2014.04.14 - DELPHI Disassembled

Jane had been surfing the net but then suddenly there was silence. The screen which had been showing a youtube Video (not that she was even looking at it) halted and showed an error, while the PDFs of classic works that were still loading halted in that. The first two minutes Jane did not even notice it as she read in the Marquis de Sade at the speed of a digital text viewer in her own Mindworld, but when she checked the other pages at the rim of her space, which were loaded from the laptop she noticed the errors. The whole Net seemed to be... broken down. Looking out of the room to the library she glared at the computer there, which should be unning and did not even show a sign of life. "Grace?! The Network is down and off." she yelled down the stairs. "Are we compromised?" Even before she had finished the sentence she was on the way back to her room, stuffing her items back into the dufflebag, shutting down the own laptop with a mental command as she entered the room.

As the network goes down, Grace is already trying to connect to all the back channels she knows. Indeed, there is a loose network of people connected to Oracle who perform tasks much like Grace does -- they monitor safehouses, and keep their eyes open on the streets. They have small communicators and network access. And when DELPHI went down, they all lost touch. Which means it's back up phone lines being used. Emergency burner numbers.

"You, too?" the black woman is saying as she ascends the stairs to where she's heard Jane call out. "No, here, too," she confirms into the phone. She covers it and looks at Jane. "DELPHI's gone down. We're not under attack. But, I think Oracle is."

The night is dark. It's late. It's the time of night when most vigilantes in Gotham are out patrolling and getting into trouble. So the idea that Oracle might be under attack... what's unusual is the fact DELPHI's gone down, not that the woman might be in trouble. She's a Bat, after all. It comes with the job.

Jane still stuffs her items to the dufflebag, tossing it over the shoulder as she gets down to the first floor, eying at the windows "I don't believe it. Her security is far from the swiss cheese of the GCPD Database." she snarls as she tosses the bag over the stone floor, rushing towards the door of the cellar to check if the phoneline was still active at all. If not, that would be a real sign of really big trouble "Are we going to the matresses tonight or retreat to pickup zone Bravo?" she asked up the stairs as she went to touch the cables, trying to get a feel for the data traffic - or lack thereof. "Or you have a backup plan?"

"I know," Grace replies. "The problem is the net has gone down at the source," she tells the girl, following her. "It's not just us. It's the entire network. The chances of anyone doing that to take out a single safehouse are astronomical. But to take out Oracle herself? That's where the smart money is. I suggest the panic room, tonight, and we reassess every four hours."

It took Jane just a few moments to find out the phonelines were not entirely dead, just all Machines had received a kill command Gathering her bag again she went into the panicroom with Grace - and even would manage to shut and lock it if the software would be fried - if she could access the powerlines of it. "We try to survive the night in here, tomorrow we assest the damage." she told to Grace.

The night would likely be rough, possibly even short, but If nothing really bad would happen, Jane would read the books se had in storage of her Laptop - not the litterature department, but the stuff on hacking and hardware she had downloaded but not touched as she had a whole society to catch up upon. "Ok, the network dot shot down... meaning the main node was killed or send a kill command..."

The night passes uneventfully -- for Grace and Jane, at least. Oracle and the various Bats around the city might feel otherwise. Still, it soon becomes apparent that the dismantling of the network is solely a cybernetic affair. It's cut off Oracle's eyes and ears, making it a far more personal attack than anything else. The safehouses are of no interest to the man who would see Oracle brought low. At least, they aren't interesting to him in the first twenty-four hours.

After that point, however, Grace starts hearing rumors from some of her counterparts about gang style raids on some places. The raids are random, however, and seem to be more motivated by property damage than anything else. It's like someone is simply trying to cause damage for its own sake. Not, mind, that people won't get hurt if they get in the way.

Thus, about seventy-two hours into the week, Grace is suggesting they fall back to a secluded little place they know that has never been touched by Oracle's network technology, and thus should be off the radar.

Jane agrees only relucantly, trying to sort out a pattern of the attacks, but on the way to the other safehouse she insists on buying a couple of items with cash. A sattelite dish and a fresh and clean router to set up a network at the fallback and a few memory drives. "let's try to find out where it came from..." was her comment as she set up the devices at the safehouse, routing her signal over the sattelite and thus turnign any locating of her into showing up as half the continent. On the downside she slowed her connection down quite much as she tried to gather as much about the situation as she could.

There is no pattern to the attacks. That's actually the point of it. It's like someone just placed the addresses into a randomization algorithm and targets whichever one gets spit out of the lottery ball. It's like someone is simply trying to dismantle Oracle's holdings in as painful a way as possible. No rhyme, no reason. Just destruction.

Grace is content to let Jane do her thing. She's watched the girl long enough, now, to understand that the woman thinks far differently than others. Maybe that's why Oracle brought her in. Who knows?

What does become evident, however, as tentative link to the nodes DELPHI used to haunt is established, is that the network didn't issue a kill order. The network died. It's a subtle difference, even in machine-speak. But the evidence is there. DELPHI was murdered, violently and cybernetically.

A murdered program, it felt like... like the code had been ripped apart to Jane. Something like that was... far from easy - much more a miracle to do it at all. Trying to scavenge what was left of the code, she filled the USB storages with what was left of DELPHI, using counless hours to try to make sense out of the borken, mangled, mostly senseless code or trying to learn what might have done such a damage. But without knowing the original code the best she could do was put together a mocking immitation of some of the routines that had made DELPHI itself and only with a bit luck might tell a tiny bit about the attacker at best.

There's not much left of DELPHI, really. Not even accessible to those darker corners where someone as skilled and gifted as Ashes can find it. Partly, that's because Oracle's own fortress was always that formidable. But, really, it's because there's just not that much left. The runtimes that could be saved point the cyberpath to evidence that first DELPHI was infiltrated by some sort of alien thought pattern, and then she was, effectively, infected by a highly customized virus much akin to the way a telepath might overwrite an organic mind's personality.

Jane is mostly confused by what she salvaged, glaring at the code on her screen. Tiny bits that only showed that someone... Akin to her did it... "Grace? You happen to know if Oracle knows any... Any people that interact with the Internet on a maner much more like living in it?" Other than her, but she didn't voiced that. "Or who to call when something like that happens?"

Grace looks fairly surprised by the question. "No," she replies. "But, Oracle is a very private person. And I've never heard of anyone that lives in the internet, aside from theories of internet addiction in Psychology Today." She taps her fingers to her chin lightly. "This is Gotham. If I were going to talk to anyone, I'd try to track down the Batman. But that's easier said than done." She considers that. "Unless, I guess, you want to turn the bat floodlight atop GCPD HQ. Otherwise... I don't know."

Jane chuffs as the name Batman falls "I met him. Once. I guess I have a way to get him, if I need to... But the last time he played rough on me. But if I must... Can you drop me off in the city after sunset? I think the Bat might know where to search... unless he used DELPHI and has no backup."