Marengo

When you deal in urban legends, you write a lot about dread. The best urban legends and mystery stories are heavily laden in dread. Dread is more complex than horror. If horror is the monster beneath the bed, dread is the long walk to the bathroom at night. If horror is what we feel seeing the zombie's hand reaching from the grave in a movie, dread is what we feel walking past a cemetery the night after. Horror is a hot, white flash. Dread is a slow, warm burn. It will never be as impressive as horror, but it lacks on impact, it more than makes up in longevity. It is the constant gnawing feeling of wrongness that settles in the subconscious and chews at your psyche. When you deal in urban legends, you very rarely get to write about something wholesome. So when the chance arises, you jump at the opportunity.

John Braille is a computer scientist working at the University of Hertfordshire where he has taught for the past 27 years. He has seen the university, the town and the industry change around him and he has changed with it.

Most students attending their first lecture do not expect the figure they see before them – he is tall and thin bordering on wiry. His pale face is obscured almost entirely by a Santa like beard, and he has shaved his head to grey stubble despite the fact he assures me he never really started balding. In the winter, he wears skinny jeans and plaid shirts, in the summer he'll lecture in shorts and a t-shirt. He looks more like a roadie or an ageing biker than a respected computer science lecturer.

John has an impressive resume and is credited in a number of different products, but the thing he is most proud of is a one man home project that he worked on to keep himself entertained. John decided to code his dog.

“It was just after my divorce, before my ex-wife and I were in a place to be friends again. I was at home and I was restless and I wasn't ready to hang out with anyone or do much of anything, and so I was throwing a ratty old tennis ball around for Marengo and I started wondering – could I digitise my dog?”

Marengo was a Collie that John and his wife had adopted at the start of their marriage. Named by John after Napoleon's famous horse, Marengo was a common sight around the University computer science department for many years.

“He was just this big, dumb, lazy thing. Wouldn't hurt a fly. He was very affectionate though. When I started bringing him into work, people would kind of give me the side-eye and they'd go to my boss and complain and she'd tell them, 'go see the thing and if you still want to complain, I'll take it seriously.' Nobody ever lodged a formal complaint after meeting the little guy. He was a boisterous little scamp. Sometimes he'd get out on campus and he'd just be running around causing a ruckus. You couldn't control him, you couldn't catch him, all you could do is sit back with your hands on your hips and watch him go.”

John himself had no real idea what he was setting out to do. The idea had come to him out of the aether and at the time he felt it was spurred on by boredom – the imagination of a tired and restless mind. In hindsight, he acknowledges it was always about extending Marengo's life.

“I lost my mother when I was young, and my father and I had a cold relationship. He was a good man, and he never mistreated me or my sisters, but he wasn't built to be a single parent. He couldn't handle the emotional responsibility of showing affection to three children. I grew up with a fear of death, which isn't unusual for children who lose a parent, but I saw death everywhere. I think that's why I probably got into computers.”

John still has the whiteboard where he wrote up his first notes. He sat and watched Marengo trudging around the house, staring up at him, noisily lapping up water, hungrily munching away at the biscuits in his food bowl. In John's head, a picture began to appear of Marengo – an image that could be reduced to code.

“People talk about it as if there's a picture of Marengo or a bunch of ones and zeros in the shape of a dog and I think that just goes to show how little people understand computers, even now,” John laughs.

The first code John Braille wrote was short and to the point. To oversimplify, it told the computer that there was something called Marengo and that it was performing one of several actions that were determined semi-randomly.

“It means nothing to the computer. It just accepts that Marengo exists and that he is drinking from his water bowl, and that's just fine by the computer.”

Over time, John added to the code. He added options to interact with Marengo by issuing simple commands that would affect the dog's behaviour.

“There have been dog games for years,” he says. “But this was my dog. It was an actual dog with behaviour that could be influenced but not controlled. I'd call Marengo and if he came straight away, that went into the code. If he didn't come until the third time I called, that went in too. Slowly, this chunk of coding became a more and more faithful representation of my dog.”

Day by day, after work or when he first woke up, at weekends and over holidays, John developed his programme. Soon it was running 24-7 in the background.

“I had two dogs,” he laughs. “One running around my feet, one running around on my screen as strings of numbers and letters.”

And then Marengo, the real Marengo, passed away.

“It was like losing my best friend. He was a genuinely wonderful dog. I missed him terribly. The staff, those who had worked at the university for any time at all, they organised a little memorial service at the college and hundreds of students turned up. We had graduates who had left years before taking the day off work to come and attend. It was beautiful, a really good send off.”

John ignored the code for weeks after the passing of his dog. Eventually, he returned.

“It was creepy,” he said. “I'm sure there are people who think all dogs are pretty much alike or that without the physical body to interact with, it just wouldn't be the same and I'm not saying it was identical but Marengo on the screen was just like the dog I'd lost. He acted and reacted just how the real thing would have done. It was so close to the real thing, but so different at the same time. It was honestly just upsetting.”

For a few days, John considered deleting the code and simply ending the experiment. With the living Marengo gone, the coded version served as a ghastly mockery. If not for his fear of death, he probably would have done. Something kept him from ever quite being able to remove the file. To John, this would have felt like the final portion of his dog passing away, all that remained of his best friend. The choice then became what was he to do with the file? Instead of burying him alongside his namesake, John decided to set him free.

“So then it came down to what was I going to do with the file? If I wasn't going to destroy it, that meant keeping it and I couldn't picture anything ghastlier than the remnants of the spirit of my dog locked eternally inside some electronic box until it eventually stopped working and ended up rotting in a garbage junk out in China. In the end, the choice was a simple one – I'd set him free. It was a simple enough idea really, not exactly morally good but I figure that he's not hurting anyone. I simply threw the code into a basic back-door malware script, then added a few little twists that a normal virus wouldn't want to have. The code for Marengo is so much more complicated than the code to break open your website.”

The Marengo virus identifies unsecured networks, poorly protected websites and public hubs then surreptitiously installs itself there. Once inside, Marengo exists only as that piece of code – a copy of strings of data that do nothing other than represent a dog. These are hidden away in strange places – the html of websites is the most common – where they cannot be activated or used, merely observed. Once Marengo is safely extent, hidden in the coding of a website, it searches for its next target. Once it detects it has been safely secured somewhere else, it is wiped clean. There is only one Marengo at a time. It does nothing. Unless you happened to be searching your website's html at the exact time Marengo ran through, you would never know that it had ever been uploaded.

“Once he was out there on the web, I deleted my copy of him,” John says.

“So where is he now?”

John smiles with a boyish grin.

“I worked out a programme that would help me track him,” he says with an almost embarrassed smile, “but I don't think I'll ever throw it together. He isn't meant to be tracked, he's gone now. He's out there somewhere, running through cyberspace. It's comforting to think that he exists somewhere. You can't control him, you can't catch him, all you can do is sit back with your hands on your hips and watch him go.”