Authors: David Wingrove
It wasn’t Trish. It was Daas from Hinton.
‘Forgive me, Jake, but you’re needed instantly.’
Jake sat up, blearily rubbing at his eyes. Beside him, Kate slept on.
‘Hi, Daas. You want me to go into the room?’
‘No. You need to come in. I’ve spoken to George. He says he’ll meet you there.’
‘I see. I’ll shower…’
‘A company craft will be on your roof in ten.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Daas was DAAS4, the Datscape Automated Analysis System, Version 4, an enhanced intelligence unit. Its job was to keep alert to sudden Market shifts.
An alarm bell was ringing. Something urgent was happening.
As he showered, Jake wondered what could possibly have got George Hinton out of bed at this unearthly hour. Something big. It had to be. But what?
Everything had been fine when he’d left, with not a single sign of anything resembling a run. There’d been no tension, no pressure either to buy or sell. No, nor none of those
uncertainties that sometimes precipitated a scramble. In fact, nothing unpredictable at all. The Market had been solid.
George met him in the Wiring Room fifteen minutes later.
It was called a Wiring Room because, in earlier incarnations of the datscape, the operatives had stayed outside, literally wired-in to the interface, data pulsing through their synapses. Of
course, there were still operatives – ‘boardmen’ – who performed that function, sat there at the great long curve of a desk, plugged in directly to the mainframe. Their job
was to back up the
logins
and process the information – the purchases and sales – that the
logins
made on behalf of their clients. But there was a special room for that
now, surrounding the central core where the datscape was held, the ‘Dealing Room’ as it was known. The “Wiring Room” had become a kind of anteroom; a place where you put on
the immersion skin and mask. That done, you were fitted into the harness and pushed through the membrane.
Inside
.
George was one of the younger Hintons, a nephew, not part of the inner circle, but still an important man, and the fact that he wanted to go inside and see for himself intrigued Jake. George
Hinton wasn’t at all comfortable in there; he didn’t have the
feel
of it, so if he wanted to go and look for himself, then it had to be serious.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked as the engineers fussed about them, fitting their ‘skins’.
‘It happened an hour back. There was an attack.’
‘What kind of attack?’
‘That’s just it. We’re not sure. It was all rather hit and miss. A few companies. Various stocks. It was all made to seem quite random.’
‘Only it wasn’t.’
‘Quite.’ George Hinton looked entirely different in the skin. Even without his mask on, he looked transformed from the business-suited ‘chap’ he normally was. Not only
that but he had developed a middle-age paunch, which the skin accentuated.
Like a fish out of water.
‘What do we know for certain?’
‘We had five
logins
in at the time, three of whom we’ve had the chance to debrief…’
‘And?’
‘That’s just it. They saw nothing.’
‘But there was damage?’
‘Quite considerable damage. But limited. Like they were flexing their muscles.’
‘They?’
‘As I said, it only happened an hour back. We’ve not had the chance to analyse it properly just yet. Oh, and before you ask, there’s nothing in from MAT. They’re keeping
this all very quiet.’
MAT was Market Activity Tracking, the Market’s own version of DAAS4. It was designed to prevent runs on the Market. To anticipate and act. That they’d not issued a warning suggested
that they didn’t yet know what they were dealing with.
Jake spoke to the air. ‘Daas? Anything to add?’
‘Just that the attacks seemed to come from four separate sources, but were timed to coincide.’
‘And those sources?’
‘Melted away as soon as we put tracers on them. They must have been rerouted twelve to fifteen times.’
So. Serious stuff. Major-league hackers by the sound of it.
‘What if it’s schoolboys?’
Daas was silent a moment, in case George should choose to field the question. When he didn’t, it answered.
‘I don’t think this is schoolboys, Jake. It was a particularly vicious attack.’
‘And schoolboys aren’t vicious?’
‘Not in this fashion. It was too sophisticated. And besides, we’ve got information on all the known hackers. This didn’t have the fingerprint of any one of them. It was…
well…
unique
.’
Daas’s choice of that word fed Jake’s curiosity. Daas had seen it all before, many times over. It was why it was such a good system. And if Daas didn’t recognize something,
then maybe it was a big thing.
And there was that phrase George had used.
Flexing their muscles
. Now why would anyone do that? Why draw attention and then run away?
He didn’t know. But he was going to find out. He was going to go in and look at the evidence.
Forensically
. Because everything you did in the datscape left a trace.
He followed George, their harnesses jolting along the guide rails.
Inside was a massive sphere, within which hung the
logins
. Compared to the virtual space of the datscape it was incredibly small. Less than a thousandth the size. But it didn’t need
to be big. It only needed to be large enough for the company’s
logins
to hang there, in their harnesses, while data flooded their skins and masks. ‘The drying room’ some of
them called it, because that’s what it looked like to the engineers who had to go in there sometimes to make repairs.
It was all an illusion. The very best available.
Jake stepped inside.
He’d not mentioned it yesterday when he’d been making the immersion. Explosion wasn’t really the word for it. Sensory overload, more like. Every time he ‘stepped’
through. Like an all-body orgasm. The drugs from the immersion skin helped, of course, sensitizing him, letting his real skin merge with the artificial one. It was one great data feed, only
translated into see, feel, smell and touch. SFST, or a walk down Science Fiction Street, as some wag had called it.
If his avatar had had a cock, it would have been hard every second he was in there.
‘Christ,’ George said quietly. For a moment he had forgotten.
Jake glanced to his side. George’s avatar was hardly subtle. He was a British grenadier from the eighteenth century, complete with cocked hat. A major, by the look of his regalia.
Jake stopped, looking about him at the sweeping vistas of that rainbow-coloured landscape, seeing, in the distance, a number of other figures wandering about.
Everything looks fine. Fine and healthy.
That was the other thing about the datscape. The silence. It was all a great dumb show. Not a cry or echo.
Some companies even hired the deaf, thinking they were perhaps better sensitized to such a place, but Jake knew better. One filled that absence with one’s thoughts.
Besides, if anything, the removal of one sense enhanced the others.
To his right, great melted slabs of glaucous blue climbed the air like some nightmare giant’s causeway. Beyond them was a riot of sienna and slate-grey crystalline shapes, while to his
left, beyond George, piles of tiny blocks of shining amethyst fought for space with massive spikes of olive green. Steaming flows of hot pink lava ate narrow gullies into the surrounding rock-like
edifices, whilst just above them to their left, a waterfall of forest green and ivory particles fell in a constant tumble from a ledge of startling black crystal. And always, everywhere, were the
data threads, like rainbow-coloured smoke trails.
‘Daas? Where the fuck are we heading?’
Daas answered at once. ‘I’ll put up a guide thread.’
Instantly, a pulsing thread of bright, golden light appeared, snaking its way through the geometric chaos into the distance.
He looked to George and pointed, mouthing the words.
‘You go first.’
Like Orpheus in the underworld…
Or like Joe Chip in the half-life world.
Only he knew where he was here. And if there was danger you had only to cut the connection and in an instant you’d be back there, in the drying room, hanging limply in the harness.
Jake smiled and walked on, following the portly figure of the grenadier.
The smell of it hit him from twenty paces away. A sickly sweet, charred kind of a smell. Not healthy, like the smell of cooked meat. This was something rotten, something
suggestive of corruption.
‘Archer and Simmons,’ George said, kneeling over it to conduct an examination, ignoring the stench.
Instantly, Daas fed him data. Archer and Simmons had been bond merchants, specializing in Far Eastern bonds, commodities and London financial futures. Now they were little more than a charred
space on the floor of a virtual landscape.
In the real world they would be arriving any time now, to find their doors barred, their company wound up and in administration.
Poor bastards. They never knew what hit them.
‘Systematic destruction,’ George said, straightening up. ‘Only why? Is this someone getting their revenge?’
Jake spoke to Daas. ‘Can we see a re-con?’
At once a massive, opaque bubble formed about them. An instant later, the datscape shimmered and then jumped. They were back two hours.
The reconstruction began.
Jake watched. Saw how good a company Archer and Simmons had been. The tiny clusters of purple, grape-like growths that represented it were bulbous and had a healthy shine. You could smell how
rich and fine they were.
And then, suddenly, and with a savage intensity that took Jake by surprise, the attack began. For a moment there was nothing, just a kind of pulse in the air, and then a swarm of tiny orange
crystals, no bigger than dice, seemed to materialize from nowhere and descend on the grape-like clusters.
It was over in seconds. Literally in seconds.
They slowed it, ran it back.
‘Jesus… look at that…’
Slowed down you could see how the tiny crystal shapes attacked, like a pack of jackals, prising the skin of the company open and manoeuvring themselves into the tiny fissures that formed in the
bruised purple of the clusters. Once they were in they began to digest it piece by tiny piece, devouring it in moments, leaving only the tiniest traces of it to linger, like some vile calling
card.
Leaving just the rotted carcass smell.
Jake stared at it, impressed, but also the tiniest bit afraid. He had never seen its like. This wasn’t malware or a virus, not even of the most complex kind. This was different. As
different as one species from another, for each crystal had been programmed to work with every other crystal, like a tiny army of super-efficient soldiers. This wasn’t hacking in its
traditional sense. It went way beyond that. To visually conceive this was one thing – to programme it quite another. As he ran the re-con again and again he realized just how astonishingly
complex they were, the code written in counterpoint, like tiny symphonies. Yes. But who could have written anything quite so beautiful, quite so devastatingly destructive?
And one other thing. Where had it all gone? The bonds. The company’s assets. If this was a metaphor, what did it represent? Because something must have happened to them. They had to be
somewhere, didn’t they? Archer and Simmons had been worth six billion Euros. So who had that money now?
George looked to him and shook his head. ‘Come, Jake. Let’s move on. I want to get this done, before the board meets at ten.’
While the board met, Jake went home. Kate had gone, but she had left him a note, propped up on the kitchen table.
Gone to see M & D. See you later. K xxx
Jake smiled. So she’d gone to tell her parents.
He showered again, standing there in the fine hot mist of water while he thought about what he’d seen.
They still had no idea who was behind the attacks. Whoever had written the attack programmes had made sure that the datscape tracers that latched on to them were led a merry dance, this way and
that, until they fell off cliff-edges or found themselves in virtual cul-de-sacs.
Exasperated, Jake had run several of the complex ‘fox and hound’ programmes he had developed for this purpose, trying to discern patterns, to work out just how they had slipped in
and out again, under the radar. Trying to get under the skin of what happened, to understand it better.
Only it hadn’t worked. Whoever had devised these attacks had known someone like Jake would try something like this. They had anticipated it. Had
written it in
.
Part of the ‘beauty’ of these rogues was the fact that they were
so
efficient, and that had happened because someone had spent a long time analysing the datscape’s
protection system, looking for its fundamental weaknesses.
Given time, data-shields like MAT and DAAS4 were programmed to deal with such intrusions. However, they had first to identify them. Thus there was a delay in responding. Not a long delay –
in both cases it was less than four seconds, real time – but a delay nonetheless. A
hiatus
in which an aggressive interloper could break in and cause havoc.
All four of the attacking viruses had played on that. The longest had taken 2.357 seconds start to finish, the shortest a mere 1.670 seconds. All four had been tightly coordinated, such that the
intrusion took just 2.623 seconds in its entirety.
Daas hadn’t stood a chance. By the time it had realized they were hostiles they were gone, leaving smoke trails and a false scent.
Not only that, but each was quite distinct. One tore its victim-host apart. Another stripped it to shreds. The third vaporized its victim. And the last – Jake smiled as he thought about it
– the fourth had simply frozen the assets of the company it had attacked. Left them intact but made them valueless. He wasn’t sure how they had done it, but they had.
So. Four coordinated attacks on four quite random, unconnected targets, each of them frighteningly efficient. Each utterly untraceable.