John Golden: Freelance Debugger

by Django Wexler

  She gave me a withering stare. “Because I am not an idiot, I am aware of Oberon's Law[18]. I am referring not to the fact that something got in, but rather to the fact that it appears to have left no evidence of how it got in while doing so. That should be impossible.” She shifted her glare from me to Falmer. “Who is he supposed to be, anyway?”

  —[18] The aforementioned homily about a system only being secure when it is turned off.—

  “This is John Golden, the expert I told you about. Give him everything we've got on the problem and whatever system access he needs. Help him however you can, all right?”

  “Ah.” She turned back to me, and I recognized her expression. It was the pained smile of the geek preparing to swallow her pride and kowtow to an idiot because he's higher up the org chart. I'd worn that smile almost continuously, back in the bad old days. “Good to meet you, Mr. Golden.”

  We exchanged a tepid handshake. Falmer clapped his hands together and said, “All right. I've some things I should take care of upstairs. Deli, if anybody gets in your way and you need a word from me to sort it out, let me know. Mr. Golden, good luck! I look forward to your report.”

  The words 'I look forward to your report' pushed a button deep in my soul labeled 'Panic', a leftover response from my years in the trenches. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw 'Deli' flinch. Falmer appeared not to notice, and gave us another dazzling smile. Then he left, and an awkward silence descended in his wake.

  I cleared my throat. I'd gotten off to a bad start with the one person whose help I would genuinely need, but it wasn't too late to start making amends[19].

  —[19] Excellent justification. I'm sure he'd have been just as solicitous if she'd been some grizzled neck-beard.—

  “Should I really call you 'Deli'?” I said. “I mean, I can if you want, but ...”

  She stared at me blankly for a moment, then chuckled. “Only Mr. Falmer calls me that. Well, him and a few of the boys from the second floor. He has a thing for food nicknames, I think.”

  “Can I ask your real name, then?”

  "It's Delphi," she said, pronouncing it 'del-fai'. She had a faint trace of a British accent, though I couldn't place it precisely. "Call me Del, if you like."

  "Much better. I'm John. I'm sorry if we got off on the wrong foot."

  "I'm sorry I snapped at you," she said, lifting her glasses with one hand and rubbing the heel of her palm into her eyes. "It's been a long couple of days, and this has been driving me crazy."

  "Believe me, I know how that goes."

  "Let me show you what we've got." She started to turn her monitor so I could see, but I held up a hand.

  “First Sarah needs a network account so she can poke around. She's logged on to your guest network, you should be able to see her.”

  “Sarah?”

  “My assistant.” I put my hand on the laptop bag slung over my shoulder. “Also my sister, it's sort of a family firm. She's remote.”

  Delphi nodded and switched her attention to her monitor for a moment. After a few clicks of the mouse, she frowned.

  “I see her logged in, but...”

  “Damn,” Sarah said in my ear. “I forgot to tell you, I can't spoof an outbound trail from here. Everything's locked up too tight[20].”

  —[20] In my defense, he should have known that already!—

  “She can't be remote,” Delphi said. “There's no traffic out to the net. But there's a lot of activity...” A few more taps, and she looked up at me, suspiciously. “Are you running some kind of network-mapper?”

  I try not to explain about Sarah if I can help it, not because it's a secret, exactly, but because people tend to be a bit weirded out.

  “In a way.” I gave a little sigh.

  Under the circumstances, though, there was nothing for it. I patted the laptop bag again. “This is Sarah.”

  “You mean it's some kind of expert system?”

  “No,” I said, patiently. “She's my little sister.”

  Delphi's eyes narrowed. I could see the wheels turning behind them, trying to decide what kind of lunatic she was dealing with.

  “Your…sister.”

  “There was an accident. I'd rather not go into the circumstances, though[21].

  —[21] I will. He lost my body in a poker game against a transvestite minotaur. On a pair of nines! You can get details on the whole sorry episode in John Golden and Portia's Solution, but let me just add here for the record that I feel I behaved with exemplary courage and levelheadedness through the whole affair.—

  The upshot was my sister's... soul[22], for lack of a better word, ended up transferred into an old Dell Inspiron[23].

  —[22] This is a matter for debate. As an atheist, I believe that I am merely a computer program that happens to convincingly simulate Sarah Golden. John always replies that for all he knows, the same could be true of everybody he meets, with an aside to the effect that some of them are not even particularly good simulations. I proposed several experiments that could resolve the issue, but he refuses to 'muck about with my insides', so the issue is still unresolved in spite of the potential for significant advances in philosophical thought.—

  —[23] Never inhabit an Inspiron 1720 if you can possibly avoid it. Something about the math co-processor makes everything smell like burning tin.—

  We've upgraded her a bit since then, of course.” I could see this was not convincing enough. It rarely is, except to other debuggers who've spent time in burrows and know the sort of weird things that can happen in there. “Go ahead and give her access, she'll tell you herself.”

  Keeping her eyes on me in case I made any sudden moves, Delphi typed a few commands. A moment later an incoming call popped up on her screen, and she answered it.

  “Hello, Delphi,” Sarah said, over the desktop's speakers. “It's nice to meet you.”

  Delphi blinked, looking from me to her screen and back. “Is this some kind of prank?”

  “If so, it's fooled me for four years,” I said.

  “John's got it more or less right,” Sarah said. “I've been stuck in here[24] for a while now.”

  —[24] To be honest, it has some real advantages. Example: for all you know, right now I could be running a simulation where my virtual body is massaged with scented oils by a trio of well-muscled young gladiators. I say things like “stuck in here” to make the meatbags feel better.—

  “I offered to buy you one of those little robots to ride in,” I said.

  “Those things fall over when they try to climb stairs,” Sarah sniffed. “You'll have to carry me until we get a little closer to Blade Runner.”

  “You're really...in there?” Delphi said, looking now at laptop bag. “Can she see me?”

  “Not at the moment,” I said. “I have a camera rig I wear if I need it.”

  “But that's...” Delphi sat back in her chair. “That's incredible!”

  I shrugged. “It's the sort of thing that happens when you go chasing down burrows. After a while, you get used to it.”

  ~

  Delphi excused herself for a moment to get us some coffee and find me a chair. While she was gone, I muttered to Sarah, “How does it look?”

  “It's a big system,” she said in my ear. “A proper analysis is going to take a while. But I can already tell you there's definitely a burrow here somewhere, and not a friendly one.”

  “Not a grazer[25], then?”

  —[25] A benign category of fairy that skims bandwidth and cycles for its own purposes but does no other damage.—

  “No such luck. I don't want to leap to conclusions, but I'm guessing it's some kind of gremlin[26]. There's too much damage for it to be accidental.”

  —[26] A less benign category of fairy that intentionally tries to wreck the system it inhabits.—

  “Wonderful.” It's always better to negotiate a critter out of its burrow if you can manage it, but that probably wasn't going to be an option if we were really dealing with gremlins. “Anything el
se?”

  “I'm still analyzing, but Delphi seems to be correct about the system boundaries. They're well-defended, and I'm not seeing any obvious breaches.”

  “Interesting.” At that point Delphi reappeared, so I muttered, “Keep looking,” and moved to help her with the chair. Once we were both seated and equipped with coffee, she turned the monitor in my direction and started calling up system performance graphs.

  “We think it started about three days ago,” she said. “But the day before yesterday is when the alarms started going off. See the falling effective-cycle rate? That night I did a system flush and started checking the direwalls. But when we brought everything back up...” She tapped the screen, where the green line representing the number of uncorrupted processor cycles began to drop precipitously. “Right about here we started getting more serious failures; data corruption, even some hardware problems. That's when I told the boss we had an emergency on our hands.”

  “Wait,” I said. “This was yesterday?”

  She nodded.

  “Then why did he wait until this morning to get in touch with me? You must have debuggers here in the city.”

  Delphi rolled her eyes. “First he tried shouting me down. Told me that it was impossible. I had to practically get down on my knees and beg before he'd look at the graphs, and then he accused me of screwing up the perimeter security somehow. It wasn't until last night that he realized something was seriously wrong and he couldn't get out of it by pointing fingers.”

  I frowned. Falmer was in the security business himself. Surely he would know that time was critical in this sort of situation?

  “So they've had at least three days to dig in,” I said. “And you haven't found anything at the perimeter?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and set her jaw. “I'm sure there wasn't a flaw. I set everything up myself.”

  “I can confirm that,” Sarah said through the desktop speakers. “The external security appears to be impeccable.”

  “Odd,” I said. “Very odd. I can think of two scenarios, and neither of them is positive. The first is that we're dealing with something capable enough to not only drill through your security, but to patch it up again behind them so perfectly that Sarah can't tell the difference.”

  “That's what I told Mr. Falmer was impossible,” Delphi said.

  “It's not impossible,” I said. “But I can't think of any entity outside the Court that could manage it, and if you had one of them in your system we'd know about it by now. So it would have to be something new.”

  “What's the other possibility?”

  “Somebody brought it into the building, physically, on a removable disk. Some species can bootstrap from an egg on something as small as a flash drive. I assume you don't allow that sort of thing?”

  Delphi nodded vigorously. No secure system administrator worth his caffeine drip would allow his people to attach media that had been exposed to the chaos of the Wildernet. It defeated the whole point of a security perimeter.

  “God damn it,” she muttered. “I bet it was one of those stupid hackers from upstairs, bring his porno collection to share with the boys...”

  “Unlikely,” Sarah said. “If the initial source of the infestation had been on a particular terminal, that terminal would be a core node. The burrow appears to be spread out across your backend.”

  “That's what I was afraid of.” I grimaced. “The only way that could happen would be if someone brought in an egg and purposely pushed it into your network. In other words, deliberate sabotage.”

  Delphi's cheeks had gone several shades paler with suppressed rage. “You mean someone did this to my system on purpose?”

  “We're not certain yet,” I said. “But it's possible. I'll know for sure once I get into the burrow.”

  “On that note,” Sarah said, “I have mapped enough of the infestation to secure a transfer point. You can go in whenever you're ready[27].”

  —[27] Yes, I mapped a faerie burrow in four quasi-dimensions across a ten-thousand-core network in a few minutes. Hold your applause.—

  ~

  A lot of people are uncomfortable with what we debuggers do. And no wonder, really. It's not something the human race has gotten a good handle on yet.

  I know people with the talent who spend all their time at CERN or FermiLab, helping the eggheads try to figure out exactly why it is some of us can twist ourselves out of the usual set of dimensions and into the weird virtual spaces where the faeries live.

  For that matter, no one knows why some people can do it and others can't. I've heard people say that we have extra structures in our brains, that we can achieve states of mind unavailable to normal people, that we're blessed by God or cursed by the Devil.

  My favorite theory is that the faeries themselves sometimes crossbreed with humans, and debuggers have a bit of fairy blood in their veins[28].

  —[28] This seems implausible, since as far as anyone can tell the debugging talent doesn't run in families. (I certainly didn't have it, even when I had a body.) Besides, only a very powerful fairy would be able to muster enough corporeality to...ah...'crossbreed' successfully.—

  So when the time comes to do my magic trick for a client, I'm never certain what kind of reception to expect. The most common reaction is to look the other way, leave me alone in the room as though I were doing something sordid.

  Some people are frightened of me, especially once I come back, and act like at any moment I would start throwing fireballs and turning people into frogs. A few, especially the Doubters[29] (once some higher-up finally forces them call in a professional) even get angry at me. I try not to take it personally.

  —[29] The 'Doubters' are a group who believes, or professes to believe, that fairies don't exist at all. As best I understand their admittedly convoluted ideology, a vast conspiracy of debuggers, IT professionals, and software companies have foisted this enormous fiction on the world, at tremendous expense, to facilitate the creation of a New World Order. Ironically, their sub-culture flourishes in the darker corners of the Wildernet, and some fairies amuse themselves by joining their message boards and adding new wrinkles to the mythology.—

  Thankfully, Delphi turned out to be from the somewhat smaller group who finds what I do fascinating. In spite of her obvious exhaustion, she turned down my offer to go home and get some sleep, and insisted on accompanying me to the machine room.

  “There really isn't anything to see,” I said. “No twinkly lights or anything.”

  “But you're going inside my computers?”

  She unlocked the door and opened it, and dry, cold air slammed me in the face. Racks of machines ran from wall to wall in neat ranks into the middle distance, with the mighty steel louvers of the air-conditioners aimed right into their guts. The lights were out, but there was a soft glow from thousands of tiny, eldritch blinkenlights that twinkled like grounded stars.

  “I'm not going inside them,” I said, suppressing a groan. I have this conversation, on average, once a week. “I'm going to twist myself into the fairy burrow.”

  “Which is inside the computers.”

  “It's not physically inside them. It's a metaphor built out of stolen cycles and bandwidth. It's not like I shrink down and climb into the air intake.”

  “But what would happen,” she said, a mischievous twinkle in her tired eyes, “if I started messing with them while you were in there? Will there be a JohnGolden.exe file in some directory? What would happen if I started to erase the drives?”

  “Please don't,” I said.

  “Could I really erase you?”

  “No. I told you, it doesn't work that way[30]. But if the faeries think you're trying to attack them, they could get riled up.”

  —[30] Though it's not clear what would happen if the entire network lost power while he was inside. I think he'd just get popped back out into real space. Probably. But I'm not eager to put it to the test.—

  “All right, all right. So is there anything I can do
from here?”

  “Not really. Here.” I pulled off my headset and handed it to her. “Sarah can keep you up to date.”

  “Won't you need it?”

  “Not in there. She's got access to the system, she can talk to me directly.”

  “I am all-seeing and all-knowing,” Sarah boomed from the little headset, followed by a giggle[31].

  —[31] I have a weakness for melodrama. So sue me.—

  “Enough of that.” I glanced at the stickers on the front of each rack unit that carried its name and details—Delphi ran a very organized shop—until I found the one Sarah had directed me to. “SS-corp-049, right?”

  “Right,” Sarah said, from Delphi's hands.

  “Then here we go.”

  I touched the machine—not strictly necessary, but it helps focus my attention—and did my thing. It's pointless to try and describe it. I would tell you to imagine being able to walk in a new direction, not up/down or left/right or forward/back but away along some fourth axis poking awkwardly out from between the traditional three. Except you can't imagine that, and anyway that's not what it's like at all[32].

  —[32] Masterful. That's deathless prose, right there.—

  I feel like if you really could picture it, then you'd be able to do it, and I wouldn't have to explain anything.

  There's always a moment of searching, like when an idle hard drive spins up and the whole computer waits for it to shake its groggy head and figure out what's going on. Then there's this indescribable twist, and then I'm standing in the burrow. Like I told Delphi, no twinkly lights. If she were watching, she would see me disappear between one blink and another, like a character in a badly edited film.

  This time, I opened my eyes and found that it didn't make much difference. There was a faint hint of gray, greasy light coming from somewhere, but not enough to do more than make out the vague, tangled shadows of strange-looking shapes all around me.

  “Sarah?” I said.

  “Ready and waiting.” Her voice came out of thin air beside my head.

  “A little light, if you please.”