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k a dozen years before he had assembled his first Vorman-perl script.
That was what he believed, at least, that the spider was ancient, an unearthed artifact, splendid in its antiquity. And crafty. Ever so crafty to have survived undetected for so long. So he had come after it with guile of his own. He'd been laying his traps for almost two weeks, off and on, salting packets of bait along the back alleys of the data structure, each bundle of code a lexicon of chaos text that was more noise than signal, but noise pregnant with its own nefarious structure. Tasty bits like the pixellated approximation of a skittering housefly. He taught himself what the spider liked, what it ignored, what it processed and what it left behind once the gorging was done. Then he built his own database of its tastes, and refined his applications to suit the particular interests of his target. He watched and waited, measured the spider's strikes in picoseconds and studied the web vibrations as it dragged its soft and pale underbelly along the dynamic datascape.
And all the time, he scuttled along surreptitiously behind the beast and plugged the holes it had chewed in the fabric of the network. He learned many of its favorite paths and its trapdoor escape routes. He buried his sensors and dug his holes, lined the walls of data-dense caverns with pungi sticks of Escher algorithms and Moebius logic.
He bided his time.
And waited.
Made guesses.
Made himself miserable, in fact.
He'd only gotten a good look at it once. No, that wasn't true. It hadn't even been a proper look, just the poor facsimile of a faded image. The spider was a thing of nightmares, line after line of the most scabrous and key-jacked code he'd ever seen. Old perl, some original pre-Protocol Vickers Standard, a sublime injection of Gancet and R-ASP synthesis logic. He'd somehow snapshotted the tail end of it, a lucky cache dump in the fraction of a second before the temp logs evaporated, and what he had extracted from even th