operator with no real clue as to what was going on.

  In time, Liam expected to be able to operate the valves at will, and cause havoc up and down the basin streams and rivers that captured the outflow of the dam. Millions of people and millions of square kilometers of land would be affected.

  And the Prime Key would be a few steps closer to
being executed.

  But before his small scout force of bots could exit at KG-1, they ran right into another force of Cyber Corps packet sweepers.

  Liam swore under his breath and sat up straight in his chair, studying his dashboard. He’d already configured the instruments and dials to shift to a new mode altogether whenever he ran an op like this, which meant whenever Hardy and Brindleman weren’t looking, which was most of the time. One button, and E Module console B-1 was a window into a very different world than its designers ever imagined.

  Now, the board was showing signals coming back from the scout force: the bots he had launched were stuck at the KG-1 off-ramp, unable to penetrate the outer defenses of the dam’s control system, actually hosted in a rack of PLC-type servers inside the dam main control station south of Denver.

  Liam studied the situation for a few a moments. But before he could puzzle out a strategy to force or trick his way in, the scout force was set upon by Cyber Corps packet sweepers, like rabid dogs, this time a large force of them. It was like the previous encounter only bigger, quicker, more aggressive. He tapped furiously on his keyboard, trying to re-configure the bots beyond their initial programming. Maybe if I try this…or this….

  Now the battle was joined, sweepers against the angels, Cyber Corps against Liam Winger and Symborg and Config Zero. They engaged each other in a growing furball just outside the Kings Gorge main hub and network, battling furiously to overcome each other’s defenses.

  Thirty-three hundred miles east of Buckland Center, Anson Leeds and Valerie Patrice studied the Watch Center screens as James Tsu handled the early stages of the fight. Leeds had to grudgingly admire the researcher’s balls and guts; maybe it was decades of gaming experience, or quick wits or twitchy fingers or something like that. But Tsu seemed a natural in this world of packet combat inside the Net, attacking, counter-attacking against moves from the other side. Cyber Sweeps’ packet sweepers had been upgraded with more nimble effectors and extra propulsors, which along with displaced cleavage lines and a souped-up processor made replication and maneuvering in the nano world of bits and atoms a little faster. Now Sweeper One was no longer a Fokker Trimotor dealing with its adversary. He had become more like a Spitfire.

  Tsu was mumbling something and Leeds had to ask the researcher to repeat it.

  Tsu spoke up more clearly. “I said, I’m not sure but I think we’re dealing with something beyond automated responses here…it’s reacting like something pretty intelligent, anticipating my moves, sensing what I’m about, reacting with speed and efficiency. You gotta admire this bastard, whoever he is.”

  Leeds snorted. “I’m not admiring anything. Maybe this is your Net sentience at work, Tsu, but why go after Kings Gorge? I’m thinking this is some human bastard with a nit to pick against the dam. Or some wacko hacker who wants to play in a bigger bathtub.”

  “Or play with the lives of several million people downstream,” Patrice reminded them. “Maybe the truth is a little of both.”

  “Sweeper’s holding his own,” Leeds observed. They had signals back with a grainy view of the bit-level battlefield.

  To Valerie Patrice, the battlefield looked like something out of old vids of the Battle of the Bulge. A sleet storm of oblong shapes—pyramids, cubes, tetrahedrals—flitted by. Faintly visible in the background was a fast-flowing river of dirty cottonballs. Tsu had said that was the bitstream, the carrier signal bearing packets of data to and from the Kings Gorge Dam Discharge Control System. The river coursed back and forth and flew along at insane speeds, almost too fast to see. As she studied the imager scene, she realized there was a great shadow lurking off to the left.

  James Tsu called it the Black Curtain. It was the Discharge Control System’s multi-level firewall…a great wall of spinning cylinders, all rotating vertically, except for one area where the river of cottonballs approached. Here, a single spinning cylinder had lowered itself like a spinning drawbridge and the bitstream entered the Black Curtain at that point.

  “That’s our goal,” Tsu announced. “Keep the buggers from catching a ride inside the firewall.”

  Patrice pointed to a ragged line of devices gathering around the front of the Black Curtain. Each device was two pyramids inverted and attached at their apexes. A wide girdle wrapped around the device equator, like a belt, studded with effectors. Propulsors beat a cyclic rhythm from the bottom of one pyramid. Another set topped the device.

  “You mean those guys there?” Patrice asked.

  “Here comes the cavalry,” Leeds announced. And indeed, sweeper bots from Cyber Corps were already infiltrating the sleet storm and engaging. The sweepers were distinctly different in outline, even in the blurry view they had. Nested cylinders, topped with effectors and bond disrupters, they spiraled in to the line of MARTOP bots and in seconds, a small thunderstorm had erupted out of the sleet, as mechs slashed and discharged disrupters left and right.

  “It’s a cat fight!” Leeds warmed to the scene. “Look at ‘em go!”

  Tsu was all hands and fingers, playing his console like a master pianist. “As long as we can keep them from that down cylinder along the firewall, where the bit stream’s going in…I’m changing config, adding some more pyridines and carbene grabbers.” He sent the command and moments later, the sweeper master bot grabbed loose atoms from the sleet and slammed together more hands and fingers. The command went out to all the replicants and the fight was on, with renewed ferocity.

  It seemed to be all over in less than ten minutes. This time, the results were better than before. Though the sleet never relented, even Patrice could see that the MARTOP bots had thinned out, either shredded by Cyber Corps sweepers patrolling up and down the length of the firewall, or withdrawing away from the dam’s Discharge Control System ports.

  Tsu took a deep breath and sank back in his squeaking chair. His forehead was bright with sweat.

  “We’re not home yet…they were may be re-directing. I’ve got to study Kings Gorge’s architecture, all their firewalls, packet sniffers, the whole thing. MARTOP’s persistent and cunning…there’s definitely somebody or something intelligent driving those bastards. I think we won this round.”

  “All those mods and config changes you made worked,” Leeds decided. “Last time, we got our tails whipped. But this time—“

  Patrice was thoughtful. What would it have been like to be aboard one of those sweepers? “This time, we smacked ‘em.”

  Tsu was noncommittal. “I’m not quite ready to declare victory. Kings Gorge has a lot of ways in and these bastards are clever. There are some wicked exploit kits out there and all it takes is one loose screw somewhere, one setting not right and they’re in. I’m replicating a patrol force for the Black Curtain to give Kings Gorge extra protection right at the firewalls. They need it. And I’d better let the sysops know what we’re doing too.” He tapped out a message and sent it, describing the battle they had just fought.

  At Buckland Center’s E Module, Liam Winger was less pleased. The engagement had basically been a standoff and there were other ways into the Discharge Control System, but it never felt good to have your butt kicked. Despite an hour more of probing along the firewall and other ports that made up the operating perimeter of the Kings Gorge protective barriers, Liam found he couldn’t break through from where he was. The scouts he had pinched off weren’t fast enough, or strong enough to force any of the normal weak spots that every firewall and back door had.

  He decided he would have to do this the hard way. He would have to enter the Net himself and try to probe and breach barriers that even now Cyber Corps was erecting around the Dam’s systems.

  For the moment, Cyber Corps and their sweepers had won. But Liam Winger had always been persistent and resourceful. Even his Dad had once called him a ‘little bull with big brains.’ Plus, Symborg had programmed him with all kinds of tricks to enable completing the Prime Key. Liam knew Symborg had an inexhaust
ible supply of magic to deal with any situations. The Mother Swarm could do anything.

  This new defensive ability of Cyber Corps would require more study to defeat. Liam decided right then and there he would enter the Net himself, that very night, and do a little recon.

  Just then, the door to the network control station was shoved open. It was Danny Vranek, first shift ops supervisor, coming in a little early, to catch a nap and slurp down some doughnuts and coffee. He already had a tray of goodies balanced on one arm. Danny was a Normal, so far as Liam knew.

  “Hey, Liam, want some?” Vranek went to his console in the corner, set down the tray and checked the board. “No catastrophes overnight? Nothing took a bite out of your ass in the wee hours?”

  Liam hadn’t even realized shift change was near. Time had creeped up on him.

  “The usual baggage…a few glitches with Rack Five. I think some of the disks may be going bad. Could be ready to mirror or migrate.”

  “What fun,” Vranek decided. “I’ll take a look.”

  Liam wanted to get inside the Net as soon as possible. But he couldn’t do it with Danny around. Then he had an idea.

  “I’m heading down to the canteen. Cover for me?”

  Vranek already had some kind of shoot-‘em-up game going on his display. Explosions and screeches were clearly audible. He didn’t even look up. “Sure thing, mac. Go get some calories.”

  Liam slipped out of the glass doors of the control room and disappeared down a narrow aisle of server racks along the far wall, looking back to make sure Vranek wasn’t paying any attention. He wasn’t.

  There was a locked closet at the corner. The T-7 hub was in there, humming and flashing and blinking as it operated like a traffic cop in Times Square, routing data, packets and housekeeping traffic in and out of E module, part of Buckland’s system maintenance operation.

  Liam unlocked the closet door with his palm print on the bioscanner and went inside the cramped space. He shut the door behind and it locked. Only a single light bar shone down from above. But Liam didn’t need much light.

  T-7 was chock full of ports, easy to force, if you knew what you were doing.

  And if you were an angel.

  It only took a few minutes. Liam had seen ancient vids in museums and on the Net of a character named Clark Kent, a.k.a Superman, who often dashed into something called a phone booth, so he could change from street clothes into superhero getup. Liam smiled. Maybe this was something like that.

  Five minutes later, Liam Winger had no body. He was a sparkling swarm of disassociated nanobotic elements, held together by a config known to Symborg as C-223877ZZ8.

  The swarm hovered for a moment around the T-7 hub, then began flowing toward A port along one side. The lead bots of the swarm easily inserted themselves past the port connectors, riding along thick Worldnet 20-gauge cabling to the E module master node, which was physically mounted in a small bay in another closet on the opposite side of the control room.

  From there, the thing that had once been Liam Winger entered the Net and began its little recon mission.

  And thirty-three hundred miles east of Buckland Center, while Liam Winger was going for a little ride, outside the Watch Center at Cyber Corps headquarters, Valerie Patrice headed for the small autocar she had left in the south parking lot. Once inside, she didn’t dial up her hotel and enter it as a destination, as she normally did.

  This time, she punched in new coordinates: Forest Hills Church of Assimilation, somewhere over in Springdale. Patterson Road, near a Mexi-Thai restaurant.

  Valerie Patrice wanted to find out a little bit more about this deconstruction process.