Daemon

space. They were relatively young people for the most part, not theseasoned analysts who developed strategy but the younger officers who worked in the world of operations, monitoring the data feeds. They were the nerve endings of the United States.
    They were especially keyed up as they watched the large central screen and its digital world map. Hundreds of red dots on that map were scattered throughout North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. And in this business, red dots meant trouble.
    Dr Natalie Philips stood behind the central control board operator. A three-star general and the NSA’s deputy director, Chris Fulbright, stood alongside her. Fulbright had the earnest, soft-spoken manner of a high school guidance counselor, but his mild demeanor masked a steely-eyed pragmatism. Philips knew that mild-mannered people did not rise to Mahogany Row.
    She gestured to the digital map filling the screen. ‘Approximately thirty-eight hundred corporate networks in sixteen countries have been hijacked by an unknown entity – and these are just the ones we know about. We have good reason to believe the entity is Sobol’s Daemon.’
    The general stared at the screen. ‘Sergeant, notify the Joint Chiefs; inform them that we are under attack.’
    The board operator looked up. ‘Already taken care of, sir.’
    The general looked to Philips again. ‘Where are the attacks coming from?’
    Philips stared at the world map. ‘You mean where
did
they come from, General. The battle is long over.’
    ‘What the hell is she talking about?’
    Deputy Director Fulbright interceded. ‘She means these networks were compromised some time ago. We’re only learning about it just now.’
    The general’s nostrils flared. He looked darkly at Philips. ‘How is it possible no one noticed these networks go down?’
    ‘Because they didn’t go down. They’re still operating normally.’
    The general looked confused.
    Philips explained. ‘Someone took them over, and they’re running them as if they own them.’
    The general gestured to the screens. ‘Why wasn’t this detected? Our systems should have sounded the alarm the moment anomalous IP traffic patterns occurred. Isn’t that what the neural logic farm is for?’
    Philips was calm. ‘It wasn’t detected, General, because there were no anomalous traffic patterns to detect. The Daemon is not an Internet worm or a network exploit. It doesn’t hack systems. It hacks society.’
    The general looked again to Fulbright.
    Fulbright obliged. ‘Dr Philips discovered the back door in Sobol’s video games some months ago. One that allowed users to enter secret maps and be exposed to the Daemon’s recruitment efforts.’
    The general nodded impatiently. ‘So the Daemon recruited people to compromise these corporate networks on its behalf?’
    ‘Yes. We believe it coordinated the activities of thousands of people who had no individual knowledge of each other.’
    ‘The Daemon Task Force was supposed to detect and infiltrate these terror cells.’
    Philips regarded the general with deliberate patience. ‘Our monitoring resulted in several dozen arrests, but the Daemon network is massively parallel – no one person or event is critical to its survival. It has no ringleaders and no central point of failure. And no central repository of logic. None of the Daemon’s agents knows anything more than a few seconds in advance, so informants have been useless. It also seems highly adept at detecting monitoring.’
    ‘Forget arrests. What about infiltration?’
    ‘We’ve been working with the interagency Task Force, but progress has been slow. My people are not undercover operatives – they know far too many national secrets to be put at risk of capture – and the operatives who’ve been broughtforward from Langley and Quantico are not expert enough in the lingo and culture of computer gaming – or cryptography and IP network architecture for that matter. A third of them are evangelicals with little or no experience in online gaming. Developing their skills will take time. We’re painfully short of suitable recruits.’
    The general pounded his hand on a chair back in frustration. ‘Goddamnit, this thing is running circles around us.’ He looked to Philips again. ‘How does recruiting kids through video games translate into taking over corporate networks?’
    Philips was looking at the big screen. ‘Because it didn’t recruit kids. Have a look at the demographics of video game