became dark lettering streaming down over a pale green-white background. He passed it over to Dev.
Dev skimmed down the code, then stroked the window to make it scroll. “Looks like it wanted to get out through the Ring into as many other ’cosms as it could . . .”
“Which would’ve been bad,” Giorgio said. “Each time one of these things got into a new ’cosm it would have cloned itself again. The system would’ve been flooded with them in minutes. But they couldn’t get out of the ’cosm . . . or rather they could, except only into other shuntspaces. The rogue logins couldn’t tell the difference between the shunts and the real spaces because all the code’s identical, right down to the accounting structures. But everything’s isolated from the main structure by design . . .”
Dev nodded slowly, looking at the nasty and elegant code in his hands. “So here they stayed until they expired.” He glanced up. “Though not all at once.”
“Nope,” Darlene said. “Expirations were pretty much random, though there were some clusters that might have been either lazy programming or something to do with the rogue logins not being able to execute their routines correctly—caught in loops, maybe.” She shrugged.
Dev flipped the page of code over to Giorgio, who crumpled it up and tossed it in the air, where it vanished. “Now all we need to figure out is why the CO shoved those logins into the shuntspaces,” Dev said.
Giorgio nodded. “We’re looking into that. So are Spike and Dietrich here—they were on last night helping with the analysis and cleanup after the first attack, and we called them over from network security to help us try to understand what was going on.”
“What we are all agreed on,” said the dark-skinned young man who to judge by his accent was probably Dietrich, “was that it was a good thing that so many of the illegal logins wound up being directed into the shuntspaces. They protected the rest of the system a little. Otherwise the battle might have gone very much differently.”
“As bugs go,” said Spike, a little Asian guy in a white shirt and business flannels, “it was more welcome than most.”
“Undocumented feature,” said one shuntspacer whose name tag read “AMALIE,” a young brunette woman in jeans and an Omnitopia hoodie.
“Yeah, well, I prefer them documented,” Dev said. “But you must have some theories about how this happened. Anybody?”
Heads shook all around the circle. “That’s why we left you all those notes, Boss,” said Giorgio. “You and Tau are the only ones with access to the CO. You two’ll have to figure it out.”
“All we can tell you,” said Darlene, “is that every one of those rogue logins had Conscientious Objector ID strings prepended to them. Though the format looked weird.”
Dev let out an exasperated breath. “Weird? Syntax errors, you think?”
“Like you would ever make a syntax error, Boss,” somebody said, sounding very dry.
Dev laughed. “Please. My perfection is a matter of public record.”
The snickering was no crueler than necessary. “Don’t know that it was a coding error, either,” Darlene said. “Or not one of yours. The other reason we called security was that, besides the CO strings, we also kept finding outside computer address strings appended to the attacker logins, whereas all the others we had been trying to follow up until then didn’t have any. Which makes sense, because that’s absolutely not the kind of thing you’d want to leave behind you if you were a hacker. We couldn’t understand where the appended addresses were coming from.”
“Code error at the other end,” Giorgio said. “Had to be. After all, the attack code has to have been millions of lines long. No way you can write that much stuff without messing up something somewhere—”
“Tell me about it,” Dev said.
“All it would have taken,” said Darlene, “was one line duplicated somewhere in those guys’ code—a semicolon forgotten or a pair of quotes or brackets not closed—” She shrugged. “Then you get this fragment of address information left hanging off the end of a login. . . . That might have been what made the CO react. But you’ll have to be the one to tell us that.”
Dev shook his head. “It sounds like we just got lucky,” he said. “Okay. Tau and I will look at your notes as fast as we can. Probably mostly Tau—my plate’s so full today . . .”
“Boss,” Giorgio said. “We know you’re . . . protective about the CO routines.