Hari Kunzru - Transmission

His life might have progressed in any number of directions had he not, one evening, left a floppy disk in the A-drive of his PC. When he started up the following morning, his screen suddenly went blank. He pressed keys. No response. He rebooted. The machine ran slow. He rebooted again. And again. Finally, after an interminable crunch and stutter from inside the case, a message appeared in front of him.

u r a prlz0n7r ov th3 10rd$ ov mlzr00L

He kept shutting down and restarting, but the problem only got worse. His beloved computer had been reduced to a pile of scrap metal. To get it running again, he had to reformat his hard drive, which meant that he lost all his data. Everything. Months of work erased by this catastrophic visitation. He started to research what it was that had happened, and found that he had been hit by a thing with a name, the Carnival Virus, a string of code that had hidden itself in an innocuous floppy disk and had used his computer to make copies of itself. Every restart had given birth to another generation. Life.

Information on computer viruses was hard to come by. Even a sketchy impression of where they originated was difficult to form without his own internet connection, and in India at that time, that was an impossibility. By writing off for disks and magazines and making occasional cripplingly expensive calls to foreign bulletin boards, he managed to get hold of a few code samples, which he studied like religious texts. In the privacy of his bedroom he created several simple viruses, careful to keep backups of his data in case (as happened once or twice) he accidentally infected his own machine. He taught himself assembly language, and by his late teens had begun to excel in all sorts of more conventional programming tasks. His parents, who were worried by his reclusiveness, his bad posture, his unwillingness to play sports or bring friends round for tea, began to see an upside to his obsession. Computers were the coming thing, Mr Mehta would remind his colleagues at the firm. My son will be an engineer.

It was only when he went to college, and at last had proper access to the data riches of the net that he was able to properly satisfy his curiosity. He started to burrow into the underground, logging on to chatrooms and IRC channels, navigating with a thrill past the braggarts and hypers, the ranters and flamers and paranoiacs who infested this grey area of the computing culture.

Screw you lamer, don’t come running to me when it wipes your hd, i just distributed the thing. Well anyway enjoy doods, cya at my next release…

That was the style. If you had knowledge you wore it with arrogance. You put down the pretenders and the fools like a dashing musketeer, a programming dandy. Arjun was shy. Even online, hidden behind the anonymity of a screen name, he lacked confidence. For a long time he just lurked, watching and listening, gleaning information about security flaws, vulnerabilities, techniques, exploits. But in the true underground, the untraceable underground of temporary private channels and download sites with shifting addresses, exchange was everything. If you didn’t give, you didn’t get.

So, feeling trepid and illicit, badmAsh started to appear on virus-exchange boards, offering to trade code for code. To his pleasure and surprise, he found that people wanted what he had, and he soon became popular, respected. It gradually dawned on him that behind the bluster most other traders were not that talented — they were handymen, tinkering with already existing routines. They were not the originators, the architects. badmAsh became something of a star.

Further blurring the borderline between life and not-life, the internet had brought computer viruses into their own. When floppy disks were the primary transmission vector, rates of infection were low. Now that files could be sent over phone lines, the number of incidents soared. From his college terminal Arjun watched in fascination as malicious code flared up like a rash on the computing body of the world, causing itching and discomfort to a public educated by science fiction and the Cold War to regard the convergence of machines and biology with uneasy reverence. Computer virus. Future terror.

Arjun himself had little time for science fiction. For him it was all Romance. Pyaar. Being the hero of the Vx boards was a sterile thing in some ways, because the point of being a hero is to get the girl, and on the Vx boards there were none. Not one. Not even (as in other zones of the net) anyone pretending to be one.

Pyaar. Pyaar. Pyaar. Throughout South Asia you can’t get away from it. Perhaps the rise of Love has something to do with cinema, or independence from the British, or globalization, or the furtive observation of backpacking couples by a generation of young people who suddenly realized it was possible to grope one another without the sky falling on their heads. There are those who say Love is just immorality. There are those who believe it is encouraged by amplified disco music. There are even those who claim that the decline in arranged marriage and the cultural encouragement of its replacement by free-choice pair-bonding are connected with the obsolescence of the extended family in late capitalism, but since this is tantamount to saying that Love can be reduced to Money, no one listens. In India (the most disco nation on earth) Love is a glittery madness, an obsession, broadcast like the words of a dictator from every paan stall and rickshaw stand, every transistor radio and billboard and TV tower. While Arjun tried to concentrate on public-key cryptography or the Hungarian naming convention, it kept knocking on his bedroom door like an irritating kid sister. Will you come out and play? He would have paid no attention to it (what could be vaguer and less logical?) but sickeningly all its absurd rituals and intricacies led back to something he wanted, something he had started to crave with a longing bordering on panic.

Touch.

Love was the price of touch. Love was the maze through which you had to find your way In the May heat, when the heavy air was like a hand on his body as he lay awake at night, he could feel the need for another person as a hard ache inside, an alien presence which had formed in his chest like a tumour.

As far as it is possible to piece together, the sequence of events runs like this.

At 21.15 PST, Wednesday, badmAsh appears on #vxconvention, which at the time is running on a server belonging to a private internet-service provider in Indonesia. By 21.28 PST he has completed a negotiation with a regular user known as Elrick21 to swap a copy of a packet-sniffing utility for a compressed file containing a list of around a million email addresses, the kind of list that spammers use to send people messages about penis enlargement, great investment opportunities and requests for urgent business assistance. In return for the home phone number of pro golfer Tiger Woods (which badmAsh had acquired as part of a batch in a previous trade, and which Elrick21 thinks ‘would be cool just to have’), he also acquires a list of a dozen or so IP addresses belonging to computers on to which, unknown to their owners, Elrick21 has installed a piece of software known as a remote-access trojan.

Between 21.32 and 21.37 PST badmAsh attempts to communicate with these machines. Only one responds: a PC physically located in the banlieue of Paris, which its owner, a junior doctor called Patrice, has hooked up to a broadband connection so he can play Second World War flight Sim games. Patrice sometimes thinks he would rather be a fighter ace than a medic with a crummy apartment in a bad part of town. Patrice tends to leave his computer on all the time. Right now (it is early on Thursday morning in Paris) he is still at the hospital, and so is not present to watch badmAsh establish communication with the trojan, send a set of commands to his machine and take control of his email software.