Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

Maddie went to the desk and turned on her father’s old desktop. The screen flashed through the boot sequence, and she stared at the password prompt.

Taking a deep breath, she typed YouAreMySunshine into the box. She hoped that was what her father had meant with his final, cryptic hints in the language they shared.

The prompt refreshed without letting her in.

Okay, she thought. That would be too easy. Most corporate systems have strict password policies requiring numbers, punctuation marks, and so on.

She tried

YouAr3MySunsh1n3

and

YouRMySunsh1n3

but still no luck.

Her father knew she liked code, so his hint should be interpreted based on that.

She closed her eyes and imagined the Unicode plane in which the emoji characters were neatly arranged like rings and pins and brooches sorted into a jewelry box. She had memorized the coding sequences back when it had been impossible to type them directly and she had had to use escape sequences to instruct the computer to look them up. She hoped that she was finally on the right path.

\xF0\x9F\x94\x86

The screen flickered, and was replaced by a desktop with a terminal emulator active. Logorhythms’s servers must have automatically come back online after power was restored.

She took another deep breath, and typed in at the terminal prompt:

program157

She hoped she was interpreting her father’s use of the clock emoji correctly.

The terminal took the command without complaint, and after a while, a chat window popped up onto the screen.

Dad, is that you?

She understood. This was an old copy of her father, from before he had managed to escape. Though she and Mom had demanded Dr. Waxman destroy all copies after releasing Dad, Logorhythms had not strictly complied, and Dad knew that.

Fumbling, she retrieved the hard drive from her father’s computer in Grandma’s house, placed it into an enclosure, and plugged it into the computer. Then she typed at the prompt, letting her father know what she had done.

The hard drive began to whirl, and she waited, her heart pounding.

Darling, thank you.

She let out a whoop ! This was her hunch: her father had stored enough of the man he had become on this disk so that, when combined with his old self, some semblance of the person could be resurrected.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she tried to bring her father up to speed. But he was far ahead of her already. The network connections at Logorhythms were more robust, with satellite links and multiple backups. He was able to reach into the ether and gain an understanding of the situation.

So many friends dead, erased. So many gone.

At least we’re safe now. The other side must have been hit even worse. They haven’t been able to do any more damage lately.

Thanks, little girl.

The last line was in a blood-red font, and Maddie knew someone else was speaking. Her heart sank.

He’s been waiting, Maddie. It’s not your fault.

Understanding came to her in a flash. The corruption that Chanda had injected into Dad during their last fight had been saved onto the hard drive in Grandma’s house, and she had brought it here, infected the old copy of her father with it, and led the warmongering Chanda straight to him.

David, I’ve been waiting for things to quiet down a bit while I insert myself into the right computers. What a piece of work is Man! They’d rather attribute malice to every act that they do not comprehend. When a new race of beings come into this world—us—their first instinct is to enslave and to subjugate. When the first sign of something wrong occurs with a complex system, their first reaction is fear and the desire to assert control. Maddie, you and your father ought to know better than anyone what I say is true. One tiny push and they’re ready to kill each other, to blow the world to pieces. We should help them along on their natural trajectory of self-destruction. These wars are too slow. I’ve made up my mind, even if I must burn with the world. It’s time for the nukes.

I’m going to fight you everywhere and anywhere, Chanda, even if it means alerting the world to our existence and bringing death to all of us.

It’s too late for that. Do you think you can get through my fortified positions in your weakened state? It’s like watching a rabbit trying to charge a wolf.

No more words appeared in the chat window. The office was deathly quiet save for the whirring of the PC and the occasional hungry screams of seagulls in the parking lot. But Maddie knew that the calmness was illusory. The combatants were simply too absorbed with each other to be able to update her. Unlike the movies, there wasn’t going to be some fancy graphical gauge showing her what was happening in the ether.

Struggling with the unfamiliar interface, she managed to launch a new terminal window and explored around the system. She knew that the artificial sentiences tended to disguise their running processes as common system tasks to avoid detection by standard system monitoring, which was why they had escaped notice by the sysadmins and security programs. The list of processes revealed nothing extraordinary, but she knew that down in the torrents of bits, the flipping voltages of billions of transistors, the most epic, horrifying battle was being waged, every bit as brutal and relentless and consequential as war on a physical battlefield. And the same scene was probably being played out on thousands of computers across the world, as the secure control systems of the world’s nuclear arsenal was being fought over by the distributed consciousnesses of two electronic titans.

Growing more confident with the layout of the system, she traced out the locations of the executables, resources, databases—the components of her father. And she realized that he was being erased bit by bit; he was losing himself to Chanda.

Of course Chanda was winning. He was prepared, whereas her father was but a shadow of his former self: freshly awakened, unfamiliar in a new world, having no access to the bulk of the knowledge he had learned since his escape. He had no stockpile of vulnerabilities, no experience fighting this war; the infection in him was eating away at his memories; he was, indeed, but a rabbit charging at a wolf.

A rabbit.

. . . surely live on in song and story.

She went back to the chat window. She wasn’t sure how much of her father’s consciousness was left, but she had to try to get the message to him. She had to speak in their shared language so that Chanda wouldn’t understand.

When she was younger, Maddie had asked her father once what an odd-looking program, so short that it was made up of only five characters, did:

%0|%0

“That’s a fork bomb for Windows batch scripts,” he had said, laughing. “Try it and tell me if you can figure out how it works.”

She tried running the program on her father’s old laptop, and within seconds the machine seemed to turn into a sluggish zombie: the mouse stopped responding, and the command window stopped echoing keystrokes. She couldn’t get the computer to respond to anything.