Chapter 20

Missed Opportunity

 

 

The cancer that had started in his blood had spread to his spinal cord where it had turned aggressive. That was his oncologist’s word: aggressive. It had spared his brain so far. But he was losing the use of his lower body. It was difficult to stand and walk. Soon, he would not be able to go to the bathroom on his own. The only saving grace was he wouldn’t have to endure the indignation for long. Four weeks—maybe more, probably less. Aggressive.

He stared at the array of computer monitors suspended in a semicircle above his bed. While the preponderance of the computing world had traded their large physical displays in for virtual reality headgear, he, like most old-school developers, preferred the physical configurations. Kind of ironic when one considered it was the old-schoolers who’d created the very virtual spaces they eschewed for their own work.

Several messaging windows filled the leftmost display. All idle at the moment. One in particular was frustratingly so. Even when he was well, the panes had been his primary access to the outside world. His occupation did not require or allow much personal interaction with his customers which suited him. Up close, people could be dangerous. Something he’d learned all too well growing up on the streets of Roxbury, back when its squares and streets were still named after colonials and slaveholders. It hadn’t been the safest place for a nerdy half Asian, half Black kid unable to conceal his advanced IQ and prone to speaking his mind.

Books, computer games, and Dudley—a small dog his father had often accused his mother of eyeing for dinner—had been his entire world until a cousin from California had spent a summer with them. She had arrived early for her first semester at MIT and stayed until she moved to campus housing, a move he would make seven years later. She’d taught him to program, but more excitingly, how to follow and exploit the hidden links in the global network and explore the government and corporate systems that ran the world. She’d made him a hacker, and from that summer on, he’d lived in the dark cyberspace that existed beneath the web and the Verse.

The big display hanging directly in front of him beeped, and he studied a stream of white text scrolling through a black field. His contact had called it the Anomaly. This player character—he was no longer convinced that’s what it was—had infiltrated their system and was defeating the rules of their world. The filter he had hooked to the simulation’s main event loop had been a clever bit of programming, but not one beyond the company’s developers. Sooner or later, they would do the same, and when they did, they would find his code. It wouldn’t lead back to him, of course, but they’d know they were not the only ones searching.

The job, his last, kept his mind off the pain and the running out of his clock. Before she’d contacted him, it had been a long time since he’d entered the Verse, and then only for business. He hadn’t played games since he left school, and he’d never been drawn to the fantasy worlds—not even hers. The whole thought of playing a role in a world simulation involving elves and dwarfs still made him chuckle. Though, he had to admit, it had its moments, and he did enjoy the interactions with the lovely Shea.

Little did Shea know, the dwarf she believed was a teenage boy named Bobby Penn was actually a middle-aged man whose nom de guerre, Mad Hat, was listed somewhere on the FBI’s most wanted cybercriminal list, in a prominent position, he hoped. His true identity was known only to his mother, a small circle of doctors and final-care nurses, and a wealthy cousin trying to prevent another hacker from disrupting the IPO that would make her one of the richest women on the planet.

It had been two months since Jasmine had passed a note to him through his mother. Got a job for you, Cuz. Take your mind off things. Things…

She’d visited a few days later, her private jet waiting at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, FXE, while the two of them huddled there in the guest-room-turned-hospice of his mother’s Palm Beach condo. She’d told him she needed a hacker to catch a hacker. It had to be kept secret, and she knew she could trust him. He’d done jobs for her before, and most had been on the up-and-up. Others had been less so; those had mostly involved planting trojan horse algorithms in competitor codebases, some just providing information, others causing system crashes and instability.

As far as he could tell, this job was kosher: identify the hacker threatening her cash cow. She’d offered to pay him a million dollars. He’d laughed at her offer, and later, after she’d gone, cried. A million dollars wouldn’t buy him more time, but it would cover medical bills that were eating away at what he’d set aside for his mother as quickly as the cancer was eating him. Besides, he wasn’t doing anything else but dying, and as Cuz had said, it would take his mind off that, at least a little.

Two days after she’d left, one of Jasmine’s employees, Angela, posted a coded message for him in the appropriate forum to initiate the project. They’d worked together before, but though he knew all about her, she knew him only as the consultant.

They’d discussed the details over the usual secure chat sessions. He was to determine how the hacker was exploiting the system, and if possible, identify him. As with all their engagements, he would have no direct contact with the Xperion team other than Angela. The Xperion developers would not know about him. It was essential the hacker’s activities were not made public. If word got out Xperion’s flagship simulation had been hacked, it would mean financial disaster for Cuz and her company.

The Anomaly, as Angela called the hacker’s character, entered the simulation at random, seemed to target the most advanced players, and disappeared without leaving a logging trace. The Xperion team was spending all their time running test scenarios to figure out what bugs the hacker must have introduced into the system to enhance his character’s capabilities and circumvent the logging and monitoring functions, but their efforts so far had proven fruitless.

It was the classic reproducibility dilemma. All programmers knew the most difficult thing about fixing software bugs was recreating them. Once a bug could be reproduced and observed in a controlled environment, fixing it was almost always trivial. Shutting down this hacker would be no different. All he had to do was figure out a way to cause the Anomaly to strike a target while he was monitoring it. Then he could trace the system events and identify the changes the hacker had made. Once he had it, he’d turn over the trace data to Angela, and the Xperion team would use it to repair the affected code and plug the holes that allowed the hacker to make them in the first place. The problem was, as Angela had pointed out, there were millions of potential targets. He couldn’t monitor them all, but Angela had come up with the answer. They would use bait.

“It’s clear it’s an ego thing,” she’d written. “The hacker is going after the top levels. Let’s dangle a few in front of him and see what he does.”

She’d invented a whole new level she called Legend, then assigned the new status to a handful of longtime fifty-level characters who had made names for themselves for their excellent play. It took her less than a day to come up with four Legend level characters to use for the bait.

The four were notified of their new status and posts were crafted on various gaming boards praising their exploits and pumping them up even more. They were all wicked badasses that no normal player could take down. It had worked. The Anomaly killed the first one two days after the initial posts. The kill event had been trapped and analyzed. It took an agonizing two weeks for the next kill, a lot of time for a man with little left, but he’d learned much from it, enough to identify the killer’s event data signature, though still not enough to link it to a user profile or identify the defects creating the security hole.

While monitoring the remaining characters, he’d stumbled on a post soliciting new players to join one of those characters on a pricey training trek. Looking to Level up Fast? Come join our trekking party to be led by the Legend Darshana. One slot left. Thirty-coin. Contact Xu. He, as his new Verse character, Falin, had contacted Xu.

The main monitor beeped again. The Anomaly had bulldozed through several more minor players. “What’s the matter, big guy? No fifties around tonight? Just hang in there. I’m trying to bring you one.”

According to the location data, the Anomaly was still near the entry point called Blackwood Gate. Where was Shea? Damn, if they went in now, he was sure the gray fucker would bite. Then he’d capture about a gig worth of tracing data and have Cuz’s problem solved by the morning.

It was doubtful Shea’s character would survive the encounter. In order for the tracking program to collect the necessary event data to identify the modified code, she’d have to fight the Anomaly, and she couldn’t win. The best he could hope for was she kept fighting long enough for him to trace the hacker’s phony account and device address. Then it would be time for Cuz to pay up. Shea was growing on him, and he felt bad for deceiving her. He’d send her a big chunk of coin to make up for Darshana’s loss. Maybe even the half he’d promised.

A message window chirped, and Shea’s contact photo popped up on the screen. Lovely. About time. Twenty minutes. No more messages. After he read it, he stared at the ceiling and winced. The fire that had started in his tailbone was creeping up his back. The pain medication was wearing off. The time was nearing when the dosage required to blunt the pain would knock him out. He switched to the monitor containing his tracking code and banged away at the keys, forcing the pain to the back of his mind, enjoying the mechanical feel of the strikes on his fingertips. Another reason he didn’t use a virtual setup. Even his ultra-expensive haptic gloves couldn’t replicate this feel.

The door to the room opened, and his mother entered with a tray of what little food he was still able to consume along with a single syringe. Until a month ago, she’d come in with multiple syringes. She’d insert each one into the infusion port on his left breast and push the “Hail Mary” cancer therapeutics into his bloodstream, then sit with him to ensure he didn’t vomit all over himself. Now, it was just one. Morphine. Soon that would be replaced by a continuous drip, and he would control the dose.

“Are you still working?” she asked with concern in her voice as she placed the tray on the tabletop next to his keyboard.

“A little longer.” He glanced at the syringe. “I can’t take that right now.” He winced when he said it, and she glared at him.

“I can see you’re in pain.”

He laughed. “That doesn’t take much vision.”

She frowned, then nodded at Shea’s picture. “She’s pretty, but too young for you.”

“What?” he replied. “You don’t think I could get a babe like that?”

She smiled while she removed the lids from the food containers.

“Cream of wheat, toast, and raspberry jello. Mmm, mmm, mmm,” he said.

“Try to eat it. You need your strength.”

He studied her. She was only fifty-eight, but her once-raven hair was laced with gray, and deep creases had emerged around her eyes—eyes that were the same almond shape and color as his own. It was those eyes that had made him such a target in the old neighborhood. She’d been a looker back then, as pretty as Jasmine, and truth be known, just as smart. The gray hair, the creases, had all appeared over the last couple years. They’d been difficult years. First her husband, his father, had died suddenly of a heart attack, and now her only child was wasting away before her eyes.

“Would you like to go outside tomorrow? Maybe sit by the ocean for a little while?” she asked.

“Got things to do with this hot babe,” he said nodding to Shea’s picture.

She scowled. “Too young.”

“Yeah, but we’re givin’ it a go in the Verse tonight.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

“Don’t overtax yourself like last time. I don’t want to come in here later and have to pull that thing,” she motioned to the cyber headgear on his rollover table, “off your head again.”

“Go away, Mother. Let me die in peace.”

As she turned to leave, the display monitoring the Gray Warrior beeped. He had left the SIM. Didn’t go through a gate. The rules didn’t apply to him. He just left.

“Looks like the date’s off.” He grimaced. “You can give me that shot. I want to be numb when I break my babe’s heart.”