In VR, their battles and lifestyles could go farther, including interaction with elves, unicorns, and other creatures from myth. Which meant that when the combined elf/unicorn attack had come, it had completely shocked the SCA members. Particularly when the avatars used by the hackers had proceeded to perform acts with each other that pretty much negated the whole had-to-be-a-virgin-to-ride-a-unicorn thing.
The attack had then escalated into violence as the attackers engaged some of the SCA members in combat, proving yet again that in video games the computer always wins.
Apparently it hadn’t all been bad, however. Although the peaceful elf-loving contingent had pulled out of VR in shock, the more physical SCA warrior-types had actually expanded its membership.
Jay had backtracked the troop of attackers to this small hole. They had apparently entered the CyberNation system here, and then taken what resources they needed to expand their numbers before the attack.
But there was really something wrong with that hole.
He tabbed his visual input control and instantly he was in full Raptorvision. He ran his new glasses at low rez most of the time, because at high rez he found he sometimes had to reinterpret details that seemed too blocky or fuzzy when sharpened. Which meant that going to high rez was kind of like putting on X-ray glasses. Kind of.
The scene before him shifted. He could still see the hole, only now there were faint gridlike lines around it.
A patch!
Someone had hidden the network details on the incursion space.
Jay extended his forefinger and a small probe shot out. He slid it around the now visible hairline crack surrounding the hole, separating the code that wrote the patch from the VR code that made the hole.
The patch slid off into his hand, and Jay popped it into the satchel strapped over his shoulder, a small VR analyzer.
This could be good news — he hadn’t found anything like this before. If this virus had been programmed to cover its tracks, there might be something interesting about this access node that would give him more information about how it worked.
The analyzer chimed and a code window opened up at eye level. He scanned it and frowned.
It was a patch designed to conceal part of their network interface. He’d been given access to their system, all right — but they hadn’t wanted him to see everything, so they’d tried to cut off from the bits they didn’t want him to know about.
What, did they think he was that stupid? Didn’t they have a clue who they were dealing with here?
He scanned the woods nearby. If you knew where and how to look, it wasn’t that hard to find…
There it was — a programming back door, concealed as an old tree stump. Easy to hide if you weren’t looking for it, because it was an integral part of the environment, not anything added, like the hole.
Well, he’d pop the lock on it, and show these CyberNation jerks what a real VR coder could do. Once he was in there, he’d give himself all kinds of access—
Ping! Ping! Pingpingpingpingpingpingpingping!
Something had gotten caught in Jay’s snare. Ah.
His anger forgotten for the moment, Jay ran back the way he had come. As he had traversed the woods, backtracking the attack, he’d laid traps for code remnants that might still be around. It happened sometimes. A virus mutated and didn’t reach full functionality, left a bit of itself running around in the bushes, as it were.
It was one thing to see the traces of where an attack had come from, but to see a still-working example was far better.
He jumped a small creek, running hard, bare feet lightly treading the earth, long black braids flying behind him. He reached down and drew the tomahawk from his belt.
Just because he was in a medieval forest didn’t mean he had to be medieval. He was Jay Gridley, last of the Mohicans. Or at least, last of the movie version of them…
There.
Up ahead he saw a large fox in the trap he’d left. It moved strangely for a fox, examining the trap, as if trying to figure out how it worked.
As he watched, it looked up and saw him coming.
It opened its delicate fox jaws and then huge teeth sprouted, like in some werewolf or vampire movie, huge, metal teeth. Its mouth opened impossibly wide and it lunged for its own leg, caught in the trap.
No way, pal—!
Jay threw the tomahawk, a hard overhand toss, and watched it twirl end over end toward the fox. The hickory handle smacked into the side of the fox’s head; it yelped and fell over, stunned.
Now, that’s what I’m talking about: Jay Gridley has come into the forest, booyah!
He pushed a button on the satchel and it expanded. Quickly, before it could recover, he slid the fox, trap and all, into the analyzer.
A few seconds later a chime sounded, announcing that the virus had been analyzed.
Before he’d come to CyberNation, he’d uploaded the latest virus encyclopedia from the Center for Virus Research in Beaverton, Oregon. A special tri-split screen appeared showing him in the first pane the code for the virus, broken down into segments. In the second window was a representation of an insect. The insect metaphor had become the de-facto ideogrammatic standard for depicting viruses; various parts of the insect were colored to highlight the separate codes making them up, and the body parts always represented similar abilities. The legs showed its ability to spread; pincers or mandibles its ability to attack; the overall size could indicate ease of detection, and so on.
The CyberNation virus looked like no real insect Jay had ever seen, nor would he want to. It had large wings, indicating speed, and a huge stinger plus pincers. The venom reservoir was split, indicating that it could sting for several functions — to paralyze, and replicate.
Nice.
But the third pane of the split screen was what he was most interested in. The CVR had spent years tracking down viruses to their origin countries and, when they were lucky, to their earliest programmers. Since most computer attacks were based on similar methods, there was a synergistic effect to coding, where a hacker might steal an idea from another, or be inspired to create something new.
It looked as if this virus had been developed from code that had origins in Europe, with pieces of USA ancestry.
Jay tabbed a control and called up the reconstruction of the virus that had attacked the military network. Since they hadn’t caught it in its entirety, it was more of an identikit version, based on its effects. He compared the two.
They were similar. It was the delivery system that seemed to be the same — the speed, along with the venom replication. The military bug had some of the same code, but there were South American influences as well.
Interestingly, there were no influences at all from what could be called Asiatic countries. No Japan, no Taiwan, and no China.
Which by itself meant nothing, but combined with his earlier clue about China, it reminded him of his second favorite Sherlock Holmes adage. The one about the dog not barking in the night.
There were no Chinese dogs barking here.
And somehow, Jay knew that was a clue. No logic or reason to the knowledge, but a certainty nonetheless.
Which brought back a fleeting memory of an old movie farce about a superagent in the 1960’s, Derek Flint. In one of the funniest scenes in that picture, Flint walks down a hall past a couple of military guards. Suddenly Flint attacks the guards, uses his martial arts abilities to take them out, then picks up a fallen weapon and cooks them. When the head of the agency runs up behind Flint and whacks him, thinking he’s gone mad, Flint explains why he did it. They were imposters. What gave them away was, they were wearing Battle of the Bulge ribbons. Cramden, the agency head, says, “There aren’t any Battle of the Bulge ribbons.”