Omnitopia Dawn (18 page)

GOT NEW TIMES FOR YOU, said the text on the screen.

Danny reached for one of the copy shop’s branded pads, tore a piece of paper off it—during one of the earlier security briefings, he had been warned about the readability of any notepad’s lower sheets—and started writing on the single piece of paper on the hard table. YOU READY? said the screen.

Danny put the pen aside.
Go,
he typed.

The screen spilled out a series of six letter and digit sequences, which Danny diligently and carefully began to copy. Each of these looked like one of the standard six letter and digit codes in hex that stood for a color that could be used in a Web page’s code to paint in a background or color a type font. But at home, Danny had a neatly-printed little codebook in which each of those 256 groups had been assigned a different meaning—most of them having to do with times. Each code group changed in meaning depending on which other code group it was near. Anybody who happened to be intercepting this message, and anyone trying to figure out later what it meant, would easily mistake it for a set of directions for the design of a loading Web page. But the codebook meanings were far different. Danny had laughed, just once, when he finished reading that little book through—a boring read, most of it—and came to the last group, the “#000000” code for the color black: it translated as “flee at once, all is discovered.”

At least there was no sign of that in
this
message. There was nothing else, either; the person typing at the other end was never chatty. When the code groups stopped, the only thing that came up on the next line was the single word: REPEAT. Danny typed in the six- digit sequences exactly as he had noted them down. He understood the other guy’s concern about making sure that it was right. The code sequence described the times when Danny and his many coconspirators in this hack would be hitting a lot of different servers worldwide, a lot of different player groups in Omnitopia, with the goal being to overwhelm them while accounts were being raided for money. This business would require split-second timing in acting as one character, dumping it, signing out, signing in as someone else, on some other server entirely, and then acting as that person. It had been four or five months ago now that Danny had been sent the software with which to do this work on his own home computer and various others. Those other computers—including the poor dim ones here at work—were now all latent zombies. They would be transformed into willing slaves of his own machine at home as soon as he activated the program there and sent them the necessary command down the broadband line. This was a technique that spammers had been using for years to confuse large systems, and even occasionally to break into military or other classified sites by the sheer weight of numbers overwhelming their gateways to the outer world. In this particular case, the group that Danny was working with had brought the concept of the distributed denial-of-service attack up to a whole new level.

They’d had to. Omnitopia’s Conscientious Objector routine was too damn smart to be taken in by the simple botting techniques of an earlier, kindlier age of spammers. It could immediately recognize a computer that was acting like a bot and freeze it out—shutting down any access from that computer’s network address, and incidentally calling the local cops. The people behind this plan had had no intention of wasting their time on so old and predictable a technique. Instead they were basing the attack on sheer numbers of genuine human beings, which the CO routine shouldn’t be able to profile so easily. If a lot of these logins would be coming from China and other parts of the Far East—places where labor was cheap and there were lots of willing people sitting at keyboards who didn’t care too much about the details of what they were doing as long as they got paid something better than their weekly wage—that was entirely to be expected: it was a resource worth exploiting.

Each person would activate his own or her own share in a pulsed wave of attacks that would come from all over the planet, clogging the Omnitopia servers with resource-heavy demands that would leave certain accounting and cash- inventory routines starved for resources, taking seconds to execute instead of milliseconds. And during those vital fractions of a second, from all over the world, many hands would reach into the virtual cash register while its drawer was stuck open and pull out wads of the green stuff.

Danny smiled to himself in quiet appreciation of the elegance of the scam and its simple audacity. His own nameless and faceless handler had been cagey about the details, but the number of keyboard slaves involved in the attack sequence was apparently somewhere up in the millions. There was no way the Omnitopia people would be able to defend against that completely—especially not at this time when their inside sources had confirmed that the new Omnitopia servers would be vulnerable.

And they were coming into that magic time now, Danny knew. The attacks would be taking place very soon—he’d known just how soon once he got these code groups home. But one way or another, within three days it would all be over. Omnitopia would be looking very stupid, and the Black Hat Ring who’d hatched and carried out this exploit would be famous—or infamous—worldwide if anonymously so. Danny wasn’t particularly concerned about the fame: all he’d wanted was a chance to get out of this loser’s life of minimum-wage jobs and into a life of lazing by some seaside with a cold drink in his hand, partying when he liked, and never doing anything that looked like work again.
And by Saturday, I’ll have it.
By Saturday afternoon, having been given lots of helpful instructions about how best to lose yourself in the system despite its best attempts to keep track of you, he would be on his way out of Georgia, on the first of a number of planes, trains, and automobiles to anywhere—and finally on his way to the place in the sun that life owed him.

Danny waited, watching the black screen. Momentarily, the type came through. FINISHED.

And that was all there was. This was the only sad thing about the plan for Danny. He’d always been a gregarious type; he enjoyed playing the Great Game with others, talking about it, laughing about it. But there was no one, absolutely
no one
he could share this with. And of course, he understood the reasons; but it was sad all the same. Brag rights would be so sweet. Even afterward, if he wanted to stay free and wealthy, he could never say anything about having been part of The Day the Black Hats Won. It was really very, very sad. In fact, his handler had advised him to give up Omnitopia entirely.
It’s a goddamn shame,
Danny thought.
After I finally got my mage up to level thirty-five.

A little sadly,
Finished,
he typed.

The black screen went white: the browser window closed itself. Danny reached down and punched the computer’s reset button to make sure the broadband router’s logging function failed to shut down correctly. That would mean that all the morning’s sessions on this machine would fail to log as well. Ricardo would give him grief about it, but the machine occasionally committed this error on its own, so Ricardo wouldn’t be able to specifically blame Danny for it.

The machine started rebooting. Danny got up, stretched, and went to the window to look out at the sun blazing through the smog, and the lunchtime traffic, and the hot air dancing over the parking lot. In his mind he could already see a much different sun, shining down on white sand, a blue sea beyond it, a cold drink in his hand.
A mint julep,
he thought.
I’ve never had a mint julep. But I’m going to have one soon.

Danny turned away from the window and, methodical as always, started straightening the padded envelopes in the bin by the scale.

The employees called Infinity Inc.’s main New York-area manufacturing and R&D facility “The Flats,” not so much as a reference to the wilderness of North Jersey salt marsh all around it, but because it was (they said among themselves on the company infranet’s chat area) just a little too small inside for you to be able to see the curvature of the earth. Phil—checking on the infranet chat under a pseudonym, as everyone knew he sometimes did—had at first been slightly offended by the nickname when he’d heard it. But the reaction had worn off over time, as none of his employees seemed eager to dump their jobs just because of the facility’s size.

He was standing on the balcony outside the executive office suite at the building’s west end, looking down over the shop floor—a sprawling quarter-mile long vista of cubicles grouped in nodes of four, eight, and sixteen, depending on how many subteams, teams, or groups they were housing, along with various “pick up and go” group meeting modules for employees whose job descriptions made it more sensible for them to move from area to area in the course of the day’s work. Some of them were making their way around the floor even now on razor scooters or on one or another of Infinity’s little fleet of Segways, and the huge place hummed under the high roof with a soft clamor of conversation, the sound of people getting on with business in a place designed to keep them on track. It was a heartening view. Phil liked his people working where he could walk or ride around under one roof and see them all without having to run all over the landscape, at the mercy of the traffic or the weather.

Where is he?
Phil thought, pulling his phone out of his pocket to see if he’d missed a text. But nothing new showed on the screen.
He’s not going to like it if he makes me come looking for him. Well. Give him another five minutes.

Phil wandered down to the end of the balcony and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window at the northward view, over the huge parking lot and beyond. Infinity Inc. Kearny had been built just inside one of the major loops of the meandering Hackensack River, on land Phil had acquired five years previously when the company started getting a good head of steam and he foresaw the need for a far bigger facility that would be able to hold both his development and manufacturing requirements under one roof. Even then, undeveloped, the property had been a good bargain: reclaimed land, cheap even after factoring in the price of detoxing it from the waste chemicals, heavy metals, and so forth, that had seeped into the ground and the water table beneath it from the older industries that had occupied the area prewar. All those industries, shipbuilding and small-scale light manufacturing and so on, had expired of capital loss during the Great Depression, or of inability to keep up with consumer trends in the postwar boom, leaving the local communities chronically short of employment opportunities and desperate for inward investment of any kind. When Phil had come along and offered Kearny Township money for land that until then had been essentially worthless, they’d grabbed the offer with both hands.

And they hadn’t been sorry afterward, especially when this facility opened and hiring began. Infinity Inc. had become one of the major employers in northern New Jersey, and had been able to pump a lot of action into the local economy simply due to I.I. Kearny’s location. It was handy for cheap transport, right by the Jersey Turnpike and the rail yards outside of Newark, and close to the courier and parcel shipping companies that clustered around the fringes of Newark Airport. To Phil’s way of thinking, a tightly consolidated facility like this made far better economic sense than some splashy purpose-built greenbelt facility, more style than substance.

Back at the middle of the balcony, he heard the elevator go
ding!
Phil turned to see his operations manager Link Raglan step out of it—

“Link? Down here.”

He came hurrying down to Phil, a bland- faced blond guy who looked more like a professional wrestler than anything else: burly and massive across the shoulders, with wrists as thick as some people’s forearms, and a neck so big it could be detected only by the presence of a collar and tie around it. Unfortunately these were always under a suit that looked like Link had been shoved into it under pressure. Even on his salary he insisted on buying his suits off the rack, and his notion of what constituted a fit was uncertain at best.

“Sorry, Mr. Sorensen,” Link said as he came up to Phil. “The turnpike was a mess, and I couldn’t stop to text.”

“It’s all right,” Phil said. “Just don’t make a habit of it: I’m going to need you accessible at a moment’s notice when things heat up over the next few days.” They started toward the staircase at the end of the balcony. “Are the people we’re supposed to be seeing ready for us? I can’t stay long. I have to get ready for that charity thing tonight before I head out to the Island.”

“They’re ready,” Link said as they headed down the stairs.

“Good. How are the preload numbers looking?”

“Busy. The download servers are getting hammered with thousands of logins, people trying to hold download slots open.”

“But the system’s dumping them on six-minute latency?”

Link nodded. “To favor the high-speed broadband users, as we planned. The dial- up and ADSL people will be getting a download manager pumped downstream to them in the first five minutes, and when they get dumped, they can log in as many times as they have to in order to pick up where they left off.”