Daemon d-1

by Daniel Suarez

  Mosely was emotionally and physically exhausted. And still it went on.

  It was like being dragged over an emotional washboard. Mosely wound up feeling virtually every emotion of which humans are capable-not once but hundreds of times. He was long past his breaking point-not that he even noticed he’d passed it.

  The images continued. An unknowable number of hours, and still the images continued. Mosely’s mouth was parched, and he strained to stay alert. The images kept coming.

  But one concept had begun to form in Mosely’s mind. Like a rock slowly revealed as a wind blew away surrounding sand, Mosely was starting to see himself. With all his built-up emotional defenses long since worn away, simple truths had begun to emerge. Even he knew their meaning: he was angry at his wasted life. He felt deep feelings of loss that he had no family as a child, and that he had not provided one for his son-wherever he was now. Also Mosely had a desperate desire to belong. To matter. To stand for something besides himself. He was the perennial outsider looking in on the fellowship of others.

  The last films were pivotal. Where the earlier ones seemed to break him down to his emotional building blocks, the latter ones seemed to be building him up-filling him with joy as he saw people struggling together. Relying on each other. Sacrificing. Gratitude. Joy. Free men looking toward distant horizons. Horizons that beckoned the adventurous, hinting at danger.

  The people in these films were of all races and ages, but Mosely noticed that they shared some traits in common: they were capable, they were highly motivated, and they acknowledged no limits. Danger was not a deterrent. It was life lived to its maximum. They were truly alive.

  He had almost forgotten the real world existed. He did not know how long he lay there, but when the screens faded to black, it was as though he were cast into an abyss. He panted, struggling to find some reference point. His soul adrift in nothingness.

  From somewhere in the darkness he heard Sobol’s voice. “Follow me, and I will help you find what you have lost. I will give your descendants a future. The past no longer exists for you.”

  A light began to rise in the infinite distance.

  “You are an exceptional person. I choose to have faith in you.” The soft light filled his vision.

  Mosely slowly remembered that he existed as a person. He remembered his name. Charles Mosely. He felt different-as though all his sins were washed away.

  Suddenly the crushing weight of exhaustion fell upon him.

  Someone lifted the goggles from his head, revealing the same soft light above him. The big guy was there, nodding slowly. A metallic chunksound echoed in the room, and Mosely’s limbs were suddenly free. Other hands came to ease him up.

  Mosely looked and saw the other orderly in his white coat helping him up into a sitting position. Mosely felt dizzy. Weak.

  The big guy leaned in. “We’re going to withdraw the needle. It will just take a second.”

  The other orderly placed a cotton ball over the spot, squeezed, then withdrew the needle. He quickly taped a bandage over it.

  Mosely’s dull eyes noticed his own clothing. He was wearing surgical scrubs with booties. He stared down at his feet, then looked up to face the big guy, who nodded slightly.

  “The danger’s past.”

  Mosely’s dry voice croaked, “How long?”

  “Forty-six hours.”

  A water bottle appeared next to his mouth. Mosely turned to see the other orderly extending it. Mosely took it and sipped greedily.

  “Not too much.” After a few more moments they took it away.

  The big guy regarded Mosely. “The fact that you’re still alive is all I need to know about you.” He extended his hand. “I’m Rollins.” His eyes darted. “He’s Morris.”

  Mosely regarded the hand. “Like I’m Taylor?”

  Rollins laughed. “Exactly like that.”

  Mosely shook his hand. Rollins made eye contact. They were confident eyes, not at all unfriendly.

  Morris nodded and shook his hand also. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Aboard what?”

  Rollins gestured. “The Daemon chose you. You’re one of its champions now.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You already made your choice.” He looked into Mosely’s eyes. “This is where you want to be. That’s why you’re still alive.”

  Mosely absorbed the words. The images were so fresh in his mind. Breaking him down to his basic building blocks. Understanding him. Mosely understanding himself. The elation.

  He realized Rollins was right.

  Rollins continued. “There are no leaders here. We are all peers. And we answer directly to the Daemon-and no one else. I am your equal. And you are mine.”

  Mosely wasn’t sure this was even happening. He shook his head to clear it.

  Rollins patted his arm. “First, some food and rest. There’s a lot to learn, but the Daemon chose you because you’re smart. And you’ll need to be.”

  Chapter 28:// Ripples on the Surface

  Natalie Philips paced with a laser pointer at the edge of a projection screen. The Mahogany Row conference room was dimly lit, and silhouettes of her audience were arrayed around a sizeable boardroom table. Military badges on the uniforms of some audience members reflected the light from the screen.

  Her title presentation slide was up:

  Viability of Daemon Construct Over Peer-to-Peer Networks

  She was already addressing the group.”…the feasibility of a narrow AI scripting application distributed over a peer-to-peer network architecture to avoid core logic disruption.” She clicked to the next slide. It bore the simple words:

  Distributed Daemon Viable

  A murmur went through her audience.

  “Our unequivocal findings are that a distributed daemon is not merely a potential threat but an inevitable one, given the standards unifying extant networked systems. In fact, we have reason to believe one of these logic constructs is currently loose in the wild.”

  Much more murmuring went through the crowd.

  She changed her slide again. This one depicted two sets of graphs labeled Incidence of DDOS Attacks-All Sites Compared to Gambling/Pornography Sites.

  She looked back at her audience. “A distributed denial of service (or DDOS) attack involves harnessing the power of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of zombie computers to transmit large amounts of packets to a single target Web domain. A zombie computer is one that has been previously compromised by a malicious back door program. This could be John Q. Public’s unsecured computer sitting in the den. An army of these zombie computers is called a botnet,and its collective computing power can be directed to overwhelm a target, making it too busy to respond to legitimate traffic. The potential to harm an online business is obvious.

  “Unlike a simple denial of service (or DOS) attack-which is launched from a single machine and thus easily blocked by an IP address-a DDOS attack comes in waves from different IP addresses coordinated to continually incapacitate the target. Likewise, the nature of the traffic can vary wildly, making it difficult to filter out garbage connection requests. In short: it is significantly more serious. Unless the attacker brags about his deeds, tracing the real source of an attack can be next to impossible.”

  She wielded the laser pointer to highlight various parts of the screen. “These two charts illustrate a pattern detected four months ago in the occurrence of distributed denial of service attacks on the public Internet-both overall and as experienced separately by commercial gambling and pornography Web sites, both legal and illegal, hereafter referred to as ‘G/P sites.’

  “Note the increase of approximately twelve thousand percent in the occurrence of such attacks against G/P sites during the period January through April. Contrast this with the flat-to-declining trend in DDOS attacks versus the overall population of domains.”

  She changed slides to a graphical breakdown of the top international gambling and pornography domains, with call-out
s indicating the crime gangs operating out of Russia, Thailand, and Belize. The graph was broken down on the x-axis by time and on the y-axis by packets per hour.

  “The CIA has associated the following international crime rings with these three G/P enterprises. Their Web interests encompass tens of thousands of loosely affiliated Web sites hosted on hundreds of domains in dozens of countries. Each one of these crime gangs is a vast IT organization, and collectively they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year. Their operating units include product development, security, finance, and infrastructure support elements-they are, in effect, multinational corporations whose product lines include narco-trafficking, sexual slavery, money laundering, and extortion.”

  Her graph showed that the Web assets of each individual crime ring had been attacked in a campaign of orchestrated infowar. Philips’s laser pointer cavorted as she hammered her point home. “The Russians were first in line. We estimate that roughly ten million workstations launched a Pearl Harbor-like cyber attack simultaneously from all points on the globe, beginning in mid-January and stretching through to the end of the month. This effectively brought the Russian business to a halt worldwide-making their online gambling and pornography assets unavailable to paying customers for extended periods. These were not simple smurf and fraggle attacks. The Russians appear to have tried everything, from hardware filtering to rate-limiting connections, but it didn’t put a dent in their downtime. They tried to launch new sites and migrate customers to these, but the new sites also were rapidly targeted and brought down.”

  She changed to a slide of translated Internet headlines from a passel of third-world sites. They listed dozens of killings in Asia and Russia.

  “This appears to have sparked a brief gang war, followed by a purge within the ranks of the gang’s IT staff. The CIA estimates several dozen related killings, but notably, all during this period, the DDOS attacks did not let up and shifted constantly to originate from new locations. The Russian enterprise did not recover until the end of January, when it was suddenly fully operational.”

  She looked up at her audience. “The following cell phone conversation was intercepted by ComSat assets over the Republic of Georgia on January twenty-ninth and is a conversation between an unidentified caller and a known Russian mafia figure based in St. Petersburg, herein denoted as Vassili.The transcript is available over Echelon. The abstract number is listed in your presentation binder. This raw intercept comes to us compliments of Group W.” She turned to face the screen as tinny, foreign chatter came in over speakers. An instant translation appeared on the screen in a scrolling fashion as the words were uttered in Russian:

  Vassili: We’re driving. Tupo [nearby person], no. Where are you? Where are you now?

  Caller: Belize City.

  Vassili: They are online there?

  Caller: Yes, yes. They’re running perfect.

  Vassili: Perfect? Since when?

  Caller: Perfect, like before perfect.

  Vassili: Before the attacks?

  Caller: Yes, yes.

  Vassili: Do they know the extent of it there?

  Caller: No. Nobody knows.

  Vassili: They’re angry about Tupolov, yes?

  Caller: Yes. But they have their money now.

  Vassili: You paid the dead American?

  Caller: Yes.

  Vassili: And now we’re online again?

  Caller: Yes.

  Vassili: [unintelligible]. They’ll be next, and we must regain market share while they are down. You know what to do?

  Caller: Yes. Sobol told us.

  The screen cleared and the lights came up as animated discussions filled the room. Philips called to be heard over the din. “There are additional intercepts of a similar nature, but I think this is a representative sample. The waves of attacks continued until a couple of months ago, hitting each organization in turn-and growing in ferocity-at which point they disappeared suddenly and entirely.”

  One of the DOD brass spoke up, “What’s your read on all this, Doctor?”

  “I think the crime gangs running online gambling and pornography have been forced to pay protection money to someone or something.”

  “You conclude that from one intercept?”

  “This is one of dozens of intercepts, the transcripts of which you will find in your presentation binders.”

  “How much money are we talking about here?”

  Philips placed the laser pointer on the nearby podium. “We have an e-mail intercept from a Thai gang that mentions a ten percent gross payment.”

  “Ten percent of gross?”

  “All online transactions. The CIA estimates worldwide revenue from online gambling and pornography at approximately seventeen billion U.S. dollars per year. In truth, no one really knows. But if we use this as a baseline and extrapolate, assuming that the Daemon has-”

  “You’re talking about a couple billion dollars a year.”

  “There is anecdotal evidence that these payments represent an outsourcing of the IT security function of these criminal gangs to some unknown entity.” She paused, either for effect or to gather her courage-even she wasn’t sure which. “We suspect that the entity is not a living person but a massively parallel logical construct. I believe it’s Sobol’s Daemon.”

  The room erupted in talk for several moments until someone in the back shouted over the din, “How do you know it’s not just another gang?”

  The noise died down to hear her response.

  Philips nodded. “Because that was the first thing the Russians thought. Quite a few hackers died at their hands in an effort to identify those responsible. At some point the Russians were presented with evidence that convinced them no living person was behind this attack. We don’t know yet what that evidence was-but we have operatives attempting to get their hands on it.”

  The division chief just looked at her. “This is reckless conjecture. We’ve got Detective Sebeck convicted and on death row, Cheryl Lanthrop dead, and Jon Ross on the run. This situation is under control.”

  The most senior NSA suit spoke. “I disagree. Right now the media is stoking a panic on cyber crime. A public discovery that Sobol’s Daemon was preying on Internet business could spook the financial markets.”

  A visiting analyst from the FBI Cyber Division shook his head. “The facts don’t support the media panic, sir. Overall reported incidents of computer breakins this year are down slightly-not up. In fact, we could spin the demise of gambling and pornography sites as a positive.”

  Philips regarded the FBI agent, then turned to the room in general. “Anyone have anything on the media’s current fascination with cyber security? Does anyone know what’s driving it?”

  “Sebeck’s trial?”

  The FBI analyst began to hold court on the topic. “The government has few real controls over either the Internet or private data networks. This manufactured panic is addressing an actual deficiency in the cyber infrastructure. It’s the invisible hand of the market in action.”

  Philips looked impassively at him. “Unless it’s already too late.”

  The NSA section chief raised an eyebrow. “Is your copycat Daemon up to something more than demanding tribute from pornographers, Dr. Philips?”

  She revealed no emotion. “For one, I believe it isSobol’s Daemon.”

  “Highly unlikely.” The FBI analyst looked ready to disprove anything. He just needed fresh grist for his logic mill.

  Philips continued. “Gentlemen, there are loose ends all over the Sobol case. There’s the poisoning death of Lionel Crawly-the voice-over artist for Sobol’s game Over the Rhine. What dialogue did he record that we have no knowledge of? The introduction of a strange edifice in Sobol’s online game The Gateat almost the instant of his death. And then there are the back doors in his games-”

  “There are no back doors in his games.” The FBI analyst scanned the faces in the room. “It’s a fact.”

  The NSA chief kept his eyes on Philips. �
�Your Internet traffic analysis was interesting, Doctor, but if you have evidence linking Sobol’s Daemon with the Daemon attacking G/P sites, then where is it?”

  “In Sobol’s game maps.”

  “Steganography? Didn’t you explore that last year?”

  “Fleetingly-before Sebeck’s arrest. But let’s not forget that Sobol was an extraordinarily intelligent man. He was able to envision multiple axes simultaneously.”

  “Is that a polysyllabic way to say he thinks outside the box?”

  A senior cryptanalyst nearby removed his glasses and started cleaning them. “No offense, Dr. Philips, but if Sobol’s games contained steganographic content, you should have readily detected it by plotting the magnitude of a two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform of the bit-stream. This would show telltale discontinuities at a rate roughly above ten percent.”

  Philips aimed an anti-smile in his direction. “Thank you, Doctor. Had I not spent the last six years expanding the frontiers of your discipline, I’m sure I would find your input invaluable.”

  The division chief cleared his throat. “The point is still valid, Doctor. How could Sobol hide a back door in a program using steganography, of all things? Doesn’t that just hide data? You can’t execute steganographic code.”

  The FBI analyst couldn’t hold back. “Even if he was storing encrypted code within art asset files, he’d still need code to extract the encrypted elements-and we would have found the extraction routines in the source.”

  Philips turned to him thoughtfully. “Yes, but the back door isn’t in the code. It’s in the program — but it’s not in the code.”

  Her audience looked confused.