Broken System Ch. 72-73 (Patreon)

Ch. 72 - Distributed Computing

That first afternoon, they stayed secluded in their rooms as much as possible to hide from Margerot and anyone else who might have known the mage that Benjamin was pretending to be. Instead, his friends watched city life from the balcony and listened to what was going on in the other nearby apartments to get a better idea of how everyone acted there. Benjamin didn’t have time for that, though. Aside from short breaks to rest his eyes or refresh his mana with Matt’s help, he was lost in his codex designing new magical gadgets that he might be able to use to gain some kind of edge in all of this.

There was no denying that being here was intensely dangerous. Everyone knew it. They were in the lion's den. Even Emma had a certain tenseness in her normally fluid movements. At any moment, they might be found out, and when they inevitably were, they’d be badly outnumbered. Their first warning would probably come in the shape of green fire or a swarm of demons before an army of fanatic warriors ran up the stairs, eager to die for the cause.

Fortunately, the sheer number of their enemies gave Benjamin a lot of data to work with. While his friends ordered delicacies like tea and dumplings from the Kitchen, he located the data and then analyzed the dense web of traffic buzzing around the city like a magical fog.

At first, he did this by using his own system, but when he figured out what ports were being pinged and how things were being authenticated, he started building a dummy system in a beautiful silvered mirror with a gilded bronze frame. It made for a strange monitor, but he decided it was probably strong enough to stand up to a couple mana being channeled through it as long as he didn’t get too crazy.

Over the next several hours, he proceeded to create the most useless magic item ever, and then, as it got warm to the touch from all of the information involved, he got to work using it as sort of a proxy server to analyze and understand the interactions.

After that, he sat there almost motionless until he broke for dinner as the world passed him by. In all that time, the only things he did were to watch the data coming in, in constant kaleidoscopic bursts of emerald and chartreuse runes, and notice when his friends walked in and out of his peripheral vision. Sometimes, they would watch the digital fireworks show he was attempting to wrangle into smooth, laminar data flows, but he ignored them and their questions.

Though initially the data was difficult to parse, as he saw more patterns and more scripts, he eventually started getting it under control. The commands and bits of information were still so dazzling that they were practically overwhelming, but that was fine. This was Benjamin’s element, after all.

He would have been a great developer back on Earth, but here, those skills could be put to better use, and he lost himself in his efforts as his mind moved faster than the world around him. He felt like he was only ever finding a few pieces to connect in an ever-expanding, monochromatic jigsaw puzzle, but despite that, he still learned a great deal. However, when he tried to explain it to his friends over spicy meat skewers and roasted vegetables, they looked at him blankly.

“I’m sure I knew all of this once, but I can’t imagine I found it interesting even then,” Emma said. “Internet? Handshaking? IP packets? How will this help us kill these damn mages already?”

“Directly?” Benjamin shook his head, “It won’t. But indirectly, well, we know a lot more than we did this morning. The Rhulvinarians still haven’t secured their network and probably don’t even know how we’ve gained access so far!”

They thought that was interesting at least, but when he started delving deeper into the topic that the only communications out there that he’d been able to find that were actually encrypted seemed to be between the mages themselves, and the fact that such an arrangement almost certainly meant that that the Summoner Lords had a whole separate system from the one they imposed on someone else, or at the very least a more secure and feature-rich system than the one they used on their slaves, no one seemed to care much.

“Does that really matter though?” Matt asked, “If you’ve been trying to unlock Raja’s voice for what six… eight months now and you still haven’t broken the code, I doubt you’re going to be able to take a peek into that any time soon, so it gains us nothing.”

“Actually, I had a thought about that,” Benjamin said hesitantly, noticing that Raja perked up immediately. “You don’t remember what a denial of service attack is or how torrenting worked, but there might be a way we could mimic that sort of thing here. It’s just going to take some leg work.”

Benjamin didn’t bother to explain all the precautions he was going to have to take to make this a viable plan or even how noticeable it was going to be, but as they finished their meal, he gave everyone the basics. “Essentially, I’m going to make a scaled-down version of the brute force cracking algorithm that Raja is almost always running, and I’m going to put it on every slave in the city,” he explained. “It’s going to burn a mana every ten or twelve hours instead of every hour so no one notices it right away, but even if it’s running at one-tenth speed across five thousand people, it’s still going to let us try…”

Benjamin paused a moment to do the math. He’d upgraded the algorithm that governed his brute force spell several times over the winter and it now clocked in at 10 billion attempts an hour which was a far cry from where they’d started at 36 million attempts an hour. He worried that with that kind of intensity running in the background all the time it was getting on Raja’s nerves, but his friend never complained.  “It’s more than a hundred trillion combinations a day if we leave it on all the time. That’s as many tries as Raja could do in like a year and a half. ”

“So what does that get us?” Emma asked. “Besides the charming voice of our friend, I mean. Aren’t you painting a giant target on us if you do that?”

“Maybe. Someone might very easily notice me stealing that much mana,” Benjamin agreed, “But at the same time - it doesn’t seem like they have computer viruses, and it kinda seems like they should, so I’m not sure. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Raja needs his voice back, and we need to take these people out, but before we do that, I’d kind of like to see what important secrets we can steal to use in the next battle.”

Benjamin worked late into the night, but even by lunch the next day, after a few hours of sleep, he still wasn’t ready to try an even small-scale launch, and he felt the time pressure acutely. Before he could start a worm that would spread to everyone with an open port and begin running a process that would siphon a noticeable amount of mana from each of them, he first had to create a backup plan that involved a few other things, like an additional worm to first gather everyone’s credentials.

After all - the very worst that would happen when his efforts were discovered, aside from all of their deaths, was that someone would patch the vulnerability, and Benjamin had to be ready for that. Sadly, by the time the annoying woman from the previous day insisted that he see her, after twelve hours of continuous coding, he was forced to set it aside and greet her.

“You never came out last night,” she whined as she sat next to him on the couch, and Emma busied herself serving tea. “I had been hoping that you and I could catch up, especially since you seem to be up to another one of your little intrigues.”

“Intrigues,” he said, trying not to choke. “Why would you say that?”

“Well, it’s perfectly obvious,” she said, eying Emma. “You’d be staying in the tower with the other members of house Darton unless you were up to something, wouldn’t you?”

She flashed him a manic smile at that. “But if you aren’t playing at one of your little intrigues, and it’s not a secret that you’re here, then I suppose you won’t mind if I mention it to Hayden or Noreallian if I see them at the party tonight.”

“You can’t do that,” Benjamin said, reaching out to hold her hand. “What I am doing… is a matter of great secrecy and importance.”

He was terrible at these things and had no idea what he was going to say in this circumstance. He was sure of one thing, though: he could not pretend to be the man whose face he was wearing around anyone who knew Lord Darton well. This mage was already beginning to see through his facade, and it was clear to him that she was nothing but a socialite and a dilettante.

“Oh?” she asked, leaning in. “What’s her name?”

“You think this about a woman, Margerot?” he laughed, leaning back with feigned amusement.

“Mariek, when is it not about women with you? You are a complete hound!” She smiled sweetly, but there was enough ice in her eyes to make Benjamin wonder what Lord Darton had done to her in the past. “I’m just saying that if her standards are low enough to be amenable to a tryst with you, perhaps I could play too. I’m dreadfully bored, you know.”

Even if he wasn’t pretending to be someone else in a city full of his enemies, getting involved with the woman in any way was a terrible idea. He could tell immediately. Rejecting her and making her feel the need to seek some sort of imagined revenge would be even worse, though. He could feel it.

“I have grave concerns about the recent attacks on the plantations,” he said finally, trying to find a topic that was important enough to get her attention without revealing too much. “I fear there might have been… Rhulvinarian involvement.”

She looked at him for a long moment before she burst out laughing. It took several seconds before she finally calmed herself down enough to ask, “You’re serious, aren’t you?” but even when he nodded, that wasn’t enough for her to take him seriously. “How could you possibly think that? Even if one of the houses wanted to ally with those animals, and I wouldn’t put it past someone like the Drothins or the Medillar, the fae would rather rip them to pieces than play along. You know this!”

“I do,” he nodded, “Nonetheless, I suspect what I suspect, and as soon as I finish putting my evidence together, the Prince will be the first one to see it. Until then, I ask you to keep my secret for another day or two at most.”

“Perhaps you might buy my silence for that long with a few choice morsels…” she said, leaning forward with interest at the perfect angle to allow him to look down her cleavage if he wished to do so.

Benjamin shrugged and spent the next few minutes painting a picture for her that was as far from reality as possible. He told her about enchanted centaur arrows and clay soldiers that boiled up from the ground as soon as the alarms on the wall were deactivated, by someone with the knowledge of runic magic that no beast-man would ever have. In the end, she seemed skeptical until he mentioned that even his beacon had been tampered with, and when he tried to summon reinforcements, they never arrived.

“That I have heard something about,” she said thoughtfully. “There are so many rumors right now that it’s simply hard to know who to trust, but I’m grateful that you trust me with this much at least. I shall make sure to be in attendance when you make your full report to the court then.”

Benjamin didn’t trust her at all. That was why he’d told her nothing but lies with a single unimportant truth to tie it all together. She could spread those lies all over the city if she liked. Chasing ghosts and looking for traitors that didn’t exist would only help him.

Ch. 73 - Everything is Connected

Lady Thraxes invited him to join her this evening in the lavender rooms of the second floor if he needed a break, and Benjamin promised he would, but he had no plans to follow up on that. No matter how beautiful she was, he had no intentions of spending any more time with her than he had to.

Instead, he and his friends worked out a plan. They would go mingle with the other black-eyed workers of the area in shifts, learning what they could, while he focused on finishing up the various scripts and programs that were still so deep in development that he had no idea how much longer it would take to finish something he could release into the wild.

The answer turned out to be almost two full days. For hour after endless hour, he drained his own life to fuel his tireless efforts. He submerged himself in his strange glowing codebase of interconnected swirls and magical incantations. The hardest part was figuring out how to recreate the methods he was already familiar with in the more mature languages he was used to. No matter what new experiment he tried, he felt like he was creating something from scratch.

It was clear to him that whoever had created these runes and systems had never done so with this sort of work in mind. Given at least a decade, he knew he could rework the whole thing from the ground up with more power and efficiency, but that wasn’t today’s rabbit hole.

Today, right now, while that nosey sorceress was out telling everyone and their brother that there was a traitor among them, he needed a way to steal every password that wasn’t nailed down, which involved broadcasting his data leak spell in a more subtle way than he’d ever done before. There would be no command to break everyone's chains attached to it. Instead, it would replicate and erase its own tracks, leaving a few surprises behind but without any obvious tracks or records that it had ever been there when all was said and done.

At least, that was the plan. It was a frustratingly delicate balancing act as he worked his code down to a smaller and smaller file. Eventually, the self-destruct that erased its passage was larger than the rest of the spell combined, but there was nothing he could do about that. It was too important to leave out.

Once that was done, he had to build a database from scratch to house the flood of information he expected, which took a couple more hours. It was only when all of that was done after his friends had returned and he'd had a chance to warn them about all the ways that this might go wrong that he pulled the trigger.

When Benjamin was finally ready and the invisible signal spread out across the city, nothing happened. At least, not right away. For the first few seconds, there was only a tense silence as the four of them looked at each other. Then, without any warning, his database began to fill with all the information that he’d sent his worm to hunt for. Name, soul ID, class, level, owner, and password data all started flowing into his reservoir in neat, orderly rows that were scrolling too fast for him to read.

Benjamin smiled at that, checking to make sure that there were no errors that might have indicated he’d tripped any sort of security reaction with the Summoners. Just because there’s nothing obvious doesn’t mean they didn’t see that, he reminded himself. On some level, he'd sent a signal flare up - the only question was if anyone was looking or not.

There were any number of ways that Summoner security might be looking for the cause or the destination of the massive tide of data he’d just unleashed, and for several tense minutes, he watched the local traffic for any signs that he’d been noticed and that someone might be searching for him. It was only when he saw nothing unusual that he finally gave everyone the all-clear.

“So now you can unlock Raja’s voice?” Emma asked.

“No,” Benjamin shook his head. “Now I have a backup plan and can send out the program that can start the process. I think we should wait until the city starts to go to sleep, though. I have no idea if the people we’re turning into a botnet might feel something or see some indication on their character sheet.”

“All that build-up for nothing,” she sighed, walking to the balcony to show her displeasure.

It was a little anticlimactic. He agreed, but no one questioned his decision. Instead, the four of them ate fish that had been baked to perfection with something that tasted a little like a spring roll and waited for the noise of the city around them to dim.

Eventually, the noise of the wagons and shuffling feet faded. It was replaced by the sound of parties and celebrations that the Summoner Lords seemed to have every night in their rooftop gardens. Somehow, their lax, hedonistic nature had managed to lower Benjamin’s already abysmal opinion of them even further, even if, right now, it was an advantage.

“Alright, Raja, I’m going to need you to lay down,” Benjamin finally said, gesturing to the couch as the time came. “And Matt, I’m going to need you to keep an eye on him.”

‘Why? Your program never hurt me before now.’ Raja typed.

“Well, I’ve never channeled hundreds of people’s mana through you to perform complex computations before either,” Benjamin said. “The last thing I want to do is give you a soul scar like I have. Don’t worry. We’ll start slow, and I’m going to keep myself in the circuit the whole time so I can cut it at the first sign of trouble. I want this to work, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.”

Raja smiled at that answer, and everyone else got ready while Emma kept a lookout on the city below. Then Benjamin sent out his second worm.

This time, he routed everything through himself since he doubted the mirror could handle it, and from there, the mana and the processing power would flow into it. He wasn’t sure what sort of object would best function as a magic item in a case like this. He hadn’t done testing or anything, but he was pretty sure that whatever channeled this kind of power would have to be alive, though; no amount of gold or gemstones was likely to bear such a load.

When Benjamin finally sent out his worm a second time, it bore a very different payload. This time, it didn’t force the user’s system to share their most important details; it forced them to perform a few simple math equations. On Earth, that would have been called a crypto mining virus, but here it was a seal-breaking spell.

The worm was almost identical to the last one he’d sent out, but there were two key differences involved. The first was that it would not trigger if the target didn’t have the isSleeping flag on their status sheet, and the second was the delay he’d attached to the rebroadcast. Last time, he tried to spread the effect throughout the whole city as quickly as possible, but this time, each attempt to spread further came with a thirty-second delay to give him the chance to evaluate the effect and cut the connection or send out a cancellation order.

Even with those security precautions in place, he waited nervously as the first dozen or so connections started to link together with his system. The result was a thin trickle of essence and packets connected to it that he could barely feel. The sensation wasn’t even as powerful as using his life-drain ability on himself.

Benjamin knew it would scale up quickly and that each new wave would be exponentially higher than the last as all of the rebroadcasting reached further and further. So after the first batch of several dozen, the second group that came in was hundreds strong, completely dwarfing it. Still, it wasn’t so bad. It was only about eighteen mana per hour. It was a lot, but at less than 1 per minute, which was well below the amount he used when casting spells in battle, and it felt completely manageable.

Benjamin spared a glance over at Raja, who gave him a thumbs up. So far, everything was going according to plan, but the real challenge still lay ahead. It was the wave after that, only a minute into their process, that was truly noticeable. This one was channeling the efforts of 1,137 people into him, which was just over a mana and a half every minute.

While not distressing, Benjamin could definitely feel it. There was a hum passing through him. Raja obviously could, too, but he didn’t seem to be in any pain.

Then, the levels more than tripled. Benjamin was fairly sure that at 4,682, he had maxed out the city's sleeping population. If he hadn’t, he’d certainly gotten close. He hoped that he’d gotten close anyway. At almost 7 mana a minute, he was feeling a little light-headed. He wasn’t quite high or anything, but if he were to double the reach of his spell, he probably would be.

Well, that, or I’ll stroke out and die, he thought sardonically.

Even with full control of his faculties, he still felt a sort of connection to everyone in his ad hoc network in a way that was usually only felt and described by the sort of hippies who grew dreadlocks and thought that crystals had medicinal properties. At ten or twenty thousand people, he thought he would either lose himself completely in the minds of those he was siphoning from or burst into flames. He didn’t want to test it and find out which, though.

It was only when the number of connected systems increased to 4,877 on the fifth jump that he finally allowed himself to relax. After that, the number only slowly shrank, losing one every minute or two as someone woke up or depleted their mana and they left the network.

It was nothing for Benjamin to be alarmed about. Instead, he watched hundreds of millions of attempts scroll by every second in a blur that was impossible for anyone to read as he immersed himself in the collective unconsciousness of the city.

In the sort of server that he was used to, the only byproduct of computation was waste heat, but as he sat there filtering all the traffic and watching the statistics of their code-breaking, he could feel the ghosts of other people’s thoughts pass through his mind. Benjamin tried to ignore those and did some quick math in his head to figure out how much of an effect this was having in the grand scheme of things.

He figured out that in the last 8 months, they’d tried almost 1% of all possible combinations. With this setup, they could try almost 4% a night and over 10% percent if they ran it all day.

That meant that in the worst-case scenario, they were only a month from breaking the seal, but in the best case they could break it any second. Those were long odds of course. Each guess currently coming into Raja’s system was about 50 million times worse odds than winning the lottery, but they were stacking up!

As Benjamin watched, the counter he’d built to track their progress tick over to 2%, he felt like this might actually work, eventually. Eventually wasn’t good enough, though. There was no way they’d stay hidden here for a month. They probably wouldn’t stay hidden here for a week. They needed more speed.

So Benjamin sent the command to increase output through his network by 10%, and then when he decided he could bear that, he did it again. The first jolt brought the mana output to over 7 mana a minute, and the second brought it to over 8.

At these levels, the experiment was uncomfortable but not unbearable, so he boosted it again, increasing power to 9 mana a minute. Up until now, Benjamin had been getting strange feelings and sensations at the edge of his mind in addition to the warmth and phantom sensations. Now it felt like he was practically vibrating, and he was hallucinating small fragments of people’s dreams, or maybe memories, he wasn’t sure.

Most of them were battles, and all of them contained strong emotions that he was forced to taste for a moment, but he endured them. This was important, and though it was the strangest invasion of privacy he could have thought of, he hoped that the random barrage of images would help him better understand the people of the city that he hoped to free in the next few days.