上海梦想 精彩片段：
Chapter 63
Caldwell ducked below the worktop just as two PLA entered the door of the control room. Mei Lin caught the first by surprise delivering a blow to the side of his neck. The man slumped to the floor but his friend was quick. He was already whipping out a revolver. As the PLA turned around, Caldwell saw Mei Lin’s hand slip behind her back with blazing speed. She was reaching for the Glock. There was a delay as the man’s brain tried to register the fact that there was a woman in the control room. That delay cost him his life. Mei Lin’s arm was already extended. The Glock spat fire and a black hole appeared in the middle of the man’s forehead. He slumped to the floor face first. Mei Lin stood still listening.
“Quick. I am not sure whether they heard that,” she said. Caldwell ran to the server. There was a toolbox nearby. He switched the servers off and started removing the metallic panels on the machine with a screwdriver.
“What are you doing?”
“The AI is gone. There seems to be no backup, the other server is just a bunch of data, some kind of knowledge network used by the AI’s neural network. I am going to remove the processors.”
A minute and a half later, both servers had been opened up and Caldwell had carefully eased the processor from its housing on the modified motherboard. The other server seemed to be running a powerful industry-standard Sun Microsystems processor. Caldwell handed the processor to Mei Lin, who slipped it into a small grey box and placed it in her rucksack, all the while listening out for the PLA.
“OK. I need to get the root username and password,” Caldwell said, breathing heavily. The adrenalin was pumping. A PLA officer had been killed. If they were to get caught they’d both be killed without a shadow of a doubt. No amount of diplomatic wrangling could change that, not even Fouler’s maneuverings. This is what Kat had meant when she had said Fouler was sending him on a fool’s mission, that day outside The Puzzle. But he had to keep cool, keep his wits about him. This was no time for fear. This was, for him personally, the biggest frigging score in the world full stop. At stake, his past his future, his life. Their lives!
Caldwell sat at one of the other terminals and attempted to find the user directory. All the machines seemed to be connected to the network in one way or another. Sometimes in his haste, his fingers slipped on the keyboard. Sweat was dripping out of every pore of his body even though the temperature in the PLA’s control room was quite low.
“I am not happy being up here while these guys walk in and take shots at us. I am going downstairs to secure the area. Give me your Glock and hurry,” Mei Lin implored.
“OK. I am trying my best,” Caldwell said, reaching in his trouser pocket for the Glock and handing it to her. Mei Lin disappeared into the corridor, both Glocks at the ready.
Caldwell removed Yamamoto’s console and its peripherals from his knapsack and switched it on. He donned the goggles and continued typing away on the PLA terminal. The same text display he’d noticed on The Bund appeared on the bottom right of the goggles. The console was discovering new networks. He removed the goggles. Caldwell found the user directory on the PLA terminal and scanned the list of users. There were 2038 in total, including one with root access and five with administrator privileges. The rest had identical low levels of access.
Caldwell called up his netbase on the console. There were two messages but he didn’t have time to read them. The console had locked onto the PLA network. He turned quickly to the PLA terminal as an idea formed in his mind. He pinged the terminal and it came back with its network address. It was using standard cyberspace protocols. Smiling to himself, his head quickly darting towards the door to the control room, he typed the usernames and passwords for the root and admin in a message to Fouler.
Heart thumping, Caldwell logged out of his netbase. The goggles were now displaying the high resolution version of Shanghai. Once again he was on the banks of the Huangpu river. To his left The Bund, to the right the shimmering glass and lights of Pudong. There were people on the promenade, moving between the buildings in Pudong. A lone figure stood on the pavement on Zhongshan Lu. There was a commotion downstairs in the mansion and the sound of gunshots.
In virtual reality, the figure across the road was looking at Caldwell’s avatar and it started walking towards him. But how was that possible? He could see them but they couldn’t see him right? He was not part of the network. Yes, he was. He was connected from within the system and now even with just the goggles and the gloves he was an avatar in this world and the lone figure had seen him and was now fixing him in that lifeless high resolution stare. Caldwell stood up and started walking towards the figure, flexing his fingers in the gloves. He looked down at his hands, his virtual hands, and they flexed back mimicking his actions. The figure stopped in front of him and smiled.
“That is one way to intrude on a private network my friend. You might as well be wearing a T-shirt that said: ‘Intruder, Come Get Me’,” the figure said in Mandarin, laughing. It was an avatar in a crisp blue suit, the fabric pulsing with life.