The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  Holy shit, Jared said. The students murmured.

  What? Justin said.

  A dog barked in the room.

  Justin opened his eyes and Duke was running around sniffing everybody out. He went to the horse and raised his leg.

  I didn’t begin building it! Justin said. Everyone was silent.

  Dude. You did.

  A timer was overhead to keep each student to thirty minutes. It had taken Justin 0.02 seconds. Two one-hundredths of a second. More people popped into the room. Within seconds, all the seats were filled.

  Gotta be a hack.

  Never seen that.

  Why the fuck did you call me here?

  Dude sweated the program, the whole place vibrated.

  Jared stood up and gestured for everyone to quiet down.

  Do something else, Jared said.

  What?

  Atomically perfect gold.

  Without thinking about it, a plate of gold appeared six inches above the workspace and slammed down: 0.0001 seconds.

  NO WAY! everyone howled.

  Have him hack into something, a ninja said.

  Shut up. We don’t do that, Jared said. He sounded distant, thinking.

  It was a fluke.

  He couldn’t.

  If he can’t then what’s the big deal? They push away Sleepers all the time.

  Have him hack into MindCorp; that’d be hilarious.

  Yeah, hack into that.

  I got through two portals before they booted me.

  I got through your mom’s portholes before she blew me.

  The ninja and an alien with suckers for hands came to blows at the top of the seats.

  Come on, Jared. Let him.

  Jared, don’t be a pussy.

  -Jared- -Jared- -Jared- -Jared—a thousand ‘Jareds.’

  Fine, fuck! Shut up everyone. Justin, do you want to try and hack into MindCorp?

  I don’t know how, Justin said.

  You didn’t know how to make a dog but it’s pissing on everything anyway. It isn’t a big deal, just bragging rights. MindCorp doesn’t take the hacks seriously. Hell, they used to hold contests to test their security.

  Okay.

  The room rebooted. The ninja and the alien warrior weren’t allowed back in.

  The whiteboard had vanished. In its place, like the rings of Saturn, were a billion tiny reflections that orbited around a dark, iron orb

  All those glitters are programs, Justin, Jared said. That orb at the center? MindCorp.

  This is cyberspace?

  Yes, sir. Cool, eh? She built it like space, three-dimensional and all. But here, MindCorp IS the center of the universe.

  Justin closed his eyes again. He saw: MINDCORP LOGIN V112.43. ADMIN.US.DN.1Col.IP72.243.993.42.42:7908

  Holy shit. He’s going at a Colossal, someone murmured. Then Justin heard no more. He felt the code wash over him, he could feel the firewalls try to misdirect him and his mind turned blacker than the night, blacker than the deepest void in space. And he could feel the program. The numbers became atoms. The code, living cells. As he barreled through security protocol after security protocol, hammering them with passwords, multi-threading, contacting employees as a peer to coerce information, multi-threading, discovering the root of the program and tearing it apart from the foundation up. Through these things that had never been done before, he finally felt alive. His mind unfurled like a solar flare and in this world, he finally felt complete.

  = = =

  Cynthia was in a meeting with Helene Rossia, the President of their Israeli Division, when the lights flickered and the room trembled. They steadied themselves.

  “Whoa, what was that?” Helene asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Cynthia replied. She’d check after the meeting. They were discussing new security protocols and network redundancies MindCorp was implementing globally. They looked at a large map of the Middle East on a projector.

  “If we spider-web the network . . .” Cynthia began. Suddenly the room jumped. Helene and Cynthia flew from their seats. The entire space slammed up and down like it was on a pogo stick. A seam formed across one of the walls and bright, purple light bleached through.

  “What the hell is going on?” Helene yelled. They were getting tossed around like dice, slamming into chairs and walls, hitting the ceiling and then—as if the room was spinning—catapulting into the opposite wall. The seam opened wider and on a bad bounce, Helene vanished into the purple light, screaming as she went.

  Cynthia ripped the Mindlink off her head. An emergency light flashed above her. The Core. In her ten years, she had never seen that light turn on. Sabot burst into the room. He didn’t say anything. Cynthia jumped up and they ran to the elevator.

  MindCorp was one hundred and fifty stories tall. They rode two hundred stories down. Beneath MindCorp Headquarters was one of two Colossal Cores in the region. Because of the support structure needed for the huge glass Data Core cylinders, it was much easier to build down than up.

  It was immediately clear that something was wrong. A properly operating Data Core looked like a giant blue fluorescent tube. A thick blue arc of data light connected the fiber lines at the top with those at the bottom. But now the Core flickered and popped, booming with thunder.

  “What the hell!” Cynthia said.

  They got to the ground and as they did, the Data Core began to spin and pulse. The blue went to black and then snapped back to blue, like a kid was flicking a light switch off and on.

  The ground floor was chaos. Spinning red lights flashed around the perimeter of the Core. A shrill alarm filled the air. The Sleepers that surrounded the Core were still out, but they rocked back-and-forth in seizures. A dozen technicians scrambled between them like medics on a battlefield, checking vital signs, throwing Mindlinks on to see what was causing the Sleepers to frenzy in their slumber. Cynthia grabbed Jim Schmidt, the scientist in charge.

  “What’s going on?” she yelled over the alarm. She saw two Sleepers shake themselves loose of their harness and belly flop to the ground.

  “Something huge is altering the data path of the Core,” he said. He had a Mindlink on.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something online is out cycling our processors, it’s dragging portals out of their orbits.” Jim handed the Mindlink over to Cynthia.

  “We’re being hacked?”

  “No . . . yes . . .” he shook his head, he couldn’t grasp it. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s ignoring the operating system of the Core. It just hit.”

  “Limit bandwidth to fifty megabytes,” she said. She didn’t want to have a seizure because of whatever was out there. Jim hit the keyboard and gave thumbs up.

  She put on the utility Mindlink. Consumer Mindlinks were designed to allow access to the various programs in cyberspace. Sleepers used utility Mindlinks to maintenance the network, portals and programs, and the space in between.

  While Cynthia had built the cyberspace construct to behave like space, in her universe even the voids held data. This allowed a Sleeper to move from portal to portal effortlessly (as well as through the portal’s subset of programs) and to know their position in relation to any portal or program in the system. It also allowed them to see the data paths of the users online. There was no anonymity in cyberspace. Every user had a digital ‘tail,’ a distinct path that anchored them to their true physical location. Sleepers could trace this tail and find the user’s origin. They could, if given permission, go in and read that user’s thoughts.

  What Cynthia saw staggered her mind. Jim had placed her just outside the anomaly’s effect. The millions of portals normally spun in harmony on a three plane axis—x, y and z—orbiting the gravity core. While the majority of the portals—they looked like mirrors floating in space—were operational and followed their orbital path, one quadrant did not. In it, thousands of portals ignored the gravity core and churned on an entirely different axis like dirt circling a drain. They spun haphazardly, smashing i
nto each and spinning off. As Cynthia drew closer, she couldn’t believe what she saw.

  A mist surrounded the rogue portals and Cynthia new what that mist was, even if she had never seen it on that scale. It was a mindscape—a visual manifestation of a person’s influence in cyberspace. Sleepers had mindscapes; that was how they programmed. There was no physical connectedness in cyberspace. Hands and feet were programmed assimilations. It was the mind versus code all the time. The mindscape was how the two related.

  But this . . . this . . . it was like God decided to try his hand at it.

  “What could do this?” Cynthia whispered. “Jim, can you trace this? It’s not native, it’s coming from somewhere.”

  “I’ll get Sleepers from a different Core to trace it. I need to pull ours offline.”

  “Do it.”

  Could it be terrorists? she wondered. Impossible. What she saw before her shouldn’t be. The freedom afforded to MindCorp Sleepers was an illusion. Her online universe had been created with exacting, unbreakable rules. Yet those rules were being broken right in front of her. Someone had introduced chaos into a binary system of order. How? How?

  Cynthia bumped her bandwidth up to two hundred megabytes, enough to move around, and her sense of the physical world vanished. She was now in the void, looking down on the mirror-riddled cyclone. She flew toward it.

  Cynthia, we have Sleepers from surrounding Cores zeroing in on the anomaly, she heard Jim say. She could see them. For some reason, a Sleeper in cyberspace resembled a sperm with dozens of long tails that waggled and moved in all directions. It wasn’t disgusting. It was almost angelic. She saw thousands of them drifting toward the turbine mess.

  There is a gravitational center, Cynthia, Jim said. The portals that look in disarray are not, they are breaking the laws of cyberspace, but they are breaking them with order.

  A giant mindscape, Cynthia projected. In the control room where Sabot, Jim, and now a vacant-eyed Cynthia sat, her voice came over a loudspeaker.

  Correct, Jim replied.

  What is happening to the portals? Can any Sleeper go in? Are they being manipulated? Cynthia asked.

  Hold . . . Jim said. They are shut down. No occupants are in them at all.

  An odd thing to envision, Cynthia thought. A portal could house programs that held tens of millions of people in them. It could be New York City; it could be a sports arena or a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. It could be a corporation’s virtual location. But in the anomaly they were all empty. Not one soul was in them. So whatever had caused this had intentionally or unintentionally booted people out.

  I want to see what the fuss is about, Cynthia said.

  Cynthia moved at the equivalent of light speed. The velocity combined with the sheer silence still amazed her. The gravitational center grew in her field of view.

  A portal is the gravitational center.

  She was in the mindscape and she didn’t know if that would have any effect on her. It hung in space like a green poisonous cloud, covering all the portals in a mini milky way.

  Are you getting this? Cynthia said to Jim. She watched as the mindscape poured out of the portal.

  It’s a shareware program. A flight simulator, Jim said in disbelief.

  Do you have the tail?

  We have the region, not the tail. We can’t get inside the program.

  Suddenly the mindscape vanished. The portals that had been pulled out of orbit fell back toward the beltway, slowly re-orientating to their programmed location in the construct.

  It’s gone, Cynthia said. You got the region? China?

  giant mirrors the size of states flew past her, finding their place.

  DeKalb, Illinois.

  That can’t be. That’s a farm com-

  The universe started to pull apart. Cynthia’s body stretched wide. Her round form thinned to a sheet of paper. Her face contorted in excruciating pain. The Sleepers around her became sunspots in her vision before vanishing. She turned her gaze and from another portal a million miles away, a mindscape had connected to the MindCorp gravity core like a parasite. Its tentacled reach vibrated and shook with energy.

  We’re shutting down the Core! Jim said.

  One more second.

  It’s hacking through our firewalls.

  We have to find it.

  It is at the root program.

  That’s impossible.

  She went dark.

  = = =

  Cynthia called WarDon. He was in Washington and directed her to Evan. Ten minutes later, she and Sabot were in his office. After Cynthia’s recap of the events at the Colossal Core, Evan’s own thoughts drowned out her babbling. The possibilities that this ‘anomaly’ presented were astounding to his future plans.

  “But not terrorist?” Lindo asked absently.

  “I don’t know. Our data shows that both tails came from DeKalb, Illinois, a farm town. The population is in the hundreds and their data feed is three hundred megabytes up/down per home.”

  Lindo waited. He liked seeing Cynthia unraveled. He could use that.

  She continued. “It doesn’t sound like much, but to take over that section of cyberspace—roughly 0.0025%—would take a million terabytes of constant data programming and pushing, maybe more. I don’t know. We’re still crunching numbers.”

  “So it’s impossible that it came from DeKalb,” Lindo said.

  “Improbable, not impossible,” Cynthia corrected.

  “Why do you say that? You just told me that it couldn’t be done.” Lindo was intrigued.

  “If it was AI or some kind of software, it could push more bandwidth by first planting a codec in cyberspace and then compressing data at the tail. It’s theoretical, but there’s no reason that it couldn’t be done. But if that were the case it would be a simple program, more of a cancer: no purpose, just growing,” Cynthia said.

  “Which doesn’t explain the hack.”

  “Exactly.” Cynthia confused was more rare than moon rock. “We’re trying to piece it together. We know the hack came from an education portal.”

  “That had the login address to your Colossal,” Evan baited.

  “That was public information,” she replied.

  “Might want to pull that off-line now.”

  Cynthia gave a short, frustrated laugh.

  “So what do you need, Cynthia?” Evan liked those words. They tasted better than steak.

  “This could be the first attempt at cyber-terrorism. That’s your jurisdiction isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Evan and Cynthia looked at one another for a moment. Evan broke the gaze and shuffled papers around his desk.

  “I assume we’ll have full access to the data reports on this, full access to anyone we need to interview?” he asked.

  “Per my approval, but yes.”

  “I’ll speak to Donald and we’ll investigate ASAP.”

  Cynthia got up and she and Sabot headed toward the door.

  “Question,” Lindo said. Cynthia turned. “This compression algorithm, this ‘push’ as you call it, that amplifies a mindscape. Do you know exactly how they did it?”

  “Not yet, but we will.”

  “I’d like to know when you do,” Lindo said.

  Cynthia smiled and walked out the door.

  = = =

  Later that day, Evan briefed WarDon on his meeting with Cynthia.

  “I’m glad they came to us,” WarDon said.

  “They really had no choice. It’s not like they can go investigate on their own.”

  “They’ll keep it discreet?” WarDon asked.

  “Yes, definitely.”

  “Good, this is the last thing we need to freak out the public. Cyberspace is supposed to be safe. It’d fuck everything up, even for us.” WarDon thought about their collusion with MindCorp against their Coalition allies. “We’re going to keep this off the books. You’re in charge and report to me as you see fit, but keep it analog. I’m assigning you the best soldier I�
�ve ever seen. He’ll report at 0600 tomorrow. I’ll brief him on the need for total discretion. He’s young. A lot like you, actually. A prodigy. Don’t let the accent fool you or the lazy way he looks around the room. He’s a pit bull.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Evan hung up the phone and reclined in his chair. The hum of the server bays soothed him and while the lack of windows would make anyone else claustrophobic, they allowed Evan to forget about a world that he felt no longer mattered.

  “Dim,” he said, and the overhead lights dimmed to flickering candles. He closed his eyes and built his future in his head.

  His favorite quote was by Louis Pasteur, “Luck Favors the Prepared.” To Evan, life was preparation. It was the most important thing. It took chance and made it your ally. Preparation allowed him to direct conversations and manipulate other people’s will.

  He crumpled up the note he referenced while talking to WarDon. It had nothing to do with the anomaly at MindCorp. It had to do with pushing WarDon’s buttons to get what Evan desired. In his cryptic scrawl the note read:

  Goal: Autonomy. Go-ahead to investigate on my terms.

  Key Points (WarDon)

  -Focus on national security. Focus on our current investigation of Coalition. This jeopardizes it.

  -Cynthia’s concern. Out of their hands. Need us.

  -Discretion. No one should know.

  At the bottom of the note:

  -Doesn’t know the implications of the anomaly!! Play on fear, NOT benefit.

  With his eyes still closed, he stood up and walked out of his office and into the field of servers. He held his hands out like antennae. He felt their vibrations. Even though he wasn’t connected, he could feel cyberspace. He could feel the nations interconnected by fiber veins that pulsed light instead of blood. If the anomaly was what he thought it was, his plans could come together quickly. If not, well, it was just another bump in the road. Quitters never win.

  Mike Glass reported to Evan the next morning right at 6:00 a.m. He was twenty-three, Kentucky born and bred. Six foot, a buck ninety, unshaven, he had long, sandy blonde hair, a bit greasy, that made him look like a front man to a bad rock group. But Evan saw what WarDon had warned: his eyes held no emotion in them. He watched Evan like a crocodile watched a baby gazelle drinking from the shore.