Von Neumann’s War

Dick’s master control password was a 196 character string of random high ascii. And he never wrote it down. He may have just been a staff sergeant, but that didn’t interfere with having an eidetic memory.

When he was sure that his master server was safe, he stopped and sat, elbow on table, chin in hand, looking at his screen. He wasn’t sure what he was dealing with but he had certain verities in life. He watched science fiction movies and TV, so he had those to go on. But he disagreed with some of it, based on his personal knowledge and training. One thing that he could simply not believe was that you could cram a full, functional, artificial intelligence into a tiny data packet. No matter how compressed the information, you still were dealing with a limited number of ones and zeros. And all the data packets that got through were small. Ergo, what he was dealing with were fucking viruses, worms and trojans. And he’d been writing those, and fighting those, for twenty years. He couldn’t say that he knew all the tricks, but he did know how to think about the tricks, how they could and could not work. How they could and could not hide.

The problem being that most viruses, trojans and worms were detectable by “signatures,” bits of code that were really variants of earlier versions. But he was pretty sure these weren’t going to use legacy code. And he was the only person who was looking at them: Symantec’s facilities were trashed. Ditto the National Information Security site. Even “heuristic” checking wasn’t going to do it.

He’d have to start from scratch. Okay, he could do that. And he could do more.

“Simone, what the hell are you doing!” Lieutenant Gathers asked as he hurried into the server room. “Everybody else is running around trying to work the problem. What the hell are you doing just sitting there?”

“Working the problem, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, not bothering to look up. “And I gotta start somewhere. So gimme your laptop.”

* * *

Richard frowned at the incoming packet. The packet alleged to be a jpg, but it was clearly corrupted. However, when the “corruption” was analyzed, it turned out to be a short communique from the nice sergeant in Huntsville. The nice, apparently very clever, sergeant.

Richard finished reading the data and then smiled. Any of his former students who had seen that smile would have dropped his class abruptly. And probably left town, taken an assumed name in a foreign country and tried very hard never to be noticed.

Richard had never considered being a soldier. But it appeared that he had just been recruited.

On the other hand, it was a war that he was both predisposed to and capable of fighting.

He flexed his fingers and for just a moment wondered how clever he really was.

He finally decided that he was clever enough. And if not, there was always the brute force approach. There were other clever people left in the world. Presumably a computer could not disconnect itself.

* * *

Dick looked up as a harried Dr. Reynolds ran into the room.

“IBot transmitter computer?” Roger asked.

“Clean as far as I know,” Simone replied. “I pulled the connections before the server that it’s hooked to got corrupted. Is it still transmitting?”

“I think so,” Roger said.

“It’s still clean,” Dick replied. “If these bastards got in it it wouldn’t be transmitting.”

“Good,” Roger said, running out of the room.

“Everyone rushing about,” Dick said, shaking his head. “Don’t they know there’s a war on?” He hit “Enter” and leaned back. All four of the attacking programs that he’d found so far had certain bits of data loaded into them. Most of the data was what to do in the event that they were discovered. But they also were supposed to report back on what they found. As far as Simone could tell, he’d prevented that. However, the data told them where to report back.

Intelligence flows two ways. And there were still lots of people on Earth who could do something with things like the electronic location of one of the probes’ master computers and information on what protocols it expected when information was being sent in. And the difference between information and sabotage in the computer world was… very, very small.

With one click of a keystoke, Dick had just sent the data to all of them.

“You wanna play games, motherfucker? I’m a master of playing games.”

* * *

“General, the probes are coming live again,” the lieutenant said, breathlessly. “Not all of them, but quite a few. We’re engaging them as they approach, but we can’t get all of them. Some of them are headed for the antenna farm. Others are hitting places further down the mountain.”

“They’re taking out the IBot transmitters,” the J-2 said. “At a guess. We’ve got transmitters lower down the slopes as well as the main transmitter up on the hill. And bots scattered in the minefield.”

“Some of them are blowing up down there, but not all,” the lieutenant added.