The Gift by Dave Donovan Read Free Book Online Page B

we had it." Dan slipped from describing the process into acknowledging their defeat.
    Sam finished his water, rose to get another and sat back down. Dan was mindlessly peeling the label off of his emptied bottle.
    “Dan, you're a genius!”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Look at what you’re doing.”
    Dan looked down at his hands. “I’ve had enough mysteries for one day, Sam. How about you just tell me what you’re talking about?”
    “When we figured out the terminating file was mirrored, we discarded the mirrored portion, right?”
    “I just said that.”
    “But when we connected the other pieces, we kept the overlap, like on the label you just peeled off. The overlap isn’t necessary for the label to do its job. It’s a by-product of the manufacturing process. Just like the mirrored portion. It exists to let us connect the pieces, but it is not part of the finished product.” Sam got up and started for the door before he finished talking. Dan was right behind him.
    They rushed back to Sam’s workstation. Sam began making changes to the script that assembled the program and reran it. Like dozens of times before, it produced a potentially executable file. Sam was just about to try running it when he stopped himself, got out of his chair and said, “This time I insist, Dan. We need all the help we can get.”
    Dan took a seat, paused for a moment, then executed the program. It ran.
    “Yes! Finally!” Sam put his hand up for a high-five. Dan was still staring at the screen.
    “We have a problem, Sam.”

C HAPTER S IX

    Before Sam called Web, he looked around the room for Chang, who wasn’t there. Not wanting to have this conversation with Web without Chang’s support, he asked Dan to find him and bring him back. Waiting to tell Web was not an option and neither was leaving his workstation. He picked up the secure line and dialed Web. The phone rang twice before Web picked up.
    Web answered curtly, “Web.”
    “Web, it’s Sam. We got the program to run. I think you should see this.”
    “I’m busy, Sam. Can it wait?”
    As much as Sam would like to put off the conversation he suspected he’d soon be a part of, if their roles were reversed, he would want to know about this immediately, “No, it really can’t.”
    “I’ll be right there.” Web closed the line.
    Sam looked back at his screen. Whatever the programs were doing now, they continued to increase their share of the cluster’s processing power. As complex as some of the malware he’d worked with in the past had been, he’d never seen anything like this. He rubbed his dry eyes to no avail and waited for the others to arrive. Thankfully, Dan arrived with Chang before Web joined them, undoubtedly accompanied by Jack.
    Sam greeted Chang with some relief, “Thank you for joining us, Chang.”
    “I wouldn’t miss it. This is now where the action is. Dan told me a little bit about what you did to get the program together. Fascinating.”
    Before Sam could respond, Web walked in, with Jack on his heels. Somewhere along the way, Jack had found time to not only get into a freshly pressed uniform, but also shave and otherwise clean up. He was back to being a well-kept dick.
    “So, you got the program to run. Should I congratulate you or fire you?” Web asked.
    “Neither, yet," Sam replied.
    Dan started to say something, presumably in Sam’s defense, but Sam stopped him with a gesture. Nothing Dan could say would improve the situation.
    “What do you have?” Web asked more pointedly.
    “I called you right after we executed the program, so we know very little about what it’s doing right now, but we can surmise it’s doing quite a lot by monitoring its resource usage, or rather, their resource usage," Sam answered.
    “What do you mean, ‘their’?” Jack asked.
    “As soon as we ran the program it began making additional programs and executing them. Within seconds, according to the process logs on the other nodes in the cluster,