Chapter 29: Replicative Phrasing

"A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arise from words."

-Edmund Burke

Going from a simple interface with a limited set of commands to the full interface was what I usually saw when I got my electronic tendrils properly into any given computer system, so I reflexively opened my full attention to whatever IO was going on. It was like stepping from a sound-isolated room into the frontlines of any major ground conflict and damn near pinned my metaphorical ears back but I could just barely take it. Plenty was coming in…as you'd imagine…but nothing was going out again. Yup, the relay was 'down'.

"And it IS in operational mode. Except still discarding all data that's not in the 'correct' transmission format."

Simplest thing in the world. I had a nice clean high-bandwidth root-access channel, and the file that was growing at a shocking rate was the next thing that caught my eyes, squinted as they were to discern useful patterns through the profusion of signals. A log of the messages queued for retransmission? When precisely had the relay gotten infected? If I could just get a timestamp, I could have some idea of when the little bastard was converted. I usually tried to let the boy know what I was up to, even if he didn't quite get it, because nobody liked waiting in ignorance.

"My god, the backlog of retransmits is…"

Reading a magazine versus being slapped in the face by an unabridged dictionary was the best way I could think of to describe what happened when I tried to open that file. I slammed a hardware interlock on the channel down to a few thousand bytes a second and tried to regain my composure, throwing the image's test to one side and the pencil to the other and letting my hair assume the finger-in-light-socket-look that the rest of me was feeling. I put my face in those oh-so-young hands and took a moment before having my image stare out through the display at Jerome.

"Even the log file is too big for me to open. I WAS going to dump a copy of the current software, retranslate it on the fly, erase it on the relay, and do a hot load…"

….about half of which probably just went over Jerome's head.

("Pretend I got that. There sounds like there's a but.")

"There's a huge but. I don't have that much storage space on here. Not with me in here. I take up a lot of space."

At one point I'd sat down and calculated the difference in storage capacity between another theroretical Pyro with the same hardware and the same minus-me software, and come up with a figure that was a little surprising. On one level, it was flattering that what fit in a couple pounds of organic matter took a lot more digital space to replicate, on another it was vaguely unnerving to know precisely the bounds of my soul in terms of bytes.

"You don't understand just how big a scale this is, because it's all 'just' computers. But the buffers are big enough that there's messages from all over the solar system for the past few DAYS in local storage. I can probably use them as temporary space, but if there's any kind of power outage they're going to be shuttling techs in from Earth for months to clean up the mess."

("Do you have to completely reload it? It's language-scrambled, sure, but can't you…")

Jerome paused for a moment to collect his thoughts and I waited patiently, gradually opening back up that channel again to see if I couldn't dig around for some useful digital forensic data. The last couple entries in the transmit log ought to be particularly interesting…that mystery wide-band out toward Pluto and the botched update. If our saboteur was stupid, it would be sent out as soon as it was received, with a high priority as befitted a purely internal message. If our saboteur was smart, it could've been entered at any point…but with the checksum of the transmission I could at least pattern-match against the logs of incoming data. If they hadn't been purged. Or overflowed.

("It sounds hard and risky. Can you put a translator on both ends? Translate all inputs into the proper language, translate all outputs back into whatever they should be?")

I pointed my finger at him and opened my mouth to tell him what a bad idea it was, but it wasn't a bad idea.

"Assuming I flip the flags back, you mean. And for good measure, put a comparison logic segment before the translator…if anything coming in is recognized as syntactically correct by the corrupted core logic, meaning it's in my language, blow the fuck out of the broadcasting ship and send up the alarm."

It really wasn't a bad idea. I was sure the throbbing in my temples was just the armor monitoring sensors, or the reactor fuel system, or something in the EM warfare suite running hotter than usual. Or maybe it was just psychosomatic. I could hear Dravis now, though. "And you thought it best to pass the solar system's message traffic through a known compromised system which may exhibit further aberrant behavior at any time?"

("There's another but, isn't there?")

I sighed and nodded, shrugging my shoulders helplessly.

"It'd work. But Sammy would flip his shit. I'm going to have to do a decoder stage on the relay anyway to copy the existing programming through to those buffers."

("If we break the relay, Sam's going to flip his shit anyway.")

"If we fix it, he's going to flip his shit that we didn't fix it sooner. If you're willing to stake success on us not having shot anything important back there."

("We broke the thing tourists pay to see and that PTMC would need to make another planetary-scale hole. Is that important enough?")

When he put it like that…

"I saved the gun camera films. You know there was nothing in our contract specifying media silence upon completion, right?"

Yeah, I'd have to data-dump and sell short as we fled the solar system, but if I could convert the payment into tradeable goods or supplies…hell, if I could even use it to cache something more. Jerome didn't know, and wouldn't unless one of his little side projects resulted in a kid he acknowledged or we had to go into hiding, but there were supply caches all the hell over the system that would make sure a Corbell who knew about them would have access to resources for survival. Data, funds, supplies, weapons, accounts and passwords, blackmail material that was juicy enough to be useful at least a generation or two later in the case they didn't get opened for some time.

("Contingency plans for everything. Wonder what would have happened if we hadn't gotten along like a fuse and a match?")

"If you broke my heart, you mean, back then? Dated for a while, dumped me? Well, if we got along indifferently enough that it was an option, nothing."

I could and occasionally did evade a direct question. Despite the reflexive 'you'd probably be dead', or the inevitable urge to arrange the mysterious disappearance of whatever floozy he'd been swayed by, I would still have cared enough about him not to do more than have her mistakenly arrested for some heinous list of crimes and detained for interrogation for a few days .I still couldn't figure out why or precisely where I'd fallen so hard, but he was the glue that held my pieces together. Even though we were both coming unglued again as this stretched on.

"BUT, yes, it's your call on this."

("There's nothing I love more than making decisions I know almost nothing about. Fuck this sabotage, I don't want to leave anything in place. See if you can get origin data before you change anything, just in case. I gotta think there's enough spare power capacity between space and the Sun to run something like this relay for a little bit longer.")

"I'll get right on it, boss. There is a large possibility that I may find jack and shit, with jack having left the system."

I was already looking. The trick would be to let the relay's systems handle file access instead of reflexively reaching for it myself—the difference between watching the news and actually getting the facts. Hopefully the relay lied less. A little legwork…

("I don't see how if it came through here you couldn't find traces.")

"Did somebody request Professor Jenny?"

("Dear god no! I'm curious but I'm juggling so much right now. Tell me whatever's operationally relevant, and we'll save the 'how' for theoretical free time.")

I was a little disappointed but had the schoolgirl shrug and vanish in favor of something more librarian-esque.

"Short version, I could make it hard but not impossible if this was recent. If it was sent a while back, and waiting for a particular trigger—like I think we talked about a while ago—hard to say. I can at least find out how it got here and when, and maybe something about that mysterious Charon burst."

I hoped. It was straightforward enough to chunk the outgoing log down into bite-sized pieces and peer at them. I could see the transmission to Charon as the last one that'd been sent via the relay itself instead of through the PTMC software making it tick, and it didn't look good at all.

"Real short version, fuck fuck fuckity fuck. Get this."

I blanked out the librarian and the view of the stationary borehole from Jerome's helmet and threw up what I could decipher. It was in my language outgoing, natch, but the content was just a list of ships, their registration information, and their unique fingerprint for sensor-detectable emissions. What worried me was three of the ships on that list—a last-gen UEG fighter registered to a Mr. St. Jon, a obsolete destroyer registered to a Captain Garcia at an electronic mail depository in the Belt, and II-JNY-01 registered to Uncivil War down on Earth in a shipping container with all the comforts of home that neither of us could ever go back to, a J. Corbell listed as pilot. I highlighted the entries in blinking blue.

("And this was beamed out to the Pluto area? That's all the mercs that Dravis interviewed, I think, because we're last on the list. Shit.")

"You're damn right, 'shit'. Somebody knows we're on the case. Probably our saboteur. There must've been something in this package to set up a dead-man's switch. Whether or not PTMC got through to fix the issue or blow up the relay, the first PTMC ship in range trying to get in would've triggered it. So now something out there knows what forces are in play to respond to their crisis."

("So our worm thinks that some odd one-off is trying to hold down an entire solar system of trouble? Doesn't that make them underestimate us?")

"And that's about what I like to have happen. I just wonder how that data got out, because if we've got a worm in PTMC then we're….I'd say we're more fucked but at this point there's not really much possible along those lines."

And now I had yet more digging to do. The logic that spewed out the transmission in the first place was easy enough to trace, since the outbound log had the altered transmission parameters to use. Nothing in the code itself suggested any trace to origin…except the way it was built. And I finally saw how it'd even gotten the data, a stupidity which made me show up on the helmet just to slap my forehead.

("Just once today I'd like to see you find something that made you happy.")

"The fucker pulled our file, then updated the HR system to reflect that he'd talked with us about this assignment, and probably some sort of personal assessment. Because that's something that other personnel managers would need to know about if we applied for work at some other location….so it naturally sent it out to the relay for side-band database updates. All this fucking filter does is catch HR updates, collect them, and spray them out to a preset set of coordinates on the next attempt at a maintenance access."

Jerome sighed heavily and closed his eyes for a moment, at least that was my best guess.

("That's almost elegant. Nothing on the second attempt, of course, because then the warning's already been given.")

"And we nearly get our poor dumb asses roasted because there's no fucking manual for the menus."

I heard a stifled sporfle from the boy that dissolved into quiet chuckling.

("I never, never, ever, thought I'd hear you admit that instructional materials were any more useful than toilet paper.")

The librarian-me grimaced at him and flipped the bird.

"A well-designed system ought to be intuitively obvious. A poorly designed system requires time, experimentation, or readily available assistance to get things done. I still stand by that. This is well-designed, and to me points a number of potential fingers to our saboteur being within PTMC, highly placed enough to know their operations."

("Knows their software too, but we knew that. What else?")

The question that was rapidly proving to be the bane of my fucking day. I threw up an image of a spinning drone as a sort of hourglass equivalent, small and flat so he didn't mistake it for an actual hostile, and got back to getting my hands dirty. I knew the coordinate system, or at least it was simple enough to feed through my navigational 'memory' and find out what had been there at that time. Sure enough, the beam spread would've reached Charon and Pluto and points beyond with enough oomph to be easily read by anything modern enough to talk to the relay at all. That wasn't unexpected, so I closed the outgoing log and went for the received log, which was growing by leaps and bounds. Eyes tight shut, I stuck my fingers in and searched for anything that felt like a PTMC update. Only one entry floated to the surface and I grabbed it and pulled it out of what came across as a roaring waterfall, far enough to see the data that came with it. The metaphors kept getting switched around on me, and I always wound up feeling like a triathlon competitor when I was done with whatever system I was into. Somewhere there was a glitch, but trying to fix it—worse, having some unclueful external tech bit-bang on it—was just as great an idea as performing brain surgery on yourself with nothing more than a drill and a hand mirror.

"Okay, the transmission did go out where Dravis claimed, and would've been easily readable. Better still, that system update came in via the normal authentication channels—straight from fucking Shiva."

It wasn't fair, I was already paranoid enough when left to my own devices.

("I was just thinking that our directive gave us authority to blow away Shiva and claim it was infected. I wrote it off as a bad idea and irresponsible abuse of power.")

"Yes, and you're a goodie two shoes. Comparatively. Don't even start."

("Don't tell me you seriously think it's a good idea, then. We're not having that discussion.")

"And if that's the problem? It came THROUGH Shiva, sure, but who actually wrote it? Some compromised contractor Earthside? A hijacked terminal somewhere in a lunar colony, codebase altered after the minimum-wage syntactic sugar-daddy knocked off for the day?"

That was how I'd have done it. In the list of shit I wanted to look up when subspace commo was up and running again, I added 'IT patch coding: LC-7?" If they outsourced their edits to whoever would do it the cheapest, well, you had to pass certain tests to live in a lunar colony, and you HAD to have a job. The air didn't exactly pay for itself. Remotely working on somebody else's codebase in your pajamas did have a certain appeal to a certain demographic. And since the UEG's response would be to assume that the entire colony was compromised—after drones probably took out their dropship—having all the evidence go up in primaries and hard radiation would be a great way to cover a trail.

("I can't really imagine our saboteur as some underpaid coder working for a hot-dog-and-macaroni budget.")

"Well, assuming it's not somebody working THROUGH that cutout or system. The other options are either somebody outside this internal system with a real disturbing knowledge of PTMC software and procedures…or somebody inside PTMC itself. And that's where the problem comes in."

With the high-profile waves he'd been making…that had been freaking me out since the beginning…this was where one of those other enemies came in. That I'd been trying to warn him about. But I was kind and didn't explicitly mention it.

("I hate it when your paranoia is justified.")

"And how often is that again?"

("….Most of the time.")

I grinned at him and went back to digging around.

"Anything else you want me to try to find out?"

("Anything else you think you would need to know? …That's immediately relevant?")

There went my plan of harvesting banking details, passwords, blackmail materials, nifty little secrets or stashes, the usual collateral from a data dive. Old habits died hard. Nevertheless, I went through the transmission backlog looking for anything that mentioned us, only to find something with our callsign and directive reference as the address. I fished it out and let our access pull it up.

"This is strange, there's something from Dravis for us. Tagged not long after we last talked to him and with a set of transmit flags that indicate it was too sensitive for a message torpedo."

Like he'd have known exactly where to launch the torpedo…and it wouldn't've survived the trip around the sun, they didn't have that much fuel and mostly ran ballistic.

"'MD-1032, please note that our facility manifest lists an amply-armed command station and bore driller in the Mercury core station. Exercise caution to avoid damage.'"

("To us or IT?")

"Please, boss, can I nuke Shiva now?"

("Maybe later, dear, if you're good. Would you be able to detect any sign of tampering?")

Would I…yeah, just have the relay beam a copy of all incoming and outgoing traffic to my coded channel, then sort through it at my leisure looking for anything that didn't add up. I'd seen short-sleeved shirts fired out of air cannons at sporting events, but this would be a lot more like phone books fired out of an actual cannon. Complete with the wad and powder and friction igniting the pulp for that lovely fireball effect. Not what you wanted to aim at a crowd, at least not most days. His faith in me was touching but there were times there was no fucking way I could justify it.

"You're standing at the bottom of a waterfall, somebody's playing fire hoses on your front and back, and you're trying to detect an eyedropper of food coloring that may or may not even be blue anyway. My original idea of getting some sort of ongoing tap on this assumed that our saboteur was here to inject that patch, not that it sprang forth fully-formed from some sparky's department internally."

Dawning comprehension.

("And why not just put the food coloring in the water somewhere upstream? Or in the fire truck, I guess?")

"It's the place that's hardest to find if you don't know anything upstream is wrong. I think you're getting it."

("All right, so what more can you do here before we make Sammy flip his shit?")

What could I do? What couldn't I do! Aside from a number of obvious options.

"Not much that's relevant. I guess I'm ready for the boring part if you still want to give the goahead."

("Yeah, let's test this process on something non-critical like a unique system comm relay before we try it anywhere IMPORTANT, like an outmoded Venus processing station. No pressure, babe.")

I wasn't going to let him get away with anywhere near that degree of suppressed amusement.

"Hey, if I fuck this one up, it's your ass in the hotseat explaining what you did, what you thought you did, why you thought it'd work, and what went wrong…and without dragging me into it. No pressure, darling…but at least we're safe in a hole in the ground if it all goes pear-shaped. Now shaddup and let me concentrate."

It felt like the entire mission was beginning to shake down into some semblance of sanity after all the talking, after all the plans changing, after all the drama and trauma. Building the translator stage was oddly involving but didn't require much thought beyond where to place the initial code blocks. In the same ways that assembling playing card sculptures went best when you tuned out and trusted your hands and judgment, once I'd figured out the structure I stopped monitoring most of the relay data that was streaming across the channel and focused on Jerome's breathing while letting the back of my mind steer the autonomous routines that were embedded in the electronic warfare bits. There was no shortage of free space to work in, and it was with a sudden mental start that I realized the translator stage was complete and had run out of my knowledge of my ex-language to use.

"Well, you're going to shut down the relay now. Good luck, Mister Corbell."

Writing the message for rebroadcast was easy enough when you spoke the language, and the software didn't care exactly what it sent out. I had the ear of everything in the system that was trying to time-slice into the subspace modulations the relay was multiplexing…and it was a heady moment. All the quotes, all the things I could say and be heard, just the once, by everybody listening. Still, Earth was in tatters, the interplanetary logistic pipeline was broken and spewing figurative inefficiency across known space, the UEG was probably on a bit of a hair trigger, and this would be part of history. "Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto!" wouldn't be well-received.

With a sigh, I shut down the receiving and transmission stages with a simple unscheduled maintenance notice, citing an anticipated return-to-service time of a depressingly normal few minutes from now. There wasn't a number to call for status updates, not really, so I listed 867-5309 with Shiva's prefix. With any luck that would be some receptionist who was just about to no longer have much free time. And, dammit, it was a karmic imperative that I sign my name SOMEWHERE in the entire affair.

"Out of all the things I could have said….you owe me big. Nubile young people of unspecified gender polishing and waxing me, for starters."

I echoed the message to his view, heard him laugh, cough, and moderate the laugh, and went back to ignoring him for a bit. The buffers were clear, and the system had brought itself down to a basic operating system level enough that the file systems still were clean. I ran all transmitters up to half-power, cracking my knuckles before starting work, and told the entire install to copy itself through that decoding stage and to temporary storage in the buffers. Yeah, I had my arms around the entire process, but it was more out of foolish optimism that I could catch any overflow than from any serious expectation of being able to contain damage. As the transfer began to progress in a semi-orderly fashion I was able to echo a progress bar to Jerome. It was going….slowly, but not terribly so. Nevertheless I didn't want to divert any attention away to generate any animated graphics for his sake.

"Mommy's riding the white tiger, but I think I can handle it. …Oh, and you can talk again."

("If there's anything I can do to support your heroine habit?")

"I'll let you know. I'm not going to try to change anything in the copy process, it'll keep until after we're done with this stage."

Speaking of things I couldn't do…by the time I could catch the problem phrases, fix them, and spew them back out, they'd be a few encyclopedia volumes of data behind and hilariously out of place. Better to let it verbally shit itself until it was done, then try to clean up a little.

("If I'm just going to be sitting here, will you deflate?")

Took me a moment to process that. Like a good girl I let go, almost unlatching the canopy by long habit before catching myself in horror. Sure, the helmet and suit would hold air, but! I decided not to mention it out of a sense of both guilt and preoccupation. Jerome stretched every muscle and limb he could, making it a little difficult to ignore the control inputs.

"If you're going to wiggle, at least hit the damn hardware lockout, this is not the time to be randomly caressing me."

He reached back behind his head, wincing, and flipped a toggle positioned where nothing could hit it by accident and I sighed in relief, once again able to focus.

"It's not that I mind, it's just that I don't really want to see you explain to Dravis that the relay needs a complete firmware reload because you couldn't keep your hands off your secretary."