by Kate Kyle
He tapped in a command to see the content of the loop. Lines of text started rolling onto the screen.
"Putting the same on the other screen for you," he said. "Flag them up as soon as you spot something unusual or noteworthy. Look for lines with text, any text that might make sense to a human. It may be an incomplete sentence, or the words may be jumbled."
Jax moved to the other workstation.
He strained his eyes, searching for clues.
"Hey, here's something, I think," Jax said after a while.
"Show me."
She moved closer with her chair, her breathing rate elevated.
She stood up, pointing to the screen. "I think this means Captain… and then something Irk maybe?" she added, hesitantly.
SingMa glanced at the spot indicated by Jax. A vague sensation of recognition swirled in his brain.
Captain Irk?
"I've seen that somewhere," he said. "In the game probably. Nevertheless, let's treat it as if it's what we're looking for."
He scrolled to the line and started disentangling the piece of code from its context.
"Go back and keep looking."
It wasn't easy. His fingers slipped along the keys. He'd rather work on a virtual touch board, but the ship was obviously too old for that.
"Old ship with a new computer," he said to himself. "Top of the range computer for precious medical cargo, I suppose."
"Likely so," Jax replied.
"Sorry for distracting you, just curious," he said meekly and returned his full attention to the board. He'd investigate that further once this was all over.
That is, if the world survived and returned to its previous level of functioning.
He focused on the image on the main screen.
The string of code Jax identified seemed to behave slightly differently. It seemed to be looking for a way to repair itself, engaging and disengaging with various other pieces of code, as if trying on different garments.
So, the whole thing worked like a giant billion-pieces jigsaw puzzle: by trial and error. Lock and key? Until the two fitting elements could join.
Yeah, it was as if someone had sneezed into a giant puzzle, spreading the pieces around the solar system.
SingMa chuckled.
"You okay?" Jax asked.
Yeah, she was irritated.
"Just a funny thought. I'll share it later. Got the bugger captured though."
"Good. I started worrying about your mental health," she grumbled. "Got another something though. 'Boldlno hrdrf gone bofre'."
His head hummed. His eyes ached.
"What?" he glanced at her.
"I think this is meant to say bold… something-something… gone before," she explained, shoving the tablet in front of him.
He shifted his gaze and stared at the string of code.
"How on earth… " He paused. Yeah, maybe… "Boldly no… what?" he paused again. "Okay, Okay, I'll get on that one, too."
He sent the code over to his screen and returned his focus to the control panel.
The letters danced. He rubbed his face. It helped a little. He tagged the piece of code for later.
A few very long moments later the first tagged item was destroyed. Now, he knew how to deal with the other one.
"My screen is flickering," Jax warned. "I think that's all I can find here. Can you give me access to another piece of the network?"
"Just a second." He isolated the second piece of code to make sure it didn't do anything dangerous while he was looking away.
Why was he thinking of a piece of code as a living creature?
He shrugged and swiped the screen back to the map of the main network. He'd have loved to check The Rainbow's End private circuit, but the café's location on the network was almost completely dark, with just a couple of weak blinking dots - probably the Republic's best coders working their butts off to save the station and the Solar System.
Or maybe still playing? No, it didn't look like playing, the sub-network had been disconnected from the PSS.
Someone very clever must have been at work there…
The shuttle port was dark. In the section representing the port where TNUSSA was docked, only one dot shone - no doubt and individual marking their own connection.
A few dots were blinking in the Plantenaium, probably automated monitors of the food-growing manufacture; a bunch of dim dots filled the government services section, which included the safety and security branch. He should probably look into it next. But his gaze shifted to the brightest section: the Si-Carb clinic and research facility.
"Maybe help Professor Li in the clinic?" he asked, calling up the access node.
A grumbling noise boiled up from his left, but he ignored it.
The dots in the clinic network pulsed slower and slower as he tapped on the board, trying to access the section.
Finally, he was let in.
"Here you are," he said, swiping the view and the access onto Jax's screen. "Search this one, I'll check out somewhere else."
A few seconds later, he was staring at one of the government networks. Thinking along the lines presented by Professor Li, that the malicious code would most likely attack the most vulnerable and most sensitive sections of the network first – those with connections to the external world. Ports and the shipyard were the most obvious places to start. As was the AdAstra network coordinated from the Rainbow's End. The hospital, which was being taken care of by the professor, and the government facilities. Not the finances, but the IT security and… if the professor was right in her suspicion of the rock being the carrier of the virus, the ADS - Asteroid Defense System.
His index finger hovered over the node.
Hacking wasn't a crime in the republic, but only if it served a greater good. This was certainly hacking for a greater good but accessing government facilities was always difficult. The lack of spending on defense and the military led to a much, much greater budget for strengthening electronic security.
Well, a good challenge for a top coder, as SingMa always wanted to be.
He took a deep breath and tapped onto the board.
That was a messy place, full of tiny, solitary dots and randomly shaped constellations. He strained his eyes, trying to find strings of letters and numbers that made sense. His head was pulsating. His mouth felt like the inside of a super dry nanofiber storage box.
But he kept scrolling.
His eye caught a group of symbols that made sense.
Probably.
Should he spend some of the precious time sandboxing it? He stared at it.
"SingMa," Jax's voice cut through the silence in the room.
"Busy," he replied absentmindedly.
"I know, but something strange is going on."
He tensed. The piece of code he was studying shimmered, and the symbols reshuffled. No doubt the effect of yet another one of those attempts at 'trying different pairings'.
His hands trembled as he attempted to separate the chunk of information from the rest of the environment.
Thank goodness for the interfaces which allowed this way of working with the code.
His back was burning from sitting in an uncomfortable position. There was an ever-growing sense of heaviness in his stomach and his head.
"Sing," Jax's voice raised in volume. "You must see this. The dots are bouncing around like crazy."
Her hand dropped onto his shoulder.
"But they're darkening," he replied, barely glancing at her and quickly shifting his gaze back to the screen. "I've got something here, too-"
"Now, they're pouring out."
The flagged chunk on his screen stopped shimmering and brightened.
Shit!
They must have made a match. The piece of shit was multiplying.
He pulled away from Jax's hand and began to tap furiously on the keyboard.
"Stop… stop the bloody replication," he growled.
But the screen froze. The control panel dimmed. His scr
een blackened.
"This is TNUSSA. Critical security event detected. Critical security incident suspected. Due to the immediate danger to the entities using the terminal, according with the First Law, the connection has been severed. Goodbye."
The screen flickered, but the last dot remained steady in place, like the final nail in the coffin.
SingMa winced. Strange thought…
"Oh, shit," Jax groaned.
"Yeah," he said, turning around to look at her. "So much for our work…"
But Jax wasn't looking at the message on the main screen. She stood staring at the tablet - in her hand.
"There was a little dot bouncing around and putting other little dots out," Jax said, her voice sounding weak and weary. "And then, something started to leak into the main network."
His chest tightened, and his head exploded into one, long, fast drumming.
"The extinguished dots are likely automated patient monitors. And the leak…"
He ran out of breath.
"We've got to go there," Jax yelled, grabbing him by the elbow. "Now."
24
Rutger
Rutger chocked as he tried to draw in a breath. The air felt too thin and overwhelmingly sticky at the same time. A coughing fit forced him to sit up.
His head pounded to the rhythm of his cough.
"Get out, get out," a voice hissed into his ear.
A somewhat familiar voice.
He heaved his eyelids open.
A petite black-haired woman, definitely familiar face, somewhat dilated pupils in her dark eyes.
"Get the fuck out of here, I need this station," she said, pulling a monitoring plate off his arm and putting her hand on his shoulder. "Go, go," she urged him, un-securing the side rail.
Rutger wiggled his toes. Still working. He rolled over to the side and, a moment later, his legs dangled over the floor.
"Hurry up," the woman yelled. She was already a few steps away from his bed, pushing in another bed towards him. Rutger's eyes ached, his vision was still blurred, but he could see a person in the bed.
His head wobbled, releasing a wave of nausea. Rutger put his hands against his ears and squeezed hard, hoping to stabilize it. The pounding shifted higher, into his temples.
The woman… what was her name? Ah, Lulu… Professor somebody, he remembered.
She unplugged his bed and pushed it away, with Rutger still sitting on it.
Whatever she needed it for, she must have been desperate.
A high-pitched beeping cut through the chilled air. He pushed the hands in harder.
A sharp pain shot through his temples.
Rutger released his head, fortunately, a little more stable now, and looked around. White walls, bright light, big semi-transparent wall and a large screen currently beeping furiously, suggested a clinical area.
The screen above his head must have gone berserk due to the disconnected cables, because he was obviously alive.
So, he was in a hospital.
Although definitely colder than he should have been.
He grabbed the blanket tossed at its feet and wrapped it around himself.
The blanket had a small silvery logo on it. Si-Carb.
His head seemed full of mud again. Was he being revitalized after arriving from the Earth?
A vague memory of a ship and a lengthy trip in semi-sleep emerged at the edge of his memory.
Nope, this must have been something else. His head…
He touched his temples and ran his finger along what felt like a suture. Rugged line though, not a typical, clean, precise cut. Sore, swollen.
A vague memory waking up in another white room a while ago. And a strong, internal impulse, like a twisted gut to get the implants out of his head.
He glanced at his hands. His right hand had thin lines of dried blood. Did he use a piece of glass to do that?
He might have. He touched his temple again. The tissue seemed thick, swollen, but there seem to be just soft tissue. No the usual feel of the hard, smooth surface of Gen 1.1 brain implants.
Maybe they had removed them.
Good. Even though it was not entirely clear in his memory, he felt that the implants were somehow responsible for the mess he was in.
He sat up. The beeping stopped.
He glanced over his shoulder.
The woman was fussing around the other bed, saying something in a language he didn't understand. Soothing noises.
Rutger took a deep breath. The air still felt thin and cold, but at least his breathing was easier.
He slid off the bed.
The room filled in with beeping of several alarms at the same time. His hands sprang back to his ears.
Ouch!
He misjudged the distance and hit the sore, swollen temples.
He winced and stepped towards the door.
The woman pushed in front of him, rushing to the corner just outside the door.
A nursing station? Control panel? The woman yelled something he didn't understand and started tapping on the control panel.
Suddenly the world behind the glass wall darkened.
Rutger stepped forward.
The space he'd taken for a hallway, was actually a circular inner room, like an island, surrounded by bays, just like the one he was in.
If he was correct, these bays would contain other people like him. Sick people. People needing medical help, and monitoring. Monitoring done with energy. Which was why all but one of the bays were filled with light.
Well, all but two now.
Rutger shifted his gaze to the control panel on the other side of the glass wall.
Lulu Zhou, that was her full name, was furiously tapping on the virtual keyboard.
Another bay darkened.
A chill ran down his spine.
She was turning off life support on the individual pods!
She was killing people! One by one.
His heart kicked into a higher gear, sending another pounding wave through his temples, but he pushed it aside.
He jumped towards the door, which opened smoothly, letting him into the control room.
"Stop immediately," he shouted, dashing towards her.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and jerked her away with all the strength he could muster.
She pushed back. Her elbows stabbed into his stomach. He recoiled.
She sprang back to the panel.
Rutger launched himself after her. This time he gripped her elbows, pulled her arms back. And a few smooth moves later had her in a hammerlock.
He stood still, holding the woman's arms and breathing heavily.
What the fuck should he do now?
Jax
Jax kept hammering on the capsule's panel, as if that would make the monorail car travel any faster. If it wasn't for the darkness in the transport tunnels, she would have considered running to the clinic.
Darkness and disorientation. And not knowing the area.
Or more importantly, an increasing sense of despair and hopelessness.
SingMa breathed heavily at the back. He was also shifting position every frigging few seconds. His knobby knees and spindly elbows dug into her back. The seats in the minicar weren't made for wriggly children, that was for sure. But they didn't have any children in Segedunum. Or so the rumor went.
"You're okay?' Jax asked.
Stop wriggling.
"Sure. Yeah, nah. I'm just trying to figure out if I destroyed the code before the whole thing collapsed."
Jax pulled at the zip of her suit.
"Does it even matter now?" she asked, glancing at the panel again.
An amber-lit image of a battery appeared on the side of the panel.
Shit.
"How far is the hospital?" she asked.
"Not sure," he replied. "But just thinking that-"
"We need to charge the car. I hope we get there before the—" she yelled.
"…the shutting down is not a bad thing," he carried on. Clearly,
not listening to her.
She shifted in her seat. Her knees hit the front panel. Definitely not built for tall people.
"Shutting down is what we want to avoid," she said. How could she get his attention? Maybe he knew where they could find some spare batteries for the vehicle.
"How long does this thing last from the moment the warning light comes up?" she asked.
"It is good. Because we can restore everything back to the last stable version."
Jax gritted her teeth. What was he going on about?
"We might stop at any moment. Can you get us from-"
"No, no. That's the problem. Once the shutdown is in progress, we can't stop. It'll wipe everything out. And then, we can-"
Blood rushed to her face.
"Are you even listening to me!" she snapped. "Power. Low. Amber- no, red now," she yelled, tapping her finger on the control board and stressing every word.
SingMa fell quiet, but only to take a breath in. He coughed.
"The air is thinning," he said. "There is no other option."
Jax folded her arms across her chest. It didn't matter that it made it feel tighter. What mattered now was that the red light on the control panel was flashing and the world around them was getting colder and stuffier.
"So, what's your plan, Mr. Smart?"
Maybe he had something important to say. This team working business was such a nuisance. If it was just her, she'd know what to do.
Well, she didn't have much of a plan herself, apart from keep on walking until some sort of exit and then find her way upstairs. Or whatever the lower, inhabited level was called.
No, she wouldn't. But at least, she'd only have herself to take care of.
"Are you even listening to me, Jax?" SingMa said.
Jax shuddered. So, neither of them listened. She didn't have any good ideas, but maybe he did.
"Sorry, I was just a bit-. Now, back and all ears."
"My plan is to shut down the whole system," SingMa said. "Force a reboot, like with a computer. The whole system backs itself up every twenty-four hours. It's automated. So, all we need to do is to wipe out the station's memory storage and reload the system from the backup from just before your ship arrived. That'll be yesterday's backup."
