Beautiful Red

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Thinking about what she saw, if she imagined the same behaviour in a system, Jack would have identified the man as a bot - clearly not in control of his actions, not having any agency of his own. But he was definitely a human, unless military cybernetics had advanced dramatically and in complete secrecy and they had unleashed their android creations on the street. They could only manage two of the three, at best, Jack thought and chuckled.

  She searched a few boards for any information that might help, and found a discussion on a few similar sightings elsewhere. There were a few still pictures of people who looked similar enough to the man Jack saw in the alley. They weren't always with other streeters, but they always looked completely vacant and were either stealing or destroying gear. Jack posted a brief description of what she had seen and included an excerpt of the video. Some of the other posters immediately asked questions about the incident and she discussed the scene with them for some time. There were the usual mix of theories, none of which appealed to Jack. She couldn't help thinking of the scene in terms of a system. He was just a bot. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Except that he was a human, not a program.

  Jack paged out of the board and went offline. She was disturbed by what she had seen, and she needed to compose herself. She got herself a beer and some toast, and focussed on those very corporeal tasks of eating and drinking. After the toast was gone and the beer was halfway there, she still felt at odds and needed something else to help ground her. She opened up her fridge and pulled out the peas. She lit a frozen cigarette and spent the next ten minutes forcing herself into a more relaxed state, while simultaneously increasing her heat rate and general nervous system activity.

  She sat, smoking and drinking, and began to review the tools used by the Buyside intruder. She started to read the code, looking for similarities between the programs. She first compared the part of the "map" to the document she had obtained from Gilles. After searching through the full document, she found the snippet embedded within it. Clearly, the document she was using and the document used by the intruder were identical. No great surprise here, since the spec was obviously easily available.

  After ruling out this piece of code from being a useful clue, she turned to the other two pieces of code. She scanned them both for comments and similarities in style. She looked for particular designs and peculiar methods. She found very few similarities, and determined that the tools had separate original authors. However, the code represented by the two by four had clearly been modified from its original condition. A chunk had been added in the middle, and this part was written in a similar style to the other script. Jack copied the added lines and looked at them along with the other code. She recognized a style which had been popular a few years ago among pacific rim crackers, a particular way of laying out the code designed to make it more readable. She also recognized artifacts of a scripting language that had never attained much popularity outside the rim.

  It was a legitimate clue, but to a certain extent knowing that the intruder had code from the rim was sort of like knowing that burglars had gloves from a particular mid sized franchise. It made Jack feel like she was making progress even though it didn't actually narrow things down at all. Jack decided instead to focus on the address logs. She knew that it was theoretically possible to construct a path from the information in the logs about the intruder. She had learned in her security history courses that before the ability of the everywherenet to essentially track all movement on the network, security professionals had been forced to track the paths of stealthy crackers. Jack looked up their tactics, and tried to apply them to her current situation.

  She didn't have a lot to go by - some residual entry information that she acquired at the Buyside end, and entry and exit information from the Bellis eastern system. She ran them through the various algorithms she had found on the nets that had been used in the past, and came up with a startling result - the origin of the intruder was from another network. They came from outside everywherenet.

  Until that moment, Jack hadn't known that there even were networks outside everywherenet. Why would anyone bother, when everyone and everything was hooked up together? If privacy were the concern, there were plenty of encryption solutions to that problem, and everywherenet was built specifically to allow transparency with privacy. The cost and complexity of building your own network would be prohibitive, Jack figured, and even if it weren't it was simply redundant.

  Even more shocking was that the intruders entered into the common network from a landline. It appeared that their entry point hacked into the network somewhere in a major city, though Jack couldn't tell which one. The logs showed only that it was a MetropolisGroup access point, which was the name given to the everywherenet subcommittee of the major uberurban firms. The tap could have originated in any of the massive cities and then it seemed to bounce from corporate intranet to corporate intranet until it found its final destination. And that destination was also pretty strange - it appeared to be a private citizen.

  Jack called up a directory and map. She quickly located this person, one Estella Rowan, at an address in a city in Europe and, on a not very well-thought out whim, pinged her. Jack had no idea what she would say if her query was answered, but the point was moot. There was no response. She wasn't particularly surprised; most people didn't respond to pings from strangers. When personal systems were first becoming popular, spammers switched from messaging addresses to pinging individuals directly. Almost everyone had some kind of blocker to avoid unwanted communications.

  Jack looked at the information she had on hand and and wondered how she had missed it. Estella Rowan lived in Brugges. The same city in the Benelux where there had been a strange theft of hardware recently. Jack was convinced there had to be a connection, though she couldn't see what it might be. She ran a search for an update on the Brugges robbery, but came up with nothing. Then she ran a search on Estella Rowan from Brugges.

  Bingo.

  Chapter 9

  Jack scanned a news report from the previous day. "Estella Rowan, a 63-year old adult entertainer, was reported missing yesterday by her employer after she failed to log in at work for her shift that evening." Jack felt a slight chill as she realized that the evening in question was the night of the Brugges robbery. The reports were not connecting the events - surely Brugges had its share of crime and what would a prostitute have to do with a theft of electronic parts? Jack connected the events, though. The theft had occurred only three quarters of an hour after Rowan's system had been accessed. Jack had to try and find Rowan, who might be able to lead her to the people who had contacted the missing woman just before the heist.

  Jack cracked her knuckles and settled into her chair. She pulled up her home brew three dimensional graphic representation of everywherenet, and followed the path she estimated that the intruders had taken after they left the Bellis system. It felt a lot like the good old days, when she had first begun work on the 3D system, and Jack felt herself fall into the old groove. She had spent many a long night slipping through the tiny passages and crooked labyrinths of various networks, many of which she really had no right to wander. The old thrill returned, though now she had age and experience behind her. It somehow didn't seem to make that much difference.

  She saw herself sliding through what appeared as green glowing tubes, individual packets represented by lighter green dots. She moved with the dots up, down and around the snaking interconnected pipes. After a few moments, it felt like walking through the neighbourhood where she lived. To be truly honest, it was easier. Jack knew the networks as if she'd lived there all her life, which, in a way, she had.

  She arrived at the representation of Rowan, a nicely painted wooden door, and Jack knew the woman would be offline - it's pretty hard to be missing if you are broadcasting your position to everyone on the 'nets. Jack pictured herself delicately knocking at Rowan's door, her own system pinging Rowan's offline system in a way that could force her online if the configuration files
were set for emergency access. Of course, that didn't work. Certainly the authorities had tried that route already and failed. Still, Jack was a firm believer in trying the simplest solution first - her experience as a programmer had taught her that.

  She mentally regrouped and set about attacking the problem differently. She found one of her professional tools that was represented as a shimmering key. It was essentially a lock pick for various types of systems. She set it to work and watched as it conformed itself to the inner shape of the lock. Eventually it glowed green and appeared to resolve itself into a solid shape. Jack took hold of it and turned. The lock opened and the door swung slowly inward.

  Rowan's system was pictured as a large house, the kind almost no one actually lived in anymore. Jack found herself in the foyer, and could see into a large parlour that was obviously used only for entertaining. The doors to the private rooms of the home were closed, and Jack knew they would be locked. She didn't want to open them, knowing that such a breach was highly illegal, but more importantly Jack couldn't justify doing to someone else something she would hate to have done to her. So she contented herself with poking around the more public areas of Rowan's system.

  The public address was on display above the door and some other basic contact information could be found by looking around the place. Rowan's place of employment, the Shadow Room, was listed along with its address on a list of public contacts tacked to a bulletin board near the door. Her calendar of public engagements was also available there, as well as a few publicity images of her body she probably used for work.

  Rowan was an attractive and trendy looking woman, if the publicity shots were to be believed. She had short spiky iridescent hair that gave her face a look that was both intense and soft at the same time. She looked youthful, with no visible wrinkles on her dark brown skin. She had also clearly had her hands enhanced, as the fingers appeared slightly longer and more slender than would have looked natural. She was, of course, naked in most the shots, and often bent into a contortionist's pose. In the few images where she was dressed, she wore very fashionable dresses of light flowing and almost translucent material. Jack looked at the photos for a long time, as if the images would tell her something about the woman other than how to pick her out of a lineup.

  Eventually, Jack moved into the parlour, but found little of interest in there. Rowan clearly didn't have many visitors to her system, and Jack suspected that her business transactions would occur over the Shadow Room's network for security reasons. Jack guessed Rowan didn't have many friends, since it was her employer who reported her missing and there was no evidence that anyone had been here in recent times. Jack checked the guestbook, and saw that Rowan herself hadn't even accessed this part of the system in over two months. Jack wondered what her own public space looked like, wondering how similar she and the missing woman might be.

  Jack had decided that she could not justify breaking the locks into Rowan's private space, but she felt compelled to approach the doors anyway. She touched the door off the parlour and let out a tiny yelp as it swung open. Jack staggered back and fell on to the settee in a thump. She could see into a kitchen-type area and was shocked by what she saw.

  It looked like a cyclone had torn through the room. Furniture was upended, the wallpaper was torn from the walls in great strips, holes were gouged in the walls and floor. Jack was torn between a desire to go offline immediately and a strong sense of curiosity that begged her to investigate. She moved cautiously to the door and called Estella Rowan's name loudly.

  "Hello!" she shouted into the wreckage. "Is anyone here?" She stayed in the doorway. "My name is Jack. I'm a Security Officer Class 5. I'm here to help." She felt like an idiot. There were no signs of life inside and although it went against every nerve in her body and any sense of ethics she had, Jack stepped over the threshold and entered Estella's mind.

  The disaster area that was once represented as a kitchen was a maelstrom of destroyed items. Jack stepped carefully through the rubble, looking for anything that might leave a clue about what had happened. She couldn't even imagine what this meant - a mental breakdown, some sort of catastrophic software meltdown; Jack was just grasping at straws trying to make sense of this situation.

  She continued to call out in the hopes that Estella would answer, though she was beginning to fear that there wasn't anyone there, which was a frightening concept. Integrated systems ran off the electrical current generated by the human body, and therefore would shut down when the body died. It seemed that the system was working perfectly well, even if it was in some sort of horrendously broken format. Estella must be alive, but there seemed to be no sign of consciousness inside.

  Jack sifted through the rubble, finding broken china, holes in the walls, and nothing whatsoever indicating what had happened. It could have been a fight, vandalism, some other kind of upheaval. Jack realized that the kitchen wasn't going to answer any questions and she would have to look further in the house if she was going to learn anything.

  She stepped up to the kitchen door, and timidly pushed it forward. It creaked open and Jack saw a continuation of the mess she was standing in. It was a living area that was actually used for living and it was strewn with books, clothes and equipment. Almost everything was broken or ripped, and Jack got the sense that it was destroyed in two stages - the first being some kind of a conflict and the second being blind rage. The way things were thrown around and pushed away from their usual places indicated a fight or perhaps showed the path of someone trying to escape from the room. But the vandalism could not have been a natural side effect, it had to have been deliberate.

  Jack could see, however, a slight path in the rubble. She followed the trail of fallen lamps and ripped curtains to another door. She cracked it open and saw a bedroom, in the same state of disarray as the rest of the house. The mattress was pulled off the bed and tossed aside, after having been torn open. Jack thought there must have been pillows once, judging from the piles of poly-filler on the floor. The path she was following continued through the pillow wreckage. Jack followed the trail, which was becoming more obvious now, to a closet door.

  She pulled it open and at first couldn't comprehend what she was looking at. There was little other then the haircut and skin tone that connected the mess in the closet with the woman in the images Jack had been studying in the foyer. The body was bloody and battered, though on closer inspection it was definitely Rowan. She looked as if she had been at the losing end of a fistfight with a knife salesman, and Jack leant in closer to look at the wounds. She felt her heart nearly stop as the body moved, twitching and staggering, and fell on top of her.

  Jack screamed and flailed at the woman, who moaned and writhed, but did not fight back. Her body was almost completely slack, except for some twitching and drooling which caused Jack to panic even more. Jack was strong, but she could not budge the weight trapping her. Every time she shoved, Rowan would make a horrible noise and another body part, slick with blood, would rub against Jack, trapping her further. Just as panic threatened to cause her to lose consciousness, Jack remembered that she was in a simulation.

  She quickly switched to code view, caught her breath and fought the gorge rising in her throat. She slowly regained her composure, but couldn't stop shaking. She felt as if she could still feel the blood on her body, though she was dry except for her own sweat. She scanned the code, trying to forget the image of the pretty woman in the photos turned into the vacant, corpse-like thing that she had recently encountered.

  She forced herself to focus on reading the code and recognized the signature of a human consciousness, but never like she had seen it before. She copied a random sampling of the code and searched for a similar pattern on the nets. All of the hits she brought up were medical articles discussing comatose patients, and a few classified documents. Jack scanned the medical papers, and matched the pattern of the code she had taken from Estella as similar to the brain pattern of people who were in long term comas.

/>   This made sense; if Estella were in a coma, her system would be unable to respond to pinging and there wouldn't be any activity. The coma theory didn't explain the mess, though and it certainly didn't answer where she was physically. Jack checked the sources of the classified documents. They were branded ESA; the European Security Agency. Jack knew she didn't have the skills to get access to them. She wondered if there was another way.

  She switched programs and called up her three dimensional museum interface. She walked past the welcome desk and coat check, past Greco-Roman friezes, Rodin's sculpture The Kiss, Kirschov's holo-painting Sunlight, and other priceless masterpieces and found herself in front of the Escher. She spoke a few words of command and soon heard the chime of notification at the other end.

  >Adrian, you there?

  >>Hey, yeah, I'm here. Long time no chat. What's up?

  >Plenty. I'm switching to double encryption, okay?

  >>Now I'm really interested. Okay. Key 73?

  >Seven three.

  Jack selected double encryption and pulled up her key number 39. Long ago, Jack and Adrian had agreed that if they ever had to discuss keys, they would use a number in the clear that they would translate to a different number using a simple mathematical formula they could do manually (add five, divide by two). It wouldn't make a big difference to a dedicated attacker, but it made things more difficult for everyday eavesdroppers.