Chapter 3
It took two days for Justin to re-acclimate to his normal. The night they got home from Chicago he had been almost catatonic. Charlene tried to put Justin down in his own bed and he clung to her like a monkey and whimpered deep in his throat. For the last two nights, he had slept with them. During the day Frank took him on long walks in the fields and pointed out birds and deer beds. That always seemed to calm him. The city is too dangerous, Frank thought. Out here in the fresh air, out here where everyone grew up together and knows each other’s history. It may be the only safe place left.
They got back from their walk and were greeted by two familiar faces. Fernando and Margarito were migratory workers that went farm to farm during the harvest seasons, literally jumping rail throughout the country. They had worked on the McWilliams’ farm since Frank was Justin’s age.
Fernando was tall and handsome. The years in the sun had baked his skin dark and the deep lines from a lifetime of hard, outdoor labor enhanced his already good looks.
Margarito was short and fat. He had a loopy mustache and curly black hair that fanned out from a perpetually worn baseball cap. Justin liked both of them and when they met at the front of the house, Justin threw a quick wave and pressed into his dad, almost hiding.
“Hola, Justin. Como esta?” Margarito asked.
“Esta bien,” Justin replied. “Y tu?”
“Soy MUY Bien!” He put his fist out and Justin bumped it.
“How have you been?” Frank asked.
“Good. Good harvest this year,” Fernando said with a thick accent. “Clara sends her best.” He turned to the fields. “The crops came in.”
“We’ve had the perfect amount of rain this year,” Frank said. They walked inside and Charlene brought them beer and Justin lemonade. They caught up. Frank noticed that Justin had grown restless.
Margarito was setting up a joke.
“A three legged dog walked into the sal—”
“I want to go upstairs!” Justin interrupted.
“Sorry, Margo,” Frank said. “Are you okay?”
“I want to go upstairs. I want to try the Mindlink.”
“We have guests.”
Justin got flustered. He rocked back and forth. Charlene pleaded to Frank with her eyes. He acquiesced.
“Okay. Say goodnight to everyone.”
Justin said goodnight to Fernando and Margarito and quickly hugged his mom and dad. He took the Mindlink box with him.
In his bedroom, Justin inspected the device. From the top, it looked like the skeleton of a bicycle helmet. It was machined from one piece of aluminum. The interior had LED-like red sensors that ran around the interior and two larger green sensors that pressed onto the top of the head. He unrolled a separate fiber line that connected the Mindlink to his home’s data terminal. The brochure was a slip of paper:
Thank you for purchasing the Mindlink!
The Mindlink will provide you access to cyberspace and all of the programs and functions in it. These include:
–Work
–Social
–Games
–Misc.
To start your journey, unpack the Mindlink, plug it into your data terminal (50 megabyte up/down minimum required) and wait for the sensors to self-check (30 seconds). A reclined position is recommended. Put the Mindlink on, following the prompts to set up your account and access cyberspace!
Warning: 0.3% of the population is susceptible to seizures.
With reverence, Justin plugged the fiber line from the Mindlink into the data terminal near his desk. The sensors of the Mindlink playfully pulsed and danced while it booted up.
Justin went to the bathroom and peed. He didn’t want to be mid-game or chat and have to get off. He came back, plopped into his dad’s old recliner and gently put the Mindlink on his head.
As he did, his bedroom disappeared from top to bottom. In its place was a GUI screen that asked his name, his social security number, and a few more questions to confirm his identity.
He thought his name and it appeared. While he thought his name, his social security number filled in, because his brain—unconsciously to him—had answered that question on another level. The other questions he didn’t even know he answered.
The first interface felt like he was in front of a gigantic touch screen. The next interface did not. He floated in a room. The room itself had no physical characteristic to it, no physics such as gravity or the faint movement of air we all take for granted. It was yellow and calming. He heard far off wind chimes. A question hung in the air:
–What would you like to do?–
It bobbed up and down in a friendly way. The Mindlink was a two-way highway and while the options weren’t listed, suddenly he knew all of them.
Find Jared Stachowitz, he thought. He had never met Jared, but they shared a common interest in mathematics and software programming. Justin had won a speed math contest hosted by MIT’s online university the year prior. Jared had come in second and when it was revealed that Justin was only eleven and he won without a Mindlink, he had become a micro-celebrity. Jared and he had corresponded over the year.
–Hey JM! You finally made it! (Jared has accepted your invitation)–
The words appeared in his head. The yellow room faded over to an auditorium with the longest chalkboard he had every seen. It was as tall and wide as a football field. Jared was heavy, balding and in his twenties. His eyes sparkled with humor. He was at the giant chalkboard. About one hundred people sat in rows of seats behind him. Some looked like models, some looked like superheroes, some looked as plain as they were in real life. Including Jared.
JM! Jared said/thought. I didn’t know if I’d see the day!
“I finally got a Mindlink,” Justin said aloud.
You don’t have to talk out loud, you look like a noob. Just think it to us, Jared said back. Justin heard other voices too, but he realized none of their mouths were moving. Online telepathy.
Ok, Justin projected. Is that what you look like?
Yep. Young, fat, and bald. God gave me everything (LOL).
What do I look like?
Frankly, spooge.
Everyone laughed.
What’s spooge?
(Frown) I forgot, you’re twelve. Nothing. Don’t worry about it. I’m teaching these snickering assholes Sleeper software programming. A lot of them are my students, if you can believe that. I’ll be done in an hour. Do you want to come back then? I can show you what I do.
That’d be great! Justin said. Where should I go?
When I first got on, I went to a racing simulator.
This flight simulator is cool, another voice interjected. Jared and Justin turned to a zombie named AAARGH4237.
I like planes, Justin said.
Send him the link. Jared allowed AAARGH4237.
–AAARGH4237 has bookmarked a flight simulator he recommends. Would you like to go?–
Yes, Justin thought.
See you in an hour, Jared said.
The classroom faded as Jared went back into his lesson and an airfield materialized. Justin stood on an airstrip. Planes he was familiar with were already on the tarmac, but the one he really wanted to fly wasn’t. He saw a shimmer to the left of the vision. He turned and instead of a Harrier, a Blackbird SR-71 sat there. His favorite plane.
In his head, he was asked if he’d like a tutorial. He said he would. A man appeared next to him. Justin understood it was a simulation, not a real person. Already, easily, it was clear who was real and who was fake. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. Like it was built in.
“Good morning,” a young Chuck Yeager said to Justin. Justin immediately knew all of Chuck Yeager’s accomplishments, as if he had known for years.
Chuck walked Justin toward the Blackbird.
“You’re about to fly an SR-71 Blackbird, one of America’s finest aeronautical marvels. A plane so advanced, that at one point it was thought that it couldn’t be done.”
; Chuck went on about the Blackbird as they climbed up into it.
I want to fly, Justin thought. He had been given the option to either fly or ride.
Chuck helped him taxi the plane toward the runway. When they got to the long tarmac and the tower gave them clearance, they roared down the asphalt and into the air.
“You’re doing good, son,” Chuck said. Justin could tell he was impressed.
“We’re gonna get’er up to eighty thousand feet and let her stretch’r legs,” the legend said with a smile.
The SR-71 sliced through the air and pushed Justin and his virtual friend toward the heavens. The deep blue of the sky began to turn pale and then at sixty-five thousand feet, a sheet of star speckled black poked through.
Space! Justin thought.
“Alright, we’re easing up to seventy thousand feet, we can now make a gradual ascent to eighty,” Chuck said in the calm voice of a man who had tested the limits and come back to talk about it. “We are flying at Mach 3, that’s two thousand one hundred and twenty-four miles per hour. We have fifty percent fuel reserve.”
Justin suddenly had a thought. This was a video game, nothing more. There were no real world consequences. You could drive a funny car into a tanker full of fuel and nothing would happen.
“I want to fly into space,” Justin said.
“That’s a negative, the SR-71’s peak altitude is eighty-five thousand, five hundred feet. We’re on the wire.”
“This isn’t real. I want to go to the moon.”
“Son, we all do and with American ingenuity someday we will.”
Justin pulled up on the flight stick. The nose of the Blackbird tilted up and then, without his input, the nose dropped back down. The altitude meter said eight-five thousand, five hundred feet.
“That’s all she’s got,” Yeager said.
A switch went off in Justin’s mind and the hull of the plane flickered beneath him.
This is a program.
It seemed real, but it wasn’t. The back of his mind felt like a muscle on the verge of cramping. It was uncomfortable, but at the same time, the strangeness wasn’t unwelcome. It almost felt good.
I can go anywhere, the back of his mind whispered, and when it did, the plane shuddered and once again the hull went clear. But this time, all the way. He was riding on air. He still held the yoke, but beneath him was just earth. He didn’t like it. The hull reformed beneath his feet like a piece of plastic that had melted in reverse.
“Son—”
Quiet, Chuck.
Chuck fell silent. Justin looked at his partner and Yeager was frozen like an animatronic doll shut down mid-movement.
Justin was too young to equate it, but his mind burned pleasantly like the beginning build of an orgasm. When he first put on the Mindlink, he became aware of the user options and search categories as if it was an old memory. It was the same for this program. He felt its processing, he sensed the root files that held the high resolution textures, the voice recognition software, the programming that weaved it all together. With that pleasant burning, his mind raced past the computational cycle of the server it resided on and subconsciously, he began to reconstruct it to his desires.
I don’t want the plane.
The plane vanished, and with it, Chuck. It was now just him in the quiet void between earth and space. He rolled onto his back to look at the stars and the moon. They were bright and welcoming. They beckoned him.
I miss Duke. One of Justin’s dogs passed away that year.
And Justin knew that against all odds, when he got to the moon, Duke would be there waiting for him. Maybe in a doggie space suit with jets. They could play fetch. Justin didn’t have much of an arm, but he knew in space he could throw a baseball a hundred miles.
He rocketed toward the moon like Superman. Surrounding his periphery, gelatinous floating tubes nipped into his vision like a ball of parasitic worms. But they didn’t bother him. They felt like they were a part of him. Like a jet’s contrail, he left an oily mist in his wake. But it wasn’t exhaust. This world had no pollutants. It was the mindscape of the most powerful Sleeper that had ever connected into cyberspace. It was the mindscape of a boy that was excited to see his dog on the moon.
He landed on the moon. He didn’t know that the simulator didn’t have this programmed. In it, the moon was a high-resolution texture, nothing more. But he landed on it anyway. Dust swirled up from his feet like snowflakes from a snow globe.
He saw the moon lander from Apollo 11. He saw the American flag, wavered and unmoving. Both were in the wrong location because he didn’t know the particulars of the moon. He subconsciously filled in the blanks from his experiences and conjectures. For him, the surface felt like his sand box at home because it was what he knew. It wasn’t a talcum powder-like dust, because those facts had never entered his mind.
He heard Duke before he saw him. And then Duke crested a gray hill and ran down wagging his tail in a custom made doggy space suit!
Awesome!
“Ruff!” he heard Duke say. How did he hear that? He knew that space didn’t have oxygen.
Then, Justin caught a slight reflection of himself in the clear glass of his space suit helmet.
Ah, intercom.
The next bark was in crackling, low fidelity as Justin imagined it’d be.
Justin had a tennis ball in his hand. Duke jumped around him, wagging his tail furiously. Justin wound up and threw the ball. With no arc, it launched like a cannon shot over the hill that Duke had just come over, waaaay too far to run after. But Duke had a few tricks. His jet pack fired up and with another bark he shot after it.
Within seconds he was back with the green ball somehow in his mouth, beneath the doggy shaped glass helmet.
Justin looked down and the ball was in his hand again. The dog was just as excited for another go.
This is awesome, the King Sleeper thought as he watched his long dead dog fly after another low gravity pitch.
= = =
Justin played with Duke for the hour and he was sad to go. But Duke wagged his spacesuit-lined tail and Justin bookmarked the simulator for another visit before vanishing back to the classroom.
Jared was seated in the first row. A knight Justin had seen earlier was in the process of building a noble steed. The legs and the head were completely formed, but the rest was wireframe and code.
Remember the intrinsic order of Revo, Jared reminded. The knight nodded. Behind him on the giant chalkboard, some lines of code vanished and with it part of the wireframe of the horse. New code appeared on the board like a typed sentence and the wireframe of the horse’s back appeared.
Good, Gegard, Jared said. Sit down Justin. It’ll be just a minute.
Justin could tell that message was just for him. Justin sat down and watched while Jared taught the knight to build a horse for his role playing game.
After thirty minutes the horse was complete, if a bit wonky. For some reason it kicked with its front legs and one eyeball was bigger than the other.
Save it and we’ll work on it tomorrow, Jared said.
Gegard stepped away from the chalkboard and as he did, the chalkboard flexed out and snapped back when he walked to the first row of seats.
Justin is the one who won the speed math contest last year, Jared announced to the dozen or so students.
Still looks like spooge.
Trent, I’ll mute you.
A jock-type avatar threw his hands in frustration. I’m just observing my surroundings.
Jared turned to Justin. How was the simulator?
I went to space! Justin said.
You can’t go to space, the zombie said knowingly.
I did.
Ok, you did. For being slack jawed and rotting, the zombie was surprisingly sarcastic.
Justin. Go up to the whiteboard.
Justin hesitated. He didn’t like people watching him.
It’s ok. This is a beginner’s class. This is where we can trip and get back up, Ja
red reassured. Normally Justin would have shied away. In the real world he always felt like he was at the bottom of a crushing sea waiting to drown. But here he felt airy. Exceptionally aware. He wondered if this was what it was like to be normal.
Walking up, Justin hadn’t noticed all the strange things in the room. Some objects were three dimensional like the horse. A race car sat to the left. When Justin focused, the object shimmied and he could see the flat screen of all the code that went into its design. Other creations looked like small floating mirrors. Some of the people held them in their hands. When Justin focused on them, he could see their application. Some were shareware programs, others plug-ins to some software application that Justin had never seen.
When you approach the chalkboard it gives you access to the programming software. It’s Revo based.
MindCorp had its own programming language derived from Linux. It was the universal language of cyberspace. Justin walked up to the interface. He felt the giant chalkboard lock onto him and in the upper left-hand corner, a cursor blinked. They’ll watch me build the code?
That way we can offer suggestions. This is for practice and fun, Jared said.
What should I program?
Revo is very flexible. You can code anything you want to.
I’ll create a Duke. My dog. He was in space with me.
Okay, good challenge. The dog must behave like a dog, it can’t be static, and it must obey commands. Tough first test.
Justin closed his eyes. He could still feel the program. He saw the string of code in his head to build Duke. Black and brown. Lean and strong. Always wagging his tail.
Holy shit, Jared said. The students murmured.
What? Justin said.
A dog barked in the room.
Justin opened his eyes and Duke was running around sniffing everybody out. He went to the horse and raised his leg.
I didn’t begin building it! Justin said. Everyone was silent.
Dude. You did.
A timer was overhead to keep each student to thirty minutes. It had taken Justin 0.02 seconds. Two one-hundredths of a second. More people popped into the room. Within seconds, all the seats were filled.
Gotta be a hack.
Never seen that.
Why the fuck did you call me here?
Dude sweated the program, the whole place vibrated.
Jared stood up and gestured for everyone to quiet down.
Do something else, Jared said.
What?
Atomically perfect gold.
Without thinking about it, a plate of gold appeared six inches above the workspace and slammed down: 0.0001 seconds.
NO WAY! everyone howled.
Have him hack into something, a ninja said.
Shut up. We don’t do that, Jared said. He sounded distant, thinking.
It was a fluke.
He couldn’t.
If he can’t then what’s the big deal? They push away Sleepers all the time.
Have him hack into MindCorp; that’d be hilarious.
Yeah, hack into that.
I got through two portals before they booted me.
I got through your mom’s portholes before she blew me.
The ninja and an alien with suckers for hands came to blows at the top of the seats.
Come on, Jared. Let him.
Jared, don’t be a pussy.
-Jared- -Jared- -Jared- -Jared—a thousand ‘Jareds.’
Fine, fuck! Shut up everyone. Justin, do you want to try and hack into MindCorp?
I don’t know how, Justin said.
You didn’t know how to make a dog but it’s pissing on everything anyway. It isn’t a big deal, just bragging rights. MindCorp doesn’t take the hacks seriously. Hell, they used to hold contests to test their security.
Okay.
The room rebooted. The ninja and the alien warrior weren’t allowed back in.
The whiteboard had vanished. In its place, like the rings of Saturn, were a billion tiny reflections that orbited around a dark, iron orb
All those glitters are programs, Justin, Jared said. That orb at the center? MindCorp.
This is cyberspace?
Yes, sir. Cool, eh? She built it like space, three-dimensional and all. But here, MindCorp IS the center of the universe.
Justin closed his eyes again. He saw: MINDCORP LOGIN V112.43. ADMIN.US.DN.1Col.IP72.243.993.42.42:7908
Holy shit. He’s going at a Colossal, someone murmured. Then Justin heard no more. He felt the code wash over him, he could feel the firewalls try to misdirect him and his mind turned blacker than the night, blacker than the deepest void in space. And he could feel the program. The numbers became atoms. The code, living cells. As he barreled through security protocol after security protocol, hammering them with passwords, multi-threading, contacting employees as a peer to coerce information, multi-threading, discovering the root of the program and tearing it apart from the foundation up. Through these things that had never been done before, he finally felt alive. His mind unfurled like a solar flare and in this world, he finally felt complete.
= = =
Cynthia was in a meeting with Helene Rossia, the President of their Israeli Division, when the lights flickered and the room trembled. They steadied themselves.
“Whoa, what was that?” Helene asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cynthia replied. She’d check after the meeting. They were discussing new security protocols and network redundancies MindCorp was implementing globally. They looked at a large map of the Middle East on a projector.
“If we spider-web the network . . .” Cynthia began. Suddenly the room jumped. Helene and Cynthia flew from their seats. The entire space slammed up and down like it was on a pogo stick. A seam formed across one of the walls and bright, purple light bleached through.
“What the hell is going on?” Helene yelled. They were getting tossed around like dice, slamming into chairs and walls, hitting the ceiling and then—as if the room was spinning—catapulting into the opposite wall. The seam opened wider and on a bad bounce, Helene vanished into the purple light, screaming as she went.
Cynthia ripped the Mindlink off her head. An emergency light flashed above her. The Core. In her ten years, she had never seen that light turn on. Sabot burst into the room. He didn’t say anything. Cynthia jumped up and they ran to the elevator.
MindCorp was one hundred and fifty stories tall. They rode two hundred stories down. Beneath MindCorp Headquarters was one of two Colossal Cores in the region. Because of the support structure needed for the huge glass Data Core cylinders, it was much easier to build down than up.
It was immediately clear that something was wrong. A properly operating Data Core looked like a giant blue fluorescent tube. A thick blue arc of data light connected the fiber lines at the top with those at the bottom. But now the Core flickered and popped, booming with thunder.
“What the hell!” Cynthia said.
They got to the ground and as they did, the Data Core began to spin and pulse. The blue went to black and then snapped back to blue, like a kid was flicking a light switch off and on.
The ground floor was chaos. Spinning red lights flashed around the perimeter of the Core. A shrill alarm filled the air. The Sleepers that surrounded the Core were still out, but they rocked back-and-forth in seizures. A dozen technicians scrambled between them like medics on a battlefield, checking vital signs, throwing Mindlinks on to see what was causing the Sleepers to frenzy in their slumber. Cynthia grabbed Jim Schmidt, the scientist in charge.
“What’s going on?” she yelled over the alarm. She saw two Sleepers shake themselves loose of their harness and belly flop to the ground.
“Something huge is altering the data path of the Core,” he said. He had a Mindlink on.
“What do you mean?”
“Something online is out cycling our processors, it’s dragging portals out of their orbits.” Jim handed the Mindlink over to Cynthia.
“We’re being hacked??
??
“No . . . yes . . .” he shook his head, he couldn’t grasp it. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s ignoring the operating system of the Core. It just hit.”
“Limit bandwidth to fifty megabytes,” she said. She didn’t want to have a seizure because of whatever was out there. Jim hit the keyboard and gave thumbs up.
She put on the utility Mindlink. Consumer Mindlinks were designed to allow access to the various programs in cyberspace. Sleepers used utility Mindlinks to maintenance the network, portals and programs, and the space in between.
While Cynthia had built the cyberspace construct to behave like space, in her universe even the voids held data. This allowed a Sleeper to move from portal to portal effortlessly (as well as through the portal’s subset of programs) and to know their position in relation to any portal or program in the system. It also allowed them to see the data paths of the users online. There was no anonymity in cyberspace. Every user had a digital ‘tail,’ a distinct path that anchored them to their true physical location. Sleepers could trace this tail and find the user’s origin. They could, if given permission, go in and read that user’s thoughts.
What Cynthia saw staggered her mind. Jim had placed her just outside the anomaly’s effect. The millions of portals normally spun in harmony on a three plane axis—x, y and z—orbiting the gravity core. While the majority of the portals—they looked like mirrors floating in space—were operational and followed their orbital path, one quadrant did not. In it, thousands of portals ignored the gravity core and churned on an entirely different axis like dirt circling a drain. They spun haphazardly, smashing into each and spinning off. As Cynthia drew closer, she couldn’t believe what she saw.
A mist surrounded the rogue portals and Cynthia new what that mist was, even if she had never seen it on that scale. It was a mindscape—a visual manifestation of a person’s influence in cyberspace. Sleepers had mindscapes; that was how they programmed. There was no physical connectedness in cyberspace. Hands and feet were programmed assimilations. It was the mind versus code all the time. The mindscape was how the two related.
But this . . . this . . . it was like God decided to try his hand at it.
“What could do this?” Cynthia whispered. “Jim, can you trace this? It’s not native, it’s coming from somewhere.”
“I’ll get Sleepers from a different Core to trace it. I need to pull ours offline.”
“Do it.”
Could it be terrorists? she wondered. Impossible. What she saw before her shouldn’t be. The freedom afforded to MindCorp Sleepers was an illusion. Her online universe had been created with exacting, unbreakable rules. Yet those rules were being broken right in front of her. Someone had introduced chaos into a binary system of order. How? How?
Cynthia bumped her bandwidth up to two hundred megabytes, enough to move around, and her sense of the physical world vanished. She was now in the void, looking down on the mirror-riddled cyclone. She flew toward it.
Cynthia, we have Sleepers from surrounding Cores zeroing in on the anomaly, she heard Jim say. She could see them. For some reason, a Sleeper in cyberspace resembled a sperm with dozens of long tails that waggled and moved in all directions. It wasn’t disgusting. It was almost angelic. She saw thousands of them drifting toward the turbine mess.
There is a gravitational center, Cynthia, Jim said. The portals that look in disarray are not, they are breaking the laws of cyberspace, but they are breaking them with order.
A giant mindscape, Cynthia projected. In the control room where Sabot, Jim, and now a vacant-eyed Cynthia sat, her voice came over a loudspeaker.
Correct, Jim replied.
What is happening to the portals? Can any Sleeper go in? Are they being manipulated? Cynthia asked.
Hold . . . Jim said. They are shut down. No occupants are in them at all.
An odd thing to envision, Cynthia thought. A portal could house programs that held tens of millions of people in them. It could be New York City; it could be a sports arena or a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. It could be a corporation’s virtual location. But in the anomaly they were all empty. Not one soul was in them. So whatever had caused this had intentionally or unintentionally booted people out.
I want to see what the fuss is about, Cynthia said.
Cynthia moved at the equivalent of light speed. The velocity combined with the sheer silence still amazed her. The gravitational center grew in her field of view.
A portal is the gravitational center.
She was in the mindscape and she didn’t know if that would have any effect on her. It hung in space like a green poisonous cloud, covering all the portals in a mini milky way.
Are you getting this? Cynthia said to Jim. She watched as the mindscape poured out of the portal.
It’s a shareware program. A flight simulator, Jim said in disbelief.
Do you have the tail?
We have the region, not the tail. We can’t get inside the program.
Suddenly the mindscape vanished. The portals that had been pulled out of orbit fell back toward the beltway, slowly re-orientating to their programmed location in the construct.
It’s gone, Cynthia said. You got the region? China?
giant mirrors the size of states flew past her, finding their place.
DeKalb, Illinois.
That can’t be. That’s a farm com-
The universe started to pull apart. Cynthia’s body stretched wide. Her round form thinned to a sheet of paper. Her face contorted in excruciating pain. The Sleepers around her became sunspots in her vision before vanishing. She turned her gaze and from another portal a million miles away, a mindscape had connected to the MindCorp gravity core like a parasite. Its tentacled reach vibrated and shook with energy.
We’re shutting down the Core! Jim said.
One more second.
It’s hacking through our firewalls.
We have to find it.
It is at the root program.
That’s impossible.
She went dark.
= = =
Cynthia called WarDon. He was in Washington and directed her to Evan. Ten minutes later, she and Sabot were in his office. After Cynthia’s recap of the events at the Colossal Core, Evan’s own thoughts drowned out her babbling. The possibilities that this ‘anomaly’ presented were astounding to his future plans.
“But not terrorist?” Lindo asked absently.
“I don’t know. Our data shows that both tails came from DeKalb, Illinois, a farm town. The population is in the hundreds and their data feed is three hundred megabytes up/down per home.”
Lindo waited. He liked seeing Cynthia unraveled. He could use that.
She continued. “It doesn’t sound like much, but to take over that section of cyberspace—roughly 0.0025%—would take a million terabytes of constant data programming and pushing, maybe more. I don’t know. We’re still crunching numbers.”
“So it’s impossible that it came from DeKalb,” Lindo said.
“Improbable, not impossible,” Cynthia corrected.
“Why do you say that? You just told me that it couldn’t be done.” Lindo was intrigued.
“If it was AI or some kind of software, it could push more bandwidth by first planting a codec in cyberspace and then compressing data at the tail. It’s theoretical, but there’s no reason that it couldn’t be done. But if that were the case it would be a simple program, more of a cancer: no purpose, just growing,” Cynthia said.
“Which doesn’t explain the hack.”
“Exactly.” Cynthia confused was more rare than moon rock. “We’re trying to piece it together. We know the hack came from an education portal.”
“That had the login address to your Colossal,” Evan baited.
“That was public information,” she replied.
“Might want to pull that off-line now.”
Cynthia gave a short, frustrated laugh.
“So what do you need, Cynthia?” Evan l
iked those words. They tasted better than steak.
“This could be the first attempt at cyber-terrorism. That’s your jurisdiction isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Evan and Cynthia looked at one another for a moment. Evan broke the gaze and shuffled papers around his desk.
“I assume we’ll have full access to the data reports on this, full access to anyone we need to interview?” he asked.
“Per my approval, but yes.”
“I’ll speak to Donald and we’ll investigate ASAP.”
Cynthia got up and she and Sabot headed toward the door.
“Question,” Lindo said. Cynthia turned. “This compression algorithm, this ‘push’ as you call it, that amplifies a mindscape. Do you know exactly how they did it?”
“Not yet, but we will.”
“I’d like to know when you do,” Lindo said.
Cynthia smiled and walked out the door.
= = =
Later that day, Evan briefed WarDon on his meeting with Cynthia.
“I’m glad they came to us,” WarDon said.
“They really had no choice. It’s not like they can go investigate on their own.”
“They’ll keep it discreet?” WarDon asked.
“Yes, definitely.”
“Good, this is the last thing we need to freak out the public. Cyberspace is supposed to be safe. It’d fuck everything up, even for us.” WarDon thought about their collusion with MindCorp against their Coalition allies. “We’re going to keep this off the books. You’re in charge and report to me as you see fit, but keep it analog. I’m assigning you the best soldier I’ve ever seen. He’ll report at 0600 tomorrow. I’ll brief him on the need for total discretion. He’s young. A lot like you, actually. A prodigy. Don’t let the accent fool you or the lazy way he looks around the room. He’s a pit bull.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Evan hung up the phone and reclined in his chair. The hum of the server bays soothed him and while the lack of windows would make anyone else claustrophobic, they allowed Evan to forget about a world that he felt no longer mattered.
“Dim,” he said, and the overhead lights dimmed to flickering candles. He closed his eyes and built his future in his head.
His favorite quote was by Louis Pasteur, “Luck Favors the Prepared.” To Evan, life was preparation. It was the most important thing. It took chance and made it your ally. Preparation allowed him to direct conversations and manipulate other people’s will.
He crumpled up the note he referenced while talking to WarDon. It had nothing to do with the anomaly at MindCorp. It had to do with pushing WarDon’s buttons to get what Evan desired. In his cryptic scrawl the note read:
Goal: Autonomy. Go-ahead to investigate on my terms.
Key Points (WarDon)
-Focus on national security. Focus on our current investigation of Coalition. This jeopardizes it.
-Cynthia’s concern. Out of their hands. Need us.
-Discretion. No one should know.
At the bottom of the note:
-Doesn’t know the implications of the anomaly!! Play on fear, NOT benefit.
With his eyes still closed, he stood up and walked out of his office and into the field of servers. He held his hands out like antennae. He felt their vibrations. Even though he wasn’t connected, he could feel cyberspace. He could feel the nations interconnected by fiber veins that pulsed light instead of blood. If the anomaly was what he thought it was, his plans could come together quickly. If not, well, it was just another bump in the road. Quitters never win.
Mike Glass reported to Evan the next morning right at 6:00 a.m. He was twenty-three, Kentucky born and bred. Six foot, a buck ninety, unshaven, he had long, sandy blonde hair, a bit greasy, that made him look like a front man to a bad rock group. But Evan saw what WarDon had warned: his eyes held no emotion in them. He watched Evan like a crocodile watched a baby gazelle drinking from the shore.