Reamde

“There are a couple of things I would never, ever like to have to explain to him,” Wallace said. “First, that I lost important files because I forgot to back them up. Second, that his files have been accessed by unauthorized persons because I backed them up to a remote server not under my physical control. So what choice do I have?”

“Keeping the hardware under your physical control is the only way to be sure,” Peter said soothingly. “What is the backup drive exactly?”

“A rather pricey off-the-shelf RAID 3 box, which I have placed inside of a safe that is bolted into the concrete wall and floor of the condo. When I am home, I open the safe and pull out the FireWire cable and connect it to my laptop long enough to accomplish the backup, then close it all up again.”

Peter considered it. “Unconventional but pretty logical” was his verdict. “To physically steal the box, someone would have to do huge damage to the safe and probably destroy the RAID.”

“That’s kind of my thinking.”

“Okay, so your first move on getting home was to open the safe and make a backup just like you said, so that if your laptop’s drive just happened to crash at that particular moment you’d still have a copy of the file I sold you.”

“You convinced me that it was the only copy extant,” said Wallace, sounding almost defensive.

“So in a world governed by Murphy’s law, making an immediate backup was the right move,” Peter agreed.

“He was expecting the file to show up on a particular server in Budapest no later than … translating to West Coast time, here … two A.M., and it was only midnight.”

“Plenty of time.”

“So I thought,” Wallace said. “Having set the backup in motion, I left the room, took a piss, and listened to the voice mail on my landline while I unpacked a few items and mixed myself a drink. I sorted through the mail. This might have taken all of about fifteen minutes. I went back to my study and sat down in front of my laptop and opened up a terminal window. When I am undertaking operations of this sort, I prefer to use SCP from the command line.”

“As you should,” Peter agreed.

“My first move was to check the contents of ‘Documents’ to remind myself of the filename and approximate size of the file that you sold me. And when I did that, I saw—well, see for yourself.”

Evidently Wallace’s laptop was already open on Peter’s workbench. There was a brief pause and then Peter said, “Hmm.”

“You need to understand that yesterday, ‘Documents’ contained a dozen or so subdirectories and maybe two score of files,” Wallace said.

“Including the file in question.”

“Yes.”

“And now it contains two files and two files only,” Peter said, “one of which is called troll.gpg, the other—”

“README,” Wallace said. “So I read the fucking thing.”

Peter snorted. “I think it’s supposed to be called README,” he said, “but there’s a typo. They transposed two letters, see?”

“REAMDE,” Wallace said.

“You’ve already opened it?”

“Perhaps stupidly, yeah.”

Peter double-clicked. There was a pause while (Zula imagined) he examined the contents of the REAMDE file.

The name had jogged a vague memory. Zula’s bag was leaning against the wall right next to her. Moving quietly, she reached into the padded laptop slot at its top and pulled out her computer. She set it on the floor, sat down next to it, and opened it up. Her first move was to hit the button that muted the sound. Within a few seconds it had attached itself to Peter’s Wi-Fi network. She clicked an icon that caused a VPN connection to be established to Corporation 9592’s network.

“We already established that you’re not a T’Rain player,” Wallace said.

“Never got into it,” Peter admitted.

“Well, that picture you’re looking at is of a troll. A particular type of mountain troll that lives in a particular region of T’Rain, rather inaccessible I’m afraid. Which might help you make sense of the caption.”

“‘Ha ha noob, you are powned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key.’ Ah, okay, I get it.”

“Well, I’m pretty fucking glad that you get it, my friend, because—”

“And now,” said Peter, cutting him off, “if we check out the contents of the other file, troll.gpg, we find that”—miscellaneous clicks—“one, it is huge, and two, it is a correctly formatted gpg file.”

“You call that correctly formatted!?”

“Yeah. A standard header and then several gigs of random-looking binary content.”

“Several gigs you say.”

“Yeah. This one file is big enough to contain, probably, all the files that were originally stored in your ‘Documents’ folder. But if we take the message in REAMDE at face value, it’s all been encrypted. Your files are being held for ransom.”