by K S Augustin
They sailed over the Rhine-Temple, looping high above the skyscrapers of data, until they finally settled on the ledge of “their” building. Tomek was there and he greeted Carl’s appearance with a shrug and a self-deprecating grin.
“Glad you could make it. I have to be honest and say I tried to stop her but she had some crazy idea of saving your skin.”
“She’s a tough one to say no to,” Carl said.
They watched the botnet's destruction.
“What was it like in there?” Tomek asked, after a pause.
Carl shook his head. “It was like a giant machine on auto-pilot. I’m sure I was only in the old command centre, the one the original virus used, but it was still impressive. In a way, it’s a shame we had to destroy it. It might have given us some new paradigms in data management. But it’s too late now.”
“Look,” Tania said, pointing. Carl and Tomek followed the path of her outstretched finger and saw a lower canopy of tendrils turn black then crumble to dust.
“How long before it takes down the entire thing?” she asked.
Carl watched the shifting colours of the Rhine-Temple. Quickly, he focused on the immediate levels above and below them. With satisfaction, he noted that the Rhine-Temple extensions also appeared to be suffering the same fate as their parent.
“I’d say a few minutes should do it,” and there was a touch of pride in his voice.
The three of them sat, silently counting down the time in their heads.
From a distance, the destructive power of Carl’s virus was even more spectacular. As if suffering from creeping subsidence, the remaining data pipes started crumbling and collapsing. Segment by segment, the entire structure began dissolving into clouds of black dust that were miraculously siphoned away into nothingness. The engulfed networks and databases started crumbling as well, revealing the bare floor of that layer of cyberspace.
“What happens to all that data?” Tania asked. She was watching as clouds formed around the botnet then cleared, leaving nothing behind but a large expanse of empty space.
“Everything goes,” Carl replied. “That’s the beauty of it. Nothing survives to spawn another botnet.”
There wasn’t much left to do after watching the Rhine-Temple self-destruct. Searching up and down through several levels, the three cybernauts saw expanses of flat blue where there used to be giant stores of data, invaded by red writhing tentacles.
“It won’t take long to rebuild,” Tomek said, when they congregated back at the ledge. “If I come back tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll see tall buildings again where, right now, I see nothing but emptiness.”
“It’s the nature of data,” Carl replied. “And backups.” He grinned.
The man who sometimes appeared as a giant white rabbit regarded both of them gravely. “I must say goodbye at this point. My team, and my government, will be very happy with the outcome of this. I add my thanks to theirs.”
Tania rose as well and shook his hand. “Maybe we’ll meet again?” she asked. “Perhaps at a conference?”
“I’ll be sure to wear a disguise you recognise,” he said with a wink. He pressed a button on his wristwatch and disappeared.
Carl pursed his lips. “I haven’t ever seen him do that before. Whatever he’s using to exit cyberspace seems to be ahead of our tether technology.”
They both stared at the space where Miller had been only a moment before.
“We could do some research on it,” Tania said, tugging him off the building.
They drifted down to the pavement. “Together?”
The traffic swirled around them but they avoided the vehicles with ease. “How else?”
“Which brings up another question. Now that I’ve survived my unsurvivable suicide mission, how do we get back?”
Tania smiled and kept walking. “I made an arrangement with Don before I left. An insurance policy, if you like. You said earlier you had visited the Basement Five network. All we need to do is go there and find Server Three in its DMZ. I requested that port 27014 be opened for a limited amount of time every thirty minutes, connected directly to the two insertion rooms.”
“So we sneak in like a couple of teenagers after a night out on the town and slip back into our beds?”
“More than a decade in your case,” she said, “but yeah, something like that. I’m sure there’ll be some filtering before that point, but if Don’s smart, he would have transferred the retrieval protocols across to Server Three. With any luck, input into our bodies shouldn’t take much time.”
They walked in silence for a while.
“Tania?”
She didn’t turn around. “Hmm?”
Carl swallowed. “About what I said in the Rhine-Temple control room.”
There was no need to expand on that. He was sure both of them knew exactly what he was talking about.
Tania paused for a bit longer this time. One of her steps faltered. “Uh huh?”
“I just wanted to tell you…” He licked his lips. “I meant it.”
She stopped suddenly, twisting to look at him. “Meant what?”
Her expression was a mix of bravado and apprehension. He knew he would need to work on that, to gradually ease the anxiety out of her and reassure her of her own worth. Of what he felt for her.
“I meant what I said. I really think I’m falling in love with you.”
Her dark eyes were sceptical. “Wasn’t that a rather quick change of heart?”
He shook his head. “Not for me. I’ve had fifteen years to think about it, remember? It’s not a strategy I would recommend to any cyberspace psychologists,” he hastened to add, “but it worked in my case.”
An eyebrow quirked. “Fifteen years to just think you’re in love with me? I wonder how long it would take for you to make sure, Carl Orin?”
She was a provocative witch, all right.
Carl pulled her towards him and kissed her full lips, tenderly parting them with his tongue and exploring the moist cavern beneath until she pressed her body against his and shuddered with delight.
When he finally released her to speak, his voice was low and husky. “I don’t think that bit will take long at all.”
Then he paused and had the grace to look embarrassed. “Uh, there’s just one thing.”
She waited.
“I, er, don’t own anything anymore,” he said. “Back when I thought I was about to lose my life, I made sure I transferred all my assets. To you.”
“To?” Tania’s eyes widened. “Me?”
Carl shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. “I thought it was the least I could do. Besides,” he said, looking away for a moment, “there really wasn’t anyone else I…felt strongly about.”
She put her hands on her hips. “So, let me see if I’ve got this right. That toy plane that whizzes you to your beachside villa in Bermuda? The one you mentioned on the first day we met? That’s mine?”
Abashed, he nodded.
“And that fancy Italian place I kept hearing about over the past few months?”
He nodded again.
Tania’s voice deepened. “And I suppose that includes your Swiss bank account too?”
He pulled her close, a smile tugging at his lips. “Well, not exactly Swiss.”
“But it’s all mine?” she insisted.
“Every dollar and franc of it.”
Moving her head back, she avoided his lips, but Carl saw a spark of devilment in her dark eyes.
“Does that mean you’re entirely at my mercy and chari
ty, Mr. Orin?”
“Whatever you ask,” he said, “I’ll do.”
“Hmmmm. Let’s make sure.”
She took his hand and they started strolling again in the direction of Basement Five’s server. “I believe you left a couple of suede ‘persuaders’ at my apartment the last time you visited. I’ll get you home and then maybe you can start earning back your assets. Deal?”
He grinned. “Deal.”
Author's note
The wireless neural headset is already a reality, aimed primarily at gamers. But while the currently available commercial version (as of 2012) contains sixteen sensors, the Basement Five headset contains sixty-four sensors and is a much more sensitive instrument.
In case you were wondering, port 27014 is one used by Valve Corporation, the company that brought you the games Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2, and Zero Clash to name three.
Botnets also exist, although they haven’t achieved the status of semi-sentience that I’ve outlined here. I’m sure that the data mining operations that scour everybody’s emails and social media accounts use very sophisticated heuristic algorithms that mimic artificial intelligence, so it seemed a natural progression to use the same kind of government surveillance program as a kick-off for true AI. And I have the utmost respect for the abilities of Central and East European programmers.
DMZ stands for “de-militarized zone” and refers to the part of a computer network where the computers (or servers) interface directly with traffic coming from the internet. The servers in the DMZ are the first line of defence against internet-based security attacks as they are the ones that authenticate and authorise the requests of information that come to that particular network.
TLS, as Tania and Carl know, stands for “Transport Layer Security” and is a cryptographic protocol that supercedes the earlier SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol that was used when, say, buying online goods or services or doing some internet stock trading or banking. TLS is – and SSL was – used to enable secure communication between two parties over the internet. I suppose I could have written the protection as a personal firewall instead but, to me, that conjures up an image of a metal suit of armour that could still be penetrated and I wanted something more flexible for Tania and Carl to escape in. The TLS (mentally to me, at least) seemed to fit the bill.
And, lastly, I’m sure there’s a PhD waiting for anyone willing to do research into the dynamics of data organisation in semi-anarchic environments, where “semi-anarchic” can be described as contexts which contain both related and unrelated data elements across distributed locations. Think of it as the next step up from the cloud.
