Overclocked

by K S Augustin

  He passed un­der the cover of sev­eral data pipes. It should have been dark un­der the um­brella of blood-red, but it wasn’t. Dark­ness, sun­light, shad­ows were all con­structs of the real world. In cy­ber­space, Carl could clearly see whatever his mind could com­pre­hend. Un­for­tu­nately, he was cur­rently com­pre­hend­ing everything.

  The pipes – Tania liked to call them tentacles – closed over him, mak­ing him draw in a deep breath.

  “The only way is for­ward,” he told him­self and willed his body to put one foot in front of the other.

  Ac­cord­ing to his re­search, the IRC chan­nel port he was after should have been situ­ated quite close to him. The dis­tance wasn’t a prob­lem. What con­cerned him more was the kind of de­fences it had. He moved fur­ther into the maze of pipes, step­ping over some at ground level and bend­ing his head to avoid oth­ers. The closer he got to his des­tin­a­tion, the more tightly the pipes wound around each other, un­til he was brush­ing against them as he slipped through nar­row gaps. He thought he felt a faint pulse beat against his skin as he knocked against them, and tried not to shud­der.

  The port he was look­ing for was old and he let out a breath of re­lief when he fi­nally found it. It was cir­cu­lar, matte black and a little wider than the width of his shoulders. Over it, like a nest­ing spider, lay a lock­ing mech­an­ism. The lock was hexagonal in shape and from each side, a thick leg ex­ten­ded, soldered seam­lessly in place against the port’s cas­ing. Carl stared at it for a long mo­ment and tried not to think of how much time he had left be­fore the Rhine-Temple re­covered from Tomek’s at­tack code.

  “Why am I see­ing a six-legged spider?” he muttered. “Six de­fences? Or maybe just one de­fence in six parts.” He nar­rowed his eyes. “Maybe if I can break four legs that’ll be enough to open the port.”

  He wished Tania were here. She’d be able to identify the lock’s un­der­ly­ing struc­ture within minutes. All he could do was rely on his in­tu­ition…and guess.

  Without mov­ing his gaze from the lock, he reached into the side pocket of his suit and pulled out a small device. It re­sembled the tether that he had first worn when en­ter­ing the Blue so many years ago. In fact it was that tether, but it had been mod­i­fied ex­tens­ively over the past fif­teen years. He hadn’t told Tania that he still had it. Flip­ping open the lid with his thumb, he fi­nally dragged his gaze to the small screen on the unit, choos­ing sev­eral dia­gnostic pro­grams to ex­ecute. He then poin­ted the tether’s hinge at the port lock. He had worked for months on the hinge, in­sert­ing a small probe into it then mak­ing sure it was pro­tec­ted against knocks and falls.

  He watched as the pro­grams ran through their ana­lyses and smiled when, after a few minutes, the device beeped at him. He per­used the res­ults care­fully.

  “Got it,” he said softly in tri­umph.

  As he had sus­pec­ted, the Rhine-Temple had closed down the IRC port back in its in­fancy to pre­vent its ori­ginal op­er­at­ors from in­ter­fer­ing with it. That shut­down had oc­curred at a time when it wasn’t as soph­ist­ic­ated as it was now. Tick­ing that task off its list, the bot­net had then moved on to tak­ing over other com­puter sys­tems.

  The lock had ef­fect­ively been for­got­ten.

  But not by Carl.

  Rather than rep­res­ent­ing six lay­ers of de­fence, the spider that squat­ted over the port’s cover used only a re­l­at­ively simple hash al­gorithm to pro­tect ac­cess. That was easy enough to crack, es­pe­cially as Carl had fif­teen years to work on the prob­lem. He dir­ec­ted his mod­i­fied tether to work through the com­bin­a­tions us­ing a method he cre­ated and was grat­i­fied when, only five minutes later, the spider’s legs clicked open and the lock mech­an­ism fell off the port.

  Carl stamped on the lock with his foot, in case it some­how came back to life and blocked the exit again, then wondered why he cared. After all, wasn’t this sup­posed to be a one-way trip?

  “Habit,” he told him­self and care­fully eased up the port lid.

  The cover was sur­pris­ingly heavy and creaked as it moved. That was Carl’s brain telling him this was an old and dis­used ac­cess port...as if he didn’t already know.

  When he had the lid fully open, he peered in­side. A long dark tube snaked down and away to the right. Un­der the cir­cum­stances, he wouldn’t have been sur­prised to see cob­webs ob­scur­ing part of the pas­sage. Gingerly, he crouched and entered the tube.

  It was an eerie jour­ney. His path was dark but it wasn’t clothed in shadow. He hadn’t brought any form of il­lu­min­a­tion, yet could clearly see every square cen­ti­metre of space. Bent over, he shuffled along the tube, his fin­gers brush­ing against faint, reg­u­lar cor­rug­a­tions, and was happy when he saw an end to it fi­nally emerge from the eerie gloom. Pulling him­self through the open­ing with a grunt, he jumped down two metres into an oc­ta­gonal room.

  The walls were streaked with grey, meet­ing at a point many metres above his head. On each wall was fixed row upon row of mon­it­ors, rising to the ceil­ing. Some of the mon­it­ors showed in­form­a­tion he could com­pre­hend, such as views of the Blue, or close-ups of some data pipes. Oth­ers showed no more than flash­ing lights zap­ping across the screen or an­im­ated graph­ics that per­haps tracked per­form­ance of one kind or an­other and de­fied easy la­belling. As fast as his clocked up brain was work­ing in cy­ber­space, it ap­peared that parts of the Rhine-Temple were cap­able of op­er­at­ing at even faster speeds.

  Carl knew he should be mov­ing but couldn’t help gaz­ing around him in fas­cin­a­tion. Nobody in either world, real or cy­ber­space, had ever stood where he was stand­ing at that mo­ment, in the very centre of a mal­ware-AI hy­brid. As­sum­ing his plan was suc­cess­ful, would such an en­tity ever ex­ist again? The worst of it was, con­sid­er­ing this was a sui­cide mis­sion, there was nobody he would be able to talk to about it.

  He reached for the sphere that had been nest­ling un­der his arm. There would be no time left once he ac­tiv­ated the bomb. Its pro­gram would start im­me­di­ately. Was he sat­is­fied he had made peace with the uni­verse? Was there any­thing else he could’ve said to Tania? Any­thing other than in­form­a­tion re­gard­ing sev­eral trans­fers that had moved own­er­ship of his as­sets from him to her? He had com­pleted that task while she had been tak­ing one of her power-naps and had left a mes­sage with Tomek to give to her once he was – he swal­lowed – dead.

  It was such a hard concept for him to grasp and, des­pite the lethal black bomb he held in his hands, he couldn’t help won­der­ing – was there a chance he could get out of this thing alive?

  “No there isn’t,” he said to him­self. “And you knew that go­ing in. Now’s not the time for second thoughts. Just hit the damn but­ton and get it over with.”

  With a shak­ing fin­ger, he tapped at the sur­face of the bomb and a dis­play lit up. A blink­ing but­ton said only one word.

  Ac­tiv­ate.

  He moved his fin­ger for­ward—

  “I think you should pause for one second,” a voice told him.

  Startled, he spun around and caught sight of a dusky face peer­ing at him through the open porthole.

  Tania?! What the fuck was she do­ing here?

  She jumped down to the floor then straightened and held up a hand when it be­came ob­vi­ous to the both of them that he was about to erupt into a rage-filled tan­trum at her ap­pear­ance.

  “Don’t get hys­ter­ical on me, Orin,” she warned him.

  Hys­ter­ical? He was livid. “What. The. Fuck. Are you do­ing here? Are you fuck­ing sui­cidal?”

  She re­garded him with cool eyes and Carl didn’t know whether to start the bomb’s se­quence or put it down some­place so he would have both hands free to shake some sense into her.

  “This isn’t an ex­per­i­ment, Tania. This is for fuck­ing real. Now g
et out of here!”

  She looked so calm and col­lec­ted, he al­most screamed in an­guish.

  “There are two things I know,” she said, and damn her if that me­lodi­ous voice of hers wasn’t as steady as she looked. “One, I know this is real. And two, I also know that neither you nor I are sui­cidal.”

  “What the hell are you talk­ing about?” He looked around in des­per­a­tion. Tania’s ap­pear­ance had taken him com­pletely by sur­prise. If she had man­aged to find him, would a squad of bot­net drones be next?

  She reached into the pocket of her suit and with­drew two gel-packs, throw­ing one to him with a flick of the wrist.

  Carl caught the soft pack and looked down at it. The thick li­quid en­cased in a matte poly­mer skin was warm to the touch. When he squeezed it, he thought he saw little points of multi-col­oured light move within the gel, joined to each other with faintly vis­ible strands of sil­ver.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked, look­ing back at her.

  “It’s a cus­tom­ised Trans­port Layer Se­cur­ity shell.” Her lips twis­ted. “The latest thing. I should know, I de­signed it my­self.”

  He frowned. “A TLS? So what? All a TLS does is en­able com­mu­nic­a­tion between in­ter­net ob­jects.” He made a sound deep in his throat. “Look, I’ll give you a minute be­fore I hit the but­ton. That should give you enough time to get out of here and out of the range of the Rhine-Temple.”

  Her voice was firm. “I’m not leav­ing here without you.”

  Carl gripped the gel-pack tightly in his hand, sur­prised when it didn’t rup­ture. “Damn you, Tania, as much as I think I love you, this is way big­ger than both of us.”

  Her dark eyes lit up. “You love me?”

  Carl paused, as if sud­denly aware of what he’d just said. “I….”

  “Or was that just the kami­kaze spirit talk­ing?” She didn't look im­pressed.

  He shook his head sav­agely. He didn’t have time for this but, from past ex­per­i­ence, knew she wouldn’t budge un­til he could ham­mer some sense into her.

  “You’ve driven me crazy from the mo­ment I met you,” he told her. His voice was angry. “So smart, so in con­trol. It was like a nuc­lear det­on­a­tion couldn’t move you, once you formed an opin­ion.”

  “You took it as a chal­lenge, didn’t you?”

  “You had the edu­ca­tion. You cre­ated half the the­ory we’re deal­ing with here. What did I have? A big mouth and an in­cred­ible streak of luck?”

  “You un­der­es­tim­ate your­self,” she said, but he wasn’t really listen­ing.

  “You want me to ad­mit it? Okay, I was a bas­tard. I thought the only way I could get ahead was by bring­ing you down. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

  She spread her hands. “And this is your pen­ance? Let­ting your bomb dis­as­semble you into your com­pon­ent bytes?”

  He sidestepped the an­swer to that too-re­veal­ing ques­tion.

  “Un­less you’ve come up with some­thing bet­ter?” He’d had fif­teen years to think this through and he wasn’t about to give up on his plan now.

  The tone of his voice promp­ted her to raise an eye­brow. “In fact, I have.” She nod­ded to his hand. “You’re hold­ing it right there.”

  “The TLS shell?”

  “Think about it, Carl. If you’re an ob­ject that uses TLS, what does that mean? In or­der to com­mu­nic­ate with you, touch you, an­other ob­ject has to hand­shake with you. That’s the first, in­vi­ol­able rule of the pro­tocol.”

  A light dawned in Carl’s head. “But if I re­fuse the hand­shake...”

  She was nod­ding. “…the other ob­ject doesn’t get ac­cess. Period. You’re pro­tec­ted.”

  He rolled the concept over in his mind. Damn it, but she was right. For years, he’d re­searched the sub­ject of us­ing some kind of en­cryp­tion suit, but he hadn’t thought of some­thing as simple and el­eg­ant as a TLS shell. All his other op­tions had led him to de­cide that the Rhine-Temple would have enough time to hack through and des­troy him.

  “You’ve cre­ated a cy­ber­space con­dom,” he said with grow­ing won­der.

  “I prefer to think of it as an en­vir­on­mental suit.” Her voice was dry. “But the concept’s the same. So what do you say? Put the suit on, set the bomb and let’s blow this chicken out­fit, as you Amer­ic­ans like to say.”

  This was…. Carl couldn’t be­lieve he was be­ing offered a way out of his prob­lem. He had been so fo­cused on sac­ri­fi­cing his life that he hadn’t con­sidered what would hap­pen if he didn’t. Help­lessly, he looked at the gel-pack again. “How do I ac­tiv­ate it?”

  “See that plug at the top? Press it.”

  While Tania watched, Carl punched the cir­cu­lar pro­tru­sion at the top of the pack with his thumb. The gel star­ted to move, wig­gling in his hand. In a couple of seconds, the en­tire pack star­ted vi­brat­ing strongly, then it jumped clear and landed on the floor. Startled, Carl was just about to bend over and pick it up when it ex­ploded all over him. He lif­ted his arms in a de­fens­ive ges­ture but it didn’t help. The goo en­gulfed him. He had the sud­den urge to hold his breath then real­ised what a fu­tile ges­ture that would be in cy­ber­space. With blind­ing speed, the gel climbed across his torso, down his legs and over his back. In seconds, he was con­sumed by it. Through a waver­ing trans­par­ent field, he saw Tania tilt her head, re­gard­ing him with dis­pas­sion.

  “I’ll ad­mit that wasn’t pretty, but I didn’t have much time to spend on it. Looks like you’re fully pro­tec­ted though.”

  “When did you get the time to come up with this?” His voice soun­ded like it was try­ing to es­cape through a tank of wa­ter. Tania was im­it­at­ing his ac­tions and only answered when she, too, was fully en­gulfed.

  “Earlier today. The idea came to me while I was out on my walk, but I had to check the para­met­ers of your bomb to make sure it wouldn’t get through the shell. Oh, and I also ad­ded a routine to avoid any sec­tors that matched our, er, con­doms, as you put it.”

  The floor rumbled and both of them stead­ied their stance.

  “I think it’s time we primed that bomb of yours,” she said. “Looks like the Rhine-Temple is start­ing to come back to life.”

  It was a task of seconds to set the bomb and fix it to the floor of the cham­ber. Carl hit the but­ton then urged Tania to get out through the porthole first. Be­hind them, he thought he heard a whoosh as his virus was re­leased then, a few seconds later, the sound of mon­it­ors sus­pen­ded high up on walls crash­ing to the ground. Glan­cing up, he saw Tania far ahead of him, then he levered him­self into the tun­nel and hur­ried after her.

  Carl wanted to have con­fid­ence in Tania’s abil­it­ies, but the shell she had craf­ted was still an un­tested tech­no­logy. There was a slim chance it could fail, claim­ing two lives in­stead of one. Feel­ing as if he was wad­ing through wa­ter, he caught up to her, then pushed her ahead of him.

  “What if a hand­shake com­pletes by ac­ci­dent?” he asked as they staggered back through the tube. As far as he was con­cerned, they weren’t mov­ing nearly fast enough. He nudged her for­ward again and tried not to think of the en­croach­ing virus.

  “Im­possible.” She stumbled but con­tin­ued to move. “I set it to re­fuse any and all hand­shakes as a de­fault. This shell was de­signed to do only one thing and that was to pro­tect us.”

  She put out a hand against the curved wall to help steady her steps. “How much longer?”

  “Till we know if my bomb’s work­ing? I think it’s already star­ted.”

  As if his words set off a sig­nal, the tex­ture of the tube they were trav­el­ling through began trans­form­ing. Carl saw the smooth fin­ish start to crack, tiny grid-like fis­sures grow­ing into one an­other. With eyes wide, he pressed briefly against Tania’s shoulder, ur­ging her to move faster.

  When they
reached the old hatch and climbed out, Carl took one hur­ried look be­hind them. The tube they’d trav­elled down had dis­in­teg­rated, con­ver­ted to a dark chasm that ap­peared to swal­low every atom of light that fell into it.

  “We have to get out of here,” he yelled. Damn but the stu­pid suit was ham­per­ing his abil­ity to com­mu­nic­ate. Had Tania heard him or had his words soun­ded like noth­ing more than a series of gurgles?

  Swear­ing, he quickened his steps. They dodged and sprin­ted through the jungle of data pipes as best they could. They were still mov­ing slower than he liked, and there were dozens of ob­struc­tions in their way.

  “How far?” Tania asked, her long legs clear­ing the dis­tance from the heart of the Rhine-Temple, step by step.

  Carl didn’t an­swer, his con­cen­tra­tion fo­cused on the over­hanging blood-red tendrils. As he watched, they froze and star­ted turn­ing grey then black when the cracks de­vel­op­ing on them be­came wider. He knew the same thing was hap­pen­ing be­low his feet. He felt him­self sink­ing through what was pre­vi­ously solid ground. He put his left foot for­ward and pushed down into dark sponge and knew that his virus was over­tak­ing the both of them.

  They weren’t go­ing to get any­where if they con­tin­ued at this pace. And while Tania’s suits might have pro­tec­ted them, what would hap­pen if they were trapped in noth­ing­ness? With no frame of ref­er­ence to use as an an­chor, or a life­line, they might end up as good as dead.

  With a muttered oath, Carl once again looked up­wards at the over­hanging tentacles. When he saw some of them blacken, he didn’t hes­it­ate. Launch­ing him­self away from the crum­bling ground, he reached for Tania’s hand, lift­ing her up with him. She gasped, then held onto him with a tight grip.

  They were ar­row­ing up un­der the closest web of data pipes. Were the tentacles turn­ing black? Dis­in­teg­rat­ing? Bey­ond that, Carl could see the clear of the Blue beck­on­ing to them, but he still closed his eyes as they bar­relled through, re­lieved when he felt noth­ing hit­ting his body.