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MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesA short story - A tribute to William Gibson
The old CD was quietly spinning in the player, filling the dark room with the crystalline digital notes of Everything But The Girl, megabytes of dense musical data piping through the digital to analog converter to the electrostatic loudspeakers. The cold glow from my cyberdeck monitor was flooding my face, the only other light a halogen 50W lamp pointed to the powder blue ceiling. The gray sky over Ninsei seemed to be pouring from outside through the window into the room. Just one hour before, at Chatsubo bar, I met a kid coming directly from the Sprawl - BAMA, Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Area, this huge concentration of people, data and shit. He e-hologrammed me a plea for help. He wanted to show me a slab of code that "could melt black ICE". His words, not mine. Why me. I left the Sprawl nearly one year before with the dream of hiding into Night City, in the deep heart of Tokio; sure that I could continue to patrol the electronic borders around my company through the matrix. Deeply planted into the very heart of Night City was Ninsei. Buried deeper into the darkest corner of Ninsei, my room was guarded more by its secrecy than by its security countermeasures. And now, an unknown boy contacts me through the matrix, to offer me to look and possibly own something that legends say only military organizations have access to. Why me. He was vague, and this night I met him over a Kirin beer at Ratz's place to have him explain me why.
Trailing an intruder track through the cyberspace was quickly overflowing the capabilities of the visual interface, so I had to switch to direct deck control, plugging in the interface connecting the trodes to the Ono Sendai. This is something I am trying to avoid if possible, being so faithful to the old traditions of keyboard and monitor interface, so common when I started kicking around with computers. The Internet seemed so large and unbounded then; something that would seem ridiculous now, compared to the consensual hallucination that is cyberspace. I am old. Thirty-something and still around in this business is exception and not the rule. Mousing around on the video is something that no cyberboy riding the tide is able to do with the manual skill that was the badge on the lapel of old dogs like me. They only sport 'trodes burning brain neurones. I am thirty-six and I am no cowboy. Never been, in fact; just brushing the border that is so fuzzily delimitating the domain of sysadmins to the realm of cyberspace cowboys. But what was making my humble person peculiar was the Squid. During the War I volunteered for having implanted in my brain cortex a device to decode and download directly to my brain the contents of any memory chip in two-meters range. The Army doctor called it a Superconducting quantum interference detector, but everybody in Chiba who knows about the device call it a Squid. After that three out of seven people had their grey tissue inside their skullbones literally evaporated by the device, the Army quickly cancelled the project, forgot that anybody was involved, and gave us four survivors a plastic of a Singapore bank with some thousands bucks in. Just to help us forgot it too. Then I got a job with a conglomerate, and soon a headhunter made me escape and get a contract with my present company. Smaller but definitively safer. This is not something I like to talk about. When you have a squid implanted, being near any electronic device is like to be in a stadium with eighty thousands spectators, and able to hear the conversations all of them are conducting. I cannot turn it off. I can only ignore it. Nobody knows, and this is what is saving my ass, because many Night City surgeons would like to have a look under my brain cortex, instead. This is why I hide in a thirty million people city.
The young boy was a would-be cyberdeck cowboy. He didn't reached the status fully; lack of experience, mostly. But he learned from some of the best people in the game, and he owned a innate talent. He showed this talent and his recklessness reaching behind some lesser countermeasures in some corporate data bank to steal this Black ICEbreaker. The boy tried to reverse engineer the ICEbreaker and learned that some key procedures were copyrighted by our company. He launched a AI bot over the matrix and somewhere, someway, the bot found and reported him that I was the one that developed some of the ICE that was defending my company data banks. I could tell if the thing was made of the right stuff. He was clearly crazy. If you steal something, and you find an address label over the thing, you do not normally go to the address to ask for help to use it. But he was lucky. I was no yakuza, and, above all, I never seen this ICEbreaker. In exchange he wanted me to explain. He dropped the black-and-aluminium cased ROM in my hand. I weighted it, and the squid kicked in. Black. A screen like black foil wrapping the ROM was everything the squid was able to scan. I was deadly curious and the boy gave me the ROM with the program to examine. We had another appointment in 12 hours at Ratz's place to report about my findings.
The intruder tried to disguise itself as a NSA routine scan, piercing the first ICE shell surrounding my company computer. ICE1 was not a very sophisticated piece of code; in fact its cross-checking procedures were completely fooled by the attacking program. The problem was not the data stolen. The areas that could be reached overtaking the ICE1 shield were not keeping data so sensible that the loss could be a damage. The problem was that the intruder based its disguise on a little piece of self modifying code dropped into the fabric of ICE1 back layers. This, combined with the self repairing procedures I built into the ICE, gave way to a something that was surprisingly and dangerously approaching the virus status.
The intrusion started about ten minutes I extracted the ROM from my Ono Sendai. I dumped the ICEbreaker into the matrix and I decided to see it at work. I jumped around a little to cover my steps then I launched it, straight and deadly as a poisoned arrow, into the Hong-Kong Government Environment Department; and I councurrently closed my connection. The ICE at HKEP eaten it and when I connected again the breaker was shredded to pieces. And the HKEP ICE was no black ICE.
The virus was quickly eating into the ICE, blindly incorporating code belonging to the reparing procedures. It was rapidly blobbing under my eyes, from few megabytes to half a gig in less than two minutes. I touched the control heart of ICE1, a place I could walk with closed eyes. I wrote and perfected it over the years. It was a shell smart enough to reject any normal intrusion, still leaving entering paths large enough not to bother legitimate data flows. The hard core of corporate data was hidden and shielded behing the black walls of ICE2, cold and deadly as a ninja shuriken. ICE1 weakly and slowly responded to my touch. The virus infection had already compromised large part of its code. Alternate procedures were still protecting the intact core, but the infection was quickly spreading and approaching its centre.
A weep like a baby crying was the sound of the wounded ICE, mixing with the loud EBTG music. I should have known. I should have known. Of course the ICEbreaker was a fake and a bait, and the boy was some yakuza envoy. A pain of agony pierced my brain as ICE2 kicked in. I was relatively safe but the raw power of the black ICE sweeped out the virus program in a flash. The intrusion lasted a total of four minutes twenty-two seconds.