“Already on it,” she answered, voice thin over the speakers as the CIA’s best tracer went to work. Syler braced against the dash as Arthur took the turn into the agency parking garage entirely faster than physics advised, still thumbing through the reports.
“Right Miranda, Jason, hold the firewalls. I’m on my way down.” Syler pulled off his seat belt before the car was fully parked, already rushing to the elevator, Arthur hot on his heels.
He pushed through the door to the bullpen just after the Colonel and descended straight into the fray alongside his staff, directing the handful of junior techs on staff to start pulling the highest priority classified file servers offline. Their system was based on layered firewalls, each section partitioned off carefully, communications systems kept aside from project files kept aside from personnel information all kept well away from classified mission intelligence. The hackers were making an equal opportunity bid at breaching each one if the way they were hammering away at everything in sight was any indicator, though they did, indeed, seemed focused on shutting down communications first.
“Why are they so focused on inter-agency?” Jason muttered, swearing as he tried to shore up another digital hole in blown wide in their firewalls.
“Isolation,” the Colonel replied. “They want something from us and they don’t want us to have help keeping them out.”
“What do we have that no one else does?” Arthur cut in.
“The collective intelligence of the entire country and half the world. Would you like the list alphabetically or categorically?” Syler snarked.
The lights flickered overhead suddenly. Non-essential monitors displaying mission read-outs on the sidewalls of the bullpen went dark, system programmed to prioritize power to the command stations. The steady hum of the generators coming from the main server room kicked on. Syler swore, moving from assessing their system to looking at the utility networks surrounding the agency. “They’re after the power grid now. Trying to lock them out of it.” A sudden surge ended in a muffled bang from the secondary server bank off to one wall, fully shutting down the equipment on the sidewalls of the bullpen.
“Oh not today, you fuckers,” Thompson snarled, swearing for the first time in Syler’s memory, darting off in the direction of the main server room as he slipped on a headset, surprisingly quick for a man of his age. “If you honestly think you can short circuit equipment I built, you’ve got another thing coming. I’ll keep us up and running, you keep them out!”
Syler held his position at the command desk, calling up the utility grid and pushing the surrounding area into a localized power outage, trusting that their back up generators would hold more reliably then he could keep a directed surge from frying their equipment. “Maria, any luck with isolating a location?”
“No and it’s pissing me off!”
“Boss,” Miranda called over the line, “they’ve started hitting the personnel file firewalls harder.”
“Redirected?”
“No, like they’ve added a half dozen players to the game. They’re still going just as hard on our communications.”
“The code looks the same on every front. How are this many of them attacking this seamlessly?” Jason cut in, still trying to get communications online and call for back up from their sister agencies.
“Fabulous question,” Syler muttered. “Alright, I don’t like playing defensively. What do you say we isolate them with a bait and switch trap?”
“So very on board,” Miranda replied. “Shall I build a tempting box around the personnel files?”
“Read my mind. Make it just tight enough to look like a flawed last minute defense. See if we can draw their attention,” Syler responded, pulling up a program of his own design. It generated a dummy file of the same size as the personnel files in the first layer, seamlessly swapping them out, as well as containing a tracer they could piggyback off of. Maria grinned as he built out the code, already prepared to chase the hacker so Syler could mount a penetrative hack of his own. “Ready everyone?” With the go ahead from his shift leads, he executed the code, timed to correspond with another wave of firewall volleys.
“Oh, right for it,” Maria gloated. “Now let me just—son of a bitch!”
Syler glanced over, watching in dawning horror as Maria’s entire station powered down. “What the fuck?” Attention drawn back to his station, he realized the hackers had used the location trace to jump directly into Maria’s terminal, remotely shutting it down. “That’s not possible. They’re reverse engineering my program live time! I spent months on that!”
“S, they locked onto mine,” Jason called, frantically trying to key out of his station before he could be locked out of the system. Beside him, Miranda was similarly overwhelmed. Syler looked back at his monitor, executing the kill code on the program just before it could be used against him but too late to stop the lock out from taking out his colleagues.
“They’re learning on the fly,” Maria murmured, stunned.
“Not they,” Syler intoned, face alighting with the realization. The something that had been just out of reach in the log reviews struck him like a tsunami. “There’s only one. There was only ever one.”
“That isn’t—”
“Augmented AI,” he breathed, pulling up a command window “That’s why the encryption was so ballsy. There was no possibility of error. And that—” he frantically typed in the same code scheme that had been utilized to protect Pyrona’s networks, slamming the return key to execute it, “is how we stop it.”
His screen went momentarily dark, system restarted when the trap code forced a lock out on the first incorrect password attempt. As his computer powered back on, every other station still connected to the back up generators did as well, coming to rest on the main login screen. A cursor appeared in the username box, and then a message:
Clever.
---
“Out of curiosity,” Arthur called from his spot against one of the desks, “what the hell did I just witness?”
“I’d very much like to know that myself,” Thompson said, reappearing from the server room,
