Overclocked by K. S. Augustin Page B

you need to find a room or can we keep work­ing?”
    They broke apart, laugh­ing.

Chapter Eight
    “This is the only chance we’re go­ing to get,” Carl said, “so let’s go over it one more time.”
    Tomek groaned and even Tania grim­aced.
    “Do we have to?” she asked. “We’ve already been through the plan a dozen times.”
    Carl didn’t want to scare her but knew he had to em­phas­ise the ser­i­ous­ness of the situ­ation. He had resigned him­self to dy­ing in cy­ber­space and didn’t want his death to be in vain.
    “We should get go­ing,” Tomek ad­ded. “Even clocked up, every minute we spend here in your lab means one more minute the mon­ster out­side can use to ex­pand its reach.”
    Carl took one of Tomek’s code cap­sules, now en­cased in a hard white shell. Small lines of blue light arced across the sur­face every now and then. He held it up.
    “We have cre­ated three in­stances of Tomek’s code,” he said, ig­nor­ing their ex­pres­sions of protest. “Once prop­erly aligned to Rhine-Temple pro­to­cols, the code will re­lease thou­sands of self-rep­lic­at­ing mod­ules. Those mod­ules have only one task—to travel a pre­set dis­tance from its par­ent or sib­lings and rep­lic­ate it­self. Once it has pro­duced six­teen cop­ies, each of them identical, it will clamp down on a piece of the bot­net. At that point, the code shell will kick in. The shell will ini­ti­ate a se­cure hand­shake with whatever part of the Rhine-Temple it can find and start bom­bard­ing that data chan­nel with thou­sands of use­less data re­quests.”
    “I can cer­tainly ap­pre­ci­ate the irony of us­ing a denial-of-ser­vice at­tack against a bot­net,” Tania said with a smile. “It’s an el­eg­ant solu­tion. By lever­aging a quick rep­lic­a­tion strategy, the Rhine-Temple should be im­mob­il­ised fairly quickly from the sheer volume of the at­tack.”
    “The beauty of it is,” Tomek ad­ded, “the minute the bot­net moves to block one source, six­teen oth­ers spring up in dif­fer­ent places.”
    Carl nod­ded in agree­ment. “I don’t care how smart it
thinks
it is, it can’t stop the sheer volume of re­quests it’s go­ing to re­ceive. And, be­cause a se­cure and trus­ted re­la­tion­ship has been es­tab­lished with each mod­ule, it can’t just shake them off. The Rhine-Temple will be
forced
to try to ac­know­ledge and an­swer each and every data re­quest, no mat­ter how ri­dicu­lous.”
    Tomek grinned. “Chew­ing up its valu­able time and re­sources.”
    “At which point,” Tania said, “when it’s close to para­lysis, you de­liver the fi­nal blow.”
    There was an edge to her voice that Carl didn’t miss. There was no ar­gu­ment about the code cap­sules and only a little dis­agree­ment re­gard­ing the make-up of the shell and how fool­proof to make the data re­quests. Every­one agreed that the cap­sules had to op­er­ate in such a way that the Rhine-Temple wouldn’t have any choice but to con­nect to each of the mod­ule re­quests and sub­sequently over­load it­self. How­ever, the cor­dial work­ing re­la­tion­ship between him and Tania broke down com­pletely when Carl out­lined the next stage of his plan, Tomek wisely stay­ing out of the way whenever such dis­cus­sions came up.
    Once the bot­net was frozen, Carl would des­troy it com­pletely with an eras­ure al­gorithm that would scramble then scrub every Rhine-Temple byte. He had cre­ated his weapon so it would be ruth­less and dev­ast­at­ingly com­plete. Any­thing that the Rhine-Temple touched, in­clud­ing it­self, would be des­troyed. That meant that, de­pend­ing on the nature of the data­bases that the Rhine-Temple had already as­sim­il­ated, per­haps thou­sands of tera­bytes of in­form­a­tion would be wiped clean along with the bot­net, but there was no other choice. It had to be done.