<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #38

They spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what had gone wrong. From everything Fede could tell his code had run correctly. Tonx couldn’t make any sense of the errors he was getting. Huge swaths of the genetic recommendation fit perfectly, and then there would suddenly be a chunk that just didn’t fit. There was no gradual combinatory degradation as he’d expect from a near-fit solution.

Then, in late afternoon just as the sun seemed suddenly to cool, Fede found something strange.

“Cessus” he said, nudging an elbow into his ribs. “Give me some screen room. Look at this.”

He pulled up a window on the laptop in front of them. He pointed at one of the sample chunks of RNA they’d posted for processing in one column, the genetically developed algorithm for processing it in another. The result was shown in a third column, an RNA combinate like all the others they had received from the virused machines. Fede took the numbers representing the RNA chunk and ran the algorithm on it. A second later a result appeared. It wasn’t the same as the result they’d downloaded.

“What the fuck?” asked Cessus.

“Is your code screwed?” asked Tonx.

“No, man. The code works fine. But we got a weird result posted” said Fede. His face tightened into a scowl. He copied the function again, jumped to a terminal window and ran a carefully worded search string.

“What are you doing?” asked Tonx. Next to him Cessus narrowed his eyes. Fede thumbed his comm lightly and the screen suddenly filled with scrolling lines, all identical.

Fede slumped backwards in his chair, head tilted, gazing upwards at the sky as the lines scrolled past his vision.

“He searched for other instances of the same result or formula” said Cessus, his eyes scanning the screen. “Those are all the times a combinate was suggested that was identical to the first error.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” asked Tonx.

“It means we’ve been cracked” said Cessus. “It means that our data got intercepted on the way to being posted and huge chunks of it were replaced with bogus results.”

The lines stopped, displayed a blinking cursor on an empty line.

“Who?” asked Tonx.

“We don’t know” repeated Cessus.

Fede’s head snapped up.

“You got the Rijndael/CTR encryption you used on the background image for the initial data set?” he asked.

Cessus nodded. “Yeah, why?”

“Run it on our results” said Fede.

Cessus stared at the younger man for a moment, then began to drum his fingers on the tabletop. He paused a moment, watching the results scan over the back of his eyeballs. He wasn’t synced to the laptop, so they couldn’t see what he did, but they saw his eyes grow wide.

“Anybody here speak Chinese?” he asked after a moment.

Tonx jumped to find Cass and Fede pounded on his chord, syncing Cessus’s view to the laptop. The murky background image of the Latin American Jewish Association of Hawaii homepage appeared, crisp white text laid across its middle. The top seven lines were each in a different language, followed by a long sentence in tiny Chinese characters laid across the bottom. The English sentence read:

‘What are you doing?’

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