The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

A few minutes, a locked bathroom door and some duct tape later, he was stripped to his underwear, bound and gagged, and still unconscious. Zala changed back into dark trousers and shirt, threw on her hoodie, and wrapped a black scarf around her face. Over this, she pulled on the man’s overalls, meaning that if worst came to worst she could claim to be a maintenance engineer. Finally she donned the maintenance man’s gloves and shut the cubicle door on him. Whatever technology was in the gloves began throwing images up onto Zala’s contact lenses. A bright rectangular doorway of light appeared superimposed on the wall, and beyond it was the outline of a corridor. ‘Very cool,’ she muttered to herself, grinning.

  She reached out and touched the middle of the doorway of light, and it slid open to reveal the corridor.

  The passage was cramped and lit by a weak bulb that tinged everything a harsh green-yellow. The walls were lined with pipes and thick cables. The undulating bass from the nightclub overhead echoed down through the ceiling. Zala followed the corridor until she found herself at a concrete spiral staircase. She went down it, further and further, constantly listening out for anyone approaching, her eyes straining in the gloom.

  Four floors down from where she had entered, she reached the bottom of the staircase. She followed a long, wide corridor until she came to another door. Pressing her ear to it, she could hear the muffled hum of massive fans coming from behind it. She reached forward with her gloved hand and touched the door. Slowly, it slid aside, revealing a metal walkway which branched off above an L-shaped room the size of an athletics field, lined from wall to wall with racks of servers. Zala couldn’t help but smile.

  Server Room D of the NDLT server farm.

  Zala had worked with server farms before, but this was an operation of an entirely different magnitude. Every bookshelf-sized rack was filled with large NDLT-branded server units, all steel ventilation and rapidly blinking LEDs. The cooling system seemed to her as loud as the music upstairs.

  Zala made her way along the walkway and down a set of steel steps to the floor below. In front of her was a small terminal with a single option: DIRECTORY. She accessed it and a list of server blocks came up. While she eyed ‘NDLT Mainframe’ and ‘Rendering Neuroprocessors’ with longing, she eventually found her target: a section entitled ‘Private Use/Misc.’ and a list of EIP addresses for each server. She opened her portable terminal and compared the EIP addresses in the directory with the ones that were blocking the probe trail.

  There they were. The eight servers her probe had been unable to pass, in their own rack with one other – almost certainly the gateway server. The directory even singled them out on a minimap, indicating that they were on the far side of the room.

  Zala moved quickly down rows of computer equipment, pulse racing. Past the first ten rows, left at the end, then second right and sixth left.

  There they were. Zala stopped in front of them and grinned. Nine gleaming NDLT MBL5000T computer servers, twice as big as the rest of the servers in this room and surely more powerful than any other in the building. Whoever rented this set-up had some money behind them. Each one had its EIP address laser-printed on its front, corresponding to the EIP addresses of the servers that had made up the loop, except for the one at the top. Flicking open her own terminal, Zala set up a connection with the new server. A login screen opened – no endless loop. She ran a simple profile scraper program and within a few minutes a username and password appeared. Clearly the server’s user was so confident in their external security that they felt no need to have any more than a simple, scrape-vulnerable password on the other side – though it might also be so that they could feign enough ignorance of computer security to be perceived as incapable of any cybercrime. She typed in the details. The servers yielded, and she disabled the loop. The IP trace still running back at Polina’s apartment would be able to get through to find the source of the gssmr.auge file.

  A message beeped at her terminal.

  From: ANANSI (EIP: ----.-.------.-------.---.-----.----.-------)

  >I see you.

  Zala felt a chill run down her spine.

  She closed the message, disconnecting from the server and the NDLT local network, and shut down her portable terminal. For a moment she was tempted to claw the terminal from her wrist and smash it, but she calmed herself.

  The words echoed in her mind. Had someone spotted her? Someone on the security team, or was someone tracing her? Were they going to alert security? Or was there something else going on? The dashes that littered the EIP address were something she hadn’t seen in a long time. She had gigabytes of programs constantly running to ensure that no technique she knew of could hide a person’s EIP from her. The person who created the server loop her trace had got stuck in couldn’t hide their EIP from her. She hid her own EIP using programs no one but her used or understood, using protocols she had written and never, ever shared. It would take a supercomputer to get around them.

  ‘I see you’, it had said.

  The roaring ventilation system suddenly seemed too quiet and she found herself listening intently for something. She glanced around wildly.

  The sound of footsteps grew louder and clearer as their sources grew closer.

  Zala lightly crept two rows of servers to the right. Crouching down, she peered through a small space in a server rack, to see four armed guards round the corner and stare at the servers she’d accessed. Her eyes widened.

  Suddenly, icy focus took hold. She reopened her terminal and scanned for communication networks. One popped up on her browser, revealing the EIPs of both the computer sending the guards instructions and the guards’ portable terminals. She needed a way to get around the guards without alerting them to her presence. Her plan in the club was to make it seem as though the only notable thing that had happened this evening was a drunken clubber attacking and stripping a maintenance man. Given the increased prominence of domestic terrorism as of late, even Zala in her normal clothes attacking the man would provoke the authorities. She couldn’t risk attracting any more attention to herself.

  Zala scanned the data being sent to the guards – maps, routes, visual instructions and audio. For now, the squad of four were heading away from her, but they stood between her and the closest exit. She looked back at the intercepted map. She was two rows of server racks from the back of the room now, and there were sixteen rows and five columns of—

  Holy shit, there’re over twenty thousand servers in this room alone and it’s not even the biggest room they have in this facility!

  —five columns of server racks between her and where she needed to be. In addition, the walls of racks were long, leaving little opportunity to hide if someone came past. And, of course, the security team were armed. Zala figured she had three advantages. One, the cooling system the servers used made finding her with thermal vision nearly impossible. Two, she had their information feed right in front of her. Three, she knew how much of a threat she was, and they did not.

  She moved to the edge of a block of server racks. There was a two-foot aisle between her and the next block of servers along. If a guard was looking the right way she’d essentially be throwing herself into their field of vision. Going by the intercepted data, while there was indeed a guard walking down the gap between these two columns of servers, he should be facing the other way seven rows down. Unless he wasn’t. Or he heard her. Or he just had a bad feeling and turned round.

  Zala closed her eyes, and thought quiet thoughts.

  She crossed the gap so lightly she could have been floating.

  A sigh of relief and a satisfied grin. Her eyes on her wrist terminal, she watched as the security guard kept walking in the other direction. She straightened up and reoriented herself. She needed to move down another six rows before she could work towards the door. There were two guards in front of her and to her right and one in front of her to her left, as well as one behind her and to her left.

  Wait, she thought, there’s one behind me?

  Panicked,
she looked around. She’d lost track. There were only two rows of server racks behind her, and she was in the furthest left column of this part of the room. While the guard had not seen her the first time, there was no way he’d miss her a second.

  Zala could hear his footsteps drawing closer. She had seconds.

  She looked up, at the steel-grate fronts of the row of servers to one side of her and the tangle of cables and cooling hardware that formed the rear of the row on the other, disappearing into the ceiling. She pulled her rucksack off her shoulders.

  The footsteps came closer.

  The guard ambled past the row of server racks, his gaze sweeping over the gap between them. He lingered for a moment. It could have been anything, but to Zala it looked as though he might have heard something. Then, he continued on.

  She slid down off the top of the rack using the cables as handholds, unable to believe her luck. The map showed the guard walking along a bank of servers ahead of her. The gap between the columns she needed was free. She padded along, down the side of the wall and out into the wider section of the room. Three columns and ten rows away was the exit, if she could just—

  ‘Hold it!’

  Zala jumped, and looked round to see a guard she hadn’t spotted. He was about three yards away, a tall, well-built man with a shaven head and a wary, gaunt face, and he had a handgun trained at her head. She raised her hands.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ His voice seemed to grate its way up out of his throat, quiet enough that the others wouldn’t hear unless he raised it further.

  ‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ she replied. She had one chance, being as she was still in the maintenance uniform. ‘If we’re going to fix this coolant leak, the last thing I need is security waving guns around, shooting up even more holes.’

  She turned on her heel, away from the tall man pointing a gun at her, and opened her portable terminal. She typed quickly, inserting instructions of her own into the connection between the security coordinator’s terminal and the security guards. Twenty seconds. ‘It’s around here somewhere.’

  ‘Ma’am, I’m going to need you to present ID.’ His voice was growing more insistent. He lowered the pistol slightly.

  ‘I don’t have time, you idiot, if we let it rupture any further for all we know we could have liquid nitrogen spraying out of the cooling system. I don’t even want to think what that would do to the servers, let alone—’

  ‘I need backup!’ he yelled, raising his gun and levelling it again at Zala’s head. ‘Nice try, ma’am, but this cooling system uses freon gas.’

  Another guard appeared behind him, weapon raised. Five seconds.

  ‘Radio ahead and tell the folks upstairs we just caught a member of the New Cairo Liberation Army,’ the gaunt-faced man told his colleague.

  What, the terrorists? Zala felt faintly insulted.

  The countdown reached zero. The signal from the security computer centre spiked. Cochlear implants played a deafening high-pitched tone, optical implants let out a sheet of blinding white light. The guards screamed, though they were unable to hear themselves do so. The tall man, doubling over with his hands over his ears, squeezed the trigger of his gun in pain, and a bullet whizzed high over Zala’s head, sinking into a thick mass of cables behind her. She ran, pulling out the power cables from random servers as she went, her blind, deaf, agony-ridden would-be pursuers now writhing on the floor. Alarms sounded. Zala clambered up the steel staircase, taking the steps two at a time, all the way up to the maintenance walkway. A loud crack rang out somewhere below and Zala felt a burst of dust and concrete fragments explode just behind her head. She bolted down the final section of walkway amid flurries of shattering wall and dented, sparking metal. Her outstretched hand got her back through the concealed door. It snapped shut behind her.

  People are trying to kill me.

  The words seemed so insurmountably big in her head. She ignored them and focused on her breathing. She inhaled deeply, her chest rising, and exhaled long.

  Run.

  Zala sprinted forward, stumbling as she made her way back through the long, thin, low-lit corridors. The thick, snaking cables along the wall seemed to push in against her. She hissed her destination at her terminal, which managed to work out her hurried demands – the outside of the Five Prongs. Her terminal ran through the maps it had downloaded from the security connection. A golden trail unfurled before her, up winding stairs and round tight corners, showing her the way out. She ran so fast the display for the guide trail had trouble keeping ahead of her.

  Finally, it brought her to a tall ladder. Zala placed her foot on it, and as she pulled herself up a shot rang out, ricocheting off the wall next to her. They’d kept up with her this whole time. She pulled herself up the ladder with her arms, her legs kicking off the rungs below as she leapt to reach higher and higher. She placed a gloved hand on the glowing door at the top. The trapdoor slid open to reveal the outside courtyard of the NLDT campus. Zala heaved herself up and waved the door closed. She quickly opened up a brute-force passcode cracker and trained it on the door. In a fraction of a second, the program fed enough random, incorrect guesses into the door’s lock that it shut down as a default security measure. Zala could hear yells and hammering on the other side, but they weren’t getting through.

  She bent over, sucking in great lungfuls of the cool night air. Her exit had the good fortune to be on the opposite side of the campus from the main public entrance, and there was nobody around to see her – at least, not until a security team or maintenance workers came to follow up on the information from her pursuers. She set off briskly down the side of a neighbouring building. Finding a quiet corner, she took off her rucksack and shed the overalls so that she was back in her street clothes. She crammed the overalls into her rucksack, then strode purposefully across the courtyard and disappeared into a Downtown back alley.

  Chapter 8

  ‘I’M TELLING YOU, Kahleed, it wasn’t any one of us!’

  Matron looked ready to break her portable terminal in half. On the larger home terminal screen on the wall, a New Cairo Network newscast had headlines emblazoned all over it. ‘Terrorist attack on the Five Prongs’. Across the screen, talking heads discussed the five people in hospital, one with a broken jaw and concussion, and the other four deafened. The message sent was clear – the previous night, the conflict in the Naj-Pur and Surja districts had boiled over into the rest of the city.

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like much of anything actually happened,’ Matron said into her terminal. ‘I mean, I’m not seeing any convincing physical damage in the footage. I dunno, I’ll talk to our people on the inside.’

  She powered down her portable terminal and turned to look over at Ryan Granier, who was seated in a corner. ‘What’s your take on this, rich boy?’

  Ryan shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Three days since he’d woken up in that office and the restraints which had bound his hands were off. He’d managed to gain his captors’ trust up to a point, but on more than one occasion he had said something that inadvertently earned Matron’s rancour. He could do without her ‘forgetting’ to feed him today.

  ‘You guys have the support of most of the population in Naj-Pur and Surja. That’s a good, what, six million? If the Council’s outreach people don’t consolidate the support of the upper and middle classes, they’re not going to offer much of a fight. The Council’s media relations teams are making a mountain out of a molehill. If there’s an armed uprising and the Council need to suppress it with violent means, genuine fear of the people they’re suppressing will keep the more liberal voices in the middle and upper classes silent. Plus, this news network is wholly owned by GeniSec, and this break-in is pretty embarrassing to NDLT from a security perspective. If NDLT can’t keep their server farms secure, what else might get compromised? It might be worth checking today’s financial news.’

  Matron raised an eyebrow. ‘That figures. I’m amazed GeniSec and the Co
uncil can manipulate the press like that.’

  ‘People are asked to bury or push stories all the time out of corporate interest. It used to be that the profits of revealing a scandalous story were enough to cover expenses, but news isn’t the business it was.’ Ryan shrugged. ‘A lot of institutions have a hard time keeping up with the pace of the demand for information; it’s an expensive business, so they’ve got to cater to the moneymen.’

  Matron cast a sideward glare at the screen. ‘Bastards.’

  ‘Can you blame them? Like I say, media budgets are getting slashed and the media companies have employees to pay, and those people have families to feed and clothe. They’re just trying to do the best they can in those circumstances, but a roof over their children’s heads will make all those corporate demands seem much more reasonable.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Matron, a look of disdain on her face, ‘but those corporate demands are for the media to demonize the poorest, most vulnerable people in this city as diseased, violent or both. They portray us as being less worth keeping alive. I mean, Christ, the Council put a major piece of legislation on hold to keep you alive. They wouldn’t even fund my cousin’s replacement pancreatic implants. If it weren’t for our funding here, he’d have died.’

  Ryan had no idea where to go from there. Defending or playing devil’s advocate for the people who would have let her cousin die, or, worse, enquiring about where this ‘funding’ was coming from, could have dire consequences.

  Rule Three was to never antagonize your captors regarding religion or politics, especially when those beliefs were the reason they’d taken you in the first place.

  So instead, he just nodded and said, ‘Yeah, it’s horrible.’

  Satisfied that she had won the argument, Matron turned away. ‘You’ve got sandwiches for lunch. Ration-grade, of course. Think shuttle food, only a little drier. Don’t look at it while you eat it and you should be fine.’

  And with that she stood and walked off, leaving the newscast to flicker away.