Charlie and Peter tore down the road, the BMW gunning.
This was the same road where Mary’s brother had died, a dangerous route, one lane, two-way traffic, on the edge of the city near woodlands, a fun place to cruise too fast. It was dusty and rough. It ended at the reservoir beneath the high dam. Kids would sit at the top on the walkway and smoke in the dark and look at the city in the distance. Alex was a gray dot in their augmented vision, hurtling ahead on the map, out of real sight. Charlie couldn’t catch up so he took the left at the ridge and sloped up to the lookout point, a hilltop that was level with the crosswalk along the reservoir and looked down at the spillway in between. He kept an eye on the gray dot and hopped out of the car, looking for the real Alex to drive into view below.
Peter came up beside him. “There!” He pointed.
A cloud of dust plumed out and Alex’s car passed through it, a fairly scraped-up 2010 Jeep his dad had bought used for all of the siblings to share.
With a sickening clarity, Charlie realized Alex was accelerating, not slowing, as the wall of the reservoir—all sixty feet high and hundred feet wide of it, poured concrete and steel reinforcements—loomed in front of him. This wasn’t the first time someone had gone headfirst into the wall. A decade ago there had been a rash of copycat suicides, three or four maybe. But now it was happening, for real, right in front of him. Peter already had his glasses on and hands up, working in the Game, but he was out of Goldz, and his right hand was ruined in gamespace, gnawed to a stump by the bots, and nothing he tried was working. And there was nothing Charlie could do to help.
Or was there?
He had just rededicated himself to the Game. Be mine, it had said. And he’d said okay. How many Goldz might that be worth?
Charlie scrolled in the gamespace and waved his hand in front of him, moving the display. His loyalty had been rewarded: fifty thousand Goldz were in his bank. He looked at Alex’s car, moving quickly, bringing his hand in front of its image and closing his fingers over it, moving in time with the accelerating car. As he hovered over it, a grid wrapped it, white lines crossing along three axes, with a diagram of the attack surface laid out for him. He looked at the wireless entry points. Keyless entry was too short range and the attack surface was too small. Bluetooth was better, but he quickly found the telematics unit. It was wide-open and he could go in through the radio over cellular, and the arrows and flow diagrams on his overlay showed his way from there to the CAN-IHS bus and the CAN-C bus. Charlie swiped, and the God Game did the work. Code scrolled past under his hand—memifs2 -q -d /fs/usb0/usr/share/swdl.bin/—and the car’s system unfolded for him in waves, working him toward the physical controls—
# netstat Active Internet connections Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 144-103-28-21.po.65531 68.28.12.24.8443 SYN_SENT tcp 0 27 144-103-28-21.po.65532 68.28.12.24.8443 LAST_ACK tcp 0 0 *.6010 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.2011 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.6020 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.2021 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 localhost.3128 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.51500 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.65200 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 localhost.4400 localhost.65533 ESTABLISHED tcp 0 0 localhost.65533 localhost.4400 ESTABLISHED tcp 0 0 *.4400 *.* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.irc *.* LISTEN udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.* *.* udp 0 0 *.bootp *.*
There it was—port 6667 (no joke) was bound to all interfaces. Why on earth had Jeep’s biggest exploit landed on the Mark of the Beast?
Alex’s car went faster and the dust was kicking up all around him. He must have been going eighty or ninety and gaining, the wall looming closer. He would smash into it so absolutely that Charlie was sure he’d feel the blast from up here, Alex’s demise instantaneous and violent.
G.O.D. sent the modified v850 firmware to the car in the form of a white light streaming from Charlie’s raised hand. He was in.
Alex’s face came into view. His expression was horrible—dead eyed, grim mouthed, head tilted forward, ready. Gripping the wheel, his knuckles were white.
The wall was before him, massively taller and wider. It would’ve filled his entire vision now. The impact would be explosive. A massive, visceral SNAP.
Then darkness.
Charlie pressed with his hand in the air and sent the code:
EID: 18DA10F1, Len: 08, Data: 04 31 15 00 01 00 00 00.
It appeared as a red beam, a laser shot that hit the car in augmented reality. The code told the car, Kill engine. The hack was ingenious, courtesy of the Game. There was no direct access to the central bus, but through the radio, there was a single, indirect connection: a small chip that could wake up a larger electronic unit next door that had been taught to trust its neighbor. It was an exploitation of trust. A flaw in the grand design that turned good into evil but, here, back to good.
The engine shut down but the car was hurtling forward with such momentum that it made no difference. The death would be here momentarily.
Charlie swiped for a new command and sent another burst of red light. All brakes.
The wheels locked and screeched and the car continued toward the wall, kicking up dust and digging into the ground.
One last hope:
Charlie moved his hand again and sent a final instruction:
IDH: 02, IDL: 0C, Len: 04, Data: 90 32 28 1F.
This told the power steering to turn counterclockwise with maximum torque.
Nothing happened and the car hurtled headlong toward the wall.
Then the message engaged in a burst of red light and the car spun left, braking and turning hard, Alex’s face a mix of confusion and rage.
The car fishtailed in circles through the dust and spun to a stop with a silence that was startling after all the grinding and thrashing.
Alex stumbled out of the car and fell to his knees in the dirt. He was crying and then sobbing and looked like he might throw up. He went hands down on the ground and let his forehead press against the dirt.
Charlie ran down the slope, sliding and wide-stepping his way down the rocky grass and mud, and ended up in the dirt with Alex, shaking his shoulders and asking him to please look up.