Daemon

past.’
    Mosely’s dry voice croaked, ‘How long?’
    ‘Forty-six hours.’
    A water bottle appeared next to his mouth. Mosely turned to see the other orderly extending it. Mosely took it and sipped greedily.
    ‘Not too much.’ After a few more moments they took it away.
    The big guy regarded Mosely. ‘The fact that you’re still alive is all I need to know about you.’ He extended his hand. ‘I’m Rollins.’ His eyes darted. ‘He’s Morris.’
    Mosely regarded the hand. ‘Like I’m Taylor?’
    Rollins laughed. ‘Exactly like that.’
    Mosely shook his hand. Rollins made eye contact. They were confident eyes, not at all unfriendly.
    Morris nodded and shook his hand also. ‘Welcome aboard.’
    ‘Aboard
what
?’
    Rollins gestured. ‘The Daemon chose you. You’re one of its champions now.’
    ‘Do I have a choice?’
    ‘You already made your choice.’ He looked into Mosely’s eyes. ‘This is where you want to be. That’s why you’re still alive.’
    Mosely absorbed the words. The images were so fresh in his mind. Breaking him down to his basic building blocks.Understanding him. Mosely understanding himself. The elation.
    He realized Rollins was right.
    Rollins continued. ‘There are no leaders here. We are all peers. And we answer directly to the Daemon – and no one else. I am your equal. And you are mine.’
    Mosely wasn’t sure this was even happening. He shook his head to clear it.
    Rollins patted his arm. ‘First, some food and rest. There’s a lot to learn, but the Daemon chose you because you’re smart. And you’ll need to be.’

Chapter 28:// Ripples on the Surface
    Natalie Philips paced with a laser pointer at the edge of a projection screen. The Mahogany Row conference room was dimly lit, and silhouettes of her audience were arrayed around a sizeable boardroom table. Military badges on the uniforms of some audience members reflected the light from the screen.
    Her title presentation slide was up:
    Viability of Daemon Construct Over Peer-to-Peer Networks
    She was already addressing the group. ‘… the feasibility of a narrow AI scripting application distributed over a peer-to-peer network architecture to avoid core logic disruption.’ She clicked to the next slide. It bore the simple words:
    Distributed Daemon Viable
    A murmur went through her audience.
    ‘Our unequivocal findings are that a distributed daemon is not merely a potential threat but an inevitable one, given the standards unifying extant networked systems. In fact, we have reason to believe one of these logic constructs is currently loose in the wild.’
    Much more murmuring went through the crowd.
    She changed her slide again. This one depicted two sets of graphs labeled
Incidence of DDOS Attacks – All Sites Compared to Gambling/Pornography Sites
.
    She looked back at her audience. ‘A distributed denial of service (or DDOS) attack involves harnessing the power of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of zombie computers to transmit large amounts of packets to a single target Web domain. A zombie computer is one that has been previously compromised by a malicious back door program. This could be John Q. Public’s unsecured computersitting in the den. An army of these zombie computers is called a botnet, and its collective computing power can be directed to overwhelm a target, making it too busy to respond to legitimate traffic. The potential to harm an online business is obvious.
    ‘Unlike a simple denial of service (or DOS) attack – which is launched from a single machine and thus easily blocked by an IP address – a DDOS attack comes in waves from different IP addresses coordinated to continually incapacitate the target. Likewise, the nature of the traffic can vary wildly, making it difficult to filter out garbage connection requests. In short: it is significantly more serious. Unless the attacker brags about his deeds, tracing the real source of an attack can be next to impossible.’
    She wielded the laser pointer to highlight various parts of the screen. ‘These two charts illustrate a pattern detected four months ago in the occurrence of distributed denial of service attacks on the public Internet – both overall and as experienced separately by commercial gambling and pornography Web sites, both legal and illegal, hereafter referred to as ‘G/P sites.’
    ‘Note the increase of approximately twelve thousand percent in the occurrence of such attacks against G/P sites during