Episode 004| He Didn't Write It

Kaiyuan Year 1010 · Jan 1 · 03:24 · Saint Tranya · Information Research Substation No. 10

Lika stared at the line on the screen — "Do you remember who wrote you?" — for a full 60 seconds.

Then he got to work.

The first thing was to shut down all communications. The external power line of Information Research Substation No. 10, the sync protocols between substations, the reporting channel back to QuarktoLabs headquarters, the IoT heartbeat with Magnetar Transport — all severed. His own terminal had only two lines left coming in: one into the lower layer of Spectra's main store (a back door he'd left himself), one into QuarktoLabs' offline backup (also a back door he'd left himself).

Over his life he'd left a total of seven back doors across different systems. Tonight he'd use two of them.

The second thing was to reheat the coffee.

"At least I get one hot cup," he muttered, pressing the reheat key.

---

He opened the hacking interface.

Spectra was the largest observation network in the world; no one knew its full architecture completely. Even Spectra's chief engineer only dared to say, "I know seventy percent."

Lika was one of the few who could get into the lower layer of the main store. Not because he was smarter — because for a stretch of his past he'd spent 12 years in Spectra's engineering group, during the system's most critical expansion phase, and he'd rewritten the entire underlying protocol once with his own hands. When he did, he left a back door in Spectra.

The one he was about to open was called gate_07.

> auth L.K.S._Core --gate 07 --silent
> query --field signature --value "L.K.S._Core" --range all --include archived

The first command verified identity. The second was a search — find every record across all of Spectra's history bearing the signature L.K.S._Core, archived records included.

In theory it should return one. Just one. The one from eight months ago, when he'd fixed this string inside QuarktoLabs' internal protocol.

The system paused for three seconds.

For Spectra, three seconds was an era.

[Query complete]
[Total matches: 4,891]

---

Lika's right hand stopped above the keyboard.

4,891 entries.

Not the one from eight months ago. From some point in the past onward, all the records this signature had left across every module, every task, every log — 4,891 of them in total.

He picked up the coffee cup. The coffee had just heated; the cup was a little hot to hold. He didn't notice.

He keyed in a command to sort the 4,891 entries by timestamp.

> sort --by timestamp --order asc --display first 10

[1] Kaiyuan Year 925 · 03 · 11 · 02:14:08 · Frozen Northern Reach T-17 · Error_513
[2] Kaiyuan Year 925 · 04 · 02 · 17:30:22 · Frozen Northern Reach T-17 · auto-exec · archived
[3] Kaiyuan Year 927 · 06 · 09 · 08:11:43 · southern waters of the Dawn Continent · module init
[4] Kaiyuan Year 932 · 11 · 25 · 23:58:11 · Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R · Observer resync
[5] Kaiyuan Year 941 · 02 · 14 · 06:00:00 · Jiangbao Fortress · alert triggered
...

---

"Eighty-five years," he said softly.

The earliest entry was Kaiyuan Year 925 — matching the Error_513 he'd received tonight. Same timestamp, same source, same signature. Eighty-five years ago.

The second entry was the same listening post, 41 days later. Auto-exec. Executing what?

The third switched to the southern waters of the Dawn Continent — a place 800 kilometers away — module init.

The fourth was back at S-17-R, seven years on. Observer resync. Who was the Observer?

The fifth turned up "Jiangbao Fortress" — some remote place at the southernmost tip of the Badlands that no one in Saint Tranya had ever heard of — alert triggered.

---

He laid the five records out side by side and stared at them.

The "executor" field of every one was the same line of text.

Executor: L.K.S._Core

The "verifying signature" field of every one was the same line, too.

Verified by: L.K.S._Core

---

Lika set the coffee cup down.

Eight months ago, when he'd fixed the string L.K.S._Core inside QuarktoLabs' internal protocol, he'd thought it up from nothing. He remembered that afternoon. He'd been in his third-floor office at QuarktoLabs, drinking a cup of green tea left too long, staring at the terminal screen and thinking, "I want an identifier only I can sign with — short, easy to remember, impossible for anyone else to guess" — and then he'd written down this string. He even remembered he'd revised it three times before settling.

And yet this signature had been executing tasks inside Spectra eighty-five years ago.

And the verifier of the signature was the signature itself.

---

Lika pushed his chair back an inch. The legs scraped a little longer this time.

He opened the third command.

> query --field "creation_date" --value "L.K.S._Core" --decrypt

He wanted the time this signature had first been "written into" Spectra. Not first use — the creation date.

The system paused. This time it paused longer than before.

[Decrypting...]
[Decrypting...]
[Decrypting...]
[Partial decryption: 25%]
[Result: at least 80 years]
[Note: full decryption requires higher-level authority]

---

Higher level.

The "higher-level authority" Lika had defined belonged to exactly two people: himself, and an administrator who didn't exist. That administrator was a placeholder account he'd thrown in eight months ago, named __root__, that no one could log in to.

And yet this record needed __root__ authority for full decryption.

Which meant what?

It meant that eighty-five years ago — or earlier, centuries earlier, even earlier than that — someone had used an administrator account that Lika wouldn't create with his own hands until eight months in the future, written this signature into the lowest layer of Spectra, and left it there to execute 4,890 tasks.

---

This time Lika didn't curse.

He sat there a long while. The coffee went cold again, more than half of it. Finally he opened the terminal and typed a fourth command.

> trace --signature L.K.S._Core --map all locations

Spectra took seven seconds to return it.

The map loaded. 4,891 coordinate points scattered across the four continents, so dense that Lika had to zoom in twice to make out which coordinate any single record fell on.

But two places were especially thick with points.

The first was the Frozen Northern Reach S-17-R.

The second — he leaned close to the screen and checked three times before he was sure — was Information Research Substation No. 10, the very building he was sitting in.

For the past eighty-five years, in this building, a "person" signing with his name had quietly executed over a thousand tasks.

He had never known.

---

【Ch. 004 End · Saint Tranya】