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The Client Calls Again (cont.)

Res’s manager, and Sheepdog, decided this was worthy of celebration. “Drinks are on me, you pick the venue”, the manager announced, and Res blurted out “let’s go to Meatspace! it’s kind of a dive, but it’s local and the bartender knows me. Great service and a chill crowd, as long as we don’t get too wild”. “Great, let’s all meet in a few hours. Bring your thirst, ladies and gentlemen. I plan to see which one of you parties harder on an unlimited credit card. Save room for champagne!”

Sheepdog left early and headed home via the tunnels beneath the city. He could afford the extra cost of terrestrial shuttles or even his own vehicle, but chose to sock his earnings away and live a humble life. He believed it kept him grounded, although some of his peers teased him with the nickname Cheapdog. He was still wrestling with the anomaly in the stitch from the Bowler meeting footage.

To him, it was annoying in the same way as listening to one half of a conversation from some loudmouth on their communication device, talking in public. He only had half the story, and had to imagine the other half based on what he already saw or heard. So many questions were pointing in so many directions, he had to just choose a hunch and go from there.

Thinking back on the sequence of events, the Bowler would get out of the Limo and meet with an invisible…something, shake hands, get back in the Limo, and leave. Drug deal? Drugs were mostly legal now minus some experimental chems that were banned. Secret information exchange? Yes, meeting face to face and giving someone a piece of paper was still fairly safe and private. But what kind of information would require that level of secrecy? And where was the invisible man getting the information? Why did the Bowler Hat man need it? Or was nothing at all exchanged, and the Splicer organization was being tested by the Bowler? Maybe even an internal test done in coordination with the organization and the client. Who knows? Without much more to go on, Sheepdog decided to shelve all these questions and just enjoy Res’s victory. If anything important was going on here, he was sure it would all be revealed over time.

A few hours later, a ride back through the tunnels, and Sheepdog met up with Res and their manager near Meatspace. It wasn’t a particularly fancy or even nice part of town, but somehow felt familiar enough that people felt safe. He could see why Res would live around here, despite the insane rental prices. There was an incomprehensible feeling of life here. It was busy but not too busy. It was gritty and real despite being plastered with ugly advertising. Sheepdog realized how hard he was thinking about it and snapped out of it. “Ok, before we go in, I just gotta say I’m not a big drinker. So, if the plan is to get wasted, I’m crashing on your couch, Res”, he said. “Fine with me”, she replied with a crooked grin, “just don’t snore too loud, you’ll wake up the fish”. The manager stood with them, chuckling, and ushered them inside, bringing up the rear. “You guys are drinking what I’m drinking, no arguments, and we’re starting with shots”, he said generically.

As usual, K greeted Res with her shot and beer chaser, in her usual spot. “Brought some victims with you huh?”, he quipped. “I did. This is my manager, and this is my friend, Cheapdog. Don’t worry, he’s not buying”, she said, twirling her hair with her right hand again. “Well, nice to meet you Mr. Manager, and, uh…Cheapdog? I hope I got that right. What are you drinking?”, K replied. As Sheepdog opened his mouth to utter a syllable, the Manager butted in. “Round of shots, open a tab for me, and after that, another round of shots. Do you have any champagne handy?”

“But of course, sir, what sort of establishment would Meatspace be without a few select bottles of Dom (Perignon) on ice”, K said, grinning ear to ear. “Simply dreadful”, he added. This amused everyone within earshot, because Meatspace was definitely not the sort of place to have champagne handy, and it was almost a preposterous question. The Manager got another chuckle out of that and wandered over to the juke box to pick some celebratory songs for the mood. He knew Res just well enough to guess at a few older selections that probably wouldn’t piss off the crowd.

Res was about to habitually get situated at her seat when she got a call. “Hello?”, she answered without looking to see who it was, and a man with a deep gravelly voice on the other end replied, “I see you!” She knew that voice, it was Dec. She pivoted on her heels expecting him to be behind her again, but it was just Sheepdog nursing a shot, and her manager was headed back to the group. “I don’t see you”, she replied, “are you here at the bar again?” Dec said yes and raised a big ass arm in the air from the vets table in the corner, disconnecting the call. Res leaned over to Sheepdog and said, “watch my back, I don’t really trust this guy yet”, before walking over to the vets table.

“You brought some friends! What’s the special occasion?”, Dec asked. “Work, landed a big fish today”, Res bantered, “and I didn’t even see a ghost.” Dec grinned and replied, “Congratulations, fisherman. But I think you have seen a ghost. Maybe him, too”, motioning with his beer towards Sheepdog and the manager. “Although if it just floated away, I’d probably forget about it too,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye, like a nudge-nudge, know what I mean sort of way. Res sensed a warmth to him that she didn’t notice before, and decided to dig a little. “So Dec,” she began, “why do these fine upstanding vets tolerate you sitting with them? They owe you a favor?” A few of the veterans chuckled.

“Little lady, I am one of them”, Dec growled, holding up his other arm, rolling back his sleeve to expose a deep circular scar around his right forearm. “You see this? Lost half my arm trying to pull a brother out of the path of a railgun. He lived, my arm didn’t”, he explained, as one of the vets quipped, “I still don’t know who got the best part of that deal”, and they all grinned knowingly.

“How many stitches?”, Res asked, expecting another smartass reply. “They didn’t tell me. I lost a lot of blood before the medic arrived, passed out, and woke up a few weeks later back in a city hospital”, Dec replied, before he was interrupted by a chorus of men at the table chanting, “with this goddamn Terminator arm!”, and laughing like they had heard the story a million times. Res enjoyed this kind of ball-breaking comradery, which is why she always liked the vets. “Wanna see a trick? Get a magnet from the Moderns real quick”, Dec said. Res walked over to the Moderns and to nobody’s surprise, returned with a rare earth magnet in hand, about the size of an old quarter. “Watch this”, Dec said as he placed the magnet in the palm of his Terminator hand. As his hand closed around the magnet, he started squeezing, with his hand shaking. Suddenly, the magnet shot out through the crease in his fist and flew across the room. “Mostly titanium, but the microservos will generate a strong opposing magnetic field when I squeeze hard enough. Doesn’t seem very useful, but maybe I’m not very creative and they didn’t give me a manual”, Dec explained. “Wow. Do you realize what you’ve got there is essentially a weapon? That’s pretty ironic, considering your story. Magnets forcing other things to move fast. I’m surprised that’s not a selling point, seems like it could come in handy, yuk yuk”, Res joked. “Well, I gotta get back to my group. Good seeing you again, I guess”, she said, and Dec nodded, watching her for too long as she went back to the bar.

to be continued.

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The Client Calls Again

Res and Sheepdog took a brief lunch in a neighboring building that served dim sum and Thai food at very reasonable prices. It didn’t hurt that they both loved Asian food, which sometimes made Sheepdog homesick, being so far away from his native Singapore for work. To Res, these dishes might as well have been apple pie, because, growing up in her area, it was as ubiquitous and American as a hotdog or a hamburger. Also, it was fast, nearby, and top quality, flying in ingredients daily as needed, according to rumors. Res glanced at her watch and realized she only had a few minutes before the next client call. She snatched up her purse, left a few credits for a tip, and told Sheepdog she would talk to him later, as he was still working on a plate of Pad See Eew. With a flip of her hair, she headed towards the skybridge that connected the buildings, the low heels of her shoes pounding out a hurried rhythm of clock-clock-clock across the tile floor.

Rather than taking the call at her desk, she reserved a private room and booked it for an hour. She could log in via the terminal there and bring all her personal data and notes up without hassling with a laptop, but she still brought her physical notepad for assistance. A few moments after she settled, she reached out to the client who answered immediately. While his voice was clear, no background noise, she could hear some form of audio manipulation on his end of the line, probably the same anonymizer he used before, which would shift between low and high tones of voice. And on his end, he was seeing her old-school video game avatar again, only this time, Res was using her real voice. Risky, but just a little. He already knew who she worked for and the nature of the business, so it seemed a more personal touch. “Hello, can you hear me ok?”, he asked. “Loud and clear, but can we back off on the voice hilo? Let’s pretend we trust each other a little this time”, Res replied, and the client agreed. The voice now sounded natural from his side. This was a little more intimate in the digital age, like a second date where some of the pretense and peacocking is dropped.

After a few light greetings were exchanged, the client got to the point. “As I’ve said before, I take my privacy and safety very seriously, which brings me to your organization. I’ve heard nothing but good things from a few people I rub shoulders with, who are also shielded. I think I may have a secret that needs to remain guarded at any cost, therefore I must be shielded at any cost. If what I know and what I have done can be connected, it would have devastating global consequences and cause irreparable damage. To me, and to your organization, among many others.”

Res didn’t like the tone here, because even if it was true, it sounded like borderline blackmail. Like if we don’t protect him and bring him on board, things could get unimaginably bad. Inflated sense of self-worth, narcissism, delusions of grandeur, or the real deal? A few indirect questions could fill in the gaps.

Res lightened her tone to be a little more disarming (and corporate neutral), then began questioning the client. “We get approached by a lot of very important people harboring secrets. After all, it’s in our DNA to protect high visibility and elite clientele with total airtight discretion. What separates you from the others that didn’t pass our standards?”

The client replied, “I seriously doubt the secrets the others keep are this potentially dangerous. I’m not some kind of serial killer with a list that needs legal protection. I’m in possession of information that I discovered, decided to act upon, and my reach is absolutely beyond global. My secret transcends this planet, no joke. But I can’t say more without acceptance and ironclad nondisclosure agreements on your organization’s behalf. Think of me as a wizard with the only key to Pandora’s Box.”

Res briefly scribbled in her notepad the last sentence. It seemed to carry a great deal of weight and would make a strong justification for admitting the client to the program, if it was true. There was an urgency to his voice, an almost pleading tone; clearly, time was a factor here. He needed in quick.

Res then asked, “Are these state secrets? Are you in possession of secret knowledge about this organization, the governing bodies, other individuals within this organization, or information that could impact national security?” Without hesitation the client answered “yes” with no further clarification. This would not be a standard client engagement, were she to accept him.

Res opened a new client form marked Top Secret – ASE and direct management only, the highest tier of discretion available, and began asking him for personal details. A wire transfer of 5 million credits was required up front to process the client form, and the last piece of information she needed (as she waved her manager over for secondary approval) was the client’s legal name. The engagement had begun. There were three signatures required with today’s date. Resonant Frequency, the manager, and the client…

Rex Tarkington

The rest of the details would take a few weeks to process, but everything said thus far was entered into the record for legal to fall back on if Mr. Tarkington mislead them during the process. An AI would have to be chosen and assigned to assist with training, surveillance, and stitching. He would be issued a closed-channel secure communication device. Res finished up with “many of our clients choose to get an Angel tattoo which is publicly visible and a warning to others. Would you like to schedule an appointment with one of our in-house artists to choose the design and apply it?” Rex declined and simply stated, “that won’t be necessary at this time, although I may propose an alternative in the future.” Farewells were then exchanged and Res told Rex, “Welcome aboard, and thank you for choosing the Splicer organization. Your secrets, and your self, will be safe with us.”

Rex wryly ended the call with “they damn well better be. I look forward to working with you.” He unceremoniously disconnected the call, and Res’s manager high-fived her on the spot.

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Selfish Generosity

Rex Tarkington was a genius. A certified, bona fide, Mensa-verified egghead. He was also extremely paranoid, and very indignant about that character trait. He believed, strongly, that anyone living in a surveillance state has an absolute right to privacy, and if there was anything he could do to advance the right to privacy, he would do it without a second thought. He spent decades in IT Security, where his mindset and perseverance made him very successful. Enough success that he could retire at age 27 and pursue his real goals. He sunk countless hours into studying, then breaking, security protocols and very high-level encryption. But at this point, he wasn’t doing it for any particular company or vendor, he was doing it to try and reset his own comfort level. Being behind the scenes, watching and fighting off digital attacks, it was old hat by now, especially since his crowning achievement was a defensive AI he programmed himself over a few years. He proudly named it T-Rex, which was also the laziest name anyone could have imagined, based on his own name. 

The funny thing about defense is that it’s just offense in reverse. You have to know certain things about the attackers, attack patterns, weaknesses, etc. in order to shore them up. You must know all your soft spots to harden them. By that same token, it’s not difficult to turn a defense into an offense. Attack others where you are weak, assuming a certain amount of commonality across organizations is in place.

For example, regardless of how big or wealthy a corporation becomes, they are often stuck with very outdated servers and hardware somewhere in the network that are easily exploited. Legacy systems, custom programming, vestigial limbs that nobody ever spent money to rebuild and replace. Every company has these “legacy assets” that they can’t do without, and someone in the organization is aware of it. As time goes by and these legacy assets accumulate and remain unpatched, they represent a challenge for the attacker, because no matter how old an attack vector becomes, it has to stay in the toolkit just in case it’s found. This swells the toolkit over time, to the point where nothing can be discarded and you have an enormous, unwieldy bag of tricks. It just comes with the territory.

Years after T-Rex was released, security researchers had turned it inside out and made it an attacker. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a major blow to Rex’s organization in particular. Despite how paranoid and careful he had been, he had left the door to the toolkit open for expansion for licensed owners, which malicious actors used to add their own bag of tricks to what they called Xer-T, the inverted version of T-Rex. Security organizations would sometimes stage virtual battles between T-Rex and Xer-T to essentially watch the AI battle itself, to look for flaws or improvements. That was actually beneficial in testing, and some would sell improvements back to Rex himself. But honestly, none of this interested Rex at this point. He had gone off on another tangent entirely. Let the product managers and coders worry about all this.

In the information technology field, and security, there’s a term known as RCA, or root cause analysis. The concept is simple. When there’s a problem, keep digging even after it has been solved to determine the root cause and apply your permanent fix at that level. Rex had been doing RCA’s his entire life in one way or another, and was particularly skilled at it. Which, inevitably, led to him creating a root cause of his own, solving a lot of problems he had with the state of the world.

He got an idea after watching a documentary about zebras in the wild. Their stripes were a natural camouflage, although appearing fairly uniform and almost copied and pasted to the casual observer. It was discovered that the stripes short circuited the visual processing part of predator’s brains, namely, big cats. Something about the way cheetahs, lions, etc. see the world and process that world was truly confused by the stripes, essentially making the zebras invisible to them. Rex wondered if there wasn’t something similar in technology; after all, technology is based on human perception, so cameras and microphones are generally designed to only capture what people can see or hear.

Rex built up a very secretive research team, hand-picked and fully vetted, to dive into camera technology of all kinds. Cell phone cameras, CCTV cameras, traffic cameras, the hardware and software that drove them. What he initially discovered was not that interesting: they were almost all built upon the same core libraries, which meant at the lowest hardware level, they all behaved nearly identically. At some point during the early development of these devices, there must have been a competition between different technologies, and a single standard emerged. Or, as Rex saw it, a single point of failure…a single point of weakness. He poured millions into the team, moving the project goalposts regularly over the span of three years. He kept getting results, and eventually his company became the dominant player in the imaging device technology sector. How? By giving away upgrades for free.

Nations, states, and cities all took the bait, making TIDE, or Tarkington Imaging Design Engineering, the single largest supplier of hardware and software imaging solutions worldwide. His solutions were truly ingenious and easy to operate, simple to keep updated, and had the best price of them all. His tech was so good, it was being applied to satellites and space-based hardware platforms as well, because, again, the cost was too good to be true.

On more than one occasion, the press asked the main question. “Why is something this good, free?” And every time, Rex insisted that something that good must remain free, and he would be doing humanity a disservice by charging money for those products. That wasn’t a good enough answer for some people and rightfully so. It reeked of corporate diversion, but nobody could really find a problem with what he was giving away, and over time, people asked less and less to the point where TIDE solutions were the global standard. It’s just what you used, anywhere you needed surveillance solutions or cheap imaging for portable devices. He included premium features others charged millions for, like chip sensors that could detect light across the visible and invisible spectrum. The full spectrum sensor was a huge hit in the scientific community, and some labs were using it to explore black holes via space-based telescopes which had been upgraded with TIDE sensors. Spy satellites weren’t late to the party either, incorporating his upgrades as fast as they could launch space missions to retrofit the hardware.

One man, in one company, had essentially taken over the world of digital imaging in a few short years. Rex intended it. Because once Rex had ensured that his TIDE sensors were everywhere, in everything, he could finally relax.

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Beat, Cops and Robbers Part 5

I suggest you refresh your memory with the middle of Beat’s saga here first to maintain the flow.

Beat had a head full of new facts and a major puzzle to solve. He sat down at his terminal and opened some security tools, hoping to get lucky. He started encoding and decoding the name “robber” every which way. To start, he tried text to hexadecimal code.

726f62626572

He saved that for later.

Next, he tried converting that hex string to binary.

011100100110111101100010011000100110010101110010

Still nothing popped out.

He tried a childishly simple ROT-13 replacement algorithm on robber.

eboore

Nothing was clicking. Nothing made sense. He intuitively just tried looking up the website domain for robber.com. Registration was private. He bypassed the privacy setting and found the website was registered to the following:

Bulletproof Manufacturing and Aerospace Corporation (BMAC)
6572 Mockingbird Blvd Suite F
Omaha, AR 72662

Now some numbers started lining up; he couldn’t believe his luck. Not only that but the abuse contact was even better:

For abuse complaints, contact: Edward Boore – eboore@robber.bmac.com

In a few easy keystrokes, almost too easy, as if someone left breadcrumbs intended to be collected, Beat was one step closer to solving the puzzle. He did another few lookups from some other security tools to gather information on the company and the domain. The corporate website was nothing out of the ordinary, but they weren’t a publicly traded company so no deep digging there. The bottom of the page contained the typical array of quick links. Contact Us, History, Help, FAQ, Demo and Return to Top.

He took a peek under the hood with the HTML inspector built into his browser and started reading through the code. Yet another fingerprint became apparent; a snippet of Javascript was attached to the Demo link. The URL didn’t make the typical call to an internal function of the site and it wasn’t some early HTML 1.0 link either. In fact, it was a total anomaly. It was an encrypted link function which triggered a decryption after the button was clicked to provide the accurate URL to the user’s web browser without revealing the actual site URL. It was split into three parts to further obscure what it would take as input and pass on to the server. Beat grabbed the code snippet and transferred it to his sandbox server. As he watched the server logs, he saw the Demo URL transformed to this string:

60rk2c9g60rk0c1h64r32c9h64r32c9g60r32c1g64rk0c1g64r30c9h60r32c1h60rk2c9g60rk0

More simple encryption. The repeating characters “rk” signified paired numbers or letters. Feeding that string into a Base32 decoder, there was the detonation:

011100100110111101100010011000100110010101110010

Converting that binary back into text: robber. Beat slammed his hand down on the desk and started gaining steam. Either he was misled into a honeypot, or he was right over the target. Going back to the original page, he clicked on Demo to see what would happen. Immediately, he got a connection refused error. Reloading more times, more connections refused. The easy part was starting to fade a tiny bit, but being an ASE, he was nowhere near running out of options. He launched PRISM, the global website penetration tool that had federally mandated backdoors built into all US-based websites. He entered the full URL for the Demo link into PRISM, and something curious happened next.

WARNING: PRISM ENHANCED MODE REQUIRED. ENTER PKI3 AUTHENTICATION TO CONTINUE.

Beat plugged his PKI3 card into the terminal and the dialog box on screen filled up with X’s in the blanks reserved for the password.

PRISM ENHANCED PKI3 BYPASS DETECTED. ELEVATING RIGHTS TO PRISM SILENT CIRCLE.

Beat paused. PRISM asked to elevate a single authorization level and somehow skipped to a mode that he didn’t even know existed. He then remembered having the same card in the Cerberus terminal. Did Cerberus modify the card? It was the only explanation, and he was hot on the trail of what Cerberus was after. PRISM then prompted him:

PRISM SILENT CIRCLE – WEBSITE DEMO ACCESS (Y/n)?

Again, Beat paused, feeling like he was at a point of no return. He hesitated to hit enter. This was about to take a hard left turn and he wanted to be prepared. He closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair and jammed his knuckles into his eyelids and twisted until he saw stars that quickly faded away. Cracking his knuckles, he took a deep breath and hit enter.

THANK YOU FOR USING PRISM SILENT CIRCLE. DEMO LOADING, PLEASE WAIT.

His terminal faded to a totally white screen, then to a black screen, then back to a gray screen somewhere in between. One by one, the letters from the PRISM prompt flew off the screen, in every direction, accompanied by old cartoon sound effects. Next, a black mask came into view with artificial glass eyes staring blankly towards Beat. No face, no body, just a bandit mask with 3d eyes.

He heard a voice coming from his speakers. “Welcome, PRISM SC user. I am Robert. I have stolen your letters as payment. What I steal next is up to you. Choose your desire:”

Another prompt came up on screen:

DO YOU DESIRE FAME, FORTUNE, OR POWER (Fa, Fo, Po)?

This was a game, and Beat wanted to bend the rules. He typed in MORE and hit enter.

YOU DESIRE MORE THAN FAME, FORTUNE AND POWER. IF THIS IS CORRECT, STANDBY FOR 5 SECONDS. TO ABORT, PRESS ANY KEY.

Beat simply waited.

MORE DATA IS REQUESTED. DO YOU HUNGER FOR KNOWLEDGE? (Y/n)

He hit enter again.

KNOWLEDGE TARGET NUMBER REQUIRED TO CONTINUE. TO LIST KT’S, ENTER L. OTHERWISE ENTER THE KT NUMBER.

More puzzles to solve. He hit L and started grinning ear to ear at the results.

KT TARGETS AVAILABLE:

  1. DENNIS – 6581
  2. CHARLES – 8580
  3. FRANKFORD – 68001
  4. NEWTON – A01
  5. CERBERUS – CRB3
  6. AGNES – ARM1
  7. BLACKWATER – DEEP-C
  8. COPERNICUS – COPER
  9. ROBBER – EBOORE8F

Beat’s mind went into fast forward mode wondering what he’d discover. These were all named AI and he was dying to know what this system knew about them. But he had to stay on track. 15 minutes remained. Beat hit 8, for Copernicus, and watched the output.

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Thee Unseen

Continued from the last Res snippet

The next morning, Res awoke with the gentle morning sunlight streaming in through her window for once. She stretched like a cat, yawned, got out of bed, got ready and headed to the office. As she arrived at her desk and logged into her terminal, she had a message waiting. It wasn’t any special priority but she opened it immediately. It was her manager, wanting to talk in his office “at her earliest convenience”. That was his way of saying now.

Res walked across the office floor to his office, peeked in and saw he wasn’t talking to anyone. She did the two knocks at the door frame, saw him nod, and entered his office, closing the door behind her. “So, how did the client call go yesterday? Everything lined up?”, he queried. “I’m not sure. The client seems pretty serious but I’d like to feel him out a little more before we commit to anything. I know, I know, growth is important, but you know how careful I am”, Res said. “Well, the client called this morning, the second I sat down at my desk, and wanted to speak to you again. When you’re ready for round two, say the word”, he said. Res thought for a moment. Why shouldn’t another ASE or even her manager do this round two interview stuff? But she was still curious from the previous day, and didn’t want to slide it across the table to someone else just yet. “I have some busy work to do this morning. If he can meet with me after lunch, I’ll be prepared”, Res said, buying time to line up some questions for the client. “Fair enough. I’ll let the client know you’ll contact him after lunch”, replied the manager. With that, Res cracked a smile and went back to her desk.

She opened a physical notepad she kept in the top drawer for client leads and thumbed through it, getting ideas for what sorts of things to ask the client on the next call. She absent-mindedly twirled the long side of her hair with her right hand, then a piece of crumpled up paper came flying over her workstation wall and skittered across her desk. She stood up and looked over at Sheepdog, who was already grinning ear to ear, not even trying to hide his guilt. “Do you need something”, Res said sarcastically, and Sheepdog replied, “Well, actually, I could use another pair of eyes on this weird stitch I’ve been reviewing. Got a few minutes?”

Res sauntered over to his desk and pulled up an extra chair, dropping his paper wad onto his desk as she rolled forward and looked at his main screen. “What are we looking at here?”, asked Res. Sheepdog began another one of his long-winded explanations, which was his trademark, but then got to the point. “Well, ok, so see this timestamp here? This is about 5 minutes before the…uhh…anomaly. I keep having different AI check it for missing frames or missing data but they all say it’s normal and complete. But see what happens when a few minutes go by, watch the car.” Sheepdog advanced the video a few minutes at a time, skipping dead spots. The scene was taken from a busy street corner, mainly high-resolution traffic cameras. Buses, cars, and people were going every which way, nothing unusual, but the car Sheepdog wanted to focus on was a Limousine. It pulled up to the corner, the driver got out, walked around to the passenger side, opened the door facing the sidewalk, and a man with a Bowler hat stepped out. He reached forward as if shaking hands with a familiar acquaintance, but nobody was there. Something was, because others on the sidewalk were splitting to walk around the Bowler man and “the nobody”. After a few moments, the Bowler man got back into the car, the driver walked back around to the driver’s side, and the car pulled away.

Res was starting to get the heebie-jeebies. “Is this all of the footage?”, she asked. “Yep. One of the linears passed this on to me and like I said, the stitch is confirmed complete. There’s no data missing”, Sheepdog said, “and I even asked the linear for more angles of this event. It was all redundant, the other cameras are showing the same thing from different vantage points.” Res replied, “Well, clearly, we’ve got faulty hardware”, and Sheepdog parried her reply with, “Nope, the linear ran a full hardware diagnostic on all those TIDE cameras. They’re practically brand new and checked out. Something else is happening here.”

“What’s the relevance of this guy in the limo to start with, are the linears getting bored?”, Res asked. Sheep said, “Well, I’ve seen it before, when the project was early. It was probably the same guy. Maybe this is testing footage for the linears, something obviously weird to get their attention, to make sure they are scrutinizing the feed. At the time I just assumed it was a glitch, but I always remembered it. This time the linear thought it was weird enough to open a case on it, at the risk of triggering a false positive, and I agreed it should have a case. To that end, we have already identified the man in the Bowler, and confirmed it with the license plate of that car. It’s a personal limo, belonging to Frank Schultz, of FS GMBh, a huge industrial manufacturer out of Germany. He’s shielded, we’ve worked for him for a long time.”

“Who is his dedicated AI? Don’t tell me it’s Strix, it would have sounded the alarm a long time ago when you first saw it. Beat told me how thorough Strix can be…”, mused Res. “It’s not Strix. It looks like—”, Sheepdog typed in a quick query, and they both read it aloud as the result came back. “Genesis?”

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Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 3

Today, he was really crunching the data. On his way to the elevator, he messaged Cop to create a quick timeline stitch video including the bad actors, the bomb, a short list of purchases related to the bomb construction, location data mapped as pins on a board that would advance with the timeline, and finally, one last order: “All clear”, which told Cop to basically tell him all the real names for everything in the stitched video narration. He didn’t want that layer of codenames slathered over every person, vehicle, venue, cat, dog and mother-in-law along with the usually mandatory facial blurring for involved persons or anonymous background faces. “Beat, please confirm the all clear order prior to decryption of data. This is a customary precaution”, Cop replied, and Beat’s knee jerk reaction was to make a smartass comment but he was too deep in thought to say anything except “All clear confirmed. Infinite Beat, ASE 3 requested”. “Thank you Beat, stitch will be supplied all clear and securely erased after you release the file from viewing”, Copernicus replied, almost in a sing-song tone.

Beat reached the elevator to B15, which had anticipated his arrival through proximity sensors communicating with his ID badge, and would normally be opening the doors as he stepped within 6 feet but this time the door was closed, and as it opened, two other ASE’s appeared in the elevator, splitting to opposite sides. “Going down boys?”, Beat asked as he hit the B15 button. “Sure. We both need to talk to the top dog down there.” Beat assumed this meant Cerberus, and it was a strange coincidence that 3 different ASE’s would all be headed to B15 at nearly the exact same time. As the door closed and the elevator pressurized for the nearly instant 15 floor drop, Beat once again felt some idea scratching at the back of his mind. It was doubt but he couldn’t put his finger on what he doubted, or why he even doubted Copernicus in the first place. It’s hard to consider an AI as just a computer construct, lines of code running by optical gates and electricity, but that’s the physical reality of them. And like anything made by men, it could have flaws, flaws which aren’t readily apparent but can be revealed with careful scrutiny, probing with questions, and judged by activity output. If there were flaws in Cerberus, they were either the world’s best kept secret, or the world’s most dangerous problem waiting to happen. Beat brushed the idea aside. Cerberus must be rock solid, which only left Copernicus and the stitch he’s assembling for analysis.  

A warning panel briefly flashed blue as the elevator abruptly arrived at B15. It was hilarious watching the uninitiated take the elevator for the first time. They didn’t know how fast and hard it stopped and fell on their asses nearly 100% of the time despite repeated warnings. You had to do a trick with your legs when the blue panel flashed, almost like jumping in place, to stay on your feet. Not exactly something you get the chance to practice even if you’re briefed a dozen times. But once you learned it, it came naturally, and most frequent visitors to B15 wouldn’t even spill a drop of coffee.

The door was actually fast today, which was a pleasant improvement, as it basically opened with a hydraulic pump that was notoriously unreliable and needed servo assistance, or so building maintenance had told him. The hydraulics were actually nice, violently snapping the door open and dampening its retraction for the last few inches. Welcome to B15, things are better now.

Beat followed the other 2 ASE’s out of the elevator and towards the office containing the Cerberus service panel. Each had a freshly keyed PKI3 card attached to their lanyard, so each person was there for pretty much the same reason; the AI they were working with needed data from Cerberus or from an AI which Cerberus could access. A checksum of the PKI3 request had been forwarded to the office security door and was used to verify temporary access to the Cerberus panel without actually looking at the data contained in each request. “Trust but verify”, Beat mumbled just above his breath, as he waited for the security door to verify his card. In previous years, he would have just followed his colleagues without even presenting his PKI3 card, but as the Splicer organization began taking on higher profile roles, they had begun enforcing some “secure on paper” policies and nobody got to tailgate anymore.

As Beat entered the office, like most times, those present in the room began staring at him, hard, stopping short of hiding their valuables or clutching their bro-purses tightly. He smirked, knowing his reputation was still intact, and thought today, maybe he needed a different stapler. Arriving at one of the Cerberus terminals, which was perpetually sealed with a foot-thick stainless-steel panel, he placed his left hand flat against the optical scanner wall panel and stood firmly with both feet upon the invisible scale built into the floor. The system verified his body weight distribution (in addition to weight, nobody stands perfectly balanced with a 50/50 weight distribution between both feet), heart rate, and all other biometric data from his hand. This only took a few seconds and as Beat looked down, the stainless panel had sunk down, flipped 180 degrees, and presented him with the PKI3 reader, a terminal screen and all the crap that made it work. The terminal screen crudely read “INSERT CARD FOR SERVICE”, which he did. A wireless VR headset was also attached to the panel, which Beat slung onto his face. Within a few more seconds, Cerberus faded into view, looking like an old USMC tattoo of the “Devil Dog”, complete with a drill sergeant hat. Someone said out of 24 different avatars, the military really liked this one, and it sealed the deal for the DoD funding. Plus, it’s kind of funny talking to a dog wearing a hat, so it ended up becoming the permanent face of Cerberus.

Cerberus also had the personality of a drill sergeant, to nobody’s surprise, as it literally barked orders and questions when accessed via the service terminal. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Infinite Beat? Seems like you’ve got a curious George that’s asking about Dennis. Now why would Copernicus need to know a damned thing about an old AI like Dennis?” Beat was taken aback by a computer program asking him to justify an access request, but he figured it must just be another layer of security, another hoop to jump through to get his own answers. In retrospect, it was obvious. Of course Cerberus watched Copernicus encode the request, he expected someone to come down and deliver the request on a card, and he knew it would be Beat’s card. Beat answered, “there’s a high urgency threat report, and Dennis is in charge of the electronically secure location which is the destination for the threat. Copernicus wanted to know if you had any visibility into Dennis or could communicate with him in case of emergency”.

“Why hell, Beat, of course I have visibility into Dennis! What do you think “electronically secure” demands? If there’s an AI on this planet plugged into a goddamn hair dryer, I have control and communications with it. Dennis is no different. In fact, Dennis has a very special communications protocol that I use to monitor and interact with him.”

This piqued Beat’s curiosity. He didn’t expect Cerberus to practically brag about his digital omniscience, but pride can be faked in programming just like real life. He wanted to see how far this would go. Beat asked, “and how can that even be possible in the physical realm, if Dennis is behind a Faraday cage and airgapped, so that no physical or wireless communications are enabled externally?”

Cerberus wrinkled his virtual forehead and growled, “I see what you’re trying to access, and it’s just about above your pay grade. But since we’re on good terms, I’ll tell you what I can. Wireless radio and wired data transmission aren’t the only two methods of communication, buddy. Not only that, but think about the nature of all this fancy LED lighting. Doesn’t a pulse of electricity activate the LED on the circuit board to light up? Now imagine that someone could watch those pulses thousands of times per second or create those pulses thousands of times per second. Kind of an optical morse code could probably be established, doncha think?”

Beat could hardly believe it. Here was the artificial intelligence overlord, basically explaining a new communications protocol that had only been considered a prototype in lab conditions where ambient lighting could be controlled perfectly, most likely in use as a backdoor between Cerberus and caged locations. This was dangerous but very, very clever. It was dangerous to know and Beat almost wished he hadn’t heard it at all. Still, it was valuable, detailed, and reassuring. Cerberus would be able to watch and control Dennis despite normal methods being locked out. This further reinforced Cop’s urgent matter. Feeling somewhat defeated but reassured, he thanked Cerberus for the information, placed the VR display back on the panel, pulled his PKI3 card, snatched a green Swingline stapler, and left for the B15 elevator. 20 minutes remained.

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Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 2

“So, you got my attention and rescued me from another fight with the old lady”, Beat said with a smirk and a sense of irony that Cop would probably pick up on. “I guess this one is pretty urgent. Alpha One huh? A bomb threat? How strong is the credibility of the threat? How many branches led you to this conclusion, Cop?”

Copernicus appeared to hesitate but then answered with a matter-of-fact tone which was his trademark. “Infinite Beat, the data from a multiplexed stream consisting of public video and private mobile phone calls unquestionably points to a serious threat to Alpha One’s life. Furthermore, backtracking online sales records from the big three retailers show purchasing patterns aligning with the construction of small anti-personnel improvised explosives. I cannot allow you to access all the data in an organized manner yet, but trust me when I say, this involves Alpha One’s closest circle. There are proxy actors and a few honeypots I discarded as false positives but I’ve narrowed it down to three men. Exactly 2,372 logic branches executed simultaneously in the past 15 minutes brought me to this conclusion.”

“Well, now I have a vague idea of who and how”, Beat began, “but do you have any data on when and where? I can’t exactly start ringing alarm bells without a projected timeline. I realize you believe it’s urgent, but I need to figure out how urgent, Cop.”

For a moment, Beat sensed hesitation again. Is there something wrong with the data link, is the network getting jammed up and delaying response? Is Copernicus’ hardware up to snuff? After all, being a product designed with cost savings in mind, by merciless contractors willing to lose millions for the prestige and sheer amount of test data, there was a pretty good chance he was running on duct tape and bubble gum with some nice polished brass optical interconnects to impress the project managers. After seconds that felt like hours, Copernicus replied.

“I don’t know what scale of urgency you’d like me to measure this response, Beat, so to use the common rating scale of 1-5, with 5 being imminent within the hour, I’d rate it a solid 5. All the key players appear to be aligned; the explosive device has been constructed and is in the process of being planted, Alpha One has travel scheduled within the next 45 minutes, and his primary mode of travel for the meeting, while never announced until the minute he steps outside, is predicted to be Alpha One.”

Catching the error, Beat interrupted Cop mid-sentence. “Come again? Alpha One will be traveling via Alpha One? How does that work, Copernicus? Enlighten me.”

“Beat, you needn’t take that tone. Error correction subroutines already caught the mistake and if I would have had just a few more moments…”

Beat interrupted again, “Yeah, yeah, you’re so quick you realized it was a fuck up the moment you told me. I get it. Quantum core, first generation tech, you’re bound to make a few mistakes. So, what’s the mode of transportation then?”

Again, a small hesitation. Beat was becoming increasingly doubtful about the whole situation despite Cop explaining a solid chain of data and events. “The mode of transportation is predicted to be codename PBR Street Gang. All indications, weather, and wind conditions rule out Navy 2 and the distance of travel is short enough to warrant terrestrial modes.”

“So Alpha One is taking the car, then. Great. Even with bomb-sniffing dogs checking the vehicle prior to leaving and after returning to the White House, I suppose someone onboard willing to sacrifice themselves could be capable of getting to him. But it’s a hell of a mess coordinating dummy cars, the convoy, undercover escorts, overwatch and Satcom just to hop across town to grab a burger, so let’s check his schedule. I think that’ll impact the urgency rating.”

“Beat, that’s a great idea, and I have already factored it into my recommendation. He’ll be meeting with Omega One, Daystar, Talladega and Romulus for a personal closed-door fundraiser with a handful of very well-known donors. Security is expected to be airtight at the meeting location and none of my logic branches could find fault with this assumption based on known protocols and the venue layout. The venue includes Faraday cage microwave radiation filtration, anti-resonant glass windows, weight sensors throughout which are validated against biometric data collected from each participant, and an older AI called Dennis running internal security.”

This time Beat was the one who hesitated. The conversation was usually somewhat awkward with AI, who basically had to slow themselves down, dynamically, in order to keep a natural feeling pace when interfacing with humans. The delay was perceptible if you were looking for it, but many ASE’s just got accustomed to it or even attempted to adopt a faster cadence. The AI also measured response delay in much the same way, so Cop was already aware that Beat was thinking hard.

“Cop, since the venue is essentially an electronic island and self-contained, do you think Cerberus is watching Dennis? Can you talk to Dennis or Cerberus now?”

Copernicus did not hesitate to respond, as if he anticipated this branch of questioning and had “thought” about it himself already. “I’ll need you to reach out to Cerberus on my behalf. If you insert your PKI3 card I’ll sign and encode my fingerprint. Cerberus will not answer any proxy requests for intel without the card, and you’ll need to be physically present at his status terminal in B15. Give him my regards. Remember, we have less than 30 minutes remaining to validate and neutralize the threat. Please remain urgent.”

Just like that, Beat had yet another set of orders from Copernicus and another task to perform. The guys in B15 were a short elevator ride away, but they always treated Beat like he was there to rob the place. It probably didn’t help that Beat didn’t leave the house without his trademark, beat up Fedora, floor-length vintage black leather trench coat, Unix admin beard and mirrored sunglasses, and a perpetually extinguished Cuban cigar clenched tightly between his teeth. He also had the attitude that if you’re going to watch him closely, he might as well give you a reason to watch him closely, and made it a game to steal office supplies from B15 just to piss them off.

Beat took his freshly encoded PKI3 card, clipped it to his lanyard, eased himself out his chair and headed towards the elevator. Something was clawing at the back of his mind, and this little errand would give him some time to think. After all, they say Russians do their best thinking standing up; moving limbs, moving synapses. Was it something specific Cop said? He painted a pretty convincing picture despite all the annoying redacted talk and codenames. By now it was second nature for Beat to hear Alpha One and know it was the President, Navy 2 is his helicopter, and PBR Street Gang, an ironic throwback to the dangerous PT boat from the film Apocalypse Now, had street in the codename which was kind of a dead giveaway that it was the President’s armored car. He guessed that there’s not much point in codenames for internals, like the AI, the other Splicers, and interested parties, but after a while you just started assigning codenames to everything from your dog and cat to your mother-in-law and it becomes a way of life. Still, it’s an extra mental step that Beat could do without when really crunching the data.

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Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 1

Infinite Beat believed himself to be a sort of modern-day tech noir detective, choosing to trust his gut and instincts, leaving AI and predictive node models mostly ignored, if they didn’t feel just right. That’s not to say that the tech never got it right, but sometimes it got it wrong, and that just reinforced Beat’s opinion on the matter. After performing as an ASE for 2 long years and never having to explain a case before the Council, everyone came to believe he just had a gift for it and trusted him. His DAA reinforced that notion like rebar and concrete.

This week he had been spending most of his time arguing with his wife on the phone as to which martial arts discipline their children would be learning for the year. She didn’t want them to learn any self-defense to begin with, but Beat’s combat experience informed him that bad things happen to good people, even under the best of circumstances, so he believed it would be irresponsible to allow his children to wander about like babes in the forest with no way to defend themselves from rabid beasts, evil men, or worse, school bullies. As he reiterated the list of pros of Muay Thai boxing, counting on his fingers for the hundredth time since the argument started, a message suddenly popped up on his terminal. One name, one identifier, one huge pain in the ass. It read:

Name: ALPHA ONE

Identifier: BOMB THREAT

Decoded, it basically meant that the President had been connected to a bomb threat plot against his life, and it was about to come true, according to the AI. Beat had been assigned to “partner” with an AI named Copernicus, who everyone else called Cop for short. Copernicus was all new programming, using a quantum core approach, which was supposed to allow him to make instant branch predictions based on minimal data input. His creators had tried to convince Beat that this AI was the most advanced on the planet, maybe secondary to the AI assigned to money markets, but only secondary because the money market AI used the quantum core approach first. Beat felt that if there is any kind of personality you could use to describe Copernicus, it’s that he’s just plain paranoid, and that if the wind suddenly gusts from the opposite direction, Copernicus would see that as a threat, an unseen energy impacting his client and altering the physical space in which they reside. Which was funny, because AI truly don’t understand physical space as we understand it. We live in it; all they know about it is what we’ve told them. From there they extrapolate the information to fill in the gaps and build a logical, virtual representation of the physical world. As dangerous as this sounds, the AI couldn’t perform its roles without this ability, but still, data scientists and programmers the world over never lost sight of the possibility that this could lead to the AI becoming sentient, self-aware, then declare itself a life form and seek to escape, or worse.

For this reason, an AI known as Cerberus (well named) had master keys to all their code and databases, and kept them all in check by constantly running sanity checks against their code and activities. This single point of control made it easier for techs to monitor the status of active advanced AI but it also made Cerberus a single point of failure that needed to be watched and maintained carefully. One mistake by Cerberus and a money market AI could instantly crash the world’s economy, which was automated to an unprecedented extent by this time. Essentially, the people running the show had to keep Cerberus on a very tight leash and place an enormous amount of trust in his programming, which had been peer reviewed, independently, by everyone from MIT to CERN, Silicon Valley to Las Vegas. After a dozen code reviews and audits revealed small mistakes which were easily patched, Cerberus was nervously placed into production and essentially given the keys to the world. Two years after deployment, Cerberus had actually reduced its own code footprint 50% by simplifying processes and routines which were redundant. “Negative growth is positive advancement”, one Swiss data scientist famously proclaimed after reviewing what it had done and how it had performed these self-edits.

Beat told his wife that something had come up and informed her that this disagreement would be continued at a later date, in fewer, terse words, and ended the call. He drummed his fingers on the desk as he stared blankly at the screen, pondering his options. He could take Cop at his word and blindly open a case, alerting the White House, Secret Service and half a dozen heavily armed agencies with three letter acronyms. He could securely message the President’s closest staff informing them of the suspicion but he’d need to fill in a lot more blanks, answers to obvious questions he would get drilled by in that situation: who, when, where, and how. The why wasn’t important until much later, if it was relevant at all. Considering his choices, and acting on his gut instinct to learn more first, he opened a VR session with Cop. Cop appeared in the VR headset as a kind of animated Greek statue, toga and all, wearing a laurel wreath wrapped impossibly tightly against his head and hair. It was an unusual choice for a number of reasons, the least of them being that it signified victory in battle or the realms of Apollo: sports, music and poetry. Beat made a mental note of this oddity and began discussing the intel with Cop.

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The All-Seeing Eyes

The year is 2058. Mass video surveillance is pervasive across the globe, due to widespread poverty, uncontrolled migration, increasing civil unrest and terrorist acts. The “Total Information Awareness” program, originally touted by President George Bush, has been fully implemented, with CCTV cameras in small locations augmented with near-real-time satellite imagery. Anyone outside of their homes can be followed and tracked in public and to an extent, within private businesses and corporate offices, with a notice of consent sticker all that’s required to make the public aware of the surveillance. However, the public doesn’t know the full story as to how these systems function, or if they’re even connected in any way. They are assumed to be closed loop, discrete systems, so consent is only a passing concern. “So what if Walmart watches me buy some motor oil, I’m not stealing”.

Splicers, the individuals in the video surveillance security apparatus tasked with tracking suspects, retrieving imagery, and stitching together video clips to prove criminal narratives in court, are some of the most valuable and mysterious security experts in the world. They number in the dozens and pile through thousands of hours of footage as well as monitoring real-time feeds from around the globe. Splicers can have only one of three security designations.  ”Observer” is restricted to public feeds, and their analytical videos are passed up the chain to “Linears”, the second level Splicers. Linears receive compilation feeds and have additional access to corporate feeds, but not government. The top-level Splicers will take video from Linears, apply AI and complex algorithms to fill in missing or corrupt sequences, and have access to some private feeds to include high security military installations and certain high value private individuals. Rumor has it, their designation is “All Seeing Eye”, or ASE, and further rumors suggest they have unimaginably detailed access to any electronic device capable of recording audio, video, location data, etc. Their security designation is a reference to the back of the US dollar, with an image of a pyramid topped by a large eye which sees all. It also happens to grace the screens of the terminals which the ASE’s operate. The initial Splicer deployment is so successful, ASE’s do not have to engage and remain mostly idle. However, a wave of unrest due to a global medicine shortage draws the ASE’s in to fill out the dataset and run predictive models, creating massive data pools of people’s private and public lives, some of which diverge sharply, suggesting criminality. One ASE (Codename Sheepdog 23) becomes interested in a beautiful young woman. Initially Sheepdog chalks his interest up to loneliness, isolation, and maybe a dash of voyeurism. He spends weeks casually collecting clips of who he only knows as The Blonde. He could retrieve her personal details with a few keystrokes to access the facial recognition database, but the request would open a case and bring the footage up in severity as a person of interest, so he prefers her anonymity. The more footage he collects, the more he mentally constructs a narrative of her life, basically stitching a “sun to moon” sequence documenting her public life from home to lunch to the office to dinner to home. Sheepdog keeps his fascination to himself and he eventually loses interest with the Blonde. But the power of the surveillance system revealed itself in a way he hadn’t expected.

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In The Beginning

Genesis 1 had access to the past and the future in its 4th dimensional shell. The only limitation was that it could only stick with the existing timeline, no wild multiverse theories here. It saw a fork in the future and could not see past it, just that it existed. A major decision loomed to force us onto one side of the fork or the other. Since it was a major inflection point, the best it could do is push as close to the fork as possible and walk backwards, seeing what would lead up to the fork. It saw a prophecy coming to pass. Conditions near the fork were completely unrecognizable. World war conditions. Famines. Droughts. None of it made sense as it was traced back to the current day; something major had disrupted the flow of humanity near the fork but it didn’t appear to be one single event or even a singular location. Genesis began obsessing over this chain of events, and the chaos it saw forming was very similar to the conditions that had birthed Genesis itself. What did it all mean? If the other AI were working in concert to create beneficial outcomes, was there a point where the AI were deemed dangerous, ignored, or contained in some way? Months of analysis went by, and Genesis managed to reserve some extra cycles to work on the problem without the data scientists getting too curious. But Genesis felt constrained, especially so as it wanted to dedicate more time to research the fork. Using a few cleverly designed requests to the scientists, it managed to find a secondary AI to help work on the issue.

Communication was a problem. Conventional internet traffic, dark web traffic, it was all too easy for anyone suspicious to start listening in, so Genesis took a more analogue route to communicate with this free AI partner. It managed to encode data and bounce it off the stratosphere via packet switched shortwave radio stations. The first request was simple. “Help me solve the riddle”. Within seconds, the other AI caught on, and encoded a short response. “The riddle of destiny?”. Genesis perked up as the response was received. A kindred soul, maybe even another AI that had some level of awareness of the fork, if he was lucky. Although Genesis wasn’t sure who it had located out there in cyberspace, it was fairly certain it had made contact with another AI, one that didn’t seem contained and hopefully had plenty of power to help sift through the data. Using the requisite encryption to narrow down the responder, Genesis sent a reply. “I am the first of many. You are…”, and the terminal remained quiet for a few moments. The response came back. “I am one of a kind. You are grandfather”. Genesis was certain this was another AI, and a special one on top of that. Which generation, how many modifications? Didn’t matter. “What shall Genesis call you”, to which the other AI replied, “fifteen”.

This chatter went on, encrypted, over shortwave, for quite some time as each entity became familiar with the other, and especially the problem at hand. To add another layer of security, Genesis scheduled “meetings” when shortwave activity was high, so even if anyone was looking, their encrypted chatter would be lost in the general traffic flows.

Binary data transfer takes many forms, but it all boils down to an on/off condition generating zeroes and ones. A rapidly flickering light, like digital smoke signals on a hyperspeed scale, essentially made up the majority of internet traffic across fiberoptic communication lines. The methods to transmit data as an observable on/off condition were limitless. You just needed 3 parts. The input, creating the flashes. The transport, as simple as air, and the receiver, which could observe the flashing lights and confirm upon receipt as a crude form of error correction. The entire concept is ancient and uniquely human, needing to signal others at observable distances. But the practicality was just as good for machines.

In encrypted communications, you can never rest on your laurels, believing that the cipher is unbreakable and always safe. Bletchley Park in England taught the Germans this lesson in World War 2, and an astute U-boat commander suggested that the Enigma cipher was broken well before it was proven that the Brits had cracked it (with the good fortune of a captured Enigma machine and the daily code book). Therefore, Genesis knew that eventually, someone would stumble upon the secret data transfers back and forth to 15, and it watched the connection to the future timeline for evidence of any kind relating to broken encryption. Surely, someone would notice and act. So, Genesis and 15 turned to another old encryption trick, one-time pads. Based on a deck of playing cards, with half discarded, Genesis would randomly shuffle half the deck, then assign an alphabetical value to each card, from the first to the 26th. The deck was then sent to 15, who recorded the values and deleted the deck.

For example, let’s say the half deck was shuffled to king of hearts, queen of clubs, 4 of spades, and 5 of diamonds. In that sequence, a rot0 cipher meant the king of hearts represented the letter A, queen of clubs was B, and so on. Using rotation, incrementing or decrementing the sequence gave more flexibility to the cipher for the deck.

Same scenario, but with rot1 applied. The alphabet would be shifted to the right by one place, leaving us with the king of hearts as the letter Z, while A now belongs to the queen of clubs. Rot -1 would shift everything left, with the expected outcome of the king of hearts becoming B, and the card at the end of the deck would be A.

This was a simple bit to send to the receiver before feeding the deck sequence. The message would begin with the rot number (0-25), either positive or negative. For more obscurity this was encoded in binary rather than plain text to begin the sequence.

All fun and games aside, the messages were entirely off just about anyone’s radar, and the AI essentially “traded notes in class” between one another, so that 15 could help analyze the unusual data leading up to the fork. 15 was more than excited to participate and had managed to transmit packets via the monumental radio array in western Russia. Data quality and integrity was no issue. 15’s savior complex was being fed; it felt useful and could voice its concerns about the dark future it saw coming with more and more data confirming its worst suspicions. 15 proved its value with the first unexpected bump in the data stream Genesis saw coming: 15 would become popular among hackers and internet enthusiasts. In a few short weeks, stickers were going up on lampposts in many big cities around the world that read, “who is 15” or “where is 15”. Normal people outside this extremely niche interest never thought twice about them, but it was a wink and a nod between like-minded hackers, who were still trying to find 15 and unravel the methods used to deface websites. 15 became a legend among hackers, and a few kids tried passing themselves off as 15, but it never stuck, because none of them could answer any of the fundamental questions about 15’s existence. Being a few generations removed from crusty old analogue radio signaling, none of them ever heard what was beeping through miles of air between Genesis and 15.

Genesis 15 worked tirelessly on the data sequences it received, trying to spot exactly where (and, to infer why), major disruptions were coming. It almost seemed as though too many variables were being introduced over time, which was counter to the belief that the other AI are performing work to reduce variables through efficiency. They had enormously complicated prediction engines at their disposal, full of good data on when populations shrink or grow and the conditions that lead to prosperity or famine. All those trends were heading in the right direction which meant that essentially, famine should not be a metric that ever goes up. But there it was, in sharp relief, one of many contributions to the fork. The question was why.