Daemon

Philips, but if Sobol’s games contained steganographic content, you should have readily detected it by plotting the magnitude of a two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform of the bitstream. This would show telltale discontinuities at a rate roughly above ten percent.’
    Philips aimed an anti-smile in his direction. ‘Thank you, Doctor. Had I not spent the last six years expanding the frontiers of your discipline, I’m sure I would find your input invaluable.’
    The division chief cleared his throat. ‘The point is still valid, Doctor. How could Sobol hide a back door in a program using steganography, of all things? Doesn’t that just hide data? You can’t execute steganographic code.’
    The FBI analyst couldn’t hold back. ‘Even if he was storing encrypted code within art asset files, he’d still need code toextract the encrypted elements – and we would have found the extraction routines in the source.’
    Philips turned to him thoughtfully. ‘Yes, but the back door isn’t in the code. It’s in the
program
– but it’s not in the code.’
    Her audience looked confused.
    The division chief shrugged. ‘You lost me there, Doctor.’
    The senior cryptanalyst offered, ‘You mean the relationship of things
within
the program?’
    ‘Ah, now you’re seeing it.’
    The division chief cut in. ‘What brought you back to the stego angle? The DDOS attacks on G/P sites?’
    ‘No.’ She paused again. ‘Jon Ross brought me back to it.’ She turned back to face them. ‘For the last several weeks I have been exchanging e-mail communications with the man known as Jon Ross.’
    The impact of this revelation left her audience stunned briefly. Then there was frantic movement; previously untouched presentation binders were grabbed and thumbed through hastily.
    ‘Why weren’t we informed of this?’
    The NSA chief interjected, ‘The Advisory Panel was informed.’
    ‘What evidence do you have that these e-mails are authentic?’
    Philips was calm. ‘The first e-mail made reference to a conversation Ross and I had in person at Sobol’s funeral.’
    The FBI analyst nodded slowly. ‘No doubt he claims innocence and that the Daemon really exists.’
    ‘He’s doing more than that. He’s pursuing the Daemon, and imploring us to do the same. Which leads us once again to the back door in Sobol’s software. Because it was Jon Ross who helped me find it.’
    ‘That’s convenient for him.’
    ‘I thought so, too. That’s why I asked for a face-to-face meeting.’
    The NSA chief nodded in apparent recollection.
    The FBI analyst looked surprised. ‘And he agreed?’
    ‘After a fashion.’ Philips nodded to the back of the room, and the lights dimmed again.
    The screen filled with an animated 3-D environment. It was a narrow, medieval-looking city street, with buildings leaning over it in irregular rows. Few in attendance recognized it because none of them had the time or inclination to play online computer games. A title in plain Arial font briefly appeared superimposed over the image:
    Session #489: Elianburg, Duchy of Prendall
    Philips narrated. ‘What you’re looking at is Sobol’s game
The Gate
. This is an online role-playing game – meaning that tens of thousands of users access game maps from central servers. The game covers a large area of virtual space. Jon Ross requested a meeting at this specific location; at the corner of Queensland Boulevard and Hovarth Alley in Elianburg.’
    ‘A meeting in an online game?’
    ‘Yes. But since it’s difficult to arrest an avatar, I decided to go into God Mode.’
    ‘Meaning what?’
    ‘Meaning I cheated; I enlisted the aid of the CyberStorm system administrators to place the intersection under surveillance with virtual cameras.’
    ‘You set up a stake-out in fantasyland?’
    A chuckle swept through the room.
    Philips nodded. ‘Something like that. The goal was to monitor every character that entered this intersection up to the appointed meeting time. It’s a busy intersection – in the middle of the market where players purchase equipment – and I wanted the maximum amount of time to trace Ross.’
    One of the uniformed military officers spoke up. ‘Like tracing a phone call?’
    ‘Similar, yes. Each player has a screen name hovering over their character’s head that must be unique for that server cluster. We wrote a script that scanned for suspicious player nameson the servers. It autoharvested IP addresses for likely suspects and traced them