Chapter 23 Part 1

Sal stood and surveyed the layout. he had not come to Undertown often. As a talented deceiver, nobody was paying for work done near Undertown, and likely no one would. Undertown was somewhat akin to a living fossil. When the holonosphere emerged, almost everyone wondered how they could exploit it for their communities or profit. Undertown had actually had the opposite response. It had categorically rejected any imposition of the holonosphere on its existence. As a consequence, the sort of people who came to live in Undertown was of two varieties--purists, who believed that the world was better off without technology that made matters more complicated when mastery of the existing land and Earth proved baffling enough, and reprobates who had something to hide or a reason to want to disappear from the holonosphere.

The community was subsequently split between these two groups, and there existed a stark contrast between them. One part of the town was dilapidated and dangerous, whereas another part might be welcoming. The problem was that it was difficult to demarcate where these parts stopped and started. One might be on a street that was friendly on one block, and traverse the next one over and find one's self in danger.

Everything in Undertown was subject to the dampening. The dampening was a holonosphereically generated barrier to keep the holonosphere out. The dampening was admired by hackers and also loathed by them. It was admired because it was next to impossible to penetrate, and hated for the same reason. One of the key reasons the dampening had been so successful had involved quantum algorithms coupled with polymorphism.

In the old days, companies or nations would erect barriers in an effort to keep people at bay. The problem was that these barriers were not adaptable. If one erected a barrier and they were successful, then their barrier would still be subject to the ultimate security hole of time. As the physical barrier of the Great Wall of China proved, time is the final arbiter of security as given enough of it, any barrier or security can be overcome.

If a barrier were less fortunate, it would have a security hole that was easily exploitable. Often this took the form of services running on certain ports, or protocols being manipulated into doing something not normally performed. Once someone managed to get past the barrier, they were in. Sometimes barriers had a way of giving those who used them a sense of overconfidence. Once they had implemented the walls, they became careless because they assumed they were safe. Such an approach would likely be better served by having no defense at all because at least vigilance would be higher and likely a better security precaution.

The dampening, though, was the ultimate barrier in that it was rigid enough to keep people out, but malleable enough to change should it detect that it needed to. The old adaptable barriers did not have the advantage of quantum algorithms, or they too might have been successful. Adaptability and mutability have to be at least as free to permute as the imagination of those attempting to circumvent such precautions.

What puzzled Sal, though, was that whoever had hacked through the holonosphere and held the Inner Sanctum man had done so ostensibly from inside this dampening. To circumvent the security of Inner Sanctum was impressive enough, but to also be able to do this through the dampening boggled the imagination. Sal was as talented as a deceiver as there was, but such a task was well beyond his ken.

Sal attempted to access his interface just to see if it would work. He wasn't surprised to find it completely unresponsive. The dampening was working just as it always had.