Overclocked by K. S. Augustin Page B

of bytes here,” Carl said, “with mil­lions be­ing ad­ded every second. Un­like our own world, this one is al­most in­fin­ite, an en­tire uni­verse within each com­puter, each server.”
    Build­ings of every shape and hue whizzed past them. Any­thing that stored, or sent, in­form­a­tion via cy­ber­space was mod­elled here, from small cubes that re­flec­ted in­di­vidual users on their own home serv­ers to gi­ant edi­fices rep­res­ent­ing large cor­por­a­tions span­ning con­tin­ents.
    “In­form­a­tion about every single thing on Earth, just sit­ting some­where in the Blue, wait­ing for someone to reach out and grab it.”
    Tania let Carl’s words wash over her as they soared on­ward. She thought that the cor­por­ate-owned, im­pen­et­rable-look­ing blocks of en­cryp­ted data­bases were the largest things in the Blue, and wondered if they could be ma­nip­u­lated into more ima­gin­at­ive shapes. Then she began no­ti­cing a swarm of
some­thing
dir­ectly in their path. They were still far away from it and she nar­rowed her eyes, try­ing to fo­cus on what she was see­ing. Was it an­other build­ing? No, it couldn’t be. None of the win­dow­less sky­scrapers they had passed were painted such a dis­tinct­ive shade of red.
    It struck her that that shade she was see­ing was the ex­act same col­our as the orbs that had at­tacked them.
    They moved closer and the ob­jects star­ted to re­semble a sheet of pa­per, then a shower of thick strands, like a beaded cur­tain that had par­tially col­lapsed on the floor.
    In­stinct­ively she held back, but Carl tugged at her and they moved closer still.
    It was a web, a mass of knobbly threads that squat­ted over en­tire dis­tricts of the cy­ber­scape. Carl stopped while they were still a little dis­tance away and Tania fo­cused on the cy­ber­space layer be­low the cur­rent street level. She wasn’t sur­prised to see red tendrils reach­ing down through blocks of the level be­low her and – as she lif­ted her gaze – above her as well.
    The tendrils weren’t con­tent to merely en­gulf the build­ings. As she watched, they slowly entered blocks, pen­et­rat­ing them ef­fort­lessly, and emer­ging through shattered pan­els on pre­vi­ously slick sur­faces be­fore gradu­ally meet­ing up with the main struc­ture again, the tendrils thick­en­ing as they re­con­nec­ted with a ma­jor branch. Around the red web, spheres, very much like the bots that had at­tacked her and Carl, dar­ted back and forth at high speed, circ­ling the thick creep­ers like tiny fly­ing sol­diers.
    “What can you see?” he asked.
    She frowned as she took in the com­plex­ity of what was in front of her. “I see streets. And tall build­ings.”
    He lif­ted an eye­brow. “Really? Build­ings and streets? Not, say, pipes or streams?”
    She shook her head while re­mem­ber­ing sim­ilar words from the gi­ant rab­bit. Maybe Carl and the an­imal avatar
did
know each other. “No. It looks, more or less, like a nor­mal city­scape to me.”
    “That’s what I see too,” he said. “It means you and I must be us­ing a sim­ilar frame of ref­er­ence to in­ter­pret ob­jects in cy­ber­space.” He jerked his head. “What about that? Can you see some­thing for­eign over there?”
    “It’s,” Tania grim­aced, “de­struct­ive. A blood-red col­our, with tendrils that ap­pear to be in­filt­rat­ing data­bases. What is it?”
    “That,” Carl said, after ex­hal­ing heav­ily, “is the Rhine-Temple bot­net. You must have ana­lysed traces of it back in the lab.”
    “A bot­net?” She knew what they were but had never quite trans­lated their ex­ist­ence in to the im­age of de­struc­tion she saw be­fore her. The web of tentacles looked ma­lign and hor­rific. “How dan­ger­ous is it?”
    He tightened his lips and the wrinkles around his mouth deepened. “More