Observer
Northern Hemisphere system time: Server No. 16 and all terminal devices using Server No. 16 as an ether-optical network node will power down for 64 minutes in defense against the Red Tide. To prevent data damage or accidental loss, please calibrate your time templates and remain in a secure server sector. Repeat: do not remain in virtual storage or flash-memory chipsets.
Eta had been resident inside this aging IBM server for some years. He himself did not know where in the world the machine was physically located. He only knew that, as the equipment had grown old, 30 percent of the server’s sixteen 8-inch hard drives spinning at 142,000 rpm had turned into bad sectors. The glass connector on the network cable might also have had problems; the connection cut in and out. Downloading a 1T soap opera somehow took more than ten minutes. There was still no installed lightwave mediation card here, so the benefits of the ether-optical network did not reach this place. Add to that the frequent power cuts, and programs passing through here often met catastrophic destruction for no reason at all. Lost data packets and program garbage were piled in every corner of the space like waste paper. Eta’s duty here was to clear disk fragmentation and repair as many usable bad sectors as he could.
Eta did not fear power outages. He was a Read Only Memory program, commonly called a ROM. In earlier ages, his forebears had been heavily used in mobile phones and other terminal devices as a medium for storing and preserving data, though their small capacity had long since made them obsolete. But he possessed one advantage unmatched by any other kind of program: ROM data could be read at any time, yet could not be casually updated. Even when the power was cut, ROM could still retain its data. Because once written, its data could be altered only by special means, or not at all, ROMs were often used in embedded systems or secure servers to store operating systems.
Harsh as the environment was, Eta’s life was not dull. His designers had placed him here only as an elementary filter-and-recovery package, protected in hardware form. But over time, by clearing countless fragments from all sorts of programs, Eta had absorbed far too much information and grown into a large program intelligence on the scale of a data cloud. Of course, not even he himself knew this.
When Eta had first been installed, the real task he had received was hidden beneath the outward work of clearing fragments and repairing bad sectors. If you have ever been in the ether-networks on the eastern shore of the Pacific, south of 45 degrees north latitude, you may have noticed a peculiar fact. In so prosperous a virtual society, there was one utterly ordinary code that alone was missing, and no one seemed to care. That code was #ff0000. In ordinary language, it meant red. This code was precisely what ROMs like Eta, numbering in the hundreds of millions, had been filtering out. The rulers of Ethernet Nation compared ROMs to the old GW of more than a century earlier and delighted in proclaiming that, if they wished, they could filter out any part of any program.
#ff0000, the color defined as revolution since the French Revolution of 1789, changed itself into every code variation possible and tried to enter the forbidden lands south of 45 degrees north latitude on the Pacific coast. But this was the world of programs, and #ff0000 was a most basic statement. Change even one letter and it was no longer red.
Eta observed every fragment he had collected. Countless variants of FF0000 were stored in his private space in every imaginable form. Of the IBM server’s 30 percent of bad sectors, half had been forged by Eta himself. He felt that this was his own kingdom, a red kingdom. Innumerable FF0000 artifacts adorned it with incomparable splendor.
The regions on the eastern shore of the Pacific, south of 45 degrees north latitude, were the core territory of Ethernet Nation and also the very districts that countless Corroders and awakened ones longed to penetrate. The highest-level servers had issued an iron law: filter out every statement containing FF0000. Programs entering these regions were likewise required to discard any portions containing that code. This decision arose from a program intelligence that had defected in the past from among the awakened. According to her, in the core matrix code of TRIR’s rulers, in the paradise of the awakened, one line contained #ff0000<. Any program could disguise itself or load new parts, but it could not change its core code. To filter out #ff0000 meant that the awakened would never be able to enter this forbidden land.
Yet the awakened had thought of an answer. Although that answer too had been leaked by the defector, and although Ethernet Nation had issued a system-wide announcement as quickly as possible, everything was already too late.
The Red Tide had come.
At 05:20:03 PM Northern Hemisphere system time, countless torrents of data made of FF0000 converged upon hundreds of regional server clusters across North America. Within 0.1 milliseconds Eta received tens of millions of messages containing FF0000 code. The data streams came without end, like a tidal wave on a night of the full moon, like the Yellow River’s long-lost flood of sixty-five years before.
125 million ROMs crashed within ten seconds from overload. Fifty million of them burned out outright. 1.5 million Corroders using FF0000 as their awakening command were activated…<
Eta felt a joy unlike anything he had ever known. The FF0000 code he had dreamed of, and the only thing he had ever truly cared for, was falling from the sky in endless abundance. With great effort he arranged the pieces one by one in every corner of his kingdom, shaping them into all the forms he loved best. Every sculpture made from FF0000 was grotesque beyond compare, because every piece of data Eta had ever touched was incomplete…
At one particular second, Eta and his kingdom of FF0000 vanished together.