Survival Quest (The Way of the Shaman: Book #1)

"...
t
o find the defendant Daniel Mahan guilty of hacking the control program of the city sewage network, resulting in total system shut-down, and sentence him to confinement in a correctional capsule and resource-gathering labor for the term of eight years, under Article 637, section 13 of the Penal Code. The place of confinement will be automatically appointed for the defendant by the system. Should the prisoner meet the conditions stipulated in Article 78 Section 24 of the Penal Code, he will be given the opportunity to transfer to the main gameworld. The Court appoints the defendant the following specifications: race — Human, class — Shaman, main profession — Jeweler. The sensory filters are to be turned off for the entire term spent in the capsule. Parole is possible if the defendant pays an amount totaling one hundred million gold in gaming coins. The sentence is final and cannot be appealed."

They say that God is Truth. I don't know, really. Maybe that's how it is - it's not something I ever checked, so I'm not going to argue. But all arguments are evil and a great evil at that. And that's a Truth against which there's no argument. A play on words, if you like.

Let me introduce myself - I am Daniel Mahan, as it has already been mentioned. I am a thirty year-old specialist in IT security and everything that involves. I am a freelancer, periodically hired by corporations for finding exploits in the virtual game of Barliona. This game had filled the whole world with itself and had become the entire world for some. I can’t say that I am the best security specialist, but I’m in no way the worst either. Something between a genius and totally useless. Fair to middling.

Each year all the specialists officially involved in looking for exploits in the Game must go through retraining. What it was we had to be retrained in remained a mystery to us, because for many the search for exploits was the only source of income. But the Corporation had strict demands: if you want to look for weaknesses without breaking the law, you had to go through retraining. Moreover, the additional training mainly meant the study of new laws that increased the punishment for hacking and we were never shown any tools or methods for finding exploits. The Corporation kept a stringent control over preventing any internal know-how from being leaked to outsiders, especially to the likes of us. Today we might be honest and rule-abiding and tomorrow any one of us could turn into a malicious attacker and try to break into Barliona.

At one such retraining session I ended up sharing a table with a fairly attractive girl and striking up a conversation with her. Unfortunately she was, of course, also a freelance artist, as all those engaged in finding exploits in the game called themselves, whether they actually worked anywhere or not. I was all set to start throwing around clever and obscure terminology, expecting the girl, stunned by the brilliance of my mind, to fall into my arms. Far from it. Marina turned out to be clever and sufficiently professionally experienced: her main job was providing information security for the city sewage system, while the search for game exploits was just a hobby.

Well, well. Never tell a girl, especially a smart girl, that her place of employment is not worthy of having a freelance artist working there. We started to argue. And then, struggling to come up with anything better, I threw in my killer argument of why you shouldn't work in a sewage system, which seemed a sure win to me: "It stinks there!"

It would seem that she had been irritated with this kind of comment once too often. So irritated, in fact, that she left my table and put an end to our developing acquaintance. What a pity. I had already started to make certain plans. Well, never mind. I immersed myself fully into yet another report on how the new law was increasing the punishment for the hacking and destruction of programs. Heigh-ho! Now they give eight years for hacking. This is serious. In the break between the seminars Marina sat next to me again.

"So you say that a job like mine is only fit for amateurs?" she said in an irritated tone, and I noticed how a crowd of onlookers started to gather around us.

"Listen, I never said anything of the sort. I didn't say that you were an amateur: I said that this kind of work can’t be worthy of a professional of your caliber."

"It's the same thing. If I am working there it means that I'm not good enough to work somewhere else, which means that I'm a talentless idiot!" It's no use arguing with a girl in a state of rage. You won't prove anything to her and you'll end up looking like a fool to everyone else.

"Let's talk about something else. It's my fault. I'm sorry for my poor choice of words. I invite you for a truce over a cup of tea, coffee or whatever you prefer. I don't want to quarrel with such a beautiful and enchanting lady," I made an attempt to pull the carpet form under Marina's feet. Better for her to be indignant because of my compliments than on account of her work.

"Tell me, do you have a wife or a girlfriend?" I involuntarily shuddered at this question and automatically shook my head. It seems Marina was going on the offensive, pulling the carpet from under my feet instead. My thoughts were confirmed when her next question virtually floored me:

"Would you like to go out with me? Do you like me?" Damn, what is it with women these days? Now they are the ones throwing themselves at men; although I admit that such 'attacks' made me more than happy. Marina really was an attractive girl, pretty, with a slightly upturned nose, so I thoughtlessly nodded to her.

"Listen up, everyone!" Marina suddenly shouted. "If in a week's time Daniel manages to break through the security system I installed on the city sewage system Imitator, I solemnly promise to be his girl for at least a month! Without showing in any way that I find any of it unpleasant. But if he fails, then he’ll spend a month working as one of the waste collector cleaners. So — ready to make this bet? A test server would be set up for you with a full copy of the working system, and your hacking attempt would be officially recorded as a test of our security. By tomorrow you’ll receive all the necessary papers, ensuring that you remain clean in the eyes of the law," said Marina and gave me her hand to shake on it.

Who forced me to take this bet? I could have dismissed the whole thing as a joke and brushed the entire conversation under the carpet. We would have gone for a pint of beer together and parted our ways in peace. But no, Marina's eyes drilled me with such force that I involuntarily shook the hand in front of me.

"Great! Tomorrow you will get the scan of the request to check the security of our system and its virtual address. In exactly a week's time I’ll be here again — either with a job offer for you or fully prepared for a date. The time is ticking, hero!"

A murmur of approval went through the crowd around us and made me go into a total stupor. Marina left and people I knew, as well as strangers, started to come up to me and slap me on the back, shake my hand and offer their services in hacking. Of course, if such a girl risks herself for a whole month, everyone should lend a hand. And if I failed, it would mean a good laugh at my expense when I’d be working the sewage waste collectors.

They are right when they say that the rarest friendship in the world is a person's friendship with his own common sense. Who stopped me from heeding it? But once I committed myself there was no retreat. I spent two days gathering information about the I.I. of the city sewage system and about Marina, and then started to work.

Of course it would be a bit much to call intellect imitation programs 'I.I.': everyone will immediately starts thinking that this is real artificial intelligence and beating themselves in the chest and screaming that in our world this cannot be done and, even if it can, humanity can do without such a 'boon', because then the machines will replace humans and we will all die out. One must not mix up completely different concepts, or it would be like trying to compare 'soft' and 'green'. Imitation programs have no personality matrices. Naturally, if you program them right, they will show emotion, character and the rest. You could even get them to do it so well that when interacting with them you would struggle to tell right away whether you're even dealing with a program; but they lack the key component, which is self-awareness. Thus a program would not ask questions like "Who am I? Why am I here? How much will I get paid? When is my holiday?" It just wouldn't — unless, of course, such a parameter had been included in it from the start. And this means that it would not get anxious on account of its place in the world and would carry out all of its functions to the letter. With time, imitators, as such programs came to be called, started to be used in all spheres of human life, fully replacing human beings. And not just human beings - even pets, or rather robots that looked like pets, became a permanent feature of our world, having replaced their real animal counterparts. Of course, some, staunchly clinging to the old ways, still keep these balls of fur in their homes, but each year the number of such people grows smaller. Do you want your beloved pet to work as an alarm clock, a vacuum cleaner, an iron, a security guard and so on and so forth, while not shedding fur, making a mess on your carpet or ruining your furniture? Would you have something which, on top of all that, in no way differed either in looks, behavior or touch to a familiar house cat? Then give us a call... Damn, I think I'm getting side-tracked here.

They say that with the creation of intellect imitators humanity was only one step away from creating artificial intelligence, a full-fledged robotic mind, but this is little more than speculation. After all, there are rumors that artificial intelligence had been created some time ago somewhere deep in military laboratories, that it is currently in operation and is making itself very useful. In general, with the appearance of the imitators life became happy and carefree. But the resulting unemployment brought little joy to anyone, so the tension in society following the emergence of the imitators constantly increased...

Right, I'm getting carried away again. Backtracking.

I won the bet. In two days I gathered all the information available on the net on Marina's education background and on the seminars and training sessions she attended. If she did anything, it must have been based on something she had already studied, rather than inventing the wheel from scratch. Having bought myself new hardware in order to keep my beloved notebook safe from the defense systems that vigorously attack computers of hapless hackers, I started on the break-in. I didn't even try to hide behind a chain of servers, as is usually done by the break-in gurus. Why would I? I was working strictly as ordered and only one person could track my activities on the test server, namely Marina. I was convinced that she would spend the whole week stuck at work, waiting for my attack. So there was little reason for me to encode anything. The actual break-in only took me a few hours. I was right: a very rare but effective defense system was used. Naive girl. The author of this defense system was one of my acquaintances and when I contacted him and described the situation, I was soon told how to circumvent it. Not even to circumvent it, but where to start digging.

"The defense is solid, but it depends on access settings," said my friend. "In large cities this is an issue, especially if there is a bunch of idiotic superiors with different demands. Everything might be fine during the initial installation, but once it starts to operate there might be leaks – ‘dead souls’ with rights of access to the setup. Here a simple administrator would be of little help — leaks with access rights of such an organization are beyond his level!"

In the end things turned out exactly as he said. After just a couple of hours' work the analyzing program produced several potential leaks that I could work with. Now I regretted getting the new hardware, having erroneously thought that everything was going to be very complicated and dangerous. I spent two days preparing the password attack, so I had little doubt of my success.

A wise person once said that the devil is in the detail. It turned out that several numbers were confused in the extremely long test server number (346.549.879.100011.011101.011011.110011.) Who made the mistake - I, when I entered it, or Marina when she wrote me the letter, still remains unclear. What in fact happened was that I wasn't working with the test system, but none other than the real and functioning system, which controlled the sewage system of the whole city.

This is why I am currently in court listening to my sentence being read out.

I broke into the server, in the process completely crashing the I.I. of the city sewage works. And it turned out that after the imitator went down, the large lake in the centre of the city, just opposite the City Hall, was turned into a very foul-smelling entity. The unforeseen had taken place - the I.I. administrative perimeter was turned off, leading to a jump in pressure and the collector pipe under the city bursting in several places. And if the underground breaches remained unnoticed by the majority, the breach at the centre of the lake resulted in the crowds of demonstrators, which usually gathered in front of the City Hall demanding the ban of the imitators, suddenly remembering that they had urgent business elsewhere. The same went for the people in the City Hall. And in general, the whole city centre was suddenly gripped by a strong desire to visit their relatives in the countryside, where the air was so clean and fresh.

This case gathered a lot of publicity and everyone decided that this was a terrorist attack. There was a protest demanding that a stop should be put to the imitator-powered services and the investigators started digging around to find the party responsible.

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