by Vernor Vinge
Vaz glanced at the results of Günberk’s latest investigation. “But you have discovered critical weaknesses in Rabbit. However much he’s tried to disguise it, you’ve traced all his certificate authority to a single apex.” Having a single CA apex was not unusual; that Günberk had managed to discover Rabbit’s apex was a triumph. For Alfred—given his own, ah, sensitive relationship with Rabbit—it was miraculously good news.
Günberk nodded. “Credit Suisse. So what?”
“So if Rabbit turns out to be a nightmare, you could pull the plug on Credit Suisse and put him out of business.”
“Pull the plug on Credit Suisse CA? Do you have any idea what that would do to the European economy? I’m proud of my people, that they ferreted this secret out—but it’s not something we can effectively use.”
“We should have dropped Rabbit after that first meeting in Barcelona,” said Keiko. “He is too clever.”
Vaz raised a hand, “Perhaps, but how could we know?”
“Ja? Forgive me, Alfred, but we wonder if you know more about Mr. Rabbit than we.”
Damn! “Not at all. Honestly.” Alfred leaned back in his chair and took in the nervous postures of his colleagues. “You’ve been talking behind my back, haven’t you?” He gave them a gentle smile. “Do you think Rabbit is really American Intelligence? Chinese?” They had spent a lot of time investigating those possibilities. But now Keiko shook her head. “Then what is your theory, my friends?”
“Well,” said Günberk, sounding a little embarrassed. “Maybe Mr. Rabbit is not even human. Maybe it’s an Artificial Intelligence.”
Vaz laughed. He glanced at Keiko Mitsuri. “And you?”
“I think AI is a possibility we should consider. Rabbit’s talents are so broad, his work is so effective—and his personality is so juvenile. That last was one of the features the U.S. DARPA thought would be characteristic.” She saw the incredulity on Vaz’s face. “Not every threat is a cult or conspiracy.”
“Of course. But AI monsters? That’s a bogeyman out of the twentieth century. Who in the intelligence communities takes that seriously? Ah! That’s Pascal Heriot’s hobbyhorse, isn’t it?” Alfred’s tone became low and serious. “Have you been talking to Pascal about this project?”
“Of course not. But AI is a threat that’s been totally overlooked in recent years.”
“Correct, because nothing ever came of it. Before the Sino-American war, we know DARPA spent billions on the Little Helper Project. It was almost as much a fiasco as their Space Access Denial initiative.”
“Space Denial worked.”
Vaz laughed. “It worked against everybody, Keiko, the Americans most of all. But you’re right, SAD is not a proper comparison. My point is that some of the smartest people in the world tried to create AI and failed.”
“The researchers failed, but surely runnable code survived. The Internet is not the cramped toy it once was. Maybe pieces of DARPA’s Little Helper are out there, growing into what it could never be in the low-tech past.”
“That is science fiction! There was even a movie—”
“More than one, actually,” said Günberk. “Alfred, I don’t agree with Keiko that programs from years ago could self-organize just because decent resources are available now. But here at the IB, we have been tracking the possibilities. I think Pascal Heriot has a point. Just because most people have dismissed the possibility doesn’t mean that it is not real. We are certainly past the crossover point when it comes to computer hardware. Pascal thinks that when it finally happens, it will arise without institutional precursors. It will be like many research developments, but rather more catastrophic.” Just another way humankind might fail to survive the century.
“Whatever the explanation,” said Keiko, “Rabbit is simply too competent, too anonymous…I’m sorry, Alfred, we think the operation should be shut down. Let’s approach our American friends on this.”
“But equipment is in place. Our people are in place.”
She shrugged. “With Rabbit managing things? That could leave Rabbit with whatever we discover in San Diego. Even if we agreed with you, our bosses would never go along.”
She was serious. Alfred glanced at Braun. He was, too. This was bad. “Keiko, Günberk, please. Just balance the risks.”
“We are,” said Keiko. “Rabbit loose within this grandiose scheme is a cosmic-sized unsafety!” She could be quite full of modern Japanese bluntness.
Vaz said, “But we could arrange things so Rabbit receives operational information just-in-time as the action evolves.”
Fortunately, Günberk shot that down immediately: “Ach, no. Such remote micromanagement, it’s a guarantee of disaster.”
Vaz hesitated a long moment, tried to look as though he were thinking hard, making some hard decision. “Maybe, maybe there’s a way we can have everything—the, uh, ‘grandiose scheme’ and minimal risk from Rabbit. Suppose we don’t supply Rabbit with the final details in advance. Suppose we put one of our own people on the ground in Southern California the night of the break-in?”
Mitsuri and Braun stared for a second. “But what about deniability then?” said Keiko. “If we have our own agent breaking in—”
“Think, Keiko. My proposal risks tipping off the Americans, which is something yours guarantees. And we can keep the risk low. We simply put our own agent nearby, in a well-planned position with essentially zero latencies. What the Americans call a Local Honcho.”
Günberk brightened. “Like Alice Gong at Ciudad General Ortiz!”
“—Yes. Exactly.” He hadn’t been thinking of Alice, but Günberk was right. It had been Alice Gong on the ice at Ortiz, almost single-handedly discovering and stopping the Free Water Front. Maybe the Front would have failed anyway. After all, no one had ever tried to scale a Saturday-night special up to three hundred megatons. But if the bomb had successfully detonated, their “statement of principle” would have poisoned the freshwater mining industry off West Antarctica. Gong remained unknown to the outside world, but she was something of a legend within the intelligence communities. She was one of the good guys.
Thank goodness, neither Braun nor Mitsuri seemed to notice Alfred’s discomfort at her name.
“Inserting a Honcho now would be difficult,” said Keiko. “Are we talking a credible tourist, or cargo-container roulette?” Truly black insertions looked like WMD smuggling; they were hair-raising operations for all concerned. “None of my agents-in-place are rated for this operation. It will take a special person, special talents, special clearance.”
“I have some good people in California,” said Günberk, “but none of them are at this level.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Vaz, his voice filled with steely determination. “I’m quite willing to go, myself.”
He had surprised them before, but this was a bombshell. Braun sat for a moment, openmouthed. “Alfred!”
“It’s that important,” Vaz said. He gave them each his most direct and sincere look.
“But you’re a desk jockey like us!”
Alfred shook his head. Today he would have to let a little bit of his background story come unglued. Hopefully, it wouldn’t all tear apart. Alfred had spent years “fitting in” as a midlevel bureaucrat at the External Intelligence Agency. If he were unmasked, then at best he’d end up like the prime minister, forced back into high-level political hackery. At worst…at worst, Günberk and Keiko might figure out what he was really up to in San Diego.
Vaz --> EIA Inner Office:
Aloud, he said, “I do have field experience. In the U.S. in fact, in the early teens.”
Braun and Mitsuri both had a long stare. They were busy browsing. BioPack 3 would show them the operations. It was all consistent with what they had known before, but revealed new depths to their Indian pal. Günberk was the first to recover. “I…see.” He was silent for a moment, reading more. “You did well. But that was some years ago,
Alfred. This will be a heavily network-technical assignment.”
Alfred nodded at the criticism. “True. I am not a young man.” Mitsuri and Braun thought he was in his early fifties. “On the other hand, my specialty here at the EIA is network issues, so I’m not really out of date.”
A surprised grin flashed across Keiko’s face. “And you do know this operation better than anyone. So by being on-site you can supply the critical pieces without giving them to Rabbit—”
“Correct.”
Günberk was still unhappy: “And yet this is an extraordinarily dangerous operation. We Great Powers compete, that is true. But when it comes to the threat of Weapons, we must stand together. This is the first time in my career that that covenant has been broken.”
Alfred nodded solemnly. “We must find out the truth, Günberk. We could be wrong about San Diego. Then we’ll thankfully and silently disengage. But whatever the source of this weapon, we must discover it. And if that turns out to be San Diego, the Americans will very likely thank us.”
Mitsuri and Braun looked at each other for a long moment. Finally they nodded, and Keiko said, “We’ll support the insertion of a Local Honcho, presumably you. I’ll put planners on fallback strategies in case you are exposed. We’ll provide network and analyst support. It’ll be up to you to manage critical data on the ground—”
“—and keep Mr. Rabbit from taking over the whole thing!” said Günberk.
ALFRED SAT IN his office for some minutes after his friends departed. That had been too close a thing.
When the stakes are highest, the threats always multiply. Plan Rabbit was the most sensitive operation that the Indian government had ever (knowingly) been a part of; getting the prime minister’s support had not been easy. Today Keiko and Günberk had almost shut him down as thoroughly as the PM could have. As for Rabbit—well, AI might be fantasy, but Rabbit was just as much a threat as Günberk and Keiko feared.
Alfred relaxed slightly, allowed himself a smile. Yes, the threats had multiplied like, well, like rabbits. But here today he had collided some of those threats and neutralized them. For weeks he had been plotting his Local Honcho role. In the end, Günberk and Keiko had provided him with the natural excuse to be present on the ground in San Diego.
18
THE MYASTHENIC SPELUNKER SOCIETY
The cabal still met on the sixth floor of the library, but that was a very different place now. Robert came up in the elevator, avoiding the Hacekeans and their Library Militant. Nevertheless, sticking to reality was difficult. Theodor Geisel still held the lobby, but the administration was franchising mind and touch space everywhere else. Scooch-a-mouti characters had infested the basement. H. P. Lovecraft’s were said to lurk in the farther underground, in what had been noncirculating storage.
And the sixth floor…was empty, stripped to the bare shelving. From the elevator entrance at the middle of the floor, Robert could see through skeletal shelving all the way to the windows. The book shredders had come and gone. In the southeast corner, the conspirators were hunkered down like twentieth-century socialists plotting empire in the midst of their obvious ruin.
“So what’s held up the Library Militant invasion?” Robert said, and waved at the stark reality of the empty stacks.
Carlos replied, “A delay in finding the newest haptics is the official explanation. In fact, it’s politics. The Scoochi partisans want this floor for their universe. The Library Militant is resisting. The administration may disappoint them both and make this floor a simulation of what libraries were like when they were real.”
“But with fake imagery of the books, right?”
“Yup,” Tommie was smiling, “what do you expect? Meantime we still have the floor to ourselves.”
“We are not defeated, gentlemen.” Winnie’s face was stern. “We’ve known for weeks now that this was inevitable. We’ve lost a major battle. But it is only the first battle in the war.” He glanced at Tommie.
Parker pointed at the LED on his computer. “The deadzone is in place. It’s time to resume our seriously criminal conspiratizing.” He was smiling, but his gaze swept across them, catching each in the eye. “Okay. I’ve done my research. I can get us into the steam tunnels. I’ve even arranged festivities that will get the lab staff out of our way. I can get us to the shredda containers, and I have the aerosol glue. We can cause the Librareome Project and Huertas in particular a whole lot of pain. Of course, it won’t stop progress on this sort of thing, but it will—”
Winnie gave a grunt. “We’ve already agreed that a permanent stop is impossible. But if we can block the jerks who use the most destructive methods—well, that will have to suffice.”
“Righto, Dean. That’s exactly what we can do. It’s all set up, just missing one critical ingredient.” His gaze slid across to Robert.
Such is the power of common sense that Robert hesitated almost a third of a second. Then he reached into his pocket and retrieved the plastic box the Stranger had provided. “Check this out, Tommie.”
Parker’s eyebrows went up. “Hey, I’m impressed. I expected a paper napkin or something.” He glanced at his laptop’s display and then picked up the box. “This looks like a biosample kit.” In fact, the box was now showing colorful labels announcing just that function. “How did you do it?”
Yes, how? Robert couldn’t think of truth or lie that would make any sense.
Tommie mistook his silence. “No, no don’t tell me. I should be able to figure it out for myself.” Tommie smiled down at the box for a moment. Then he slipped it into his pocket.
“Okay. We’re all set then. Now we’ve got to decide on a time.”
Rivera leaned forward. “Soon. There’s too much lab construction between quarters.”
“Yup. And there are other constraints. You wouldn’t believe the prep I’ve had to do. I’m netted to consultants up the yinyang. Don’t worry, Dean, none of them see more than a small part of what I’m doing. I’m getting to be a real expert at affiliance.” Tommie was having a hell of a good time. “I can make this work, guys! Hey, it will be like the good old days—well, maybe not for you, Carlos; you weren’t even born back then.” He grinned at Winnie and Robert. Robert had gone on those hikes underground often, but they’d been impressive enough, trekking through hundreds of feet of tunnel and then popping up in buildings that were dark and empty and largely unfinished. Sometimes there had been stairs in the stairwells, and sometimes not.
Winnie Blount was smiling a little now, too. “Yeah, the Myasthenic Spelunker Society.” He frowned, remembering more. “We were lucky we didn’t break our necks.” That comment was from the side of the desk where Winnie had lived most of his life, the administrator with nightmares about liability and litigation.
“Yup. It was more fun than gaming, and a lot more dangerous. Anyway, that was back before computers—at least as we understand the term now. Today things are way different, but with my research and this bioprofile from Robert, I can get us past all the watchdog automation. At least, if we get the timing right.” He typed briefly on his laptop. “Okay, here’s the latest. There are three short time slots in the next six weeks when all the security holes line up.”
“When is the first?” said Winnie.
“Real soon. A week from next Monday.” He spun his laptop around so the others could see. “We’d go in through Pilchner Hall.” He launched into an extended discussion of how he would manage the adventure. “…And here is where the tunnel forks off campus. Once we get past that, we can walk almost half a mile, out under the old General Genomics site.”
“Huertas’s labs are just north of that,” said Rivera.
“Yup. And ten-to-one odds we can get in there and do our stuff—and maybe even get out!”
Neither Rivera nor Blount seemed discomfited by this prospectus. After a moment, Winnie said, “We really can’t postpone things. I vote for a week from Monday.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Robert.
“Wŏ tóngy
ì. Yes.”
“Okay then!” Tommie spun his laptop back and made a notation. “Come wearing, but I’ll supply new clothes and all necessary electronics. I—”
Winston Blount interrupted: “There’s one other thing, Tommie.”
“Uh, oh.”
“It’s not a big thing, but it could get us the right publicity.”
“Hmm.”
“I propose that we bring along a remote presence, that Sharif fellow.”
“That’s insane!” Tommie hopped to his feet and then abruptly sat down again. “You want a remote presence? Don’t you understand? You won’t even be wearing down there.”
Winnie smiled cajolingly. “But you’ll be bringing electronics, Tommie. Couldn’t we support his presence through that?”
Parker gargled on his indignation. “How do you think remote presence works, Dean?”
“Um, it’s just a kind of overlay.”
“As far as display goes, that’s true. But it’s not local. Behind the pretty imagery, there’s high-rate comm and forwarding through ambient microlasers. There are no random networks down in the tunnels. Everything I’ve planned depends on us being very quiet, in particular not using any lab nodes. What you want is—” he shook his head in disbelief.
Robert looked at Blount. “I don’t understand either. Just a couple of weeks ago we shut Sharif out as a security risk.”
Winnie’s face reddened, just as in the old days when Robert nailed him in a faculty meeting.
Robert raised his hand. “I’m just wondering, Winston. Honest.”
After a second, Winnie nodded. “Okay. Look, I was never down on the guy. We’ve met him in person, right here at the library. He appears to be a sincere student. He’s honestly interviewing you, right?”
When he’s not the Stranger or Mr. SciFi, yeah. Robert realized that just a word from him now and the whole scheme might be abandoned. He had not imagined that betrayal could be such a full-time job: “Yes. His questions are often foolish, but they’re very academic.”