“How many?” Dev said.
“Thousands,” said Darlene, who had flopped down by Dev on the next couch over.
“She’s understating,” Giorgio said. “Ten thousand, maybe fifteen, in the first wave. Our shunt handling systems started creaking under the strain, so we had to get in there ourselves and shore them up. And when we’d done that, the traffic leveled off a little—then started increasing again. Almost as if somebody’d noticed that we’d compensated. But by then we began to have enough spare time to track the ingresses back to the source. And guess what was pushing them in on us?”
“The CO routines,” said about half the group in chorus.
Dev rubbed his eyes. “Oh, God, not more Item Three stuff! People, Tau and I had a run at that issue last night before the balloon went up. And we came up empty.”
“I don’t think this had anything to do with Item Three,” Giorgio said. “If by that you mean the same thing that’s been causing these weird little glitches and outages all over with the CO’s digital fingerprints on them. This was a lot less random. As far as we can tell, the CO started acting as if the rogue logins were straightforward in-game cheats, and it shoved the first couple waves of them into the shuntspaces. Pandora was the first one to start showing those results—”
“Pandora—like Pastorale—being one of the ’cosms seriously threatened last night,” Dev said.
Giorgio nodded. “Exactly. Look. System?”
“Yo!”
Dev blinked at the syntax. “Snapshot, please, of the schematic of Pandora shuntspace from nineteen thirty.”
“Gotcha.”
Around the circle of sofas, a vast hollow cylinder of translucent green fire shot up toward the sky: the room’s skydomelike ceiling obligingly got out of the way as the cylinder narrowed and dimpled out into rapidly extruding branch structures nearer its distant top. The inside of the cylinder was sheeted with a myriad of scrolling screenfuls of code text, a thin skin of water. Here and there the flow of code ran faster than in other places, downsliding patches of code overlapping one another, pausing in their movement inside the trunk of the virtual tree, then slipping away horizontally or sliding up inside the tree again. Some hundreds of the codescreens nearest the viewers in the circle could be seen to be edged with a hot process blue. “Gamegenerated characters?” Dev said.
“That’s right,” Giorgio said. “We have about three thousand of them working in Pandora right now. Yesterday morning there were fifteen hundred and sixty-three cheaters resident.” He pointed at various other patches ascending or descending gently along the inner skin of the Macrocosm’s virtual structure: these scraps of code were edged in red. “Interactions were perfectly normal: the cheaters don’t have a clue—we interact with a sampling of them every day to make sure. But then—watch this. System? Display the time- elapsed imagery we were examining an hour ago.”
“Displaying,” said the system. Suddenly the sliding patchwork of interacting program fragments began to be obscured by more and more patches appearing. These paler patches, a leprous green-white, began overlaying all the others more and more quickly until the underlying, normal login traffic could hardly be seen at all. Soon they were so thick on the inner surface that it had gone almost entirely green-white.
“Once they got into the shuntspace,” said Giorgio, “the user logins cloned themselves into multiple fake accounts and started trying to exit the ’cosm in the usual way, via the local Ring and out into Telekil. We peeled off a few of them and took them apart—”
Giorgio pointed at one side of the tree’s interior, and one of the patches peeled itself away and sailed over to him. Giorgio caught it out of the air and stretched it wider and longer. In his hands it became dark lettering streaming down over a pale green-white background. He passed it over to Dev.
Dev skimmed down the code, then stroked the window to make it scroll. “Looks like it wanted to get out through the Ring into as many other ’cosms as it could . . .”
“Which would’ve been bad,” Giorgio said. “Each time one of these things got into a new ’cosm it would have cloned itself again. The system would’ve been flooded with them in minutes. But they couldn’t get out of the ’cosm . . . or rather they could, except only into other shuntspaces. The rogue logins couldn’t tell the difference between the shunts and the real spaces because all the code’s identical, right down to the accounting structures. But everything’s isolated from the main structure by design . . .”
Dev nodded slowly, looking at the nasty and elegant code in his hands. “So here they stayed until they expired.” He glanced up. “Though not all at once.”
“Nope,” Darlene said. “Expirations were pretty much random, though there were some clusters that might have been either lazy programming or something to do with the rogue logins not being able to execute their routines correctly—caught in loops, maybe.” She shrugged.
Dev flipped the page of code over to Giorgio, who crumpled it up and tossed it in the air, where it vanished. “Now all we need to figure out is why the CO shoved those logins into the shuntspaces,” Dev said.
Giorgio nodded. “We’re looking into that. So are Spike and Dietrich here—they were on last night helping with the analysis and cleanup after the first attack, and we called them over from network security to help us try to understand what was going on.”
“What we are all agreed on,” said the dark-skinned young man who to judge by his accent was probably Dietrich, “was that it was a good thing that so many of the illegal logins wound up being directed into the shuntspaces. They protected the rest of the system a little. Otherwise the battle might have gone very much differently.”
“As bugs go,” said Spike, a little Asian guy in a white shirt and business flannels, “it was more welcome than most.”
“Undocumented feature,” said one shuntspacer whose name tag read “AMALIE,” a young brunette woman in jeans and an Omnitopia hoodie.
“Yeah, well, I prefer them documented,” Dev said. “But you must have some theories about how this happened. Anybody?”
Heads shook all around the circle. “That’s why we left you all those notes, Boss,” said Giorgio. “You and Tau are the only ones with access to the CO. You two’ll have to figure it out.”
“All we can tell you,” said Darlene, “is that every one of those rogue logins had Conscientious Objector ID strings prepended to them. Though the format looked weird.”
Dev let out an exasperated breath. “Weird? Syntax errors, you think?”
“Like you would ever make a syntax error, Boss,” somebody said, sounding very dry.
Dev laughed. “Please. My perfection is a matter of public record.”
The snickering was no crueler than necessary. “Don’t know that it was a coding error, either,” Darlene said. “Or not one of yours. The other reason we called security was that, besides the CO strings, we also kept finding outside computer address strings appended to the attacker logins, whereas all the others we had been trying to follow up until then didn’t have any. Which makes sense, because that’s absolutely not the kind of thing you’d want to leave behind you if you were a hacker. We couldn’t understand where the appended addresses were coming from.”
“Code error at the other end,” Giorgio said. “Had to be. After all, the attack code has to have been millions of lines long. No way you can write that much stuff without messing up something somewhere—”
“Tell me about it,” Dev said.
“All it would have taken,” said Darlene, “was one line duplicated somewhere in those guys’ code—a semicolon forgotten or a pair of quotes or brackets not closed—” She shrugged. “Then you get this fragment of address information left hanging off the end of a login. . . . That might have been what made the CO react. But you’ll have to be the one to tell us that.”
Dev shook his head. “It sounds like we just got lucky,” he said. “Okay. Tau and I will look at your notes as fast as we can. Probably mostly Tau—my plate’s so full today . . .”
“Boss,” Giorgio said. “We know you’re . . . protective about the CO routines. We understand why.” Dev looked over at him, thinking,
Protective being code for “paranoid.”
“But it’s getting to the point that when you have situations like this, you’ve got to be able to hand them off to other people. Otherwise you’ve got all forty thousand of us sitting on your shoulder waiting for you to fix what’s busted, and it’s not fair to you.”
“Not fair to
us”
was what Dev had been expecting to hear, but now he felt ashamed of himself for underestimating the quality and the loyalty of the people he had working for him. He sighed. “Tau and I have been discussing that,” Dev said. “Just last night, in fact. We’ll be taking time to consider how best to go forward on the issue when the rollout’s finished and we’ve all had time to breathe.”
“Good,” Giorgio said. “Thanks.”
Dev got up and stretched. “So what else is going on with you guys?”
“We’re retrenching,” Darlene said. “Getting ready for the next wave.”
“Anybody here get any sleep?” Dev said.
There was hollow laughter from some of the Princes of Hell, but some scornful expressions, too. “Boss, please,” said Spike. “Sleep is for the weak.”
“Anyway, the next wave’s gonna be a lot more exciting,” Darlene said. “And there’s a lottery set up for who gets to be your bodyguard. Gonna kick us some bot butt. Human butt too, if we’re lucky.”
Dev raised an eyebrow. “So they
did
have people riding their bot programs—”
“Oh, yeah,” Giorgio said. “But the riders weren’t as careful about covering up their own tracks as the guys who programmed the machines were. The machines doing the automated part of the attack came into Omnitopian netspace on Internet addresses that changed three times a second, so that the programs proper jumped from machine to machine in a whole range of addresses—twenty or thirty for each machine. But the guys directing the attacks didn’t do that.
Their
machines kept the same addresses for, wow, maybe four or five seconds at a time.”
“That’s a long while in machine moments . . .” Dev said.
Darlene grinned. “They were trying to avoid latency issues,” she said. “They were apparently scared they might miss something vital during the attack, that some aspect of their own code would fail to run, if they changed machines too often. And they assumed they would have us so off- balance that we wouldn’t be able to devote enough resources to track them while the attack was going on.”
“Wrong!” chorused the other assembled Princes, and some of them laughed nastily.
“So the ambush is being planned even as we speak,” Darlene said. “Security’s busy tracking down the routes the zombie machines used to come at us—”
“They won’t use the same ones,” Dev said.
All the Princes rolled their eyes or made faces at their boss’ apparent slowness. “Of course they won’t,” Giorgio said. “But they established a pattern that showed us how they build and hub their network addresses. Once the first wave of the new attack starts hitting, we’ll be able to extrapolate their pattern backward along it, compromise their hub structure, pare them down to manageable numbers—”
“—say ten or fifteen thousand core machines—”
“—then suck those machines dry and inject our own code—”
“—so we can start compromising their function, get them to spill their guts, and ID the locations of the people riding the attack in real time before they self-destruct—”
“—it’s just going to be a matter of a few minutes to nail them to the ground, that’s all we need. So if we can make sure that the second attack nets them at least ten mil or so—”
“—maybe fifteen, but no more than that. We just have to keep them on the hook long enough to get them all thoroughly compromised—”
Dev’s mouth dropped open. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, “let’s just backspace a little. Did somebody just say ‘ten mil’ as in ten million? Ten million of my dollars?”
“
Our
dollars,” said Giorgio.
Everybody was looking at Dev as if he were insane at suddenly asserting personal ownership over something which the company line said belonged to all of them. Their expressions ranged from bemused to wounded. “We wouldn’t be suggesting this,” said Darlene, “if we weren’t going to get back ten times that much—”
“—twenty!—”
“—out of the lawsuits against the crooked IPs and spamhauser that made it possible for these guys to stage their attacks. Because there’s no way they could have done it without some level of complicity—”
“You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs, Boss,” Darlene said. “And the worm won’t bite on an empty hook.”
“Could you possibly mix that metaphor up a little more?” Amalie said.
“Oh, cut it out, you know what I mean! But it’s true.”
Dev rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “Have you spoken to Tau about this?”
“About three this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it was okay,” said Darlene.
“He said he’d be clearing it with you this morning after he talked to Jim and got the money end green-lit,” said Giorgio.
Dev suddenly flashed on Lola saying to him, with one of those winning smiles, “But
Mama
said I could!” And it was always a judgment call whether Mama really had. It wasn’t that Lola lied, precisely, but she so much wanted her version of reality to be true sometimes . . .
Nonetheless . . . it sounds like something Tau would have okayed: it has that reckless braininess about it.
Dev sighed. “Okay,” he said, “let me get out of here: I’ve got at least as many things to do as you guys have. Just keep up the good work. I’ll talk to Tau later. Make sure you add anything new to your notes for him before we meet.”
“To hear is to obey, O Mighty One,” Giorgio said.
“Right. System? My door, please.”
It appeared in the air nearby. “And guys?” Dev said. “Good work. Keep on it. We’re all gonna have a big party when everything calms down.”