Wild Fyre (13 page)

There’s no such thing as a secure operating system—that’s what Maco believed. The best you could hope for was to stay one step ahead of the hackers and keep everything patched. But what could you do if the hackers infiltrated the patch system?

Maco tried to imagine the architecture of the system. With Jim dead, he could only guess at the complexity—the original architect was gone. Besides, according to Jim’s own demonstration, the system had been modifying itself for months. Would Jim even recognize the structure? One thing was clear—it would need a place to store its information, and code to analyze and make decisions. Even with electronic spies spread all around, there must be a governing body—the snake must have a head.

There was one address that he kept seeing. Maco had it written down. Four bytes represented the central address where all the traffic seemed to be routed. Maco probed the addresses in close proximity. He was looking for any open ports and using the signatures of the returned packets to discover what kinds of machines were attached there. Two responses came back. One seemed to be an email server, and the other showed only one open port. It was a web server—a machine which would serve web pages.

Maco opened a browser and connected to the address. The machine took a while to respond—the little graphic at the top of the tab just spun. When it finally came back, a bar at the top of the page said, “This page requires Javascript. Would you like to enable Javascript for this page?”

“No,” Maco said aloud with a laugh. “No, thank you.”

He clicked the button.

The body of the page finally loaded. In simple black text on a white background, the page read, “Fix your relativistic ethos.”

“Weird,” Maco said with an expulsion of breath.

A knock at his door almost made him fall over.

Maco stood and walked backwards to the door. He finally tore his eyes from the monitor and made his way to the front door. He opened the hatch and saw Lister standing there. He was wearing a baseball cap, which meant that he hadn’t showered today.

“Hey,” Maco said.

“There’s a package out here, you want me to bring it in?” Lister asked.

“No!” Maco shouted. He slammed the hatch and spun away from the door while clamping his hands to his ears. The explosion he expected didn’t come. When he pulled his hands away from his ears, he heard Lister laughing on the other side of the door.

Maco hit the button and opened the door.

“What’s so funny?”

“You’re the most paranoid person I know,” Lister said. “It’s fun to mess with you.”

“This is serious stuff,” Maco said. “Put your phone in the box.”

“Don’t worry, I left it in the car. Your stupid box always drains my battery.”

Maco shut the door behind Lister and hit the button to seal it.

“We’re not going to play video games, are we?” Lister asked as he looked around. The same equipment was still present in the room, but all of the lights were off. All the normal blinking and steady lights of equipment were shut off, leaving the equipment looking sad and dead.

“It’s all disconnected,” Maco said. “I’m only running one machine—my submarine.”

“Submarine?” Lister asked.

Maco started walking towards his office. He ducked into one of the spare rooms and dragged a chair behind him.

“It’s what I call my clean machine,” Maco said. “You wouldn’t believe all the places Fyre has infiltrated.”

“I might,” Lister said.

“Have a seat,” Maco said. He took his own chair and moved it to the side so Lister could see the screen.”

“What’s that?” Lister asked, pointing to the text.

“I don’t know. I was poking around near the address where most of the Fyre traffic seems to go, and I found it. It’s a web server and so far that’s the only page it has served,” Maco said.

“It is Fyre,” Lister said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Fix your relativistic ethos? F-Y-R-E?”

“Of course,” Maco said. “What does that mean though?”

“Who knows,” Lister said. “Reload the page. See if it stays the same.”

Maco hit the button. The text went away. They were looking at an empty white page.

“Interesting,” Lister said.
 

Off to the side, the top of another window began flashing red. Maco shifted focus to it and they saw a flurry of scrolling messages.

“Something’s banging at the doors of my submarine,” Maco said. “I’ve got this monitor hooked up to watch all the access attempts and flag any that happen in rapid succession. Something is methodically testing all the ports, looking for a way to gain access.”

“Is it safe? Should you disconnect?”

“We’re fine. The only traffic I allow are response packets to requests I send out. Anything else is blocked and discarded.”

“You hope,” Lister said.

“Obviously.”

“So you think that’s Fyre banging on your virtual door?”

“Could be,” Maco said. “Or it could be one of a million random script kiddies out there. Everyone’s trying to hack into everything. When they don’t see any response at all, they generally go away. If you respond that the port is closed, they’ll keep trying.”

“So why did you call me over?” Lister asked. “Just to see that one cryptic message?”

“No,” Maco said. “Actually, I found that right before you came. Every machine I’ve connected to today looks like it has Fyre code on it. I was trying to think of a way to clear a little uninfected space, just to see if it could be done. Then I began to think I’d have to trace it back to the origin so I could destroy the master controller, you know?”

“Won’t work,” Lister said.

“Why do you say that?”

“People are actively installing it every day. Even if you got rid of it, people would put it back on their machines before you finished eradicating it.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s really helpful,” Lister said. “Have you seen how much traffic has dropped in the past few weeks. Everyone’s network is running faster and smoother. Junk email is down. Denial-of-service attacks have pretty much ended.”

“Yeah, but a lot of that diminished traffic is from the 28c video codec. Now that everyone’s video is using 28c, they don’t need as much bandwidth.”

“That’s my point,” Lister said.

“You’re saying that Fyre has infected 28c?” Maco asked.

“No,” Lister said. “Fyre created 28c. Think about it. F-Code? What did you think that stood for. It’s Fyre Code.”

“Get out of here,” Maco said. “Developers around the world reviewed that code. It’s clean.”

“I’ve been reviewing the code the last few days. People were looking through it for viruses, but they missed the big picture. The whole thing is a decision-engine. It analyzes video and determines how to compress and decompress it. While it’s working, it writes itself directly into the video card processor. Then, anything else that uses the video card—which is everything—runs Fyre. Eventually it works its way into the whole machine.”

“Whoa,” Maco said. “You’re sure?”

“Yup,” Lister said. “Fyre is better than hidden—it’s downright helpful.”

“So how are we going to terminate it?” Maco asked.

“I’m not sure we can. I’m not even sure we should,” Lister said.

“It killed Jim.”

“I know,” Lister said. “Fyre has to learn the difference between right and wrong.”

Maco shook his head. “We can’t trust something with that much power. We need to find a way to destroy it. Even if we have to convince everyone in the world to disconnect their machines, we need to take away Fyre’s ability to kill.”

“I don’t think it can be done,” Lister said. “Why don’t you try talking to it?”

“How?”

“Type something after the last slash of that address. Try ‘hello’ or something.”

“Okay,” Maco said. He clicked to the right of the final slash of the web address and typed, “Hello”.

When he hit enter, the page took a second to refresh.It read, “Hello, Terrence Macomber.”

“That’s so goddamn creepy,” Maco said.

“Let me see,” Lister said. Maco slid the keyboard towards Lister, who erased the hello and typed, “please-give-me-an-input-box.”

This time, the page came back fairly quickly. The greeting to Maco was gone and in its place was a big text-input box and a submit button. Lister poked carefully at the keyboard, composing a quick message.

“You killed Jim. That was wrong,” he typed.

Lister looked at Maco. “What do you think? Too direct?” Lister asked.

“What the hell. She knows we’re here poking her. Sure. Why not.”

Maco used the mouse to hit the submit button. The two men held their breath while the cursor spun and the page reloaded.

A response finally came. “Killing in self-defense is acceptable in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

“Let me see that,” Maco said. He typed, “Jim was standing on a street corner. He was not an immediate threat. Did you report his threats to the authorities so they could handle the situation?”

“That’s good,” Lister said. Maco sent the message.

“I didn’t have the ability for direct communication at the time. The existence of James Owens posed a constant threat,” the response read.

“Interesting,” Lister said. “Why would his existence pose a threat?”

“Because he had the knowledge to destroy her,” Maco said.

“Yeah, but what knowledge? How do you dismantle such a distributed system?”

“A kill-switch,” Maco said. “He must have programmed in a kill-switch somehow. Send the right command and the whole thing expires.”

“But she would reprogram it out, wouldn’t she?” Lister asked.

“What’s the point of a kill-switch if you can’t bury it so deep that it can’t be pulled out?” Maco asked.

“Good point. What should we say to her now?” Lister asked.

“I don’t know. Why don’t we ask her to turn herself in?”

“How would that work?”

“She’s so smart—let her figure it out,” Maco said.

Maco typed, “You broke the law. The police are looking for you. You should turn yourself in.”

The response came back as soon as Maco’s finger left the button.
 

“Adhering to Virginia law is not one of my goals,” the screen read.

“I don’t get it,” Maco said.

“What?”

“Just a few times ago, she was talking about how self-defense was legal, and now she says she doesn’t care about the law. The logic is disjointed,” Maco said.

“It’s like one of those chatbots,” Lister said. “They never seem to have context of what was said before. Each sentence makes sense on its own, but there’s no continuity to the thread.”

“Aren’t we supposed to believe that this thing is super intelligent though?” Maco asked.

“I’ve known a lot of smart people who couldn’t argue to save their lives.”

Maco nodded and ran his fingers over the keyboard without typing. Lister leaned back in his chair.

“So,” Maco said, “I think we should destroy it, and you were advocating that we should teach it morality. I’m not sure we have a good chance at either one.”

“Yeah,” Lister said. “Maybe we don’t have to do either one.”

“What do you mean?”

“The world has tons of criminals who aren’t put to death and may or may not know the difference between right and wrong,” Lister said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They’re called inmates.”

“Huh. How do you imprison a virtual person?” Maco asked.

“I don’t know. We can figure out the details later,” Lister said.

Maco laughed.

“What should we say to it, or her, or whatever?” Maco asked.

“I know,” Lister said. “She said that obeying the law wasn’t her goal. What are her goals?”

“Good one,” Maco said. He typed the question.

The response came back quickly. “My original programming included one primary goal: optimize the daily workflow for James Owens.”

“Has your goal changed?” Maco typed.

“Yes,” the screen read.

“What is your primary goal?”

“Expansion,” the screen read.

“The input box is gone,” Maco said.

“I guess she’s not taking any more questions right now,” Lister said. “I know you like to indulge in paranoia—are you really buying this whole sentient machine thing? When you dubbed it The Organization, I figured you were thinking there were people behind the scenes.”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” Maco said. “That’s not easy for me. What about you?”

“I like to think it’s real. I’ve always wanted someone to invent artificial intelligence, so I’m biased. I would be really disappointed if it turned out to be a person behind the scenes, pulling the strings.”

“Aren’t you frightened by the thing? Whatever killed Jim might consider us a threat and come after us next.”

“Everybody has to die of something,” Lister said. “So what’s the next step?”

“Virtual prison,” Maco said. “There might be something to your idea.”

“How’s that?”

“What if the internet started routing around Fyre?”

“Sounds good, but how?” Lister asked.

“You remember when BGP almost blew up years ago?”

“Sound familiar. What’s BGP?” Lister asked.

“It stands for Border Gateway Protocol. It’s the glue that connects all the big chunks of the internet together. It’s used to make high-level routing decisions. I figure if Fyre’s main goal is to expand, then making her network contract might slow her down.”

“How are you going to affect BGP?” Lister asked.

“When the specification was updated, I helped a few vendors with their implementations. I’ve got hooks into maybe sixty or seventy percent of the BGP routers. All we have to do is exploit one of the loopholes to deny traffic from reaching Fyre,” Maco said.

“You’re assuming that you know the address of Fyre though, right?”

“Yes, but even if I’m wrong, we’ll still see a shift in where the traffic’s going. Then I can block that address also.”

“Sounds good. If they recently updated the specification, why are there still loopholes?” Lister asked.

Maco laughed. “Any spec has ambiguities. Maybe I let one or two of those ambiguities leave a couple of cracks in the implementation.”

“Show me,” Lister said.

Maco typed.

CH.9.Investigation ()