Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“First thing I must understand: has someone fucked us or not?”

“Yes, someone has most certainly fucked us, sir,” Wallace answered.

“Apologize to Zula when you say such word!”

“Beg your pardon, Zula,” Wallace said.

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“You have on laptop, on backup drive, many important files to us.”

“Yes.”

“Status of these files?”

“The same.”

“All encrypted?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Originals and backups?”

Here the tension had become so unbearable that Zula did not know whether she might faint or throw up.

Ivanov laughed.

“I know how to do this,” he said. “Someone fucks us extremely badly, I am familiar with situations of this type. Sokolov too. Peter!”

“Yes, Mr. Ivanov?”

“You know of Battle of Stalingrad?”

“No, sir.”

Ivanov was crestfallen.

“The biggest battle of all time, probably,” Zula said.

Ivanov brightened and gestured eloquently at her. “A wonderful and glorious victory for Mother Russia?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I’d call it that.”

“Vwy not!?” Ivanov demanded, in such a blustery tone that Zula was certain he was playing her.

“Because the Germans penetrated very deeply into Russia and inflicted horrendous losses.”

This was the correct answer. “Khorrendous losses!” Ivanov repeated. He turned to face Wallace, daring him to appreciate how clever Zula was. “Khorrendous losses! You hear Zula? She understands. Where are you from? Not from this ridiculous fucking country.”

“Eritrea.”

“Eritrea!”

“Yes.”

He held out his hand to her again. “Khorrendous losses! This girl understands nature of khorrendous losses. Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

“Dead! Khorrendous losses indeed. But! Eritreans won war.”

“Yes.”

“You, here, in nice country—a victory of a kind, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Russians, after Stalingrad, marched to Berlin. DO YOU UNDERSTAND POINT, Wallace?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You said that these two, Peter and Zula, could solve technical problem and win our little battle in spite of khorrendous losses, yes?”

“Yes, we were working on it but—”

Ivanov held up his hand to shut him up. “Wallace, do favor and go through door.” He gestured toward the plastic-lined room.

Wallace didn’t move.

“Just that door,” Ivanov repeated helpfully.

“Can we just get this done quick and simple?” Wallace asked.

“Not if you sit on couch. Quick and simple depends on how fast you move. And on what information I get from Peter and Zula. Now, go wait.”

Wallace, watched curiously by Sokolov, stood up and tottered into the adjoining room. One of the men in there stepped forward, moving carefully on the slick plastic, and closed the door behind him. Through it they could hear the screech of a length of duct tape being jerked off a roll.

“Mr. Ivanov,” Zula said, “Wallace is innocent.”

“You are beautiful girl, smart, I guess you know of computers. Convince me of this,” Ivanov pleaded. “Make me believe.”

ZULA TALKED FOR an hour.

She explained the nature and history of computer viruses. Talked about the particular subclass of viruses that encrypted hard drives and held their contents for ransom. About the difficulties of making money from ransomware. Explained the innovation that the unknown, anonymous creators of the REAMDE virus had apparently come up with. Ivanov had never heard of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, so she told him all about their history, their technology, their sociology, their growth as a major sector of the entertainment industry.

Ivanov listened raptly, breaking in from time to time. Half of the time this was to compliment her, since he seemed convinced that any female who did not receive a compliment every five minutes would stab him with an ice pick in his sleep. The other half of the time it was to ask a question. Some of these were keenly insightful, and others betrayed a disturbing lack of technical understanding.

Once these preliminaries were out of the way, Ivanov began to drill down on the question of Wallace’s culpability. Was the infection chargeable to any carelessness on his part? How, in other words, did the virus spread?

Zula told him what she’d learned, which was that REAMDE was actually spread through a security hole in Outlook, an extremely popular piece of software that, among other things, managed calendars, contacts, and whatnot. In order to do anything significant in T’Rain, you needed to run a reasonably deep vassal network. Coordinated group activities thus became an essential part of game play. Which meant that several of the players in your feudal hierarchy had to be online at the same time, to transact business and conduct war parties, dungeon raids, and the like. Those activities had to be scheduled around Little League practices, dentist appointments, studying for final exams, and so on, and so a stand-alone scheduling system, existing only inside of the T’Rain app, didn’t really serve. A third-party add-on had been created that built a tunnel between T’Rain and Outlook. Most T’Rain players used it. The add-on worked by sending messages back and forth, consisting of invitations to participate in group raids and the like. Most of these were pure text, but it was possible to attach images and other files to such invitations, and therein lay the security hole: REAMDE took advantage of a buffer overflow bug in Outlook to inject malicious code into the host operating system and establish root-level control of the computer, whereupon it could do anything it wanted, including encrypting the contents of all connected drives. First, though, it sent the virus onward to everyone in the victim’s T’Rain contact list.

There was another detail, mentioned on the internal wiki, that she did not share with Ivanov: the security hole in Outlook had been known for a while and most antivirus programs were hip to it. But hard-core gamers were still vulnerable since they ran T’Rain in fullscreen mode and so were oblivious to the increasingly hysterical warnings being hurled onto their screens by their virus-protection software.

Another detail she elected not to share: Wallace had almost certainly gotten the virus from Uncle Richard’s computer, spread via the thumb drive.

“So Wallace used this add-on, ” Ivanov said, using air quotes, “and got infected by this virus.”

“Completely innocently, yes,” Zula said. During the first part of her lecture she’d been surfing on a burst of energy that had carried her most of the way through, but in the last ten minutes or so, exhaustion had come over her, and she had slowed down and begun to mumble her words and to begin sentences she didn’t know how to end. Now, she dimly realized that the upshot of all she’d said, in Ivanov’s mind, might be that Wallace had screwed up and deserved to be punished. This now left her almost paralyzed.

To her own considerable surprise and then shame, she began crying. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.

“I am eediot!” Ivanov exclaimed. “I am stupidest man in world.” He stood up. Afraid that he was going to come over and comfort her, Zula tensed and forced herself to hold it in for a moment. She dared not look up. Through her tears and her fingers she could see Ivanov’s polished shoes moving around. He stepped out of the room. She let go of a train of little gasps and sobs, mixed now with self-anger and frustration that she was being such a stupid girl. She hadn’t cried in a serious way since her mother’s funeral.

Ivanov was back in the room after no more than fifteen seconds. She could hear his footsteps behind the sofa. She flinched as something limp and heavy fell across her shoulders. “What is wrong with you?” Ivanov wanted to know. He was addressing Peter. She realized that Ivanov had grabbed Peter’s arm and draped it over Zula’s shoulders and was now tamping it down into place like wet cement in a form. She got it under control then, certainly not because Peter had his arm around her shoulders but because of a kind of humor, albeit very dark, that was in the situation: the man Ivanov, whoever and whatever he was, jetting in from Toronto to give Peter lessons in how to be chivalrous to his girlfriend, and Peter trapped, unable to explain that they had just broken up.