A Future We'd Like To See 1.36 - Dangerous Toys By Twoflower (Copyright 1994) "Yeah d00dz i got HAKK 4.0 here, dc request if ya wanted," the hacker spoke via a mishmashed speech filter program. It certainly was what I was expecting... a group of college kids with nothing better to do hanging around VOSNet, talking about how many systems they're cracked... what tools they made... who they had sex with... and so forth. A very annoying bunch, they were. First of all, unlike other VRC chat channels, #HAKKRZ had EVERYBODY there set as an administrator. I was kicked out of the channel about six times for being 'lame'. Whenever I opened my mouth to ask about the job, I'd get kicked out. Why was I bothering? I could always let it go. Hell, I didn't like VOSNet anyway. Seriously, though, this was the best hacking had to offer? A group of punks sitting around a VRC channel bragging and kicking people? If I was going to keep things safe, I'd have to do better than this. "Look," I said, without the D00dSpEK filter the hackers seemed to enjoy using, "Is there another place I can look fo--" *You have been kicked out of channel #HAKKRZ by WhaK (you suck),* a synth voice said, as my vision warped back to VRC's #main channel. I was about to give up, jack out, and forget I ever heard of VOSNet when I got an incoming message. *MSG FROM GOSUB : What is it you keep trying to say before getting kicked out?* I was impressed by the lack of english-chopping filters in the page, but kept any enthusiasm to myself. I switched to the private channel and messaged back, *MSG FROM RANDOM : Hi there, Gosub... I'm looking for someone to hack in somewhere. They've got to be good.* *If it's your standard 'I wanna change my grades' or 'Gimmie money' hack, then just say so in the channel and at least six of these toadies will leap over the offer,* he messaged back. *It's bigger than that. Really big.* *How much does it pay?* *Umm... nothing.* *Bloody unlikely you'll find anybody here that will help you, then,* Gosub paged back. *Rats. Alright, never mind... forget you ever saw me.* *Now hold on there. I said nobody HERE would help you, not that you couldn't get help. How tough is this site you want cracked open? Maybe I can line up someone who wants to try out new routines or wants a challenge.* This guy seemed informed... why wasn't HE talking up in that blasted channel? *It's pretty tough, I think. I'm not a hacker, I can't judge these things.* *Hmmm. Alright. Here, I'm direct-connecting you a program...* he paged, as a small happy face sphere appeared in front of me. *Twist that and you'll connect to #hackers.* *I was already there,* I replied. *No, you were in #HAKKRZ. There's a difference. Just twist it, would you?* I gave a virtual shrug, and twisted it. The standard VRC transition animation played, and I was in a new channel. These guys looked... different. Normal. Instead of the black leather and metal studs and large phallus ObjIcons the other hackers were sporting, these people were quite in fashion. One was even wearing a suit. "The language is good," one was discussing as I switched in, "But on the whole, performance isn't very good. The thing can't even cut level six ice. I wouldn't rate it real high." "That's because you don't have it configured right," an old- looking guy with a familiar voice replied. Yeah, that was the guy who paged me. He looked kind of unfunny, just an ordinary human image with a brown sweater and khaki trousers. "If you don't go into it with HTools or something and flip the switches for the options, it's useless. Either that or you have to pay credits to register it, and lord knows that'd be a sin." "Who's he?" someone asked, pointing at me. "Potential client. Goes by Random. Say Hi, Random." "Hi," I said, waving. "Whaddya need, Random?" the suited man asked. Wow, a polite hacker. "Well... I found this site, and some special data in it. I need that data destroyed. It's very, very important that I can't tell you anything else." "That's it? Data removal?" the suit scoffed. "Gosub, beam this twink back to the kiddie channel." "Hold on, he said it was a tough site. What's the rate, kid?" "Rate?" "Ice rating. How deep are the defenses around it?" "Umm... well, I found a public domain ice meter stick, and checked it out..." "What is it? A six or seven or something easy?" "It said the site was a thirty seven, I think. Maybe thirty six." Nobody said anything. I was wondering if I had breached some kind of netiquette... it's insanely hard to predict those things. "Thirty seven? What IS this data?!" the suit laughed. "I can't tell you. It's really, really, really, really bad stuff. Can't say it because I think I'm bugged." "Get him out of here!" the suit screamed, jumping for the administration console. "I don't want no cops busting into THIS place!" "NO! No. Let me explain... Look, I know at least enough about THAT. When I found out what this site was, I think it tagged me to make sure I didn't come back. It's a basic keyword- trigger thing, so if I say what it is, it'll warn everybody a the site and I'll die. Painfully." "Pal, how do you know if they tagged you if you don't even know a thing about how VOSNet defenses work?" Gosub asked. He seemed calm, despite the minor paranoia now in the air. I shouldn't have blundered like that. "Listen, I'm currently majoring in computers. Speech synthesis and recognition... I know when a stimulus/response program is tailing me, okay? Hacking may be foreign to me, but give me a LITTLE credit on brainpower." "What it boils down to," Gosub said to his friends, "Is we have a deep, DEEP site that needs surfacing." "How much do we get for the job?" a hacker in the back asked. "Well... I have the one hundred and seven credits I was going to use for a ski trip--" The channel broke out into horrible sensitized laughter. One or two of them were even rolling around on the floor spitting up drool. Gosub didn't seem amused, however. "One oh seven? Alright. Give me your credit number and I'll give it a shot." "Oh come ON, Gosub," the suit was chortling. "Give the kid a pat on the back and get him out of here. We've got better--" Gosub grabbed the other man by the front of his sport jacket. He shut up REAL fast. "If I say we've got a client, WE HAVE A CLIENT. You want to get kicked permanently and go spend the rest of eternity with the kiddies in the channel we made to distract the cops?!" "Err... no, Gosub. You know what's best," he stated, under duress. Or more likely under the grip of someone he both feared and admired... "Glad to hear it. Okay, kid, first things' first. Let's get that bug off of you so we can hear what this thing is." Gosub pulled out a standard virtual toolbox, and took out a variety of silly-looking ObjIcons. He made a few passes with them at me, and frowned as he saw the results. "I'd better introduce myself," the suit said, shaking my hand, careful to avoid Gosub's toys and trinkets. "Harden. I'm a lawyer for artificial intelligences and part time VOSNet expert." "AIs? I thought they were extinct..." "No, not really. Some went real, somehow leaving the net. Others are still hanging around... I negotiate to keep them safe, or in worst case scenarios, bust in there toolbox first and get them out." "Not much money in it, I'd think." "You'd be surprised how much cash they manage to squirrel away. One time--" "He's tagged, alright," Gosub concluded, packing the box. "I can't get it off. This tag is stuck on him with the equivalent of sotter, glue, adhesive tape, and fifty two iron chains. Can you tell us what you can without triggering it, Random?" "Not really," I said. "Alright, I'll just call you up. Got a phone number?" "Hey," the younger hacker near the back yelled, "I thought we worked net-only!" "Call it a rare occasion, Max," Gosub said. "It tagged my phone too," I informed him. "Checked that out after I scanned myself. Nasty program, it's designed to hear anything my phone hears, picked up or not." "Someone must have something seriously nasty to hide to do that to you," Harden whistled. "Phreeow." "Alright. Where do you live?" "Me? Faircom system. T'ykk University." "You're a Ytt?" "No, I just go to school there. Look--" "Alright, Random, I'm wiring four hundred credits your way-" "That had better not be from the company fund, Gosub," Max warned. "You know I need that to get us to CF89." "It's from my holdings, Max. Don't panic. Anyway, take those four hundred and buy a ticket to C'atel. Use the remaining cash to bribe your teachers into letting you go... Go to this address..." * The whole trip took about four days. Four long days travelling by commercial shuttle. I HATED space travel. Why was I doing this? I hadn't even gotten into VOSNet until this summer, when my professors demanded I start turning in VOS compatible programs. I don't even like virtual reality... it's just as disorienting as space travel... but it was either my grades going down the can or seasickness. So I'm browsing around the Information Superhighway, take a wrong turn, and find this thing. Before I can do anything about it, ice slams up and I have to run. Now I'm bugged and lord knows who or WHAT is probably following me... It hasn't been a good week. I can't wait under they burn that thing and get this whole mess over with. * "Knock knock!" said the door. It opened shortly after. "You Random?" Gosub asked. "Are you Gosub?" "Can't you tell?" he asked, letting me in. "Well, yeah, but usually it's not that way..." "What way?" "I haven't met anybody that doesn't change their VOSNet appearance to something else... but you're the same." "Old schoolers. Go figure." "Come again?" I asked, confused. Gosub let out a long sigh, ragged breath letting on how much older than he looked. He brushed some magazines off a chair, and slumped down in it. "Random, you don't know much about the net. Be happy about that. It's become a hellish little place since first showing up a few years back. Used to be only a few business and schools on the net, people gettin' shit DONE... now everybody and their DOG is on the Net. You get a lot of lamers." "What IS a lamer, anyway?" "There are three kinds of people on the net. Old farts like me that know what they're doing, that get things done. Then you have the two classes of new users. Newbies are people who don't know what they're doing, and know that. They ask for help. They're polite. Lamers are people who don't know what they're doing, and ACT like they're big tough bad guys. They boast and talk big and do very, very little. And they're outnumbering the rest of us." "Which group do I rank in?" "You're a newbie, as far as I can tell. You don't even pretend you know what you're doing. You actually ask for help. This is a good thing. Me, I'm new school. New tech, something I've cooked up. I was a lamer once, tagging along after this immature little jerk of a hacker named Zipcode..." "I take it you didn't like him?" "Huh? Hell no, he was one of the weirdest, coolest guys I ever knew. He was just an immature little jerk. There is a difference, you know. Anyway, I was old school once... running around the net, talking big... I saw stuff." "Stuff?" "Nasty stuff. Things nobody wants to see. Demons and the like... I got out, gave it up, went back to school and blamed it all on the few drugs I was taking at the time." Gosub got up, and brushed some wires off his huge work desk, looking for something. "I founded new school, but I'm keeping it a private institution for now. I don't want my secrets hitting the streets until I've made enough to retire on them. You're gonna keep my technological wonder to yourself, right? We can have you killed, you know." "You can?" I gulped. Yeah, should have used my deodorant today. "Well, no. But the bluff itself is nasty enough to keep potential trouble away. Alright, Random, you wanted the best, the hottest, nastiest technology known to man... here it is." Gosub took an odd plastic cartridge off the table, affixing some leads to it. He stuck it on a plastic box of the same color, and hooked a makeshift keyboard into it. "Brace yourself," he warned. He turned it on. A nearby screen flashed the logo for Super Benito Brothers. "What's this thing?" I asked. Two dimensional holo? And why was the coloring so bad? "This, my friend, is a Mega Nintekgi," Gosub said, tapping in some keyboard commands. "In the late twentieth century, these things sold for a hundred dollars each, and could play games with state-of-the-art sixteen bit power. They could run two hundred colors at once and had an optional CD-ROM attachment." "What, it's an antique children's game console?" I asked, examining the dusty plastic box. "This is the hottest thing in hacking?" "Alright, I'll help you put the logic together. Why is hacking so hard?" "Umm... because you need to cut through defense programs." "Right. And how do they defend the system?" "They keep you out?" "Yeah, but what does the really NASTY stuff do?" I tried to remember all this from the two books I had read about hackers. It was all the university library had on the subject, and was very vague to keep you from putting the information to use. "It... sends a negative feedback signal over the line, causing brain damage and occasionally death." "Alright. Now. Everybody connects to the net over a simple electrode headband, or, if they've got the money, a simple wrist- trode and wireless. This provides direct neural stimulation... sight, sound, taste, smell, the works. And the defenses will see a person hacking in, and mix the mind a little." "So what does this have to do with old video games?" "I'm getting to that. AIs can't be affected by defense programs. Why? They're not real, they're just programs. Some ice is built to handle AIs... after recognizing a non-human target, they switch code to something that can screw with an AI's process. Not all ice can do that... only stuff ranked at forty or higher, usually. It's very hard to code in. So what happens if a program attacks a site again?" "Umm... Nothing." "Good. Now, if you don't access the net through a neural link, how can you access it?" "I don't know." Gosub paused, and considered this. He went back to hooking up the toy, and continued. "Alright, I'll put it bluntly. With ancient toys that are rigged with VOS program links, I can emulate a login with a keyboard and glove." "A glove? Fashion comes into this?" "Haven't you studied your history? Back then, people used gloves and helmets and vacuum-suction underwear and toys like that. So, I'm logged into the net, but I'm just controlling a human-like probe program, seeing what it sees on the TV, controlling what it does with the glove... ice sees me, tries the default mind scrambler..." "And doesn't find a mind attached!" "Give the boy a prize!" Gosub applauded, finishing his connections. "By the time the ice knows what's going on, my 'toy' has burned it to the virtual ground. It's not fast, it's not precise, but it's just as deadly as any online hacker." "How... HOW did you come up with this?" "Oh... did it in my spare time. I got out of the hacking scene for awhile, went back to school to add an engineering degree to my physics one. I got the idea one night when I was in an antique shop. That's not the funny bit, though." "I'll bite. What's the funny bit?" "You can use just about anything to hack with," he said, turning off the box. "I tried first with some old neurostim for the optics only, and an early 21st century bodysuit. The ice recognized it somewhat fast, though, and melted the gear down. It works in a ratio... the lower the tech, the slower the response, but the harder to use. I ran a few experiments, and found that the Nintekji is the best balance of the three. With the right interface, I could hack into the net on a crummy five- credit pocket calculator." "Yeah, but how good would a calculator be at hacking?" "Lousy. I tried," he smirked. "But it is possible." Gosub took a nearby cup of coffee off the worktable, and sat back in his chair. "Now that I've told you my twists of the trade," he said, inbetween sips, "Time for you to tell me what this big bad evil site really is." "Could the bug have followed me?" I asked him. "No way. The bug was virtual. It's like my toys over there... once you're not directly on the net, they can't touch you." "Alright... I wandered into this place by accident one day in the library. It was a one in a million chance that I walked in while their ice programs were resetting... and there it was. On a crystal pedestal, a program. I only managed to read about ten lines." "That's it? You know what it does?" "I didn't then. A bunch of warning sensors went off, and I jacked out instantly. I told a friend about it, and quoted a few lines of the code. It's got some weird instructions in it... stuff he's never recognized. And stuff like 'Shutdown', 'Delete', 'Unhook'... and plenty of words like 'SwapServer' and 'Reconnect'. Looped, over and over again." Gosub pondered this, sipping his coffee. "So it's a bomb. I've seen those before, you just drop one on a site, and the code forces the server to shut down." "Yeah, but this bomb shuts you down, deletes everything you have, then reconnects itself to another site and repeats. And it clones off if you have more than one connection." Gosub stopped in mid sip. "A recursive virus that wipes everything in its path..." "One that can get into any system, no matter how well guarded, and kill it. Just looks like a harmless little program." "Something that shuts down and destroys all of VOSNet," Gosub realized. "Now you know why we have to kill it," I said. * The day of the run was the next day. Gosub had me rest up, and memorize everything I remembered about the site. I crashed on his couch. I woke up in a different room. Well, not different. It just LOOKED different. There weren't any piles of magazines, no dirty socks, no jumbled up tangle of wires. Gosub must have cleaned, and I mean *CLEANED*, when I was out of the waking world. "Hey there, pal," Harden said. He looked the same in reality as virtual reality, too, although he didn't have the suit on at the time. "Hear we get to save the virtual world today. Sounds like fun. You ready?" "Got any cornflakes?" I asked, rubbing that white eye gunk out of my lids. "Not really," Max said. "Here, have a candy bar." "Jeez, Max, you're such a little sugar demon, aren't you?" Harden laughed. "Keeps me on the edge," Max said. I could tell he was shaking, calories scraping the sky. There was a slight blur around his edges. "Nintekjis for sale," Gosub sang, wandering into the room with a cobweb-ridden wooden box. "Let's try not to melt this one down on a simple training run this time, okay Max?" Max nodded a little to fast for me to see, and pushed the smoking remains of his old terminal out of the way. The room was cleaned and tidy, except for the mass of cables in the center which linked the three aging hackers to a trio of old television sets. Each had a view of the matrix, normally 3-D gridlines of brilliant blue being reduced to cheap 2-D vector lines. "Alright. Gentlemen, start your engines," Gosub announced, pulling on his plastic and rubber glove. "I've fed the address into your systems, and you should be there now. Random, I need you on neural link." "Huh?" "Well, we can't see real well out of these things. I've got a much better grade of 3-D headset here, but only one." "Why don't YOU use it?" "Messes up my hair. Don't worry, it's still obsolete and won't put your brain through the blender. It's just like hat, except it's a hat with LCD screens." Gosub held the white helmet out to me. I shrugged, and put it on. The weight was pretty bad, pressing me down in my chair, but VOSNet was back in true 3-D glory... a little out of focus, but much better than the televisions. "Hey there," Gosub waved from inside the net, his Nintekji showing up as a glowing sphere, common objicon for a program. "Okay, you lead the way. By the way, know who this is that has the net.bomb?" "No idea... it's the red pyramid on the right, though." "Red's not a natural color for a site," Max observed. "Well, black ice does have SOME red shading... but not this much," Harden commented, his sphere floating a bit closer. "If there is thirty-seven ice out there, this is it..." "Enough chatter. Okay, you've all got the sketches Random gave me of the building layout taped to the bottom of your TVs. Let's go." The spheres floated closer to the pyramid. "Hey! Wait. How do I follow you?" "Huh?" "Well, I've just got visual input, no way to move around..." "Max, see Random over there? The green dot? Go over there and hook him to you." Max's sphere floated closer. "Gotit," he blurted. "Okay. Here we go. Take it nice and slow, we want to keep this thing off our back for as long as possible..." The spheres floated closer, contacting the red ice... and we were in. "Slow down on the cutting over there, Max, we don't wanna be noticed." "Sorryboutthat," Max said, sugar and adrenaline mixing in a bizarre way. "If Max blows his toy again I'll handle his part of the plan," Harden said. "Hey!" "Well, you ARE a bit jumpy, little buddy..." "Enough chatter, guys. We triggered two alarms... don't worry, I cut them, but there are others. Where to, Random?" "Alright... I made a left turn here." "Okay everybody, bank left." It continued on like this for fifteen minutes. I gave directions, and we floated along, very slowly. Disabling an alarm there, reconfiguring the Nintekjis every now and then to compensate for the cheap connections. I remembered the book mentioning the speed of hacking runs, how they were in and out in sometimes seconds... this was downright boring. "Stay back, Max, Gosub's got the tripwire cutters." "Comeon," he laughed, a high pitched giggle. "There's NOTHING inhere--" The television speakers blared out a poorly sampled klaxon noise. "Damn," Max cursed. "They know my program's not supposed to be there... I--" There was a FIZZLE noise and the smell of burning plastic. I lifted the helmet off for a moment to see what had happened. Max was staring, open mouthed, at the melted grey slab that was his Nintekji. His television was cheerily pumping out black and white noise. "Whoops," he said. I quickly pushed the hat back down, trying to see what he hit. "More alarms on the way..." Harden said, swerving around some red-dotted programs. "Let's make this fast, they're obviously equipped to deal with probes. Where's this program?" "Two more rights," I said. Gosub rehooked me after Max's probe had died, and we zipped along, ignoring the tripwires and sensors, setting off alarms everywhere. Then we saw it. The televisions screamed, unable to cope with the dataflow. All I could see was this weird white blob, some sort of cloud... I heard Harden screaming what the hell is that, what the hell is that... Behind it was the program. "There's the program!" I yelled. "Kill it! Kill it!" Gosub pulled a sideways u-turn, avoiding the white thing, and quickly deleted the net.bomb. The televisions screamed. Not a noise scream, but a real scream, a scream that defied human ears. "JACK OUT!!!!" Gosub yelled over the chaos. The televisions were exploding with color, hate yellow, blood red, death mauve, puke green, as the cloud enveloped the spheres. I threw off the helmet and dived for cover behind a chair. The Nintekjis didn't melt. They exploded. * Bits of plastic were embedded in the walls. In front of both Harden and Gosub were little piles of electronic components, burning brightly with blue-green flame. "God lord..." Max commented, after wandering back in. "I leave to get a soda and mourn the loss of my deck, and you three go nuts and wreck the place. Can't leave you alone for more than five minutes, can I?" "We didn't do it," Gosub scowled. He was genuinely annoyed... the furrowed brow of frustration, the angry look in the eyes. The extra few newtons of force in his step. Considering this is the first emotion I had seen from him other than boredom, I guessed something was up. "They did it... goddamit... They're BACK..." "Gosub, what the hell was that thing?" Harden asked, climbing to his feet. "I mean, never in my net.running days have I seen something as complex, as huge, just as mean and nasty lookin' as THAT--" "I know who was planning to toast the net," Gosub said, rooting around the mess for something. He picked up a blank cartridge. "And why. Max, I need your single-site bomb." "Eh? Why?" "Just give it to me, will you?!" Gosub yelled. "Alright, alright. No need to bite my head off." Gosub opened a drawer, pulling out a real VOSNet deck. He put on the trode band. "Whoa. Gosub, what're you doing?" Harden asked. "I thought you swore off those things." "They're fast, Harden. I need speed. Got the bomb, Max?" "Yeah, here, but why--" "Goddam bastards think they can just charge in here again and do whatever the hell they please--" he mumbled, ripping the disk from Max's hands. "Well, this fleshy ain't gonna stand for it." He stuck it in the drive and jacked in. "I don't like this," Harden hazarded, unsure of himself. "Gosub's never gone this ballistic before--" "Where is the bugger..." Gosub mumbled to himself, words barely audible. Every jacked in person looked a little weird, like they were in a trance or something. Couldn't always tell what they were saying or doing. "...there... gotcha... knew you'd be back... eat this, mother..." "Harden, he's goin' nuts," Max pleaded. "Hit the emergency jack out button already before we lose him." "Look, Gosub's always, and I mean ALWAYS known what he was doing, and even if he is acting all funny I'm sure he's got some good reasons for it--" Then Gosub screamed. And screamed. And screamed. His deck smoked, his eyes rolled back into his head. He fell off his stool. Harden slammed the jack out button, and pulled the trodes off his head. He was laughing. A light chuckle, a bit of a grin, his body limp and his eyes fluttering. "I got 'em." "What? Got what? Jeezus, what did that thing do to your mind?" "Found it out... all of it... we're fine now. Again. Everybody's... everything's fine." His eyes stopped fluttering. He also stopped breathing. "Aw, come on, man, don't die on us..." Max was pleading. Harden shook his head. "He's dead Max, face it," Harden said. "And I wanna know why." Harden reached for the trodes. "Harden, man, don't fool with that, you know what they say about a dead man's deck--" Harden hit the jack button. There wasn't any screaming, no mumbling. Nothing. He jacked back out. "It's gone," Harden said. "That site... all of it, even the weird cloud thing... Gosub wiped the whole sector clean." "Good lord!" Max gaped. "Why'd he do that? What killed him?" "There're a lot of scorch marks on the ground in there..." Harden said. "Lots of scrambled data. Best guess says he was fighting that cloud-thing. He must have known what it was. Knowing that nothing, I mean NOTHING, unsettles Gosub, it must have been something really, really horrible..." Everybody looked back to the collapsed form of the elderly hacker. He was still grinning. "I guess everything's fine," Harden shrugged. * I never did figure out what the cloud thing that killed Gosub was, or why it had a script that would shut down the net. I never did find out what had killed Gosub exactly, or why he had sacrificed himself like that. Maybe nobody'll ever know. I don't care anymore; I did my part, I saved the virtual world from disaster. I don't jack at all anymore. I dropped my courses, took up something less electronic. I do modern art now. My life is stable no evil beings from beyond the net out to destroy me. Everything's fine. Just fine.