Eye in the Net

An interesting stuff...

"Radhika, quickly come here! At Node 21A" said Neil, in a call he made to Radhika via his wireless handset. Some curious file had been found at Node 21A in the Computer lab of the Research, Analysis and Development(R, A&D) section of RAW.

The work of the R, A&D section of RAW was to check for new and unknown threats that might have surfaced in any corner of the Cyberspace, even including the "Deep Web", and to tackle them at their earliest, so that they may not break out as an epidemic in any or both of the two worlds- the real world and the Cyber-world. It had five networks, with a total number of fifty super-fast, high-end computers. Each network was connected to each other through a backbone consisting of twenty five mainframe computers, and at the backbone's core, there were five interconnected supercomputers. All computers of the backbone were connected in a mesh topology, while the other computers were connected to each other in star topology, which was also the pattern of arrangement for the indirectly interconnected nodal networks, connected via the backbone. The whole network was popularly nicknamed as the "Symbiote" by the agents of RAW. However, only Commander Tandon preferred to call it by its official name "RCSAN52" which was the abbreviation of "RAW Cryptanalysis Semi-Autonomous Network version 52".

"Hey Neil, what's up?" Radhika asked Neil, as she arrived there. Then she cast a casual glance on the screen of Node 21A. A terminal window was open. It displayed:

TIME ELAPSED: 00:15:39

Radhika realised that it was the terminal window displayed by their 'Brahmastra' reverse engineering tool, which till date, had never faced any failure. Whenever the Brahmastra was made to work, the work would finish within half a minute. Till date, the highest time elapsed was two minutes. What algorithm could be there so complex that the Brahmastra could not take it down even in almost sixteen minutes? Radhika was baffled.

Five years ago, RAW had undertaken a secret initiative to create the world's fastest supercomputer ever. But the calculated costs were sky-high and the Finance Minister, through the Prime Minister of India, had stated a gruesome fact: If the expenses were to be met, the President would be forced to declare a state of Financial Emergency. As a result, the Government's credibility would be at stake, as a Financial Emergency has never been previously declared in Independent India. It would raise a situation of extreme political tension throughout the country, as Government-employed officials would receive less salary than normally what they receive. The Government then cannot but topple due to the loss of confidence of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, as the Government did not command a singular majority in the Lok Sabha. Moreover, according to the Constitutional and moral obligations, the Government shall be compelled to state the reason for such a disastrous decision, thus the undertaking by RAW would no longer remain a secret. There would be no place for excuses.

It had been then just a week since Neil and Radhika had joined RAW. They came up with an ingenious idea: why not tap the power of multiple high-end computers through efficient parallel computing, rather than newly building altogether a huge beast that crunches enormous amounts of money and other resources for construction, usage and maintenance? The costs would then be surely and significantly reduced. Even the Commander personally encouraged them, and even contributed to that project. The project was called 'Project Brahma', named after the Universal Creator in Indian mythology, and the final software product was called 'Brahmastra', literally meaning 'the weapon of Brahma'. The RCSAN52 had been created in place of the huge machine that was supposed to be initially constructed, tailor-made for the Brahmastra. It was also extensible, so that it could accommodate more software suitably and that more hardware could be added to it in future. After three long years of tireless efforts put in by Neil, Radhika and the Commander himself, the Brahmastra came into being. It was very powerful in the beginning itself, and its power kept on growing, as RAW kept on adding more and more computers to the RCSAN52 network.