F Wilson - Fatal Error

A billion?

"Could this bring down the Internet?"

He saw the Lady's imaginary mountain lake, its water spilling downhill through the damaged wall… saw its feeder tributary from the Internet choking off… the lake drying up… the Lady disappearing…

Munir shook his head. "Not even close. It's a spam tsunami, but the Internet can easily absorb it."

That was a relief, but then…

"What's the point?"

"Sometimes it's prankish maliciousness, simply to cause trouble. Other times there's a definite purpose-like creating a botnet. That's what I think we have here."

"Means nothing to me."

"All right. Let's see. My computer is now what can be called a zombie or a slave or a robot-it's under someone else's control. So is yours. So is everyone in our address books who opened email from us. If you link up all our zombie machines, you've got a robot network, or botnet, that you can force into coordinated efforts. A botnet can be used to assault another system with what's known as a DDoS attack-a distributed denial of service. It uses all the computers in its network to target a system and overwhelm it with a barrage of traffic and shut it down."

"So this virus is creating a global botnet."

Munir nodded. "I'm sure it already has, one that's still growing. I'm also sure that governments are already aware of it and looking for a way to stop it. Unfortunately, it's way too soon for the antiviral companies to have a fix."

"Then somebody needs to get the word out not to open any email with a blank subject line, especially if it's from someone they know."

Munir shook his head. "Too late for that."

Jack swallowed. "Could this bring down the Internet?"

"No. The Internet's too big, too resilient. Besides, bringing down the Internet is the last thing hackers want. That's where they live. It would be like burning down their own home."

"A psycho might burn down his own home."

"Yes, but this isn't one psycho. This is a well-organized, well-funded group. Trust me, they want to use the Internet, bend it to their will, not bring it down."

Well, Jack thought, he's right about the well-organized and well-funded part, but dead wrong about its purpose.

"But they stole the code you were using for that Magog game."

"The MMO game."

"Whatever." These acronyms were going to drive him nuts. "What's that got to do with this email virus?"

"I found a piece of my code in the virus. It's something I wrote for the gaming program to accelerate upload and download of video. It triples, quadruples video transfer speed, depending on your bandwidth."

"What good is that?"

"The only thing I can think of is that at some point they're going to send a video message throughout the botnet."

"To what? Sell Viagra?"

"No," he said in a grave tone. Probably thought Jack was serious. "It must be something bigger than that."

"Ya think?"

"It may be propaganda, or a religious message."

Jack couldn't see that. The Order operated behind the scenes. Coming out in a video fed to a zillion computers in a botnet didn't make sense. Had to be something more sinister.

"You're sure they couldn't use it to crash the Internet?"

Munir shook his head. "I am telling you, these people want to use the Internet, not bring it down."

Munir was refusing to get on board that train, so he wasn't going to be much help in building a scenario of how an Internet kill might work.

"Gotta go," Jack said, rising. "Meeting some people later."

"If we could get hold of Valez," Munir said, "we could wring the answer out of him."

Obviously he hadn't heard. How could he? The victims' names hadn't been released yet.

"Valez won't be telling anyone anything. He's dead."

He gave Munir the news account of the shooting: According to the police, both the driver and his passenger had been shot by the mystery man in the mystery van from Mississippi. Logical assumption. Ballistics would square that eventually, not that it mattered.

He looked horrified. "Who are these people? What kind of monsters are they?"

You don't want to know, Jack thought. You really don't.

He pointed to Munir. "As you said, well organized and well financed. And smart. Smart enough to keep any of their people on the lower rungs from knowing the big picture. Even if Valez were alive, I don't think he could help us. I think he knew he was supposed to acquire your game code and little else. He had no idea what it would be used for. But my guess is he went too far with you and paid the price. What I don't get is Russ… how'd he get involved?"

Munir leaned back and looked like he might puddle up again, but he held on.

"I've been thinking about that, and as I've been explaining this virus to you, the pieces began to fit. Do you know what Russ was involved with lately?"

Jack remembered him telling him something at Julio's…

"Some government project to foil hackers. Said he was a 'white hat' now."

Munir nodded. "Yes. A team of hackers, supposedly put together by the NRO."

" 'Supposedly'?"

"I don't believe the project had anything to do with national defense. I think they were put together to come up with this virus."

"He told me they were doing protection. Said they'd been building firewalls higher, wider, and smarter than anything else out there."

Munir looked at him. "And how do you test a firewall?"

Oh, crap. "You create bigger and better ways to breach it."

Munir jerked a thumb at his computer. "And if that was the case, neither the NRO nor any other agency would want their name connected. I think the one thing we can be certain of is that whoever hired Russ was not who they said they were. Maybe it was some other agency, or some group outside the government."

The latter, Jack thought. The Ancient Fraternal Septimus Order.

"You think Russ helped design that?"

"Yes. It's a very elegant virus, revolutionary, you could say. You would need a team of experienced hackers-just the sort of blue-ribbon team Russ was working with-to come up with something like that. I think in his conversations with the other hackers he must have mentioned the MMO game enhancer we were working on. He had been impressed with my video code and probably talked about it. The wrong person overheard, and I was targeted. But they couldn't have Russ around when they inserted my code. He'd recognize it. So…"

"So they killed him."

Munir slammed a fist on his desk. "They could simply have fired him!"

Yeah, they could have. But death seemed the Order's favorite way of dealing with problem people.

"Do you see any way of stopping this?"

Munir shook his head. "Until someone writes a program to kill it, you can stop the spread by not opening emails with no subject line. But the virus has too much of a head start. And once in your system, it's almost impossible to remove. It hides in multiple areas. You think you've gotten all of it, but if you've missed any, it immediately regenerates itself the next time you power up."

"Swell."

"A global botnet created by a virus built to download video," Weezy said with a slow shake of her head. "To what end?"

Jack, Weezy, Veilleur, and the Lady sat around the table in the Lady's apartment. With Weezy's help, Jack had explained as best he could what he'd learned from Munir. They seemed to understand.

"That's the big question," Jack said.

A wild scenario flashed through his brain.

"What if they plan to broadcast a never-ending loop of a hypnotic chant which, if repeated often enough by millions upon millions of people, would part the veil between the worlds and let the Otherness flood in. Or maybe show non-Euclidean designs that if enough people copy will alter geometry and have the same effect."