<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #47

Tonx hadn’t been able to offer them much advice. He said they’d traced the location of the box, but it was in a massive high-rise so they were having trouble finding which room.

“Look in the directory” Fede had said.

“It’s a hundred story building” Tonx had said before hanging up “and we don’t have a name.”

Cessus had plugged into Xing’s network after giving them a small show of his sliding glasses. They did not seem very impressed until he plugged what he was seeing into a box the size of a loaf of bread that projected its image against a far wall. It’s resolution was fantastic, easily as good as what Fede saw in his goggles less than a half-inch away from his eyes.

“What is that?” he’d gaped.

“Multi-laser projection system. New from Korea, not yet sold in U.S.” Xing had said.

Cessus’s first move had been to scan their system’s security, which they seemed to take as a given. When he started propping columns of data flows as part of his background image they had begun to murmur, and when he’d started plucking bits of data out of all of them at once they’d started getting upset. One man in particular, a round, bearded guy with a bare head and coke shirt had started yelling and gesturing at Cessus until Xing had quietly said a few words to him. That had shut him up, but everyone was clearly equally excited.

“How are you doing this?” asked Xing.

Cessus had paused the feeds and pulled up a drawing screen before launching into his grand theory of unified brainpower thing. Fede had been sure they were fucked until he noticed that many of the Otaku were taking notes, completely silent. Twenty minutes into it Cessus had covered the basics of what he’d told Fede, and when he shut down the drawing screen Xing had asked him to drop it into a publicly accessible share folder. Several of the guys asked him for the software he’d used to train Fede, and as soon as he’d dumped that in the share too a bunch of them disappeared to find the biometric devices necessary to use it.

“You are training in this method?” Xing asked Fede.

“Yeah, but it only ever helped with some genetic programming shit” Fede said. Xing looked at him a moment and Fede’s heart flew to his throat.

“Then he is your sensei. You are very lucky” Xing said. “I am follower of Confucius. Choose best practices for all things. But your method looks very promising.”

He bowed to Fede, who returned the bow awkwardly.

“So what’s the problem with your network here?” Cessus asked. Xing showed them. Cessus made a show of looking around, but both he and Fede knew where to go; they’d been seeing this traffic in their sleep for a while now. Cessus quickly zeroed in on the code base that was causing the redistribution. It was Fede’s code, all right, chugging away exactly as he’d designed it to. They were able to watch it from the inside, this time, given free reign to the Chinese side of the network through Xing’s proxies. Fede watched sample sets stream through his gogs, feeds Cessus diverted to him as they roamed the networks.

“They fed us a bogus set. It’s still running” he muttered to himself.

“Looks like somebody dropped something into the updates that propagated” Cessus said. Several people nodded, silent. “But what’s interesting is that the government caught on. See, here — see how many of the machines are dumping towards the same three places? If you look at the router logs from these traffic aggregators they suddenly start going through these government machines. Same looking traffic, but now proxied through a single cluster.”

Xing smiled.

“I’d say there was a virus attack and your government thought it’d be handy to use the virus to do some business of their own” said Cessus. He sat back and folded his arms, glanced at Fede.

Xing raised his hand in a slight gesture and the remaining men in the room bowed and left, smoothly and quickly disappearing down the stair.

“What does this virus do?” he asked.

“I don’t know” said Cessus. “Just lucky in spotting it, you know?”

“Did you write it?” asked Xing, looking directly at Cessus.

There was a silence. Cessus shook his head.

Xing smiled again and turned towards Fede.

“You are very lucky” he said. “Your method is very promising indeed. Now, please. Explain.”

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