RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) Page 8

  “Wow, really good pretzels” he thought, he hadn’t tried them there before, they were delicious. He waited there for over an hour, no sign of John, he was about to leave when the bartender approached him with a note.

  “Hey you’re Dodge right?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, a guy called and left a message for you here.”

  The bar tender handed him a post it type note with Heineken at the top. He thanked him and got up and headed out to his car. As he walked out, he thought, “makes sense, I get free sticky notes from electronics houses, he gets them from breweries.” The note simply said, “The spoon, JC.”

  Dodge and John spent some time after college and between jobs eating a lot of meals at this place called Joann’s. It was cheap, served good coffee, and it was open twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. The two of them never called it by its real name only “the spoon” short for “the greasy spoon” so Dodge knew exactly what John meant but he had to stop and think about where it was and wondered if it was still open, “it must be.”

  More important though, why the heck would John want to meet in that old dive? He headed out to his car and began thinking about old times in that place. He tapped the map maker on the steering wheel and said, “Eat at Joann’s” Sure enough, the computer acknowledged it and gave him the best route and ETA. Huh, I guess Joann knew what she was doing when she bought that place, he thought.

  Ten minutes later Dodge was pulling into Joann’s, it actually looked the same, but it had a fresh coat of paint and a few other spruce ups. He slipped inside and looked around for John, he was in one of the booths way at the back, he shot his hand up to reveal his location when he saw Dodge come in.

  “What’s going on Bro? Are we strolling down memory lane tonight or what?” John looked a little nervous and strung out.

  “I was up all night, I didn’t get any sleep at all. I didn’t come to the club because I don’t think any of our co-workers should see us together right now.”

  “Jeeze John, what in the world is going on?”

  “Well Friend, brace yourself, because if what I discovered on that drive you gave me is what I think it is then we’re all straight up shit creek!”

  “Well what is it?”

  “Ok I shouldn’t have said that because I’m not really sure yet about what it is, I was up all night trying to decipher what was in that file. You were absolutely right about the first three hundred and eighteen pages but the area that appeared to be blank, well it wasn’t blank, it wasn’t even close to blank.”

  “First it just looked like spaces with no characters there at all. I ran several crack programs on it, oh and by the way Einstein you forgot to tell me the password, come on really, unrecognized font, you made it so easy to crack that if you had lost it a kindergartner could have cracked it with a third grade dictionary and a decoder ring out of a cereal box!”

  “John, calm down buddy, what’s goin on?”

  “Okay, listen, I figured it out, at least the masking part of it anyway. It is pretty genius but I still don’t know what the code means for sure but it doesn’t look good.” Dodge was getting very anxious.

  “Okay, then just tell me about the masking part.”

  “Well whoever appended your file with this extra information went to some amazing efforts to conceal it. More of the program is about hiding it from view than whatever it does. It’s mostly interested in staying invisible.”

  “Most people would never question the file size like you did because they would not know what the actual file size was before it was appended. Only the creator of the file would know the original size.”

  Almost anyone viewing the file would only view it down to the end command and not question any dead space below that. The creator of this hidden code wrote a very compressed program that launches upon the opening of the file and won’t display anything on the screen until it has sampled the display settings and deciphered the background color.

  It sets the font color to an exact match to the background color rendering the extra code invisible.” Dodge pondered for a minute.

  “Okay, so did you just change the background color and Xanadu there it was?”

  “Oh no, no, no, my friend they thought of that, this thing is too smart for that, it simply detects any change in the background color you might make and then it adjusts itself again accordingly.”

  Dodge thought for a while.

  “Okay, well, why won’t it print?”

  “Ah, yes the print problem. These guys, whoever they are, are one step ahead of everything I could think of. When I tried to print it, I got the same thing you did the other night. I set up a little app to capture the printed document into a file so I could see better what was going on. It communicates with your printer first and reads all the printable fonts available in the firmware then it comes back and makes up a font name that simply doesn’t exist in the printer. It doesn’t even have to be a name that makes any since at all it can just be a font name made of random characters so that the printer won’t print it, simple but effective. It really doesn’t matter anyway because I got around that and printed the pages and they came out in a useless format that I have never seen before. It’s encrypted or scrambled when printed because of course, they thought of that too.”

  Dodge was still baffled.

  “Do you think you can crack it?”

  “I don’t just think I can, I know I can, but it’s going to take a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I found out that they are using binary language in the program in some kind of weird shell that I have not identified yet. The good news is I am deciphering it right now on a machine running DOS 5.0.”

  Dodge sat there looking at him for a moment.

  “Have you lost your mind? DOS 5.0? Really? Are you talking about that old Microsoft disc operating system from the 1980’s? That crap is so old and the company isn’t even in business anymore! Oh, and did you say binary?”

  “I know that’s the genius of it, what better way to hide something so well than using something people no longer understand or can even recognize as code? You see the program is not all that complex in itself, it’s the masking program needed to hide it that is so large and taking up all the space on the drive. The program itself is only a few Megs.”

  “No Way! Did you say Megs as in Megabytes? I haven’t heard that term in twenty years, nothing, and I mean nothing is that small!”

  “I know, but someone went to allot of trouble to hide this tiny, binary program. In fact it’s so small most security measures we have today wouldn’t even catch it. It could slip through as a few parity bit failures. It would look like a standard communications glitch.”

  “Okay so explain to me why in the world you’re using DOS to decode the thing?”

  “It was the only thing slow enough to fool it or a better term might be, make it malfunction. You see the thing is so fast that a really slow system actually confuses it. I had to fire up one of my museum pieces to make the crack work.

  I developed a fake bios file in the PC that reports to the program that it’s a modern day processor with a reasonable amount of speed. The program realizes that it’s being compromised every time I run the cracker on it so it sends out a command to close the program based on the processor speed that I told it but I lied to it with the fake bios file. The old narrow front side bus and very slow processor on this old machine can’t shut down fast enough.

  Meanwhile the processor dribbles out a tiny bit of the deciphered code before the masking program can shut it off. Apparently whoever wrote this code never dreamed anyone would try to defeat it with Windows 3.1.”

  Dodge nearly choked on a drink of coffee that he just took.

  “Are you telling me that you have a functioning machine running Windows 3.1 and it’s deciphering a complex code that was written some 65 years later on state of the art equipment?”

  “Well yes but I didn’t say it was doing
it quickly, and keep in mind that they wrote it in binary which is antiquated as well. I created a batch file that automatically restarts the program almost instantly after it’s halted. When I was leaving the house to meet you, it had been running for about six hours and if all goes according to my calculations it should be done around two o’clock tomorrow morning. Oh and by the way it’s not even really 3.1 it’s an upgraded beta version that I fixed up to be almost as good as 3.1 and I was lucky to find that. Man, talk about unobtainium!”

  “Wow, Bro, really? Unobtainium? You’re still the king man, you always were thinking up new words, I guess you haven’t changed.”

  John smiled for the first time since they started talking.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment and call it a night, I gotta get some sleep.”

  “Thanks John, I appreciate what you’re doing. Hey do you have any idea what motive the creator of the program had in mind? I mean, where is this going?”

  “I don’t know, but this thing makes me nervous, after I get a little sleep and see the whole thing decoded I should be able to give you an answer.”

  “All-right call me tomorrow and let me know what you find out, this is killing me I have to know.”

  Chapter 6 John Calhoun was the most knowledgeable man on the planet when it came to retro programming techniques and he had studied nearly every system made all the way back to the commodore 64. He had to sign it out of a museum to study it and paid a pretty penny on the museum’s insurance premium to retain it for sixty days.

  He would have bought it but it wasn’t for sale. He documented it very carefully and built a virtual model of it that could run in a DOS shell on an old PC running Windows 95, one of the worst most bug ridden releases of software Microsoft ever released. In spite of the problems with Windows 95 people loved it and bought millions of copies of that version and everything that came after. It propelled Microsoft into huge profit margins and into one of the largest and richest companies in the world. It wasn’t until 2020 that Microsoft began to really decline in the shadows of the conglomerated giants Apple, Google, and Face Book that ultimately took over the industry until they were bought out by Galaxy-Star in 2030.

  John was a huge fan of all the old retro stuff and he thought the old machines were really fun to tinker with but he never dreamed it would be such a valuable problem solving tool in this situation. When he got back to his office over the garage, the PC was still clunking along doing its task slowly but steadily. It was still on track to finish around 2:00 a.m. so he wasted no time in getting to bed for some rest. He set his wrist watch alarm for 1:45 a.m. so he could witness the completion of the decoding.

  On the way home from the diner Dodge noticed the time on his phone as he looked at the incoming call, it was Linsey and it was almost 9:00 p.m., he had done it again. He answered.

  “Hello my dear, how are you?”

  Linsey was starting to wonder what happened to him this time. She and Sarah stayed at the pool most of the day and then went to the sporting goods center at the local mall. They needed to pick up some new Gymnast gear for Sarah’s uPComing try outs. It was for a local team that produced many Olympic hopefuls. It took them the better part of the evening so she was surprised that he wasn’t already home.

  “So where have you been mister?” she said, sounding a little suspicious.

  “Well, I went to the club after work looking for Tim because I was almost sure he would be there golfing, but he wasn’t. I figured you would be out late with Sarah getting the stuff she needed so I grabbed a soup and salad at the 19th hole.”

  “Bobby told me that you Okayed him having dinner with Matt’s family and staying over for the night so I fended for myself. Hey you would never guess who I ran into at the club, John Calhoun.”

  Linsey was surprised.

  “Really? John Calhoun, how is he doing? I haven’t heard you mention him in years.”

  Dodge figured it was time to break the ice on having John in the picture because he was bound to call him on his skyphone. It would be as if they had run into each other, exchanged numbers and got reacquainted.

  “Well, he’s doing very well, they bought a huge new home in Grande Estates, they have a pool, a big garage, a gated place, you know, even got a butler.”

  “Wow, can he get you a job where he works!”

  “Oh, well that came up, believe me, but you know John, it was just a good ribbing about me working for him.”

  “Yes I remember how he was always kidding around with you and how much fun you two had together. You should invite them over sometime.”

  “Yeah maybe I will, in fact I got his number and gave him mine, we should do that. Well I’m almost home so I’ll see you in a minute.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  Phew! Another brush with unexplainable things that he somehow got out of, he was getting a little too good at this.

  After he got off the phone with Linsey, he realized that he had not seen John’s wife Karen at the house and that John had not mentioned her. He couldn’t help but wonder if John and Karen were still together and he felt a little embarrassed just then for not asking about her and how they were doing. He was so wrapped up in solving the mystery of the invisible code that he had not been a very considerate friend. He decided he would make a point to ask John how he and Karen were doing the next time he saw him.

  Dodge slipped into bed with Linsey after a bowl of ice cream and a little conversation. He couldn’t help but notice how good she smelled. She backed into him really close and drifted off to sleep almost immediately. Dodge was lying there wide awake but didn’t want to get up and leave her, what a great woman she was, always there for him, thick or thin, she was the most reliable constant in his life.

  Dodge was lying there watching her sleep, he decided then that they needed to get away for a while, just the two of them. They needed some down time and some fun, after all, what is life if all you do is work? He had to get this one thing done first and when it was over and taken care of they would get away.

  It seemed like just minutes later but it was actually 6:30 a.m. when Dodge’s phone rang downstairs. He sat up and realized he had slept so soundly that he hadn’t moved at all. He was still tucked in really tight with Linsey who hadn’t moved either.

  “What is it?”

  Linsey mumbled, still half asleep. Apparently she didn’t hear Dodge’s phone which was downstairs on the charger.

  “Oh, uh, I must have been dreaming and wow I’m really hot, I didn’t move all night I guess, I’m gonna go ahead and get up it’s about time to anyway.”

  “Okay dear” Linsey mumbled, as she rolled over and went right back to sleep.

  Dodge grabbed some cloths and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The bathroom was also connected to the guest room on the other side so he went out that door and down to the kitchen to grab his phone. He looked at the missed call, it was from John and he had left a message. He went back up to the bathroom while listening.

  “Hey Dodge, I know it’s early but I would really like to have breakfast with you, meet me at the spoon.”

  That was it, no other information, it must have turned out to be nothing and John just wanted to give him the good news. His mind began to race while he showered, “maybe it’s really bad and John didn’t want to tell him over the phone, oh crap!”

  Dodge finished showering and dressed quickly then peeked in on Linsey. Her alarm was about to go off and so he went down stairs and left before she or the kids got up. He just had to get out of there and get to the diner without the delay of the normal morning conversations and routine.

  When Dodge arrived at the diner, John was just getting there too. He had a concerned look and neither of them said anything as they walked in and found a table near the back. The place was a lot busier now and apparently drew a pretty good breakfast crowd.

  The waitress saw them sitting down and motioned with a coffee pot from behind the counter to John who was facing that way.
He held up two fingers and she grabbed some cups and headed their way.

  “Here ya go, I’ll be back in a flash to take your order guys.”

  Dodge looked at John who still hadn’t said a word.

  “Okay, give me good news. Just tell me it was a stupid little phishing program or something harmless like that.”

  “I wish I could my friend, but the news is bad, and it’s a good thing you’re sitting down. When I got up and went out to my lab this morning and looked at the code I couldn’t hardly believe it. If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I would’ve called me a liar.”

  “What is it? Tell me,” insisted Dodge.

  “Look I’m not 100% sure, but I am 99% sure, that with a little more work, I think I can disable this thing, so don’t get to excited okay?”

  Dodge was glaring at him.

  “Come on John, just tell me! I’ve been waiting for almost three days here and I’m about to lose . . .”

  “Okay, okay, just stay calm. It’s a back door into the transmitter section of the Lifecorder uplink software. Okay? There, I said it.”

  “What? Why? What good is that to anyone?”

  “Okay, that’s three questions all at once and I’m just one guy, I need more time.”

  “Sorry. Why would anyone want such a thing? I mean it’s useless, the Lifecorder can only communicate with the chip in the person’s brain that it’s DNA coded to. Even if you could communicate with it, the data is useless, everyone knows that.”

  “I know I reviewed all those test results several times when I was working for you on the project. As I recall the test data proved without a doubt that each person had a unique brain signature and so the data was completely unreadable by anyone or anything other than their brain or that of their exact genetic clone.”

  “Okay so assuming that’s all still true, why the back door?”

  “Best I can figure, someone back at the time was thinking we were wrong or at least maybe had not discovered a way yet. I guess they were planning ahead.”