"FWLS36" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

back in his chair. "Now that I've told you my twists of the
trade," he said, inbetween sips, "Time for you to tell me what
this big bad evil site really is."

"Could the bug have followed me?" I asked him.

"No way. The bug was virtual. It's like my toys over
there... once you're not directly on the net, they can't touch
you."

"Alright... I wandered into this place by accident one day
in the library. It was a one in a million chance that I walked
in while their ice programs were resetting... and there it was.
On a crystal pedestal, a program. I only managed to read about
ten lines."

"That's it? You know what it does?"

"I didn't then. A bunch of warning sensors went off, and I
jacked out instantly. I told a friend about it, and quoted a few
lines of the code. It's got some weird instructions in it...
stuff he's never recognized. And stuff like 'Shutdown',
'Delete', 'Unhook'... and plenty of words like 'SwapServer' and
'Reconnect'. Looped, over and over again."

Gosub pondered this, sipping his coffee. "So it's a bomb.
I've seen those before, you just drop one on a site, and the code
forces the server to shut down."

"Yeah, but this bomb shuts you down, deletes everything you
have, then reconnects itself to another site and repeats. And it
clones off if you have more than one connection."

Gosub stopped in mid sip. "A recursive virus that wipes
everything in its path..."

"One that can get into any system, no matter how well
guarded, and kill it. Just looks like a harmless little
program."

"Something that shuts down and destroys all of VOSNet,"
Gosub realized.

"Now you know why we have to kill it," I said.

*

The day of the run was the next day.

Gosub had me rest up, and memorize everything I remembered