by Vernor Vinge
The car slowed smoothly to a stop, parking itself just short of the intersection. “System failure,” it said. “Emergency backup engaged. Please depart the vehicle and await emergency assistance.”
The doors popped ajar on all sides.
“Hah!” said Lena. “I was hoping for a real crash, and you having to cut the doors open.” But she was already backing out of the car.
Xiu was speechless. Did I really do this? Timid little X. Xiang?
Lena wheeled around to the front of the car. “We have a hill to climb,” she said.
FOR ALFRED VAZ, there had been various pieces of good news. He had completed his fake investigation of the GenGen labs and provided Günberk’s clever analysts with evidence that would eventually lead them far away. And finally Alice Gu had collapsed. That had come very late, but it was more spectacular than Alfred had expected; Keiko’s people claimed that DHS surveillance was blinded, in chaos. That chaos was unexplained good fortune to her and Günberk. For Alfred, it could mean complete success. Give him a few more minutes and his private research program would be safe not only from Günberk and Keiko, but also from the inevitable American investigations.
And then things went very wrong:
Miri Gu had found the stooges. He had lost his one mech in the labs, and also his fiber link to the stooges. And now—
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
It was a fantastic claim—and manifestly true. For the last ten minutes there had been minor comm glitches, error retry packets happening a little too often. The statistics were well below the level of reasonable suspicion. But then in a grand gesture—typical Rabbit madness—the creature had sent a two-megabyte jumbogram straight through the milnet and off the end of the fiber.
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
Numerical estimates floated up for “Time till stooges can reach 911” and “Time till DHS responds.” But Keiko’s people had an idea:
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz:
For several minutes, there was no manager-level traffic. Alfred was aware of Keiko masquerading as the California Highway Patrol. His own attention was on a number of tasks he hadn’t dared try while Alice Gong was still around. Günberk’s analysts were assessing how deeply Rabbit’s intrusion had gone. Their conclusions were tagged a soothing green.
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
Some analysts had more paranoid theories. The current favorite was that Rabbit was China; that would make tonight a perfect Keystone Kops comedy, all the Great Powers chasing after each other. But there were also nightmare speculations: Maybe Rabbit had fooled the network analysts and all the lesser paranoids. After all, the jumbogram had been sent just before the fiber link was broken. Maybe Rabbit was a Grand Terrorist, who had used the Alliance as its stooge, installing its own interests within the labs, a quick conversion of the entire establishment into a death factory. And there was that UP/Ex launcher in the GenGen area, what amounted to a delivery system.
Alfred sighed to himself. In the long run, he feared Rabbit as much as the extreme paranoids did, but tonight—well, if they looked too closely, they might see Alfred’s own operation lurking in the shadows. It was best to calm things down.
Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri:
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz:
Red doubt was hemorrhaging across the analyst pool, spreading from a statistical analysis team at Moscow-Capetown. These were the same chaps who had been consistently right about the Soybean Futures Plot. They had credibility…and they claimed that the views from the north side of the GenGen area were corrupt. Those were not views Alfred had subverted. For better or worse, his colleagues had discovered some other deception.
Now the signals and stat people in all the analyst pools had precedence. A thousand specialists, who a second ago might have been looking at a dozen other problems, were suddenly watching the same data. Computing resources shifted from a myriad drudge tasks, began correlating data from the accessible sensors in the labs. It was as if Indo-European Intelligence were an immense cat suddenly come alert, listening and watching for sign of its prey.
Only one of the area cams was offline, but others were subtly misregistered. The inconsistencies were scattered all across the area that the Alliance controlled…but analysis made the Moscow-Capetown guess more and more a certainty. A blotch of deception was moving into the GenGen area at the speed of a fast walk.
There! A fleeting glimpse of the Gu child. The analysts pounced on the location, dredged two sets of footsteps out of the lying silence. So Rabbit did have troops on the ground.
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz:
For a moment there was no conversation. Then:
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
There was another long pause. Yes. Günberk’s discovery that Rabbit depended on a single apex certificate authority. All power in the modern world, from flying the largest aircraft to moving bytes between components in a single processor, it all came down to the exchange of appropriate markers of trust, as enforced by the Secure Hardware Environment. And far at the top of Rabbit’s operations, via billions of unknown paths, there was a single source, Credit Suisse CA. Revoking that authority would disarm Rabbit. It would likely destroy the fellow’s access to his own most personal files, leaving nothing but what the creature held in his natural mind (unless Rabbit really was an AI, in which case nothing would be left). But the collateral damage would be enormous. Shutting down a top-level certificate authority was a metaphorical weapon of mass destruction. And now it was all that was left to them.
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz:
Another kind of failure threatened Alfred Vaz. Shooting down Rabbit had been one of his fondest hopes, but not just now! Alfred dipped back into the GenGen viewpoints. Downing Rabbit had eliminated all the slack from the schedule. And I need that time for my own cover-up. He was reduced to emergency measures: Alfred brought two more secret teams on-line. One would use the fruit-fly scam to divert what was left of Rabbit. The other would destroy his lab-within-a-lab, destroy Alfred’s work of years. But they would also outship his secret lab’s greatest prize through GenGen’s UP/Ex launcher.
For Alfred Vaz, some
form of success was still possible.
GU THE ELDEST and Gu the Youngest hiked southward out of the Huertas cavern. Behind them the shredda containers and the north entrance were swallowed by darkness. The light that traveled above them shone just a few yards in all directions.
“How far till we’re in enemy territory?” said Robert.
Miri held a finger up to her lips. She gestured, and silent messaging paraded across his vision.
Miri --> Robert:
Robert fumbled with the box at his belt. The keypad display helped, but typing was tedious. All the tricks that Juan had taught him were nearly useless without Epiphany.
Robert --> Miri:
Miri walked in almost perfect silence, and Robert tried to imitate her. In fact, with Winston and the others gone, things were very quiet in Huertas country. Maybe they were as alone as the Mysterious Stranger had claimed, shielded from friends and enemies alike.
Miri must have been reading as they walked. More sming appeared.
Miri --> Robert:
It was curious that she didn’t wonder about the Mysterious Stranger.
He tapped a few cramped words. Robert --> Miri:
Miri --> Robert:
Page 17
What you can do to defeat Alfred
First off, even I, your mysterious friend, am not sure exactly what Alfred is up to (but I am afire with curiosity). Here are some possibilities.
(1)
To blow up the bio labs, classic straightforward terrorism. But don’t you think he went to rather a lot of trouble if that’s all he wants to do? It would be a gross under-employment of everyone’s talent.
If this is the scam, you will be the heroes of the day, my hands in disabling those little boxes you and your friends planted—but your fame will likely be posthumous. My condolences!
(2)
To sabotage some component of the labs, maybe in a way that won’t become evident till much later disasters. This is almost as stupid as (1).
(3)
To install (or cover) some fiendishly clever Man-in-the-Middle software that gives Alfred de facto ownership of research done in that part of lab that you, Robert, infested for him. This would be cool, and it is my personal favorite (see my discussion of fruit flies in Chapter 3). Unfortunately for Alfred, this caper is so far blown that I doubt it will survive the audits that will surely come raining down. In this case, you two can help by grabbing anything that Alfred has not yet hidden.
(4)
In the failure of case (3), or perhaps as his original plan, Alfred may take advantage of your cabal’s efforts and outship biologically interesting materials from the labs.
[Diagram of the pneumo tube transport system]
[Picture of GenGen’s UP/Ex launcher]
To what end? Oh, the usual terrorist possibilities—but more likely, something weird and interesting. I’m confident I can identify such activity, and you—my loyal hands—can physically prevent the loading and outshipment.
For the moment we are all in the dark about this. But once you enter the perverted GenGen area, I should be able to contact you again. Be careful, be quiet, and Watch for Me in Your Sky!
Miri’s words were overwriting the text even before Robert finished reading it.
Miri --> Robert:
Robert grinned. Then he read her message a second time. And he thought back to all his conversations with Sharif, to the mystery of True-Sharif and Stranger-Sharif and…SciFi-Sharif. Oh, my God.
Robert --> Miri:
She glanced up at him and for instant her intensity was transformed into a dazzling smile. Miri --> Robert:
Robert --> Miri:
Miri --> Robert:
Robert --> Miri:
Because of the magic he promised. But he didn’t type that out.
Miri --> Robert:
Everything was still dark beyond their little pool of light, but now the walls were closer. They were almost back to the sky tunnel.
Robert --> Miri:
Miri --> Robert:
Where is tyranny when you need it! For a moment, Robert couldn’t think of anything to say.
Robert --> Miri:
Miri stopped for a second, looked up at him with that patented stubborn stare.
Miri --> Robert:
Robert managed a nod. Miri turned and marched on.
Miri --> Robert:
She hesitated, then reached out to grasp his hand.
Miri --> Robert:
Miri --> Robert:
There were surprises in almost every one of Miri’s sentences, and if he could have spoken aloud or typed freely he would have asked a hundred questions. Juan? Xiu Xiang? Miri? So many friends, doing so much to save an incompetent old fool and his fellow fools.
The ground bounced elastically against their feet. They were passing through the sky tunnel, back into GenGen territory.
28
THE ANIMAL MODEL?
Even on a slow day, thousands of certificates got revoked every hour. It was a messy process, but a necessary consequence of frauds detected, court orders executed, and credit denied. All but a handful of revocations were short cascades of denied transactions, involving a single individual and his/her immediate certificate authority, or a small company and its CA. Perhaps once a year there would be a significant cascade, usually when a large company ran into uncompromising creditors and a court order was delivered to a midlevel CA. Even more rarely, a revocation might be part of a military action, as in the fall of South Ossetia. In theory, the revocation protocols worked with arbitrarily large CAs…but until this night, no apex certificate authority had ever issued global revocations. And Credit Suisse was one of the ten largest CAs in the world. Most of its business was in Europe, but its certificates bound webs of unmeasured complexity all over the planet, affecting the interactions of people who might speak no European language.
Tonight all those unknowing customers would learn of their connection.
The failures spread as timeouts on certificates from intermediate CAs and—where time-critical trust was involved—as direct notifications. In Europe, airplanes and trains came smoothly to a stop, without a single accident or fatality. A billion failures were noted, and emergency services moved—with varying success—into action.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security noticed the failures and the growing collateral damage. Analyst pools in
the U.S. reached out to the other Great Powers and conferred under emergency protocols established years ago. Chinese Public Safety, the Indo-European intelligence services, the U.S. DHS—they all agreed that a category-one disaster was in progress, a really bad software failure or a novel terrorist attack.
In certain corners of Indo-European intelligence, understanding was more precise. Considerably more precise.
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
So far there were only small failures at UCSD, just a few certificates timing out. That was enough to make some projections: The crowds had not consciously noticed the changes, but the library riot was due for an abrupt and ignominious end. Even more than the analysts had guessed, Rabbit had been behind what they had seen tonight, and now that support was rotting away.
Down in the labs, Rabbit had been an almost invisible intruder. Confirming the absence of that intrusion was not easy, but Alfred’s analysts had a consensus:
Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri:
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz:
Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri:
RABBIT WAS UNDER pressure. He always told himself that he performed best under pressure—though usually the pressure was not so immediate, nor his opponents so powerful and humorless. Other than some of the low-ranking analysts, Rabbit didn’t know anyone on the Indo-European side who could take a joke.