Chapter 10

<<Coincidences are like trails of breadcrumbs,>> Gumps tweets.

Right. And that worked out so well for Hansel and Gretel, Heckleena replies.

I pull away from the creepy former customer number four and head for school despite the early hour. I’m freaked out to think that Fenwick could be a part of this too. Something’s nagging me and I can’t pin it down.

When I can’t remember something, I massage my head, Tule tweets.

I wish we had a memory sieve that we could dunk our heads into, Hairy adds.

I wish I could dunk all your heads into it, Heckleena replies, and hold them there.

Sitting in the school parking lot, tweeting, is what I need right now. A distraction. Chippy pulls in. I power down the window.

“Hello, Mr. MacLean, I can take a look at the network now. My server may have the same disease. Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone.”

His head swivels to me and then nods. “How’s your mother, Miss Rose?”

“A cross between Sleeping Beauty and a pin cushion,” I say.

We don’t talk more until we’re in the computer lab, where I see just how slowly the computers are running. Every time Chippy punches a key, it takes a few seconds to register on the screen. Five minutes go by while he logs in as an administrator and brings up the server dashboard. And this is when no other students or teachers are on the network.

“Okay.” My hands are shaking a little, even though I shouldn’t be nervous. “I guess … uh … let’s see what’s coming in through the ports.”

He clicks through to the monitoring of the ports and now we can see all the traffic. What’s weird is that there’s so much outbound traffic.

“It’s not a denial of service attack, right? Or data wouldn’t be flowing out.”

It’s all encrypted too, which is both suspicious and makes it tough to figure out what’s happening. We can track the IP addresses of some inbound traffic, but the problem is that the server is running so slowly it’s hard to do anything at all.

“Let’s try a new anti-virus update,” I say. It’s a long shot but maybe the Internet security firms are on top of this. I feel like a surgeon in an operating room. Scalpel. Suction. Nurse, quit poking that patient!

Nurse Chippy does as he’s told and lets out a long muh when a popup explains that he can’t access the anti-virus updater.

“So it’s a virus,” I say. Some program’s embedded in the server that’s running an operation and trying to protect itself. That explains the outbound traffic too, because the virus is trying to spread to other computers and servers.

The next display Chippy brings up is like an X-Ray; it shows all the processes and applications that are running on the server. The goal is to figure out which are virus related and which are not.

“Sorry, Mr. MacLean, but if they’ve encrypted the traffic, I bet they’re going to have hidden some of their processes.” We don’t need an X-Ray, we need nuclear imaging.

He grunts.

“Listen, I’ve got some friends who know a lot more than I do about viruses.”

It’s sad to see Chippy sit and stare at the screen. I want to help.

“It’s not only the school, Janus,” he says. “It’s businesses, government, even the traffic lights have malfunctioned.”

It’s Shadownet too, and I don’t have any answers. Not yet.

His hand clenches and he tries to update the anti-virus again.

Suddenly, the inbound traffic spikes on the servers. Chippy grips the monitor as if there’s something he can do, but I can already tell it’s overloading the system. He can’t even shut it down, it just hangs unresponsive. He pulls the plug.

“Now that,” I say. “That was a Distributed Denial of Service Attack.” Somebody doesn’t want us messing with their virus.