Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

  Leland’s equity offerings used tedious statistical analysis to mask the fact that their business centered on enslaving foreign people and ravaging their lands. They didn’t do this directly, of course, but they hired the people who hired the people who did.

  Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too—but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.

  To view Leland fund managers as immoral was a gross simplification of the world. And what was there to replace capitalism, anyway? Communism? Theocracy? Most of the Third World had already suffered nearly terminal bouts of idealism. It was the Communists, after all, who had littered the world with cheap AK-47s in order to “liberate” the masses. But the only lasting effect was that every wall between Cairo and the Philippines had at least one bullet hole in it. But nothing changed. Nothing changed because these alternate belief systems flew in the face of human nature. Of even common sense. Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.

  Leland bankers told clients that they didn’t design the world—they were just trying to live in it. And incidentally, the wonders of the developed world rose from the ashes of conflict and competition, so they were helping people in the long run. For godsakes, just look at Japan.

  And while the debate mumbled on, asterisked by legal disclaimers, Leland booked another highly profitable year.

  But profitability was not what was bothering Garrett Lindhurst as he approached the CEO’s office suite.

  Among Leland’s C-level executives, only Lindhurst was without decades-old family ties to the organization—but then again, the rapid expansion of computer systems in the corporate world in recent years had outpaced the ability of old-money families to produce senior technology talent. While Lindhurst hadn’t written any actual code since working with Fortran and Pascal back in his Princeton days, he had learned over the years how much systems should cost and what they needed to do.

  In essence, computer systems needed to do only one of two things: make money or save money. Everything else was just details. Scut work. These tasks Lindhurst delegated to the executive senior veeps, who, in turn, delegated them to someone else…and so on. It was only during times of complete disaster that Lindhurst involved himself with the actual computer systems themselves.

  Today was such a time.

  Lindhurst pointed at the CEO’s temple-like office doors as he passed the executive secretary’s desk. “He in?”

  “He’s leaving for Moscow in an hour.”

  She barely registered Lindhurst’s presence. A stone-faced woman in her fifties, she was many years in the CEO’s service and effectively had more authority than any two senior vice presidents put together.

  But Lindhurst had more authority than ten. He pushed his way through the towering double doors.

  “Garrett!” she called after him.

  He ignored her and proceeded into the CEO’s cavernous office at a quick pace.

  The tanned, pampered face of Russell Vanowen, Jr., CEO and chairman of Leland Equity Group, looked up from reading a letter. He scowled. “Damnit, Garrett, make an appointment.”

  Garrett heard the doors close behind him, and he took a deep breath. “This can’t wait.”

  “Then just pick up the phone, for chrissakes.”

  “We need a face-to-face.”

  Vanowen regarded him like a statue would a pigeon. Vanowen had that obsessively groomed look of the fabulously rich—as though his head were the grounds of Augusta National and a hundred grounds-keepers swarmed over it each morning. The ring of white hair sweeping around the back of his head was perfectly manicured like a green. The pores of his skin were flawless. His suit was masterfully tailored to make his husky form look manly and authoritative.

  Yet, for all his obvious fastidiousness, Vanowen did not look soft. He was stocky, intimidating, with a presence that projected itself without having to speak; his eyes scanned a room like twin .50-caliber machine guns. And he had an almost mystical authority in this office, with its bank of tall windows overlooking downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan beyond. This was a fabled seat of power, overlooking the length and breadth of the land.

  Lindhurst proceeded toward Vanowen’s massive teak wood desk, still thirty feet away. “We have a major problem, Russ.”

  Vanowen still held a letter in one hand, glaring over his reading glasses. He reluctantly dropped the letter on his otherwise empty desk and removed his glasses. “When you say ‘we,’ I take that to mean ‘you.’” He glanced at his massive watch, tugging a cuff-linked sleeve up to see the face. “I’m heading out to the airfield any minute.”

  There wasn’t any time to finesse it. “We’ve lost administrator rights to our network.”

  This did not have the impact Lindhurst hoped.

  Vanowen shrugged slightly and now looked greatly irritated. “So what the hell do you want me to do about it? You’re the CIO; ride your people until they fix it. Jesus, Garrett.”

  Lindhurst sat down in one of the uncomfortable leather chairs, pulling it right up to the desk. He leaned in close, still clutching the rolled magazine. “Russ, listen to me: we don’t have any control over our databases.”

  “My response is the same. Now would you let me read this letter, please?”

  “WE ARE UNDER ATTACK.”

  That got Vanowen’s attention. “Attack?”

  “Attack. All offices, worldwide. Look, I get in this morning, and I have phone calls from six division heads telling me they can’t log on as admins to our servers. They think it’s a layoff and that they’ve been shut out on purpose.”

  “Were they?”

  “Not by us. Turns out no one can get an admin logon—not even here in the main office. All systems rebooted last night. And somehow, somebody took over our network. We have only limited rights to it.”

  Now Vanowen looked really angry. He pounded his fist on the desk. “Jesus Christ, Lindhurst! Why the hell wasn’t I told about this sooner? Our clients must be screaming bloody murder.”

  “Hold on a second. Our Web sites are up, and we can access data, no problem. So can our clients. We can even change data, so no one outside Leland knows yet.”

  Confused and getting angrier by the moment, Vanowen gestured, “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that we can’t back up, restore, or change our servers. We can’t even export data.”

  “I may not know much about this stuff, Lindhurst, but I do know we spent thirty million dollars on backup systems. Surely you can take a backup copy and restore it.”

  “That’s just it; our backup SANs are toast. Our off-site replication trashed. The log files were faked. We have no backups newer than four months ago.”

  Vanowen squinted at him. “How is that possible? I spent forty-seven million dollars on IT last year alone. We were supposed to have the most advanced network security money can buy. You assured me of that. You assured the board of that. That’s why we hired you.”

  “I don’t think our systems were breached. Not from the outside. I think it’s an inside job.”

  “Call the FBI.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “The hell we can’t.”

  “Understand this, Russ: they can flush our entire network down the toilet with a single keystroke—from just about anywhere in the world. This company is hanging by a thread.”

  The room got deathly quiet. Still staring, Vanowen spoke with the sort of calm voice that usually precedes violence. “Explain this to me, Garrett.”

  “It gets much worse.”

  “Worse? How the
hell can it get any worse?”

  “Watch.” Garrett motioned for Vanowen to follow him.

  Vanowen’s office was huge, with a double-height ceiling and windows. Several sets of sofas and leather chairs were placed about the room, with a wide plasma-screen television on the far end and a conference table nearby, encircled by chairs. The place was easily a couple thousand square feet.

  Vanowen reluctantly got up from his desk and followed Lindhurst to the plasma screen. Lindhurst was already fiddling with a remote he had picked up from the credenza there.

  Vanowen settled into a conference table chair. “I’ll see that the people behind this go to federal prison for the rest of their lives.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ll see in a moment.” Lindhurst gestured to the plasma screen. “Have you used this video conferencing system yet? It cost seventy thousand dollars.”

  “Goddamnit, Lindhurst—”

  “Okay, look, this system is jacked into our corporate network. I put something out there that I want you to see.” Lindhurst used the remote to navigate to an intranet Web page, which filled the screen. “I found an e-mail in my inbox this morning. It was from the system administrator—the new system administrator. The person who took my rights away. That e-mail contained a hyperlink—which I copied to this network share.” He navigated to another page and clicked a hyperlink. “Here is what I saw….”

  Vanowen looked impatiently at the screen.

  The seventy-inch plasma monitor suddenly went black and after a few moments a whooshing sound effect escorted a whirling logo into the center of the screen. It was a stylized emblem of the words: Daemon Industries LLC.

  A professional-sounding female announcer came on, along with cavorting corporate music. It was like an infomercial or network marketing video. Her voice was cheerful. “Welcome to the Daemon Industries family of companies. In just a moment you’ll hear some of the exciting new opportunities available to you in this fast-growing global organization. An organization to which your company now belongs. But first, a word from our founder…”

  Vanowen frowned. “Lindhurst—”

  “Shh!” He pointed.

  The screen faded in on a man in his mid-thirties. He was sitting in a chair next to a fireplace. The chirpy corporate Muzak continued in the background. Words appeared at the bottom of the screen:

  Matthew A. Sobol, Ph.D.

  Chairman & CEO Daemon Industries LLC

  Sobol nodded once in dour greeting.

  Lindhurst hit the PAUSE button on the remote. Sobol froze in mid-nod. “That’s him.”

  “That’s who?” Vanowen squinted at the words on-screen. He turned back to Lindhurst. “Never heard of him. Is this the person who broke into our network?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call the FBI.”

  “Won’t do any good, Russ. Matthew Sobol’s dead.” Lindhurst handed the rolled magazine to Vanowen.

  Vanowen just glanced down at it, then with some reluctance took it. He unrolled it and moved it to arm’s length so he could see the cover with his myopic eyes. The same Matthew Sobol was on the cover of the magazine. It was eight months old. The headline read: Murderer From Beyond the Grave. “That guy?” Vanowen tossed the magazine onto the nearby conference table. “That was a hoax.” He motioned to the plasma screen. “So is this. My kid at USC could probably make this video on his Powerbook.”

  “Russ, someone managed a coordinated global attack that not only stole rights to our worldwide network, but they did it months ago without raising a single alarm. They didn’t leave a trace. Matthew Sobol was one of the few people who could have pulled it off.”

  “You’re frighteningly gullible. Jesus, some hackers got into our network, and they’re trying to put one over on you. Call the FBI.”

  “Russ, no one faked this video. If you listen to him, you’ll see what I mean.” Lindhurst released the PAUSE button.

  Matthew Sobol came back to life on-screen. The infomercial music faded as he finished his nod. “By now you’re beginning to realize that you no longer control your network and that your backups are damaged beyond repair. I am now an integral part of your organization—and have been for several months. Let me assure you that your corporate data is safe, and that sufficient backups exist off-site to provide seamless protection in the event of a natural disaster or other calamity.

  “Before I continue, let me caution you to watch this video in its entirety before contacting your local or federal authorities. This recording contains important information that may affect your decision to involve those entities in this situation.”

  A light musical jingle accompanied a twirling inset picture that spun to a stop alongside Sobol’s head. It was a video of Sobol’s mansion roaring in flames.

  Sobol smiled pleasantly. “As you can see, involving the authorities is no guarantee of your safety. Although they would certainly be willing to try again at your location.”

  The inset video image transitioned to a collection of quivering question marks.

  Sobol looked intently into the camera. “But you’re probably wondering just how you got yourselves into this situation. To answer that question, surprisingly, we need to go back hundreds of millions of years to the very origins of life on Earth.”

  The question marks expanded to fill the screen and faded away as the entire screen dissolved to an image of primordial Earth. It was a 3-D computer animation of the ancient seas, teeming with exotic life—razor-toothed fish with whiplike probosces and flitting schools of tiny translucent organisms.s

  Vangelis music rose on the surround-sound speakers. Sobol narrated, “Let me tell you the story of the most successful organism of all time: this is the story of the parasite.”

  On-screen a large, particularly evil-looking fish with twin rows of splayed fangs and a spiked dorsal array glided into view. Just then, a small organism swam for the area just behind the enormous fish’s gills, where it latched on, unnoticed. A dozen others followed it and also latched on.

  Sobol spoke. “Early on, evolution branched into two distinct paths: independent organisms—those that exist on their own in the natural world—and parasites—organisms that live on other organisms. And it was, by far, the parasites that proved the more successful of the two branches. Today, for every independent organism in nature, there exist three parasites.”

  The computer animation transitioned from one eon to the next—from amphibian to reptilian to mammalian—with parasites continuing to evolve along with their hosts, infesting some species, driving them to extinction, while other species evolved means to keep them at bay—at least for a time.

  “These two strains of evolution have been locked in a primordial arms race, constantly evolving to best each other for supremacy of this planet. As parasites evolve to perfect their systems against a species of host, the host evolves to evade their attack. Scientists call this theory of an eternal genetic struggle the Red Queen Hypothesis—a name taken from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.”

  On-screen, the image suddenly changed to an animation of Alice in Wonderland—with the Red Queen running along a hedgerow maze and looking toward little Alice, who struggled to keep up. She was saying: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

  The screen changed to a video of a small pond, with snails moving through the mud.

  “Animal behavior has evolved to battle parasites. In fact, we have parasites to thank for the existence of sex. Sex is a costly and time-consuming method of reproduction. Experiments have shown that, in the absence of parasites, species evolve toward parthenogenesis—or cloning—as the reproductive method of choice. In parthenogenesis each individual is able to self-replicate. But this produces almost no genetic variation. In the presence of parasites, cloning, while more energy-efficient, is not a viable reproductive strategy. It presents a stationary genetic target to parasites,
who, once introduced into such a system, will quickly dominate it.”

  The screen changed to an animated diagram of twin sets of human DNA strands, which moved as Sobol spoke.

  “Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female—making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system.

  “Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat…”

  The screen changed to color film footage of native villages with truly hideous parasitic infestations; children with bulging, worm-filled bellies; malaria victims.

  “…and parasitism evolves and moves through any system—not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it….”

  The screen showed food-borne illness outbreaks—images of fast-food restaurants. The camera panned to reveal identical restaurants running down the sides of each street, in Dallas, in Denver, in Orlando, in Phoenix….

  “Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system….”

  Then images of identical rows of computers in a data center, all running the same operating system…

  “Lacking a central nervous system—much less a brain—the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.”

  The screen changed to a video image of a hermit crab moving along the sandy ocean bottom. The camera followed it as Sobol spoke.

  “But if they’re so successful, why haven’t parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven’t noticed. That’s because successful parasites don’t kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce….”