Marker
A bowl of small-pot rice noodles? The thought suddenly popped into Kexi’s mind, and at once there really appeared before her a steaming bowl of beef rice noodles fragrant enough to make the air tremble. Kexi drew in a sharp breath through her nose. Even though she knew perfectly well that this was nothing more than a fabricated illusion, a few command strings stimulating her sensory ports, she still could not help smacking her lips. She tapped the great cloisonne bowl with her little finger. The sound was bright and clear, giving no clue what kind of program had produced it.
“See? We know what you’re thinking, and we can satisfy any desire you have.” The voice that spoke sounded like a boning knife scraping across cowhide.
“And yet we still admire you. You actually can keep yourself from thinking about what we most want to know. Yatakhalla ‘an.” Another voice spoke, humming like a bronze war drum.
“I want you to restore Epsilon. Can you do that?” Kexi flung the noodles to the floor in anger. The great bowl passed through the white floor as if it had never existed at all.
“Of course we can,” said Boning Knife. “Just tell us what we want, and we’ll return your lover exactly as he was, well, with no more than a 19K-byte error.”
“In fact, you once told us of your own accord about the red code. Why not say a little more? Al-mayyit.” Bronze Drum shrugged.
Kexi gave a cold snort and leaned back in her chair without speaking again. Everyone knew that even a single character’s difference in core code meant two utterly different independent programs. She cast a slant glance at the two PNC programs sitting across from her, Police Negotiation Cadre specialists. Their faces lay hidden behind iris glasses, and their wavering gazes stayed fixed upon her through the lenses.
Ever since Kexi had been brought here seventy-four hours earlier for questioning, the two PNC programs had repeated in exactly the same monotonous way a single demand: “Tell us what we want.” They never explained what it was they wanted, nor did they ever ask an extra question. Instead, they patiently let Kexi rant and make trouble. Kexi knew very well that this was nothing but a tired old fatigue-interrogation method, and she had never feared that kind of trick. Kexi had an auto-terminate-process-statement plugin installed. No matter how the interrogators tried to activate a given section of her, it would be terminated automatically, leaving no redundant temporary files behind and no risk of a system crash. The plugin came from one of TRIR’s builders. No one could screen it out.
The interrogation room fell quiet for several minutes. Then Bronze Drum spoke again. “Tell us what we want, and we will grant your wish. Alias.” His words were always mixed with syllables Kexi could not understand, and simply hearing them left her uneasy. She tried to use the TIHU search engine embedded within herself to decipher those obscure words, only to discover that they were merely Arabic runes of vague meaning.
A big bag of butter popcorn? At once a bag of fragrant popped millet appeared on the table out of thin air. Kexi gave a bitter smile, flicked a hand to sweep it onto the floor, and ignored the pressing look on the PNC programs’ faces.
“Al-takhalli ‘an al-muqawama,” Bronze Drum intoned softly once more.
A blueberry ice-cream cone? What was wrong with her? Kexi thought. She had kept her mind like still water for more than seventy hours, yet now it was wandering. Or perhaps an espresso as well? Kexi suddenly realized that the use of her virtual memory had begun to spike beyond her control. A flood of trivial thoughts came crowding in, and more and more temporary folders were being occupied by cache files. She understood then that her defensive line was beginning to collapse.
“Al-dhakira! Yajibu an!” Bronze Drum suddenly shouted, raising his voice. Kexi felt the tiny heart within her, the point where her core code and primary firewall joined, shatter with a bang. A strange, sharp, ferocious army of code poured into her body like a tide and rushed irresistibly toward the abyss where that secret was hidden.
The abyss was sealed by sixteen walls of key-script, each 243 glyphs deep, written in oracle-bone characters. The invading army jammed itself against the narrow barrier, transformed into countless giant drilling rigs, mounted them against the walls, and began boring. High-speed diamond drill bits cast off blinding sparks made of 0s and 1s.
Kexi went limp in the chair. Soybean-sized beads of cold sweat seeped from her brow and wet her pale neck, while the corners of her mouth twitched now and then with the spasms in her spine. Bronze Drum sat with both hands clasped, chanting continuously under his breath, his voice rising and falling with Kexi’s convulsions. Plainly he had established some kind of link with her and had penetrated deep into the interior of her system.
Boning Knife stood behind Kexi with his hands behind his back, coldly watching this prey that was on the verge of being taken. It feels awful to have crawling worms drilling their way inside you, he thought. Not many can endure it. His partner Bronze Drum used an extremely rare Spammer program written in ancient Arabic. Through audio communication it established instantaneous-bandwidth intrusion into the target system. Because it was written in such a minor language, few firewalls could detect it. The crawler invoked every file in the system containing an info input box, decompiled them into parts of itself, and rapidly converged into an overwhelming invasive force.
“Increase the traffic some more,” Boning Knife ordered. His authority level was higher than Bronze Drum’s. Bronze Drum nodded, and his pupils began to turn a deep red. Kexi’s convulsions intensified as well.
He can hold out at most another fifteen seconds, Boning Knife thought with satisfaction.
“Not necessarily. Perhaps you yourself can hold out at most another two.” A voice spoke from inside his body. Before Boning Knife could compute a single response, a burst of flickering and model errors threw him to the floor with a thud. When he rose again, he was no longer Boning Knife.
“Stop.” The golden-haired man spoke, and Bronze Drum’s arms immediately drooped without strength. He collapsed onto the table, his pupils turning into flickering black-and-white snow. The strong interference signals and warning lines in the room vanished as well.
“Kexi, wake up.” The golden-haired man gently shook Kexi where she slumped against the chair back, but there was no sign that she could wake. He carefully checked her core code. It had not been damaged. He raised his hand, glanced at the electronic watch on his wrist, then decisively bit his middle finger and wrote a string of command symbols in the empty air before him:
~HOOK-CASA-0920~
Hook was an emergency mechanism used to replace the “interrupt” process inside an independent program, also known as a hook. Once a specific system event was hooked, such as an independent program falling into paralysis after being invaded, the main server could respond to the event at once the moment the preset hook condition was triggered.
A pale golden arc seven feet long slowly opened like the pupil of a feline eye, revealing a doorway leading who knew where.
The golden-haired man gently pushed Kexi through the door. It quickly closed again like an eye and vanished somewhere at the edge of the boundless network. He then began drawing another complex formula in the air before him, preparing to leap away from the place.
“Xisai, I never expected you’d dare come here in person, without even sending a downstream subprocess. What an unexpected delight.” At some unknown moment Bronze Drum was again seated behind the golden-haired man, one leg crossed over the other, smiling.
The golden-haired Xisai turned and looked at him. “Your model is a little higher than I calculated. Impressive.” As he spoke, he raised his hand and pointed his index finger directly at Bronze Drum’s face.
Bronze Drum seemed utterly unafraid and went on smiling. “Do you happen to know the internal development codename of Ethernet Nation’s newest model of independent Trojan program? I hear that’s what you’ve come for.”
Xisai frowned, and his finger froze in midair.
“Boning Knife?”