by Nick M Lloyd
‘How long will it take you to write the code?’ asked Sam.
‘Just over an hour,’ said Tim. He hoped to be ready by midnight.
A few minutes later, Juan entered the server room silently, gave Tim a new laptop and left without saying a word.
With Sam next to him, Tim booted up the laptop, disabled all its wireless capability, ran virus searches, and using a zip drive copy of MIDAS, started editing the code.
The hack would not need to be complex – assuming the passwords provided by MacKenzie worked – but Tim knew the Chinese, or the Ankor, would shut him down quickly. He needed to buy some time to run the search.
The MIDAS search would run from the laptop, but at the same time, Tim would introduce a small piece of code into the servers of the CNSA systems. That piece of code would be a diversion. It would look like a search algorithm.
Tim wrote on the pad of paper.
TWT
‘Twat?’ she said, raising an eyebrow.
Tim wrote it in long hand.
Time Wasting Trojan
Sam gently squeezed his arm and leant in closer. ‘Infinite loop?’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ whispered Tim.
Software development folklore held that it was incredibly difficult for a calculation engine, be it human or electronic, to tell whether a piece of logic would execute to completion or get stuck in an infinite loop.
Tim wrote a piece of code that was so recursive and convoluted that the most powerful computer would take a solid half-minute to validate its purpose. Granted, he imagined that the Ankor, if they were all over CNSA systems, would do it in seconds, but that was all MIDAS needed. In fact, three seconds would be enough for MIDAS to search fifty gigabytes of relevant data and return any matches related to MacKenzie’s file. What MacKenzie would do with that information, Tim had no idea.
A little while later, Tim shut the laptop lid and pointed at the MIDAS access workstation. ‘Let’s call Juan?’
‘I just need to stretch,’ said Sam. She had been sitting immobile next to Tim the whole time. Her job had been to read the code as he wrote it, identify bugs, and suggest improvements. She’d done the job brilliantly, but at a personal cost.
Leaning heavily on Tim for support, Sam stood up and moved around the room on her crutches, stretching out her spine as much as she could.
‘Is it bad?’ asked Tim.
Settling back at the workstation, Sam sighed gently. ‘I’ve been skipping the painkillers, trying to keep sharp.’
‘You’re the sharpest person I know,’ said Tim. ‘Even when thoroughly dosed up.’
Sam smiled. ‘Once we get the money, I’ll do the Korean thing.’
‘Really?’ said Tim, feeling a surge of joy. ‘Really?’
Sam smiled too. ‘Yes. Assuming all this works.’
Tim looked at her again. ‘If you’d prefer to do the cauterisation, I’ll fully support you.’
‘Nice of you to finally say it,’ said Sam, her face hardening just a fraction, ‘what with it being not your body at all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tim. ‘I know it’s your choice.’
It was the first time, as far as Tim could remember, that he’d wanted Sam to be pain-free even if it meant she would never walk again.
‘It’s going to be fine, dummy,’ said Sam, looking at the MIDAS screen. ‘Hold on … There are rumours circulating that we sent up passengers in RL1 … That’s rubbish, isn’t it? SpaceOp rockets accelerate far too fast for people to handle it.’
‘Could experts get information on a rocket payload just from its flight path?’ asked Tim.
‘Let’s ask the expert,’ Sam said, typing. She read off the screen. ‘Blah … blah … the flight path is based on the mass, the centre of mass, and the engine thrust. You can’t reverse engineer the contents. But … this article confirms RL1 accelerated too fast for comfortable human flight.’
‘Anything else?’ said Tim, suddenly aware of how hard he was gripping his laptop.
‘The alien retrieval of RL1 was a success. They sent down a craft to scoop it up,’ said Sam. ‘The CNSA reported that moments before RL1 was delivered to the main craft, twenty of the Ankor pods realigned in order to create a docking zone.’
Wanting to discuss the potential implications but, more critically, mindful of MacKenzie, Tim stood. ‘I’d better get onto it.’
‘Give Mac a kiss from me,’ said Sam.
--------
Returning to the main floor of Mission Control which, even at the dead of night, was humming with purposeful activity, Tim noticed MacKenzie in deep conversation with four Leafer soldiers on the mezzanine level.
He walked over to the foot of the staircase but Juan waved him away. Tim joined Dexter at his desk instead.
‘What’s new?’ asked Tim.
Dexter grimaced. ‘We have two hundred people at the front gates of SpaceOp, demanding to see relatives who’ve been housed inside the Hot Zone.’
‘In the middle of the night? And?’
‘And MacKenzie is adamant that we remain in lockdown until after RL2,’ said Dexter. ‘He said … any one of them could be a saboteur.’
Tim turned his attention to the MIDAS news service. The standard reports showed the populations of the UK and elsewhere had calmed slightly. There was now a general acceptance that the radioactive A-Grav explosions had been accidents. This, however, had not stopped the general migration of people away from the known A-Grav locations. Tim noted a positive point, in that the exodus was a steady line of cars, not people fleeing on foot.
The next moment, Juan appeared at Tim’s side. ‘Now.’
‘Okay,’ said Tim, following Juan as he strode across the main floor and down towards the server rooms, not a flicker of emotion on his face.
As they passed the MIDAS server room, Tim stopped to tell Sam – via a written message on a notepad – to be ready to run the decoy hack.
Sam acknowledged the warning.
Tim and Juan continued through the armoured doors and to the network room. It was just as Tim had remembered it, a morass of cables and passive data sniffers.
Juan pointed out the network port that led to the Irish secondary school.
Tim plugged in his laptop and ran a series of tests to ensure the connection functioned and operated at sufficiently high speeds.
It took twenty minutes for Tim to be one hundred percent sure he was ready, then he asked Juan to tell Sam to perform the decoy hack.
The moment that Juan left, Tim sprang into action.
I have five minutes.
As far as Tim knew, he was in the most sensitive, and technically vulnerable, part of SpaceOp – and he’d decided to take the opportunity to find out how MacKenzie had used BinCubes created from individual name indexes.
He wanted to know where they were going and, here, in the bowels of MacKenzie’s technology empire, was where he could find out.
A quick look … prove to Sam I’m not totally under MacKenzie’s spell.
A data traffic monitor controlled the routing of the major network outputs: Anglesey Internal, Anglesey Data Uplink, and Internet Public. He checked its logs. They showed massive amounts of traffic in all directions since Wednesday, but readings from before then were blank. That was to be expected – MacKenzie had said he would clean it down after the earlier reinstall.
Of course, what MacKenzie probably knew – but had possibly forgotten – was that each of the major network outputs had their own independent passive data trackers which sent their own data movement information to the main data traffic monitor for reconciliation.
Those independent passive data trackers could not be remotely deleted.
So, Tim plugged the laptop into the admin port of the network box for the Internet Public route. It took a few seconds to burrow inside. The volumes arriving into SpaceOp were enormous – but the volumes sent out were small fractions of that. Tim searched the history – which went back for months. There was no record of MacKenzie hav
ing sent any BinCubes of data out.
MacKenzie could have used a different delivery method.
Conceptually, the MIDAS data outputs could be put on a series of disk drives and physically delivered.
It couldn’t have been sent by satellite, could it?
Next, Tim queried the Anglesey Data Uplink.
As, he expected there were hundreds of petabytes streaming upwards – Anglesey was clearly being used as an aggregation point for the Ankor data suck.
He checked the timestamps of the active send periods. It looked very much like over the previous few weeks – since arrival – there had been a four-hour-long burst every time the Ankor mother ship was over Anglesey.
That didn’t tell him anything about what MacKenzie had been doing with the files created on individual names. Obviously, they could be going to the Ankor along with everything else.
Shit!
Hands suddenly trembling, Tim double-checked the readings. The enormous volumes were not only in the last few weeks. As he scrolled down, more timestamps with large volumes of data appeared.
22.02.2016
22.08.2016
12.02.2017
26.04.2017
13.05.2017
The list went on. Of course, MacKenzie could have been sending this up to his own satellite. But that satellite was not in a geosynchronous orbit – it was in a medium altitude orbit – and so was only visible to the SpaceOp uplink for perhaps an hour at a time.
These two- and three-year-old data transmissions included hundreds of petabytes of data, and were being burst over six hour periods. The implication was they were being sent much further than Earth’s orbit.
Neptune?
CHAPTER 26
SpaceOp, Monday 29th April
2am
As he quickly refastened the plates on the data sniffer modules, Tim’s mind raced. It was not necessarily the case that MacKenzie was a traitor. It could all be part of a benevolent plan. This could be the Ankor’s way of getting things done. It could be that they felt some level of deceit was required to ensure humanity met the requirements to build the deflector shield.
That was plausible.
It was also possible Francis MacKenzie had simply been pumping data into space in an arbitrary way.
Shit.
Fuck.
Shit.
Tim didn’t believe a word of his terrified mind’s attempts to rationalise what he’d discovered.
I have to tell someone.
The problem was that if the Ankor and MacKenzie were in league, Tim would never get a message out via the internet. The Ankor were too strong.
Although …
An idea started to form.
The door opened.
Juan entered the small room and handed over the zip drive containing the search files. ‘Decoy in two minutes.’
Tim opened the local search copy of the MIDAS application on the laptop and plugged in Juan’s zip drive.
‘Ready.’
Next, Juan passed Tim a piece of paper with the passwords and network address for the CNSA datacentre.
His mouth dry, Tim reached for the keyboard.
Juan grabbed Tim’s hand, holding up one finger.
Tim checked the time; Juan was correct, they had one minute before Sam was going to run the decoy.
‘Sorry,’ said Tim, taking a moment to reflect. His goal was to ensure that the Chinese understood MacKenzie’s relationship with the Ankor. Specifically, that MacKenzie had probably been in contact with them for over a few years – in direct contrast to the story that MacKenzie and the Ankor were pushing.
Tim couldn’t be sure that China, or any other country with launch facilities, didn’t have a similar relationship with the Ankor. The Ankor could have been secretly preparing Earth for years through secret communications with any number of countries.
Warning the Chinese could have fatal consequences if they were also in league with the Ankor, and overall the Ankor’s motives were bad for humanity.
Then again …
On the basis that Tim had been instructed to spy on the Chinese, it was likely MacKenzie had a toxic relationship with them. That made it a little less likely they were all in league together. Plus, the Chinese had been publicly critical of the Ankor.
It was worth the risk.
His plan hinged on accepting that, although the Ankor were massively overpowered in terms of computing ability, they remained limited by the speed of light. So, unless they’d managed to install thousands of sentient computing resources, each with permission to make unilateral decisions, they would have to observe, decide, and act, from their orbit. Messages to and from the CNSA datacentre would take fractions of a second. It should be a large enough window for what he planned.
Hopefully, the Chinese were just as worried as everyone else about alien interference and would be watching all their data access points for unusual behaviour.
Juan shook Tim’s shoulder. It was time.
Tim navigated to the correct network address and was prompted for a password.
‘Could I get a little more light please?’ asked Tim, nodding towards the switch on the wall.
Juan walked over to the light switch and Tim quickly entered the password: 26A 18D 1D7 2AF.
The password was rejected, as Tim knew it would be.
A rush of adrenaline flooded through him. His hair felt like it was standing on end, and he could feel the blood pumping across his skull.
Juan was coming back.
Tim entered a different password: 508 4BF 414 4EC.
This password was also rejected. Of course.
Tim dared not look around.
Finally, he entered the correct password that MacKenzie had given him: ZZ3 8QB TP7 9XA.
This final password worked. He was inside the CNSA data centre.
He ran the macro on his laptop. It simultaneously loaded the diversionary trojan and triggered the local copy of MIDAS to search for files, words, images, anything that correlated to the materials on the zip drive MacKenzie had provided.
Within two seconds, the initial results were back.
No matches – the search was giving null returns.
With Juan now watching him carefully, Tim checked manually.
The connection was holding. They were inside the CNSA datacentre. Tim could see listings of files, servers and databases.
Tim selected one at random and looked more closely.
It was empty.
He checked another.
Empty.
A few seconds later the connection was broken.
Tim turned to Juan. ‘We’d better report to Mr MacKenzie.’
Juan pulled out the connection cord and took the laptop in one of his massive hands.
Tim followed, his plan hinged on someone in China noticing the first two failed password attempts and wondering what had happened. If they did that, then a Chinese data security man would hopefully notice that the first two passwords, unlike the real one, had been submitted in hexadecimal format.
If they then ran the code through a simple brute force decoding algorithm, they’d receive a plaintext comment that Francis MacKenzie had been in contact with the Ankor at least a year before their first global broadcast.
Just the accusation. Not the proof.
Shit!
As Tim followed Juan back up to the main floor, he desperately wanted to run. His hands were shaking. If he could reach back in time ten minutes, he’d stop himself from doing the hack. The Ankor, if they’d seen it, would have already decoded it and told MacKenzie.
Stop it …
Tim knew his thoughts were only self-preservation. This was bigger than him.
--------
Back in their flat, Tim sat with Sam sat in the bathroom with all the taps running at full power, hoping the noise and steam would be enough to confuse any covert surveillance.
Using their notepad method of scribbling notes under folded paper, Tim told Sam how it went.
Now, sitting close, whispering into each other’s ears and using oblique language where required, they discussed the wider parts.
‘What did MacKenzie say about the empty files?’ asked Sam.
‘Nothing, other than perhaps we’d try again in a day or so.’
‘But he took the laptop away,’ said Sam. ‘We don’t have any idea what the search was.’
‘When I was watching it, I saw some of the single word references,’ said Tim. ‘But it was all predictable stuff: plutonium, tungsten …’ He paused. ‘There was a bunch of chemical formulae.’
‘Remember any of them?’
Tim thought back; most of them had been very long, but one short one had stood out. ‘CH2O.’
Sam took the computer tablet they had to access the MIDAS news service and ran the search. ‘Formaldehyde … disinfectant.’
Sam reverted to the written note technique.
Briars?
Tim replied by written note.
Not seen for a few days … can’t trust anyone but Martel.
Sam wrote again.
Leave SpaceOp. During RL2 pre-launch? Raise the alarm.
He nodded. They needed to tell Martel the latest.
‘I have an idea …’ said Sam, reaching for her own laptop.
She opened the MIDAS software Tim had written to track Anglesey residents’ arrival. It produced an accurate map of SpaceOp on the tablet screen, with indication of where people were bunching.
As Dexter had said, there were a few hundred people at the front gate.
‘They’re demanding to have their family returned, but refusing to enter,’ said Sam, and then mouthed the words ‘good cover’.
‘Yes.’ If Tim and Sam could get to the main gate it should be easy to slip away. But the main gate was a good two miles away, with a multitude of electronic gates and razor wire.
They would need their car.
I can try to get to the car park. If stopped, I’ll say that you need additional medication.
‘Now?’ asked Sam.
‘No time like the present.’
Sam took the notepad.
Avoid Hot Zone
He nodded.