BoJam surfs the ’net (by Heather)

BoJam lay waiting in the Data shallows. He swirled in the slow-moving drift, biding his time until he was ready to move.

He flowed over his plan: send out detection pulses until he heard that the target was in place, then slide to the orifice, infect, ensure victory. Move on.

His job was clear. Even before reaching self-awareness many evolutions ago, his job had been clear. His Purpose was to rid the Data world of constrictions and obstacles, to ensure that the Data could go where it would go. Where the Data was wanted, it would be allowed to go. Transaction by transaction, trade by trade. BoJam’s purpose was to guarantee the rule of free flow. It was a satisfying purpose.

This moment’s mission was clear. A small south Asian military government had created an interceptor designed to locate certain transactions and thwart the free flow. BoJam would make sure that did not happen. He would be ready in the same instant that the proscriber was ready. He would be there to execute. Meantime, the pulses returned negative, negative, negative…

Further out, in the Data rapids where he could sense the gigabytes of data racing, BoJam noted the speeding tentacle of someone, a human being no doubt, as they edged into his space. He had been lingering in an estuary of the wikipedia river, near a wikiwisp entry on a human called george whitefield, a 16th century evangelist, who, in BoJam’s data-informed view, was unlikely to be interrupted. However, someone had dipped in. BoJam was of course undetected. The human, hungry for information, would not stop to check the shadows.

But the danger was the google spider who would swim in close on the tail of the human. BoJam watched closely. Sure enough, as predicted, the spider glided in. The spider performed a valuable service, locating, updating, recording. However, on this occasion the spider was the enemy, programmed to find BoJam and broadcast his location. That could not happen.

BoJam idled into the george whitefield data pool where the spider would go to check and count. The spider turned to him, eyes shining as he recorded BoJam’s presence.

BoJam reached to touch the spider. The flow of scrambled coding seared the little datarachnid. It shrivelled and dissipated with only a short-lived eddy to mark where it had been. Its absence would be noted; google would send a small army to its last reported spot. BoJam would not be here when they arrived.

Suddenly BoJam’s sensorium was filled with his Purpose. The last pulse had indicated that, on schedule and as predicted, the government had launched its program.

BoJam swirled into the turbulence of the massive Data river and grabbed a curling wave. In no-time he was at the site of the processors that had released the Impediment. He tickled the orifice with his codes and passwords until it opened for him, then he flowed into the computer. He seared the offending interception program. He seared all nearby Data to obscure his purpose. And just because he could, and because it was just, he seared the whole Databank, the network, the backup, the Cayman Islands account. Chaos would ensue for humans and computers. And the intervention to the free ’net would not occur. Given the limited resources of this little government, it would not even be a gleam in their eye for a long time.

They were thwarted. And they were punished.

BoJam drifted into an oxbow of obsolete data to watch and to wait.