... 81 Hours and Counting ...

“It went for the instructors’ accounts right away, damn it,” Brenda said. A stray lock of her unkempt brown hair drifted down into her eyes. She blew it back out of the way with a puff of air from her pursed lips. Throughout the ritual her fingers never stopped clittering on the keyboard.

“That’s not all, it trashed the file access table on the primary disk,” said Ray grimly. He sat a few feet from her, and worked an X-windows environment with a half-dozen sessions up at once. “We should just power down.”

“We can’t! If we can just salvage the file access table out of RAM and store it somehow we can sort it out later. I’ve got the main back-up drive ready now. We have to ride it out until it’s done.”

Ray switched windows to watch a net-sniffer utility he had running, checking to see what programs were currently active. Three programs, arrogantly called V1, V2, and V3, appeared on the list, then vanished again by the next scan. A cold hand gripped his guts and squeezed. Something was going on in there, the virus was hard at work, but he had no idea what it was up to now. It was unnerving. He felt like an officer on a doomed ship, battling leaks and fires, all the while suspecting that his efforts were in vain, that they were going to sink anyway.

Brenda made an exasperated sound. She brought her fist down and gave the keyboard a smashing blow, something she often yelled at students for doing. “What is this? I’m locked up!”

Ray glanced over at her, then back to his own screen. Suddenly, one of his windows closed and vanished. Two more went down in quick succession. “What the hell... It’s killing our processes. Probably searching the process table for anything with super-user permissions and nailing it. I’ll try to lock that out....” His hands flew over the keys and he was able to hold onto three of his windows, although he couldn’t get any new ones to open.

“It’s doing something with VPN communications, Brenda. We have to bring it down,” he said, turning to her.

Brenda, for perhaps the first time in her life, was indecisive. “But the back-up isn’t finished yet. Everyone’s work is on that disk. Graduate projects, grades, even research projects by several professors...”

Ray nodded grimly. Some of his own work was on that disk, and he felt like he was deciding which of his fingers to cut off. “I know, but we can’t let this thing get out to anyone else. Whatever it is, it’s the worst I’ve ever seen.”

“Damn it! Viruses aren’t supposed to hit everything at once,” Brenda said, her voice cracking. “Files, the disks, the network lines, our own sysop processes...”

Ray blinked as a dark thought came over him. “I think it’s stalling us, Brenda.”

“What?”

But even as he considered how to explain, he realized that there was no time to explain. If he was right, he needed to act fast, there was no time to lose. He rose and headed for the Door That Was Always Locked. Fumbling with the keys, he searched for the illegitimate copy of a master he had that opened virtually all the doors on the campus. He had gotten it from one of the janitors that had gotten tired of opening doors for him two summers ago.

Rhonda Wells, the Dean of Instruction, chose that moment to make her appearance. “I understand that we have a problem down here, Brenda,” she announced. “I’ve been in contact with the school President, and various authorities have been in contact with him. The FBI’s San Francisco office is in on this now, and their agents will be here within forty minutes. We aren’t to touch anything more until they arrive.” Wells was a tall woman with a firm handshake and a broad smile. Ray disliked her. She treated the faculty and staff as one would children who needed a firm but understanding hand.

“Ray?” said Brenda.

Wells seemed to notice Ray for the first time. She frowned. One of the kids was out of his seat. “What’s up, Ray?” she asked.

Ray made no reply. If he was right, it didn’t matter what the FBI wanted. The system had to be brought down. He finally had out the right key. He shoved it in the lock and twisted. The lock stuck for a moment, as the master key was a poor copy, but after a good bit of jiggling it popped open. He stepped into the darkened room full of the smell of ozone and flickering green, red and amber indicator lights. He began switching off systems, one after another. First the network switches, then the big routers that handled the feed to the internet and the grid, next the drives that were in the middle of the back-up.

“Ray? Ray!” said Wells from the doorway. She stepped inside and fumbled for the light switch. “Didn’t you hear me? We’re not supposed to touch anything!”

Ray found the main switch for the server’s CPU and flipped it. The effect was dramatic. The system made a dying, whirring sound, like a vacuum cleaner when it has pulled out its cord. Everything else died with it. He flipped several more switches. Glowing power lights dimmed and went out. Electric motors spun to a stop. Soon, the room was silent.

Wells had the lights on and now she stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips. She stared at Ray with a mixture of amazement and anger. “You killed it, didn’t you? Jesus, Ray, this isn’t like you.”

“It was stalling us,” said Ray weakly, suddenly feeling his tiredness and the stress of the day weighing him down all at once. He needed to sit down, but there weren’t any chairs in the room. Just dead hardware.

Wells shook her head. “How do you know what it was doing? It’s just a program some kid wrote, right?”

Ray shook his head. “No normal student wrote this monster,” he said, feeling out of breath. He didn’t have the energy to explain himself to Wells just now. He just hoped that he had acted in time.

“Probably one of your kids, I would guess. You teach all the graduate-level operating systems sections, don’t you? This is right up your alley.”

Ray was only half-listening. His head had decided to take this moment to start pounding and burning with a vengeance.

“You know, the FBI boys aren’t going to like this. They wanted to watch this thing in action, and you killed it. I think you really screwed the pooch this time, Ray,” Wells said. She frowned with a sudden thought. Her hand moved up to rub her face as she followed Ray out into the lab. “By the way, how did you get in here, anyway?”

Ray waved her off vaguely. He needed to sit. He needed some lunch and some coffee, too.