Terminal Connection (27 page)

Truth

The future of war is information, the future soldier, a terrorist. The Internet will be his battlefield; his weapons will be information and his targets, civilians. From his PC he’ll attack anywhere and everywhere. With the magnitude of a nuclear blast, he’ll take down power grids, worldwide communications, and all forms of commerce. He’ll blackout the nation, collapse financial markets, and starve cities. For technology is a two-edged sword, enabling progress while fostering dependence. When he pulls the plug, civilization will grind to a halt. In his war, there are no frontlines, no rules, and no prisoners—only chaos reigns. We have already seen this soldier and know his wrath. His name is Syzygy.

—Vinnie Russo, Supreme Admiral of I2 Corp.

Wednesday, June 16, 2020

S
teve stood on the beach where they had defeated Syzygy the day before. The sun still hung low in the west, tingeing everything crimson, making the beach a collage of light and shadow. The roar of the ocean drowned out all other sounds, and the ocean spray choked the air.

He could be anywhere,
Steve realized, grasping his phaser. He looked down as a warm breeze tugged at his virtual slacks. Charlie sat obediently at his side. “Charlie, scan for viruses.”

The dog’s eyes rolled back in their sockets as he searched for the virus on the VR Server, looking for viral patterns in the bytes of files, similar to how the immune system searched for viral patterns in proteins of the human body.

Steve scanned the ocean but only saw more shadows among the waves. A seagull cried and he spun around, but he saw nothing in the palm tree forest above the beach. After several seconds, Charlie shook his head. “I detected no computer viruses.”

It didn’t make sense. Even if Syzygy were a new viral strain, it would be based on existing viral models. Charlie could find any of these new strains. Maybe Syzygy wasn’t a virus after all. He breathed in. The air smelled fresh and crisp. He shook his head. Syzygy had tricked him before, not again.

The virus had to be camouflaged somehow. From the email he knew an eight-day-old connection existed that somehow let the virus in. The file holding Syzygy had to be at least that old.

“Jan, list all files on the Nexus VR Server eight days or older.”

A wall of platinum rose out of the sand. Across the top it read:
First 50 lines of 11,012
.

He shook his head. This wasn’t going to work. The only way to find the virus was to search through the files one by one, and there were way too many entries.

Allison’s words returned to him:
broaden your focus
. There had to be another way. He gazed out across the ocean. Perhaps he could view them all at once in a way that would make Syzygy stand out. “Jan, display all the files using a sun simulation. Let the color represent the age of the file with eight days being black and one hour being white.”

The beach disappeared, replaced by silence and blackness. Beneath him, a fireball roared to life and expanded from horizon to horizon. Like a launching space ship, it rumbled in his chest and rattled his bones. Sulfur choked the air, burning his nose and lungs. Individual fires dotted the landscape, extending in all directions, creating a forest of flames. A white plasma burst fell from above, striking a flame beneath him, causing it to burn higher and shift from red to white. It represented data being added to the file. Steve scanned the surface. Many of the flames were black. Syzygy could be in any one of them.

Steve pointed to the horizon. “Jan, ten miles an hour.” He moved as the surface heaved and churned beneath him. The flames burned in assorted colors: white, yellow, orange, red, purple, and black. One of the red flames turned green at its tip, expanding, until it belched a green orb of fire. It rose from the surface and disappeared into the darkness above.

“Charlie, what do the green flares represent?”

“They indicate a file or program being loaded into memory.”

Maybe Syzygy wasn’t stored as a file but only lived in memory as a running program—a computer worm. Of course! The eight-day-old Internet connection would have to be connected to an eight-day-old program! “Jan, include all running programs in the representation.”

Above them clouds appeared. They roared and billowed. Beneath the clouds, a flare of white fire erupted from the surface. Launching straight up, it struck a cloud and rolled like mist across the cloud’s underside. Several green orbs rose slowly from the surface and exploded, forming new clouds. Lightning lit the sky, linking the clouds together. On the horizon, a white tornado tore into the surface, sucking up flames and feeding a cloud. Steve watched as the tornado became darker and darker, turning almost black. He pointed to it. “Charlie, what is that?”

“The connection to the System Log.”

Steve frowned. “Do you see Syzygy anywhere?”

“No.”

It was here, but neither he nor Charlie could see Syzygy. Steve pondered for a moment. What if it hid from the antiviral software in the same way X-flu hid from the body’s immune system? He guessed, like X-flu, the Chinese had engineered the computer virus. The human immune system identified most viruses by looking for patterns in their outer protein shell and annihilating ones it did not recognize. X-flu disguised itself from the body’s immune system by continually changing its outer protein shell, never staying in one form long enough for the body to mount an immune response. The human body could not find a common pattern in X-flu since there was not one. Syzygy had to be camouflaging itself in a similar way. If Syzygy altered the order of its bytes, changing its pattern in memory periodically, an antiviral program would miss it.

Steve shook his head. How would it fit? There was not enough memory on the Nexus to hold such a complex virus. An idea came to him. What if Syzygy appended itself to an existing program and then squeezed both itself and the existing program smaller, using a compression program? By using a different compression program each time, it could also change its pattern and evade detection.

Steve stared at the forest of flame. Nothing stayed the same here. How could he ever find it in this mess? A flame hurled a green orb into the clouds. Only a hundred feet separated the surface and clouds. This represented the lack of memory on the VR server. That was it!

The virus needed to find any copies of itself. It could not afford to re-infect the same VR server repeatedly. That would eat up all available memory and eventually crash the server. He would find Syzygy the same way it found itself; but how did the virus do that?

He remembered Allison’s list of infected sites. The Syzygy programs had been running for several days on many servers. Why would a stealthy computer worm leave such an obvious trail? It must be how all the programs kept in contact with one another. That meant each program was like a part of its body and the connections between served as its nervous system. In essence, it was one massive distributed program. If he was right, then that was its Achilles’ heel. An anti viral program could follow the links to each of the Syzygy and destroy them. All he had to do was infiltrate the virus. In order to do that, he would have to find out the exact way it used these links to remain in contact with its various parts, and he would have to plug in.

“Jan, up a hundred feet.” Steve and Charlie rose, sailing through the clouds. They emerged and the sky was dark again. Beneath them, the cloud tops appeared gray with an occasional bright glow accompanied by a distant pop, like a bomb going off. “Jan, can you add in outside connections?”

Stars appeared. Each represented connections from Nexus users to the VR server. Solid white rods of light from the distant stars pierced the clouds. As time passed, the white rods flashed in and out of existence as people logged on and off the VR server. One connection remained, turning darker and darker as it got older and older. Syzygy had a persistent connection. “Charlie, is Syzygy mounted to that connection?”

“Yes.”

His gaze followed the line of light to the cloud representing Syzygy. That program had destroyed his life, killed everyone who was dear to him. Steve pointed at the cloud. “Jan, take us there.”

In an instant, he hovered fifty feet above where the ray of light struck the cloud. Steve studied the hot gray mist that swirled below, dissipating into the night sky. Although most of the cloud was gray, some parts were red, fiery like the surface below. Steve looked where the ray of white light stabbed the cloud. He saw a thin membrane, the size of a manta ray, flapping its wings. It looked like an ember, glowing orange, its edges a brightly lit yellow. He watched it pulsate. Its surface shifted to white as a layer of ash appeared. Beneath the ash, its color deepened to red then purple. Suddenly, it flared to life again, becoming white hot and bright.

This was a live picture of Syzygy, a living thing, a computer worm that spanned the Internet. Yet, there was nothing tangible about it. It had no substance. It was just a program in memory, a series of ones and zeros in a memory chip, consisting of a pattern of electrons, a pattern that had destroyed his life.

Steve looked at the ray of light—Syzygy’s internal link. He could use it to track down each iteration of the program and destroy it. To do that he needed some way to get into its
head
, to learn and follow the links.

A computer virus would infect, spread, multiply, and express. Syzygy expressed itself by murder and death. If he removed that part of Syzygy’s code, leaving only the part of Syzygy that infected and spread, he could use this “lobotomized” Syzygy to link up with the other Syzygy programs running on the other VR servers. By putting a different expression program in place, he could invade the virus.

Steve stared down at the cloud. He almost sensed the thing breathing as it alternated between white, orange, and red. Syzygy was transient, a program running on the VR server and the Nexus. He needed to get a copy.

The Core File!
Of course.

The Core File captured an image of all programs running on the Nexus when the Nexus crashed. “Jan, make a copy of the V-Chip program from Xik Qang’s Core File. It should contain a computer virus. Extract the virus and delete any of the sections of the virus that are expressive.”

After a few seconds, Jan replied. “Task complete.”

Now he had to find a way to eradicate the worm. Syzygy was a dynamic program, able to escape to different sites. Steve needed the new expression program to be intelligent, something that would chase Syzygy down. Like … like Charlie. “Jan, replace the expression sections in Syzygy with Charlie.”

Floating beneath him, Charlie yipped and looked up, wagging his tail wildly.

“Task complete,” Jan said.

Steve grinned. It was hard to believe this little rodent of a dog was going to bail out the U.S. military; but you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, especially in VR.

As if reading his thoughts, Charlie looked up at him and barked.

W
alking through eight-foot double doors, Vinnie entered the virtual room. It was round, its ceiling lined with copper, its floors carpeted with the Presidential seal, bordered in red cedar. The lower half of the circular wall was also paneled in cedar. The upper half of the wall sported the portraits of the previous presidents. At the opposite end of the room was a fireplace, around which were two couches where the President and one of his advisers sat.

As Vinnie approached, they stood. The President stepped forward and shook Vinnie’s hand. “Before we begin, I want to thank you for stepping in with such short notice.”

“My pleasure, sir,” Vinnie nodded.

“I want to introduce Troy White, the new PACCINC.” The President turned to the adviser. “Troy, can you brief Vinnie on what the Joint Chiefs said?”

He nodded. “Computer, pull up map of South East Asia.”

In the center of the room a satellite image of the region appeared. Superimposed on the map were national boundaries, major cities, and the current location of the ASEAN forces and the Chinese military.

Troy continued. “The situation is this. The Chinese effectively control the South China Sea after taking three actions. One, they took out Vietnam. Two, they have blocked the entrances into the South China Sea. Three, they took out Warscape as well as the carrier Warscape was on,
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln
. Now, let me explain each of these.

“The Chinese Peoples Liberation Army successfully launched a massive air attack against Vietnam’s major Naval and Air bases. Da Nang, Hanoi, and Haiphong were all decimated by cluster bombs. Further south, the Chinese PLA also struck Cam Ranh Bay and Cao Tho.

“How did the Chinese strike so far south?” Vinnie gasped. “Their carrier
Varyag
wasn’t operational!”

“The carrier was a ruse. Our analysts failed to account for the Chinese in-flight refueling advances and their use of sea floats—floating airfields.

“Anyway, very little of Vietnam’s military assets survived. They flew their remaining air force to bases in the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, while setting its surviving Navy to sea. In short, Vietnam has been neutralized.”

Vinnie shook his head.

“It gets worse. Warscape went down along with
U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln
. As you know, all hands were lost, including Ed Davis. We lost one other ship in the battle group, a supply/logistics ship called
U.S.S. Camiden
. The rest of the battle group is fine for the time being.

“A few fighters made it off the carrier before she sank. The Chinese will wait a of couple hours until these planes have run out of fuel before they decide to strike or hold off. If they hold off, the Chinese PLA will likely get enough subs and littoral crafts into the Spratlys to screw us anyway.”

“Littoral?” Vinnie asked.

“I mean skiffs, light sea craft, or anything used in shallow water. The PLA will dig into the Spratlys. They can easily hide their subs and light sea craft among the thousands of cays and reefs and set up floating airfields. Even if Warscape comes back up after that, we’re in a world of hurt. Warscape’s sensors will have a hard time distinguishing between the PLA and the ambient sounds of the reefs.

“If we try to take them out by force, they would grind us down, taking us out a ship at a time. Their losses would be high, but it wouldn’t matter. Their people are more acclimated to casualties. After a few of our ships sank, the U.S. public would demand that we pull out. Mr. Russo, if the Chinese make it to the Spratlys, we’ll never get them out.

“In the meantime, the Chinese have stationed six nuclear subs, two at each entrance, into the South China Sea. They’ve placed two between Singapore and the Indonesian State of Kalimantan in Borneo. They have two more in the Taiwan Strait, stationed between Taiwan and Mainland China. And they have yet two more patrolling the Luzon Strait between the northern Philippines and southern Taiwan. Of course, together they effectively block the two largest trade routes in the world.

“Eighty percent of Japan’s shipping flows through these trade routes. The Japanese Ambassador has hinted that they will evoke article six in the WWII treaty signed by the U.S. and Japan. The article states that in exchange for stripping Japan of its military, the U.S. will defend Japan’s national interests.” The NSA nodded to the President, indicating that he was done.

The President turned to Vinnie. “As I understand it, you identified and killed the terrorist involved, but Syzygy still prevents Houston, the other Warscape, from coming online. Is that correct?”

Vinnie nodded.

“So that leaves us with three options,” the President said. “Option one is nuclear. If we explode a one-kiloton atomic bomb a mile above the ocean, it will generate a strong electromagnetic pulse. This pulse would radiate out for a thousand miles in every direction and would be strong enough to fry anything electronic in that range. It might buy us some time.

“Unfortunately, China’s perception of nuclear weapon use is
very
different from our own perception. The Chinese PLA could easily misinterpret our actions and begin launching nuclear or chemical weapons against U.S. military or civilian targets.

“Option two is electronic. We have a number of electronic assets in place, a variety of computer moles, viruses, and worms. We could take down a good percentage of their civilian infrastructure: gas, oil, financial markets, transportation, and water supply. Given their problems at home, they might lose interest in the Spratlys.

“However, we are much more technologically dependent than China. If we attack them electronically, we’re sending a message that our computerized infrastructure is fair game. Even with limited penetration into the U.S., the damage would be colossal. Worse, the United States as a democratic and multiethnic society hides spies well. The Chinese, with their homogeneous dictatorship, do not have this problem.”

After a brief pause the President continued. “That leaves option three. Vinnie, we need you to take down Syzygy and bring up Warscape in Houston. If you can pull this off, this temporary appointment to the Assistant Secretary of Defense C4ISR will become permanent.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The President smiled. “Don’t thank me yet. Depending what you do, Warscape and I2 Corp may remain dead. You might be on the street tomorrow.”