Code three, and they were out.
Hill called out the time. Armory-to-exit was the best they’d done yet.
They were just about ready.
2
Jay Gridley, head of Net Force’s computer section, leading expert and master of virtual reality in all its intricate, complicated forms, couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this tired. His eyes burned, and felt gritty when he blinked. His body had that brittle feeling, like a piece of glass, as though something would shatter if he moved too fast.
The days when he could sit up in VR all night long, then go all the next day without sleep were gone. When had that happened?
Little Mark, his darling baby boy, had run out of milk the night before, and Jay had gone out to the local 7- Eleven instead of the supermarket where they normally shopped. It was closer and faster. That’s why, he had explained to his wife, Saji, they called it a convenience store. . . .
Apparently, as it turned out, however, 7-Eleven cows weren’t the same as Safeway cows.
So at 3 A.M., when the boy had discovered the agony of gas pains, Jay had to get up and take care of him. Saji was pissed off. “What was it you said, Mr. Genius? Milk is milk, no big deal? Tell it to your son. . . .”
Nobody got any more sleep. The time he’d saved going to a convenience store had not been convenient at all. Nosiree . . .
To top it off, he’d been scheduled to brief General Ellis on the computer problem at 7:30 A.M. at the Pentagon Annex. Why so early? Why couldn’t they do it in VR? Because the military said so, that’s why. Screw ’em all. Jay liked being the honcho at Net Force, he’d gotten to match himself against some sharp players, but this military crap was for the birds. Maybe it was time to start thinking about changing jobs.
Jay hadn’t met General Ellis before, and was curious to see what his boss’s boss looked like, although he wished he could have been a bit more rested.
Although if what Thorn was saying was true,
“Sir, the general will see you now.”
Jay stood up and followed the far-too-fresh-looking secretary through a short, dark hallway, and then into the general’s office. Jay’s personal guard and escort stayed in the waiting room.
A picture of the President hung on the wall, along with several photos of an older man shaking hands with various dignitaries. Books cluttered dark-grained bookshelves, and small trophies occupied those areas that weren’t held by books: ammunition, models, and other pieces of hardware. A painting of a bayou that could have come from one of Jay’s own VR scenarios hung on one wall, cypress trees thick with Spanish moss crowding a red-hued waterway, itself tinted by a setting sun.
Behind the desk sat a man in his mid-fifties, fighting the battle of the bulge and losing. He was pale, and had hair going from gray to white.
“Mr. Gridley.”
The words were stretched out: “Mist-uh Guriddleeee.” A song of the South. Texas? Louisiana? Somewhere down there.
“That’s me,” said Jay.
“Your boss tells me you’re the best bug-squasher we got.”
Jay couldn’t help but grin. He’d never heard that precise phrase put to it before, but it fit. Always nice to hear the word “best” associated with his name, anyway.
“I guess you could call it that,” he said, “although I don’t think that’s what we’ve got here.”
“So, tell me, what do we have here?”
“Well, sir, basically someone has put together something that I call the ‘Archimedes Effect.’ ” Jay saw the blank look on the general’s face. “From Archimedes’ quote. ‘Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world’?” The general still looked blank. “It’s technically called a Distributed Computer Project, or DCP, a piece of software that runs on thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of different computers. The program hunts for answers, or, in this case, scenarios, for how to crack Army base security, and when it gets them, it spits them back out. Those are the ‘lever long enough,’ if you see what I mean.”
General Ellis nodded. “Tens of thousands?” he asked. “How does it do that?”
“The software is distributed by a server. After it gets run on the host computers, it sends partial work- packets until the job is complete. At that point, the server redirects the packets back to the server, where pieces of the solution are put together.”
The general frowned.
“The idea was first used in the late nineties. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence sent out a DCP that worked to search streams of radio-telescope data they’d collected for signals. They’d send out a block of information that was a portion of the search area, and the software on the host machine would process it whenever it wasn’t busy doing something else.”
The general was still frowning.
“Okay, I got that part—but where are these machines?”
“All over the world. The way it works is the attacker put the thing on the Internet, and people who thought it might be amusing downloaded it. And the interesting part is, whoever did it put it out in the open, disguised as a computer game—a science-fiction scenario called
“How did they get the specs of the real bases?”
“That’s the real question, isn’t it? I’m working on that.” Which was true. He still didn’t have a clue, but he was working on it.
“Um. Anyway,” Jay continued, “the computers sent their information back to the originator, automatically taking advantage of their Internet connection. With most of the civilian high-speed cable and dedicated phone lines, you are linked to the the net all the time. Firewalls stop stuff coming in, but not a DCP going out. That’s the beauty of it.”
The general nodded.
“Since the game is pretty high-tech, it appealed to hard-core gamers, people who have fairly powerful machines, and people who are used to playing games where cracking security is part of the, um, fun.”
“Go on.”
“This is how you set it up: Okay, here is an alien military base on the planet Alpha-Omega Prime. Here are the specs for its computers, security devices, the timing of its patrols, all like that. You are the leader of the terran underground forces on this world, and they are getting ready to attack Earth. Your mission is to bypass their security and delay their plans by crippling their bases. How would you do it?”
“You tellin’ me our Army base was cracked open by a buncha
Jay gave a little cough to cover a grin. The general seemed to be forgetting that Jay himself was a video- game geek. “Well, yeah, basically, that’s it. The average game player might not be too knowledgeable about such stuff, but give ten thousand of them a few dozen cracks at something? A solution, if it’s out there, is apt to come out eventually. Whoever ran the program had the stats on what was most likely to work, and exactly how to do it.”
