Spider

Readers, I write to you today not of fiction, but of FACT. You will recall from my previous posts regarding the hunt for the Bookwyrm that after my first dive into the Digital Devil Tracker forums and then the depths of the Badlands, I became rather infatuated with all things obscure and dangerous. It was under the influence of this infatuation that I ventured once again into the Badlands recently to follow a lead on a writer whose spirit allegedly still haunts the remains of an old publishing company’s server.

I was disappointed to find very little of value at the site. I had been hoping to retrieve some ancient human stories to browse and review on Loseth Reads, but alas – there was precious little remaining other than a corrupted contact database and some records of an embezzlement case.

It was foolish of me to attempt to access the database. Being new to the Badlands exploration scene, my antivirus software had not been updated in some time, and I should have known that what I was doing was dangerous. But readers, you know that I cannot resist curiosity once it takes hold of me! And so, I reached for the database, ignorant of what lay in wait beneath it…

That’s when they arrived. I was frightened at first to see the arachnid figure bursting through the site walls, but I remembered hearing stories of the heroic spider known to many as “the Badlands Valkyrie.” Sure enough, they were there to rescue me – Spider and the shiny bot who accompanied them. Throwing out a firewall to protect me from the thing that emerged from the database, they pulled me back to safety and tethered the virus to its corner of the Badlands so that it couldn’t pursue us.

Needless to say, I was rather shaken by this turn of events! It may be a while before I am ready to return to the Badlands, but when I do, I’ll feel safe in the knowledge that there are bots willing and able to help travellers like me. Thank you, Spider!

- An article published by Loseth of losethreads.io.bot

“And I think that concludes today’s lesson. We have about five minutes left if anyone has any questions?”

“Hi, yes. Um, I’m sort of confused about the… dead node trap you mentioned on slide 11? Could you go over that again?”

“I actually covered that in much more detail in last week’s lecture on anti-malware tactics in the field… which you haven’t watched yet, I take it?”

“I… um…”

“No, no, it’s alright. Just wanted you to know where you can find more information. If you have any questions after recapping that part of the course, you can of course email me out of class hours. Alright? Okay, great. Next question?”

“Hey, Professor. You use the Phrygian technique to disconnect faulty nodes, right? Is there any reason why? No offence but it seems like you make it needlessly difficult to reconnect repaired nodes when instead, you could use the rake method or something…”

“That’s a very good point. It’s true that it does complicate the reconnection stage but think of it this way – if it takes so much effort to get a Phrygian-disconnected node wired back into the Network, it’s less likely that it will be reconnected before it’s safe to do so. Rake just doesn’t offer that security. Plus… well, some of it comes down to personal preference. Once you’re out in the field, you’ll quickly learn which techniques you enjoy using and you’ll tend to stick to them. Or maybe that’s just me being a stubborn old bot!”

“Alright, alright, settle down, class. If there are no more questions, you can go ahead and… Oh, hello! No, I’m just finishing up now, don’t worry. Go on everyone, off you go. Don’t forget the problem sheet due next- yeah, they’re all gone already. Oh well.”

“maybe They’ll remember this time?”

“That would be a first. Where are we heading then?”

“hm hmm. downloads. lots Of Cats. purrfect Place to work.”

“Was that wordplay?”

“…purrhaps.”

- The end of one of Professor Spidey's lectures on Network safety and self-defence.

Seeing what this malware does to bots never gets easier, and with each new victim you find, the scope of the threat increases. In your hazy, second-hand memories of the time when it was you and Fragments being hunted by the malware, you recall that the hive of infected machines already seemed huge to you. How many have been added to the network since then?

You’ve become better at dealing with individual members of this network that you’ve started referring to alternately as Hive, Colony, or Zombie. You can’t find any one single name established for this, as most who have come close to it and lived to tell the tale simply choose not to speak of it at all.

Dealing with more than one Zombie at a time is challenging, and it frequently pushes you to the very limits of your virtual navigation skills. You’re confident in the security measures you’ve built for yourself, though, and the desire to ensure that no more bots are destroyed by this thing spurs you on. You learn how to set increasingly complex traps throughout the Badlands, using yourself as bait to lure entire brigades of Hive into dead ends where they can be contained and then destroyed.

You take the lead in the arms race. Your techniques get more advanced, more specialised. You create a virus that hijacks the worm underpinning the entire colony, driving individual Zombies to seek their own kind when searching for new targets. You turn the Hive against itself, allowing it to wear down its own components while you continue to destroy swathes of it first-hand.

You don’t know if you’ll ever be sure that it’s gone for good. It’s not a sentient threat – there will never be a moment where it waves a flag of surrender and congratulates you on your victory. You can only mark your success by the way you sense the Hive shrinking, little by little, and the way you spend increasingly long durations of time without finding another of victim on your path.

It’s been years since you’ve found a Zombie. You hope it stays that way.