Dawning of a new age

To her left the world seemed dark. Not dark as in the absence of something but rather the sort of dark that came late at night in the desert when there's a power cut in the town you're walking towards. There's a sense of something being there, a hint of a building or a street from the way the darkness assembles itself, only there's nothing you can see. And this was how it felt as she glided past the Eastern Trading Block.

Skilfully she slipped off the main stream and into a rarely used tributary, circling around on the darkness. Vietnam passed by, turning into Laos. The faint glow of a local garage guided her now. Already her bots had sunk their teeth into it, finding its weaknesses and giving her a place to hide.

More bots slipped out into the streams, passively being carried on the currents towards the darkness. She lost sight of them as they vanished into the flow. In a few seconds they would reach their target, explore it, try to understand what it was. It had to be something. Bits of the net don't go missing when there's so much demand for real estate.

Data reached her, carried on the back currents, buried in the handshakes and feeds that the garage kept alive. What was the time in Laos? She didn't know, but a casual look at the credit cards and parts orders suggested it was the middle of the day. She swiped a couple of card numbers, useful data to trade with someone else later.

Then the data stopped. The bots fell silent as whatever lurked in the darkness shut them down. She'd trawl the data later, but for now she knew she needed to get out of there before a different type of bot came after her. She swept herself down, making sure nothing was clinging to her before carefully stepping out of the garage and back into the stream. She followed the flows back, retracing her steps and carefully closing down each hop to disguise her presence. And after many minutes of careful work she returned to the reality that was her home in a three-bedroom former council house in Addison Grove in the Somerset town of Taunton.

Carefully she removed the goggles and placed them on the desk before her. The dull light from the single shaded lamp by her bed hurt her eyes a little, so she closed them to let them rest. She didn't need her eyes to turn off the console or remove her ear buds. Probably she could have reached her warm bed without opening them either.

Bed.

She was tired, but then she always felt that way after going in. The constant concentration and complete lack of distractions was draining, forcing the brain to process data far faster than it would normally. Most people couldn't last more than forty minutes or so. With training she'd managed a couple of hours. After that the safeties cut in and dumped her off net and wouldn't let her back on for a full day.

"Ellie, do you want some hot chocolate?"

The voice at the door was her father. A nice guy, always there for her although he sometimes tried a little too hard. After what happened to her Mum it was probably understandable although she still wasn't sure if she completely forgave him. The other driver had been drunk, way over the limit, but he'd been close to it too.

"Sure, Dad," she said.

The door opened as she expected and her father was there with the drink already made. He smiled at her warmly as he came in, a smile she returned for an instant.

"Playing with your friends again?" he asked, nodding at the console.

"Yeah," she said and resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. He was trying.

A mug with the ubiquitous "Hello Kitty" was placed on the mat on the edge of the desk. It was hot, steamy chocolate, the perfect way to end a day. The small kiss on her forehead was a little overdone.

"Thanks," she said.

"I'm going to bed now. Everything's shut off downstairs and the alarm's on. You can bring that down in the morning."

"Sure. Have a good sleep."

"You too," he said and headed out of her room. As he closed the door he whispered, "I love you," and she tried not to notice.

-

"What you get?"

He was probably the one person at college who "got" her. Everyone else saw a set of contradictions: the pink-walled bedroom full of soft toys and love of boy bands and trash pop that put her in the "girlie girl" brackets; the geeky STEM student who aced her exams and did things her teachers didn't fully understand; the bright purple hair, black leather jacket, tight PVC jeans and heavy boots that screamed "neopunk". Some saw it as a demand for attention, others as a pretty girl rebelling against whatever. He got this was who she was.

"You'll love this," she said and pulled her laptop out of the small rucksack that was permanently attached to her jacket.

She unfolded it, putting it on the desk and tapping keys until the data streamed past. Forty-odd years of development and still the most effective way to use a computer was a keyboard and a screen.

"What the hell is that?" Pete asked, bending down to look closely at the numbers and letters that appeared on the screen. There were ninety-seven eight-digit blocks in total and none of them made sense.

For a moment he was close enough to her for the tension to build. He was handsome, strong jaw and piercing eyes handsome. Fit too, a fly-half in the rugby team so he was strong without being huge. And he was always charming and polite with her, even if to everyone else he was distant and even rude.

"Got it over in Myanmar," she told him. "There's a big block of darkness over there that I ran into last night. Managed to get this before they shut me off."

"What is it?"

Her left hand went to her chin, rubbing upwards before sliding with a firm grip down her neck. It was a gesture she always made when she wasn't sure of the answer but was about to make a big, and probably correct, guess.

"I'd guess it's old assembler code. I mean real old. It looks like old hex blocks and I figure each one's got a meaning or an instruction or something. God knows how the bots got hold of it."

"It'd have to crack security real deep," he said, leaning back and raising his eyes in surprise. She loved when he did that. "What bots you use?"

"Mine. Custom jobs. Code traits were obfuscated."

He looked at the data again.

"Googled it?"

"Hell no!" she shouted. A couple of people looked round at her and she glared at them. Her reputation as "the freak" was enough to make them turn away. Apart from John, who was enough of an arsehole to smile at her before flicking his tongue out in an obscene gesture. She rolled her eyes and returned to her conversation. "I figure whoever has enough authority to make a block dark probably doesn't want people finding out what they're doing. Soon as I search, I figure I'll get a knock on the door. And I was really carefully to make sure that didn't happen."

"Backtracks?"

"And then some. Hell, I'm so good at it even the FBI couldn't find me after I cracked those banks in the US last year."

"Last year, Ellie. You know how quick things move," he said, genuine concern in his voice.

She looked into his big blue eyes and her heart melted.

"When are we going to get together?" she asked him as she always did at the end of their conversations.

He smiled. "Never, honey, I told you that. Afraid I'm just another asexual athlete."

She moved a little closer.

"But come on, we could just be together, you know."

He laughed and stood up, swinging his bag onto his shoulder.

"Hey," he said, turning serious again, "be careful. Like you said, whoever can make shit dark has some voodoo going on."

"I will be," she promised and blew him a kiss.

As he walked away, she let herself watch him and admire the chiselled, finely crafted shape he had. Damn it, girl, she said to herself, stop being in love.

-

When she dove in that night what she'd wanted to do was hunt out some easy online sex. There were a couple of places she knew where a young girl like her could slip on a slightly raunchier avatar and have fun. Give her ten minutes and she'd have some overeager middle-aged guy happily pumping cash into one of her accounts. Only she didn't reach that part of the net as the draw of the darkness was too strong. Instead, she spent ten minutes building a fortress around her location and sat in an internet cafe in Xiang Ngeun and just stared at the darkness.

Leaving the darkness in her periphery she called up her coding deck and started on a new project. It didn't take her long to modify a couple of existing weapons from her armoury. She left one in the store, another in the post office in Ban Nakha, then slipped away.

She needed money.

-

For two weeks she fought the urge to return to the darkness. An assignment from college helped, taking up her time as she coded the dull inventory tracking system the tutor demanded. It wasn't particularly challenging and most of what she needed she'd constructed a half-dozen years ago as part of her self-taught education in programming. Good hackers needed to learn to code, she'd read in a book, and they need to understand how computers work. Not in a superficial way, but in a deep, tear them apart and put them back together again way.

She milked a couple of guys for a large amount of cash and bought herself a second-hand Lenovo. When she wasn't working on the assignment, she was stripping it down and rebuilding it, removing all its identifying marks and turning it into a little spot of darkness in its own right. Then she gave it a set of revolving fake IDs she'd kept handy. As always, she'd check them before she used them.

Then there was the library. Walking into the building and going over the shelves to find a book you never took out left no trail, and it was easy for her to find what she needed. She made sure where she sat was away from the CCTV and that no one was snapping candids of her. For added protection she went in "normal girl" mode: loose jeans and top, her hair under a fashionable cap. No need to draw attention to herself. It took two trips to break the code, another four to have enough information to interpret any new code that might come her way.

"An instruction set?" said Pete. "You sure?"

She nodded and showed him the notebook she'd been writing in. It was covered in code fragments and scrawls.

"Real old processor too," she said. "Maybe thirty years old?"

He looked genuinely surprised. He was nowhere near her level but was close enough to understand no one put thirty-year-old processors on the net. Code didn't exist to protect them for a start, and they couldn't handle the loads demanded by the net.

"Yeah," he said. "It doesn't make sense."

"I thought it might be a honeytrap, some way for the FBI or whatever to trap hackers. Get a curious looking, vulnerable system and break in, but I can't see anyone talking about it."

"You gotta get away from it," he told her firmly. "It's not good."

"I know," she said. "But there's one last thing I've got to do."

-

Snark ran the cafe out the back of his vinyl shop on Montpellier. It was a small place with a couple of tired old machines if you needed them although most people took their own. His network was reliable enough, just not the quickest. He was cheap enough to use a consumer connection for his business, but when you were far from home and needed a connection, his was cheap and good enough for practical purposes. Just don't try and dive in.

"Hey sweetie," he said cheerfully when she walked into the shop. His eyes stroked her body in a way that made her feel a little dirty.

"Hi, Snark," she said. "Any slots free?"

"Sure," he said. "Out back as always. Only watch it, network's a little shaky."

That was the extra security he'd suddenly acquired a couple of days ago as she prepared for her visit. It was a heavy-duty package on a free trial she'd installed. He probably thought she came in now and then because he was cool, not because she owned his network. She put a couple of crumpled notes on the counter as she passed into the back. Always cash.

As her laptop spun up, she pushed the cable into the side of the machine and listened to the reassuring click of a plastic latch snapping into place. She liked coming here, it felt like she was back in the early days of the internet when hackers used nothing but their wits and a sysops manual in a quest for knowledge. They'd hacked because they could, exploring the frontiers of the vast network of computers for nothing more than the intellectual challenge. That was before people saw it as a way to make money, to advance political agendas, support wars, destabilise countries and all the other reasons hackers were despised.

The PAYG mobile phone beeped at her. She'd set a watcher up on a machine in Temple Meads that was telling her someone had logged into the network. That was her, so she knew it was working.

Skilfully she layered herself into the net, building up false trails and disguised nodes around her. It took ten minutes, but when she was done she was pretty sure no one would trace it all back in time. Anyway, what were they going to trace?

Circling the drop-off spots, she double checked nothing unexpected was happening. She couldn't see any tracers, although that was never a guarantee. Her own code, hidden deep inside systems vulnerable to her touch, hadn't been modified, which gave her some comfort. It was time for her to set events in motion.

The cascade would leave a small trace back to her machine when she triggered it. Her defence was the layers of false routing and the hope that any tracer would be watching where the data went, not what caused it to move. A single keystroke set it in motion.

She was hidden by a confusing mess of data transfers. The files were broadcast to locations around the world, pushed onto servers and individual computers she'd pre-selected. Sometimes the files were encrypted, other times reversed, some left in plain sight. From one thousand different locations one thousand files were sent to one thousand places. One of those places was a laptop used by a biology student in Dresden who, every Monday morning from 9am to 11am, had a lesson that meant it was switched on and connected. She'd made sure it was accessible before the cascade started and right now it was receiving files and transferring them, via a complicated network of pathways and streams, to the laptop in Snark's cafe that thought it was an online payment gateway for a small shop in Buenos Aires. The moment it finished the laptop vanished from the network, the pathways collapsed, and the shop could take credit cards again.

For a minute or more Ellie sat looking at the screen of her laptop. There were two dialogs on it, one telling her the network connection had been lost, the other that all files had been received. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she prepared herself for the door being kicked in by heavies from the police, MI5 or even the CIA. If that happened, she had no idea what she'd do other than cry.

Only no one came. The door wasn't kicked in and she just sat there until a loud chime from the laptop told her the files had been assembled. Nervously she leant forwards, clearing the alerts and opening the file. It took a few moments for it to appear on screen but when it did, she saw what her newly trained expert eye saw as thirty-year-old code for an outdated chipset.

Slowly she scrolled through it. Here and there bits made sense: a command to move some bits around in memory; another to open a file on a storage device; push data onto a network stream. She knew it would take more time to understand it.

Carefully she closed the lid of the laptop and slipped it into her rucksack. She'd told her Dad she was coming to Bristol to do some shopping. Suddenly the distraction of looking through endless clothes shops seemed quite welcome.

-

Submitting the program she'd written as part of her course work would probably earn her an "A" followed by a visit from the police. Based on a tool she'd found to translate Mandarin to English, she'd changed it to parse the newly acquired file and construct something that looked vaguely readable. Unlike a human's language where context and subtleties matter, computer code is precise and logical.

It took a couple of attempts to get it right, but when she did, the output read like a horror story.

"Pete, can you come over?"

There was a pause before he said, "Is this just a ploy to get me into bed?"

"Now," she said with more force in her voice. It surprised her as much as it did him.

"OK," he said.

Twenty minutes later he was lying on her bed with a large teddy bear under his chest to support him as he read through the translation on the tablet. Her Dad was at work, so her having a boy in her room while she was wearing only her bra and panties wouldn't cause a problem, although she had realised the neighbours might mention it after she closed the front door.

"Is this right?" he asked. There was a tremble in his voice.

"As far as I can tell it is," she said.

He sighed.

-

Mr Brown often joked he was living proof of why the Government's policy of raising the retirement age to seventy wasn't a good idea. He was a few months away from that milestone and looked as tired and frail as someone who had worked for nearly half a century. Though tall he was hunched over a little and his bald head was like a smooth, shiny sea that exploded in a cacophony of wrinkles when it reached his forehead. He moved slowly and deliberately, his knees long since past their prime, his long, spindly fingers spread slightly and with knuckles swollen with arthritis. When you looked in his eyes you saw fires burning and when he spoke about technology and its impact on society his voice was filled youthful passion.

In his left hand was the tablet while the finger of his right gently scrolled the text. His eyes focused with intensity on the code that passed by. The machine interpreted version had been discarded in favour of the original code.

It was a massive assumption she made. She'd assumed his age meant he'd know something about what she was looking at and help her understand if she was right about what the code did. It paid off though.

"When I was a kid, about your age," he said quietly, still reading, "I was a hacker. That was back in the early days of the commercial web when things were a little less secure and a lot easier for people like me. I don't mind admitting I stole a fair few credit card numbers and lots of personal data and confidential documents. They were worth a lot of money back then."

"So how come you ended up as a teacher?" she asked.

"Oh, I didn't sell them. That wasn't the point. The point was I could steal them and then I could brag about it. Build my standing in the community."

"You get caught?"

He paused for a few seconds, apparently distracted by a code segment, before continuing.

"No. But I grew up and decided I wanted a career teaching people how to use computers. Not press buttons on a word processor, but proper, deep understanding of how they worked and the effect a program can have on a person's life."

"For better or worse!" she laughed. It was one of the phrases she often repeated in his class, usually if a student had left a catastrophic bug in their code.

"And this, my dear, is definitely in the latter camp."

He put the tablet on the desk in front of him and rubbed the bridge of his nose, apparently releasing some pressure.

"Where did you get this?"

She shifted nervously on her feet, unsure if she could trust him with the exact details.

"Seriously," he pressed, "where did you get this?"

"There's a dark place out over South East Asia," she told him reluctantly. "What's it do?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's designed to trash a processor. Very clever too."

In a surprising display of speed, he spun off his chair and wiped a part of his whiteboard clean. Quickly he drew a rectangle and a circle next to it with a line between them.

"This," he said, pointing to the rectangle, "is the processor and the circle's the fan they typically come with to cool them down when they get hot. From what I can see the code appears to be telling the fan to reverse direction and then sets off an impossible calculation which propagates across the processor's net. I suspect the result is a burnt-out chip. Very clever."

She nodded in agreement. "I got the impossible calc bit, but I didn't know what that other stuff was doing."

"I'm not certain," he said. "That's just what it looks like."

"But it's really old code, right?"

He nodded.

"But," he said, "the code's incomplete. I'd like to know what else it does."

They fell silent. Her mind settled into a quiet, logical analysis of why the code did what it did and what else it might do. The "what" bit was relatively simple as an overheated, burnt out processor would kill the machine it was in. "Why" was obviously to disrupt a computer system for some reason that wasn't clear. "What else", she decided, had to be a way of replicating and spreading itself to other machines.

"Unless the delivery mechanism is separate," she said aloud.

Mr Brown looked at her in surprise.

"What?"

"Sorry, I was thinking what else it might do. This is pointed at thirty-odd year-old computers, so it can't just float around the net hoping to latch onto something. There has to be a separate delivery system that specifically targets machines with this chipset on."

"Chip family," he corrected. "Generational changes still only happen every six or seven years and there will still be code to allow even older code to run to ensure backward compatibility with older applications and systems."

He went back into the code and searched through it again. His dark skin noticeably flushed.

"South East Asia?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Where some of the world's largest chip manufacturers are based."

-

Skilfully she wrapped layers of security around herself, hiding herself from view. Then she tried to hack herself, tried to discover where she was using every tool she had. Nothing could get through. At least she was as sure nothing could as she could be.

All this time and effort so she could log onto the National Tech Crime Unit's site.

"I have some code I need to report," she typed into the chat window. There was tape over the cam on her laptop.

"Could you please provide details," the operator replied.

"It looks like code designed to attack a chipset directly. I've provided full details here."

She pasted the link into the window and waited.

"Thank you," came the reply.

They'd be tracking her already, trying to work out where she was.

"Goodbye," she typed and killed the connection and turned her machine off.

Then she sat in the cafe and waited. As she lifted her coffee to her lips, she noticed her hand trembling. Her eyes moved to the cafe's large window, watching the street and waiting for the blare of sirens and the appearance of a police unit to arrest her. She was good, but was she a match for a government?

Ten paranoid minutes later she rose from her seat and tucked her laptop into her bag.

-

To her right the world seemed dark. She was coming in from a different direction, taking one of her regular sweeps across the Eastern Trading Block and checking in on the dark space that sat so silently on the net. A week had passed since she'd handed over her files to the police, and she knew they'd accessed them because an hour later they'd been deleted. No one but the government and its secret networks of spies and techs should have access to code so dangerous.

They were probably out here now, watching like she was, hidden among the small businesses and wide-open laptops. They'd probably seen her too and taken steps to find out who she was. Had they linked her to the download? Had they traced her home?

Something from outside the net was creeping into her consciousness. It was a sound, a whirring that was growing quickly in pitch. Her movement slowed and judder as the images in her goggles paused for almost a second before leaping forward. Someone had spiked her and instinctively she tapped the key that triggered her exit. Her security collapsed behind her, hiding her as it sent whoever had attacked her on a wild goose chase across the globe.

The noise was still there.

It was coming from her console. Nervously she put her hand on top of the black slab and was surprised to feel too much heat coming off it. Her finger flew to the power switch, holding it down until the machine switched off. Hopefully before it was irreparably damaged.

"Ellie, you screwing with the net again?" shouted her father from downstairs.

She left her room with its pink walls and boyband posters and stuffed toys and rushed downstairs. Her heart was pounding, convinced that at any moment the police would charge in through the door and send her off to Belmarsh. They'd killed her house, separated her from the net so she couldn't shout out for help or destroy her files and tools. "Preservation of evidence", they called it.

In the living room a small trail of smoke was rising from the router hidden behind the TV. She rushed to it, pulling the power cable out before reaching down to switch the power socket off for the media centre too.

"Turn everything off," she shouted at her father. "Everything!"

As she ran into the kitchen, her father took a more direct route. He pulled open the smart meter cabinet and cut the power to the house.

"Shit!" he shouted, blowing on his hand.

Ellie put the console on the kitchen counter. It crackled loudly and gave out a final "pop" before settling into silence.

"What the hell just happened?" her father shouted.

She picked up the hot phone with her finger and thumb, carefully turning it over so she could take the back off. A wisp of smoke rose up with the stench of melting plastic not far behind.

"I think the Chinese just put the west back into the stone age," she said.

Author's note:

This was written in the height of the fears Huawei's inclusion in the global 5G roll-out would give China unprecedented access to Western infrastructure. I asked the question what if the conspiracy theories were true?