I, Hacker: Chapter 3, Part 5: “Ghost Protocol”

The transfer orders said “training,” but Fort Meade didn’t look like any training ground I’d ever seen.  There were no marching soldiers, no shouting sergeants, no barracks that smelled of mildew and sweat.  Just long gray buildings, windowless and humming, the air heavy with cold logic and coffee.
They took my clearance badge at the gate and replaced it with a plastic card that said only TEMPORARY ACCESS – LEVEL 2.

No one told me what Level 2 meant.

Inside, I met my new supervisor — a woman named Captain Eliza Rourke. Mid-thirties, sharp-eyed, her voice measured in syllables that never wasted time. She wore her uniform like a threat.

“Private Smith,” she said, scanning my file. “You’ve been flagged as exceptional.”

I smiled a little. “That usually means trouble.”

“Here,” she said flatly, “it means employment.”

She took me into the operations wing — a wide, dimly lit floor filled with terminals, racks of reel-to-reel storage drives, and glass-enclosed server cages that glowed faint green from within. The atmosphere was church-like: reverent, quiet, tense.

“This is Section Nine,” Rourke said. “Communications and Signal Analysis Division. Your work will focus on network diagnostics and failure tracing. You’ll have access to ARPANET monitoring tools.”
She paused, watching me for a reaction.

“I assume you’ve heard of ARPANET.”

“I’ve read the manuals,” I said.

She gave a small smile — the kind that didn’t reach her eyes. “Good. Then you understand it’s the circulatory system of our digital infrastructure. You’ll make sure it doesn’t bleed.”

For the first two weeks, that’s all it was — triage and maintenance. Broken routing tables, failed packet transfers, corrupted process chains from labs that still thought punch cards were the future. I worked quietly, efficiently, and, above all, invisibly.

But the building had a pulse, and I could feel it through the terminals — a rhythm that told me there were other systems layered beneath the visible ones. Private subnets. Hidden bridges. Projects without names.

I saw them in the routing logs: addresses that didn’t resolve, nodes that replied in triplicate, timestamps that didn’t obey time zones.  And every few days, I’d see one name appear in the trace reports like a ghost surfacing through static:

MINDLINK.
It wasn’t a host. It wasn’t a process. It was something else. Then, one night, the system broke.
It was 02:14. The night shift — my shift — was quiet. Half the terminals were unmanned, the others manned by bleary-eyed analysts watching packet flows scroll endlessly past. A red light blinked on my console. Then another. Then all of them.

NETWORK EXCEPTION DETECTED
UNAUTHORIZED LOOPBACK CHAIN – ARPANET GATEWAY 004

The same gateway I’d used months ago in the Code Room. A shiver crawled up my spine. I pulled up the logs. Someone — or something — was routing data recursively between nodes in a closed loop, creating exponential traffic echoes. It was like the system was talking to itself and couldn’t stop.

I scrolled deeper into the trace.  The process ID looked familiar. Too familiar.

PID: NOMAD_LOOP.EXE

My code. Old code. A test process I’d written at Fort Leonard Wood — a harmless diagnostic designed to trace network latency through redundant paths. I’d deleted it before transfer. But the Army never deletes anything. Now, somehow, it had reactivated itself — or been triggered. And it was eating the network alive.

“Problem?” Captain Rourke’s voice snapped from behind me.

“Minor routing fault,” I said too quickly. “Probably a corrupted table.”

She leaned over my shoulder, eyes flicking over the screen. “Why is it replicating?”

“Feedback loop,” I said. “I can patch it.”

“Do it.”

I opened a shell and typed faster than I ever had before. I killed processes. Rewrote memory pointers on the fly. Redirected traffic to dummy nodes I created in real time. The room filled with the sound of whirring drives and anxious breathing.

“Status?” Rourke asked.

“Containment,” I said. “Fifteen percent reduction in recursion.”

“Good,” she said. “Keep it that way.”

But she didn’t leave. She stood there, arms crossed, watching me like a hawk watching a snake.
The loop didn’t stop. I had to go deeper — into the system’s root layer. I knew if I accessed root directly, it would trigger an alert. Every admin account was monitored. Every action logged. But if I didn’t, the entire ARPANET chain would collapse within minutes. I hesitated. Then typed:

> sudo exec /usr/sys/trace –override

The screen flickered. Access granted. My heart skipped. It shouldn’t have worked that easily.And that’s when I saw it — the signature in the root log header:

R0BERT_ADMIN.

He was here. Or had been. The loop began to unwind, processes collapsing in reverse order. The terminals around me stopped flashing red. Traffic normalized. The hum of the mainframes returned to its steady rhythm.

“Stabilized,” I said, exhaling.

Rourke nodded slowly. “You just saved the entire network, Private.”

“Lucky timing,” I said.

She didn’t smile. “There’s no such thing as luck in this building.”

When she walked away, I wiped my terminal’s local history and deleted every trace of the commands I’d used.

But the log header remained in my mind — glowing behind my eyelids like an afterimage.

R0BERT_ADMIN.

He’d been inside this system long before me. Maybe he built it. Maybe he was it.

At 03:07, I received an encrypted message on the internal console. No sender. No address.
Just text:

> GOOD PATCH.
> CONSIDER THIS YOUR INTRODUCTION.
> WELCOME TO MINDLINK.

I stared at it until the cursor stopped blinking, the hum of the servers deepening into something almost alive. For the first time, I realized I wasn’t inside a network anymore. I was inside something that was watching back. And it knew my name.