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ELEVEN

Friday, 9.43pm, Chennai, India

The nights were getting cooler. Still, Sanjay Ramesh preferred to stay here in the air-conditioned chill of the office than risk the suffocating heat of the city. He would wait till the sun had fully set before heading for home.

That way he might avoid not only the clammy heat, but the ordeal of the stoop. Every night it happened, his mother trading gossip and health complaints with her friends as they sat outside until late. He found himself tongue-tied in such company; in most company as it happened. Besides, September might be cool by the standards of Chennai but it was still punishingly hot and sticky. Inside this room, an aircraft hangar of an open-plan office, filled by row after row of sound-muffling cubicles, the conditions were just right. For what he needed to do, it was the perfect environment.

It was a call centre, one of thousands that had sprung up across India. Four storeys packed with young Indians taking calls from America or Britain, from people in Philadelphia anxious to pay their phone bill or travellers in Macclesfield wanting to check the train times to Manchester. Few, if any, of them ever realized their call was being routed to the other side of the world.

Sanjay liked his job well enough. For an eighteen-year-old living at home, the money was good. And he could work odd shifts to fit in with his studies. The big draw, though, was right here inside this little cubicle. He had everything he needed: a chair, a desk and, most important of all, a computer with a fast connection to the world.

Sanjay was young, but he was a veteran of the internet. He discovered it when both he and it were in their infancy. There were only a few hundred websites then, maybe a thousand. As he had grown, so had it. The worldwide web expanded like a binary number sequence – 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 – apparently doubling its size with each passing day, until it now girdled the globe many times over. Sanjay had not matched that pace physically of course – if anything he was a slight, skinny lad – but he felt his mind had kept up. As the internet grew, he grew with it, constantly opening up whole new areas of knowledge and curiosity. From his upstairs bedroom in India, he had travelled to Brazil, mastered the disputed border politics of Nagorno-Karabakh, laughed at Indonesian cartoons, gazed inside the world of the Scottish caravan enthusiast, scanned the junior fencing league tables of Flanders and seen what really motivated the tree-growers of Taipei. There was no corner of human activity closed off to him. The internet had shown him everything.

Including the images he had not wanted to see, the ones that had prompted the project he had completed just twenty-four hours earlier. He was a late developer as a computer hacker, coming to it when he was fifteen: most started before they were teenagers. He had played the usual tricks – hacking into the NATO target list, coming within one click of shutting down the Pentagon system – but each time he had held back from pressing the final button. Causing mayhem held no appeal for him. It would only give people a lot of grief and, his surfing of the web had taught him, there was plenty of that in the world already.

Now he felt the urge to laugh, partly at his own genius, partly at the joke he had played on those he had designated as his enemy. It had taken him months to perfect, but it had worked.

He had devised a benign virus, one capable of spreading through the computers of the world just as rapidly as any of the poisonous varieties hatched by his fellow boy-geniuses, those whose malign purpose made them, in the argot of the web, crackers rather than hackers.

At this moment, it was his method, rather than his objective, which delighted him. Like most viruses, his was designed to spread via ordinary desktop computers, those that were connected to the internet all the time. While people in Hong Kong or Hanover were tapping away, emailing their friends or doing their accounts, or even fast asleep, his little baby was inside their machine, hard at work.

He had given it a target to look for and, just like everyone else, it used Google to find it. Invisible to the user, below the screen, it got back its results and used them to compile what Sanjay thought of as an enemies list. These would be the sites to feel the virus’s wrath. All of them, like any other site, would have some bug or glitch in their software: the challenge was to find it. For that, hackers (and crackers) would devise a set of ‘exploits’, designed to trigger the glitch. It might mean sending it a little nugget of data the software was not expecting; even one rogue symbol, a semi-colon perhaps, might do the trick. You never knew until you tried. Sanjay imagined it like medieval warfare: you would fire hundreds of arrows at a castle, knowing that only one might find the slit in the stone and get through. Each castle would have a different gap in the armour, a different weakness. But if your list of exploits was long enough, you would find it eventually. And once you had, you could take down the site and the server that was hosting it. It would be gone, just like that.

And these sites certainly deserved to disappear. But Sanjay had taken his war against them a stage further. Most hackers stored their list of exploits on a single server, usually salted away in the bandit country of the internet, a place out of the reach of the regulators. Romania and Russia were favourites. This method carried with it a fatal weakness, however: once the attacked sites realized the source of the enemy fire, they could simply block access to the server containing the exploits. The raids would stop.

Sanjay had found a solution. His virus would get its arsenal of exploits from a variety of sources and would even carry some of this payload itself. Better still, he had programmed it to retrieve extra exploits every now and then, to improve itself. He had created a magician constantly able to replenish his bag of tricks. And creation was the right word, for Sanjay felt he had conceived a living creature. In technical language, it was a ‘genetic algorithm’ a piece of coding that was able to change. To evolve.

His virus would alter its list of exploits, even its method of distribution – sometimes through email, sometimes through bulletin boards, sometimes through bugs in web browsers – as it spread throughout the infinite universe that was the internet. In this way, the virus would reproduce itself, but its ‘children’ would not be identical either to the original virus or to each other. They would mutate, by picking up new exploits and new methods of propagation from sources all over the virtual world. Some of these sources would be servers in the internet badlands of eastern Europe, some would be found by scanning security bulletin boards – where people would discuss how to thwart the very tricks Sanjay was deploying. Sanjay was proud of his creation, travelling across the globe, mutating and bettering itself in a million different ways – thereby making itself all but impossible to track down and eliminate. Even if he never touched a computer again, they would continue without him. Still a teenager, he felt like a proud father, or rather, a great-great-grandfather – the founder of a vast dynasty. His progeny were everywhere.

And they were engaged in noble work. Scanning the results now, he could see he had set the parameters sufficiently narrowly that only the target sites were collapsing. Within a matter of hours, every one of the world’s websites dedicated to child pornography would dissolve. Sanjay was laughing because he could see that the final command he had programmed into the virus was also now taking effect. Each of the sites that once displayed violent and pornographic images of children was now replaced by a single picture: a 1950s, Norman Rockwell-style drawing of a son on his mother’s knee. Below it ran a simple, four-word message: Read to your kids.

Sanjay headed home, grinning at his joke – and his accomplishment. No one needed to know what he had done; he knew and that was enough. The world would be a better place.

Even at night Chennai was a noisy city, as raucous as it had been when it was Madras. Perhaps that, and the fact that his mind was racing with his success, is why he did not hear the footsteps behind him. Perhaps that is why he saw and suspected nothing until he was walking down the side alley to his own house, when he felt a handkerchief over his mouth and heard his own muffled screams. There was a sharp pricking sensation on the side of his arm and then a woozy slide downward into sleep.

When Mrs Ramesh found her only son dead on the ground, she screamed loud enough to be heard three streets away. It gave her no comfort that her boy – who had dreamt of one day doing something ‘for children’ and who had been murdered before he had a chance to do anything – had been killed by some apparently painless injection. Police admitted they were baffled by the murder; they had seen none like it before. There was no sign of violence or, God forbid, abuse. And there was the odd demeanour of the body. As if it had been handled with care. ‘Laid to rest,’ was how the policeman had put it. ‘It must mean something, Mrs Ramesh,’ he had said. ‘Your son’s body was draped in a purple blanket. And, as everyone knows, purple is the colour of princes.’