Daemon

gotten Oberstleutnant Boerner to say those things? Was it some sort of Easter egg created by CyberStorm? Gragg had already checked the chat boards, but his search turned up nothing – no mention of the encrypted message or of Boerner’s little speech, or of the disappearance of the Monte Cassino map. Was he the only one experiencing this? He hadn’t asked a soul, though. This was Gragg’s secret.
    Gragg had begun to suspect that the Monte Cassino map made a registry entry on his machine that prevented the map from appearing in the game listings again. To test his hypothesis, he cleared out hard-drive space on another PC and installed
Over the Rhine
on it in the hope that the clean machine would give him access to the Monte Cassino map, but it still didn’t appear in the Internet listings.
    Had the game somehow restricted his IP address? Or his router’s MAC address? Goddamnit, he was grasping at straws now.
    Think!
    The problem: he had an encrypted string but no key – and no idea what encryption algorithm was used to create the string. Boerner had looked straight at him – or at least his avatar – and said,
‘ … use your key, and ve vill meet again
.’ If Gragg found the key and decrypted the string, where did he enter the decrypted value? Would entering it somewhere make the Monte Cassino map reappear?
    Gragg got up and wrapped the scratchy, smelly blanket around him. He shuffled across the room toward his workbench. Four desktops and two laptops were still powered up there. One was running a dictionary file against the encryptedstring using a series of standard decryption algorithms. He stared at the lines spinning past in the debug window and laughed.
    This was ridiculous. It could take a thousand years with all the permutations of a thirty-two-character string.
    He thought about it for a moment. He could harness a few dozen zombie computers and distribute the task among them. He shook his head. He’d have to design the program to distribute the load – and it would still take too long to run. What, a hundred years? And what if the result wasn’t a proper word? How could he programmatically detect a successful decryption? He didn’t even know the encoding algorithm.
    He cast off the scratchy blanket and sat down before a keyboard. He’d searched the chat boards, but he hadn’t done the obvious thing and Google-proxied the problem. He launched a Web browser and prepared to type the URL in manually. Perhaps there was a Web page dedicated to this.
    Gragg froze just after his home page loaded. It was a popular news portal, and there off to the right were the news stories of the moment. The top headline screamed at him:
    Dead Computer Genius Kills Eight
    Gragg clicked the link, and the extensive news coverage of the siege at Sobol’s estate unfolded before him. Gragg voraciously read every word and followed every link. An hour later and he was wide-awake again with one ‘factoid’ echoing in his mind: ‘… Matthew Sobol, game designer and AI architect for
Over the Rhine
.’
    This Sobol guy had been a genius. Beyond a genius. Gragg was rarely impressed by other people’s hacks – but this Sobol was the king. Engineering a daemon that took vengeance on the world once you were safely dead and beyond all punishment. Gragg’s mind ran through the possibilities. They were endless.
    How much money had Sobol spent on this? The planning! And the Daemon was still on the loose. The Feds didn’t know how to stop it. You could hear it in the closed-lip pronouncements of the government spokespeople.
    Goose bumps swept over Gragg’s skin. It felt like a new world had opened up to him. Was the Monte Cassino map just a coincidence? It had appeared in the last few days – only after Sobol’s death.
    He couldn’t say that for sure, though. He’d been otherwise engaged prior to the mess with the Filipinos.
    It couldn’t be a coincidence, though, could it?
    Gragg knew, now more than ever, that he had to decipher the encrypted text. He felt he could never be sane again unless he knew more about the Monte Cassino map and about Sobol’s Daemon. He might have the inside track on something incredible – a new frontier in a world filled with familiar hacks, police surveillance, and drab suburban vistas. How long had it been since he’d felt a sense of wonder in his jaded soul? He was feeling that now. Was Monte Cassino Sobol’s work?
    Gragg did a Web search for Monte Cassino and came up with a slew of