Antivirus (The Horde Series Book 1) (4 page)

“Well, I have to say, I’m truly impressed,” said Monroe appreciatively, casting a sour glance at his security specialist before turning back to face Kat. “That was a most convincing demonstration. You understand, Miss Hale, that we needed to ascertain the feasibility of this new technology operating correctly under less-than-controlled circumstances.”

Kat nodded, quietly breathing a sigh of relief that it had worked out as well as it had. “I understand perfectly, Mister Monroe.”

Sherrard’s voice came back through the hub, a note of concern in it. “Hey, Kat?”

“What is it, Jon?”

“Take a look at number two, will you? What do you guys make of that?”

Immediately, all eyes turned toward the monitor, which still showed all three machines clear of viruses.

“What am I looking for?” Kat asked, somewhat confused.

“You don’t see it?”

“No,” she replied. “Our board is green.”

A pause. “There’s something going on in here, Kat.”

“Jon, I don’t see anything. The read is clear. Nothing in the honeypots...” Her voice trailed off as the display suddenly blazed with colors, then went into emergency diagnostic mode. “Jon? What just happened?”

“Pull the plug!” his robotic voice suddenly screamed from the system. “Pull it! Pull it now!”

“Jon?” Kat pressed, panic rising within her.

This time, there was no answer.

“Jon!?” she asked more insistently.

Silence.

“What’s going on?” Monroe demanded, his smile gone.

Kat ignored him and threw herself into the chair, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “David! Isolate the honeypots!”

Even as she was speaking, Rivers ran around the table, manually tearing out the hard lines to the three machines.

“Jon!” she nearly screamed in frustration this time.

“Honeypots are offline!” Rivers shouted, true horror in his own voice.

“Jon, talk to me!” Kat exclaimed, pulling up several diagnostic screens, her fingers flying as she scanned the readings.

“What’s going on here?” Monroe demanded again.

“I don’t know,” Kat snapped. “Looks like something is in the system.”

“What about Mister Sherrard?”

Kat ignored the question and paused for just a moment, looking at the computer screen. The changing diagnostic readings told her all she needed to know. She spun out of her chair and ripped the wires out of the back of the hub.

“What are you doing, Kat?” Drew yelled, looking at her with a wild look in his eyes.

Kat spun back to the system and quickly powered it down. Then she sat back with a devastated sigh and stared blankly at the now-dead screen.

“Kat?” Rivers asked, his voice shaking. “What just happened?”

She shook her head.

“Kat,” he pushed, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Where’s Jon?”

She continued to stare at the dead screen. “He’s in there,” she finally whispered.

“There’s no power to the computer,” Monroe snapped angrily. “You just killed your driver!”

She shook her head again. “No, Mister Monroe,” she answered quietly. “A power outage is harmless. We’ve already tested it. He’s still in there. We just need to think this through before we go retrieve him.”

“Then what just happened?” he demanded.

She paused before answering, her voice a whisper. “It’s the Horde.”

Chapter 5

St. Peter’s Hospital, Helena, Montana:
The soft beep of the heart monitor was the only sound in the room as Jen Sherrard sat by the hospital bed where her husband lay. The official medical diagnosis was coma, but Jen knew there was more to it than that. She knew what her husband did with FutureTek and now, as he lay motionless on the hospital bed, all her arguments had come roaring back to her. She wanted to shake him, to scream at him “
See what I mean?
” But Jon would never hear her, because he wasn’t there.

“How’s he doing?” asked a soft voice from the doorway.

Jen turned her tear-stained face toward the door and forced herself to remain calm. The woman standing there was the obvious target for her simmering anger and frustration, but she wasn’t yet ready to unleash it on her. “He’s alive, Kat,” she said simply, before turning back to watch her husband’s unmoving face.

Kat stood in the doorway for several moments before entering the room and quietly pulling a chair over to sit next to the other woman. The two women had been friends for years, all the way back to their college days. Their paths had diverged after graduation, when Kat had thrown herself into her career and stayed single, while Jennifer had worked her way into government contract work, eventually catching on as a field agent with the Agency. Jen also married one of their college friends, the very man who lay motionless in the hospital bed in front of them, who was also a one-time flame of Kat’s. It had never been a point of contention between the two of them, but Kat would be lying if she claimed she never thought about what might have been between her and Jon if she had pursued things.

“He’ll be okay,” Kat said quietly, though her voice wavered and she knew she was lying. She simply did not know if he would be alright or not. She studied Jon’s face for any trace of movement, but she knew there would be none. Jon Sherrard wasn’t in there.

Jen picked up on her apprehension right away. “How can you say he’ll be okay, Kat?” she questioned, an edge coming to her voice. “You don’t even know what happened in there, do you?”

“Only a hypothesis right now,” Kat admitted, shaking her head helplessly.

“How could you let this happen? He was your friend.”

“Look, it’s not like that at all, Jen,” Kat replied, trying not to be defensive, but knowing she was failing. “We’ve been so very careful with this project and Jon’s done this numerous times with never a glitch.”

“This was the first time he was out of the box, though. You had to know it would be dangerous.”

“New and unexplored, yes,” she countered. “But dangerous? Jen, we’re talking about computer viruses in cyberspace. They’re nothing but lines of code. Jon’s been working with them for months.”

“Except for this one.”

“Except for this one,” Kat agreed gloomily, thankful to have something else to vent her own anger at and hoping Jen would steer the blame away from her and FutureTek. “Everything had gone so well up to this point that maybe we were too confident in our abilities to handle viruses in general. The Horde is…well, it’s different.”

“But why would this one be a problem?” Jen asked. “Despite all the doom and gloom about it, it’s still just lines of code, right?”

“We’re still trying to figure out why this one is so different, but we think it has something to do with its makeup,” Kat explained. “Most other viruses or worms are preprogrammed to do a certain thing. They have well-defined parameters, even the extremely complex ones that are designed to cause physical damage to systems and equipment. That gives our technology a considerable advantage to combating them because we understand the reason for their existence. This one, however, appears to be well beyond that.”

“How so?” Jen asked. As a computer science minor in college and then wife to FutureTek’s version of a test pilot, she was very familiar with technology and the makeup of viruses. She had heard a little about the Horde virus, but it had only been in passing as it was a relatively new challenge to the high-tech world and she hadn’t taken the time to study up on it. It was, however, a pretty big deal to the people who had to deal with it.

“Well, for starters, it has no defined parameters. It’s a free-range virus and actually learns as it goes. Some experts have floated the hypothesis that it possesses a crude form of A.I.”

“Artificial intelligence? That’s absurd.”

“Normally, I would agree with you,” Kat admitted. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

“But what does all that have to do with Jon?”

“That’s what we don’t know yet,” Kay answered after a weary sigh. “It all happened so fast and Jon simply disappeared before we even knew it was the Horde that was attacking the honeypot.”

“Could he be dead then?” Jen dared to ask, her eyes going back to her husband’s face. He looked so peaceful; it was hard for her to believe he was doing anything but sleeping.

Kat shook her head again. “I don’t believe so,” she answered truthfully. “Jon’s conscious is no more than electrons in the system, able to manipulate code and software. So he doesn’t actually exist on a physical or a coded level. In essence, he exists outside the effectible realm of the virus.”

“So he’s still out there?”

Kat nodded.

“Do you truly believe that?”

“I have no reason to believe otherwise,” Kat replied, looking her friend in the eyes. “But we just don’t know where. We’ve run tests in the past where we’ve shut down the test bed while Jon was plugged in and we’ve never had a problem. So we know that being separated from the hub isn’t harmful.”

“Then what happened this time?”

“We just don’t know,” she admitted helplessly. “We’re not even sure he’s in an active state. If he’s dormant somewhere, we could have looked right at him a hundred times and never saw him.”

“What do you mean by being dormant? Is that something he can do when he’s inside?”

“We discovered it by accident, really,” she explained. “During one of our closed system tests, we were playing around with external stimuli and trying to see if there was any way Jon could access his body while remaining in the system. During the test run, Jon accidently sent himself into a dormant phase. When he did, we lost all track of him. He was effectively invisible.”

“Wow,” Jen breathed as she quickly understood the ramifications of that discovery. “The military applications of that in cyber warfare could be astronomical.”

“Something we considered as well.”

“So you think it’s possible that he’s in a dormant state?”

“I think it’s definitely a possibility,” Kat said. “He may have seen a threat in this Horde virus that we couldn’t see and he shut himself down to avoid it.”

“Can he wake back up?”

“He always has in the past,” Kat replied. “After the first time, and a little bit of worry on everyone’s part, it was easy for him. We’ve tested it a number of times.”

“So why hasn’t he come back this time?”

“I don’t know,” Kat shook her head. “But I promise you, we’ll find him, Jen.”

“How?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Kat said carefully, looking directly into her friend’s eyes. “We’re kicking around an idea, but it’s going to take a little bit of time to get it ready. And I won’t lie to you. It could be dangerous.”

Before she could explain further, there was a knock at the door and both women turned to see an ashen Drew Jackson standing in the doorway.

“What is it, Drew?” Kat asked, immediately noticing his drained appearance. The man had been deep into crisis management since the accident and it was wearing on him. His face now told her that something new had developed.

Drew cleared his throat and looked plaintively at Jen, before turning to look at Kat again. “Perhaps we should speak outside.”

Kat shook her head. “No,” she countered, swallowing her own fear. “Jen has as much right to know what’s going on as anybody. Now tell me what happened.”

Drew looked back and forth to each woman before clearing his throat again, definitely uncomfortable with what he was about to share. “It’s the prototype,” he finally stammered.

“What about it?” Kat demanded.

“It’s gone.”

“What?”

“It’s gone, Kat,” he repeated. “When I told Rivers to unpack it and begin setting it up for emergency use, it wasn’t in the case. He thought you might have it.”

“Why would I have it, Drew? It’s been locked up in storage since Systemtech started showing interest in us.”

“Kat, what’s going on?” Jen interrupted. “What’s this about?”

“It’s a wireless prototype unit of the hub,” she explained quickly, shaking her head in a mixture of alarm and disgust.

“Another one?”

“In a sense, yes,” she answered. “But it’s wireless and portable. However, we haven’t worked out the bugs and there’s a lot of questions about its safety. In limited testing by Jon, we know that it works, but we don’t know enough about it to use it without a lot more careful thought. When Systemtech started nosing around, we suspended work on it to fine-tune the main system so we could get ready for the demonstration.”

“So what does that mean for Jon?”

“Nothing concrete,” Kat answered truthfully. “The idea was for someone else to use the prototype to try and locate Jon. And I stress that it is just an idea right now.”

“But why not use the regular hub?”

Kat was silent for a few moments before answering. “We don’t dare use it, Jen,” she finally said softly. “The main hub is attuned to Jon right now and there is no telling what would happen if we put a different person in the chair. If we use it, there may be a chance we could never get Jon back, even if we did find him. Not to mention, there would be risks to someone else using the hub until the machine was cleared of Jon’s settings.”

“So we were going to use the prototype to go and search for him,” Drew put in, still from his place at the door.

“We were thinking about using it,” Kat corrected, shooting Drew a nasty look. “There’s no guarantees that we would be successful and, we’re scared to death that we’ll end up losing someone else out there.”

“That’s just it, Jen,” Drew added. “Jon is the only one who has been truly out in cyberspace, and the accident happened the very first time he went long. Even on the closed test beds, Perry’s the only other one who has been a driver and he only did it one time. We just don’t know how dangerous it would be to put someone else out there when they’re not prepared for it. And with the prototype, that level of unknown goes off the charts.”

“But the prototype could do it?” Jen pressed.

“In theory, yes,” Kat replied. “But it’s a real shot in the dark.”

“So, why would someone steal it?” Jen asked, looking at both of them.

Neither had the answer and Kat could only shake her head. “I don’t know, Jen,” she said, putting her arm around her friend’s shoulder. “I really don’t know.”