The Orion Plague Read Free

breakfast but only one fat nerd after that? Procedures become
rules become graven in stone, and nobody asks why. He kept
hoping he could use this fact somehow, but guards were always
nearby, and Stanley refused to talk about anything but work. He
wasn’t cruel, but he was reserved, probably afraid.
    They ate breakfast in silence.
    From there Stanley passed Rick through the
cafeteria door with his keyed badge and a code, then down a short
hallway to his workroom. Divided into four workstations, the room
gave each man a corner. There was enough space for four
technicians, no more, no less. Once he arrived, at least two of the
employees were always in the room with him. One could take a break,
but never two.
    And these minders were not stupid guards.
They were technicians, engineers and computer scientists almost as
talented as he was, so fooling them on something tech-related was
difficult.
    Not to say he wasn’t working on it; in fact,
he had several snippets of code embedded in the network, hidden
subroutines lurking, waiting to be activated, or gathering
information in trapdoor files. Anything one person could devise,
another could circumvent, and they did not seem to realize just who
they had sharing the network with them.
    I wonder how much access they would give me
if they knew my sole job for the last five or six years has been
designing network cyber-attacks on the Big Three.
    Hacking United Russia had been easy, what he
could reach; their solution to intrusion was to keep their most
important networks completely separate, unconnected and physically
protected. It worked, but made them inefficient.
    The North American Union was a harder target,
willing to fight a war of cyber-blades, hacker bots, worms and
viruses versus ICE, the name for Intrusion Countermeasure
Electronics, defensive security software. It was an entertaining,
clean kind of war, most of the time.
    Greater China was another matter. Their ICE
was almost as good as the North Americans, but unlike them Beijing
had no compunction about attacking back, even with lethal means.
Quite a few of Rick’s colleagues had been assassinated by the
Chinese or their proxies early in the Second Cold War, before
Colonel Spooky Nguyen had put a stop to them by equally effective
countertactics. The Free Communities’ prisons were full of Chinese
spies and assassins.
    Today in the virtual dungeon he worked on a
relatively benign subroutine, a piece of control software that
helped translate nerve impulses from humans to servomechanisms.
Rick had no way of knowing for sure that it would be used for
sinister purposes – it was exactly the type of thing that could be
put to use to control prosthetics, or teleoperated mining machines,
or even play games, but it could also be used to steer combat
drones or control implanted bionic augmentations. It was this
latter that he considered the most likely possibility. He’d heard a
few things about the Shadow cyborgs these people built.
    What should I do to this piece of
software? He wondered. I’d hate to be the cause of anyone’s
injury or death if it does get used for innocent purposes. But I
have to believe that work like that would not need to be done in
secret, by pampered slaves like me. I have to put aside my doubts
and go with the most likely explanation. That’s what Mom would say,
Occam’s Razor. And Jill would say, “Better to do something and be
wrong than to do nothing.” What would DJ say? “Do the right thing,
even if you’re afraid; bravery isn’t lack of fear, it’s facing your
terror down and beating it”.
    So he fit snips of code into the program here
and there, innocuous things that would by themselves cause no
problems until certain specific circumstances came about. These
conditions were unlikely to obtain in a laboratory. Sufficient
field testing might uncover them, and that was the greatest risk;
but he hoped that the induced failures, the little time bombs he
planted, would trigger only in a