“Barely,” said Anja/Sahara. “Only if I try—it’s crazy loud out here. I’m going to find cover. I think her wrist is broken, and—ow—maybe a couple of ribs.”
Marisa pointed to Lal. “That means he can hear us, too, if he’s paying attention. We need to find some way of incapacitating him so we can work.” She looked around the room, saw a box full of blue headjack drives, and smiled maliciously. “Oh, that’s perfect.”
“What are you going to do?”
Marisa pulled out one of the drives—a dose of Bluescreen—and walked toward Lal. “I’m going to crash this blowhole’s brain.” She ripped the djinni cable out of his headjack, and his eyes popped open, disoriented and frightened.
“What? Marisa?”
“Hi, cutie,” Marisa said, and jammed the Bluescreen dose into the jack.
“Wait,” he said, “don’t do that!” His eyes started to roll back, and his muscles clenched as the drug took effect. “Stupid . . . bitch . . .” He passed out, and Marisa unplugged the drive triumphantly.
“Call me a bitch?” She spit on his chest. “Help me tie him up, the crash only lasts a few minutes.”
“There were easier ways of subduing him,” said Omar. “Now he’s going to wake up as a lunatic killer zombie, right here in the room with us.”
Marisa pulled a long cable from a box in the corner. “That’s why we tie him up,” she said. “And believe me, this was way more satisfying.” She lashed Lal’s wrists together as tightly as she could, then his ankles, and finished by tying him firmly to the chair. “Now we can get down to business. If this is malware, we need to look at the code—but that’ll take hours, maybe days to sift through it.”
“I thought you were a computer genius,” said Omar.
“This is the most complex program I’ve ever encountered,” said Marisa, “and I’m completely unfamiliar with it. Finding the piece that doesn’t belong is like . . . looking for a needle in a needle factory. There’s no way to tell the piece I want from the zillion other pieces I don’t. Maybe if we try it from another angle . . . do you have any idea how the malware got in?”
“I don’t know code,” said Omar. “You know that.”
“Is it a targeted attack,” Marisa asked, thinking out loud, “or some kind of mutant glitch? Maybe it got in through whatever back door you use to bypass the users’ security systems. I’ve been trying for days to get Anja’s antivirus software to delete Bluescreen, and nothing works. Did you just disable each target’s software completely? How did you not expect something like this to happen?”
“Are you crazy?” asked Omar. “What good is a puppet with no antivirus software? A system with no security is useless; we’d lose control of the target within seconds.”
Marisa nodded—she’d studied enough viruses on her hotbox to see how quickly they could destroy a system, turning the fanciest computer into a useless brick. So how did Bluescreen bypass everyone’s security? The program broke past the security once by overloading it, which is how it installed itself, but then what? They needed the security disabled to protect their software, but enabled to protect the user. How did they do both . . . ?
“That’s it,” she whispered. “Why didn’t I see it before?” She looked at Omar. “They add their own security software. It’s kind of brilliant, actually: when Bluescreen installs itself it also installs a second antivirus program, over the top of the one you already have. It’s just like Yosae or Pushkin or whatever you use, but run out of private databases on these servers.” She gestured to the servers lining the south wall. “They keep your pre-existing system active, so you don’t notice, but they disable it, so that all the actual antivirus work is being done by Bluescreen itself. That’s why we could never get Anja’s Yosae to kill it, even when we added it directly to the database.” She nodded; this explained everything. “eLiza was studying VR, so she’s the one who built the puppet code, but Nils was a security specialist. This was his job on the team—not cracking people’s security, but maintaining it.”
“That, well . . . ,” Omar stammered. “That makes sense. But how does that help us find the malware inside of the malware?”
“We don’t have to,” said Marisa, looking at the servers. “Now that we know how it works, we can save everyone out there the same way we tried to save Anja outside of her school: we upload a copy of Bluescreen to the Bluescreen security database, and tell it to recognize itself as a virus. Then we run a system update and it will delete itself from every connected system that has a copy of the virus.” She turned to look at him, feeling hope for the first time in days. “We can wipe Bluescreen off of every puppet out there, all at once, and then burn this place to the ground so it can never happen again.”
“It might work,” said Omar, “But that server is protected by biometric security. It’s completely unhackable.”
Marisa looked at Lal, still unconscious from his Bluescreen overload. “No it’s not.”
TWENTY-FOUR