The last films were pivotal. Where the earlier ones seemed to break him down to his emotional building blocks, the latter ones seemed to be building him up-filling him with joy as he saw people struggling together. Relying on each other. Sacrificing. Gratitude. Joy. Free men looking toward distant horizons. Horizons that beckoned the adventurous, hinting at danger.

The people in these films were of all races and ages, but Mosely noticed that they shared some traits in common: they were capable, they were highly motivated, and they acknowledged no limits. Danger was not a deterrent. It was life lived to its maximum. They were truly alive.

He had almost forgotten the real world existed. He did not know how long he lay there, but when the screens faded to black, it was as though he were cast into an abyss. He panted, struggling to find some reference point. His soul adrift in nothingness.

From somewhere in the darkness he heard Sobol's voice. "Follow me, and I will help you find what you have lost. I will give your descendants a future. The past no longer exists for you."

A light began to rise in the infinite distance.

"You are an exceptional person. I choose to have faith in you." The soft light filled his vision.

Mosely slowly remembered that he existed as a person. He remembered his name. Charles Mosely. He felt different-as though all his sins were washed away.

Suddenly the crushing weight of exhaustion fell upon him.

Someone lifted the goggles from his head, revealing the same soft light above him. The big guy was there, nodding slowly. A metallic chunksound echoed in the room, and Mosely's limbs were suddenly free. Other hands came to ease him up.

Mosely looked and saw the other orderly in his white coat helping him up into a sitting position. Mosely felt dizzy. Weak.

The big guy leaned in. "We're going to withdraw the needle. It will just take a second."

The other orderly placed a cotton ball over the spot, squeezed, then withdrew the needle. He quickly taped a bandage over it.

Mosely's dull eyes noticed his own clothing. He was wearing surgical scrubs with booties. He stared down at his feet, then looked up to face the big guy, who nodded slightly.

"The danger's past."

Mosely's dry voice croaked, "How long?"

"Forty- six hours."

A water bottle appeared next to his mouth. Mosely turned to see the other orderly extending it. Mosely took it and sipped greedily.

"Not too much." After a few more moments they took it away.

The big guy regarded Mosely. "The fact that you're still alive is all I need to know about you." He extended his hand. "I'm Rollins." His eyes darted. "He's Morris."

Mosely regarded the hand. "Like I'm Taylor?"

Rollins laughed. "Exactly like that."

Mosely shook his hand. Rollins made eye contact. They were confident eyes, not at all unfriendly.

Morris nodded and shook his hand also. "Welcome aboard."

"Aboard what?"

Rollins gestured. "The Daemon chose you. You're one of its champions now."

"Do I have a choice?"

"You already made your choice." He looked into Mosely's eyes. "This is where you want to be. That's why you're still alive."

Mosely absorbed the words. The images were so fresh in his mind. Breaking him down to his basic building blocks. Understanding him. Mosely understanding himself. The elation.

He realized Rollins was right.

Rollins continued. "There are no leaders here. We are all peers. And we answer directly to the Daemon-and no one else. I am your equal. And you are mine."

Mosely wasn't sure this was even happening. He shook his head to clear it.

Rollins patted his arm. "First, some food and rest. There's a lot to learn, but the Daemon chose you because you're smart. And you'll need to be."

Chapter 28:// Ripples on the Surface

Natalie Philips paced with a laser pointer at the edge of a projection screen. The Mahogany Row conference room was dimly lit, and silhouettes of her audience were arrayed around a sizeable boardroom table. Military badges on the uniforms of some audience members reflected the light from the screen.

Her title presentation slide was up:

Viability of Daemon Construct Over Peer-to-Peer Networks

She was already addressing the group."…the feasibility of a narrow AI scripting application distributed over a peer-to-peer network architecture to avoid core logic disruption." She clicked to the next slide. It bore the simple words:

Distributed Daemon Viable

A murmur went through her audience.

"Our unequivocal findings are that a distributed daemon is not merely a potential threat but an inevitable one, given the standards unifying extant networked systems. In fact, we have reason to believe one of these logic constructs is currently loose in the wild."

Much more murmuring went through the crowd.

She changed her slide again. This one depicted two sets of graphs labeled Incidence of DDOS Attacks-All Sites Compared to Gambling/Pornography Sites.

She looked back at her audience. "A distributed denial of service (or DDOS) attack involves harnessing the power of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of zombie computers to transmit large amounts of packets to a single target Web domain. A zombie computer is one that has been previously compromised by a malicious back door program. This could be John Q. Public's unsecured computer sitting in the den. An army of these zombie computers is called a botnet,and its collective computing power can be directed to overwhelm a target, making it too busy to respond to legitimate traffic. The potential to harm an online business is obvious.

"Unlike a simple denial of service (or DOS) attack-which is launched from a single machine and thus easily blocked by an IP address-a DDOS attack comes in waves from different IP addresses coordinated to continually incapacitate the target. Likewise, the nature of the traffic can vary wildly, making it difficult to filter out garbage connection requests. In short: it is significantly more serious. Unless the attacker brags about his deeds, tracing the real source of an attack can be next to impossible."

She wielded the laser pointer to highlight various parts of the screen. "These two charts illustrate a pattern detected four months ago in the occurrence of distributed denial of service attacks on the public Internet-both overall and as experienced separately by commercial gambling and pornography Web sites, both legal and illegal, hereafter referred to as 'G/P sites.'

"Note the increase of approximately twelve thousand percent in the occurrence of such attacks against G/P sites during the period January through April. Contrast this with the flat-to-declining trend in DDOS attacks versus the overall population of domains."

She changed slides to a graphical breakdown of the top international gambling and pornography domains, with call-outs indicating the crime gangs operating out of Russia, Thailand, and Belize. The graph was broken down on the x-axis by time and on the y-axis by packets per hour.

"The CIA has associated the following international crime rings with these three G/P enterprises. Their Web interests encompass tens of thousands of loosely affiliated Web sites hosted on hundreds of domains in dozens of countries. Each one of these crime gangs is a vast IT organization, and collectively they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year. Their operating units include product development, security, finance, and infrastructure support elements-they are, in effect, multinational corporations whose product lines include narco-trafficking, sexual slavery, money laundering, and extortion."

Her graph showed that the Web assets of each individual crime ring had been attacked in a campaign of orchestrated infowar. Philips's laser pointer cavorted as she hammered her point home. "The Russians were first in line. We estimate that roughly ten million workstations launched a Pearl Harbor-like cyber attack simultaneously from all points on the globe, beginning in mid-January and stretching through to the end of the month. This effectively brought the Russian business to a halt worldwide-making their online gambling and pornography assets unavailable to paying customers for extended periods. These were not simple smurf and fraggle attacks. The Russians appear to have tried everything, from hardware filtering to rate-limiting connections, but it didn't put a dent in their downtime. They tried to launch new sites and migrate customers to these, but the new sites also were rapidly targeted and brought down."