The Blue Nowhere

their own, without any human input. They can travel from one machine to another, they can reproduce, they can hide, they can communicate with other computers or people, they can kill themselves.”
    Gillette drew a second diagram, to illustrate how Trapdoor worked. “Demons are a type of bot. They sit inside your computer and do things like run the clock and automatically back up files. Scut work. But the Trapdoor demon does something a lot scarier. Once it’s inside your computer it modifies the operating system and, when you go online, it links your computer to Phate’s.”
    “And he seizes root,” Bishop said.
    “Exactly.”
    “Oh, this is bad,” Linda Sanchez muttered. “Man. . . .”

    Nolan twined more of her unkempt hair around a finger. Beneath the fragile designer glasses her eyes were troubled—as if she’d just seen a terrible accident. “So if you surf the Web, read a news story, read an e-mail, pay a bill, listen to music, download pictures, look up a stock quotation—if you’re online at all —Phate can get inside your computer.”
    “Yep. Anything you get via the Internet might have the Trapdoor demon in it.”
    “But what about firewalls?” Miller asked. “Why don’t they stop it?”
    Firewalls are computer sentries that keep files or data you haven’t asked for out of your machine. Gillette explained, “That’s what’s brilliant about this: Because the demon’s hidden in data that you’ve asked for, firewalls won’t stop it.”
    “Brilliant,” Bob Shelton muttered sarcastically.
    Tony Mott drummed his fingers absently on his bike helmet. “He’s breaking rule number one.”
    “Which is?” Bishop asked.
    Gillette recited, “Leave the civilians alone.”
    Mott, nodding, continued, “Hackers feel that the government, corporations and other hackers are fair game. But you should never target the general public.”
    Sanchez asked, “Is there any way to tell if he’s inside your machine?”
    “Only little things—your keyboard seems sluggish, the graphics look a little fuzzy, a game doesn’t respond quite as quickly as usual, your hard drive engages for a second or two when it shouldn’t. Nothing so obvious that most people’d notice.”
    Shelton asked, “How come you didn’t find this demon thing in Lara Gibson’s computer?”
    “I did—only what I found was its corpse: digital gibberish. Phate built some kind of self-destruct into it. If the demon senses you’re looking for it, it rewrites itself into garbage.”
    “How did you find all this out?” Bishop asked.
    Gillette shrugged. “Pieced it together from these.” He handed Bishop the printouts.
    Bishop looked at the top sheet of paper.
    To: Group
    From: Triple-X
    I heard that Titan233 was asking for a copy of Trapdoor. Don’t do it, man. Forget you heard about it. I know about Phate and Shawn. They’re DANGEROUS. I’m not kidding.
    “Who’s he?” Shelton asked. “Triple-X? Be good to have a talk with him in person.”
    “I don’t have any clue what his real name is or where he lives,” Gillette said. “Maybe he was in some cybergang with Phate and Shawn.”
    Bishop flipped through the rest of the printouts, all of which gave some detail or rumor about Trapdoor. Triple-X’s name was on several of them.
    Nolan tapped one. “Can we trace the information in the header back to Triple-X’s machine?”
    Gillette explained to Bishop and Shelton, “Headers in newsgroup postings and e-mails show the route the message took from the sender’s computer to the recipient’s. Theoretically you can look at a header and trace a message back to find the location of the sender’s machine. But I checked these already.” Nodding at the sheet. “They’re fake. Most serious hackers falsify the headers so nobody can find them.”
    “So it’s a dead end?” Shelton muttered.
    “I just read everything quickly. We should look at them again carefully,” Gillette said, nodding at the printouts. “Then I’m going to hack together a bot of my own. It’ll search for any mention of the words ‘Phate,’ ‘Shawn,’ ‘Trapdoor’ or ‘Triple-X.’”
    “A fishing expedition,” Bishop mused. “ P-h phishing.”
    It’s all in the spelling. . . .
    Tony Mott said, “Let’s call CERT. See if they’ve heard anything about this.”
    Although the organization itself denied it, every geek in the world knew that these initials stood for the Computer Emergency Response Team. Located on the Carnegie