Utopia

by Lincoln Child

  “So take the head shot,” Poole interjected once again.

  Warne looked at him in silent query.

  “Take the head shot,” Poole repeated, as if it were obvious. “First thing our CO taught us. You’re in a combat situation, you’ve got your choice of targets. Which one do you shoot?”

  Nobody answered.

  “The one who offers a clean head shot,” Poole answered his own question.

  “Your CO,” Warne echoed. “So you were in the armed forces?”

  “Sure, we were armed.”

  Warne looked back at Terri. “If we strip away the homicidal veneer, I think he’s suggesting we do the most obvious thing first.”

  “Find the affected code.”

  “Yeah. If we can pinpoint how the Metanet’s been altered, maybe we can reverse the procedure, pinpoint the affected bots.”

  “That means putting on our detective’s hats.”

  Warne nodded, sighed.

  “Detective?” Poole echoed.

  Warne’s left shoulder throbbed, and this time he didn’t bother to look back. Now, here was a bodyguard who took an unusual interest in his client’s doings.

  “We dig through the system,” he replied. “Look for crumbs the bad guys left behind.”

  Terri jerked one thumb toward the metal cart that contained pieces from the misbehaving robots. “We could start with those,” she said. “Run a diagnostic, get a dump of their most recent operations.”

  “We could.” Warne shifted in his chair, looked at the jumble of wires and chips that made up the brain of what, until a few hours ago, had been Callisto’s premier ice cream vendor. “You know, I’ve been thinking about Hard Place.”

  “What about him?”

  “It just seems strange. Obviously, he was reprogrammed to go nuts, wreak havoc. But why did he go offwhen he did? It seems premature to me. I mean, this John Doe hadn’t yet made his play.”

  Terri thought a moment. “Did you notice anything unusual right before it happened?”

  Warne shook his head. “Hard Place was acting just like he had in all the trials. He made a root beer float for Georgia. Then I gave him a special order that identified me as his creator.”

  “A special order?”

  “Just a back door I built in. No big deal. A double pistachio chocolate sundae with whipped cream. When he hears that, a special process is activated. He calls me Kemo Sabe, makes the special order. But right after giving me the ice cream, he went nuts. Started breaking up the place. I managed to activate the kill switch before he did any real damage or hurt anyone. Except me.” He rubbed his wrist ruefully.

  “Hmmm. A back door.” Terri glanced at him. “You can bet whoever altered his code didn’t know about that. EvenI didn’t know. Did you consider that, by activating your back door code, you might also have activated the rogue instruction set? Set him off early, so to speak?”

  Warne looked at her in surprise. “No, I didn’t. And I’ll bet that’s what happened. That’s brilliant thinking, Terri.”

  “Shucks. I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.” But she was unable to conceal the faint flush that rose in her cheeks.

  “We can verify it later. But Hard Place and the others are still just individual bots. I think we’d do better to inspect the Metanet itself.” Warne placed his hands back on the keyboard. “In the meeting this morning, Barksdale said the Utopia Intranet was a hardened system, entirely isolated from the outside world. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So whatever tampering was done, was done from the inside. That means we can skip over external hacker steps like footprinting, enumeration. We can assume he’s already done a privilege escalation. Right?”

  Terri nodded again.

  “So we can move right to the final steps any hacker would take. Do you archive directory listings?”

  “Every week.”

  “Could you get me the last six months or so, please?”

  “Sure thing.” Terri slid off her chair and headed toward a particularly high stack of papers on a nearby table.

  Poole had taken several steps closer and was standing beside Warne, looking down at the screen. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Taking the head shot,” Warne replied.

  Poole raised his bushy eyebrows.

  Warne pointed at the Metanet terminal. “Somebody has compromised this computer. They’ve used it to send bogus programming to the Park’s robots. But Utopia is a highly secure environment: a hacker, even somebody on the inside, couldn’t just take a seat and start typing. They’d have to use a Trojan of some kind.”

  “Wise precaution these days. Ribbed, or regular?”

  “Not that kind. I mean a Trojanhorse . It’s software that hides itself within another program, does its dirty work in secret.” Warne shrugged. “Of course, that’s just one scenario, but it’s the most likely one. So we’re going to look for any signs of tampering in recent months.”

  Terri returned, a sheaf of yellowing printouts in one hand. “I thought you’d want hard copy,” she said. “Low-tech, but more reliable.”

  “Agreed.” Warne typed a quick series of commands at the terminal, and a window opened, a detail listing scrolling within it. “Let’s compare these old printouts to the current state of the Metanet. We’ll start with the most recent and work back.”

  The two fell silent as they bent over the sheets. Poole watched for a moment, then did another circuit of the room. Wingnut, idling beside Warne, observed the man’s movements closely, rolling back and forth on his oversize wheels. In the background, the ragged voice of Axl Rose struggled for supremacy over the frantic, soaring guitar lines of Slash.

  “I don’t suppose I could convince you to turn that off,” Warne said, nodding at the CD player.

  “Helps me think.” Terri turned over a sheet. Then she giggled.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking. A double pistachio chocolate sundae with whipped cream. Sounds absolutely hideous.”

  “That, coming from a woman who spreads brown shrimp paste on unripened fruit.” He hesitated, then looked up from the printouts. “It’s a funny thing.”

  “What is?”

  “Here we’ve been talking to each other, every week, for just about a year. And all this time I thought, with a name like Bonifacio, that you were Italian.”

  “I see. You had fantasies of Sophia Loren, bending over the Metanet terminal in a low-cut blouse. Instead, you’ve got little old me, the friendly Pacific Islander. Disappointed?”

  “No.” Warne shook his head. “Not in the least.”

  Maybe it was something in the heartfelt tone of his voice. But the broad smile this comment elicited had none of the impish irony of Terri’s usual grins.

  “Sheesh,” Poole said. He walked to the door and unlocked it. “I’m going to check the corridor,” he said. “Don’t let anybody in but me.”

  Warne watched as the door shut behind him. Terri locked the door, then returned to her chair. Their eyes met again.

  “You think he’s some kind of plant?” she asked, her smile fading.

  “I don’t know. Anything’s possible. According to Sarah, you’re a suspect, too.”

  “Figures.” Terri rolled her eyes.

  “But in my gut, I just can’t see Poole as one of the bad guys.”

  “I know what you mean. Besides, what terrorist would dress like that?”

  Warne returned to his printout. After a minute he sighed, let it fall to the desk.

  “What is it?” Terri asked, putting her hand lightly on his shoulder.

  “Have you ever worried about something you knew was crazy, only to have it come true, after all? Like just now. I knew that searching for Georgia was nuts. The chances of anything happening to her were minuscule. But thensomething did . And now I can’t shake this feeling of dread.” He stopped. “Does that make sense?”

  Terri looked at him, dark eyes holding his. Then she let her hand slip from his sh
oulder, dropped her gaze to the printouts. For a moment, she stared at them in silence.

  “When I was growing up in the Philippines,” she began, “my parents put me in a convent school. It was awful, like something out ofOliver Twist . I was the youngest, and the smallest, and I got picked on a lot. I don’t like being bullied, so I always fought back. But it seemed like I was the one who always got punished. The nuns used paddles. Sometimes I couldn’t sit down for hours.” She shook her head at the memory. “I could deal with that, though. What I couldn’t deal with was confession. I hated it. I hated that little, dark space. I was sure that one day I was going to get locked in, forgotten about. I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I just knew if that ever happened, I’d die. It scared me so much that, one day, I refused to go. It was unheard-of. As punishment, the mother superior locked me in a broom closet. A tiny room, with no lights.”

  Although Terri was still staring down at the printout, Warne could see she had gone rigid at the memory. “What happened?” he asked.

  “I collapsed. I guess I fainted. I don’t remember anything, don’t even know how long I was there. I woke up in the convent infirmary.” She shuddered. “I was only nine, but I was convinced I had died in that closet. The next day, I ran away. I’ve been claustrophobic ever since. Can’t even go on the Park’s dark rides.”

  At last, she looked up at him. “So I guess what I’m saying is, Ido know how you feel. Even your craziest fears can come true sometimes.”

  The silence that followed was broken by Poole’s whisper at the door. Terri rose, unlocked it. “Let’s get back to it,” she said as she returned.

  It was a tedious business: pick a file on the screen, note its date and size, then compare the same file to the old hard-copy dumps, looking for any discrepancies, any change in file size or date accessed, that would signal external tampering. Warne finished one listing, then another and another.It’s like looking for a needle in a virtual haystack. I’ll . . .

  Suddenly, he stopped. “That’s odd,” he said, pointing at a printout. “Take a look.”

  He was indicating a file named/bin/spool/upd_disply.exec .

  “I don’t recognize it,” Terri said. “What’s it do?”

  “Hmm. It’s a routine to refresh the display before the morning downlink to the bots.”

  “Sounds pretty benign.”

  “You aren’t thinking like a hacker. Are you going to hide your code in a file namedworm_infect_reformat, or in something boring and insignificant?” He jabbed at the paper. “The important thing is that this is a maintenance file, part of the core routines. There’s no reason for it to be altered. But look at the file size.”

  Terri looked closer. “Seventy-nine thousand bytes.”

  “But look at the same file as it exists now on the Metanet.” He pointed toward the listing on the computer screen.

  Terri whistled. “Two hundred and thirty-one thousand bytes.”

  But Warne was already flipping through the other printouts. “Look, the file size stays consistent all the way up to . . .” He turned over another page. “Up to a month ago.”

  They looked at each other.

  “What?” Poole asked.

  Quickly, Warne took the printout and ran his finger down the listing, comparing the files as they had existed a month before to the way they existed now, on the screen. Except for a smattering of temporary files, nothing else had changed.

  “That’s it,” he murmured.

  “Any chance we’re wrong?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s a binary file.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Terri rolled her eyes.

  “What?” Poole asked again.

  Warne dropped the printouts, rubbed his face with his hands. “Somebody’s modified one of our core routines. It’s three times as big as it should be. It’s been turned into a ‘rogue executable.’ Each time the Metanet runs, this file is doing things we don’t know about. And if we’re to have any hope of finding out what, we have to reverse-engineer it.”

  “Reverse what?”

  “Disassemble. Take it apart at the machine-instruction level, try to figure out what it does. Not a fun thing to do.”

  “And it takes time,” Terri added.

  “But I’ll betthis is what caused the bots to go native. If we can figure out what it does, maybe we can reverse the tampering it’s done.” Warne pushed away from the terminal. “Any reason not to proceed?”

  “Only the obvious one,” Poole said.

  They both turned to look at him.

  “Go on,” Warne said. “Go on, drop the other shoe.”

  “The perpetrators said no interference, right? Well, this sure sounds like interference to me. They’re not going to be too happy.”

  Warne held the man’s placid gaze for a moment. Then he turned to Terri. She was looking back at him: a searching, inquiring look.

  “Only if they find out about it,” Warne said. “And they won’t. Not unless they’re even better coders than they are terrorists. Now, let’s get to work.”

  And he turned back to the keyboard.

  3:12P.M.

  ALMOST AS QUICKLYas it had filled with clamor, the Central Medical Facility fell silent once again. Except for a few small groups, huddled around curtained recovery bays, most of the guests had departed. While one or two had marched resolutely toward Debarkation, threatening legal action, a remarkable number had seized upon the free meal vouchers and casino chips and headed back into the Park.

  Sarah Boatwright watched them leave with mixed feelings. Much as she hated lawsuits—an aversion shared by all Utopia cast and crew—she wished that more had decided to head for the monorail. Watching them all stream back up into the various Worlds was almost like watching wounded soldiers, wandering unwittingly back into battle.

  She walked down the brightly lit central corridor of Recovery, nodding at various nurses as she passed. She stopped to confer with a security tech. And then she continued on, slipping at last between the curtains of Georgia Warne’s bay. Dr. Finch had said the girl would be fine, but that the sedative would keep her asleep at least another hour.

  Sarah settled into a seat by the foot of the bed, fixing her gaze on the still form beneath the covers. Georgia was sleeping naturally, hair spilled across her forehead, lips parted slightly, the ordeal she had gone through on the Waterdark ride consigned temporarily to oblivion.

  Sarah sat, listening to the distant murmur of voices at the nurses’ station. There were many things she could be doing: updating Chuck Emory in New York; touching base with the line managers, keeping up the pretense of business as usual. And yet, somehow, they seemed pointless. It was up to John Doe now. Everything was up to John Doe. She leaned back in the chair, willing her muscles to relax, feeling little surprise when they refused.

  Her eyes turned back to Georgia, to the fresh bruise on her cheek, to the way the slender hands clutched the cotton blanket. Funny, that her own feet should have taken her back to the bedside of the first major failure in her life.

  When she’d moved in with Andrew Warne, she had been determined to make Georgia like her, accept her. Sarah knew that any problem could be solved by a sufficient effort of will. And yet it seemed the harder she tried, the more Georgia resisted.

  Of course, if she was honest with herself, she knew Georgia wasn’t only to blame. It was true Sarah had appeared on the scene when Charlotte Warne’s death was still fresh in the girl’s mind, and Georgia had been very possessive of her father. But perhaps the girl had also sensed, with some childish instinct, that Sarah could never have been a full-time mother. Sarah herself now understood that such a commitment would have been impossible. Her career was simply too important. After all, hadn’t she taken the Utopia job without a moment’s hesitation? She could still remember the look on Andrew’s face when she’d told him: he was so sure she’d be coming along to Chapel Hill, help him get his new technology venture off the ground. But the chance to run a
place like Utopia was the dream of a lifetime. Nothing could have kept her from taking the job.

  To run a place like Utopia . . .

  She stirred restlessly in her chair. Order was critical to Sarah; she thrived on it. Utopia was the ultimate ordered system; a complex, perfectly knit closed system. And John Doe was the random element that had introduced disorder, even chaos.

  She leaned forward, rested her chin on her hands. “What should I do, Georgia?” she asked. “For the first time, it seems I don’t know what to do.”

  Her only reply was a stirring from the bed, a muttered sigh.

  Suddenly, Sarah found herself wishing Fred Barksdale were there. Normally, she would have rejected such an emotion as being sentimental or weak. Not now. Freddy would know just the thing to say to help her through this.

  When she first arrived at Utopia, romance was the furthest thing from her mind. And the last person she could ever imagine falling for was Fred Barksdale. She had always gone out with men like Warne: charismatic in an astringent sort of way, a little arrogant, unafraid to hang their brilliance out for all to see. Freddy was just the opposite. Oh, there was no denyinghis brilliance—the way he had taken on the incredible IT challenges of a place like Utopia, overseen the construction of its digital infrastructure, was a remarkable achievement. But he was just too perfect: his aristocratic British manners, his movie-star looks, his literary erudition, were almost a cliché of the ideal man.

  But then, one evening two months ago, they’d met, accidentally, at a roulette table in the Gaslight casino. That had been shortly before the New York office decided management attendance at Utopia’s gambling palaces should be discouraged. Barksdale had just lost a lot more money than he’d intended to, but had nevertheless charmed her with some bons mots from Falstaff on the evils of gambling. They’d ended up having a drink in nearby Moriarty’s. The following week, dinner at the best French restaurant in Vegas. And Fred had been a revelation. He’d spent twenty minutes discussing the wine list with the sommelier. But it had not been mere posturing or affectation; he was genuinely interested, and clearly knew a lot more about thechâteaux of Saint-Emilion than the wine steward did. He’d passed much of the meal answering Sarah’s questions about Bordeaux, explaininggrands crus andappellations .