Day 12: Mid Morning, A West Coast, US City.
“Can anyone find a way to stop that signal. We need to have some sort of control here!” George pushed back his chair and stood with his hands on his hips and glared at the wall screen. He turned to the nearest tech who sat frozen staring at his screen and various data fields displayed and faster and faster changes.
“Is everything down?” The tech nodded absently then realised who had spoken to him and looked up at his boss. Tears tracked slowly down across his cheeks, “yes sir, everything’s down, but it, … it’s not anything I’ve seen before. They haven’t destroyed our walls or our signals, they’re still there! It’s as if they’ve somehow used our signals, all of them, as the carrier wave for their data transmission!” The tech glanced back at his screen and then back to George, “It’s beautiful sir, truly beautiful. I would gladly spend the rest of my life studying this and learning how to replicate it!”
George frowned and looked at the mans’ screen and it’s numbers moving like water through the data fields. “You’re on son!” George scanned the room, found Sloan and motioned her over, then turned to the tech officer. “Sorry your name?” “Ford sir …” George frowned again, “Updike sir, Ford Updike, your Tech Liaison sir.”
George nodded, “Right Sloan, get Prefect here whatever he needs to do whatever he needs to do to this Incarna signal so we can crack it!” Sloan smirked at the reference then gave Ford her very serious look and walked around to his work station. She checked over his setting and then reached to his keyboard and pressed the esc key.
The room went silent and the wall screen began it’s restart sequence. Sloan nodded to George and gave Ford a smile. “With me ten minutes!” and she walked off back across the room to where she had been conferencing before George called her over. George turned back to Updike and tilting his head waited for Ford to explain. “… because it’s a carrier wave utility signal sir all we need to do is conduct a system wide restart but with different parameters and the carrier wave will have to adapt to our new firewall frequency mix. Our firewall systems do this randomly throughout the day so any probes or attacks on us can’t propagate through known structures.” He paused and grimaced as he read over the new data stream building as the system came back up to full functionality again.
“What we’ll now be able to see is how adaptive their carrier wave algorithm is.” George turned back to his desk and picked up the ePad with Gordon and Susan’s analysis still being displayed. “Would this help?” and he handed it to Ford. His face lit up and a broad grin slowly spread from ear to ear. It was one of those narrow faces where the ears tried to balance this out by protruding further from the head than was usual and which usually landed the owner of such ears with the epithet of Radar.
“It’s Max Parrish!” and he started laughing. “It’s Max fucking Parrish! I should’ve known it!” Ford turned to his work station and his hands flew across the keyboard. “I know this work sir, I did my PhD on Parrish’s Biologica Paradigm for Self Replicating Programs!”
George let the lad run with his enthusiasm. He knew the type well. An Aspergers spectrum personality who could loose himself for hours in whatever it was had taken his attention. Not always pioneers especially after they had reached their thirties but essential for his kind of operation.
“Yes here it is.” and Ford pointed to a window he’d brought up on his screen which now displayed the data fields in a visual form. Ford pointed at one of the very symmetrical lines. “This represents the Incarna carrier wave effect. You can see by the waves amplitude and period that it carries huge amounts of data.” He indicated another flickering line with a less obvious pattern. “This is the Gordon Effect you just showed me. It’s a Parrish search program called Fungus!”
George just stared at the screen. This phase of the explanation from a Tech was always painful for him but he always made himself ride it out so he could then see the patterns from which he would derive the ‘Great Answer’.
Parrish reasoned that using the word virus to describe computer attack software indicated to a whole family of programs. So he looked at the methods of reproduction in the biological world and created algorithms modeled on these different methods.”
Ford barely paused for breath, “This is a Fungus program. Parrish created small units of code that he called spores and just released them into a system or in this case the entire internet. They’re moved around randomly by the eddies of pressure from data transmission itself. Each spore responds to where it ends up according to how data rich the environment much the same as a fungus spore can only grow in the right environment!”
George nodded he had it now and jumped in, “Sorry Ford, but do the spores coalesce to form larger units of code or grow from using the nutrient data in their environment?” Ford looked up quickly in slight shock. He wasn’t used to being interrupted mid description. He smiled, “the latter sir and they do it so gradually that any software designed to detect malware of any sort, itself becomes recruited by the growing Fungus.
George had an image of fungal mycelium growing through Susan’s garden that she’d shown him once. “Everyone tends to think only mushrooms or the mould on fruit of bread but thats just the fruit of the fungus. The body of it are these minute mycelium fibres.
“So in a healthy operating system Parrish’s Fungus grows through it and makes it more efficient the way soil is made healthier!” Ford looked up again and gave his boss his big grin!
“What does Parrish get from this?” asked George. Ford chuckled, “The Fungus then produces it’s own spores and these contain information about the operating system it has grown into. He has harvesting programs that collect the 'mushrooms' as he calls them and then he gleans whatever data has been collected.” Ford shook his head as he became distracted by changes in the flow of data across his screen.
He pointed at the field that represented the Parrish Fungus program. “It’s not very specific and yields huge quantities of mostly useless data so nobody really ever did much with it." He paused and peered again at a data field. "Someone has though because this is specific to our systems in the way that each species of Fungi needs a specific host or environment." He pointed at the way the data field was now fluctuating. "Sir I reckon this has been written specificsally for our systems. Parrish has been eavesdropping on us sir!”
George humphed at Ford as if that was nothing new. He reached down and pointed at the Incarna display, “Is this Parrish as well then?”
“No sir, I’ve no idea what this Incarna signal is or where it’s come from, but I will!” Ford began typing instructions and up came new data fields, he whistled. "This one shows some sort of activity acting like a background radiation field. The coding packets are minute compared to the fungus program." Another datra field showed an exponential curve. He pointed to it. “This so called Incarna carrier wave has begun to infiltrate the firewall sir, it will take 33 minutes to reset and take over again.
George stared at Ford, “You must be joking, 33 minutes!”