Code Breakers: Alpha

by Colin F. Barnes

  “She’s been busy,” Gabe said, staring at the old CRT monitor inside his cubicle opposite Gerry.

  “Poor girl got penetrated,” Petal said.

  “Does it have control of her?” Gerry asked.

  “Not yet. That’s the good news. Bad news is the demon’s got its claws into her.”

  “The algorithm? Does it have full access?”

  “I can’t see that far in,” Gabe said. “Petal, what can ya see?”

  “The demon is using Mike’s AIA to interface with yours, Gerry. It’s screwing by proxy. Did you bridge your systems for some reason?”

  Gerry thought back. “Damn it. Yes. Last week. We were experimenting with a new internode protocol. It was done entirely off the network, though. Nothing could have…” Then he thought of Jasper again. He’d started work just a day before.

  “How can we stop it?”

  Silence.

  All three sat in the darkened room, strapped into the chairs, heads jacked into the local network. Their bodies acted as nothing more than servers and routers. Humanity was in short supply.

  “Guys, just tell me. I doubt I’ve got long if it’s screwing with the algorithm.”

  “You’ve got kids, right?” Gabe asked.

  “Yeah, two girls.”

  “A wife?” Petal asked.

  “A wife, yes.”

  “If you want to see them again, you need to open your AIA ports to the demon. Let it in entirely.”

  Gerry wanted to turn and stare at the girl, to give her his best ‘are you mentally ill?’ look, but the restraints held.

  Gabe spoke up and broke the harsh silence. “Once we have it in your AIA, we can trap it ’ere in our protection room.”

  “And how do I do that?” Gerry asked.

  “Hang on. I’m sniffing it and will tell you the port numbers to open up. It’ll jump in quicker than a hobo at a free food store.”

  Pulses of information threatened to fry Gerry’s brain as Petal let down some of the walls of protection. The demon’s digital tentacles were all over Mags, searching for entry. Her subroutines launched into action but were instantly uninstalled by the demon. This made Gerry’s head twitch as if he were having a fit. His eyes fluttered in a frenzied motion. He wanted to call out, tell her to stop, but then he heard Petal’s voice over the communicator.

  “Eighty-oh-one. Thirty-three-zero. Seventy-oh-eight-seven.”

  Gerry heard a harsh feedback screech through his communicator, followed by the bizarrely calm voice of Gabe. “Good work, Petal. Punch those numbers, man. Let the beast in, and I’ll do the rest.”

  Gerry’s hands thrashed uncontrollably against the arm rests. Jolts of pain mixed with overwhelming feelings of doom crashed through his system. He’d never experienced evil until this point. That thought caught him off-guard. Was it evil? It was just code, just another artificial-intelligence programme. Surely evil couldn’t be programmed…?

  Ignoring this random thought process, he transferred the instructions to Mags to open the specified ports. It was easier than expected. No resistance, no warnings.

  Petal was right. The demon was quick. The nanosecond the ports opened, that black mass entered Mags like an eager teenager beginning their first sexual experience.

  There was no struggle, no last dump of security subroutines. It was quite the anticlimax. Gerry had expected something more explosive. Mags remained silent, running its various processes as normal: no reports, no alarms, no execution of disaster protocols or breach of defence systems.

  “Did it work?” Gerry asked between panting breaths.

  There was a long silence. Gerry could feel the tension in the room. Petal was unusually quiet. Gabe was busy at work, he knew that much. He could see in his mind the flow of traffic increase exponentially from Gabe’s terminal to his AIA.

  After five minutes of furious typing, grunts and expletives. Gabe finally spoke. “It’s done.”

  “Now what?” Gerry asked.

  “I exorcise it. Ya need to get off the grid, though. Uninstall Mags completely.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Possibly, yeah, but trust me on this one.”

  “But if I uninstall her, I’ll—”

  “Be a free man? Absolutely. It’s that or death—for you and for anyone else connected with you.”

  “My whole life will be over. I’ll be a criminal, a rogue. My whole existence, and my family’s, is on the grid. I can’t do that. I’ll be—”

  “Just like us,” Petal said.

  Mags communicated to him, “Thank you for your sacrifice, Gerry. You have just one day left. Please inform the Council of your funeral arrangements.”

  “It’s changed ya internal clock, man. The algorithm’s next. Think about ya contact list. Everyone on that list could have their numbers up. Ya family, friends, colleagues. Is it worth it?”

  Gerry considered Gabe’s words while trying to ignore that he potentially had just one day left to live. Going off the grid was almost as bad as dying. He would lose the ability to work, to support his family. He’d be an outlaw.

  He would have to leave his family behind. His entire life as he knew it would be over. The alternative was either death or this demon taking entire sections of society off the exemption list. Too much to risk. How could he willingly allow that to happen? His city, the only place he’d ever known, was precious. It was a virtual utopia—for good or bad—and he couldn’t just idly watch its destruction, regardless of the downsides.

  Not much of a choice, though: his own life and an end to his suffering, or possibly an entire city’s stability. As difficult as it was, he realised in truth it was an easy decision when he thought about it: he couldn’t let the whole city down. Sure, the place had problems. The Family were maniacal with their control, but people still had good lives, safe lives.

  The image of his daughters and wife conjured in his mind. He couldn’t let them suffer if he had the choice to stop it. Picturing them that morning around the breakfast table, he ignored the pain that stabbed at his heart and made the decision. He logged in at super-root level, meaning he could access the parts of his AIA that controlled how it worked at a fundamental level. It wasn’t something anyone could do.

  He’d realised he had this ability while testing potential exploits at Cemprom. During the experimentation, he’d created a secret login procedure to his AIA, mostly out of curiosity. Like everyone in the city, he had no desire to leave the network. But this time he had a damned good reason.

  Once logged in, he activated a piece of code that, as far as he knew, no one had executed before. He was just a few seconds away from living without the essential life support of the network.

  Gerry closed his eyes, squeezed in the tears. Hesitated.

  “Do it, man, do it now!” Gabe said.

  “Let her go, Gez,” Petal added. “Let her fly.”

  He could feel the colossal blackness manipulating Mags, trying to log him out. Trying to prevent him from entering the fatal code. But he was at the base. Nothing could stand in the way of his release, the cease of support, the release of society, of being one of many.

  Using his mind-interface, he moved a cursor over a representation of a door with ‘EXIT’ marked on its surface. All he had to do was open the door and walk his avatar out. The AIA would be uninstalled. The demon would no longer be in charge of his destiny. Mags would be free to exist in her limited silicon shell. Without a human to assist, he wondered what she would do. Just how much independent thought did they have?

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on the interface. The door remained closed. It shrank and moved to the right of his view. A grid of thumbnail images of his family replaced it, and he scrolled through each one. He attempted to burn their happy, smiling faces into his brain. He would no longer be able to carry them with him once Mags was gone.

  He cried uncontrollably.

  Tears flowed down his face like small pebbles down a hill. Each image blinked out of view. The demon.
It was wiping the photographs—his memories!

  He reached out and gripped the handle of the symbolic door and pushed it open. Bright light flooded into his interface, and a cautionary paragraph of text hovered into view. It was the usual stuff: This process is not reversible… are you sure you wish to delete… criminal offence punishable by death…

  He mentally marked the agreement checkbox and clicked OK. Nothing would ever be okay again. Never seeing his family was not okay. Never working at Cemprom with his now dead buddy Mike was not okay.

  And then he was cut loose. Just a regular human again—whatever that meant.

  He held his breath, expecting something different, expecting to somehow feel strange, as though his previous life was lived vicariously through his AIA. But he was the same old Gerry.

  Then it hit him like a hammer: he could never return home. That’s what felt different: the detachment. A wave of loneliness coursed through him like a strong wind whipping through his clothes. He felt nauseous again and wanted to sleep, to dream, to pretend none of it happened.

  But the breathing, corporeal bodies of Gabe and Petal sitting next to him in their individual cubicles reminded him that he could dream all he wanted. He would never be the same again.

  Chapter 4

  Gabriel spun round in his chair. “Good job, man. We’ll do our bit next. Just relax for a bit, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Relax. I’ll crack a cold beer while I’m at it.” They weren’t listening. Gabe and Petal were chattering away about stuff Gerry had never heard of before. He just watched, fascinated, as they blended these old tools with current-day technology like modern-day alchemists.

  “Demon’s big,” Petal said.

  “I’m containing it now. Ya ready for download?” Gabe asked the girl, swirling round in his chair. The multitude of snakes plugged into his brain wrapped and tangled behind him.

  “Yeah, give it to me.”

  Petal typed furiously at a beige, retro QWERTY keyboard, and her screen monitor flashed with lines of computer code. It was real old. Gerry remembered something about that language in his college days. It was antiquated then, but now it was positively dead. Very low level, almost chip level, which was unheard of now. Outdated symbols: hashes, colons, dashes, dollar signs, and various brackets filled lines on the screen.

  Petal’s head thrashed side to side, and she stopped typing. Her goggles turned blood red. She screamed a piercing note of extreme agony.

  Gerry leapt out of his chair towards her, but the cables attached to his neck halted his movement with a crack. He crumpled to the floor.

  “Leave her, man. She’s containing it,” Gabe said from across the room.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Exorcising the AI.”

  Gerry turned to look at Gabe’s screen, expecting the same code, but instead he saw proper words, old words. He managed to read just a few before Petal screamed and thrashed violently again.

  From his limited knowledge of religion—he only had a part of an antique bible, which belonged to his mother—it seemed like a sermon of sorts. Gabe was actually typing biblical commands to the demon, a piece of code, albeit an artificially intelligent piece of code. That idea raised its head again: had someone coded evil?

  Minutes of frantic typing from Gabe and screaming from Petal stretched Gerry’s nerves to the snapping point. Sweat dripped from Gabe’s face as he hunched over the keyboard, banging out word after word after word. The screams reached a crescendo and finally died. Gabe collapsed into his chair, wiped the sweat from his brow, and turned to Gerry.

  “It’s done.” Gabe pulled the cables from the sockets in his head and rushed over to Petal, who slouched low in her chair.

  Gerry unwound himself from the snake nest of cables and moved quickly to the chair. He and Gabe stood either side and looked down at the fragile thing that was once the full-of-bravado Petal.

  Her goggles were opaque again, and blood dripped from her lip.

  Gerry moved his hand to her pale neck to check for a pulse. Her chest was still; she resembled a corpse.

  A delicate hand reached out, weak fingers encircled his wrist.

  “Don’t,” Petal said, her voice cracking.

  The tip of her tongue escaped the tight aperture of her purple lips and licked at the blood before darting back in.

  “This one’s salty,” she said quietly, her breath shallow. “Like pretzels.”

  “Pretzels?” asked Gerry.

  Petal turned her face to Gerry and pulled the goggles off her face. Her eyes were no longer the shiny black orbs from before. Gerry was silent. Fixated. Her eyes glowed scarlet, like LEDs. He couldn’t even make out her pupils. Something swirled inside.

  “Beautiful, ain’t they?” Gabe said.

  “What are you?”

  “I can do some strange things. My eyes are like this because it’s the manifestation of the things I contain. You’ll get used to it, eventually. The effects aren’t always the same. It’s pretty cool, right?”

  “You’re containing the demon code inside you? Isn’t that—”

  “Look, we ain’t got much time. We need to leave town and dispose of it,” Gabe said.

  “How do you do this? Is it some kind of new tech, or…”

  “Petal’s special,” Gabe said. “She’s disconnected from City Earth’s grid like me and, of course, you now, but she’s her own special kind of ring-fenced network. Ain’t that right, girl?”

  “Yeah, I ain’t the same kind of hacker like Gabe here. I’m impervious to data. I can kinda block code demons, bad AIs, and viruses inside me, like a secure safe house for bad code. But when I get full, like now, I need to dump ’em somewhere safe. And we need your help.”

  “What do you need?”

  “To get out of the city,” Gabe said.

  Gerry choked on spit and wanted to laugh. “Are you both completely insane? No one gets out of the city. There’s nothing out there!”

  “Oh, Gez.” Petal patted him on his head. “You’ve got so much to learn. Don’t worry, though. You’ll pick it up as we go along.”

  “Pick what up?”

  “You’re one of us now. You’re gonna work with us. And you kinda owe us for saving your life.”

  “Yeah, but, what—”

  Petal stood up and disconnected her cables. She pulled her goggles back down.

  She leant into his ear, real close. He could smell something sweet on her breath: a perfume of sorts. Her lips brushed his ear as she spoke. “You’re a Techxorcist now, Gez. You’re gonna help us track and contain our next target.”

  “What target?”

  Gabe turned to face Gerry.

  “A particularly nasty AI that’s gunning for President Kuznetski. It’s already breached City Earth’s outer network. It’ll get to him in a matter of days. It came on the coattails of yours. It’s much more complex, though. Real evil. But first we need to empty Petal’s internal storage. We leave in five minutes.”

  “What does this other AI want? Who’s behind it?”

  “That’s what we’re gonna find out, man. We’ve stuck a trace on it for now.”

  “Shouldn’t we just alert City security? At least let me get in touch with Cemprom. Tell them what happened to Mike. They’ve got good hackers there. They can—”

  Gabe shook his head. “Nothing goes in or out, ya hear? I suspect it’s an inside job. We can’t risk it. We’ll nuke it before it gets to him, and then we’ll see what’s what.”

  President Miralam Kuznetski, a grandson of a Croatian diplomat, was one of the first proper immigrants to the City. The Family brought him in due to his heritage and his father’s support of the Family during World War III. Although he portrayed himself as an independent leader, guiding the City Earth Council for the benefit of the citizens, he’d often tried to dictate the direction of Cemprom’s research.

  Although Gerry didn’t trust him, he was still the appointed helmsman of the City, and stability was important. If he was taken out, a
ffected by the AI, the ramifications could run through every department of the City.

  ***

  Gerry sat alone in the drawing room, his head swirling with confusion. It was all moving so fast. He thought about his family. No doubt they would find out soon enough about his numbers and go through the formalities of a ceremony. There’d be no burial without a body.

  He would have to get word to them soon, somehow. But even that would jeopardise their safety. The Family didn’t like loose ends and would interrogate them to find his whereabouts. It would be much better if they didn’t know the truth or have any trail that could lead to him, which, of course, meant entire network silence. He’d have to do it by proxy somehow.

  “You’re gonna need this.” Gabe dropped an aged leather duffel bag at his feet.

  The top fell open, and Gerry pulled out the contents: two books, a vial of NanoStems, and a polished brass and mahogany box.

  “This was my old man’s. I don’t use it no more.” Gabe motioned to the box.

  Gerry opened the lid and gasped at its contents.

  “A pistol? How did you—”

  “No time for more chatter. Just take the gun, and read the books on the way.”

  Petal arrived in the doorway between the drawing room and kitchen. “Nice, ain’t it? Ammo’s in the bag.”

  “Lighter than I thought it would be.” Gerry lifted the gun, feeling its weight in his hand.

  “You know Helix++?” she asked.

  “I’m familiar with it.” Gerry lifted up the heavy paper tome titled Programming Exploits and Malicious Algorithms with Helix++.

  “Transport’s on its way. Let’s get out of Dodge. Security detail’s tracked our general location. They’re like a swarm of angry wasps. Won’t be long before they find this place. Besides, I’ve only got a couple of hours.”

  “Until what?” Gerry asked.

  “To get rid of the demon. It’s a big’un, and it’s already passed my internal security. It’ll be out in a few hours if we don’t dump it.”