Daemon

bounced off. After a few tries, he got bored and walked off.
    Philips: What’s this?
    Ross: A Type II gate. It will only permit those I choose to enter, and I just typed your character’s name in. What does ‘FANX’ mean, anyway?
    Philips: I’ll let you puzzle it out
.
    Ross: Please step through the portal
.
    NSA Tech: Doctor, we’ve got a physical address, but it’s in Helsingborg, Sweden
.
    Philips: [MUTE ON] Notify local authorities and Interpol. [MUTE OFF] Where’s this lead to?
    Ross: What does it matter? Look, I hope efforts to trace my physical location are not distracting you. I’m running several layers of proxies, Dr Philips. By the time you track them all down, this will be long over. Just pay attention, please. This is important
.
    Philips: Jon, I’m not –
    Ross: It’s okay, Doctor. That’s your job. Just step through the gate, please
.
    The perspective of the screen changed as Philips moved her character through the gate. It was a swirling vortex of blue lines, and then suddenly the view changed to a darkenedmasonry tunnel filled to a depth of a couple of feet with black water. The area was lit by the swirling lights of the nearby magical portal. Rats scurried away along ledges, and the water’s surface rippled with the dazzling lights.
    Someone in the dark muttered. ‘Nice algorithm …’
    The NSA chief craned his neck. ‘Shhh!’
    On-screen, Ross’s hentai warrior princess waded out into the water and stood in front of Philips’s character.
    Philips: What is this place?
    Ross: It’s a sewer beneath the Temple District. Not accessible without a magical portal
.
    Philips: What did you want to show me, Jon?
    Ross: Look straight ahead. What do you see? You may need to move side to side to notice it
.
    The view on-screen changed as Philips focused straight ahead. There in the semidarkness of the slime-covered wall was the outline of an oxidized bronze door – nearly the same color as the surrounding stones.
    Philips: A door
.
    Ross: Not just any door. A back door
.
    Philips: It’s a literal door?
    Ross: You were expecting a code snippet? Maybe something that accepted anonymous connections at a certain port address or carried out actions on the user’s computer with their rights? But you didn’t find that. You didn’t find it because you shouldn’t have been looking for a back door leading IN. You should have been looking for a back door leading OUT
.
    Philips: But how would that permit Sobol to control a user’s machine?
    Ross: It isn’t their machine he’s trying to control
.
    Philips: You’re saying he was trying to control the user?
    Ross: Why don’t you step through the portal and find out?
    Philips: Wait a minute. We still should have found this in the code
.
    Ross: Why? Were you looking for a graphic of a door that when
used as an object in the game environment loads a game map? Do you know how many times that innocuous function call appears in the source code? The code itself is benign – it’s the map it loads that isn’t. Because the map in question is not on the CyberStorm servers, and I’ll bet you didn’t look farther than the IP addresses of the map links
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    Philips: [a sigh of disgust] You mean he’s using a redirect
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    Ross: It will look local in the map database, but when you try to load it, it redirects to an external IP address – which logs the user off the current game and establishes a new connection on an alien server. In short: this portal leads to a darknet
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    Philips: A darknet. An encrypted virtual network
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    Ross: Correct. Except that this is a graphical darknet
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    Philips: How do you know all this?
    Ross: Like I said – step through the portal. However, I will leave you now. Your colleagues are quite skilled and have probably located my zombie in Sweden, maybe even my zombie in Germany – and I really must be going. Please remember that I am innocent, Natalie – if I may call you Natalie. I’d really like to tell you the whole story over dinner sometime
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    Philips: I don’t date felons, Jon – especially cross-dressing felons
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    Ross: Till we meet again, Doctor
…
    At that, Ross’s avatar disappeared – as did his magical gate – leaving her in relative darkness. There was just the faint glow emanating from the door.
    NSA Tech: He’s off-line, Doctor
.
    Philips: We’re still recording?
    NSA Tech: Affirmative
.
    On-screen, Philips approached the door and activated it. It creaked open, the noise echoing down the sewer tunnel.