Strange Flesh (48 page)

Assuming he has one, Billy’s larger artistic objective must be to remind
everyone
that while the internet affords us our aliases and avatars, the same technology also makes it feasible to record all our purchases, conversations, and actions with frightening ease. In most cases, our beloved disguises are distressingly fragile, and the volume of secrets that can be disclosed is greater than it’s ever been.

McClaren calls me two hours later.

“You have any hot ideas for getting this genie back in its bottle?”

I’d been assessing the possibility of containment just before he called. A couple net-crawlers I sent out searching for sample file names told me Billy already has his NOD shard up on another server. It will only be a matter of hours before his dungeon reconnects to the main grid.

“Well, since he’s distributing child porn, I’m sure the ISPs will move fast to shut down his backups. In the meantime, you can have Red Rook hose down sites as they crop up.” I’m suggesting he mount a denial-of-service (DOS) attack to cripple any servers found hosting the files. “So if not back in its bottle, maybe we can wash it down the drain.”

“Yeah, our guys thought of that. But looks like Billy has alternates in quite a few uncooperative lo-calities. And he’s crammed Google’s results with pages that link to mirrors. So attacks won’t buy us much time before they get impractical.”

Billy came prepared. Even if Blake authorizes an internet-scale reprise of his Whack-A-Mole game, I doubt it’s one he can win.

McClaren asks, “Anything else?”

I say, “He’s probably got a kill switch. If we could find him—”

“Yeah. I’ll bet we could talk some sense into the boy. You can imagine the boss is getting a little—”

“I know. I’m doing everything I can.”

But I feel a ramping sense of futility. A person with the brains, devious nature, and unlimited resources of Billy Randall can stay hidden from his pursuers too easily. Our only recourse is to track him down, despite that for the past month, the entire Randall security apparatus has failed to do so. They can’t expect that I, working more or less alone, will be able to locate him before this stuff storms across the internet.

And yet . . . My mind won’t quite let go of the problem. The hallmark of a good hacker is machine-like persistence. The numb commitment to the belief that there is always a way in. You just have to keep swinging your pick.

W
hen confronted with what seems like an impenetrable wall, one studies it carefully for even hairline fissures. I bet the faults in Billy’s fortifications will radiate from the impact of Gina’s suicide. Her death demands this twisted tribute from him. Her memory makes him emotional and precipitate, maybe less careful. Indeed, I first found him through her.

And what do we know about his most recent actions?

Watching that video must have really multiplied his anger at Blake over her death.

But why
?

I force myself to endure it several more times. For the life of me, I can’t find anything new in that tight head shot. Billy said, “I know everything now.” As though watching the video provided some last, essential piece of information. So is there something in the video—a dog-whistle code that only he can hear—that makes him want to train his guns on his brother?

Maybe a dog whistle is a bad metaphor. Maybe it’s something that I
could
hear if I just knew what to listen for.

So how do I find out what I’m missing?

Of the two people who could answer that question, one is in hiding and the other is dead. But then I recall something I’ve learned about Billy’s research: the curious way he described his visit to Gina’s apartment to her landlord.

Maybe it’s time to conduct a séance.

Virtual world builders are usually very mindful of security since they often have convertible currencies on which their users rely. So they face an economic holocaust if some enterprising cracker finagles himself keys to the mint. NOD keeps their boxes’ software locked correspondingly tight.

Breaking in will take a bit of setup. I start by hunting through a bunch of NOD forums for email addresses of company employees. For all but the most senior, they have an enforced “first name underscore last name” convention. I spend a few minutes with Spemtex, a delightful spammer’s tool that sends a test email to thousands of combinations of common first and last names at a given organization. This gets me a list of seven people responding with out-of-office emails.

One of these, a database administrator named Zach Levin, is kind enough to provide in his auto-reply the information that he’s part of the team at the Massively Metaversal Media conference currently under way in San Jose. Running the names of the subset of other employees whose spam didn’t bounce through Dice, the Ladders, Monster, and Career-Builder yields five résumés from active NOD employees. Two of these are low-paid off-hour IT support drudges who are likely to be on duty Saturdays. One of them, Matt Jones, is a recent hire at NOD’s satellite office in Austin and simply hasn’t yet taken his résumé down. New employees make good targets because they’re not as familiar with the company’s security policies, they aren’t likely to know a lot of their coworkers by voice, and they’re generally insecure in their position and eager to comply with well-framed requests. As a final bit of icing, he’s included his cell number.

The plan is simple: I pay eight hundred bucks to rent a well-distributed botnet to intermittently DOS the NOD world domains as well as the corporate servers at their main Menlo Park office. One of these boxes is an internet telephony system. Attacking it will cause havoc in their comms. Then I send an email to poor Mr. Jones spoofed to look like it’s coming from Zach Levin:

A key strategy in establishing credibility with a mark is to make predictions that are then confirmed by “independent” sources. So twenty minutes later, I send him a fake report from Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team confirming my story. CERT maintains an email list to which most webmasters subscribe to tell them when giant worm infestations are eating the internet.

I let that marinate for an hour and then lob in a call. I’m counting on the fact that these two people don’t know each other well enough for instant voice identification over the phone. I throw on a little cell static just in case. “Jones,” he answers.

“Hey, man. Zach Levin. You get my email about the password reset?”

“Yeah. I just put it through.”

“Great. Hey, I’m on my cell here. I think there’s something wrong with the exchange in Menlo. Can you put me on hold and try one of those lines?”

He clicks off and comes back a minute later.

“Yeah. Seems like it’s down. It’s not ringing through.”

“Right, so I can’t get into my voicemail to get my new password. So can you reset it again and tell me what it is?”

“Well . . .” You never give passwords out over the phone.

“I know you’re not supposed to. But we’re in kind of a bind here. Tell you what, can you put your manager on?”

“He’s not here.”

“Hmmm . . . Well, I don’t know what we should do. It’s really starting to hit the fan. Jack is on the warpath, and I’d hate to be one of the Menlo IT guys tomorrow. You could be a real hero by helping us out. I’ll write you an email right now authorizing this. Hold on.”

I send him another email copying a couple people high in the tech hierarchy. All of whom work in Menlo and don’t have access to their server right now.

Finally, he says, “Okay, it’s one five bravo tango seven kilo kilo zero four six.”

“Thanks, bud. I owe you one.”

Five minutes later, I’m deep in their network. I’ve got some bent Linux libraries on their database server, and I’m silently sucking a copy of the two-terabyte hard disk across their hosting facility’s rocking fiber-optic line.

While her physical remains are well beyond my necromantic abilities, perhaps one of Gina’s digital selves can be resurrected. I’m hoping this undead Gina will retain some spectral connection to Billy.

Of course no avatar ever really dies to begin with, they just enter a limbo of inaccessibility. Now we can be so carefree with memory that you almost never destroy data, you just redescribe it as “deleted.” So I’m betting that Gina’s primary av can be exhumed from her plot in the database I’ve just stolen.

L
ike people, avatars tend to bloat as they age. Rezzed on 9/07/2003, during NOD’s beta-testing period, Joanne_Dark had grown gargantuan. Her bulk appears not in the Audrey Hepburn contours of her av, but rather in her possessions. She stores huge amounts of gear for role-playing sims based on
Star Wars,
Star Trek,
StarCraft
, and
Battlestar Galactica
. J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin each get folders. As do C. S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll. But I want to find the places where her NOD life intersected with her real one, and I suspect these fantasy games will only lead me farther afield.

I scroll through her in-world buddy list looking for Billy, feeling my way through her data like a newly blind man trying to recognize a familiar face by touch. If I can find the av Billy uses outside of
Savant
, I may be able to catch him in NOD using a connection I can trace.

Gina has 552 names in her buddy list. A thorough search through all their profile data might take days, but Billy is a kind of artist, and most artists regard anonymity as a deadly poison. He wouldn’t neglect to brand his personal avatar. By now, I should be able to spot him from a mile away.

I spend a couple minutes writing code in NOD’s scripting language, which they call nVerse. It populates a large area on my server with the primary skins of all of Gina’s friends. The assembly looks like a parade formation of the guests from a Halloween party at the Playboy Mansion.

I run through the ranks, first deleting all the Furries. Then the stereotypical fashionistas, stripperellas, goth girls, and superheroines are
cashiered along with their male counterparts. Plain Jane animals and their mythical cousins are sent packing as well. I reject a couple avs for their too-obvious monikers, like Ben_Dover or Mike_Hunt.