Daniel Suarez - Daemon

“A meeting in an online game?”

“Yes. But since it’s difficult to arrest an avatar, I decided to go into God Mode.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I cheated; I enlisted the aid of the CyberStorm system administrators to place the intersection under surveillance with virtual cameras.”

“You set up a stake-out in fantasyland?”

A chuckle swept through the room.

Philips nodded. “Something like that. The goal was to monitor every character that entered this intersection up to the appointed meeting time. It’s a busy intersection—in the middle of the market where players purchase equipment—and I wanted the maximum amount of time to trace Ross.”

One of the uniformed military officers spoke up. “Like tracing a phone call?”

“Similar, yes. Each player has a screen name hovering over their character’s head that must be unique for that server cluster. We wrote a script that scanned for suspicious player names on the servers. It autoharvested IP addresses for likely suspects and traced them back to their ISP for follow-up. We also established a manual system where we could select any player name, and the CyberStorm techs would look up that player’s originating IP address.”

“Why bother with IP address? Doesn’t CyberStorm have a record of each player’s billing information?”

“Yes, but it seemed likely that Ross would steal or borrow an account. By using his IP address to locate the Internet Service Provider, and then contacting the ISP for the physical address of the connection, we were more likely to actually find him.” She looked around the room for emphasis. “We scrambled airborne strike teams in several U.S. cities in preparation for this meeting in the hopes that Ross would be hiding in a major metropolitan area.”

The FBI analyst couldn’t resist. “I gather from the fact that Ross is still at large that this plan did not succeed.”

A voice in the darkness: “Can we continue, please?”

Philips nodded.

The screen suddenly came to life. Animated 3-D people moved through the scene. It was eerie how realistically the people moved—although only half of them had glowing names floating over their heads.

“The characters moving around without names are NPCs, non-player characters—they are computer controlled. Only human players have names.”

The perspective of the screen changed. It was a first-person view from Philips’s character as she moved through the crowd.

“We conducted this session from our offices in Crypto. The game permits players with VOIP capability to speak directly to nearby players over a voice channel. Ross requested that we have such a hookup. I am controlling this character in the game, and it is my voice you will hear talking with him. I had a MUTE button on my headset, and you will also hear me issuing instructions to my team. Ross did not tell me in advance the name of his character, but he said I would be able to pick him out of the crowd. Which is why we put the auto-trace script in place. But Ross took a page out of Sobol’s playbook.”

The screen view changed as Philips’s character turned this way and that, checking out the shoppers in the market. Then the POV moved toward a Nubian female 3-D character wearing a black leather corset with a plunging neckline. Something resembling a French-cut steel thong wrapped her shapely hips. She was a hentai cover girl. As the frame moved closer, the Nubian woman turned, revealing what was unmistakably a computer-generated version of Philips’s face.

Mild amusement spread through the audience in the meeting room. Philips ignored it.

On-screen the glowing name over the Nubian avatar read: Cipher. Philips’s recorded voice came in over the speakers:

Philips: Get me an IP for the screen name “Cipher.” That’s spelled c-i-p-h-e-r.

NSA Tech: Got it, Doctor. Looking up ISP…

The screen perspective moved right up to Cipher , and stopped. The scantily clad warrior princess faced the screen. A male voice came in over the speakers:

Ross: Good evening, Doctor.

Philips: Mr. Ross. Apparently you can’t resist identity theft. How did you upload my likeness to this game?

Ross: I didn’t upload anything. Players can edit the geometry of their avatars. I sculpted this one to resemble you.

Philips: I didn’t realize you studied my appearance so closely.

Ross: How could I forget you? Besides, I knew you’d try to identify my account in advance of this meeting, but your automated forensics tools don’t know what you look like, Doctor. Your physical appearance is a graphical encryption that the human mind is uniquely qualified to decode.

Philips: That doesn’t make it any less unsettling to have a conversation with myself as a transsexual lingerie model.

Ross: I find it just as uncomfortable being seen with you.

Philips: How’s that?

Ross: Well, you’ve got the default skin of a generic warrior, and nobody keeps the default skin. You are the fantasy world equivalent of a Fed. I recognized you a mile away.

Philips: Jon, why did you call me here?

Ross: To prove to you that I’m innocent.

Philips: And how do you intend to do that?

Ross: By showing you one of the back doors in this game.

Philips: We’ve been through every line of the source code, Jon. There are no back doors.

Ross: None here, true.

Ross’s female warrior gestured dramatically, as if performing a spell. In a moment a magical portal appeared in the street. A wandering player character tried to walk into it but bounced off. After a few tries, he got bored and walked off.

Philips: What’s this?

Ross: A Type II gate. It will only permit those I choose to enter, and I just typed your character’s name in. What does “FANX” mean, anyway?

Philips: I’ll let you puzzle it out.

Ross: Please step through the portal.

NSA Tech: Doctor, we’ve got a physical address, but it’s in Helsingborg, Sweden.

Philips: [MUTE ON] Notify local authorities and Interpol. [MUTE OFF] Where’s this lead to?

Ross: What does it matter? Look, I hope efforts to trace my physical location are not distracting you. I’m running several layers of proxies, Dr. Philips. By the time you track them all down, this will be long over. Just pay attention, please. This is important.

Philips: Jon, I’m not—

Ross: It’s okay, Doctor. That’s your job. Just step through the gate, please.

The perspective of the screen changed as Philips moved her character through the gate. It was a swirling vortex of blue lines, and then suddenly the view changed to a darkened masonry tunnel filled to a depth of a couple feet with black water. The area was lit by the swirling lights of the nearby magical portal. Rats scurried away along ledges, and the water’s surface rippled with the dazzling lights.

Someone in the dark muttered. “Nice algorithm…”

The NSA chief craned his neck. “Shhh!”

On-screen, Ross’s hentai warrior princess waded out into the water and stood in front of Philips’s character.

Philips: What is this place?

Ross: It’s a sewer beneath the Temple District. Not accessible without a magical portal.

Philips: What did you want to show me, Jon?

Ross: Look straight ahead. What do you see? You may need to move side to side to notice it.

The view on-screen changed as Philips focused straight ahead. There in the semidarkness of the slime-covered wall was the outline of an oxidized bronze door—nearly the same color as the surrounding stones.