Overclocked

by K S Augustin

  “To­gether?” she frowned. “We never at­ten­ded a con­fer­ence to­gether.”

  It fi­nally dawned on her that, rather than be­ing am­ne­siac, Carl was test­ing her. The im­age of the rab­bit sprang to mind. If someone could cre­ate an avatar based on a fic­tional char­ac­ter, she real­ised, it was en­tirely pos­sible that someone else could cre­ate one based on her.

  “Carl, it’s me,” she said, think­ing quickly. “Your body is in the in­ner core of Base­ment Five, in one of the in­ser­tion rooms, over­looked by the ob­ser­va­tion sec­tion. There’s an­other, identical room next to it. That’s where my body is.”

  The bar­rel wavered and Tania had time to see the per­son be­hind it. Her eyes widened.

  Carl! But...not Carl.

  “You reach the in­ner core through an­other layer of se­cur­ity,” she con­tin­ued. “The walls are made of brushed metal that al­ways made me think I was in­side a caterer’s re­fri­ger­ator.”

  She had made that same com­ment to him over din­ner one night – their first din­ner to­gether. Would he re­mem­ber? Her state­ment was as much a test for him as it was for her.

  He lowered the weapon and slid it into a hol­ster at his hip.

  “A res­taur­ant re­fri­ger­ator,” he said.

  She let out a long slow breath of re­lief.

  “You sure as hell took your time get­ting here.” His voice was bit­ter. “Why did Base­ment Five shut down its serv­ers for so long? Is that a tether on your belt? Is it work­ing?”

  Tania had been ex­pect­ing sev­eral re­ac­tions but not the hos­til­ity that was beat­ing at her. She blinked in con­fu­sion.

  “I came as fast as I could,” she said. “Yes, that’s a tether. And yes, it’s work­ing. It’s our way home.”

  “Home?” He snorted. “There’s no way I’m go­ing home, darlin’, not while the Thing is out there.”

  This was worse than be­ing in the Blue. What was Carl talk­ing about? What was the “thing” he re­ferred to? Was he de­lu­sional? And why did he look so...old?

  Her eyes nar­rowed, Tania took in Carl’s ap­pear­ance as he paced away from her, mut­ter­ing un­der his breath.

  Yes, this was Carl Orin, but not the man she re­cog­nised from their time to­gether. His hair, once a rich blond, was now much lighter, the pale gold strands over­whelmed with pure sil­ver. The col­our dus­ted the short side­burns next to his ears. There were wrinkles fan­ning out from his corn­flower-blue eyes, etched be­side his firm lips. His cheeks were more sunken than she re­membered, throw­ing his cheekbones into sharper re­lief. Be­neath the one-piece suit that he still wore, his body looked firm but thicker. In short, he looked like he’d aged twenty years.

  “Did Don send you?” he asked, from the other side of the room. Between them was a lab set-up that re­sembled the ob­ser­va­tion room of Base­ment Five’s in­ner core.

  Tania looked at the equip­ment then over to the man who had been her lover.

  “Yes.”

  Hums, from the rows of mon­it­ors run­ning vari­ous ap­plic­a­tions, filled the air.

  He shook his head. “Why?”

  She frowned. “Why send me? To find you, of course.”

  “After all this time?” He shrugged. “Not that it mat­ters. I’ve got work to do here. I can’t leave. Not yet.”

  Tania’s next ques­tion was drowned out by a large thump that shook the build­ing. It soun­ded like a bomb had det­on­ated nearby. She opened her mouth to ask a ques­tion, make a state­ment, but Carl beat her to it.

  “Shit!”

  He yanked at a drawer of the desk closest to him and with­drew an­other weapon that looked sus­pi­ciously like the one he’d shoved in her face. He threw it to Tania and she caught it with both hands. It felt lighter than it looked. To one side, above the trig­ger, a small light blinked green.

  “If any­thing comes through the door, walls, floor or ceil­ing, you blast it,” he said. “I bet it’s your god­damn tether. Gave us away.”

  The feel­ing that she was caught in the middle of a video ar­cade game was in­es­cap­able. An­other vi­bra­tion and dull thud shook the build­ing. Sta­bil­ising her­self, Tania stood with her feet slightly apart and scanned the room, won­der­ing what the hell she was sup­posed to shoot at.

  She was about to ask Carl what the in­truders looked like when the first blood-red sphere came through the wall to her left. There was no doubt about its in­tent. Be­fore it had even cleared the wall, it ori­ented it­self to­wards her and a rifle sprouted from its smooth shell. As the skin of the house ripped to let it through, Tania sighted down her weapon and pulled the trig­ger. She was ex­pect­ing noise and a sense of re­coil but there was neither. All she saw was a dot­ted line of blue shoot­ing from the bar­rel of her gun. The lead­ing bolt hit the sphere and the ob­ject ex­ploded. Tania closed her eyes and turned away but no fal­lout hit her. Open­ing her eyes again, she saw the wall re­pair it­self un­til it was once more a seam­less white sur­face.

  A quick glance over to Carl showed her that he was bat­tling four of the spheres. He seemed to be hold­ing his own, so Tania con­cen­trated on her own half of the apart­ment.

  Two spheres were try­ing to bur­row in from the ceil­ing and an­other was bul­ging up through the floor. Tania waited un­til the walls cracked be­fore let­ting off a bar­rage of shots. The small light on the bar­rel blinked am­ber and Tania took a few deep breaths while wait­ing for her strange weapon to re­charge.

  As the spheres around her ex­ploded, it seemed to her that a fifth seemed to hes­it­ate. Was it go­ing to re­treat? Tania didn’t give it a second chance. Coolly, she sighted down the bar­rel and blew the in­vad­ing globe into multi-col­oured shards.

  The battle las­ted little more than a minute after that.

  “Nice shoot­ing,” Carl said.

  Tania turned to say some­thing, ask some­thing, but he was already busy, his at­ten­tion no longer on her. In­stead, he was con­cen­trat­ing on one par­tic­u­lar screen lit up on the wall.

  “Let’s hope we got them all.”

  Tania put her weapon down on a nearby desk sur­face and ap­proached him.

  “Got what all? What were those things, Carl? What’s go­ing on here?”

  “They’re bots, sent to sniff out par­tic­u­lar in­form­a­tion sig­na­tures. Once they find what they’re look­ing for, they’re pro­grammed to either des­troy the tar­get or head back to their base and re­port their find­ings.”

  Des­troy? Base? Re­port find­ings? This was start­ing to sound less like a re­trieval as­sign­ment and more like a war.

  Ir­rit­ated, Tania grabbed Carl’s arm. He looked down at her fin­gers in sur­prise for a mo­ment then let him­self be turned around.

  “I don’t un­der­stand any of this,” she said, search­ing his weathered face. “I don’t un­der­stand why the spheres at­tacked us or where they came from. I don’t un­der­stand why they should be after my tether. I don’t know how yours got severed or why you say you won’t come back.”

  She paused, then con­tin­ued in a more broken voice. “I don’t un­der­stand why you look so old. Carl, what happened to you?”

  Carl tried cov­er­ing his face with one hand, then let it drop. He looked de­jec­ted, his one­time ex­pres­sion of smug self-sat­is­fac­tion pulled down by age and worry.

  “I was about to ask you why you still look so young, but then I real­ised that it doesn’t mat­ter how you look out there.” He jerked his head and Tania knew he was re­fer­ring to the real world. “In here, you can look how­ever you want. How­ever you feel.”

  “I don’t un­der­stand.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Come with me,” he said. He sighed heav­ily. “You need to un­der­stand some­thing. And then you’ll have a de­cision to make.”

  She mo­tioned to the front door. “What about those bots?
Are there any more of them wait­ing out­side for us?”

  “We got them all.” He smiled grimly. “Sen­tience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Tania didn’t un­der­stand that last state­ment, but she let it slide. Her ex-rival, ex-lover was look­ing tense and hag­gard and she was will­ing to cut him some slack if he was will­ing to ex­plain ex­actly what the hell was go­ing on.

  They left the apart­ment and im­mersed them­selves in the multi-di­men­sional world of wild cy­ber­space.

  “Can we talk here?” Tania asked. “Or will there be more of those bots out there, listen­ing for us?”

  Carl looked at her, an eye­brow lif­ted. “The bots were after you. And no, they’re not sens­it­ive to sound.” He looked around. “Not that sound, as we know it, ex­ists here. This is all made up any­way.”

  He took her hand and watched her face as they both lif­ted into the air, a slight smile play­ing around his lips.

  Tania knew what to ex­pect. She had done it her­self at the start of her in­ser­tion while search­ing for him. But that still couldn’t stop the feel­ing of ma­gic that en­gulfed her.

  Fly­ing. That nor­mally happened in her dreams but here, in the Blue, she was con­scious and ra­tional and could dir­ect wherever she wanted to go. The only thing miss­ing was a breeze blow­ing against her face and she wondered if she could pro­gram that in for a fu­ture visit.

  She looked down at where the fin­gers of her hand were en­meshed with Carl’s and snuck him a quick look.

  He had changed.

  The man she had known for the past half a year was brash and cocky. He had given her the best or­gasms of her life then, after the last one, left her, blind­folded and ob­li­vi­ous, in her bed. And he had done all of that, just so he could get the coveted po­s­i­tion of first Base­ment Five op­er­at­ive in­ser­ted into cy­ber­space. She knew all about that Carl and could ima­gine him pulling her along im­pa­tiently in or­der to get to his des­tin­a­tion. She could ima­gine him mak­ing fun of her for her tardi­ness, or at­tempt­ing to get her into bed at the first avail­able op­por­tun­ity, killer bots or not. She could not ima­gine him trav­el­ling at a steady pace, happy to have her hand in his. Their cur­rent speed was too do­mestic a pace for the Carl she’d known.

  No, this man ap­peared to be a much more mel­low and meas­ured per­son. He had guided her out of the apart­ment with a gal­lant ges­ture that looked so nat­ural, even as Tania hes­it­ated at its ali­en­ness. Not at the ges­ture it­self but at the fact that it had been Carl who had made it.

  Could someone really change in the space of a day, from op­por­tun­istic bas­tard to ap­proach­ing nor­mal? Gra­cious even? It beg­gared be­lief.

  The two of them soared up through sev­eral vir­tual city­scapes, neatly dodging the vehicles that sped along the high­ways.

  “There are tril­lions of bytes here,” Carl said, “with mil­lions be­ing ad­ded every second. Un­like our own world, this one is al­most in­fin­ite, an en­tire uni­verse within each com­puter, each server.”

  Build­ings of every shape and hue whizzed past them. Any­thing that stored, or sent, in­form­a­tion via cy­ber­space was mod­elled here, from small cubes that re­flec­ted in­di­vidual users on their own home serv­ers to gi­ant edi­fices rep­res­ent­ing large cor­por­a­tions span­ning con­tin­ents.

  “In­form­a­tion about every single thing on Earth, just sit­ting some­where in the Blue, wait­ing for someone to reach out and grab it.”

  Tania let Carl’s words wash over her as they soared on­ward. She thought that the cor­por­ate-owned, im­pen­et­rable-look­ing blocks of en­cryp­ted data­bases were the largest things in the Blue, and wondered if they could be ma­nip­u­lated into more ima­gin­at­ive shapes. Then she began no­ti­cing a swarm of some­thing dir­ectly in their path. They were still far away from it and she nar­rowed her eyes, try­ing to fo­cus on what she was see­ing. Was it an­other build­ing? No, it couldn’t be. None of the win­dow­less sky­scrapers they had passed were painted such a dis­tinct­ive shade of red.

  It struck her that that shade she was see­ing was the ex­act same col­our as the orbs that had at­tacked them.

  They moved closer and the ob­jects star­ted to re­semble a sheet of pa­per, then a shower of thick strands, like a beaded cur­tain that had par­tially col­lapsed on the floor.

  In­stinct­ively she held back, but Carl tugged at her and they moved closer still.

  It was a web, a mass of knobbly threads that squat­ted over en­tire dis­tricts of the cy­ber­scape. Carl stopped while they were still a little dis­tance away and Tania fo­cused on the cy­ber­space layer be­low the cur­rent street level. She wasn’t sur­prised to see red tendrils reach­ing down through blocks of the level be­low her and – as she lif­ted her gaze – above her as well.

  The tendrils weren’t con­tent to merely en­gulf the build­ings. As she watched, they slowly entered blocks, pen­et­rat­ing them ef­fort­lessly, and emer­ging through shattered pan­els on pre­vi­ously slick sur­faces be­fore gradu­ally meet­ing up with the main struc­ture again, the tendrils thick­en­ing as they re­con­nec­ted with a ma­jor branch. Around the red web, spheres, very much like the bots that had at­tacked her and Carl, dar­ted back and forth at high speed, circ­ling the thick creep­ers like tiny fly­ing sol­diers.

  “What can you see?” he asked.

  She frowned as she took in the com­plex­ity of what was in front of her. “I see streets. And tall build­ings.”

  He lif­ted an eye­brow. “Really? Build­ings and streets? Not, say, pipes or streams?”

  She shook her head while re­mem­ber­ing sim­ilar words from the gi­ant rab­bit. Maybe Carl and the an­imal avatar did know each other. “No. It looks, more or less, like a nor­mal city­scape to me.”

  “That’s what I see too,” he said. “It means you and I must be us­ing a sim­ilar frame of ref­er­ence to in­ter­pret ob­jects in cy­ber­space.” He jerked his head. “What about that? Can you see some­thing for­eign over there?”

  “It’s,” Tania grim­aced, “de­struct­ive. A blood-red col­our, with tendrils that ap­pear to be in­filt­rat­ing data­bases. What is it?”

  “That,” Carl said, after ex­hal­ing heav­ily, “is the Rhine-Temple bot­net. You must have ana­lysed traces of it back in the lab.”

  “A bot­net?” She knew what they were but had never quite trans­lated their ex­ist­ence in to the im­age of de­struc­tion she saw be­fore her. The web of tentacles looked ma­lign and hor­rific. “How dan­ger­ous is it?”

  He tightened his lips and the wrinkles around his mouth deepened. “More dan­ger­ous than any other bot­net in ex­ist­ence. We’re not talk­ing about com­prom­ising in­di­vidual ma­chines here. The Rhine-Temple, as you can see, has suc­cess­fully in­filt­rated the sys­tems of sev­eral large com­pan­ies.”

  That was vis­ible by the way some tall struc­tures ap­peared to be in­fes­ted with red, dozens of tendrils writh­ing out of holes in the build­ings like the branches of a huge tree-creature re­claim­ing an aban­doned sky­scraper.

  “When its de­velopers built it,” Carl said, “they had no idea that it would ac­quire a char­ac­ter­istic that you don’t of­ten see in bot­nets.”

  Tania looked at him and he smiled grimly at her.

  “Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. The Rhine-Temple has a de­gree of sen­tience. It can make de­cisions for it­self. And the ri­gid pro­to­cols of many ex­ist­ing com­pan­ies are no match for it.”

  Tania turned her gaze back to the red web. She isol­ated one patch of move­ment and watched as a thin red tendril tapped slowly and gently at the sheer face of a neigh­bour­ing build­ing.

  “Every time a sys­tem goes down,” Carl said, “the bot­net col­lects data, ana­lys­ing how long it took to com­prom­ise that net­work’s se­cur­ity. It then de­vel­ops it
s own pro­grams to fine-tune its per­form­ance so that, the next time it at­tacks, it’s more ef­fi­cient.”

  “What’s its pur­pose?” Tania asked. “Pro­cessing cycles for scam­mers? An il­legal grid plat­form for hack­ers?”

  Carl laughed. It was a hol­low sound, flat and echo­less in cy­ber­space.

  “It wants a whole lot more than that, darlin’. That Rhine-Temple bot­net wants to des­troy the world.”

  Chapter Five

  “I think it’s figured out that there’s a lot of real es­tate here in cy­ber­space go­ing to waste,” Carl said. “This whole vir­tual uni­verse is powered by hard­ware work­ing at peak per­form­ance. Thou­sands, mil­lions, bil­lions of in­struc­tions per second whizz­ing around above our heads and be­low our feet. Why share, when it can take it all?”

  “But Carl, des­troy­ing the world? What makes you think that is its ul­ti­mate ob­ject­ive?”

  “Be­cause I’ve been watch­ing it.” He glanced over at her. “Sit down, I want to ex­plain some­thing.”

  They were stand­ing on the top of a tall win­dow­less build­ing that over­looked the bot­net. Carl let go of her hand and Tania sat on the edge of the rooftop. From habit, she tried not to look down at the vir­tual street be­low. Carl sat next to her, angling him­self so she could look into his weathered face.

  “The Rhine-Temple and I have already fought sev­eral battles. I’ve beaten it back a few times but it keeps com­ing.” He paused. “I’ve been do­ing this for years.”

  She blinked, un­com­pre­hend­ing. “Years?” she re­peated. “But—”

  “Listen,” he said. “When we were train­ing in the sand­pit, we were in­ser­ted into cy­ber­space for only a few minutes at a time. When we came out of it, back to the real world, there was some sense of dis­lo­ca­tion, but every­body at Base­ment Five put it down to the in­ser­tion ex­per­i­ence it­self.

  “I’ve figured it out, though. When you’re in cy­ber­space for more than a few real-time minutes, your brain starts to ad­apt. Be­cause it’s now in a world that moves so much faster, it starts mov­ing faster too. And cy­ber­space, real cy­ber­space, is much more neur­o­lo­gic­ally stim­u­lat­ing than the test en­vir­on­ments where we did our tri­als. In or­der to cope, our brain has to some­how take in all that in­form­a­tion and make sense of it.”