On the Wings of Hope : Prose

Half a year - infinitely long and endless short, all as one night, - half a year was required to find an Achilles’ heel - maybe the only one of its kind. Possibly not. And then another half a year, living day by day with tiny earnings of a freelancer, writing code in semi-delirium night by night, coding and praying - to pray each and every new day to the God, known only to you, so that architects of the System haven’t found this hole in the meantime.

They haven’t discovered it. And that’s the reason they are going to die today. A disease will be destroyed once and for all - burned out by hot iron. Very few steps still remained - to unleash it into the network. A virus should be battled with similar means.

No one could possibly assume how fast this giant will stretch its killing tentacles - how quickly everything would be under its feet. How incredibly soon little men, representing the brain of this monster, will understand what is given by such a power … how quickly they will use it in a full potential.

And then everything was like a single flash of time - terrible and unrepeatable. All industrial, in-house, personal computing systems have been switched to the Corporation’s products - there was no country, no home, no man, no device, which has not been connected to and integrated with a System with no possibility for a retreat. For a possibility of switching away didn’t exist - simply was never encoded. And when first “alternatives seekers” found it out - it was too late already.

Tomorrow there will be that day, when the long-term Corporation’s control comes to its awaited end. Otherwise … otherwise everything was in vain.

 * * *

It was such a strange day - a winter one, yet at the same time both bright and warm. The sun blinded the eyes, as if looking at all the human fuss below and smiling. It always smiled that way - warming up both right and both wrong ones.

I accurately took out brand new anonymous smartphone, acquired through the Net earlier, and turned it around. Looked at the screen, which has reflected a vicinity behind my back. Everything was clear, I wasn’t observed.

The time has come.

I habitually typed thirty-letters identification code, habitually connected through a retransmission station of one of local operators with a little known host-server, which was moved out from “traditional” areas of the capital and served as one of the entry points of logon - and logged into a system with a guest access. This was thought of - wasn’t considered a hard infringement. And now we are going to cross the limits of our permissions.

Half a year was spend in order to find a combination of values for the registers of System’s processors, allowing one to cross the borders to never return back again. So banal, so simple … a possibility to alter the contents of processor’s cache. Now a code, which has been fostered during that half a year, is going to become cache’s new owner.

And everything is gonna be simple from that on.

Then this gateway will broadcast a message through radio channel about “internal system failure coded 5SNGD#1” to next hosts of the System, serving all phones, household appliances, all mobile devices - or shortly everything that formed the Net of this megacity - messages, practically indistinguishable from correct ones … except for a small block of ‘additional parameters’ code in the end of each of them.

And everything is gonna be simple from that on.

Then a malfunction in the processing of this data will lead to so banal, so desirable dynamic memory buffers overflow … then a code to dispatch a new sequence of bytes through these ‘relay stations’ of the System to all controlled mobile devices will be executed, exploiting similar vulnerability of processing a certain sequence of values in the registers of their processors.

And a moment after that all those millions and billions of devices will come alive in a single instant - will be awakened to fulfill their duty - to destroy the one who has been their only master for quite too long. Packages will flow from all corners of the capital - and after several tens of minutes “border posts” of the System will fall under a massive traffic pressure - and the access to its heart will become possible. After the fall of metropolis the epidemic will extend further, sparing no machine in its wake - and he will be left with no other choice but to observe. Sometimes it’s such an incomparable pleasure - simply to observe.

It all will take approximately ten minutes. Only ten minutes which, probably, will become eternity. Almost like all those three hundred sixty five days have become.

Fingers flipped on a phone’s keyboard. Pom, pom, pom. And once again - pom, pom, pom.

A final step comes - unleashing a virus into the network. Ten … five seconds … done. Have I made it?