Chapter Twenty

NATHEN

 

In the car, Nathen flipped through different ideas he had about magic. He wondered if the book was anything like some of the occult magic he had read about or the things he watched on television. He imagined a chemistry set with red ichor flowing through the tubes, and him repeating Latin phrases badly, causing the blood to explode and then laughed out loud.

Nathen’s gaze shifted awkwardly between Syn, Cameron, and the driver. “Sorry. Thought of something funny.”

Cameron smiled softly and hugged him. Always entertained by others’ fantasies, he sent a mental hug as well.

Once in the apartment, they set the case on the dining room table. Cameron spun the tumblers to match the numbers Theo had provided and punched open the keys. Inside the briefcase was the SSD, a thumb drive, and two neon rainbow silicone bracelets. Nathen took out the thumb drive and plugged it into his laptop. It contained an ISO image, and a README file.

Syn pulled over a chair to sit next to Nathen who was flanked by Cameron on the other side.

The README file contained a note from Theo:

Drive image is decoded; used our normal key to encode it on the stick. There’s something odd with the data. The OS is a custom Linux distribution, though a lot of the Kernel has been highly modified. It wasn’t compiled using a standard compiler. Instead it is mostly raw assembly. Was never compiled from a higher level language. It was turned into machine code and linked. They either have some crazy OCD guys, fae with too much time on their hands, or some other shit doing the coding. Happy hunting!

Regarding the de-nan, call me when you want to be cleaned. In the meantime, I included some bracelets. As long as you wear them, your little friends can’t receive, though they will transmit. So it’ll look like everything is status quo to big brother unless they hit the kill switch and you go piffle.

Cameron plucked the two bracelets and immediately slipped one onto Nathen’s wrist and the other onto his own, cringing at the fluorescent color. They didn’t look like anything special, but Cameron was willing to trust Theo’s techno mage prowess.

Nathen examined the SSD before he turned to Syn with confused apprehension.

Syn shook her head. “Sounds like a mage’s shit? But I don’t understand why he wouldn’t have thought of that. Unless it’s nothing a mage would do?”

Cameron asked, “What is it?”

Nathen responded, “I don’t know what a technomage can do, but modifying a Kernel with handwritten Assembly would be…insane. There’s roughly thirty-one million lines of code in the Linux Kernel as of this year. That is in middle level C code. Assembly is one level above machine code. One line of C would be about a dozen registry moves, pops, and pushes. No one would write it like this, no normal company would. A fae might, or…”

Cameron’s mouth hung open with abject confusion.

Syn slowed down a bit and explained. “This kind of code would take forever. There are faster and more efficient ways of doing things, so we don’t actually do stuff like this anymore.”

“But couldn’t you build a computer program to do this?” Cameron offered.

“Sure, and it would be easier for a computer to do this because they have to take a separate step to do the more efficient thing for the rest of us.”

“Okay,” Cameron responded. “So what you’re saying is that someone built a computer program that threw all this code doohickey together? Or whatever? Does it really matter that it’s written in some strange-ass code? What does it say?”

Nathen mentally spoke up. “The C compiler is the program that does this, but it doesn’t do it well enough for the machine; it is not as optimized as it would be if done by hand because the compiler generalizes but does it quicker. Writing in Assembly, you can optimize the code, which means the machine works better with it but takes a lot longer to write to do the same task.”

Nathen marveled when he recognized Cameron’s eyes glaze over, so he paused, having never actually been aware in the past when he was losing someone. “Um… A compiler is a program that makes life easier for the programmer. It turns what they write into Assembly and Machine code. This skips the ‘easy for the programmer’ part.”

Cameron turned his lost look to Syn, who chuckled. “Don’t worry about it, Cam. Here’s the short: Strange Shit. Don’t think it is a technomage because why would she or he do that? Maybe a fae, but who the hell knows about them? Probably not a random computer. And the why, as you asked, is ’cause this seems to have been a server that would route money if they were paid.”

“Awesome! That means we killed their means of getting paid!” Cameron grinned at both with memories of the explosion that had almost killed him. When they shook their heads in unison like synchronized swimmers, he pouted.

“No, Cam. These guys know what they’re doing. This was likely one of a dozen local servers and probably thousands, if not more, computers. It’s like when you got that popup while watching porn that said you had to click to pay something to get your computer back. Yeah, I know you didn’t know that I knew you were watching porn. Whatever… The point is that thousands of computers get those all the time. It’s called ransomware and you click, pay, get access to your computer returned. Or, do what I did and remove it with your best friend’s mad skills.”

Nathen made sure his computer wasn’t connected to the internet and mounted the ISO and loaded the virtual host on his laptop. It booted up and started running, showing the usual loading messages with a login prompt and a “Message of the Day” that was modified by Theo with the password. Nathen entered it and it logged in as root. By all accounts, it seemed like a normal Linux distribution. It was running a proxy server, custom forwarding software, and a service Nathen had never seen before called “SpArk.” The SpArk program used most of the resources as it processed something.

Nathen harrumphed. “Huh, that’s kind of weird.”

“What’s up?” Cameron asked, going to the fridge and rifling around.

“That is weird,” Syn agreed.

“What’s up?” Cameron asked again, as he drank OJ from the bottle and swallowed a handful of iron supplements.

“It is not connected to anything but seems to be using a lot of the resources on the virtual host. I’ve never heard of this program either. It seems to be a first party software, not off the shelf or open source,” Nathen explained.

Cameron feigned a knowing nod, “Uh-huh, that is…bad?”

Nathen clarified, “It’s not bad, just interesting.”

As they were talking, a green light appeared on the clam shell of his laptop. “That’s odd. The camera light is on.”

Cameron put his finger over the tiny lens. “Umm…anyone got gum?”

Nathen covered Cameron’s finger with his thumb, and with the other made a shush gesture, pointing to his head, having apparently forgotten that everyone was already talking in their minds. “Someone is recording us! Though this laptop isn’t online. I disconnected it from the Wi-Fi.”

Cameron ran to the bedroom, returning with a sticky note that he placed over the camera as Nathen issued commands in the prompt. “There’s a process creating files. Looks like Kernel Modules for hardware that it would normally not have access to. That is really odd.”

“What the fuck?” Syn asked. “That’s your work computer. You think they’re doing something? Like a backdoor connection? I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been recording you this whole fucking time!”

“So the server thing that was written with too complex code stuff is now taking over your computer?” Cameron clarified. “Sounds like a virus to me. Good thing it was your work computer. You can hand it over and ask for a new one.”

“Well, it might be cooler to figure out what it is, so we can get ahead of Impetus and Paradigm,” Syn groused.

Nathen shook his head. “It’s sectioned off in memory on the hypervisor, so it’s only running on the virtual machine. It’s the SSD image we got from the warehouse, but it seems to be writing its own software. It could be a virus, but usually a virus wouldn’t write kernel modules, or—” He typed in some more commands. “—it looks like it’s also somehow modifying itself in memory. The VM has access to the Wi-Fi and camera. I didn’t set that up. A virus couldn’t do that. Well, it could, but it would have to be very complex and specialized.”

“Umm…think we should maybe shut that down? Or smash it?” Cameron asked.

Syn agreed. “Especially if it is accessing the internet.”

Nathen typed more commands into the console, and the screen closed and camera light turned off behind the post-it note. “It’s off. I saved the image and memory. It is quiescent now, so we can figure out what to do with it. Thoughts? Contact Theo, or I can do my own magical investigation?”

“Theo said he was out,” Syn reminded everyone, rolling her eyes at Cameron who was projecting awe and lust at Nathen’s computer prowess. “This is the exact kind of thing he wouldn’t want to be dragged back into. And it’s not an emergency. What kind of…magical investigation?”

Cameron laughed. “It’s kind of cool. I watched through our link when we were all in the garage. He starts seeing stuff and interfaces Matrix-style with the machine.” Cameron gave a proud loving kiss on top of Nathen’s head. “He’s so brilliant.” A wave of pride and adoration flowed from Cameron, sweeping through both Nathen and Syn.

“Whoa,” Syn backed up. “Dude…” Swallowing hard, she shook her head. “Cam, you gotta watch that. I just had the compulsion to grab Nathen and kiss him myself!”

“So…the plan is to keep going along as we have been? Tomorrow’s Monday, and I have to go back to work. Nathen, I think you’re safe working with Impetus and continuing to send them information on the stuff we found. And…what? We’re okay?”

Standing, Syn’s hands fluttered up in a gesture of acquiescence. “I think that’s all we can do, right? I’m not going to investigate anymore. I’m with Theo. I’m out.”

Cameron wrapped his arms around Nathen. “Okay with you?”

“Yeah,” Nathen said, distracted. “I think that will be fine.”