In the nerve center of CLAMP Campus, the computer room beneath the main administration building, all was quiet except for the ticking sound of fingers swiftly pressing keys, the occasional beep of a machine, and, every now and then, a tense exchange of words. But the air shook with danger, an immediate threat as palpable as if explosions and crashing debris had been shattering the silence.
Turning around in his seat, Akira looked up wide-eyed from his terminal. "It's no good," he said. "Somehow they've managed to establish a connection. They're already inside the network!"
Suoh swore, his own eyes not wavering from his screen. "This is no ordinary hacker," he muttered. "No one from outside should even be able to communicate with this system. And I think whoever it is must be subverting our protective programs. I'm not getting any sense out of--damn! This machine's been locked out! /Ijyuin--/"
"I'm still in." Akira's hands flew across the keyboard as Suoh vaulted over his now-useless computer to reach another workstation. "I'm trying to block the ID that it's using, but if it gets me offline--"
"It won't let me on again." Suoh slammed his fists against the desk. "Rijichou, we have to bring the system down. We have to bring it all down /now/ before--"
"/No./" From the shadow of the Director's seat that blue-sky gaze met his, direct and unusually serious. "This system is the heart of the defenses that guard the Shinken. If we close it down now, all those defenses will fail. Our sole purpose in this war is to keep that Sword safe for Kamui, for the day that's still to come. Therefore, we must do everything that's in our power...."
Graceful fingers closed around the visored headset that lay in the Director's lap, its silver curves baroque and oddly flowing. Akira gaped and Suoh stiffened, neither having noticed the device before.
"No, Rijichou! You can't do that! The risk--!"
"I'm afraid," Nokoru interrupted, very quietly, "that we're running out of choices, Suoh."
Magician
An X/CLAMP Campus Detectives fanfic
By Natalie Baan
Part 1
Almost idly, Satsuki watched the scurrying bits of data, like an army of ants coursing around a stirred-up hill. Perceived as computers saw things, they appeared as on/off pulses, alternating presence and absence that her human mind registered as light and dark. She glided through them, a larger aggregation of bright patterns connected by streamers of will to the computer that waited for her outside the firewall machine. This network used a unique, singularly labyrinthine communications protocol, one to which Beast couldn't even establish a connection.
But she could.
In a way, she was disappointed that this wasn't turning out to be more of a challenge. Oh, she'd been mildly surprised when she'd banned that administrator's terminal only to find that someone else had taken control of the system...she wondered if they had some kind of command bridge down there, with people running back and forth and shouting orders, like in the movies. Far away from her main consciousness and only dimly perceived, a corner of her mouth quirked upward behind her face-screen. But in the end, no matter how many people there were, they were only people. What could they do when their computers opened up to her in adoration, when their own programs turned against them to do her will?
If they shut down the system, all the defenses around the Shinken would go out. If they left the system online and she gained total full of it, she'd hold the keys to every last one of the Campus's secrets. Whatever the CLAMP Campus defenders did, the Dragons of Earth would achieve their goal.
She'd always found such paradoxes engaging.
Now, though, it was time to get down to serious business. She pretty much had free run of the system already, except for the deepest administrative privileges--but those shouldn't be too hard to gain. As powerful and intelligent as this system was, as well-maintained and safeguarded, it was still a legacy system, full of years' worth of hacks and work-arounds that ultimately made it as porous to her as coral. Not like her Beast, which was designed to be self-evolving, stripping off extraneous bits of coding as new improvements were added, constantly streamlining itself for greatest efficiency and elegance...in the distance, Beast thrummed with pleasure at her thought. She reached back with a mental caress for her beloved machine, and then extended herself out further, twining her perceived "arms" about the heart of the CLAMP Campus system, ready to speak and merge--and she ran headlong into something as impenetrable and luminous as a wall of solid light.
::ACCESS DENIED:: the system said.
The shock of it rocked her back on her metaphorical heels. Withdrawing slightly, she studied the mysterious entity that had appeared without warning to oppose her. It shone like every other collection of bits, but behind that surface she could sense nothing; whereas usually she could perceive the dense, cryptic patterns of machine code that made up a program, this seemed all of a piece and impervious. As her attention played across it, all she got was a feeling of presence--of something reflecting her back at herself indistinctly, like a poorly silvered mirror.
"What is it, Beast?" she wondered, sending the computer her limited data, and she wasn't too surprised when it returned a TYPE UNKNOWN. This wasn't like anything she'd ever seen before--and she thought she'd seen just about everything. She put together a quick call, just to observe the guardian's reaction, and watched her query flash across the space between them. It vanished into the larger glow and Satsuki waited.
Nothing.
She frowned. The more she tried to define what this was, the more it escaped her. Even its general outline seemed to elude her grasp. Warily she approached it, reached out, tried to touch it, murmuring the same endearments that had brought so many programs under her control, but her will seemed to skim across it without influence or even recognition, as if her power to talk to hardware and software had no effect on it at all. More daringly, she pushed harder, as though to force her way through it, and with a brief flicker of displacement she found herself repelled once again.
::ACCESS DENIED::
"Well, you're a problem, aren't you?" she muttered. Retreating to the firewall, she looked through the user data that she'd acquired and pulled on a new layer of camouflage. Wearing another identity, she swooped back toward the root directory, traveling by a different path--and there it was again, in the /outer/ system this time, ready and waiting to meet her.
::ACCESS DENIED::
And then, as if by way of explanation: ::UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY::
"Considerate of you to give me a reason, at least." With a mental sigh, she started to pull back from the guardian once more, but it followed her this time, all the way to the intranet's gateway, hovering at a precisely measured distance as though observing her. She found such attention a bit disquieting. It didn't seem like some kind of hunter-killer program--as far as she knew, those only existed in ridiculous cyberpunk novels--but it was taking an awful lot of interest in her movements. And come to think of it, her current cover should have full privileges in this part of the system. Why was it harassing her here?
"I /am/ authorized," she told the program. "Shoo. Go away." She double checked the system's user list and confirmed that she had access, but the guardian didn't seem to be convinced. It had to be working from some other data. Looking closely, she could see a net of thin connective strands, glimmering like silk, that ran out from behind it and vanished, presumably into the core. Tentatively she extended a test query toward one of them and it recoiled, billowing aside as if her interest in it had been a faint breeze.
::USER NAME?:: the system inquired suddenly.
Satsuki started. The guardian had changed its procedures, going from passive blocking to direct interaction and information gathering, and she wondered what criteria-trap she'd tripped. Letter by letter she spelled out CHUUSONJIE, which was the account that she happened to be using, and sent the ID to the system. It was annoying; just as she couldn't read the guardian at all, it didn't seem able to speak to her directly....
::ERROR::
::USER NAME?::
Shit--had she managed to miskey it? What a time to make a slip like that! Satsuki reentered the name, very carefully and deliberately, double checking to be sure that it was correct.
::ERROR::
::USER NAME INVALID FOR USER::
::USER NAME?::
"/What?/" Satsuki almost lost her link to the CLAMP Campus system as her far-off body jerked against its restraints. Alarmed, Beast sent her a heart rate alert, and she rejected the data, trying to focus through her shock.
How could a program make the distinction between a user name and the person behind it?
/How did it know that she wasn't who she claimed to be?/
Uncharacteristically nervous, she hesitated for a moment, and in the microsecond world of a computer it was like an eternity. The guardian waited patiently for a response. Finally, through a conflicting welter of reluctance and excitement, she slowly keyed in a reply.
SATSUKI
And after a flicker of processing, during which she held her breath, wondering what she was on the verge of and whether or not she'd just made a mistake, the program responded, ::USER "SATSUKI" ACKNOWLEDGED::
::ACCESS DENIED::
Satsuki gasped out loud at the unexpected jolt as she found herself kicked right off the system. She fell back in her seat in the basement of the Government Building, wholly flesh and blood once more. "/Shit!/"
Catching her breath, she pulled off her face-screen and stared speculatively into space while around her Beast whirred and hummed in agitation. She'd been distracted long enough by that enigmatic program that she'd given the sysops time to boot her out...well, it didn't matter. She could break into the system again easily enough, and now she'd found something there that interested her even more than her original mission.
Satsuki's eyes narrowed and her fingers played restlessly along the arm of her seat.
Why did she have such a peculiar feeling about that program?
* * * * *
"/Rijichou!/"
Even as his terminal came online again, Suoh abandoned it, leaping over the railing to reach their Director's side. He lifted the headset off the golden hair, his heart lurching violently at the sight of the pale face, eyes closed and jaw set tightly, that was revealed as the visor came away. Sweat mixed with flecks of blood where the headset's contact points had broken the skin. Nokoru's fingers were clawed into the armrests of his chair; his eyes sprang open and flickered from side to side unseeingly--too fast, like someone trapped within a dream. Setting the headset aside with mingled care and distaste, Suoh caught the Director's wrists and held them until Nokoru's eyes slowed to focus on his. Nokoru slumped into the leather seat at last, all rigidity going out of his body. Suoh could feel his hands tremble ever so slightly.
"Did we--?"
Suoh made a quiet and affirmative sound, and behind him, Akira added, "The intruder's gone, Rijichou, and I've got us all back on the system again. I'm adding an extra level of password protection now...."
"That won't hold them for long," Nokoru murmured, and Suoh tensed his fingers on his superior's hands.
"Don't even think about doing that again," he said with some asperity.
"I might have to, Suoh." The blue eyes gazed back at him, pupils dark and dilated, far more so than they should have been even in the computer room's low lighting. The pulse that sped beneath Suoh's fingers was thready and much too fast. "Although I assure you that this is one adventure I'm /not/ looking forward to." Nokoru's glance shifted to include Akira, who was gazing anxiously at them both. "I don't think we'd better leave the computer center anytime soon," he went on quite calmly. "And you'd better call Kamui here to be in on this. He may have to take up the Holy Sword sooner than we'd thought."
* * * * *
"I don't see anything yet, Beast." Satsuki sighed in frustration, and leaving a tangle of corrupted files behind her, she continued sweeping toward the system's core. She could have been much more discreet in her approach, but she didn't really see the point. With the computers themselves obedient to her, the sysops couldn't block her out, not without help from that very entity whose attention she hoped to attract...and a familiar unreadable presence threw its light-shadow across her perceptions, almost as if on cue.
"/Ah./"
Satsuki came to a halt in the streaming current of bits. Across data and empty space, the guardian drifted facing her. She tossed another call toward it to see how it would respond.
::USER "SATSUKI" ACKNOWLEDGED::
::ACCESS DENIED::
Satsuki tensed. She'd come in under a new identity, there was nothing to mark her as being the same intruder, and yet this program /knew/--or perhaps simply suspected--that she was the same. In a way, the latter possibility was more disturbing. There was something almost intuitive about how it had identified her, a fuzzy abstraction, very much like a human guess....
"AI. It's got to be. Beast, do you know what this means?" The computer returned a query. "If the Imonoyamas have made an artificial intelligence like this...I've never seen anything like it. We've got to have it." Beast grumbled in machine discontent. "Don't be silly, darling," she murmured, reaching her thoughts back to stroke the computer as she studied the guardian program with avid, almost hungry interest. "It's not going to replace you. But if I can figure out what it's got--if I can duplicate its functionality and add that to you...."
But how to go about it when she couldn't get inside the program, when she couldn't even find a loose end of code to unravel? Hell, she couldn't even /see/ the code...she wondered if the fact that this was an artificial intelligence was what hindered her ability to communicate. Beast was a limited AI itself and she found it quite comprehensible, but then she had built it herself....
This wasn't getting her anywhere, she decided, and the longer she waited, the more likely it was that some human operator would try to kick her off the system again. She sent a hail of queries toward the program, demanding information about it, and got no data back except for an analysis of its response time, which was quite good, and a reiteration of ::ACCESS DENIED::. "Doesn't have too much personality, does it?" she murmured to Beast, which was continuing to sulk at her distraction. Then, a realization gave her pause. This was obviously an fantastically complex piece of programming, but so far it had given her only the sparest of answers. What was the point of a real artificial intelligence that couldn't communicate in subtleties?
"Duh," she whispered to herself, "it's the /system./" The CLAMP Campus system, while sophisticated in its own right, clearly lacked an appropriate interface for the program. It seemed quite plain to her that the guardian didn't belong in this environment--that the AI's flexibility and and ability to learn allowed it to perform well enough, but that it must have originally been designed for something else. Considering the matter, Satsuki smirked as the obvious, appealingly simple solution occurred to her. Gathering those floating streamers of concentration about her, letting them loop outward in lazy arcs, she laid a pattern of glinting, interlinked circles across the system's face, imposing her own reality-structure onto it. At the same time, she fused her will to one of the system's data transfer programs, using it to open a connection to the outside world. She bent her special powers around it, enhancing the program's functioning, directing it toward her target: this, /this/ was what she wanted....
The program indicated readiness, and she issued a command.
UPLOAD
* * * * *
"Imonoyama-san?"
Kamui started forward and was blocked by Subaru's outstretched arm. He gazed wide-eyed past the onmyouji. The Director's two assistants had lunged as one for the figure in the shadowed chair. The Imonoyama's body arched, spasming in a wild seizure, and then slumped, falling over to one side.
"/Rijichou!/" Catching the Director, Suoh half-pulled, half-lifted him from his seat, laying him down gently on the floor. He went to remove the headset that hid the other's face, and Subaru stepped forward to catch his arm. "What--!"
"Don't break the connection." The onmyouji seemed oblivious to Suoh's anger as the man glared at him with anguished heat. Instead he stared intently at the Imonoyama, mismatched eyes peculiarly unfocused.
"His soul's been taken...."