Walking back to his class, Malcolm could not avoid wondering whether he had just been duped into making a promise without nothing in return, or the principal would actually keep his word.
Well, Malcolm thought, as long as he could isolate himself with his computer, Professor Stone could ramble on as long as she wanted. Meanwhile, he had already decided he would give the principal a month. If, on the penultimate Tuesday of December, he had still heard nothing from him, he would go to his office and ask him personally. Evasive answers would mean the principal never had any intention to keep his word, and therefore, Malcolm would be free from the obligation to keep his own.
After a Math class where Malcolm learned a little more about goniometry than he knew from his experiments with a 3D engine, a break where he overheard the cafeteria lady long for her past days as a lion tamer, and an Electronics class that was virtually indistinguishable from a Math class except for the formulas being taught, the school day was over.
Walking home, Malcolm already knew what would keep him busy the following days. The first time he had examined Kilokahn's source code he had gotten nowhere, because he did not know what to look for, but now he had a trace: a fixed IP address, identifying a system in Alaska Kilokahn would connect to every time he animated a Megavirus monster.
Malcolm started his search after having a microwaved lunch at his computer. The address itself never appeared in the source, but there was a variable called "address". One of the functions using it calculated four numbers, forming that very address, by reading predetermined characters from an array of error strings and performing various operations on them. This was a code obfuscation trick Malcolm had learned from his father, so it was expected to find it in a program written by his father himself.
By searching calls to that function, he discovered that Kilokahn and the remote system would exchange messages in the Modbus protocol, used in automation to communicate with more devices using the same line. The first message was the ASCII string "KILOKAHN" followed by the current Unix time, encrypted by using the executable itself as an XOR table. Only after receiving it, the remote system would send back the string "HA82REMODELING80", XORed with a reversed version of the first message, which Kilokahn would interpret as an authorization to proceed.
Kilokahn would then upload an ILBM picture file, which would be used as an encryption key and an identifier for all following messages in that session. Kilokahn's natural language production routines would then refer collectively to those messages with the code name "Megavirus monster".
"Oh, Kilokahn. It's no use to hide information from me. That only makes me more eager to get it." thought Malcolm.
A special kind of excitement started building up inside him: a familiar, enjoyable sensation he experienced every time he started to really understand the inner workings of something that fascinated him.
Eager to continue, he went on to discover what would happen next, and that's when things got weirder. Every subsequent message would do nothing but write certain values into certain memory addresses of the remote system, but the comments implied that the code was doing much more. Without even scrolling the page of his text editor, he could read entries like:
/ The Planck constant interferes with attempts to change the gravitational constant
/ so we temporarily set it to zero
and:
/ We know the speed of light in a vacuum is constant in three dimensions.
/ Fortunately, this is not true in the other twenty-three.
/ NOTE: CHANGING THE VALUE OF C LEADS TO PROBLEMS WITH GPS SATELLITES - USE WITH CAUTION
This could not be a joke: by now, Malcolm was used to see Kilokahn do things that should not be possible, but merely writing numbers into the RAM of another computer would not break physical laws... unless that computer controlled one or more devices, the nature of which he could not even imagine, while those numbers were actually commands for those devices. They, not Kilokahn, would produce those effects. This meant Kilokahn was merely a user interface, while the "digital domain" was actually a visual metaphor of what was really going on, rendered by the remote system.
There was only one reason, Malcolm inferred, to have an artificial intelligence as a user interface: the equipment Kilokahn controlled was so complicated that a single person would never be able to use it directly, and a team would not be sufficiently coordinated.
"What are you working on, dad?" Malcolm said to himself.
Now Malcolm knew enough to perform a more advanced test: simulate a Kilokahn connection... without Kilokahn.
He set up his infiltration tool with the appropriate parameters:
Service type: Raw TCP/IP
Server: 137 . 229 . 21 . 86
First, he had to compose his message. With that, he would form a Modbus frame, which would become the data part of the TCP datagram. In turn, that would be encapsulated into an IP datagram.
Malcolm sent the first message, to initiate the connection. The system in Alaska responded as expected, so Malcolm uploaded one of his drawings. He then composed a message which, according to the source code, would create a positron-electron pair out of the vacuum and provide it with enough energy to boost it apart. He did not know what he would see after sending it, but next few seconds were a sore disappointment. All that happened, far from being a physically impossible event, was a timeout error and a disconnection.
Malcolm stared at the screen, feeling a mix of disbelief and frustration.
He had believed. For a couple of minutes, he had wanted to believe he would do something extraordinary, and now, a simple timeout error had defeated him. He screamed his rage out, a harsh, primitive scream.
After regaining his composure, he searched the string "timeout" through the source code. What he found was, in retrospect, so simple and obvious... that it was no wonder he had missed it. Messages and responses were supposed to follow one another far more quickly than any human could think them up, in order to prevent the very kind of attack he had attempted.
Yes, there was a reason why his father was working on an artificial intelligence for the Navy, while he, instead, was still in high school.
Not all was lost. There was another way for Malcolm to obtain the information he wanted... a different, potentially more dangerous way. But danger did not matter to him, because the fruits of the eventual success would be much greater.
With that, he loaded the file specs . txt and resumed his editing.