Written by Joshua Falken
Prologue
Two hours ago, a super-virus, known as Daemon, infected the Guardian Collective, controlling the security of the entire Net. The control of security protocols and, by extension, of the data transmission protocols would give total power to her. Except for a detail.
System Mainframe, that one thought to have been destroyed in an attempt of elimination by a webcreature, was connected in the Net again, and with that, the intact Guardian protocol had come back, through three other guardians. Daemon sent some infected guardians to eliminate them, thinking that it was just a detail without importance, even when they failed. How could just a system shake the control that she had on the others? That was Daemon's mistake.
System Mainframe originated a resistance movement, uniting to several others that were fighting against her and the ones that had not still been infected. Alone, they didn't have a ghost of a chance. The Anti-virus Emergency Response Team (AVERT) was formed.
Now, the forces of Daemon, known as Echelon, and the AVERT were in a technical stalemate. Each one had half of the Net under its influence. From open war, it went to a tactics of mathematical war. Nobody attacked in a direct strike nor revealed the conditions of their own resources. Now, the attacks were on the communications and supplies lines among the systems, through sabotage and cracking. The development of cryptography codes and decoding techniques became a fundamental weapon. They were the only way to protect the communication lines against sabotage.
But both forces were arriving to a definitive draw. Although the cryptography codes were more and more developed, the protective codes of the Netships were arriving their limit of possible variations. Echelon and AVERT based those codes on the MS-DOS/Neumann Equation, responsible for the hidden file force-field generation, the last possible protection for the intersystem transport.
Having in mind that that mathematical war would only reach the end with the development in a new way of generating a hidden file force-field, completely different from the MS-DOS/Neumann Equation, AVERT and Echelon developed researches in those area. Whoever got it first would win the war. Although it is not known as that research was driven in Daemon's forces, AVERT thought they had discovered a breach.
In the Pentium Institute, in Mainframe A, the project Rainbow taking place arrived at its final stages...
Go to Chapter 1 - Quantum Alteration