The Cybergypsies Read online

  Praise for The Cybergypsies

  ‘The artistry of the book lies in the way that Sinha uses the techniques of the internet to expose the dangers of the internet in a manner that users of it will understand. Not only is it an exhilarating read but it is a demonstration of why we need to read. We need books to make sense of the technological future as much as of the literary past’

  The Times

  ‘A vivid portrayal of the real social repercussions of internet use . . . fast-paced, novelistic . . . Certain passages are written with such wit and precision it is impossible to believe you are reading a piece of non-fiction . . . Sinha has got it right’

  Sunday Herald

  ‘An engrossing tale of modern morality’

  Face

  ‘Brilliantly written, it inspires confidence in the way the Net can bring people together, while at the same time highlighting its isolating tendencies’

  Edge

  For Viktoria

  Satanbug

  It’s 3 a.m. and I’m online to Jesus Slutfucker. JS informs me that he’s typing one-handed, knuckling open a beer with the other. Needs a drink, he tells me. He just got home to find his girlfriend throwing her clothes into a case. She said she was sick of being shackled to a sleazeball, his lifestyle was doing unspeakable things to her head, she was leaving. To emphasise the point, on the way out she stuck a knife in his arse. JS is a nurse, so he knows he’s barely scratched, but in any case, it’s not the knife that hurt.

  i’m b etter off w i tho u t t he bitch …

  He’s trying to tough it out, but the bugger’s clearly had a shock. I can tell he’s upset by the way he’s typing, characters detonating on my screen in bursts of venom. What the hell, JS says, wounded or not, he’ll celebrate her departure with a few more beers and then settle down to a serious night’s buttkicking on the net. Well, in Oklahoma City where he’s hunched over his keyboard it’s just after nine, so he has the night ahead of him. For me night’s nearly over. Something – the moon? my imagination? dawn? – is silvering the sky over the Sussex woods to the east. I’ve been on the computer for six straight hours and am yearning for bed. My eyes are burning from trying to focus the blue flicker of the screen, but JS is getting into his stride and there’s something I want to find out. I type:

  >Geno, friends here in Britain are shitting themselves about a virus called Satanbug. It’s clever and nasty – apparently has come from the US. Do you know anything about this one?

  A pause while the satellite relay to the States kicks in. This is the question I’ve waited up to ask. Jesus Slutfucker, aka Geno Paris, self-styled ‘technopath’, is proprietor of one of the biggest virus collections on the net: all the common viruses you’ll find on any bug-exchange bulletin board, plus hundreds of exotic specimens, various unidentified species culled from the wild and not a few he has written himself. He has links to every major partisan group in the virus underground. If anyone knows about Satanbug, it will be Geno. The wait is longer than usual. He’s thinking. Then the screen comes to life and characters flash across.

  >you know it’s a funny thing, bear, you’re the second brit in two days who’s asked me about satanbug...

  >Who was the other?

  >lady logged in here from the uk, asked if i had it... strange girl... her name is slasha something or another... i did not believe she was a she, or really calling from the uk, so i voiced her...

  >You spoke to her?

  Slasha must have been exceptional if Geno made a transatlantic voice call from his own phone. Roaming the pre-internet net is expensive, which is why so many of its denizens are there courtesy of someone else’s phone bill. The first task for a hacker, long before he starts breaking into other people’s computers, is to find a way to do it at someone else’s expense. It’s almost a law of net life. To survive for long as a serious net nomad, you need to be a hacker. Or rich. As a non-hacker who has travelled the nightsky roads for years, my finances are in serious trouble. This call to Geno in Oklahoma City is, for example, costing me a fortune. Our bills, since I began my nocturnal electronic wanderings, have become so terrifying – the largest so far was £2,000 in a single quarter – that I’ve had to start hiding them from Eve.

  >well she was for real... but weird... one of the first things she told me was that she didn’t really like american men because they did not know how to cane a girl the way a british gentleman did... i swear that was almost her exact words...

  I’m so astonished that I forget to reply.

  > hey bear, you still alive...?

  Typed communication is always tedious. There’s nothing worse during one of these sessions than sitting twiddling your thumbs waiting for the ether to respond. Eventually I muster some words.

  >Geno... the Brits do have quite a reputation for this sort of thing. The French call it ‘le vice anglais’. But this Slasha... what did she want with Satanbug?

  I feel that he’s leaning back in his chair, laughing.

  >i knew the brits rep for this type of behavior but i did not think that their women actually enjoyed it... :) strange lady... she asked for access here and in return she gave me some viruses... a couple i don’t think i had...

  This too is odd. The only viruses he hasn’t got are the kind you don’t catch from computers.

  >she uploaded a photo of herself - a home made gif... she’s about 36, i think she said, and the gif would seem to support that, and blondish, looks dyed... see if I can find it. hold on...

  Halfway across the world, Geno can’t hear me sigh. It’s 3.12 a.m. I leave for work at seven, but of course there is now no question of logging off. Curiosity has locked its wrestler’s biceps round my neck. Actually it is more than curiosity. What I’m experiencing is a sort of jangling paranoia. Is it possible that my line is tapped? Sometimes it seems as if all the connections on the net are alive to one another and that information flows through regardless of how you try to dam it up. It finds its own way, leaks along the wires and out onto the airwaves. Information, as would-be hackers never tire of telling us, wants to be free. But certain kinds of intelligence are hard to come by. It has taken me a year to work my way into the virus nets, to get to know the people who write cancerous code and send it out into the world to mutate other people’s data. My idea had been to shop these folk, but it’s not that simple. There are no laws against writing viruses, only against using them. My motives are easy to misunderstand, so I’ve told no-one, not even my ‘friend’ Nasty Ned the Net Nark, of my virus adventure. Geno is my secret. Or so I’d thought until tonight.

  The Oklahoma Institute of Virus Research

  Unaware of my sudden consternation (panic is vulgar), Mister Slutfucker vanishes from the screen to delve in the hidden part of his bulletin board, the grandly named Oklahoma Institute of Virus Research. It isn’t a ‘real’ place. It has no existence in space-time. It is a computer-generated mirage, a cloud castle, a Fata Morgana, yet real people meet here and start things which ricochet into the real world. Geno’s board is a piece of software that lets my computer, via a modem, call his. Once past the electronic portcullis, identity and password verified, I’m genuinely inside his system, or the bits of it which he allows me to see.

  Being inside someone else’s computer is like wandering round their house. Geno’s storerooms, where he has gone looking for the picture of mysterious Slasha, are stacked high with things not intended for public inspection: computer viruses, alphabet bombs, trojan horses, virus-generating and mischief-making machines. (Surely ‘mechanic’ comes from the same root as ‘méchant’?) I tap a key, and Geno’s viruses present themselves on my screen, rather like a wine list in a good restaurant – names, vintages, descriptions – lacking only prices. Viruses are the ultimate freeware.

>   BACKFIND.ARJ

  4757

  09-26-93 Trojan, overwrites hard drives. Written by some SAD fuck to take down a mutt called Geoff

  BACKTIME.ZIP

  605

  09-12-93 Prague inf., makes time run backwards

  BADBOY2.ZIP

  1068

  09-12-93 Stealth virus, variant “Make me better”

  BADBRAIN.ZIP

  2822

  10-02-93 Brainless virus by Hellraiser

  BWOLF.ZIP

  2520

  10-02-93 Beowulf. Kind of a lame little virus I wrote when I was drunk

  Next door, bits of bomb-making equipment lie scattered, as if abandoned by some hastily departed cyber-terrorist.

  G2-070B.ZIP

  47705

  09-13-93 Dark Avengers Virus Writing Program

  GWKTROJ.ZIP

  4370

  09-13-93 Kinda lame trojan maker

  INSIBV2.ZIP

  34984

  09-13-93 Fairly good ansi bomb maker

  IVP-V17.ZIP

  40610

  09-13-93 Instant Virus Production, latest version

  MPC091B.ZIP

  46178

  09-13-93 Virus creator

  MTE091.ARJ

  11100

  09-26-93 MTE Polymorphic engine

  TPE11.ZIP

  8709

  09-02-93 TPE another Mutation Engine

  VCL.ZIP

  166650

  09-13-93 Virus Creation Lab

  ZIP-TROJ.ZIP

  2203

  09-13-93 Ansi bomb, formats disk when unzipped

  I imagine the viruses as bombs made by bearded anarchists, innocent-seeming brown paper parcels done up with string and plastered with smudgy foreign stamps, the trojans as rocking horses stuffed with high explosive.

  MEGATROJ ZIP

  11650

  07-13-91 A lethal and destructive trojan, use at your own pleasure

  TROJ-1 ZIP

  7598

  02-19-91 Trojan horse from The Hill People HQ

  TROJANS ZIP

  38447

  07-13-91 Trojan horses from The Immortal Grounds, Sysop: Toxic Waste

  ARIHAK93.ZIP

  63368

  11-13-93* ARiSToTLE’s instant 500-virus creator

  BOGUS.ZIP

  124469

  09-13-93 Bogus Msg writter (sic)

  Bogus Message Writer is one of Geno’s own méchantisms, a device which enables him to pepper the net with thousands of scatological messages, each of which appears to come from someone he dislikes. ARiSToTLE’s viruses-while-u-wait creator (ARiSToTLE is a flamboyant virus collector from Virginia), I picture as a collection of multicoloured tubes and pipes, like a Würlitzer jukebox. I once tried it. It chuntered for hours before spawning a swarm of viruses that looked like a drawerful of silverfishes, thus:

  αϒιΣƒ101.zip

  668 14/08/93

  10:31

  αϒιΣƒ102.zip

  662 14/08/93

  10:32

  αϒιΣƒ103.zip

  661 14/08/93

  10:32

  αϒιΣƒ104.zip

  664 14/08/93

  10:32

  αϒιΣƒ105.zip

  669 14/08/93

  10:32

  You ask innocently: Bear, what is a computer virus? It is a tiny program, a scrap of code that burrows into other programs, then makes copies of itself to infect further hosts, like a biological virus. It needn’t be destructive. If you’re simply interested in replication, your virus will probably be harmless. It’s easy, however, to include instructions that erase or mangle data, or cause the characters on your victim’s screen to cascade tinkling into a heap at the bottom. Rumour has it that Satanbug is a nasty virus. But however mean a virus may be, a trojan horse is nastier, because its intention is always hostile. Viruses play a mischievous game of catch me if you can. Trojans lie. They masquerade as harmless programs, but when you run them, they may wipe your hard disk, delete files or, as Geno puts it, ‘tunnel down and fuck the FAT’ (the file allocation table which tells your computer where to find its files). Particularly cruel was Story Book, which told its victims, ‘Watch your child smile as Homely (the G-rated) Clown happily tells his story.’

  ‘Joy,’ says Geno, ‘is creative and stylish destruction.’

  Oddly, in all the time – several months – I’ve been calling Geno’s board, I have never asked him what he looks like. In my mind he shapeshifts. Sometimes he’s large, blond, moustachioed. At other times short, wiry, dark. He has long hair tied back in a ponytail, or a Yul Brynner No.1 cut. In reality, I know nothing about him save what he sends to my screen. I feel we’re mates, yet I’ve never even heard his voice. It’s a strange kind of friendship, which blossoms like a bat-pollinated durian flower, always in the dead of night.

  Light thickens,

  And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,

  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse

  And night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

  These lines come to me, and I think of what I’ve become.

  Alone in the cybernight

  3.21 a.m. in the weald of Sussex. In the field outside my window, a small animal, probably a rabbit, screams as its life is ended by a fox. There are far more lethal creatures abroad, but no-one dreams that they exist.

  The night, my love, is full of invisible pathways, crisscrossing the globe, bounced off the stratosphere by orbiting comsats. Along them wander an odd gypsy folk, ceaselessly exploring, always on the lookout for new systems, new people, new information. They congregate, these travellers, at the oases and caravanserais of cyberspace: this bulletin board, that multi-user game. Fifty million people connected to the net, yet all over the world you meet these same few. You come across their spoor on systems in South Africa and Argentina. You bump into them at online parties in San Francisco or Stockholm. You hear rumours that they’ve hacked a High Street bank, or were last seen heading Amazonwards to track down illegal mahogany cutters with satellite-linked bulletin boards. Faster than the jet set is this net set. They can flit from London to San Francisco to Finland in seconds, and have friends, on whom they regularly call, in places like Sarajevo, Bombay and Vladivostok. Some are hackers, virus writers – you may never know who they really are. Some may be known to you as scientists, housewives, musicians, policemen, yet in other guises you have probably fought them on multi-user games or flirted with them in that haven of deep roleplayers, the Vortex. These people are the cybergypsies, the explorers of cyberspace. Theirs were the first camps in cyberspace. They mapped it and made its links. They named the constellations of its night sky. They share your secret life, and guilt.

  3.25 a.m. Here in Britain respectable computer folk have long since climbed the wooden hill. Earnest techies, calling each others’ boards to keep up with the latest anorak talk, are sleeping now. The universities have quietened down for the night and their network, the JANET, is just a whisper. In the City of London, fifty miles north of us, big commercial networks are running their inhuman data transfers, banks and corporations trading digits with, here and there, like a fly on a precipice, the odd hacker patiently trying to find a way to crawl in.

  At this hour, the only hotspots are the really dedicated multi-user games and certain offbeat bulletin boards. On Shades, the serial killers will be lurking, hoping to ambush unwary necromancers and enchanters come to gather easy points in the dead of night. The roleplayers at the mysterious Vortex will still be playing out their bizarre fantasies. The software pirates are busy, but their boards are always busy all night. On the porno boards, lusts will be subsiding as patrons are forced by tomorrow’s approaching workday to drag themselves away from their keyboards to solitary beds.

  Then there are the people like me, the addicts, who drift round the globe with the tide of darkness. 9.25 p.m. now in Oklahoma City. East Coast America is just coming online. The partying on The WELL, in San Francisco, won’t be in full swing f
or maybe six hours yet. Nothing significant ever happens on the net before midnight. The catch is that midnight is sweeping round the world at speeds up to and including 1,000 mph. Some modem jockeys like to ride the cusp of darkness round the globe. If you’re addicted enough, have unlimited funds and access to chemicals, you can make night last forever, because it’s always night somewhere on the net.

  Slasha

  3.27 a.m. Geno’s back.

  >found it, yeah, it comes back... she had a kind of cultured british accent (if I am any judge, because all I have to go on is the movie my fair lady and my brief setting down in scotland when i was in the air force) but another thing she likes to talk about is how that riding crops are really too nasty to use on human beings, unless that they really deserve it...:)

  >This is very peculiar Geno. Really extremely strange.

  >yeah, but i must admit this slasha, or sasha is entertaining...

  >You’ve no idea how fucking weird this is.

  >come on, thought you limeys would be used to this kind of thing... hey, tell you what, i’ll squirt you her picture along with the virus... okay stand by to receive satanbug and slasha...

  It’s too late at night to explain that it’s not the sado-masochism that’s weird. There are lots of S&M-ers on the net. They meet in places like the Vortex, which has a facility, Madame Pompadora’s, devoted to the art of pain. No, what is weird is that hours earlier, I’d first heard of the Satanbug virus from a British bulletin-board operator called Josh, whose girlfriend is Carmine. And Carmine is a slender blonde whose bedtime reading is Skin Two catalogues, who attends clingfilm and candlewax parties with the keener Vortex players and, if this isn’t clear enough, is known to have a fondness for the lash. Last time I saw Carmine, she was sheathed in a black rubber dress that clung like a condom, sucking vodka through a leather mask that sprouted nails like porcupine quills.