Act 1: Beating Heart
Segment 3: A Glorious Arms Race
Chapter 3-11: Like Sand in the Hands
"Professor Mackenzie!" A grad student rushed down the hall to Brian's office. He wasn't there. "Where could he be?" he wondered, glancing at his phone. "His meeting should have ended fifteen minutes ago! Ah, this is bad, this is bad…" he muttered, pacing back and forth.
The grad student's head whipped up at the sound of footsteps. "Professor!" he yelled.
"Xiaorue, you seem agitated. What's wrong?" Brian asked.
"You've got to come! Please, follow me!" Xiaorue took off back in the direction he'd come, towards the grad students' lab room.
"Oh no. Not again?" Brian's heart sank. They couldn't afford another outage so soon. They were just about recovered from the previous incident, and were about to deploy back to the university's internal servers. They could not afford losing the backup data in Koto.
"It's definitely happening again!" Xiaorue panicked. They burst into the lab. The monitoring dashboards on the wall were littered with warnings and alerts. Grad students were distraught, staring at charts, graphs, code lines, everything. One of them was sobbing in a corner.
"All that work, just for this…" she moaned. Her desk was covered in bottles of tea and other foodstuffs. She had clearly been pushing herself a lot over the spring break. "Why us?" she cried.
Brian looked up at the monitoring board. Their backup control plane was apparently in critical state, with a third of their nodes dropped out. Two students were furiously tapping away and looking through documentation for some hope to be able to recover it. His shoulders fell, and he collapsed into a spare chair. This was not a good Friday night. Nobody was supposed to be working on this at this hour. They weren't supposed to be working on this at all.
He closed his eyes. He could imagine the Dean's questions already. How would he respond? He might lose his working contract over this. His nine grad students would certainly lose their projects, all of them, at this rate. How would he make it up to them?
He had no answers for any of it, just grief and frustration.
One of the students looked up and sighed. "And now the control plane is trying to make up for dying nodes," he remarked, as the cluster node count marched up and bumped into its autoscaling ceiling. "Just great."
Brian squinted. "Guys?" He pointed at a monitoring table. "What the hell is that?" Amongst the control plane nodes were hostnames they didn't recognize.
The students stared at the foreign domain. They had no idea what the "dwyg" subdomain was supposed to be, or where it had come from. They looked at each other.
Brian's foot rose and fell repeatedly, like he was thumping out a fast beat. "Nobody made a misconfiguration, right?" Xiaorue gave him a look. The timbre of his voice was far more strained than he'd ever heard from the professor. The rest of the grad students rushed to figure out if someone had. They browsed through piles of git commit history, Vault transactions, MongoDB document versions. Nobody in the team seemed to have made the change. But there they were, sitting in their inventory, altered at some point by something earlier today. When Xiaorue checked the author, there was only a random-looking string of hexadecimal. Even the commit message was random hexadecimal. He ran it through various decryptions just to check if it made sense.
Nothing sensible returned.
Brian buried his face in his hands. It was just like the last corruption in Prometheus 2, except this time, it was going to destroy their whole system. A panel lit up, indicating that their main SQL database had lost its primary and was switching to backup.
"Are we at least keeping an audit log of this stuff, guys?"
Xiaorue nodded. "At least we have that, on the university server."
Brian chuckled. So at least they would have some evidence that it wasn't their own mistake. But it hardly mattered when they couldn't trace who it was that was targeting them. He could feel the clock ticking away on his time at Waseda.
Another alert popped up, flashing too many connections to the database. Xiaorue was stunned. Where were these connection requests coming from? The DB's CPU usage shot upward. He went to check what was happening. "Who's writing all this data to the DB?!" he exclaimed. It was all encrypted.
Then, all of a sudden, alerts faded out one by one, as node lines disappeared. Charts fell to zero and flatlined. Connections, running threads, inserts, deletions, map reduces, all of them. Xiaorue desperately tapped in to tunnel to the DB nodes. They immediately bounced, saying that the nodes were unreachable. He went to the hardware management screens to see if the disks at least still had data on them.
They had been formatted.
Brian looked up as a heavy sigh went around the room. He hung his head in shame. "Everyone… feel free to go home. I'll figure this out tomorrow. Please." He stared at the floor as the sound of footsteps passing by dwindled and came to a halt. When he looked back up, everyone had left. He stared intently at the quiet monitoring boards.
The post-mortem would not be pleasant. He snorted. It might as well be a post-mortem for his career.