by John Conroe
“Awesome,” Maya said, almost breathless. The other two nodded and then all three were suddenly typing.
“I’ll take city records,” Eric said.
“I’m on utilities and finance records,” Maya called out.
“And I’ll handle the IRS and state taxation departments,” Aaron said, cracking his knuckles before diving back onto his virtual keyboard.
I looked at Yoshida, who just smiled. “This is exactly why they all work here,” he said.
“And why we make more than you do,” Aaron said without looking up.
Yoshida shrugged at me and nodded. “Maybe, but you don’t make that much more. Admit it: You just like the government-level access to all of those networks you’re currently having your way with.”
“Yeah, power trumps money,”Maya said with a leer before turning back to her station.
Chapter 14
The rest of the week was a blur of teaching and training, with evenings for Astrid and the fam.
Yoshida’s wonderkin assured me that they had throughly changed all of my families’ records to reflect a slightly different address. I chose a unit across the street whose owners travelled a lot and were currently out of the country. I also started some contingency planning in case it either didn’t work or worked too well. And I explained what was going on to both Astrid and Harper—separately. Those two did not get along. But they both needed to know for their own safety. And Harper was an expert on the Spiders and a great resource for figuring out how to hunt them.
“Yeah, the major’s right… you don’t need to hunt them. They’ll come after you,” Harper had said when I told her.
“It isn’t like they’re pissed that I offed Lotus. They’re logic-based machines, for God’s sake.”
“No, they have no emotions, but that very logic you speak of will identify you as a major threat to their mission. You managed to kill Lotus. The last Spider killed took hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and drones to take down. You did it with just your rifle and one of their own drones.”
“And the Decimator too,” I pointed out.
“Nah, Lotus neutralized that bitch,” she said, waving one hand dismissively. “Yoshida better have his nerds harden and shield that thing or it’ll get used against them. Probably why he won’t let anyone take it into the Zone.”
We were in her apartment on the ground floor and she was gulping water. I had just caught her after another of her fitness classes. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, looking around. Her apartment was tiny, the smallest in the building, but she seemed fine with it. An eclectic mix of decorations seemed to change every time I stepped into the place. “You doing alright with the network people?”
“Hell yeah. A lot better than those idiots working for Zone D. I’ve got a couple of Dios FX-37 news drones completely hardened. Should be good to go unless they get within fifteen meters of a Spider. Better than the Deca-mato.”
“Decimator. It’s a Decimator,” I said.
She just smiled slyly. “If you say so. But to answer your question, Trinity is very happy with my work, and thanks, by the way, for making the intro. Big pay increase.”
“So you don’t think much of the work that Maya, Eric, and Aaron are doing?”
“That their names? No, not based on that performance on the bridge.”
“Well, they seem pretty sharp. Good hackers, really good,” I said, anxious because it seemed that the people who had handled my family’s security were not up to snuff.
“Sure, might be the best hackers going for standard stuff, but protecting drones from mid-flight interference is different. Oh, I get it. You’re worried about the false address job. That’s probably fine for what it is.”
“What do you mean, what it is?”
She reached out and tapped my forehead with a finger. “You know what I mean. You’ve been up close and personal with everything the Zone has to offer. You really think anything sent by Peony will be fooled by an empty apartment across the street for very long? They hunt and kill humans, for heaven’s sake.”
My face must have given me away because her own snarky expression softened. “You’ve got your contingency planning underway, right? And you have sensors covering that empty place across the street? They will go there first. When they do, you trigger your surprise and then get your family out of here. Have you told your mom?”
“Not yet.”
“Ajaya! You have to tell her. Come on; she’s a tough lady. You gonna wait till you have to explain in the middle of the night, with killer drones right outside your windows?”
“No. I’ll tell her, but what makes you think the Spiders could get a drone out of the Zone?”
“Well, other than the fact that I got in and out all the time there’s also the fact that if you’re right about these accidents, it seems like it’s not just all tiny bits of mucked-up code. Those undetermined incidents might have had a more up close and personal cause. Or there’s always the idea that Peony could just crash a big delivery drone into your place. And you will tell your mom or I will.”
Harper liked my mom a lot. The rest of the ladies in my family weren’t so friendly to her, seeing her as some kind of threat to Astrid or something, but my mom was always nice to her.
I found myself nodding, agreeing with her about telling Mom. It was one thing to contemplate a commercial drone going amok, but an entirely different thing to think about a Raptor or Skyhawk peppering my family with deadly projectiles. Still, if a Spider could get drones out of the Zone, I think it would have already happened, and I said as much to Harper.
“Yeah, so who’s to say it hasn’t? Think about it… these Spiders are masters of strategy and tactics. Why wouldn’t they keep a secret egress point and only use it when the need was high? Any spot they found would be small like that weak area I found. They would calculate the chances of success for getting anything large out as too small to undertake. Instead, wouldn’t they keep it as a secret weapon, for an asset for just the right opportunity, or maybe to neutralize a real high priority target?”
“Which you’re saying is me?”
“Well, you killed one Spider, and now, thanks to your efforts, there’s a new focus on hunting the others down. So yeah, you’re a threat. They could also send out some kind of small infiltrators to dig into infrastructure, you know… really burrow into the Internet of Things and the web?”
That actually made more sense than the random Raptor drone sent to assassinate someone. And it would give the Spiders a much better chance of changing commercial drone code than the online approach recorded on Lotus’s log.
The next day, I broached the topic with Maya while we were in the simulator’s control room, setting up an introductory exercise for the students and their about-to-be issued Kestrels.
“You really think something could get out?” she asked, biting one rather well-chewed fingernail as she thought about it.
“I know it’s possible to get out. And in. Not easy, especially for a drone, as there are pretty tight ranks of EM detectors all through the Barrier, but yes, it’s possible, especially for something small, like a Kite or a Crab.”
“That’s an avenue we haven’t looked into for backtracking the corrupted codes in the crashed drones. Some kind of small bot could conceivably get inside a computing center or server farm and invade the network from within,” she said, eyes turned up toward the ceiling.
“Probably no way to go looking for such a thing,” I said, putting as much believable resignation into my voice as possible without going overboard.
“Of course there is!” Maya said, taking the bait. “It’s just that we never thought it was even a possibility, so we didn’t go looking for it.”
“But you could,” I suggested. “Like you said, the other two sure aren’t going to go down that path.”
“No, they won’t. They’ve been focused on finding code packets coming from the network’s main AI, not an additional update that’s been piggybacked onto a valid p
acket further down the line. You know what? I’ll look into it. If I find something, it’ll be worth the extra time to see the look on their faces.”
I felt a little surge of guilt. Maya had been bogged down with helping me prep classes for the trainees and had been excluded from the extra searching that Eric and Aaron were involved in. Now she would have to spend a chunk of her very limited free time searching for something that might be a wild drone chase. But if there really were infiltrator drones outside of the Zone, we absolutely had to find them.
“To tell you the truth, Ajaya, this little exercise in virtual reality programming has been more fun than I thought it would. You know way more about the drones inside the Zone than I thought you did. No wonder your Berkut does so well,” she said.
“Thanks. That reminds me… how goes the Decimator?”
She grimaced, looking down at her virtual keyboard as she coded the parameters of the exercise I had dreamed up. Of course, Yoshida had reviewed it and put his own personal stamp on it, and then Maya had come up with a few embellishments, but most of it was still mine.
“The major was seriously pissed when Lotus hacked Unit 19. We’ve been all through it a dozen, no two dozen times, shielding it, hardening the components, trying to build contingencies into its programming.”
“What did Lotus do to it?”
She grimaced again, looking more than a little embarrassed. “Hacking drones has been going on for decades. The wireless control protocols used to be unencrypted, but that changed quickly; then of course there were radio frequency jamming techniques, electromagnetic burst methods, malware, and denial of service attacks. Most of those led to an increase in drone autonomy, giving each unit the ability to fall back on its own machine learning capabilities to solve problems and achieve goals. We build in contingencies for all of that stuff and more. But we missed a basic one.”
“Oh? What did you miss?”
“A very simple GPS hack. All drones use some type of positioning system. The Decimator uses the US original GPS system as well as the newer Chinese one for backup. Lotus sent it a false set of signals that matched both systems and replaced the correct ones. Unit 19 was smart enough to realize there was false data but couldn’t differentiate between the real systems and the false signals. So it froze in place while it tried to figure out where it was. Embarrassing.”
“You must have fixed it by now?” I asked.
“Oh, we did. We took a page from your Berkut,” she admitted.
“What? When?” I asked.
“Calm down. It wasn’t from your personal Berkut, but from the Berkut system. The Russians gave their best drones a backup system. An advanced dead reckoning system that runs side calculations on the drones’ positions, corrected regularly by the main GPS navigation system’s input. If GPS fails, the drones fall back on the most recently stored information and begin to adjust it for speed, direction, and time of travel. It’s less accurate, but they always have some idea of where they are. That’s why your Rikki never faltered for a second.”
“So if you know that and you’ve built in a backup like that, why not use Unit 19?”
“Because the Decimator is the first real advance in fighting drones that we’ve come up with. It proved very effective up until it didn’t. The major isn’t willing to have anyone second-guess the Decimator again. So we’ve been carefully dreaming up all the problems it could face and building defenses against them. But they take up memory space, airframe space, add extra weight, slow down reaction times, and on and on. So we’re moving slowly and carefully and senior leadership is focused on this reclamation project, which buys us some time to get it exactly right. Which means you and your class come first.”
“I bet the fellas hate that,” I said.
“Aaron seems impatient with the whole thing, but Eric knows that sometimes taking a step back from a project is a good thing. Lets you see it more clearly.”
“So how do you go about finding an infiltrator bot?”
“It’s all about analyzing corrupted code packets and trying to find out where along the command path they got changed. The guys are looking for changes in the CPU, but I’ll be looking for something sitting along the path, intercepting and recoding instructions. Then it’ll be up to you or whoever the major wants to send into the hardware to find and stop it. The question is which AI system to start with?”
“The smart city systems are the most important,” I said.
“We need special permission to get into the NYC Traffic Controller,” she cautioned.
“What about the city smart grid or water and waste systems?” I asked.
“They all require us to coordinate with the City IT people, and they are a pain in the ass. I think one of the big integrated mega corps had more crashes than the others. I don’t remember which one, so I’ll have to double-check. Then I can use our government audit license and get a look into their drone control network. If we find one of these infiltrators, then you can have the major or maybe even the general get us authorization for the citywide systems,” she said.
“Fair enough. I’ll leave it in your hands then,” I said.
“Yes you will, because you need to get down in the Room with your wonder drone and test this scenario out. The sooner we get it debugged, the sooner I can start on your next project,” she said.
I frowned, trying to figure out if she was complaining or joking. Did she not understand how scary this would be?
“Go on already. You’ve officially scared me so bad I’m going to have to walk home. I won’t trust public transit till we figure this out,” she said, pushing me toward the door. Okay, at least that question was answered.
Chapter 15
Two days later, she came up with something. It was late in the afternoon, and I had finished my last class in how to train your drone.
“Ajaya, I have something for you,” Maya said. I had seen her waiting diffidently for me to answer the inevitable questions that followed every class.
“Oh, I think the scenario ran pretty well, Maya. We don’t need to adjust it any further, plus that was the last simulator run. We start live Zone insertions tomorrow,” I said.
“Pretty well? Are you kidding? It was fantastic,” she said, waving one hand back at the Room entrance. “No, I found…” she looked around and got closer, lowering her voice to almost a whisper, “one of your infiltrators.”
“What?” I almost yelled, caught off guard. A couple of straggling special operators looked at us curiously while she shushed me.
“I found a spot on the communications path where some commands seem to die and others seem to spawn spontaneously. The drone delivery control system is housed in the nearest order fulfillment center,” she said, voice so quiet I had to lean in.
“You’re talking about Ama—” I started to say but she glared and hushed me again. “Yes, and not so loud.”
“Why?” I asked, curious.
“OpSec. You and Major Yoshida are always going on and on about it. Who’s to say what AI system might be listening? All these virtual systems constantly alert for keywords. Say the wrong one and something is bound to start querying the company about a reported issue with a fulfillment center. Then before you know it, your little infiltrator is warned that you’re coming.”
“And where exactly am I going?” I asked, realizing I hadn’t spent a great deal of time thinking about what I would actually need to do once we found evidence to back my theory. Well, actually, Harper’s theory.