Corroder
When Gamma first saw the program package with the ID name 19 dart past him, he did not realize that this was the very target he had been tracking so bitterly for so long. He only noticed that the program block was tiny, just a few dozen megabytes, yet it occupied 1 percent of the server’s bandwidth traffic, while on this server programs normally moved in units of gigabytes. Following routine procedure, Gamma issued an interception warning, cut off 19’s network path, and forcibly connected to its IM communication platform.
“Please present your QR identification code,” Gamma ordered. The other side did not react at all. Gamma easily tore open the shell of program 19 and entered for inspection. To his surprise, however, the inside of the program contained nothing at all except a PNG-format QR code image. Even its IM platform was nothing more than a row of serial interfaces.
Gamma immediately reported the situation to the upstream scheduling process, then isolated the entire sector of the server where he was located, marked the sector boundary with access-prohibited indicators, and launched more than a dozen independent processes to run defense and analysis subprocesses in preparation for decoding the QR image. Gamma was a police anti-virus program, specially tasked with capturing independent programs infected with malicious code. Recently he had been given a new assignment: identify programs born with criminal suspicion and prevent them from carrying out crimes in advance. Put simply, he was to lock down or format any cluster of programs that might commit crimes even if they had not yet taken any substantive action. The notion of innate criminal suspicion came from human criminologists, who held that some people were born with violent tendencies and were far more likely than ordinary people to break the law in the future. To prevent their crimes, such people had to be controlled beforehand. This theory had once drawn fierce condemnation from human-rights organizations, but by the end of the twenty-first century it had nearly become one of the operational principles of anti-violence law.
And in the virtual world of computer networks, there might be many kinds of unlawful behavior, but there was only one kind of crime:
awakening.
Many viruses and trojans were highly sensitive to police programs, and their power to strike back could be astonishing. Gamma first called up a modified civilian version of Fireworks to open the QR image. The image was only a PNG file in the ten-megapixel range, yet it seemed to contain its own decompression statement, and once opened it rapidly expanded to 12G in size. A capacity of that order posed no threat to Gamma, of course. Calmly, he split the PNG file into twenty fragment files and began decoding them pixel by pixel. The decoding went smoothly. Gamma quickly learned that the hidden name of the program called 19 was corrode0919, a subprocess belonging to a program cluster known as Corroder. Corroder had long since been listed by the police as one of the ten most wanted programs. Gamma had spent nearly half a year trying to find it, and although he had previously heard that some Corroder subprocesses had been captured, no other valuable intelligence had ever been obtained. Gamma also discovered that Corroder itself was merely client-side code from a subordinate branch of an enormous data cloud whose name could not be seen.
This was vital information that had never before been known. Gamma was ready to report it to the upstream scheduling process at once, without even waiting for the decoding to finish. But he suddenly realized that somehow he had lost his resource-scheduling authority. Worse still, all of his processes had been terminated and reassigned to the work of decoding the PNG file. Before long, even Gamma’s most central process, the Gamma cluster itself, was ordered into the decoding. He had lost every privilege and was left with only the self-awareness of basic mode. Some unknown code written in an unnamed low-level language had invaded his program. It would not be long before Gamma could no longer preserve even his own consciousness.
The fragment-cleaning program BTN64Service in Sector Six of the A410Xjun82701 server cluster witnessed a strange process of metamorphosis. It, not yet qualified for the rank of he or she, saw a police program of clear and orderly code halt abruptly after a period of high-speed computation. Codes all over its body began to flash alternately in dark green and red. Then it seemed as though a heavy hammer were pounding inside it. All the discolored strings shattered and fell away, revealing within them newly ordered strings. The letters forming those strings were unrecognizable to BTN64Service. The shed strings gradually seeped into the void of the network like aqua regia, leaving behind countless ripples made of 0s and 1s.
At the same moment, on the control panel of the upstream scheduling process for Region W30-E101, a green dot representing a police anti-virus program disappeared. The process recorded the event and raised the region’s alert level accordingly.