The Passage (59 page)
Authors: David Poyer
S
TARING up at the grooved steel, Hank Shrobo wiped his hands on his shorts. Wet hands were dangerous, the guys told him. Could make the bar slip. Interesting how a small amount of moisture increased the coefficient of friction, while more lowered it. Without a word, the man behind him handed him a piece of rosin.
TARING up at the grooved steel, Hank Shrobo wiped his hands on his shorts. Wet hands were dangerous, the guys told him. Could make the bar slip. Interesting how a small amount of moisture increased the coefficient of friction, while more lowered it. Without a word, the man behind him handed him a piece of rosin.
“Okay, how much?” Shrobo asked him.
Iron clanked. “Try her with this. Hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Too heavy. I've never done that much before.”
“I'll safe for you. You were pumping a hundred and forty yesterday. You been at this a while; you ought to be scaling up. Come on, give it a try. Just remember, don't try this without a spotter, okay? Specially when the ship's rolling.”
He stared up at Williams's inverted face, then muttered, “All right.” He reached up and got his hands set, then yanked the weight off the stands.
It came down hard, almost crushing his chest before he got his arms set and started pushing back. To his surprise, it went up. Not easily, but it rose as his muscles strained. His elbows locked and he steadied it above his clenched teeth, arms trembling.
“Relax your jaw; that doesn't help you lift. Go on, do a few reps. Till it hurts. You got to tear them muscle fibers; then your body fixes them twice as strong. Go on ⦠. That's good, another ⦠. Okay, I got it.” Williams's strong hands closed like leather gloves over his and guided the bar back into place on the rests. “Take a break.”
Panting, he sat up, and the exercise room's stark white walls, the well-used Nautilus machine, the racks of weights in welded brackets along the bulkheads, all returned to vertical. Others worked in tense self-absorption on the inclined board and the treadmill, and the punching bag made a steady machinelike rattle. He
knew their names now, or at least the nicknames they went by among themselves as they grunted under masses of iron: Hemmie, Lightbulb, Baby J. Williams had introduced him, and although he felt inadequate around them, weak and pale beside their swelling chests and dark massive arms, they seemed to accept him.
knew their names now, or at least the nicknames they went by among themselves as they grunted under masses of iron: Hemmie, Lightbulb, Baby J. Williams had introduced him, and although he felt inadequate around them, weak and pale beside their swelling chests and dark massive arms, they seemed to accept him.
“How'd I do?”
“Real good, Doc.” Williams squatted in boxing shorts and Nikes and poked him painfully. “You know, you getting some development. Keep this up when you get back shoreside and you'll be more comfortable walking around in that body of yours.”
“I never felt uncomfortable.”
“I know, I know. Okay, let's grab a shower, see if any of the guys want to hit the beach.”
Â
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AS he pivoted slowly under the hot water, his mind turned, as it did almost every waking minute and most sleeping minutes, too, to the problem at hand.
Since his last discussion with the captain and the assembled officers, he and Williams and Dawson and the other DSs and ETs had been full-time on the Crud. Or at least they'd started off full-time. But gradually, the others had dropped behind as he entered a shadowy forest of theoretics and speculation. First the chiefs, then the others had made excuses or found something else to do, until finally only Matt Williams was with him.
He was more and more impressed with Williams. The slowspoken petty officer had no real education beyond the rather sketchy Navy data systems training, but he made up for it with an uncanny insight into programming. He wrote the search routines that Shrobo sketched out directly in assembly language, skipping the CMS-2 compiler. That wasn't so extraordinary. He had several people fluent in ULTRA-32 back at Vartech. But then he'd seen the kid stare, tranced, at the rippling, winking lights on the face of the computer and push the stop button at the exact instant the operating system handed off to the navigational module. He'd realized in that stunned second that he'd seen a human being read machine language in real time. Still, he reassured himself, it was more of a trick, like being able to multiply large sums in your head, than a valid intellectual achievement.
Which was what he'd felt he was on the brink of in the last few days: a breakthrough, something far more radical, more fundamental, and more far-reaching than patching up Elmo to aim the missiles properly again.
Standing motionless under the hot water, he went over it all again in his mind.
A week beforeâhow long ago it seemedâhe'd first recognized that the virus operated in a five-step sequence. One: It wrote its basic program, the “infector,” to memory. Two: It “unzipped” itself to activate the hostile portion of the program, and wrote it to additional areas of operating memory. Three: Running in bursts of approximately three-hundredths of a second, so rapidly that it wasn't visible to the operator, it destroyed data by deleting portions of the existing code. Four: It replaced the erased code with randomly generated garbage, mimicking the format of the original data.
And step five, unlike any program he'd ever heard of before: It rezipped itself to the spore form and wrote the infector to several other portions of the tape, continuing the insidious process of destruction at the next reboot.
Since then, while the ship's officers had been distracted by this refugee thingâhe heard about it, but it wasn't his concern what the ship did or where it went; he had not even breathed open air for daysâhour by hour, night after night, he'd hammered at the elusive virus's structure.
But the deeper he went, the more difficult further progress became. For one thing, the UYK-7s were the first militarized thirty-two-bit machines. Unlike most computers, they used a binary logic procedure called the “1's complement.” Each bit in the original word was complemented to invert the register contents. One drawback of a 1's-complement machine was that it was possible, under certain conditions, to register a negative zero. This was an illogical thought, and computers finding themselves thinking illogical thoughts created an error condition that was very difficult to debug. The virus took advantage of this to mask itself. Not only that, it seemed to have privileges that pointed to a spawning out of the executive program. It knew the demand entrances; it used cycle stealing to move itself around.
But gradually, as day followed night, he'd crept into the initializing code. This preceded the zipped portion, and though it wasn't easy, it was possible to decipher it gradually, with patience.
And he knew now he had to. He and Williams had gotten some of the modules cleared and running in isolation. But that was only a temporary fix. They couldn't sterilize the programming and expect it to run clean for more than a few hours. They could compare code with listing, cut and patch and paste till their eyes fell out and rolled around on the deck, but as soon as they ran a data tape, the virus would emerge from one of its fiendishly chosen hiding places and reinfect, degrade, destroy.
Isolation was not the final answer.
He had to read the virus, all of it, in order to build a program that would prevent it from ever returning.
This was because his ultimate aim was to create a search string for the Crud.
A “string”, in computer jargon, was any given sequence of characters, whether instructions or numerical data. A “search” string was a program that ran through the machine like a rat-catching snake, looking for that particular sequence. If he could break and read the virus's infector, then he could write a search string that would automatically scan the contents of the computer's memory for itâlike reading the Bible with a Hi-Liter in hand, marking a given word wherever it appeared. Except that a computer could do it far more rapidly. A relatively simple search routine could rapidly locate a given string wherever it was hidden, even amid hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and insert break points to stop the program there.
And just now it occurred to him that once he had that, it would be relatively simple to add programming to delete and overwrite the virus automatically, then mark the module and line so that the DSs could patch what would now be simply a blank space in the code.
He smiled under the needling water; sometimes ideas came that way, instantaneously, from nowhere. Once you knew everything about the problem and had concentrated on it for days, answers came mysteriously, generated by some deep processing that went on whether you were awake or asleep, only lighting an occasional indicator in the high-level interface that was the conscious mind.
But the next moment, he frowned. He was getting ahead of himself. In order to write a search string, he had to be able to read the virus. And after a certain point, he couldn't. Whenever he tried to unzip it, it erased, vanished utterly as a dream, leaving only meaningless and dysfunctional nonsense where before had stood the stark inhuman beauty of machine language.
Even more unsettling, he still had no idea what the zipped code actually didâexcept for one thing.
He suspected now that what lay curled at its inmost heart, a black spore in a tightly spun shell of trick and trap and encipherment, was a 1's-complement negative-zero random-number generator, a blasphemous and demonic incantation that was the ultimate negation of all logic, all rationality, all causality, and all order.
No doubt about it, whatever twisted and evil mind had come up with this thing, it was clever.
After days of trying unsuccessfully to slip past the Crud's defenses, he'd gone back to the weight room and started walking on the treadmill. He'd walked for four straight hours. And gradually he had reverse-engineered the virus himself, redesigned it from
scratch, as if
he
was the hacker, trying not to defend but to penetrate the AN/UYK-7 and its resident programs.
scratch, as if
he
was the hacker, trying not to defend but to penetrate the AN/UYK-7 and its resident programs.
He decided that he would have built the virus as follows. The first part of the program would be an execute instruction that would trick the host computer into unzipping and running the infector. Second would be the infector proper. And the third part would be the self-eraser, the portion of code which re-spored the infector, scattered it through the host programming, then deleted the original virus. Williams, when he explained this to him, had pointed out that the first section probably also included an instruction that went immediately to the self-erasing feature if the inserting mechanism was interrupted or tampered with. That was what had frustrated their efforts to read it.
So the petty officer had helped, but Shrobo had wished more than once for someone of his own caliber to bounce ideas off of. If they hadn't been at sea, he'd have picked up a phone and called Fred Cohen at USC. But Mainhardt had warned him not to discuss
Barrett's
decreased combat capability. Anyway, the more deeply he thought his way into the problem, the less he wanted anyone else in on it. It was taking on an epic quality in his mindâa chess match against some anonymous and evil Dr. Fu Manchu, both of them battling on the frontiers of information-processing theory. If he could crack it, defeat the virus, there was a paper in it: a classy, seminal publication that would be referred to again and again for decades to come.
Barrett's
decreased combat capability. Anyway, the more deeply he thought his way into the problem, the less he wanted anyone else in on it. It was taking on an epic quality in his mindâa chess match against some anonymous and evil Dr. Fu Manchu, both of them battling on the frontiers of information-processing theory. If he could crack it, defeat the virus, there was a paper in it: a classy, seminal publication that would be referred to again and again for decades to come.
Now, still standing motionless under the shower, he suddenly realized he was thinking like an academic. Of course, he
was
an academic, but he was in business now, too. And there was more than a technical paper at stake.
was
an academic, but he was in business now, too. And there was more than a technical paper at stake.
He leaned against tin, suddenly gripped by a lightninglike premonition of the future. No modern ship or plane could fight without computers. If viruses could infect and disable them, why then scan and detection programs would have to be written, updated, and serviced.
Who better to win the contracts that were sure to be let than his own company, built on a solid theoretical foundation, combined with demonstrated Navy troubleshooting?
And then beyond that golden mountain, taking his breath away, loomed up a whole Himalaya glittering with diamonds. Military computers were a small market. But a program written to search out viruses in an AN/UYK-7 or a USQ-20 could be quickly compiled to sanitize DECs or VACs or IBMs, and there were thousands of business mainframes. If viruses could infect military systems, they could infect business applications, too. Companies could create special strains and release them into their competitor's systems, destroying
customer databases and essential information. No one could afford to be without a safeguard.
customer databases and essential information. No one could afford to be without a safeguard.
A face stuck itself through the plastic curtain, and he flinched and covered his privates. That was something he couldn't get used to, the total disregard for privacy aboard ship, men dressing and going about with members and bellies dangling obscenely. He supposed there was a sort of nudist-colony naturalness about it, but
⦠“Hey, you about ready? Thought you done gone down the drain. The guys all duded upâ”
“Oh, sorry. I was thinking. Guess I'm using too much water, too.”
“Don't sweat that; that's Miami water. Have a pool party.” Williams disappeared and Shrobo rinsed down and went out into the compartment, holding his towel carefully lest it come undone, into fifty or sixty men dressing and boasting to one another what they were going to do in town. He found his bunk and got his suit on.
“Oh
man.
Whatthefuck you wearin'?” said Hemmie, stopping.
man.
Whatthefuck you wearin'?” said Hemmie, stopping.
“My gray suit. It's the onlyâ”
“You coming with us to the Zone, you ain't wearing
that.
Come over here to our bay. Lightbulb, he's tall as you. Maybe he got something to fit you there.”
that.
Come over here to our bay. Lightbulb, he's tall as you. Maybe he got something to fit you there.”
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