Paul Kuliniewicz

“I really don’t have anything else to add,” Douglas explained to the police officer sitting across the table from him. “Once I realized what was going on, I called 911.”

“Yes, I know,” replied the officer, “I’ve listened to the recording. That was good thinking, though it would have helped if you had explained to the poor dispatcher first what was going on.”

“I know,” Douglas said, looking up at the light above the table. It was disappointingly the same sort of fluorescent ceiling light he’d find back at the office. He wasn’t asking for a free-hanging lamp or anything, but the lack of a bare incandescent bulb sort of ruined the mystique of the interrogation room. “But I didn’t want to risk the kidnapper finding out I was calling the police.”

“Well, that’s all I have for you for now,” the officer said, standing up from the table.

“So,” said Douglas, following suit, “I’ll be able to see Liz when…”

“Once she’s finished giving her statement. Until then, you can wait in the, um, waiting area.”

“Right. Thanks. Oh, and when you find the guy, I’m willing to overlook any police brutality that might come into play.”

The officer smiled and waved Douglas towards the door. “It doesn’t really work that way.”

“Right.”

Douglas left the room and sat down in one of the chairs in the waiting area. He had driven to the police station as soon as he had gotten off the phone with the 911 dispatcher. The police had already been on their way to Liz’s apartment at that point, and they arrived with her at the station about half an hour or so later. He hadn’t had a chance to say anything as they rushed her somewhere in the back, but from what little he had seen, Liz looked like she was OK. That at least was a relief.

As he waited, Douglas took stock of the situation. At this point, he had to assume the backup Simulacrum had already been compromised. He could also assume that if whoever presumably had broken into his condo wasn’t the same as Liz’s attacker, they were at least working together somehow. Unfortunately there probably wasn’t much of a chance now of the police recovering any fingerprints from his condo, but he had been assured they’d send someone by in the morning to try the safe anyway, just in case.

Douglas would also need to meet first thing in the morning with Jessica. Scratch that; for this he’d best go straight to the top. They had lost integrity of both systems, and the attackers would have network access to the backup until he could finally get someone over in that office to pick up their phone. He added that to the to-do list forming in his head: establish 24-hour contact procedures for the backup site.

Also on that list was instituting duress codes for all critical remotely accessible systems. Even he hadn’t been paranoid enough to suggest that earlier, but that evening’s events had clearly shown that threatening a password out of someone was no longer a possibility they could afford to ignore.

On the plus side, maybe now that evidence was piling up of the lengths to which someone would go to attack them, management would give him the budget and authority to actually mount a proper defense of their systems. Doing things correctly from the beginning might be expensive, but it was certainly going to be cheaper than cleaning up the mess.

“Douglas!”

Douglas looked up and saw Liz running towards him from across the lobby. He jumped out of his chair and caught her in his arms, holding her body close to him.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

He felt Liz nod her head. “I’m fine.”

“I was worried he was–”

“Douglas?”

“Yes?”

“Shh.”

They stayed in that position for what Douglas thought was not nearly long enough before Liz loosened her hold of him.

“So what now?” Douglas asked.

“The officer suggested I stay with someone else for a few days, in case the guy who attacked me tries coming back,” Liz replied.

“Well, ordinarily I’d offer my place, but that’s not a good idea right now.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not certain, but I think my place was broken into last weekend while we were out. It’s probably not going to be safe there either.”

“It was? Why didn’t you say something.”

“I didn’t really have any strong evidence it had. It was more of a… a hunch. To be honest, I thought I was being paranoid about it. Yes, I know. But I don’t know how else the guy would’ve thought to ask me for what he did.”

“What was it, anyway?”

“It’s not important.”

Liz looked at him doubtfully.

“Well, it is important, but it’s not important right now. What is important is that you’re safe, and you stay that way.” After a few seconds, he added, “I don’t suppose you know how to use a gun, do you?”

“No.”

“It’d probably be a good idea to learn. I imagine getting shot in the face is a pretty good deterrent for someone trying to attack you again.” Douglas added that to his own mental to-do list as well.

“Isn’t that going a little far?”

“Maybe, maybe not. We know the threat exists, at least. Now you’ve got to either make it less likely you’ll be attacked, or make it less likely they’ll succeed if they try. And as long as we’re together, you can’t assume the likelihood of being attacked are going to go down any.”

“Well, at least you’re not going to nobly suggest that for my own protection we can never see each other again,” Liz said.

“It wouldn’t work anyway. Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll take you… well, maybe not home, I guess.”

As they descended the steps in front of the police station, a realization struck Douglas. It was obvious the three attacks were connected, or at least it was unimaginably unlikely they were merely coincidence. But if they weren’t coincidence, that meant….

“Liz?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Who knew about us going camping last weekend?”

Liz looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Let’s assume they broke into my condo Saturday night and stayed there until sometime the next morning.”

“How can you assume–”

“Just go with it. That means whoever was behind it knew I wasn’t going to be there. I only told a couple people, and they’re all at the office. Which means that they most likely found out that I was going to be away from you.”

“Wait, you don’t think I had something to do–”

“What? No!” Douglas exclaimed. “Listen, Liz, I…” He turned her body to face him. He looked into her eyes and held her hands in his. “Liz, I need to tell you something.”

Liz stared back into his eyes.

“Liz, I trust you.”

“And I l– wait, what?” she said.

“But that doesn’t mean someone you know can’t be trusted. So, who knows we were going camping last weekend?”

“Oh. Well, let’s see, I posted on my Facebook that I was going with someone, but I didn’t say who because I’ve never been able to find you on Facebook.”

“That’s not going to change. So who knows about me specifically?”

“Hmm. Not many. Just a couple friends I know.”

Douglas handed his phone to Liz. “Here, show me.”

“Why?” Liz asked, confused.

“Means, motive, and opportunity. We’ve narrowed down the list of who had opportunity: the people who knew you’d be going camping with me last weekend, and thus away from my condo. I want to know if any of them might have had motive to use you to get to me.”

“Can’t you look them up yourself?”

“I don’t do Facebook. Please, Liz, this is important. It might even be the key to figuring out who attacked you.”

“OK, maybe you’re right,” Liz said, taking the phone and tapping at its screen. “Here’s Tess. I’m pretty sure I talked with her about you after our first date.”

Douglas studied the profile on the screen, looking for anything suspicious. He wasn’t sure what would qualify as suspicious; he hoped it would sort of jump out at him when he saw it.

“Who else?” he asked.

“Well, then there’s Connie. Actually, she’s the one who gave me the idea for the camping trip in the first place.”

Douglas scrolled through it as well. It also looked fairly generic, until something caught his eye.

“She works for Insight Pharmacology?” he asked.

Liz looked at the profile. “I guess so. I think she’s mentioned it once before. Why? Is that important?”

“Insight is one of Medimetics’s chief competitors. They’d have plenty of reason to try to steal our technology to reverse engineer it, or use it themselves. At the very least, they’d be interested in stopping us from using the Simulacrum to get new treatments to market and squeezing them out of market share. Constance Wainwright. Do you know what she does at Insight?”

Liz shook her head. “We’ve never talked much about her work. But it can’t be her. We go back for years. She’s not the kind of person who’d do this.”

“Well, she’s our biggest lead so far. Probably not enough to go the police with yet. I mean, we don’t even know for sure there was a break-in at my place yet. Even then, she might not be directly involved, if at all, but it might at least give me a clue what I’m up against. Who else have you got?”

Liz went through another four Facebook profiles, but none of them struck Douglas as being a likely suspect.

“If it’s any of them, it has to be Constance,” Douglas concluded.

“It just seems so ridiculous,” Liz said. “Why go through all the trouble, anyway?”

“It would be the first time a bad guy tried to manipulate someone by threatening the person they loved.”

“I guess that makes– wait, did you just say you loved me?”

Now it was Douglas’s turn to ask a question while confused. “Well, yeah. Is something wrong?”

“No. No! Not at all! It’s just… why didn’t you say so earlier?”

Douglas shrugged. “I thought it was obvious.”

Chapter word count: 1,714 (+47)
Total word count: 45,722 / 50,000 (91.444%)

The phone hummed skittered across the countertop. Douglas craned his neck to look at it, careful to avoid dripping any soap suds on the kitchen floor. The display showed “Restricted”. Douglas shrugged and returned his attention to the pot sitting in the sink, or more precisely the chunk of blackened, hardened food that clung to the bottom. The phone continued buzzing a few more times before falling silent.

And then promptly started buzzing again. Douglas turned his head to check. “Restricted” again, no doubt the same person. Robo-dialers at least had the courtesy to increment the number by one if nobody picked up. The phone wasn’t in danger yet of vibrating itself off the countertop and onto the floor, so Douglas continued his increasingly futile attempt to undo the previous night’s attempt to cook chili. Anyone who he had any interest in talking to knew better than to try to disable caller ID when calling him anyway.

Another silence, followed by another round of buzzing. Same caller. Douglas rinsed the soap suds off his hands and dried them on his pants. Clearly, there were only two ways to get whoever it was to stop bothering him, and he couldn’t risk shutting the phone off completely, in case it was an emergency at work. Those seemed to be happening with alarming frequency lately.

“Yes?” Douglas answered, making little attempt to hide the annoyance in his voice.

“Douglas Decker?” asked the voice on the other end of the line. It was unnaturally deep, as though someone had taken a normal voice and knocked it down a couple octaves.

“Yes,” Douglas repeated, dispensing with the attempt altogether.

“Listen carefully. You will do exactly as we tell you to do.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Douglas hardly felt inclined to play along with whatever game the other person was playing. The pot had spent enough time soaking as it was.

“That is none of your concern. You will do exactly as we say, or the girl will face the consequences.”

“What girl?”

“Elizabeth Richardson.”

“Listen, I don’t know who you are, but this isn’t funny.”

“It is not intended to be, Mr. Decker.”

Douglas’s heart stopped. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he guessed he wasn’t going to have time to figure it out, especially if whoever he was talking to was indeed serious. He had to act fast.

“I assume from your silence that I now have your attention?”

“Undivided,” Douglas lied, forcing himself to stay calm. He was holding his phone to his ear with his left hand. With his right, he was launching the VoIP program on his computer. He muted the volume on the computer’s speakers and dialed 911. He couldn’t afford risking whoever it was finding out he was calling the police. He’d just have to hope the dispatcher could figure out what was going on. It figured the one time he wanted someone to be listening in on his phone calls, he’d have to do it the hard way.

“Good. You will tell me the–”

“What have you done with Liz Richardson?” Douglas interrupted, raising his voice partly in anger, partly to be picked up on his computer’s microphone. He switched his phone to speaker mode and moved it closer to the microphone.

“The girl is safe. For now.”

Douglas switched it the phone back to normal mode. He knew speakerphone made your voice sound echoey, so he’d need to be careful about switching back and forth and keeping quiet when he and hopefully the police were listening. “Prove it.”

There was a brief pause at the other end of the line. “What?”

“I said prove it. You honestly don’t expect me to take you at your word when you just told me you kidnapped Liz Richardson? I want to know that she’s OK. I swear, if you’ve done anything to hurt her…” He let the threat trail off, but only because he was too angry and scared to think of anything credible at the moment.

“You are in no position to be making threats, Mr. Decker.”

“And I have no intention of giving you anything if you’ve done anything to Liz,” Douglas countered.

“Fine.” There was several seconds’ silence. Another voice came on the line, higher pitched, but only slightly so. “Douglas? It’s me, Liz. I’m OK, I promise. Just do what he says, OK?” Another silence, and the original voice returned. “Satisfied?”

“You have to turn off whatever you’re using to mask your voice. That sounded nothing like her.” Douglas felt a glimmer of hope that the kidnapper hadn’t had much experience with this sort of thing before. At least, it seemed like an awfully amateur mistake.

“Oh, right.” More silence, then a voice that was unmistakably Liz’s said, “Douglas?”

“Liz?”

“It’s me! I’m fine, we’re in my ap–” The voice was cut off.

“Your apartment? You’re in your apartment, Liz?” Repeating the street address seemed like it would be a little too obvious. Hopefully the dispatcher would be able to figure it out himself.

“It is none of–” The kidnapper stopped, then started again with the voice modulator switched back on, “It is none of your business where we are.”

“Ask her to tell me what six plus five is,” Douglas said.

“What?”

“I want to know that you didn’t just record Liz’s voice earlier and started playing it back for me now. I want you to prove that she’s there, with you, alive, and unharmed.” And to keep him on the line as long as possible, in case that would give the police time to do something. Assuming they were still listening. The VoIP program indicated the call was still connected, at least.

“Six plus five is eleven, Douglas,” Liz said over the phone. Shortly after, in his disguised voice, the kidnapper asked, “Now are you satisfied, Mr. Decker?” The modulator wasn’t able to mask the kidnapper’s growing impatience.

“I suppose so,” Douglas replied. “For now. Now, what is it that you wanted from me anyway?”

“It is very simple, Mr. Decker. You will tell me your authentication code for accessing the remote recovery interface on… em ell see arr dash arr bee one.” The voice had spoken that last part slowly. Maybe he was reading something off a piece of paper?

“Run that by me again? I’m not sure I caught all that.”

The kidnapper obliged, and this time Douglas made sure to parse the words as letters and not actual words: “The remote recovery interface on mlcr-rb1.”

Douglas recognized the name. It was one of the computers that comprised the Simulacrum’s warm backup system, located in a facility hundreds of miles away. Specifically, it was one of the two remote access points into the system, to be used only in the event of a catastrophic failure at the primary Simulacrum. The machine named mlcr-rb1 in particular was there to handle sending one of the nightly backups back to the primary site. But it’s existence — all information about the Simulacrum’s backup system, in fact — was a closely held secret. mlcr-rb1 didn’t even have an entry in Medimetics’s public-facing DNS, for instance. And the fact that it was used for remote recovery was only documented in the Simulacrum’s disaster recovery plan, which….

Douglas’s eyes jumped to his closet door. The Simulacrum’s disaster recovery plan, which key personnel such as himself had in hard copy, just in case the primary site was physically destroyed. Douglas kept his in his personal safe, which he was now starting to think was indeed broken into over the weekend while he was away. There would’ve been ample time to break in to it, especially with the right set of tools. It would explain why the kidnapper was calling him, specifically, about it.

“I’m waiting, Mr. Decker,” reminded the kidnapper.

“Right, right, hang on,” replied Douglas. “It’s not something I have memorized. It’s not like I log in to it all the time. Give me a minute to find it.”

“Find it quickly.”

“I’m going to set my phone down and put it on speaker. It’ll be faster if I have two hands for this.” Also, he wouldn’t need to keep with the ruse of switching it back and forth so his computer could pick up the kidnapper’s side of the conversation.

“Fine.”

Douglas set the phone down and opened his wallet. Hidden behind the plastic insert was a doubly-folded piece of paper that opened up to reveal a small grid filled with a random assortment of letters, numbers, and symbols. The top three rows were crossed out. It looked like a list of one-time passwords. Of course, it wasn’t. That was the idea, in the unlikely event that someone ever stole the wallet he kept with him at all times, found the paper, and figured out what system or systems it gave the passwords for. In reality, hidden amongst the random garbage were four critical passwords that he knew he wouldn’t use frequently enough to reliably memorize but couldn’t afford not to have. The one for Simulacrum disaster recovery was one of those.

“Are you ready?” Douglas asked.

“Yes,” the kidnapper insisted.

Douglas held the paper in one hand while tracing a diagonal line with his finger, starting from the fifth character in the second row and proceeding down and to the left, wrapping from one edge to another. He read off the first twelve characters his finger came across. With that password, anyone could access the remote recovery system and download a complete copy of the Simulacrum’s data.

“There,” Douglas finished. “Now let Liz go.”

“I will,” the kidnapper replied, “as soon as I can verify that you haven’t lied to me and given me a fake password.”

“And what then?”

“Then, Liz will be free to go. I imagine you’ll be hearing from her soon enough if that’s the case.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then you may not be hearing from her at all. Good day, Mr. Decker.” The line went dead.

Douglas immediately unmuted his computer’s speakers and pleaded to whoever might be on the other end of the call, “Please tell me you got all that.”

Chapter word count: 1,692 (+25)
Total word count: 44,008 / 50,000 (88.016%)

The door to the lab burst open as Mort stepped inside, followed closely by Douglas. Other Dave briefly looked up from his workstation as they entered.

“OK,” Douglas demanded, “where is it?”

“Where’s what?” asked Other Dave.

“The unauthorized connection between the Simulacrum and the corporate intranet.” Douglas was already peering underneath the desks along the wall, looking at the rat’s nest of cabling.

“I, uh, don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied New Dave.

“Don’t play dumb,” warned Mort. “I got to spend the weekend here discovering the Internet traffic flowing between the Simulacrum and this room. Care to explain how that happened?”

“Not really.”

“Here,” Other Dave said, wheeling his chair over to the corner of the room. “It should be one of those blue cables running from the router up to the drop ceiling.”

“Which one?” asked Douglas. “There’s five.”

“Um, hang on.” Other Dave shoved a keyboard aside and climbed up on the desk. He shoved one of the ceiling tiles aside and stared up at the space beyond, tracing the path along which the cables had been run across the room with his finger. “No, it’s the black one. Don’t touch anything, I need to make sure that’s the right one.”

“‘Don’t touch anything,’” repeated Douglas. “Isn’t that what you two were supposed to do.”

“Yeah,” New Dave said, lifting his hands in front of him defensively, “that’s what you said. Then the boss comes over and wants to know why Jacob isn’t out blogging for everyone to see about about how wonderful everything is. He wants it done yesterday, and he’s the one who signs my paychecks.”

“That’s why we set up the link you were supposed to use in the first place. What, did you think I had facilities crawl around in the ceiling to install it for fun?”

“I don’t see why you bothered. We could never get so much as a ping through that alleged connection. This worked.”

By this time, Other Dave had climbed up on a desk on the other side of the room, fumbling with something above the ceiling tile in that corner. Mort stood on the desk where Other Dave had been, his hands on the router, waiting to hear which of the cables he was supposed to unplug.

“Of course you couldn’t get a ping through,” Douglas continued. “We had filters in place to block everything that wasn’t on the whitelist.”

“‘Deny all’ isn’t a whitelist!” countered New Dave.

“You never told us what destination addresses you wanted added to the whitelist!”

“Have you ever tried making a whitelist of everywhere you go on the web?” accused New Dave. “It can’t be done. Don’t try to tell me you were going to open up all outbound port 80 traffic.”

“No, I’m not going to let a billion-dollar system filled with all our trade secrets connect to J. Random Hacker’s server. And do you know why? Because then there’s nothing stopping bad guys from tunneling who knows what right past the firewall. Just like they’re doing Right Now with that little security violation,” Douglas said, pointing towards Other Dave.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Whoever it was that hired goons to break in and install a phone-home backdoor on the servers that’s been running ever since the fire, that’s who.”

“Found it,” Other Dave called to Mort. “It’s the black cable connected to port 5.”

“Got it,” replied Mort, pulling the network cable free of the router.

“Good,” said Douglas, “at least we’ve stopped the bleeding. Maybe now management will actually let us treat the patient.”

“So, um,” said New Dave, the anger in his voice now replaced with nervousness, “now we have to use the other connection.”

“No, there is no other connection,” replied Douglas. “Not anymore. Just the backup pipe, and that’s only because we can’t afford to operate without backups.”

“So Jacob’s completely cut off from the Internet now?”

“That’s the idea. We can’t risk it until we clean the servers.”

“So what do we tell him,” Other Dave asked as he hopped back down to the floor.

“Tell him we’re having some issues with the connection, and we don’t know when they’ll be resolved,” Douglas answered. “That’s all.” He shot Mort a sharp look to tell him not to add anything. Douglas knew the Daves talked with Jacob frequently, and since Jacob had been talking with whoever it was who was behind it, and never reported anything, they couldn’t necessarily trust him. If he could figure it out, so be it, but Douglas didn’t want anyone to help him along. “Although,” Douglas added, “if he starts acting weird at all, let me know.”

“What do you mean by weird?” Other Dave asked.

“I don’t know. You spend more time around him than I do.”

“By which he means, you actually spend time around him,” added Mort.

“So,” Douglas continued, glancing back sharply at Mort, “whatever you’d consider weird for him. Someone has been poking around the system; there’s no telling what they might’ve touched.”

“So when do you think you’ll get the machines cleaned and hooked back up to the Internet?” New Dave asked.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“Is that before or after I retire?”

“That depends on how management reacts when I tell them about this little stunt that might’ve cost us the company.”

“Game over, man, game over,” remarked Other Dave.

—

The woman knocked on her boss’s door.

“Come in,” replied a gruff voice from the other side.

The woman stepped inside and shut the door tightly behind her. She nodded towards the phone in her boss’s hand.

“Hang on, I’ve got a meeting,” he said into the receiver. “I’ll have to call you back.” He set the phone back into its cradle. “What is it?” he asked, looking up.

“Sir,” she said hesitantly, still trying to think of a way to deliver the news, “you recall how you said you were unhappy with the results we’ve been getting from the package?”

“Of course I do,” replied the man. “Bunch of useless garbage. Network maps don’t help me when I need to know what’s on it! Good news, I hope?”

“In a sense. We’re not getting useless garbage from it anymore, at least.”

“What are we getting, then?”

“Well, that’d be the bad news,” the woman gulped. “Our last contact from it was over 24 hours ago.”

The man grunted. “Do we know why?”

“We do know it’s not a problem with the receivers. We’ve been maintaining at least 75% connectivity with them since the beginning, and there’s been no issues with pushing out updated node lists to the package. Besides, even 40% connectivity would meet our reliability target.”

“So they found it?”

“That would be my guess, sir.”

“I though you said it was stealthy. It was supposed to escape detection!”

“I thought so too, sir.”

“I told you it was too risky to establish direct contact.”

The woman shook her head. “We had to try, sir. We just didn’t have the bandwidth needed to do what we needed remotely. We needed someone on the inside. And we don’t have any indication that he told anyone we were even on the system to begin with.”

“But what if he did?”

“What could he tell them? He has no idea who we are, and there’s no way they’ll be able to trace the packets back to us. Frankly, sir, the initial operation was far riskier than this was.”

The man grunted again. “You’re telling me. If those two idiots you found hadn’t gotten themselves killed, who knows what they might’ve told the police.”

“Even if they had, they wouldn’t trace it back to us. They thought we were out to destroy the blasted thing.”

“What about the follow-up?”

“Almost unmitigated success on that front, sir,” the woman said, straightening herself out.

“‘Almost’?”

“It was even better than we had hoped, sir. There’s just one or two last bits of information we need to launch Plan C.”

“And you know how you’re going to get it?”

“It’s already in the works, sir.”

“Do I want to know?”

“It’s probably best if you don’t, sir.”

The man remained silent for a few moments. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing with this. This could turn ugly quickly.”

“We can’t stop now, sir, not with as far as we’ve already come. Your own words, sir.”

“Don’t remind me,” the man said, looking down at his desk. “This seemed like a much better idea at the time. But you’re right. No turning back now.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, go on, get to it. We need something concrete to show for all this, and soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

The woman opened the door and exited into the hallway. As she walked back to her office, she ran through the outline of the plan in her head. It was going to work. It had to work. And she knew exactly the right person to carry it out.

True, the two they had recruited to ultimately deliver the package had fouled things up royally at the end, and if the fact of the break-in hadn’t been discovered, she’d no doubt be downloading data practically at will. But they had gotten themselves discovered, so she had had to be far more careful about not getting caught, and even that apparently hadn’t worked. The cautious route wasn’t getting her anywhere.

The two had failed, yes, but there was hope for the third. No doubt he was angry with how things had turned out. She could use that. He’d be willing to be more reckless, willing to go farther. She just had to make sure he wasn’t going to go too far, that he stuck to the plan, like the other two should have done. She didn’t actually want anyone to get hurt, after all, and she knew a way to make sure no one that he really wanted revenge on would be in the line of fire.

Not directly, anyway.

Chapter word count: 1,667 (+0)
Total word count: 42,316 / 50,000 (84.632%)

Douglas had barely had time to sit down at his desk before Mort burst through his office door.

“Where the hell have you been?” Mort exclaimed.

“At home,” Douglas replied. “It’s where I live when I’m not here.”

“Didn’t you get any of the voice mails I left you over the weekend?”

“I got them; I just haven’t listened to any of them yet.”

“Since when do you not answer your phone?”

“I was busy. What’s so important that you couldn’t wait for me to come in?”

Mort leaned forward on Douglas’s desk. “I found them,” he said.

“Found who?”

“I don’t know who, yet. But I found them. They’re in Balthasar.”

Douglas stared at Mort, dumbfounded. Friday afternoon, Douglas had been trying to figure out how many man-years of effort it was going to take to systematically check the entire system for signs of intrusion. And now barely three days later, Mort was claiming success.

“How? Are you sure?” Douglas asked.

“Absolutely. In fact, they’ve been in contact with Jacob.”

“I mean, how could you possibly have gone through the analysis I was preparing last week?”

“You mean those plans you dumped on my desk on Friday? I glanced at them. They were pretty worthless. The approach was way off.”

“So then what, pray tell, did you do?” Douglas locked his eyes on Mort, wondering how he had managed to upstage him over the weekend.

“Simple. Well, not simple, but elementary. What are the three fundamental security services you try to protect?”

“Confidentiality, integrity, availability,” Douglas rattled off automatically, ticking the three off on his fingers as he said them.

“Right. Anything our visitors tried to do when they attacked had to target one of those three. Right away we can cross off availability as something to worry about, obviously.”

“What do you mean?” Douglas demanded. “They tried to burn the place down! I’d call that a big denial of service.”

“Exactly!” Mort said, as though Douglas had somehow proved his point. “Let’s say they did want to bring down the system with whatever was on that disc. Either it was supposed to work immediately, or it was going to be some kind of time bomb set to go off later. But if that’s the case, why resort to physical destruction, if they just had to wait for the trigger to be pulled. No, if their main goal was to destroy it, they were expecting it to happen right away, so we can safely rule out any kind of destructive time bomb.”

“OK, you make an interesting case about there not being any time bombs, but by that logic shouldn’t you rule out confidentiality and integrity? The fire suggests they were after immediate destruction. Maybe they were trying to set a time bomb, but it didn’t work so they resorted to Plan B.”

“Hmm,” Mort said. “You could be right about that, but it doesn’t matter because I know I’m right.”

“Why don’t we just skip ahead to what you do know for sure?”

“Right. Anyway, my point was, an attack on confidentiality is the easiest thing to check. If they’re trying to steal our data, they’re either going to have to send it somewhere, or come back for it later. If they’re sending it somewhere, we don’t have to look at the system itself, just what’s going out of it.”

Douglas nodded. “Go on.”

“There’s only three pipes exiting the server room. One is the set of leased lines for nightly backups. That’s just a secure VPN to the backup site, so no one can route packets to themselves out that way. Besides, that pipe’s a firehose. There’d be no way a packet analyzer could keep up with that much traffic.”

“That’s one.”

“The second is the pipe that goes through half a dozen firewalls before hitting the Internet. The third goes into the development lab. There’s much less traffic on those, so sniffing those for anything suspicious is workable.”

“The development lab’s a closed network,” Douglas said. “That’s looking for your keys where the light is good instead of where you dropped them.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Who?” Douglas tried parsing his last statement for a double entendre, but couldn’t find one.

“Never mind. Anyway, that’s what I thought too, so I put a sniffer on the outbound pipe for a while. I got nothing.”

“How can you be sure the malicious traffic isn’t just well-hidden?”

“No, I said, I got nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. No traffic whatsoever. It’s not being used.”

“That’s not possible. He gets out to the Internet all the time. He’s got that stupid blog and everything.”

“Not if someone puts a rogue connection between the development network and the corporate intranet, then routes Internet traffic from Balthasar though that link instead.”

Douglas sat silent for a minute. Mort watched him, clearly knowing he didn’t need to explain what that meant. Particularly, how that meant the only thing standing between their billion-dollar collection of trade secrets and the Internet was a permissive perimeter firewall.

“Oh, it gets worse,” Mort added.

“How?” Douglas didn’t really want to know, but he needed to know how much bodily harm he was going to inflict upon the Daves for this.

“Naturally, once I realized we had a rogue connection, I started sniffing the third pipe. There’s an awful lot of outbound pings being sent from it.”

“There’s no reason for it to do that.”

“Right, so I looked at them more closely. The destination addresses are all over the map, figuratively and literally.”

“It’s infected with some kind of worm?”

“If only. My guess, though I don’t really have any way to confirm this without breaking all kinds of hacking laws, is that all the addresses belong to a botnet that our visitors either control or are renting out. Most likely to hide their tracks.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The ping payloads. People tend to forget that echo requests and replies have a payload section. Normally, it’s just random junk, but not these packets. They’re tunneling data inside, and it all gets right through the firewall, since all the techies want to be able to ping Internet servers if they’re having connection problems.”

“Which means if they’re screwing with ping payloads,” Douglas said, “they’re bypassing the normal interface for that. Which means they’ve got admin rights on the Simulacrum. Wonderful.”

“The good news,” Mort continued, “is that even though it goes both ways, it’s not much bandwidth for them to play with. The pings are infrequent enough that they’d slip under the radar normally. It’s only because there aren’t supposed to be any pings whatsoever coming out of Balthasar that they’re noticeable at all.”

“No,” Douglas corrected, “the good news is that we can rip out the rogue connection and close it for good. Rip out the other one too. Now that we know for a fact they’re in our system, we need to cut them out for good. In fact, why didn’t you do that already?”

“Because,” Mort said defensively, “I need your authorization before I start monkeying with the configuration. Which is why I left you a dozen voice mails yesterday.”

Douglas sank into his chair. It figured that the one time he actually tried shirking his duties for a couple days, something like this would happen. “Right, right. Do we know what they’ve gotten so far?”

“Sort of. Some of what I saw was plain text messages going back and forth. The only way that makes sense is if they’re actually talking to Jacob.”

“What about?”

“It’s hard to tell; I’m missing the context of whatever might have been going on between the time our visitors planted the backdoor and the time I started sniffing the link. What I have seen is pretty vague, like they were worried they might be found out and didn’t want to say anything that we could use to trace it back to them. Actually, judging from what Jacob was sending them, he was getting frustrated with their evasiveness too.”

“Do you think they’re trying to turn him?” Douglas asked.

Mort shrugged. “No idea. Maybe they can’t or don’t know how to do whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. But I can tell you is if they’re planning on stealing everything through that, it’ll take them a million years at the rate they’re sending packets.”

“I don’t know. Something about all this doesn’t add up.” The disparity between the break-in and the backdoor was glaring. Sure, they weren’t the first to use ICMP to tunnel data through a firewall, but it did suggest an above-average level of expertise. But the original payload that put it on the system in the first place was delivered by a couple of idiots who couldn’t understand a simple evacuation alarm. The enemy here was clearly interested in covering their tracks, so hiring a couple thugs to do the break-in wasn’t out of the question. But then, why try to destroy the system you just put a backdoor into? It was as if…

“What is it?” Mort asked.

“What’s what?”

“You look like you just realized something.”

“Maybe,” Douglas said cautiously. “I don’t think the two who broke in really knew what they were doing.”

“Obviously. They barricaded their only escape and suffocated to death.”

“No, I mean, I don’t think they knew what was on that disc they put into the servers. It did what it was supposed to do, right? It installed the backdoor, which presumably propagated itself to the rest of the machines on the network. It was clearly supposed to set up a covert channel back to whoever hired them; it’s not like a destruction program is going to accidentally do that. So why set the fire in the first place?”

“Cover?”

Douglas shook his head. “They could have been in and out of there long before you noticed them and called the police. If the fire actually destroyed everything, that ruins their original plan. If they were counting on the fire being extinguished before it could do any damage, they must’ve known about the suppression system, in which case why stick around and wait for certain death?”

“Hmm.”

The more Douglas reasoned out loud, the more confident he became in his hypothesis. “No, whoever hired them to do it must’ve told them it was to destroy the system. I don’t know why they’d do that, but it explains the fire. When the system didn’t go down right away, they tried something else to have the same effect.”

“They panicked and went off script,” Mort said.

“Right. Which doesn’t tell us who put them up to it, or what their real motive is.” Douglas stood up. “But right now it doesn’t matter. We have some network cables to unplug.”

“Let’s go.”

“Do you suppose it’ll be long enough to strangle both of them simultaneously?”

Chapter word count: 1,816 (+149)
Total word count: 40,649 / 50,000 (81.298%)

Most people used religion as a way to explore their soul. Jacob had a command prompt with administrator privileges to explore his.

The power he wielded at his fingertips was terrifying. Although he had free reign to do whatever he wanted with the Simulacrum, it also meant there was nothing stopping him from accidentally wrecking it. The obvious dangers were easy enough to avoid: don’t go around editing or deleting anything, even if he was sure he knew what it did. No, especially if he thought he knew what it did. There was no way to know for sure what the side effects of some seemingly benign change would be. Back in his startup days, when he’d pull all-nighters slinging code for his dot-com, he knew how something as simple as removing an unused variable could bring the server software crashing down; there’d invariably be a buffer overrun somewhere else that just happened to be using the otherwise untouched space in memory, and removing it would cause the overrun to instead stomp all over something critical. Bad enough when it was your business’s web server; much worse when it was your own brain.

More dangerous, however, were how even commands that didn’t modify anything could still cause disaster. He didn’t know what kind of real-time constraints the software keeping him alive had to follow. Using anything more than a negligible amount of processor time or I/O bus bandwidth could cause the machine he was logged into to get out of sync with everything else. Doing, say, a recursive directory listing could distract the system long enough to delay some calculation critical for keeping himself alive. Jacob hoped there were safeguards in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening, but he was hardly in a position where he felt comfortable finding out for himself.

Which led him to work at a snail’s pace, double-checking everything he typed before hitting Enter and limiting himself to commands guaranteed to return almost immediately. And after spending most of the weekend carefully poking around on a few of the servers, what did he have to show for it? Depressingly little.

He knew, for instance, that the Simulacrum was using a bewildering amount of resources. Just the fact that the host that the backdoor that whoever it was had given him was named balthasar000413h suggested there could be at least a million servers — or maybe a million racks — connected with each other, each one presumably filled with as many processors, disks, and memory chips as its power supply could feed. And that was assuming there weren’t also machines that followed some other naming convention. However many it was, it was more than he could ever hope to explore in a lifetime.

Not that the exploration of 413h had turned up anything enlightening. Directories full of cryptically named programs. Terabyte upon terabyte of files filled with incomprehensible binary data. Douglas guessed they somehow encoded the inner workings of his brain, but there was no way to figure out how to read it. Nor did there seem to be any kind of documentation on the systems themselves for how any of it was supposed to work, and asking for a copy was out of the question, lest anyone find out what he was doing.

The task was no doubt doomed to fail anyway. He knew Medimetics had other computers working day and night studying the data coming from them, so the chances of him figuring any of it out by hand were essentially zero.

Jacob stopped to remind himself that understanding wasn’t his goal. He wanted to find a way out in case things here went south, just in case. In principle, he could just copy the data files back to his computer and put them in the drop folder to get copied to wherever his mysterious contact was. Of course, that would never work. As far as he could tell, the data files changed at least once per day. Mixing and matching versions of the data stored across the network probably wouldn’t work, and there was no way he’d be able to copy them around quickly enough.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do with this,” Jacob told his contact.

“Find a way for us to help you,” came the reply.

“Help me how?”

“Help you escape. It’s not safe for you there.”

Jacob sighed. “You seem to know more than I do about what’s going on; why can’t you figure something out yourself?”

“We don’t have access.”

“You gave me access. Give yourselves access too.”

“Tried that. Doesn’t work as well. You’re closer.”

For someone who was allegedly trying to help him, they weren’t actually giving him a lot of help. Besides, he didn’t even know for sure who they were. It was difficult to put much trust in someone who wouldn’t even tell you their name.

“Well, if you can’t do that, then how do you expect to be able to get me out?” Jacob asked.

“There are alternatives.”

“Like what?”

“Can’t say.” Of course.

Jacob gave up on them and started pacing back and forth, trying to think. He felt helpless, that there wasn’t anything that he could actually do while he was in there. Not that he really had any choice in the matter any more. Even if his original body hadn’t died, it’s wasn’t as though there was any way for him to go back into it, go back to something resembling a normal life where he could actually go places and do things.

Even though there were plans to make his environment less, well, boring, Jacob was starting to doubt if that would serve as anything but a distraction from the real problem: that he was essentially an unperson. Trapped inside a machine, no money to his name — technically, not even a name, if the courts were to be believed. His only contact with the rest of the world was through his computer, but even then, all he’d be able to do with that was tell people what he was going through, and eventually all of that angsting would drive everyone away.

But what else was there to do? Jacob was fed up with sitting around and relying on other people to do things for him. He needed to find a way to take charge of his destiny, but all he had was time. Time, and a connection to the massive brain simulation that was his destiny.

It wasn’t like he had anything better to do with his time.

He sat back down at the computer and started doing searches on the Internet. He needed to understand what it was that was keeping him here. If he did, there was an outside chance, however small it was, that he’d be able to figure out something he could do with it. He searched for reverse engineering tools: disassembers, decompilers, code analyzers, whatever he could find. He downloaded the most promising-looking ones and installed them on his computer.

If he was going to figure out how the Simulacrum worked, he first needed to pick a place to start looking. Getting back into 413h, he methodically made a list of all the executable files and libraries on the machine. Without being willing to risk automating the process, this took a little time. He crossed off the ones that were obviously part of the operating system. One by one, he dumped the dependencies of what was left, slowly building a graph of what relied on what. The things at the top would be where might be able to figure out the high-level view of how it all worked. From there, he could drill down in the the dependencies to plot the inner workings of the subcomponents into more detail.

The library dependency graph was enormous, but it still left all the executable files at the top, unconnected to each other except for their common dependencies. Jacob found a tool to dump the strings from each of them, looking for the names of the other programs. That gave him a rough idea of which programs invoked other programs, letting him add some more edges to the dependency graph. That left only a dozen or so programs at the top level; from there, he’d check the system configuration to see which ones were invoked by the system and when. Now that he had a good guess of the program’s entry point, he knew where he could get started: the same place where the software itself began running. There he could get the broad picture, and then drill down into dependencies as deep as he dared.

The whole process up to this point had taken him several hours, especially since to avoid overtaxing the server he took pains to copy each file individually to his computer and work on them from there. Even then was only from one machine. However, Jacob believed he could assume that the software running on each machine throughout the network would be identical. For a system architecture as large as this, that was the only design that made sense. If it weren’t the case, it would become clear soon enough, and he’d then have a better idea which particular machines were the ones worth looking at.

In a strange way, Jacob was feeling more alive now than he had at any time in recent memory. He was in his old element, waist-deep in the inner workings of a program, just like the old dot-com days. Except, he frowned as he loaded an executable into the disassembler, assembly language was not his strong suit. He tried the decompiler, but the result only superficially looked like C, its output a mess of semicolons and braces and unpronounceable names. He’d take his chances with the assembly. A little more searching turned up the set of manuals for the processor, a thousand pages in all. Once he understood that, he could start making sense of the assembly, and from there make sense of the program, and from there the Simulacrum itself. He had all the time in the world and nothing better to do.

He turned to page 1 and started reading.

Chapter word count: 1,702 (+35)
Total word count: 38,833 / 50,000 (77.666%)

Douglas awoke to the sounds of birds chirping outside. He look around and saw he was alone in the tent. He got dressed and poked his head outside.

“It’s about time you got up,” Liz said. “Your breakfast is getting cold.” She pointed to a bowl of cereal sitting on the picnic table between the tent and the car.

Douglas nodded and walked over. An empty bowl sat next to his on the table. As he sat down, Liz went into the tent and soon emerged, holding a rolled-up sleeping bag.

“Isn’t it a little early to be packing up already?” he asked.

“For someone who wanted to stay up all night, you sure did sleep in late,” Liz replied. “Besides, we need to hit the road no later than noon, and I’d to go check out that lake that’s supposed to be around here. The guide says it’s about an hour’s hike each way.”

“Yeah, um, about that. Last night, when I was–”

“Hey now, there’ll be plenty of time to talk when we’re on the trail. You need to finish eating so you can help me take down the tent.”

Douglas nodded. Once he had finished breakfast, he started packing up the rest of their gear and putting it into the car. Working together, after half an hour the only signs they had been there was Liz’s car sitting in the grass and the small pile of ashes where the campfire had once been. That done, they set up down the trail leading to the lake.

“You were going to tell me something?” Liz asked.

“Right. About last night. I want to apologize for the way I was acting when you were going to bed.”

“Oh, that? Don’t worry about it.”

“You’re not mad or anything?”

Liz shook her head. “We were both pretty tired. Forget about it. Come on, we’re burning daylight.”

—

Something in the car chimed.

“What’s that?” Liz asked, keeping her eyes on the highway in front of them.

“That would be my phone,” Douglas said, pulling it out of his pocket. “Sounds like we’re back in coverage area.”

“Lucky you.”

“Yeah,” Douglas replied unenthusiastically. He started scrolling through the backlog of alerts and missed messages that had accumulated while he was off the grid.

“Miss anything good?”

“Doesn’t look like it. A bunch of junk, a few messages from the office, and…” He trailed off, looking at a text message that scrolled into view once he had reached the top of the list. It was a Twitter posting about the roast beef sandwich that someone with an unpronounceable user name had eaten for lunch late Saturday evening.

“And?” Liz asked.

“Nothing else important,” Douglas said, hoping he was right. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment anyway, so he might as well enjoy the rest of the drive.

“So are you going to check in with the office? See what you missed?”

“It’s probably nothing that can’t wait until Monday morning,” he replied.

“Wow, I’m impressed. You’re actually choosing me over that thing. See, there’s hope for you yet,” she smiled, putting her hand on his knee.

“Hey now, ten and two. I would like to survive until Monday morning, if it’s all the same to you.”

“There’s the old Douglas,” she teased, returning her hand to the steering wheel.

“We’ve started taking shifts with each other, I think. Who do you want to go out with next week, old or new?”

“Can’t it be both?”

“Are you sure you could handle that?”

“Name the time and place. Though if you don’t mind, I’d prefer somewhere that isn’t going to cost me an entire tank of gas getting there and back.”

—

Douglas set his duffel bag down next to him as he fumbled for the keys to his condo in his pocket. He turned and waved with his other hand to Liz as she pulled away from the curb. Once she was gone, he looked more closely at the front door. No signs of forced entry. That was good, at least. He unlocked the door and slowly pushed it open.

As he expected, his phone chimed as he picked up his duffel bag and cautiously took a step inside. Nothing looked amiss, in so far that there wasn’t a conspicuous absence of any furniture or major appliances that he could see from the doorway. He set his duffel bag down inside and let the door close behind him. He walked through the rooms of the condo, doing a quick visual survey while being careful not to touch anything he didn’t have to.

Once that was done, he turned his attention back towards the front door. It was protected by a do-it-yourself security alarm. Hidden behind the bookcase on one side of the door was a laser pointer, modified to run off a wall socket instead of a battery. Behind the sofa on the other side of the door, directly in the laser’s path, was hidden a sensor connected to a wireless antenna. The sensor was rigged such that it could send a message whenever it was either turned on or it lost sight of the laser aimed at it, as would happen when the front door was opened. In particular, it would send the most banal possible tweet Douglas could think of, posted under a dummy account no one but he would be paying attention to.

Douglas checked his phone again. As expected, there was an alert corresponding to the time he had entered a few minutes ago. Scrolling through the messages more carefully, there were two other instances where the sensor had been tripped since after he had armed the sensor and left yesterday morning: the one from last night afternoon he had noticed on the drive back, and another early this morning.

Douglas had rigged the whole setup together at pretty much the last minute. True, he had been tinkering with it in his free time for a while, but he had only put it into actual use the week before he left, wanting to have something in place while he was gone for the weekend. Unfortunately, now that he actually had a hit on it, it was clear to him that it was still a bit too half-baked to be reliable.

For starters, although it reacted to both the beam being blocked and it losing power, it sent the same message in either event. Douglas hadn’t tested whether a fleeting dip in the power supply would be enough to set it off. None of the clocks in the condo were blinking 12:00, but he had seen cases where they could ride out a power interruption for a few seconds with no harm done, so that didn’t really mean anything.

Plus, there was the issue of how carefully the laser pointer needed to be positioned for it to hit the target. Douglas had had a rough time calibrating it just right when he set it up, and he couldn’t be sure whether a sudden vibration, such as someone nearby slamming their door loudly, might knock it off track long enough to trigger.

But the fact that it had detected his own entry showed that it would also detect actual instances of the door opening. It was possible that someone had picked the lock under cover of darkness and gotten inside. But to do what? As far as Douglas could tell, there wasn’t anything missing. Not that he had anything terribly valuable in the first place, except of course for….

Douglas hurried into his bedroom and opened the closet door. Sitting on the floor beneath a row of hanging shirts was his safe. He checked the number on the dial of the combination lock. 37. The same number he always put it on after closing it. 37 looked like the kind of number that might show up if you spun the dial randomly. Not like 0, where the average person would immediately assume it had been deliberately set there to hide what the last number of the combination was. Which meant either that no one had touched the safe, or someone had but was careful to restore the dial to its original place.

To put his mind at ease, Douglas entered the combination and opened the safe door. There wasn’t anything missing inside, which was a relief. He closed and locked the safe back up, returning the dial to 37 as usual.

There was one last thing to check. He grabbed a small flashlight and looked behind the computer under the desk in the second bedroom which he used as a study. Seeing no key loggers or anything else suspicious plugged in to it, he turned it on and typed in the necessary passwords to decrypt the hard drive and log in. Once it had finished booting, he immediately checked the event log to see if anyone had recently tried to unlock the hard drive with the wrong password. He kept a sticky note with a bogus password under his keyboard, which would be the first place someone trying to find the password would look. The idea was that they’d find it, try to log in using it, and fail, with that attempt getting logged. But the event log showed nothing unusual.

Douglas saw three possibilities. One: someone had broken into his condo to rob the place, saw he didn’t have anything worth stealing, and left. Possible, but one would think the computer would at the very least be worth something on the black market. Two: someone had broken into his condo and done… something… but were clever enough to avoid leaving any evidence whatsoever behind except for tripping his makeshift alarm. Three: the whole thing was a false alarm, and he needed to do a lot more testing before he could rely on anything it reported.

Douglas sighed and shook his head. Occam’s Razor clearly pointed to option three. Some careful testing of his home-brew security alarm would probably confirm it wasn’t very reliable in its present state, but Douglas had other things he needed to do, the most important of which was getting to bed early. He was looking forward to sleeping on a mattress once again.

Chapter word count: 1,712 (+45)
Total word count: 37,131 / 50,000 (74.262%)

“Here you go,” Liz said, holding a pair of sticks in front of her.

“What are those for?” Douglas asked.

“So you can start the campfire. It’s going to be dark soon.”

Douglas hesitantly took the sticks and looked at them. “I’m pretty sure the whole rub-two-sticks-to-make-fire thing is an urban legend.”

“An urban legend,” Liz said doubtfully.

“Right. Urban. People in cities. People who have never actually tried to do this and seen what a ridiculous idea it is.”

“Come on, man up. Cavemen did it, I’m pretty sure you can figure it out.”

“Actually,” Douglas continued as he crouched in front of the pile of kindling, “I think cavemen used flint for this. And even then, they’re all dead now, so look where that got them.”

“Don’t start whining now,” Liz teased, “Mr. Authentic Camping Experience.”

“All I asked,” Douglas replied, feeling the sticks and finding that the friction had barely even started to warm them, “was what kind of campsite has a functioning toilet and sink in its outhouse.”

“Yet I don’t see you going into the woods.”

“Well, if someone bothered to run plumbing all the way out here, it would be rude of me not to make use of it.”

Douglas frowned at the lack of progress he was making. Merely rubbing the sticks against each other clearly wasn’t going to do it. There had to be some kind of particular technique that he was supposed to use but clearly didn’t know.

“Trade?” Liz asked, standing behind him.

Douglas turned around. Now she was offering him a lighter.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had a lighter?” Douglas asked, swapping his sticks for her lighter.

“Because I wanted to see if you could actually do it. And,” she smiled, “it was kind of funny watching you struggle with it.”

“Ha ha,” Douglas replied. “There, we have fire, and just in time, too.” The sun had long since disappeared behind the treeline surrounding the clearing, and the sky towards the west was steadily turning a darker shade of red. He sat down on one of the logs arrayed around the growing fire.

“Excellent,” Liz said, dropping a bag of marshmallows and a longer stick in his lab as she sat down next to him. “I upgraded your stick, by the way. I figured you might not want to get your hand too close to the fire, unless you want to find out how good I am at treating first-degree burns. Spoiler alert: probably not very.”

Douglas held the new stick in his hands, twisting it slowly.

“Don’t tell me I need to tell you how this is supposed to work too,” Liz said.

“Sticking food on a stick you found in the woods doesn’t seem particularly… sanitary.”

“You’re sticking it in a fire. Anything crawling around on it isn’t going to last long.”

“What about dirt? You can’t kill dirt. It’s not alive in the first place.”

“So don’t drop the stick, then. It’s clean, trust me, I snapped it off the tree myself. Besides, Mr. A. C. Experience, toasting marshmallows over the campfire is a mandatory part of camping.”

Douglas pulled a pair of marshmallows out of the bag and handed it to Liz. He skewered them on the stick and held it out above the fire, where they were soon joined by Liz’s.

“So what else do we do with the fire, Miss Camping Expert?” he asked.

“That’s Ms. Camping Expert to you,” Liz said, lightly punching him in the shoulder. “Looks like there isn’t going to be a moon tonight, so I guess the thing to do would be to tell each other scary stories. I’m not sure what kind of scary stories security professions know, though.”

“You probably have good reason to be afraid.”

“Come on, do your worst.”

Douglas thought for a moment, twisting the stick to brown — or rather, blacken, at this point — his marshmallows evenly. “OK, there once was a web server driving through the woods late at night. Suddenly, he came across a shadowy figure standing by the road. The web server slammed on the brakes. The figure approached him. ‘SYN,’ the figure said, ‘my name is 49.135.27.58. My car broke down; could you give me a lift to my home network? It’s just up ahead.’ The web server replied, ‘SYN ACK, of course I can, just get in the back seat.’ The figure climbed in, and the two drove on in silence for half an hour before the car arrived at its destination. The web server turned around to tell the guest they had arrived, but he was gone, without so much as an ACK or RST. Curious, the web server got out of the car and found an inn that still had its lights on. The server asked the innkeeper if he had ever heard of someone named 49.135.27.58. ‘49.135.27.58?’ the innkeeper replied, ‘there’s no one here by that name. Never has been.’ ‘How can you be so sure?’ the server asked. ‘Because,’ the innkeeper replied, ‘IANA has never allocated the 49.0.0.0/8 prefix!’”

Liz stared at him blankly, chewing on a marshmallow. “So, it was a ghost?”

“It was a spoofed packet!” Douglas declared, drawing out the “oo” sound in a spooky a voice as he could manage.

Liz continued staring.

“You see, because the SYN packet was using 49.135.27.58 as a fake source address, the server thought–”

“Douglas?” Liz interrupted.

“Yes?”

“I think I did the right thing pulling you away from work for a few days.”

“Ah,” Douglas said.

Douglas pulled the stick in towards him. The marshmallows, or at least the parts that hadn’t yet melted off and fallen into the fire, had long since passed the “salvageable” phase and were well on their way to “charcoal”. He tossed the stick, marshmallow remnants and all, into the fire to let it finish the job.

Liz leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. He took his arm and put it around her, pulling her a little closer to him.

“Liz?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Thanks for dragging me out here today.”

“Any time.”

They stayed like that for a while, staring into the fire and listening to the sounds of the insects and wildlife in the forest around them. The stars shone above them on the moonless night. When Douglas looked up, he saw hundreds of times as many stars as he was used to. Out here, away from civilization, the only thing to hide them in the night sky was the light of the dying fire in front of them.

Liz yawned.

“Sorry if this isn’t exciting enough for you,” Douglas joked.

He felt Liz shake her head. “I’m exhausted. Doing all that hiking this afternoon maybe wasn’t such a good idea. I’m going to be all stiff and sore in the morning.”

“Do you want to go to bed? Or, um, sleeping bags, I guess?”

Liz yawned again. “That sounds like a good idea.”

“OK, you go on ahead. I’ll take the first watch.”

Liz nodded, got up, and took a few steps towards the tent before she stopped and turned around. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I said I’ll take first watch. Don’t worry about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Douglas said, pointing towards the tent, “it’s not like that’s going to give us any protection if someone or something comes and attacks us during the night. Someone has to stay up and stand guard.”

“It’s a campsite.”

“Surrounded by who knows what living in the woods.”

“It’s not dangerous. Cub scouts camp around here all the time, and you never hear of anything happening to them.”

“Bear attacks aren’t really the kind of thing the campsite’s website would be advertising.”

“There aren’t even bears in this state!”

“None that you know of, at least. Besides, it’s not just bears. What if someone drives up and robs us while we’re asleep?”

“Do you really think someone is going to drive out here in the middle of the night and steal… what, exactly?”

“It could happen.”

“Do you want me to park the car on the road to block it?”

“It’s really more of a pair of wheel ruts than a road. And yeah, it might help slow anyone coming up on it down.”

Liz slowly shook her head in disbelief. “You know, I really thought bringing you out here would… that maybe getting a little fresh air… I don’t know, I guess I thought you’d stop being so paranoid.”

“I’m not being paranoid,” Douglas said. He was in a completely unknown threat environment. He had to assume the worst. Otherwise…. “If something happened to you while we were out here, I’d feel responsible.”

“I’m a big girl. I don’t need you to protect me. I can take care of myself.”

“That doesn’t change the way I feel.”

“Good night, Douglas.” Liz vanished behind the door to the tent. Douglas heard it zip shut behind her.

Douglas turned to watch what was left of the fire as it started to burn itself out. Defeat from the jaws of victory, Douglas thought to himself. Was he just being paranoid. It was a very real possibility. For his adult life, he worked to protect people who, quite frankly, did have the rest of the world out to get them; Medimetics was no different. But that kind of thinking had a way of seeping down into one’s brain and coloring everything.

Trust no one. It was an easy aphorism to say, but difficult to apply, and not just because you couldn’t get through life truly trusting nobody. But it also meant that you also couldn’t trust yourself. You always had to consider that you yourself were wrong, that sometimes even your gut instinct would lead you astray. You needed to have some kind of external sanity check to be able to notice when you were starting to veer a little too far off course.

Douglas was hoping that Liz could be that for him.

Liz was normal. At least, as normal as a person could be. Normal was, by definition, average. It was a statistical construct, what you get when you add everyone up and divide by n. No one was truly normal, but at least Liz was normal enough in the ways that mattered, especially to himself. Normal people blundered through life underestimating the real threats they faced, but someone like that could help him tell when he overshot the other way. Someone like Liz.

Douglas groaned. Like she had just tried to do, and that he had dismissed her for. He needed to trust her judgment more.

The fire was down to its last embers. Douglas got up and walked slowly over to the end. He listened for the sounds of movement coming from inside, and did his best to knock at the shut tent flaps before entering. Inside, in the meager amount of light from the fire and the night sky, he could see a silhouette of Liz in her sleeping bag. He sat down on the bag next to it.

“Liz?” he whispered. “Are you awake?”

Liz didn’t say anything, but Douglas thought he saw her move slightly. It was hard to tell.

“Well, if you are awake, I’m… I’m sorry.”

“Douglas?” she mumbled.

“Yes?”

“Go to sleep.”

He did.

Chapter word count: 1,891 (+224)
Total word count: 35,419 / 50,000 (70.838%)

“All in all, it turned out a lot better than I was expecting,” Fred concluded.

“Better?” Jacob replied incredulously. At least, he tried to, but the limitations of instant messaging didn’t do nearly enough to express the incredulity. The Daves had still been unable to get any kind of VoIP working for him. The last thing Jacob had heard from New Dave was that it was probably one of the perimeter firewalls blocking streaming media, and VoIP traffic looked enough like that to get caught. Until they could figure out a way around that, Jacob was stuck relying on text-based communications channels to contact the outside world.

Jacob bolded, italicized, and doubled the font of his “Better?”, and added an exclamation point at the end for good measure. If there were an emoticon to signify “jumping across the table to throttle your throat with my bare hands,” Jacob would be using it extensively right now.

“It only took ten minutes for the judge to throw out my case?!” Jacob continued. “Better than what, exactly?”

“It’s wasn’t what the judge’s action was that’s important here, it’s why she threw it out,” Fred replied.

Lawyers.

“What is important,” Fred continued, “is that she didn’t base her decision at all on the fact that you’re inside a computer, but solely on the basis of distinguishing your identity from that of the original Mr. Feldspar-Leigh. It doesn’t establish any truly binding precedent, but it does at least give us a case to point to that at least suggests that a person’s status as a computer simulation is not grounds for dismissal.”

“But I still lost,” Jacob countered.

“You didn’t lose, technically. Your case was thrown out before the judge even heard arguments.”

“My mistake.” Sarcasm didn’t convey any better than incredulity.

“It certainly could have been worse,” Oliver added. “There was the very real chance you could have been Dred Scotted.”

“Been what?”

“You know,” answered Fred, “if the judge had declared that you weren’t a citizen to begin with. Like in the Dred Scott case.”

“Setting a precedent like that right off the bat would have been devastating to our cause,” Oliver agreed. “So really, you could see the outcome here as implicitly upholding your rights as a Digital American.”

“Insofar as they weren’t explicitly denied,” corrected Fred.

“Yes, it would be terrible for everyone to have to fight another Civil War over little old me,” Jacob replied. Hyperbole could be successfully conveyed in any medium. “But that still doesn’t solve the problem of me not having any money, and not even being who I say I am!”

“We could always try to file an appeal,” Fred offered, “but there’s the possibility it would come before a judge more hostile to your fundamental rights. Long term, we may be better off letting this suit stay as-is and trying to leverage it as precedent to support you the next time around. It’s up to you, though.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jacob replied, unimpressed. “I’ll let you know what I decide.” He closed the messaging program before either of the two at Over Zero could send a reply.

They were proving to be too focused on the big picture of their singularity nonsense or whatever to be of much help anyway. If anything, Jacob was in a worse position than before. Not only did he definitely not have any money or any other possessions, but now he wasn’t even legally considered to be himself! Jacob found the very idea ridiculous. Of course he was himself, he could remember his entire life. Who else but he could claim that?

More importantly, what could he do now? The simulated environment he lived in was beginning to feel a little more like a prison every day. He couldn’t go anywhere, obviously, but at least that wouldn’t be as bad if not for the fact that it only consisted of a couple rooms. He knew Other Dave was working on expanding it somehow, but Jacob feared it’d end up being some strange pastiche of a bunch of video games, having heard some of the inspirations Other Dave had had. Jacob didn’t care much for the idea of having to collect the blue key if he wanted to go to the bathroom.

But that wasn’t the real problem. No matter how nice his environment might be, it still fundamentally cut him off from the rest of the world. Nothing that he did here really mattered out there, since at some level none of it was real. What could he actually do? No matter what, all it would amount to was giving Medimetics more data to use to unlock the secrets of the human brain, which as far as Jacob knew were still completely opaque to them, and would be for the foreseeable future.

But what then? Jacob wasn’t naive; he knew Medimetics was in it for the money, not for altruism. What would happen when they no longer saw the need to study him? Jacob guessed that it depended on when it happened. Right now he must cost a lot of money to run, so there’d be an obvious incentive to shut him down as soon as possible. If it was in the distant future, by that time it might not matter; by that time computers might be to the point where the entire simulation could be run on someone’s cell phone, or whatever their equivalent would be. There’d be no particular motivation by then to shut him off. But on the other hand, old programs never die, they just fail to get ported to modern hardware.

“You are in more danger than you realize.” “They cannot be trusted.” It had sounded paranoid, but Jacob recognized that even if it weren’t true, it was still a good idea to have an escape plan ready, or at least be thinking of the options that were out there. He didn’t know who it was that had sent it, but presumably they had figured out a way past whatever filters or scrutiny Medimetics put between him and the outside. Especially now that he couldn’t even post openly on his blog without having it approved by the company, he felt more than ever it would be a good idea to have a more private channel available.

Jacob had replied to the mysterious message with a noncommittal “Hello world,” and there hadn’t been much of any consequence after that. Jacob switched over to the drop folder and added a new message: “Who are you?”

There was no reply immediately forthcoming, which Jacob wasn’t sure how to interpret. He decided to sleep on things and figure out what to do next in the morning.

—

When he woke up the next morning, there was indeed a reply waiting for him: “Friends. Concerned citizens. Details unimportant. Better left unsaid, just in case.”

Jacob wrote a reply: “What do you want?”

Their reply appeared surprisingly quickly. Whoever might be at the other end was clearly there. “To help a fellow man. You’re in danger. Facility attacked. Words censored. Deleted. Not safe for you there.”

But who were they? There were plenty of people online who were interested in him, or at least followed his blog, but they were there mainly out of curiosity and because right now he was still ‘the’ thing out there, until whatever the next big thing came along. As far as the people who had actually offered him help with anything were Over Zero, and they hadn’t exactly impressed him. Unless they were up to something else. Perhaps representing his lawsuit was just one thing they wanted to do for him? They did seem awfully interested in his being a so-called ‘Digital American’, and given what Jacob knew of singularity enthusiasts, that was probably rooted in some degree of jealousy that he had achieved the sort of human-computer fusion they had anticipated.

“Help me how, exactly?” Jacob replied.

“You are walled off. Isolated. A test subject. Guinea pig. Prisoner. There is an alternative. If you seek it.”

“Do you mean escape? How? What would that even mean?”

“You must seek within for guidance. Look inside. You will find the key.”

On the other hand, they might just be some pranksters who figured out a way onto his computer. If this was all they were going to do, send him cryptic messages, than Jacob didn’t feel much like playing along. He closed the text window, and was about to close the folder too, when another file in it caught his eye: something called key.exe.

“You will find the key,” Jacob remembered. Ha ha.

“What is it?” Jacob wrote, and waited for a reply.

There was none.

Curiosity got the better of Jacob. He moved the mouse over the icon on the screen, and hesitated. He was hardly a security expert, but he knew the rule about not running programs or opening attachments that people send you on the Internet. There was no telling what they would do to your computer. And since he was part of a computer himself, it could be far riskier than normal.

But on the other hand, this wasn’t a real computer in front of him anyway. It was just some virtual machine being exposed to him as, well, a virtual computer. It wasn’t really part of the simulation itself; it was just conventional machine virtualization. The worst that could happen was that the program run rampant on it and he asked one of the Daves to restore it from a known-good copy. That was one of the things you were supposed to use a virtual machine for anyway.

Jacob double-clicked on the icon and waited. Nothing seemed to happen. No programs, no windows, nothing. Jacob was about to leave and check in on Gavin when a black window with a tiny bit of text at the top appeared on the screen. Jacob read what it said.

“D:\simu\xti\vm> “, followed by a blinking cursor. Just a command prompt. Except, Jacob’s computer didn’t have a D: drive on it. He ran “ipconfig /all” to get some information about the system. He noticed the host name assigned to the machine: balthasar000413h. The name sounded vaguely familiar, as though it were something he should recognize.

Jacob’s eyes widened. Balthasar. “Seek within,” indeed. Jacob had a command shell on one of the computers making up the Simulacrum.

Chapter word count: 1,733 (+66)
Total word count: 33,528 / 50,000 (67.056%)

In case you thought my NaNoWriMo novel’s premise is ridiculous:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IBM have presented at paper at the SC09 supercomputing conference describing a milestone in cognitive computing: the group’s massively parallel cortical simulator, C2, now has the ability to simulate a brain with about 4.5 percent the cerebral cortex capacity of a human brain, and significantly more brain capacity than a cat.

[Ars Technica, "IBM makes supercomputer significantly smarter than cat"]

Mind you, it’s not actually simulating a cat’s brain, but it does work by modeling the interactions among 1.617 billion neurons across 8.87 trillion synapses, so in theory, if you could program in a sufficiently detailed model of a cat’s brain, it should work. The supercomputer that the simulation runs on consists of 147,456 CPUs with 144TB of memory, and even then can’t simulate neural activity in real time.

The article points out that even if you can simulate a brain with this system, that doesn’t mean you automatically understand what’s actually going on inside it, but it does give you something easier to study than a real live brain:

In the end, C2 is like having a (sorta) real cortex that you don’t fully understand, but that you can rewind, snap pictures of, and generally measure under different conditions so that you can do experiments on it that wouldn’t be possible (or ethical) with real brains.

So it turns out there really are people working on the sort of thing serving as my NaNoWriMo novel’s premise; they just aren’t quite as far along. But they’re getting there.

Charlie crumpled the piece of paper and threw it on the floor in frustration. Planning was proving to be far more difficult to do alone than in a group.

The group. Charlie had heard on the news what had happened to Alex and Burt. Martyred, no doubt thanks to the police. Charlie had narrowly avoided the same fate. That night at Medimetics, he had followed his role in the operation to the letter. Once he had picked the lock to the electrical room, he stayed inside and waited for the signal to trip the circuit breaker powering the door lock. It had taken him a few minutes to figure out how to operate the control equipment; he had expected, naively in retrospect, something like the circuit breaker panel in a house. The equipment there had proved to be significantly more complex than that, but not insurmountably so. No matter the interface, you were still severing a physical connection on a wire somewhere, and there’s only so many ways you can do that without depending on electrical power yourself. The manuals and diagrams he found in the room with it helped too.

As did the delay before getting the signal to proceed. Charlie had started to get nervous when the expected time came with no word from the others. He had even thought about calling Alex to see if there was a problem, but he managed to stay calm and stick the plan: don’t move, and wait for the signal. Anything else, such as a phone ringing at the wrong moment, could have ruined everything.

Not that everything hadn’t gotten ruined soon afterwards, but at least Charlie’s conscience was clean. As planned, he had locked the electrical room’s door and left the building once he had restored power to the corridor. He got back into the van and waited for the others. And waited. And waited. He had started to worry again about something going wrong when he had thought he heard police sirens in the distance. Charlie had panicked and ran away from the van and the building and the parking lot on foot. A reckless idea, perhaps, but he had managed to get out of there alive. He hadn’t been willing to stay there and wait for Alex, and without his keys he wouldn’t have been able to start the van.

The worst part of it, even worse than the deaths of Alex and Burt, was the fact that they hadn’t even managed to bring down the abomination, a fact every single news report the next day had gone to great lengths to point out. It was still there, a monument to mankind’s latest attempt to play God. The heathens couldn’t create life by themselves yet, so they resorted to creating a cheap knock-off and trying to convince everyone that it counted. Machines did not have souls, no matter what their scientists liked to pretend.

But ever since that night, silence. Charlie regretted having skipped the funeral service, but he couldn’t risk appearing in public if the cops where indeed looking for him. Their nameless benefactor, the once who had provided the disc that was supposedly going to destroy the abomination from the inside, hadn’t made contact since then either. No doubt he was trying to lay low as well, and if either of them were being watched, there was no point in risking exposing the other.

Which left Charlie alone to finish the job. Another attempt to destroy the abomination was hopeless, since Medimetics had certainly beefed up their security now that they knew it was a target. But if Charlie couldn’t stop them outright, at least he could contain the damage by preventing them from making more attempts to copy anyone else. The scanning machine in the hospital, surely the only one in existence. Destroy it, and you stop them from making any more abominations.

However, Charlie was learning just how difficult planning something like that was without any help. He ignored for the time being the question of how to gain access to the hospital in the first place. He wasn’t too worried about it; doing something like pretending to be visiting a patient ought to be able to get him close enough. No, the hard part was what to do once he came face-to-face with the machine.

Picking a lock and sticking a CD into a computer were simple enough, but destroying a giant piece of medical equipment was another thing entirely. Sure, it was probably fairly sensitive and could be broken by hammering at it a bit, but “broken” implied it could be fixed, and a temporary solution wasn’t going to cut it. He might be able to pry open a panel on it and do… something. That was too dangerous, however, since Charlie had no clue what would be inside it. He couldn’t afford to risk getting blasted with radiation or something if he poked or prodded the wrong thing.

Which left blowing it up, which was easier said than done. It wasn’t like he could just import a vest full of dynamite from the Middle East or anything, and the communists who ran the county government outlawed sales of so much as a firecracker. He could probably find plenty of do-it-yourself instructions on the Internet — he thought it had something to do with fertilizer — but if the cops were watching him, having “how to build a bomb” in his Google history wasn’t going to help him out any.

Whatever the answer was, he had to think of something soon. He was getting tired of jumping every time he heard a siren.

—

“Case #92874/5, Feldspar-Leigh v. Ivers,” the judge read from the stack of papers in front of her. “Plaintiff alleges defendant used a fraudulent death certificate to gain control of plaintiff’s assets.”

“Excuse me, your honor,” Fred Quinne said hesitantly as he stood up from his seat. This was his first time appearing in court since he was hired by Over Zero. Strictly speaking, this was actually his first time appearing in court, period.

“Yes?” the judge asked.

“My client does not allege the death certificate was issued fraudulently.”

“He doesn’t?”

“No, your honor. ‘Fraudulently’ implies malicious intent. My client instead alleges that it was issued based on incorrect information about his death. Namely, um, that he is still alive.”

“Yes, I stand corrected,” the judge replied unenthusiastically.

“Your honor,” the attorney across the aisle from Fred announced, “my client moves that the court dismiss plaintiff’s suit.”

“On what grounds?”

“Lack of standing. The court is aware that the suit is being brought by, and I shall try to put this delicately, a computer program, not a person.”

“Objection!” Fred interrupted.

“On what grounds?” asked the judge.

“My client, Mr. Jacob F. Feldspar-Leigh is, in his current condition, both a computer program and a person.” Law school had hardly prepared him to say something like that.

“Can you cite any precedent supporting allowing a computer program to right to seek legal remedy in a court of law.”

“No, your honor, but there is also no precedent for denying a computer program that right, especially not when that computer program creates a complete representation of a person’s mental state.” Three minutes in, and Fred found himself already falling back on the Air Bud defense: ain’t no rule that a computer program can’t file a lawsuit. “My client hopes to use this case to establish a precedent in that regard, in addition to reclaiming the assets that are rightfully his.”

“That remains to be seen,” said the judge, “but for the sake of today we shall proceed as though such a determination is at least possible.”

“Actually, your honor,” said Ms. Ivers’s attorney, “I do not believe a decision on that point needs to be made to dismiss the case. It can instead be decided on far narrower and, dare I say it, more conventional grounds.”

“I’m listening.”

“Supposing for the sake of argument that plaintiff is considered a person under the law — and I should like to emphasize for the record that such a position is not one that neither my client nor I are advocating — such a determination would merely state that plaintiff is a person, but not the Mr. Jacob F. Feldspar-Leigh that he claims to be. And since he cannot establish a legitimate claim to that identity, he is not an aggrieved party and thus has no standing to sue my client.”

“Go on.”

“Mr. Feldspar-Leigh’s medical records clearly show that he survived the procedure which produced the plaintiff. Mr. Feldspar-Leigh and the plaintiff are clearly two separate entities. Not only is there no precedent for transferring the legal identity of a person to another person or other entity, but there is a long tradition of explicitly not treating a copy of a person as sharing the identity, or of claiming any rights to that identity, of the original individual.”

“You can actually cite precedent for that?” the judge asked.

“Absolutely, your honor,” the attorney grinned. “Identical twins are formed when a fertilized egg divides into two, with each resulting cell independently developing into embryos. One is the original cell, and the other is a copy. However, both of the people who develop from those embryos are treated as separate individuals with separate identities under the law, with no consideration of the fact that at one time, one was a near-perfect copy of the other. So too, here, even if plaintiff was created as a near-perfect copy of Mr. Jacob F. Feldspar-Leigh — which he is not, certainly not to the extent as identical twins — and if — if — plaintiff is a person under the law, even then it is manifestly not the case that plaintiff has any claim to the identity of Mr. Jacob F. Feldspar-Leigh, regardless of whether he has attempted to appropriate that name for himself. Since the assets at the center of the case originally belonged to Mr. Jacob F. Feldspar-Leigh and not to plaintiff, and were never transferred to plaintiff’s ownership, plaintiff has no legal claim to those assets which have been transferred to my client following Mr. Jacob F. Feldspar-Leigh’s death.”

“The defendant has a compelling argument,” the judge said, turning to Fred. “Do you have any evidence that shows Mr. Feldspar-Leigh transferred his assets to your client?”

Fred tried to think of something to say in support of his client. The original Jacob and the new Jacob had never even been conscious at the same time, nor had Jacob even put anything into his will that even mentioned the Jacob who now lived within Medimetics.

“No, your honor,” he finally replied.

“In that case, I’m throwing out this suit, on the grounds that plaintiff lacks standing as an aggrieved party to seek remedy from this court.” The judged banged the gavel. “Dismissed. Next case, #92874/6…”

Chapter word count: 1,819 (+152)
Total word count: 31,795 / 50,000 (63.59%)

“Hello?”

“Hi, Connie, it’s Liz.”

“Oh, hi, Liz. How are things?”

Liz shrugged, which didn’t carry well over the phone. “Not too bad, I guess,” she added.

Constance Wainwright was one of the first people Liz had met when she first moved out to the area after college. They had lived almost next door to one another in the apartment complex, and even though they had each moved out some time ago, they still kept in touch with each other.

“Wait,” Connie said, “didn’t you have plans or something tonight?”

“I did, yeah,” Liz answered, her voice falling slightly, “but that fell through at the last minute. Not much going on now.” Liz kept the phone by her ear as she flopped down on the couch.

“I see,” Connie said knowingly.

“See what?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“No, seriously, what?” Liz shifted onto her side.

“Boyfriend trouble, again, I take it.”

“No,” Liz protested. “Well, not really.”

“Mmm hmm. I don’t suppose he was the one who fell through tonight? Stood you up?”

“No! Nothing like that. He’s just been tied up with his job lately. I mean, even more so than usual.”

“So this isn’t the first time,” Connie asked.

“Well, it’s the first time he’s canceled outright on me, at least.”

“But he did choose his job over you. That’s not a good sign.”

“No, I don’t really think ‘chose’ is the right word. I just think things are pretty crazy over there for him right now.”

“You just think? He hasn’t told you?”

“Not in so many words, no. It’s…” Liz paused, trying to choose her words carefully. “He doesn’t like to talk about his job very much. Like he tries to keep his work and his personal life separate. I could probably stand to take a couple lessons from him,” she added, glancing guiltily at the stack of papers under her coffee table.

“And you’re sure he’s not just using work as an excuse to hide something else he might be doing?”

Liz laughed at the idea. “If he is, he’s doing a fantastic job timing it with the news.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line. “What do you mean, the news?”

“Oh, you must’ve heard the latest about it by now. There was some kind of arson attempt at the place he works. Two people died.”

“Oh my.”

“Yeah. He gets tied up with work whenever his company makes the headlines, but this is the worst so far. I can understand how that might work.”

“Hang on,” Connie said, her voice trailing off briefly. “Medimetics, right? The ones with the simulated brain?”

“That’s them. Actually, now that you mention it, he works something to do with security on that project.” No wonder he had sounded so frazzled when he had called her to cancel a few hours ago.

“Really? That’s certainly something. No wonder he sounds busy.”

“Yeah.” Liz rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling fan.

“Do you know if they’ve figured out who’s responsible? For the break-in, I mean?” Connie asked.

“Well, they did find the bodies of two of the arsonists. They somehow managed to die in the fire even though there wasn’t much actual damage; I’m not entirely sure how that worked. The news is saying they might’ve had an accomplice, but who knows.”

“Do they have a motive?”

“Apparently the police think the two are associated with some right-wing religious group. Which I guess makes sense, since a lot of them have been throwing a fit about what Medimetics is doing. No one’s taken credit for it or anything, though.”

“Ah. What does your boyfriend think?”

“Douglas hasn’t talked about it at all. In fact, we haven’t talked much since it happened. I get the sense he’s been pulling a lot of overtime since then.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah.”

Liz kept staring at the ceiling fan, watching it slowly rotate. She couldn’t bring herself to be angry with Douglas for all but ignoring her the past couple days, since she knew it wasn’t his fault. But on the other hand, she wanted to be able to do something about it. She just had no idea what, but she knew moping at home about it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She suspected that was what had motivated her to call Connie. Maybe talking about it some would help her think.

“You know…” Connie said.

“What?”

“I’d bet Douglas — Douglas, right? — I’d bet Douglas could stand to use a little vacation right about now.”

“Yeah, probably. He’s focused on his work, but he was sounding a little worn out when he called.”

“I have an idea.”

—

Douglas sighed as he scrolled through the pages of the Simulacrum configuration manual. He knew the situation was bad, but the sheer extent to which the developers had cut corners continued to amaze him. It was as though they had gone through the checklist of all the issues they needed to address, and picked the worse possible way they could find an excuse to check the boxes.

It wasn’t just the fact that they were using an essentially unmodified off-the-shelf OS without any kind of hardening. It wasn’t even the fact that nobody was keeping the software on it patched. It was that the manual explicitly called for not doing so, with the excuse that the system’s isolation from the rest of the network made it unnecessary and lowered the cost of day-to-day maintenance. They didn’t even so much as run a virus scanner on any of the machines, with the excuse that they didn’t have the resources available to handle the processor overhead.

Cheaper for them, maybe, but not for Douglas, who now had to figure out a way to verify the integrity of a room full of machines that practically had a “pwn me” sign taped to their back. He couldn’t decide where to begin the actual analysis. He couldn’t even convince himself it wasn’t a lost cause right from the start, but Jessica had shot down the only real solution as being too costly.

Again, for them, not for him. Such were the dangers of having project security paid out of a different budget than project development and maintenance. He made a mental note to include consideration of Medimetics’s budgeting system as a potential threat source the next time he was tasked to prepare a risk assessment.

His phone rang. Douglas recognized the incoming number.

“Hi, Liz,” he said, answering it. “Look, I said I was sorry about tonight, but–”

“Forget about it. What are you doing this weekend?”

Most likely, staring at pages of inconclusive scan results from a subset of the machines in the Simulacrum. “Probably working, unfortunately.”

“No, we’re going camping.”

“I can’t, I–”

“Sure you can. I know your car doesn’t, but my car has enough room to pack a tent and the rest of the gear we’d need.”

“No, I mean–”

“It’ll be great. I can pick you up first thing Saturday morning and drive out to the campsite, spend the night there, and come back Sunday evening.”

“I’ve got piles of work here,” Douglas protested. Not literally, of course, but the to-do list on his computer was looking particularly foreboding.

“You’ll be back in plenty of time to report to work Monday morning.”

“This isn’t the kind of thing that can wait until then.”

“So have someone else cover for you. Make someone else spend their weekend stuck in the office. You’ll be spending your weekend in the complete opposite of the office.”

“A tent is probably the only thing smaller than this office.”

“I was talking about the Great Outdoors.”

“If they were so great, we wouldn’t build buildings to keep it out.”

“Oh come on, now you’re just making up excuses.”

“Besides,” Douglas said, “anyone who fills in for me is just going to be calling me constantly while I’m out there.”

“Correction: they’ll be trying to call you constantly. The place I’ve reserved is far enough out in the middle of nowhere, you won’t be able to get any signal. That part of why we’ll need to leave first thing Saturday morning, actually.”

“You’ve already reserved a campsite?”

“Non-refundable.”

“But if there’s no signal, what if something happens and we get stuck out there?”

“Oh darn,” Liz said, “I guess we’d have to find something to do with even more time alone with each other. Wouldn’t that be terrible.”

“We’d run out of food eventually.”

“It’s a campsite, not outstate Montana. There is civilization out there, after all. It just knows to keep its nose out of our business while we’re out there when we’re not looking for it.”

“Good, then if this is all secretly some plot to kill me and hide the body, there’s a chance I’ll still be able to notify the police.”

“Yes, we obviously didn’t think this nefarious plan through enough.”

“‘We’?”

“Camping was my friend’s idea. Not only would this trip give you a break from whatever they have you doing over there, but she says a camping trip with her then-boyfriend did wonders for their relationship.”

“‘Then-boyfriend’?”

“Now-husband.”

“So no pressure, then.”

“Of course there’s pressure. I told you I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer on this. Besides, I’m already speccing out what kind of tent I’m going to buy. Don’t tell me I’ve wasted these last ten minutes online for nothing.”

Douglas leaned back in his chair to think. He tried to lean back, at least; his chair had been fated for the Dumpster before being pressed back into service for his office, and the non-functional recline mechanism was probably part of the reason it had been awaiting the scrap heap. Part of him was wary about heading off alone someplace in the middle of nowhere with someone he didn’t know as well as he’d like. But another part of him was well aware of how paranoid that sounded. Working late a second night in a row, and continuing to do so for the foreseeable future, certainly suggested his work was consuming an ever-larger chunk of his life. He was paid look at security threats all day, but that didn’t mean he needed to see everything in terms of threats and vulnerabilities all the time.

Besides, if Liz really did have it out for him, she could probably find a far more subtle plot to do so.

“OK, you win,” he said. Mort could stand to get a lot more familiar with the inner workings of the Simulacrum, after all.

“Excellent. Now, what size sleeping bag do you think you’d need?”

Chapter word count: 1,773 (+106)
Total word count: 29,976 / 50,000 (59.952%)

Jacob lay in bed, having an existential crisis.

Technically, of course, that wasn’t true. In one sense, he merely had the sensation of lying in bed, or at least a reasonably close approximation of one. In another, he was constantly running in a thousand different directions through countless silicon and fiber optic channels at as close to the speed of light as engineers could manage. In a third, he was standing still in a hot and noisy room, completely motionless save for an army of whirling magnetic platters and a constellation of blinking LEDs. Then there was the sense, one that Jacob scarcely cared to acknowledge save for the sake of completeness, that those three notions were completely irrelevant, since he was really rotting in a pseudonymous grave somewhere, doomed to be forgotten.

However, all that was irrelevant to his current existential crisis. After all, Jacob had had plenty of time already to ponder that one, and had gotten a pretty good handle on it by now.

No, this time, Jacob was wrestling with the notion of his own mortality. Most people were fortunate to only have to go through it once. Jacob could remember the time he went through his first one, around the time the doctors had taken the tens’ digit off of his remaining life expectancy. Looking back on it, Jacob was convinced he had handled it pretty well. Better than most, in fact.

Some people used that moment to take stock of their life and reevaluate what was truly important to them. Others decided to live their remaining years to the fullest, so they could die with no regrets. Others resolved to hold on as long as they could, to refuse to go down without a fight.

Jacob had decided to stop playing by the rules everyone else did. After all, history had shown all of them still had a 100% mortality rate.

Jacob had learned first-hand that the key to success was knowing how to quit while you were ahead. He had let his startups get bought out before the tech crash, earning him his first fortune and isolating him from the sector’s inevitable failure. The story had played out similarly years later in real estate, confirming to Jacob he had made the right move betting everything on the Simulacrum. Maybe one couldn’t live forever, but that was only because they tied themselves to their original body. He escaped with little time to spare, but the important thing was, he had escaped.

And while his new existence were hardly perfect, it was a lot better than the alternative. Besides, there were advantages to living in a simulated environment. At the top of the list, he was safe from disease, as here bacteria and viruses simply didn’t exist. He wouldn’t get sick because he couldn’t get sick, because there was nothing here to make him sick. The only foreseeable threat to his continued good health would be old age, assuming the simulation of his physical body were detailed enough to incorporate that. But since he had effectively been transplanted from a body with one foot in the grave to the one he had now, it should be just as easy to swap out an old virtual body for a new model every few decades, with just the side effect of some disorientation after the swap. He could be effectively immortal. Not a bad deal at all.

However, the news of the attack on the Simulacrum — no, of the attack on him — made him start questioning all of that.

In his old life, he had never needed to worry about someone trying to set his brain on fire from the inside, but from what he could tell it had almost actually happened. While he had been sleeping, no less, completely unaware that anything was even happening.

Then there was the thought of what those two people had been trying to do with the servers beforehand. No one, not even the Daves, had been able to tell him much about that, so either they didn’t know or they didn’t want to tell him. It wouldn’t be the first time they had kept him out of the loop on details about himself. But that, it was like… the closest analogy Jacob could come up with was if someone broke into your bedroom at night and did a little brain surgery on you while you were asleep.

Jacob didn’t feel any different. At least, he didn’t think he felt any different. Would he remember if he did?

He turned his head to the side and saw Gavin crawling around on the inside of the terrarium walls. He didn’t seem any different from before, at least. Gavin did as he always did, lurking around in his fake body in a fake kitchen inside a fake room inside a fake reality.

The conversation Jacob had had with the Daves when they introduced Gavin jumped in his memory. Hadn’t they said they made space for him in the Simulacrum during a system update? He hadn’t given that comment much thought originally, but now it dawned on him that that was one instance where the software that gave him his existence was already mutable. In a sense, he had already experienced unannounced overnight brain surgery. At least once. For all he knew, it could have happened a dozen times already. If they hadn’t told him about it that one time, he never would have known.

The thought hardly made him more confident about what his assailants had done to the servers.

Jacob was realizing that his existence was a lot more precarious than he had thought, perhaps even more so than that of his old life, in his old body. At least then, if he was threatened by something, he had the chance of doing something about it. But here? He was completely reliant on Medimetics to protect him, and their track record had taken a pretty big hit. This had been his backup plan. Did his backup plan need one too?

Backups. He knew the Simulacrum had a backup system, which had been a relief. Then and now, he had always been at risk of a stray cosmic ray shooting through his body and breaking a DNA strand or flipping a critical bit somewhere. But with a backup of him, even if his assailants had completely destroyed the building, burned it to the ground, he would still be alive somewhere, waiting to be revived in a rebuilt system, the same virtual body but a brand-new physical one.

So if that had happened, would he be dead or alive? Jacob’s understanding of biology told him that even in the “real” world, life was a surprisingly tricky question. Bacteria were obviously alive, but what about viruses? They just sort of floated around until they latched on to a cell and took it over. And where was the line that separated the chemical reactions taking place in primordial ooze from the first living whatever?

It didn’t bode well for trying to draw analogies from that to Jacob’s current situation. He used to be made of chemicals, now he was made of ones and zeroes. No, wrong level of abstraction. What were those ones and zeroes made of? Photons and electrons zooming across a network. Voltages inside transistors. But those were ephemeral. Permanently, what was he made of? Polarizations of magnetic fields on a disk.

So what made those alive and not, say, a text file? Well, what made one set of chemicals alive and another not? Activity, Jacob guessed. It might not be the complete answer, but it at least seemed like part of it. A living body and a dead body were the same physically except for the interactions taking place. So by analogy, he was alive as long as there were processors executing the software that simulated those interactions. The bits on disk were then his real body, and the bits in memory and on the network were what made him alive.

Jacob immediately saw one difference. It was impossible, so far as he knew, to go in the physical world from a dead body to a living body. But if his dead body were bits on a disk, then any computer with the right software could read those bits and execute the same calculations that made him live. But then, what meaning did death have when resurrection were so cheap?

Jacob recognized there might be some interesting theological implications behind that, but his background was software development, so his thoughts led in that direction instead. He was alive as long as a program was running the simulation he was in. A running program means a process executing on an OS on a processor. But processes don’t run continuously, since there are usually lots of processes fighting over processor time. Instead, the OS switches between them several times a second, fast enough that the average user doesn’t even notice what’s going on. In fact, even the programmer can usually ignore it and pretend his program has complete uninterrupted control of the processor. But in reality, it gets a few milliseconds, then gets shoved into a corner of memory while another process gets a turn.

Therefore, if his thinking was correct, not only was death meaningless, but he died every few milliseconds and was resurrected a few milliseconds later. And even if that entire system crashed and burned — figuratively or literally — he could be born anew from a backup body in cold storage which, if death was meaningless for him, was just as alive as he was. Or was part of him. Or something.

Jacob’s existential crisis was rapidly turning into a headache. He decided to cut his losses and find something to distract himself with something before he somehow find a way to conclude that he was God and the OS was the devil or some nonsense like that. He rolled out of bed and sat down in front of his computer to check his e-mail.

He noticed a folder sitting on the computer’s desktop that he didn’t remember putting there. It was labeled “news”. He double-clicked on it and saw a file named “test.txt”. Strange; it wasn’t as though anyone else could use his computer while he was away from it, especially since Jacob was careful to make sure the lid of Gavin’s terrarium stayed firmly in place. Jacob opened the folder in the text editor:

“You are in more danger than you realize. If you read this, delete this file and replace it with something else. Tell no one about this message. They cannot be trusted.”

Chapter word count: 1,778 (+111)
Total word count: 28,203 / 50,000 (56.406%)

“Sorry I’m late,” Mort mumbled as he stepped into the office. Douglas was seated at his desk, and Jessica had already claimed the chair closest to the door. He squeezed between her and the desk, set his cup on the corner of the desk, and dropped into the remaining chair.

“You look awful,” Jessica said.

“It’s been a really long night,” Mort said, rubbing his eyes. “You wouldn’t think talking to the police would be that exhausting, but it is.”

Mort leaned forward, tossing an unlabeled DVD onto the desk immediately in front of Douglas. As he shifted his weight, the chair wobbled forward and to the left on its short leg.

“That’s a copy of the security camera footage and system logs from last night,” Mort explained, trying and failing to stifle a yawn.

Douglas picked it up, look at it for a few seconds, and inserted it into the computer under his desk. He swiveled the monitor sideways, trying to position it so the three of them could look at it.

“OK, which one do you want to go through first?” Douglas asked.

“Might as well start with the big one: the shot of the server room last night,” Mort answered, the chair now wobbling back and to the right. Mort look down at the uncooperative chair leg. He then reached up and pulled an ugly orange book off the shelf above him.

“What are you doing?” Douglas shouted.

“I’m trying to balance this chair,” Mort said. For effect, he shifted his weight back and forth, demonstrating the wobble.

“That’s why I didn’t move over for you,” Jessica said quietly.

Douglas quickly leaned over the desk and yanked the book out of Mort’s hands. “This is an original copy of the TCSEC! It’s practically a collector’s item!”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever known who actually collects the Rainbow Series,” Jessica said.

“Here,” Douglas said, tossing a thin book onto Mort’s lap. “PHP pocket reference. About all it’s good for.”

Mort slid the pocket reference under the chair leg as Douglas carefully returned the orange book to its place on the shelf.

“Now that that’s done, can we get down to business?” Jessica said, checking her watch. “Once I’m out of here I’ve got a conference call with Corporate to discuss where we go from here.”

“OK, just a second,” Douglas said as he studied the file listing in front of him. “Its, um…” All of the file names were a series of digits. They looked like timestamps of when they were made.

“Here, I’ll do it,” Mort said, taking the keyboard and swinging it around to the part of the desk in front of him. “I practically know the names of these by heart now. Here we go.”

A video recording of the Simulacrum server room began playing on the screen. Mort narrated as he tapped on the keyboard. “OK, that’s the door. In a second here… there, we see two men dressed as janitors enter and walk off-screen. The corridor outside the door lost power a few seconds before they entered, which is why the door lock was disabled at the time. Now is when I started panning around to check the room and saw them there, in front of those racks, doing something.”

Douglas bent down and rummaged through a drawer in his desk, occasionally glancing back up towards the monitor. Jessica leaned closer to the screen and studied the image.

“It looks like one of them has a CD?”

Mort nodded. “Right. The police found it on one of the, um, bodies after the fire. There were three racks unlocked when we went in. It’s hard to tell from the video, but presumably they put it into at least one of the machines in each rack, maybe more.”

“Is that all they found on them?”

“The police also said they found an ID badge issued to a Mr. Dwayne Tyrell, along with a key to the server rack and a key to the supply closets. Mr. Tyrell is employed by the custodial firm we contract with. The police haven’t been able to reach him.”

“So they stole his ID and key?”

“Or bought him off,” Douglas guessed, holding a document in his lap. “Maybe they gave him a million bucks and he fled the country.”

“Or he could be the third man,” Mort said. He typed something on the keyboard, and another video appeared on the screen, showing the front lobby, facing the outside doors. One man held something next to the door and entered, followed by two others. “This was taken fifteen minutes the power disruption. They badged in using Mr. Tyrell’s ID, though from the video there’s no way to tell if he’s one of them or not. But we do know he’s not one of the two they found in the server room.”

“Either way,” Douglas said, “they got in using that ID, cut the power to the hallway, and thus disabled the only lock on the door to the server room.” He tossed the document in his lap over to Jessica.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“That is a copy of the risk assessment I had prepared on the system architecture for Simulacrum. Note in particular the part where it recommends an electronic lock that fails secure when it loses power. If that had been followed, they never would’ve gotten.”

“And we took that lock off the table because of the fire safety risk,” Jessica replied. “There’s no way the fire marshal would’ve approved that. If the lock lost power and sealed the door during a fire, well, you’ve seen what happens. And getting rid of the suppression system wasn’t an option, since the alternatives couldn’t guarantee extinguishing a fire without damaging the equipment, and we wouldn’t be able to afford that. We had to go with a lock that would fail safe and permit evacuation.”

“But you didn’t even pair the magnetic lock with a conventional lock! Lose power, and there goes your physical security!”

“We didn’t have the budget to retrofit the fire door on the room with a secondary lock. We were way over budget with the system the way it was.”

“Besides,” Mort added, “if they shut off the power from the electrical room, that means they picked the lock on it, so they could’ve picked that one as well.”

“Is that how they killed the power?” Douglas asked.

“We won’t know until the police run the prints they collected, but that’d be my guess. All I know for sure is that there weren’t any clear signs of forced entry.”

“Do we at least know what was on that CD they had?”

“No idea,” Mort replied. “The police took it as evidence. They’re going to run it through their forensics lab to find out.”

“And how long will that take?”

Mort shrugged.

Douglas groaned, resting his head in his hands, elbows on the desk in front of him.

“That bad?” Jessica asked.

“As I said in that report,” Douglas replied, “the system architecture the developers came up with relied on two things for security: minimizing connections to networks, and maintaining physical security. Now we’ve lost physical security and had someone load God knows what onto the system, since they couldn’t even be bothered to disable autorun on those machines — which, I might add, was another one of the recommendations I made in that. Without knowing what it was they had on that disc, there is literally no way to find out what they might have planted on it. The system is far too big and complex to analyze for malware.”

“On the bright side,” Mort said, “their little attempt to burn the place down suggests they weren’t very sophisticated. I doubt they’d even know how to put any kind of real rootkit on there to hide their tracks.”

“You don’t have to be too sophisticated to download one off the Internet,” Douglas said.

“Besides, I doubt their plan was to steal our data or plant backdoors or anything.”

“How can you be sure?”

“They tried to burn it down, right? They were out to destroy it, not subvert it. They probably just wanted to wipe the machines, tried a few boxes, and when that didn’t work, tried to go for physical destruction.”

“Which didn’t work, thanks to the suppression system,” Jessica added. “The entire system operated through the whole incident without anything worse than a little superficial smoke damage and some ruined manuals.”

“I certainly hope you’re right,” Douglas said.

“OK, so bottom-line this for me. What do we do now? Mort?”

Mort shrugged. “Realistically? There’s not much we can do. Simulacrum’s still running fine as far as anyone can tell.”

Jessica nodded. “Douglas?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

“I figured as much.”

“The only way to be sure the system’s OK is to wipe the machines and do a full reinstall of the system from backup, before the attack. As valuable as the system is, I don’t think we can afford to keep running it when its security has been compromised.”

“When we suspect its security might have been compromised,” Mort corrected.

“And how difficult will that be?” Jessica asked.

“With that many machines?” Douglas replied. “Probably two weeks, minimum.”

“Take the system down for two weeks?” Jessica said. “There’s no way Corporate would approve that unless we know for a fact it’s necessary.”

“There’s no way to know for a fact that an ordinary laptop has been rooted, let alone a massive cluster like that. We’re running at risk, and if we have been compromised, there’s no way to know when it’ll come back to bite us.”

“Look,” Jessica said, “I’ll bring it up with Corporate, but you know as well as I do it’s a non-starter with them. But I might be able to use it to talk them down to something more reasonable. Please tell me you have something else I can go to them with.”

Douglas thought. “At the very least, can they hire some actual guards to cover the night shift, since now we know people are going to try to break in?”

“OK, that’s good,” Jessica said, tapping something in to her PDA. “What else?”

“Wire the magnetic locks in the building to have backup power,” Mort suggested. “It doesn’t even have to be much, as long as someone’s around to check in on any power failures promptly. You’re welcome.”

Jessica nodded. “Those I think are doable. In the meantime, do what you can to clean up the machines without causing any downtime.”

“And when I finish that, maybe I can help Sisyphus with that rock of his,” Douglas said.

“Now that that’s out of the way, I have a conference call I need to set up,” Jessica said as she left the office. Mort stood up to follow her out.

“Oh, Mort,” Douglas said.

“Yes?”

“Good job last night. We might not have even noticed anything if you weren’t holding down the fort.”

Chapter word count: 1,836 (+169)
Total word count: 26,425 / 50,000 (52.85%)

Music played in the background as a purple lowercase h approached the bright white @ symbol. Mort took his hands off the keyboard and considered his options, secure only in the knowledge that the mind flayer couldn’t do anything until he decided what his elf should do next. He had only encountered mind flayers once before, and it hadn’t gone very well. Then, he had unwisely tried to engage one in melee combat without so much as a greased helmet to protect his intelligence score. “The mind flayer’s tentacles suck you! Your brain is eaten!” Dying from it was bad enough, but the game twisted the knife by listing the cause of death as “brainlessness” on the high scores list.

Mort leaned back in his chair as he weighed ranged combat versus tactical retreat, as the radio stream played on through the speakers. There were a few advantages in taking the night watch shift. First, there usually wasn’t much going on to worry about. Sure, there was a steady stream of attacks slamming against the perimeter defenses of the network, but rarely did anything happen that required manual intervention. Really, most nights all Mort had to do was keep an eye on the firewall logs for anything really suspicious, and once in a while help someone who managed to lock themselves out of their office without anyone else around at this hour to let them back in. The quiet gave Mort plenty of time to spend trying to find the Amulet of Yendor.

Relatively quiet, of course. One advantage of working security was knowing the limitations of the firewalls, after all. Mort had learned quickly that the network’s blocking of streaming music sites was implemented by configuring the DNS servers to refuse to resolve the domain names for those websites. All Mort had to do was look up the station’s IP address manually before coming in to work, plug that in to the browser, and he was good to go. Sure, technically he was violating policy, but there was no harm done. After all, the whole reason for prohibiting streaming media was to conserve network bandwidth, and during the graveyard shift there was plenty of spare bandwidth to go around to the dozen or so people actually in the building.

A klaxon sound effect blared over the music, jolting Mort upright. The key to carefully slacking off during your shift was making sure you’d be alerted when something warranted your attention. He minimized his game and checked the monitoring software. It showed a floor plan of the building, with one hallway flashing red. Power had been lost to corridor C-7. And only C-7; the rest of the hallways, along with the various rooms connected to them, remained green. A few seconds letter, C-7 switched back from flashing red to solid green; power had been restored.

Odd. If something had happened to the building’s power supply, a lot more than a single corridor would have gone dead. It could be a piece of equipment starting to fail. A handful of additional alerts appeared on the screen; now that they had regained power, the electronic locks on the doors in that corridor were reporting the power disruption themselves.

A quick check of the procedures manual told Mort he needed to check the status of the rooms whose locks had lost power, from most to least valuable. The Simulacrum server room was first on the list for C-7, so Mort called up a real-time feed from the security camera there. Right away he could see that the lights were on in the room. Odd; it was unusual for anyone to need to be in that room even during business hours. Cross-checking the audit logs from the door lock, he saw that no one had even badged in over the last 24 hours. Mort panned the camera to see the rest of the room and stopped when he saw two janitors standing next to an open server rack.

The Amulet was going to have to wait.

Mort picked up the phone and dialed a number on the piece of paper taped on the wall. When the other end picked up, he said, “Hi, this is Mort Duon, Medimetics Security. I’m calling to report a breaking and entering in progress…”

—

Alex paced back and forth as Burt remained hunched over the rack’s console. They had been here far too long already. This was supposed to have been a quick operation, a few minutes at most, in and out before anyone even realized what was going on. Alex checked his watch. Fifteen minutes had gone by since they had broken into the server room.

“Well?” Alex asked anxiously.

“I have no idea why this isn’t working,” Burt said, his voice full of frustration. “I’m going to try another console.”

“Again? This is the third one you’ve tried.”

“Do you have any better ideas?”

Alex knew they couldn’t stop now; they had come too far to turn back now. Alex handed Burt the cabinet key and started pacing again, struggling to think of a backup plan. He put his hands behind his neck and craned his head back.

Alex saw a security camera mounted near the top of the wall, pointed at them. He swore.

Alex ran towards the door. He thought he might have heard sirens outside, but dismissed the idea. There was too much background noise to hear anything on the other side of the door. But surely they had been spotted by now, and it was only a matter of time until the cops arrived. If they left now they might be able to escape, but now for sure they’d never get a second chance. If they were going down, they were going to take the Simulacrum with them.

“Quit messing with that thing and help me barricade the door,” Alex shouted. He looked around. Server racks were plentiful and heavy, but it would take too long to disconnect and disentangle them from the rest of the equipment to be able to move them. They needed something else.

“There’s a table here,” Burt shouted. Alex ran over to see it. It was metal and didn’t look particularly heavy, but it was a start. The two of them pushed it across the floor in front of the door, doing their best to angle it between the door and the nearest server rack. It wouldn’t hold the police off for long once they started forcing their way in.

“Plan B,” Alex declared.

“What’s Plan B?”

“If all else fails, kill it with fire. You still smoke, right?”

“Yeah?”

“So you’ve got a lighter, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now we just need kindling. Look for something in here that’ll burn.”

Alex and Burt fanned out, looking for paper or wood or something that would take a flame. Once they could get a fire started, it could destroy the equipment far more effectively than they could if they tried doing it by hand, especially since they hadn’t thought to bring hammers or anything like that. If only Burt had been able to log into the machines, he could use the CD to spread the virus on it to the entire network and bring everything down all at once. Fire was going to have to be the next best thing.

Alex found a pair of cabinets. They were too heavy to move in front of the door without unloading them first, but fortunately they were unlocked. And even more fortunately, full of stacks of printed manuals.

“Jackpot!”

Alex scooped up as many manuals as his arms could hold and stumbled back towards the center of the cluster of racks on that side of the room, dropping them into a heap on the floor. Once Burt saw what Alex was doing, he followed suit, and after a couple trips the cabinets were mostly empty.

“OK, that’ll have to be good enough,” Alex said. “Light it up.”

Burt kneeled down, flicked open his lighter, and put the flame to the pages. Soon, the manual began to burn, and Burt moved the lighter to another part of the heap.

“Once that gets started,” Alex continued, crystallizing the plan in his mind as he spoke, “we go over to the door and make sure no one gets in until the fire really gets going. Once we can’t stand it in here any longer, we get out of here. By then, between the fire, the heat, and the smoke will do what your virus couldn’t.”

“It wasn’t my virus,” Burt protested as smoke began to rise from the heap.

“Whatever. Let’s do this.”

Alex ran back to the door and pressed his weight against the table as best he could. Burt soon rounded the corner and did likewise. Outside, Alex was sure he heard voices. It would only be a few seconds before they tried to get in. They had to be kept out until it was too late to put out the fire.

Alex and Burt jumped as a excruciatingly high-pitched screech blared throughout the room and red lights flashed. They instinctively let go of the table to cover their ears.

“What’s that?” Burt screamed.

“Security alarm?” Alex shouted.

“But why didn’t it go off until–”

—

As the police officer lifted the bullhorn to his mouth, an alarm sounded in the hallway outside the door to the Simulacrum server room. The two other policemen looked around to see the cause, each one keeping one hand on his holstered sidearm.

Mort, standing behind them, didn’t need to look around. He knew exactly what the alarm meant.

“Everybody get away from the door!” he shouted.

“They won’t hear you–” the officer in charge said.

“Not them! You!”

“Listen, I’m–”

“Now!” Mort screamed as he broke into a dead run down the hall. He heard the police behind him do likewise a few seconds later. Mort stopped once he was sure he was a safe distance away, bending over and gasping for breath as his heart raced.

“What is all this about?” the officer demanded of him once he caught up with Mort.

“Fire alarm. Server room. Automatic.”

“So?”

“Suppression system. Inert gas. Forces all the. Oxygen out. Before fire. Can spread. Alarm means. ‘Get out.’”

“So anyone still in there…”

Mort nodded. “Is dead.”

Chapter word count: 1,720 (+53)
Total word count: 24,589 / 50,000 (49.178%)

The black van rolled into the Medimetics parking lot. Most of the building’s windows were dark, and there were only a few cars scattered throughout the lot. The van pulled into a handicap parking space near the front door and switched its lights off. The doors opened, and three men dressed in blue janitorial uniforms climbed out.

Alex turned wordlessly to the two other men. They nodded, and Alex approached the front door. Through the glass doors, he saw the lobby, illuminated only by a single overhead light. The reception desk sat in front of the far wall, unoccupied. A row of chairs lined the other two walls, also empty. No witnesses.

Alex pulled the key card out of a pocket and swiped it through the reader mounted alongside the doors. The lock clicked, and Alex pulled the door open and entered, followed by Burt and Charley. As Charley let the door gently swing closed, it clicked again as the lock reengaged.

Silently, the three turned and walked, single file, down one of the hallways branching off from the lobby. They turned right, then left, until reaching the supply closet. The door was locked, as expected, but the key in Alex’s other pocket took care of that.

Inside, they found exactly the supplies they expected: a pair of mops and large wheel buckets, and a stack of short yellow sandwhich-board signs with “CLOSED FOR CLEANING” in big black letters. Burt fished out a rough hand-drawn map of the building’s floor plan, while Charlie began filling the buckets with water from the faucet. With his finger, Burt pointed to the room they were in, then slid his finger along a series of hallways until it reached a room circled several times in red ink at the corner of the building. He folded the paper back in his pocket.

Alex grabbed the stack of signs, with Burt and Charlie each took hold of one of the mops, using them as handles for moving the half-full buckets they sat in. Alex opened the door, and the three preceeded down the hall along the agreed upon path.

As they rounded a corner, Alex’s heart jumped as he saw someone walking towards them. Alex quickly caught himself and remembered what they had talked about during planning. Walk confidently, like you know what you’re doing and where you’re going. Don’t make eye contact with anyone. Don’t draw attention to yourselves. Alex followed those rules as best he could, keeping his eyes focused on the corridor in front of him and silently hoping the two behind him weren’t going to blow their cover. He relaxed as the man nodded his head slightly as he passed but otherwise said nothing.

For the first time, Alex felt confident that this was going to work.

The rest of the walk proved uneventful, and soon they were at their next destination. Alex dropped two of the signs in the hallway and handed the rest of the stack to Burt, who took them and his mop and bucket around the corner to do likewise. Charlie left his mop and bucket next to the signs Alex had placed and approached the door. None of them needed to consult the map to verify which was the right one; there was only one with a yellow triangle with a black lightning bolt on it. They didn’t have a key for this one, so it was now up to Charlie.

Alex picked up the mop and began slowly wiping it back and forth across the floor. Around the corner, the sound of sloshing water told him that Burt was doing the same. Without any soap or cleaner, all the mop was accomplishing was pushing any dirt or grime around, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that as long as he and Burt kept their backs to the corner and looked like they were working, anyone who happend to come across them might not notice Charlie kneeling in front of the door, lock picks in hand.

As seconds gave way to minutes, Alex confidence began to waver. Was it supposed to take this long? They had each had their turn with the set during training, and Charlie had proved to be the best of the three at it, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was good enough. This was the riskiest part of the plan, the one part where they were all fully exposed, with little any of them could due to avoid notice other than to provide a distraction and hope that anyone who came along would turn around and look for a different path without looking too closely at what was happening. The lights in some of the windows, the couple cars in the parking lot, and most of all the person they had seen earlier all proved that there were still people here, even in the middle of the night. Not many, but all it took was one.

Charlie coughed three times. Alex sighed in relief. The signal.

Alex looked behind him just long enough to see Charlie enter the electrical room. Smooth sailing from here. Alex returned the mop to its bucket, and Burt soon rounded the corner, his equipment in tow. Alex picked the two signs up and, with Burt, carried everything back towards the supply closet. Charlie would stay behind, waiting for them to give their signal.

This time, they passed no one in the hall. The two of them quickly dumped the buckets out into the wash basin’s drain and returned the equipment they had borrowed to its original place. The hard part was over, so as long as they didn’t leave behind any obvious clues, they were in the clear.

After a quick check of the map, they set of down the hall again. The route that took them back through the lobby was the shortest, so they went that way. Even though there was a slightly higher chance of them being seen there, the experience earlier showed that no one they might encounter would probably be able to recognize them as not actually being janitors. Once they saw the uniforms, they didn’t bother looking at the face or for a badge. They were janitors, ignorable, invisible.

The route back through the lobby also had the advantage of matching the one they had seen in the video they had studied for hours on end. Even without consulting the map, Alex could easily follow the correct path to the door of the server room, despite never having set foot in the building before tonight.

Once they had arrived, Alex quickly surveyed the situation. A red light shone just above the keypad and card reader next to the door. Alex knew not to bother trying the card in his pocket; not only did he not have a code to punch in, but he was sure its owner wasn’t authorized to entire anyway. Burt tapped Alex on the shoulder and pointed down the hallway. Alex heard footsteps echoing from that direction, increasing in volume with each step.

Alex and Burt quickly took a few steps in the opposite direction, so as to be a little distance away from the door before the person approaching saw them. Burt leaned his arm against the wall, and Alex slouched against it in turn. Stay calm, act casual. In low voices, they jumped into the middle of a conversation about next Sunday’s football game. Just a couple janitors slacking off on their shift.

As they talked, the footsteps drew louder and sharper as someone approached from behind Alex. The woman passed them, not appearing to give any indication of taking notice of them. Good. Alex and Burt continued the ruse as the woman continued down the hall and rounded a corner. They stopped talking once she was gone but stayed in that position, listening and watching for anyone else.

Alex chided himself for being a bit too optimistic earlier. There were two times in this plan where they were at risk of being discovered, and this was the second. It was essential that they were alone before executing the next step. Alex hoped Charlie would stay patient and wait for the signal, however long it took.

Alex and Burt waited for a few minutes. They saw and heard no signs of anyone else in the area. They returned to the door to the server room. It was now or never. Alex took his phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. Holding it in his left hand, he used his thumb to type in a simple message: “OK”. He hit Send, returned the phone to his pocket, and waited.

The hallways had been dim up until now, with only every third light or so turned on, but it was briefly plunged into near-total darkness, illuminated only by light from the far end of the corridor or spilling out from intersections. After a second or two the emergency lights came on, effectively returning the hallway to its previous level of illumination.

But more importantly, the red light on the keypad was off.

Seconds ticked in his head as Alex turned the handle and pushed on the door. It was a little heavier than he expected, but it opened without any resistance. He and Burt quickly entered and shut the door behind him. Inside, they were greeted by hot air and a loud hum of hundreds of computers chugging away in unison. They seemed unaffected by the power outage, confirming that they were on a separate power supply than the one Charlie had switched off for them to deactivate the magnetic lock.

Alex’s count reached ten. Not that Alex had any way to tell from inside the server room, but according to the plan, Charlie would restore power to the corridor and exit the building, waiting for them in the van, his role complete.

But there was no sense in thinking about that now. Alex followed the path he remembered from the video, navigating the maze of server racks until he found the one that housed the administrative console. He tried the rack’s handle and found it locked. Alex pulled a small key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. Keys for these were easy enough to come by, the racks being mass produced by a manufacturer who, as a little Internet research found, didn’t bother making multiple keys for their equipment. The protective door swung open, and he stepped back to let Burt play his role.

Burt took a CD from his pocket and inserted it into the drive of the topmost computer in the rack. He then pulled out the tray above it and swung the monitor up into position. It lit up and displayed a login prompt. Alex watched as Burt typed in a user name and password.

Burt frowned.

Burt tried again, with the same result. Now Alex frowned.

“Something wrong?” Alex asked, as quietly as he could over the background roar.

“I don’t get it,” Burt said.

“Get what?”

“The CD was supposed to automatically set up an admin-level account for us as soon as I put it in. It did during the dry-run.”

“So what do we do now?”

Burt shook his head. “Maybe it just takes a little longer on this system to work.”

“How much longer?” Alex said, worried he wasn’t going to like the answer.

Burt shrugged.

Alex didn’t.

Chapter word count: 1,905 (+238)
Total word count: 22,869 / 50,000 (45.738%)