what I’ve said.”
“Oh, I think you can count on that, Ms. Skye.”
She left and Alex turned back to work. A virtual country? No taxes? Preposterous.
Wasn’t it?
14
Jay Gridley walked across the huge laboratory’s hard linoleum floor toward the test chamber. A low, dry rustling sound, as if thousands of leaves were being tossed about in a huge lotto machine, echoed through the room. The air was heavy with the smell of ozone. Across the room, two Jacob’s ladders, the epitome of mad- scientist decor, buzzed, sending hump-shaped blue sparks up their V-shaped electrodes. Close at hand, a bank of Tesla coils radiated even more intense sparkings, and Van de Graff electrostatic generators added their cracklings. A large Lava lamp stood off to the side, and on one of the lab benches, a Rube Goldberg forest of beakers, retorts, and Bunsen burners drove multicolored liquids through tubes and distilled them into yet more containers. At the end of another bench, an old oscilloscope displayed a revolving sine wave. The topper was the huge computer lining the entire wall at the end of the room. Huge rolling reels of magnetic tape rolled back and forth, interspersed with banks of flashing lights. The sound of clicking relays was a touch he had added himself.
Jay grinned. This particular scenario wasn’t actually all his, but since he had the final word in most Net Force VR work, his suggestions had carried some weight.
Frankenstein would be proud of this setup. Or at least the moviemakers who did all those science-gone-mad flicks of the thirties, forties, and fifties would be. Jay was proud, too. His people had done their usual great work.
Around him on the other three walls were hundreds of museum-quality display cases, each one lined with cotton and filled with odd-looking insects. On top of the lab benches, in huge wooden boxes, were thousands upon thousands more bugs: Their assorted wings, legs, and pincers were what made the leaf-rustling sound.
This wasn’t Jay’s usual VR scenario. It wasn’t intended to help him break into other net sites. It wasn’t even connected to the net at all. Instead, it was quarantined in a stand-alone Net Force computer, with no links to the outside net at all.
This scenario was a holding cell. It was also a visualizer and a synthesizer. It translated computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses into distinctive insectoid shapes, complete with whatever features made each particular program unique. When it came time to see how a new attack program worked, Net Force personnel came here, to the test lab, to see what they were up against.
If the virus ate data, for example, it might have oversized mandibles along with a big abdomen and colors to match the data it went after. If it propagated by hiding in other data, or by catching hold of it, it might have a chameleon-like ability to change color, or spinnerets to ensnare its prey. Each mode of operation, combined with the bug’s delivery and goal, would give Net Force’s software enough info to make a distinctive-looking bug.
Naturally they still had to look at the actual code that made up the cores of the viruses, but the visualizations gave them a better way of tracking how the virus actually worked.
Like now, for instance.
Behind a thick Plexiglas wall was the virus test chamber, itself an analog representation of data transfer between computers. An old-fashioned punch-card printer sat at one end of a long conveyer belt. At the other end was a scanning array and punch-card reader along with a large diagram of a computer that looked like an ant farm.
Everything was a brilliant white, like some scientific version of heaven. Cameras and magnifying lenses surrounded the apparatus to make it easier to watch the process from start to finish. A long section of the Plexiglas wall had been built to make a huge lens that brought sections of the conveyer belt up several levels of magnification.
Jay walked over to the punch-card printer and sat at a terminal. He tapped a few buttons and the printer began to spit cards. What he’d actually done was to upload an e-mail that had been infected with the new blanker virus going around. High-end security software had caught it, but the virus had slid past standard virus-checker stuff, and he wanted to find out why.
He moved to a magnifying glass in front of the printer, one half of which was cut away like a “how it works” kind of drawing, and took a look. There, near the punch card being printed, was a small insect shape. He flipped a larger lens down over the area he was watching and took a better look.
The bug was fairly large. Pale, almost clear, without color, it was segmented into three main sections. It had six legs and six pincer arms, with one pair of each per section. The head was surprisingly small, with tiny feathered antennae, and it had large eyes.
As he watched, the middle thorax — if it could be called that, there being three of them — went completely transparent, and he could see through it.
Clever. The author of this little bug had come up with a new invisibility routine, a don’t-look-at-me-I’m-not- here bit of misdirection that made viral data less noticeable.
As Jay watched, the bug worked its way toward a small pile of punch cards.
The first batch of cards dropped down from the printer onto the belt, which inched itself forward just enough so that the next batch of cards wouldn’t hit the first, and then stopped. The bug didn’t go yet, though.
It waited for the second set of cards — which actually represented a packet of data — to begin stacking up. Then it reached between the second and third sections and did something to detach the last set of arms and pinchers. That segment moved toward the cards, went transparent, and began cutting at them with its claws. When it had made enough room, it burrowed in and pulled a section of torn card back to cover itself. The bundle of cards dropped onto the conveyer belt a few seconds later, and packet number three began printing.
Fascinated, Jay watched as the bug split itself apart again several packets later and the second segment burrowed into another stack of cards. The very next stack got the last third of the bug.
Impressive. A trinary virus — and, if he was right, one coded to ride different packets.
The last stack of cards dropped onto the conveyer belt, and then the belt sped up, taking the cards toward the scanner at the other end of the test chamber.
The cards were VR representations of packets of information: the e-mail he’d forwarded broken down and sent in little bunches. The way it worked was the first packet had a list saying how many packets were coming, kind of like a cover sheet for a fax. The last packet had a little tag saying, “The end.” The packets in between contained the actual e-mail itself.
The computer or server getting the data would watch for all the packets and confirm delivery of each one before forwarding on to the next link in the chain. If there were any errors, the problem packet would be re- sent.
Early virus writers had taken advantage of the fact that each packet was a set size. That meant that if your message was, say, ten point two packets long, eleven packets would still be sent. The point oh eight unused space would usually be filled with zeroes, and that was where the virus would hitch a ride.
The virus checkers had gotten wise to this, though, and started carefully checking the size of messages against the number of characters sent.
So the innovative virus writers had gone one better, and had their creations cut out sections of legitimate data in the middle of the stream and hide there.
This would change the size of the packet, of course, which would throw an error, but that wouldn’t set off any alarms. Errors in transmission were pretty common. Line noise, bad connections, time-outs, there were many, many legitimate reasons why errors occurred. The receiving computer would simply flag the error, the entire stream would get sent again, and the recipient would get their data unaware of the hitchhiker that had come along.
This had led to binary viruses, where the virus would split into two innocuous-looking sections that didn’t do anything until they were reassembled at the other end of the chain.
This was the first time he’d ever seen a trinary, however. In addition, the way the bug had not spaced the
