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“Cassandra,” she said, “and I already know your name.” She said this matter of factly and noticed I’m sure the stunned look on my face.

“Cassandra?” I asked. Aware that Cassie was but one step away.

“Yes, but not Cassie. I hate that name.”

“Good,” I said before I could stop my mouth fro saying it.

“Why good?”

“Already know a Cassie. Could be a problem.”

She looked at me, no doubt trying to figure what problem it could cause. Then she gave it up, smiled in a not so pasted up way, and looked back at the man I’d begun to think of as Christopher Masters. Why not? He acted like he owned the building. And whatever those in the building did to keep the business, whatever that was besides creating computer viruses, afloat.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll leave you two to get to work. No time like the present. I’ll show up once a day. Unannounced. To keep track of your progress. And with that he left us alone.

“So,” I said. “Night watchman and computer hacker. Quite a combination.”

“Only the computer engineer part is correct. Remember, we’re going to create the virus, but we’re also going to produce the antivirus. Hacker isn’t the right term for someone who does both.”

“And we’re going to take the public for maybe billion dollars in profit in the process. What does that make you?”

“And you, too.”

This was going nowhere. I tried not to look at her. The resemblance to Cassie, while not exact, was too close for comfort.

“Shall we get to work?” I asked her.

“Fine with me. I got up at four this afternoon. Just finished lunch and raring to go.”

“And I woke about five in the morning and spent my day traveling on in assortment of planes, buses and taxis. About time for me to hit the sack.”

“Shall we wait until morning then?”

“No. Let’s get to the preliminaries at least. Then we can sleep on the problem and be ready to get going tomorrow.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she said. And it was.

We spent the next couple of hours filling up large sheets of paper with a general schematic of how we’d proceed. What she’d do and what I’d do. Occasionally I’d ask her a question about how we’d both ended up in this situation and who we were working for. She knew less than I did about the who, but more about how we’d arrived. She, it seemed, was on a hacker most wanted list. I had no idea such a thing existed. She apparently spent her life moving from place to place just for the thrill of creating little beasties that crawled around inside the Internet and the computers that visited there. Most of them did nothing but collect data. Data that could prove embarrassing to those computer owners if made public. It was apparent from the minute I opened my mouth that she thought I was more a liability than an advantage. A college professor from nowheresville, legally researching computational intelligence and artificial life. Publishing in academic journals without profit just to get tenure and promoted to professorship. But we made a go of it and when we finished had laid out a fairly reasonable step-by-step plan for how to achieve our goal.

I finally retired to my special room off the main supercomputer lab to get some sleep. Here I found a sterile bedroom, bathroom, small kitchen well stocked with generic food, and a closet full of replacement clothes of the type that I wore when I’d arrived. No books, television, radio, or anything to make my stay there more interesting. A perfect place to go crazy. And want to get back to work next door.

9.
The first thing I thought of when I woke the next morning, or what I assumed was morning, was no windows. Every link to the outside world had been sealed. No idea what time it was except by the clock inside the computer on which we worked. And yes, my room had a monitor for me to use just like the lab. And no, no Internet, email, or any other route for communication or entertainment. I was locked inside a cocoon of sorts. Unable to contact the world outside. Including Cassie.

I remembered an old classic line, ‘Just because you’re not paranoid it doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you.’ Was Cassandra a spy? Here just to keep an eye on me. And how about all my friends back in North Dakota?

I also considered my state of affairs in terms of escape. No one had told me I was imprisoned here, but surely I was. What would happen were I to simply walk out the door of the lab, down the halls to the elevator, down to the first floor, and out the glass front doors? Would someone stop me? Surely it couldn’t be possible for me to escape so easily. But I’d seen no one guarding me. Of course, that seemed logical. Why show a force before it becomes necessary?

Breakfast consisted of eggs, toast, and coffee. Fresh ground coffee from somewhere south of Mexico. Great food. No complaints there. I had a feeling I needn’t wash the dishes. They would somehow get done. As would the replenishment of groceries and cleaning. If this were a prison, it wouldn’t be that bad of one. Except, of course, for the lack of anything to amuse myself with.

After dressing, I meandered out into the main room and found Cassandra busy at one of the stations. So busy that she didn’t notice me at first. Out of curiosity I walked to the main door and tried it. Locked, of course.

“Don’t bother,” she said, “I’ve already tried it. I’ve even looked over the ventilation ducts. Nothing doing. We’re in here for the duration I’m afraid.”

“Duration?” Sounded like a life sentence to me.

“Until we give them what they want.”

Maybe still a life sentence. An invisible undetectable computer virus that wouldn’t harm anything, just provoke windows to appear at random intervals making individual computing impossible for as long as they remained on the screen. Simple. Sure.

“So what’ll it be? Virus, worm, Trojan horse, or some other thing like I read you’ve worked with? Artificial life things.”

“You have experience working with all of those?”

“Too much experience, I’m afraid. I can create them in my sleep. None of them meant to do much of anything except force individual computers to act as surrogate spam momentarily cripple large corporation’s Internet capabilities.”

“That sounds like more than I’ve done.”

“It is. But you’re not here to do that. You’re here to make the beasts. I’m the one that turns them operational.”

Seemed the way it was all right. I still couldn’t get over how much she looked like Cassie. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Who makes the beasts invisible?” I asked.

“Now that’s the question of the day. Get past firewalls, antivirus protections, and so on, without raising an alarm. We could try DDos, but that day is past I’m afraid.”

“DDos?”

“Sounds like ‘invisible’ falls more in your line of work than mine.”

“Au contraire, monsieur. You make it, I’ll test it.”

“But you’ve got to give me some parameters.”

“Like?”

“Like a definition. That would be good.”

“But that would be easy.”

“Easy?”

“Sure, nothing would be invisible.”

“No. I mean if I created something that wasn’t actually anything it would be invisible.”

“You’re losing me here.”

“For example. What if for one microsecond something entered my computer and changed a few bits here and there . . .”

“Distributed.”

“Yes. Little parts of it all over the place that got together at random times. And it wouldn’t actually be there. Just altered bits of nonessential information in dozens of locations and on a particular cue would join together, cause the problem, and then disperse again. Could that work?”

“By Jove, he’s got a clue after all.”

She’d jumped from dialect to dialect, French to British in a flash. That could get tiring.

“Are you suggesting that such a thing might actually work?”

“Might. If you could send it piecemeal as well. A microsecond at a time. Just two or three small instructions that would be part of the whole virus rather than the complete thing, it might very well work.”

“Can you find out?”

“My job to.” And with that she turned to her terminal and simply got lost. I could tell she’d disappeared in the screen. Virtually. No doubt about it. A hacker through and through. Was it just that simple? Just some free association and that was it?

Suddenly I realized I was doing exactly what they’d hoped for. Get lost in solving the problem and forget where I was and what I was actually doing here. I’d have to watch it from now on. It couldn’t be this easy. Of that I was sure. From now on, I’d have to make it harder. To not solve the problem. As I worked out a way to make this right.

10.
I had an interesting experience during my last year as a Ph.D. candidate. I had created a program for my dissertation that took current living creatures, virtualized them with all available information, and then slowly changed the environment they preferred to see how they would change over time. Complicated coding and mountains of data. My choice of specimen was a certain type of well-researched frog. All of this, of course, was based on Darwin’s evolutionary principles. When I had completed my work and visualized it so I could watch time speed by as generations and generations of frogs appeared and disappeared in the blink of an eye, things became magical. At least as long as you didn’t spend too much time empathizing over all the quasi-dead frogs. When I turned up the temperature slowly, and it had to be slowly or the entire population would die out, the frogs slowly changed into spidery kinds of creatures, hiding under rocks to survive the sun’s heat and lack of water.

My program required so much computation time, however, that it made demonstration impossible. So my advisor got me a grant for time on a supercomputer. What had taken hours before took less than the blink of an eye. And interestingly this caused a minor problem. People who came and saw the program work seemed unimpressed, or at least not as impressed as I felt they should be. It soon became clear that people expect hard things to take time. Maybe not dozens of hours, but at least a minute or two. Thus it was that I incorporated a function in the program called ‘sleep.’ This function, similar to the one my associate would be creating for our virus, simply put the software to sleep for a given period of time. Suddenly my program caught on. The delay gave the apparently necessary impression of hard work being accomplished.

I thought of this early experience as I worked on my first experiments with invisible viruses. The computer was just too fast. Even I, given my previous experience, found it tough to keep up. There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. To observe what was I doing required time. And so I once again incorporated a meaningless ‘sleep’ function to slow things down to a reasonable minute or two. To help me think through things. To let me catch my breath. And to think about Cassie and how much I missed her, And, of course, how to escape this miserable place in which I found myself.

“How’s it going, Francis,” Cassandra asked me. Apparently even here, a couple of thousand miles from North Dakota, my first name Will was just too hard to pronounce.

“Damn computer’s too fast for me.”

“Noticed that, huh.”

“You, too?”

“Yeah. I’m used to laptops. Usually two or three years behind the times. This is ridiculous. And no Internet or email. What’s with that, do you suppose?”

“Don’t want us to tell people where we are.”

“Good thing. At least for me. But you don’t look too happy.”

“Not. Friends who’d like to know how I’m doing.”

“Plenty of folks would like to know how I’m doing too. Also, where I am. That I’d like to keep a secret.”

No response to that.

“Funny though,” she said.

“What?”

“Helps keep our mind on our work.”

“So what have you got?” she asked me.

“Just trying to get ideas. Was revisiting my Ph.D; dissertation code.” And I told her about the frogs, spiders, and the sleep function.

“Never got there?”

“Where?”

That’s when Christopher Masters or whatever his name was walked into the room. With the two of us gabbing away at nothing much.

“Working hard, I see,” he said. Still with the dress suit and tie. Was he watching and listening to us from a different room?

“Actually, comparing experiences that may relate to our project nicely,” I said. Score one for me.

“I’d hoped for more. Remember, time’s not on our side.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The goons who attacked you, that’s why.”

Cassandra looked at me and then back at CM, what I’d decided to call him until I could find out his real name.

“I’ll check back a bit later and hope for more encouraging results.”

“This is not an easy problem,” I said as he turned to leave. He kept walking. And closed the door behind him. I heard the lock tick into place.

“What about these goons?” Cassandra asked.

“No big deal. I’ll tell you sometime.”

She looked confused. Time to get her back on track.

“Do you know his name?”

“Who? Him?”

“Yeah. Him.”

“Don’t you?”

“No. I call him CM. For Christopher Masters.”

“Christopher Masters?”

“The name of this building.”

“Oh.”

So, do you know what his real name is?”

And we returned to our work. Two people locked in a cell, probably being captured on video, but as different as different could be. Their one thing in common? They were building billionaire making illegal software to spring on an unsuspecting public.

I had to figure out a way to communicate with Cassandra without being overheard. I checked the various programming languages and other applications on the supercomputer to see if we were connected. We must be, I thought. After all, only one computer here. Unfortunately, there are many ways to keep multiple-users on a single machine from talking to one another and they’d apparently used one or more of them. I searched everywhere and found nothing. Of course, even it I found one, there was no guarantee that they weren’t kibitzing our monitors and could read everything I wrote there as well.

“Do you speak Lisp?” I asked her.

It took her several seconds to separate herself from her work and then another breath to figure out my question.

“The computer language?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I might write my code in Lisp. Might help if you knew it as well.”

She nodded. Looked back at her monitor and then looked back up at me again. Her confusion turning to realization. I was asking her more than a simple question. A code. Something to keep us connected with the almighty Big Brother listening. She nodded again. And smiled. She liked codes.

I went back to work.

“Cookie Monster,” she then said while still looking at her monitor.

I tried to decipher that. But how could I? We hadn’t defined our code yet.

“The first computer virus from the mid-sixties,” she continued as if that explained everything.

“So?”

“How so?”

“That little virus popped up and repeated a line something like ‘Give me a Cookie!’ and wouldn’t stop unless you typed in the word ‘Cookie.’ An annoyance that users would gladly give a few bucks to stop.”

“Maybe we should call our project that.”

“Or CM. Like the name on the building.”

“Good idea.”

And with that we went silent again. Neither of us had even looked at one another. She was a sharp cookie, I thought, and smiled at my unconscious connection.

I eventually got hungry and walked to my room. I looked back at Cassandra. Where did she eat? Did she eat? Did she have a special room where she slept? Or was a spy working right alongside me?

When I went into my little apartment, I left the door open. Maybe a subtle way to invite her to join me. Maybe just to keep an eye or her. Maybe I just forgot to close the door.

I fixed myself a large sandwich made from very fresh lettuce and other goodies. Drank some freshly made coffee. As I’d expected, someone was keeping the kitchen well stocked. As I ate I watched Cassandra at the computer, lost in her work. Even in the bright lights of the large room, the glare from the monitor highlighted her features. Lovely face. And looking more and more like Cassie to me. This would have to stop or things could get very complicated.

She apparently didn’t eat lunch. Or sleep. Maybe she received her nourishment from the computer somehow. The two were actually one. No matter. Except for the muscles and tendons in her forearms and fingers, she didn’t move from her chair. Typing furious commands to whatever she was working on.

When I finished eating, I resumed my place at the alter of the almighty machine and spent the rest of the afternoon, if it was afternoon, working on the code I’d soon share with Cassandra so we could communicate with one another. One of the many things Lisp is noted for is its symbolic processing. That variable names can be set to hide data. Therefore, a simple word like ‘hello’ could represent millions of numbers, hidden so you could work on them without having to see them each time you did. That was the easy part, though. The tricky part would be getting her to understand what these variables meant without expressly telling her so.

To accomplish this, I mentally – for typing could be observed – encrypted words like ‘hello’ to mean ‘goodbye.’ Simple, but effective. For a few minutes, that is. They’d soon get the idea and be able to translate the code for themselves. Particularly after watching what we actually did as a result of our words. So I encrypted a trigger word. ‘Cassandra.’ Whenever I said it, we would change from whatever mode we were in to the opposite mode. This might work for a while longer. For now it would confuse them enough we might get away with it for a day or two. At least long enough for us to figure out a new code.

I’d used this code in high school and a friend of mine and I had gotten away with it for almost a week. But I had some experience. Begin with a non sequitur.

“How high is up?” I said.

She looked up from her monitor.

“What?”

“How high is up?” I said again.

“Thirteen stories?” she said finally. Right answer. It was thirteen stories down to the ground. Of course it was also thirteen stories up from the ground as well. To make she she’d gotten the picture, I said, “No.” Meaning ‘yes,’ of course.

She smiled.

“Too bad,” she said. Meaning ‘good’ I hoped.

“Getting someplace?” I asked her. Meaning ‘Not getting someplace?’

“No,” she said. Not getting anywhere because of the question.

“Too bad.” Great.

It’s a good way to get a headache, I decided, and remember my not too fond memories of mixed messages. She smiled then, though, at least recognizing my intent. The only way we could keep these buggers from knowing everything we were doing was a code of some kind. Now to think of a not so simple one that wouldn’t confuse us more than them.

I worked on variations of my doctoral dissertation. A virus that would be so benign when it entered a machine that no detector could find it, and then grow into a monster when it found the machine. Simple code creating faux life. I also thought more about codes. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. The programmer’s mantra. In all things programming, KISS.

I visited my bathroom several times and again noted that Cassandra did not. Had they found a way to make lovely robots in this place? Just plug her in somehow and that was it. Or maybe her body just shut down while she worked, understanding somehow that her mind need few calories and her body was simply marking time.

By five o’clock, I’d figured out two things. My dissertation subject held great promise of our success at bilking billions of dollars from the unsuspecting public. I’d also come across a known but somewhat obscure code that might work. This one more directly involved Lisp. All it required was a very good memory. The first word in each sentence represented the variable and the rest of the sentence what the variable means. So I said, “I am here.” ‘I’ meant ‘here.’ If my next sentence began with a known variable, then the rest of the sentence was to be taken literally. If not, a new variable was being defined.

She stared at me. Clearly trying to figure out what I meant by that. My next statement or question would have to make her understand or we’d probably never get there. If she understood that, we’d be on our way.

“I are you.” Meaning ‘Here are you.’ No new hidden meanings in variables.

She stared at me some more. I could see she was confused as to whether I was continuing my previous code or begging a new one.

“This is a new proposition,” I said. Hoping she’d get the meaning now of ‘this.’

“I are you,” I repeated.

“Yes,” she said. One word answers only mean what they say. She’d gotten it. Perfect. I landed with a very perceptive hacker. Great with codes. Far better and quicker than me had I been in her shoes.

This time we kept up with our coded banter. Before long we could make connections between things that any observer within listening range would have taken as literal statements. Sentences like ‘Where is the mustard,’ meant ‘Let’s get out of here.’ These last two sentences brought forth a disappointing answer. For me at least. She didn’t want out. Why should she? This was how she made a living. And the pay was excellent.

With a few more coded words defined I was able to convince her that the high stakes involved never being discovered. Which in turn meant how could they ever trust us? Which then implied we were expendable. That, apparently, had never occurred to her.

“The connections are up for grabs,” she then said. Meaning that she hadn’t thought of that. She’d get back to me.

And we got back to work knowing we’d at least developed something useful to confuse our so-called benefactors. A language they couldn’t understand in which we might be able to conjure some kind of solution to our predicament.

12.
I didn’t have the code from my dissertation program and no way to connect with my website to download it. So I began all over again. Sometimes a good thing to do even when things work right. There’s always new ideas that can make things work better, faster, or even innovative notions that can take you in different and more productive directions. My new approach was KISS and making it so small that it couldn’t be detected. I wanted it no more than a couple of kilobytes when compiled to binary, the zeros and ones that ultimately make up the programs we use. I didn’t know exactly what I’d do with the program when finished. Whether I’d fool our captors into thinking it would do something it wouldn’t or just run away with it, hide it, or somehow make it impossible for them to use. Anything but let them outright have it. My reasons for making sure they didn’t get their precious product were not altogether altruistic. I’d believed what I’d told Cassandra. No way were they going to let us return to our lives with the knowledge of what they’d done. We would be a constant threat to revel their purposes and identities.