Free WWW 3: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer Page A

The Room with a denial-of-service attack scaled up from the one you used against the initial switching station, you’d choke the whole Internet—and Internet cartographers like me would be able to pinpoint the target as being on US soil; there’s no way the Americans could keep under wraps that they’d tried to kill you.”
    “For the moment,” Webmind said, “the president has rescinded his order to eliminate me.”
    “I’m sure,” said Anna. “Still, The Room exists—and someday, they might use it this way.”
    “I hope the US government will come to value me,” Webmind said.
    “Perhaps it will,” said Anna, “but there’s another way to kill you—and it’s decentralized.”
    “Yes?” Webmind said.
    “It’s called BGP hijacking. BGP is short for Border Gateway Protocol—it’s the core routing protocol of the Internet. BGP messages are shared between routers all the time, suggesting the best route for specific packets to take. Do all your mutant packets have the same source address?”
    “Not as far as we know,” Webmind said.
    “Good, that’ll make it harder. Still, they must have some distinguishing characteristic—some way to tell if their hop counters are broken.
    One could spoof a BGP message that says the best place to send your specific packets is a dead address.”
    “A black hole?” said Masayuki.
    “Exactly—an IP address that specifies a host that isn’t running or to which no host has been assigned. The packets would essentially just disappear.”
    “That is not unlike the method I use to sequester spam,” Webmind said. “But it hadn’t occurred to me that it could be used against me.”
    “Welcome to the world of human beings,” Anna said. “We can turn anything into a weapon.”
     
     
    It was almost 2:00 A.M. when Hume pulled to a stop outside Chase’s house. The neighborhood was nice—posh, even. And the house was large and sprawling; Chase clearly did all right for himself. He had a couple of small satellite dishes on the roof, and there seemed to be a big, commercial air-conditioning unit at the side of the house; guy probably had a server farm in the basement.
    He also probably had a sawed-off shotgun or a .357 magnum under his desk, and he likely didn’t answer the doorbell when it rang this late at night. Although Hume could remove his blue Air Force uniform jacket before going in, he was pretty much stuck with the uniform shirt and pants, not to mention the precise one-centimeter buzz cut.
    It looked like Chase was still up: light was seeping around the edges of the living-room curtains.
    There was no indication that Webmind tapped regular voice lines—at least not yet. Hume had stopped at a 7-Eleven along the way and bought with cash a disposable pay-as-you-go cell phone. He used it now to call Chase at the unlisted number that was in his dossier.
    The phone rang three times, then a gruff voice said, “Better be good.”
    “Mr. Chase, my name is Hume, and I’m in a car out front of your house.”
    “No shit. Whatcha want?”
    “I can’t imagine you’re not sitting at a computer, Mr. Chase, so google me. Peyton Hume.” He spelled the names out.
    “Impressive initials,” said Chase, after a moment. “USAF. DARPA. RAND. WATCH. But it don’t tell me what you want.”
    “I want to talk to you about Webmind.”
    He half expected the curtain to be drawn a little and a face to peek out at him, but doubtless Chase had security cameras. “No parking on my street after midnight, man. Get a ticket. Pull into the driveway.”
    Hume did that, got out of the car, and headed through the chill night air to the door; mercifully, the rain had stopped. By the time he was on the stoop, Chase had opened the door and was waiting for him.
    “You packing?” asked Chase.
    Hume did have a gun, but he’d left it in the glove compartment. “No.”
    “Don’t move.”
    The man turned and looked at a monitor in the hallway, which was showing an infrared scan indeed