“What’s the last thing you remember?” Sam asked.
Dodge furrowed his brow. “We were at CDD. Working. On the trail of the phantom. We …” He faltered.
“Let me fill in the blanks,” Sam said, and spent the next few minutes doing so.
“Who’s Ursula?” Vienna asked when he had finished. “You mentioned her a couple of times in your sleep.”
Dodge shook his head and got to his feet. He seemed a little shaky and swayed back and forth, finally holding on to the wall to steady himself.
“Ursula,” he said vaguely, shaking his head. “I don’t know. But I know who’s doing this. I must have worked out most of it just before I got zapped. Figured out the rest while I was sleeping, I guess.”
“You know who the phantom is?” Sam asked.
“There is no phantom,” Dodge said. “There are no hackers or terrorists, apart from those two who got wiped out.”
“Then who is it?” Sam asked.
“Who’s doing this?” Vienna asked almost simultaneously.
“We are,” Dodge said.
35 | EXIT STRATEGY
“Lie back down,” Sam said. “I don’t think you’re quite ready to be standing up.”
“I’m fine,” Dodge said, although he swayed a bit on his feet as he said it.
“Explain,” Vienna said.
“It’s us. Not you, me, and Sam here, but just about everyone else. Everyone with a neuro-connection, that is.”
“I’m still not getting it,” Vienna said, although Sam was starting to.
Dodge said, “They introduced neuro-connections, what, a year ago? The take-up has been phenomenal. Faster than cell phones. And in the last few months, sales have gone off the charts. There are millions of people neuro-connected all over the world.”
“So?”
“So what happens when you join millions of brains together? What do you get?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“Nobody knows,” Dodge said.
“Are you suggesting that all these connected brains somehow work together?” Vienna asked.
“Maybe. Some kind of collective consciousness,” Dodge said.
“I thought the neuro-firewalls were supposed to isolate us,” Sam said.
“Did they isolate Swamp Witch?” Dodge asked. There was silence.
“And it’s more than that,” Dodge said. “The millions of brains are not just connected to each other, but to the Internet itself. This ‘consciousness’ has access to every computer in the world, almost. To every bit and byte of human knowledge. Its eyes are every security cam, every spy satellite, every live neuro-headset.”
“A meta-system,” Vienna said. “That’s what you’re talking about. But who’s Ursula?”
“She’s a sim. One of the training instructors from the neuro-headset software,” Sam said. “Haven’t you done your training yet?”
“Only just got the headset,” Vienna said.
Sam said, “I think Dodge must have associated her in his mind with this ‘meta-system’. While he was sleeping.”
“Why attack Swamp Witch?” Vienna asked. “Why attack you?”
“My best guess,” Dodge said, “is that this meta-system—let’s call it Ursula for now—has a very basic, almost childlike concept of good and bad, of right and wrong. She knew the terrorists were bad, so she erased them, like we would erase a computer virus if we found it on our hard drive. Spam, gaming, the same. It’s bad, so delete it.”
“And Swamp Witch? Was she bad?” Vienna asked.
“She was a threat,” Sam said.
Dodge agreed. “Ursula is only a few months old, remember. Just a child in a dark room with a stick. If she feels fear, she hits out at what scares her.”
“Even human beings? You said she had a sense of right and wrong,” Vienna said.
“I’m not sure she understands what human beings are,” Dodge said. “To her, Swamp Witch was just a bug in the code.”
“And she got debugged,” Sam added.
“Have you guys had your meds today?” Gordon shook his head, disbelieving.
“You still here?” Vienna asked in a surprised tone.
Gordon rolled his eyes and rattled the handcuff that was fastening him to his desk.
“So what now?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Vienna said. “There’s nowhere to run and there’s nowhere to hide. If this meta-system— Ursula—exists, then there’s no escape from her. She has access to the network—”
“She
“Dodge!”
Dodge’s eyes opened, but they were blank and unseeing, as before. With an effort, they slowly focused, and Sam could see the consciousness returning.
“Are you so sure that she’s bad?” Vienna asked. “It seems to me that you’re basing a lot of assumptions on what happened to Swamp Witch.”
Dodge shook his head. “Today she erased someone she saw as a threat. Yesterday it was spammers and phishers. The day before, she targeted gaming sites. Who’s to say that tomorrow it won’t be based on race or religion? Or height. Human beings have all kinds of prejudices. How many people does it take to feel strongly about something before their collective consciousness, Ursula, decides that it is bad and gets rid of it?”
“We have to warn the public,” Sam said. “Tell them not to use their neuro-connections.”
“That could cause a panic,” Vienna said.
“The more people who plug in, the more powerful she is,” Sam said. “We’ve got to warn them.”
“What we have to do,” Vienna said, “is find a way out of here, before they figure out where we are.”
Dodge fingered the skull hanging from a leather strap around his neck and said, “I think it’s time to open the crypt.”
36 | THE CRYPT
“I call it ‘the Plague.’ It’s a crypto-virus,” Dodge whispered. “I think it’s our only chance.”
They were huddled in a far corner of the room, out of earshot of Gordon.
“A crypto-virus?” asked Sam.
Vienna said, “I read a bit of the work that Young and Yung did in the field.”
Dodge said, “The Plague is an encrypting virus.”
He took off his skull necklace and pulled off the jaw, revealing a USB3 plug underneath.
“This is the nastiest, deadliest, most poisonous bit of code you will ever dream of. I wrote it about two years ago and have been refining it ever since. I keep it with me, hoping that I will never be in such a desperate situation that I might have to think about using it.”
“Like now,” Vienna said.
Dodge nodded. “The Plague encrypts everything it finds. Secure 2048-bit encryption. The virus can still read it, as it has the decryption key built in, but nothing else can. The machine becomes totally unusable, except by the virus. It replicates and spreads. It operates at the micro-code level, even below machine code, so it doesn’t matter what operating system is on the computer. If it encounters a firewall, it encrypts that, too, and passes through it.
