Sarah had wondered whether those who held the reins of power really did have the planet’s interests at heart, or if that was an outdated and naively optimistic view. In any case, did her father still have his finger on the pulse of world politics any longer? Well, she’d find out soon enough.
‘OK, Dad, I’ll try to keep you posted. Give my love to Mum.’
‘I will. And try to get some sleep, you look tired.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll get a decent night’s sleep before I head out.’
‘Good. Saving the world can be exhausting, you know. And remember, your mother and I are very proud of you.’
That had been twenty-four hours ago. Here she was now on the other side of the Atlantic, in a driverless cab weaving its way across a vibrant Manhattan on a bitterly cold evening. She still wasn’t sure what she felt about having been thrust into the limelight like this.
The truth was that she wasn’t cut out for this world of politics and public relations. In fact, rather than feeling flattered by all the attention, she’d felt a growing insecurity – a nagging anxiety that her shortcomings and the many gaps in her knowledge would, sooner or later, be exposed. She kept telling herself this was classic imposter syndrome. She was easily as highly qualified and knowledgeable as anyone else in her field, and she’d worked hard to get to the position she was in. Still, returning home briefly had meant she could hide away for a couple of days and hope that everyone forgot about her as the world moved on to another story.
As the taxi pulled up outside her hotel, a cheerful electronic voice said, ‘Have a nice day, Dr Maitlin. Thank you for using New York Autocabs,’ and the door of the car slid open as her fare registered. The place she was staying at was a small but comfortable hotel ideally situated in downtown Manhattan between 5th and Park Avenues. There was a welcoming aroma of coffee in the lobby. Nodding a hello in the direction of the bored-looking receptionist, she poured herself a mug and headed up to her room.
She felt relieved to finally have some time to recuperate, catch up on some work and maybe look up an old friend from university days who now lived and worked in New York, before her Saturday morning meeting at the UN. Walking into her room, she was greeted by a gust of warm air and absent-mindedly commanded the heating to be turned down a few degrees. As she turned to close the door she spotted an envelope on the floor.
Who delivered paper notes any more? And who slipped them under hotel-room doors, for Christ’s sake? Intrigued, she picked it up and pulled out a neatly folded sheet of paper. The words were quaintly hand-written on UN headed notepaper.
Dear Dr Maitlin
My name is Professor Gabriel Aguda, a geologist at the University of Lagos, but mostly these days I act as an Advisor on Earth Sciences to the UN here in New York. Like you, I have been recruited onto the new UN committee. I must say it’s a relief to have another scientist on board and as you can imagine I’m looking forward to meeting you. If possible, would you like to get together for breakfast first? I can try to bring you up to speed on what this is all about. If so, I can meet you in your hotel lobby at 7.30 on Saturday morning.
If I don’t hear from you, then I’ll assume this is the plan. But if for any reason we cannot touch base before the meeting itself then do ping me at any time in the coming days.
Yours truly,
Gabriel Aguda
The note had a charm to it. Presumably, Aguda was someone who didn’t trust cybersecurity systems enough to leave her a message online. She blinked to activate her augmented reality and her field of vision was filled with her favourite 3D search engine intervening semi-transparently in front of her view of the hotel-room surroundings. She said, ‘Search Gabriel Aguda United Nations.’
It seemed the geologist had been a powerful mover and shaker in the academic world and had written a number of influential and highly cited papers on earthquake prediction early in his career. Recently, though, he seemed to have operated more as a politician than a scientist, although he still spent part of his time back in his home country of Nigeria as well as teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Rochester.
Since she had no UN allies yet, breakfast with Gabriel Aguda sounded like a good place to start.
7
Thursday, 7 February – Tehran
Twenty-year-old computer science student Shireen Darvish was certain her mother cooked the very best fesenjoon in the world and she would take on anyone who claimed otherwise. When the rich aroma of the pomegranate stew wafted up to her bedroom, seeping beneath her closed door, she realized how hungry she was.
Although she was physically in her room, which was so crammed with electronic equipment it resembled a space mission control centre, Shireen’s mind was somewhere else entirely. Inside her virtual reality helmet was a universe of data and lines of machine code – an electronic landscape of pure information. And it was a world Shireen had always found more familiar and reassuring than the real one.
She’d been working hard for several hours but was still reluctant to leave her computer even for a moment. She was at last closing in on something big. The last few months had been spent testing and re-testing her Trojan horse hacking software; she’d almost been badly burned on a couple of occasions when she’d been sure the authorities were on to her, but finally she felt that all the bases were covered.
Which was just as well, because she had important end-of-year examinations in the summer and didn’t want to fall behind in her classes. She justified the time spent on her extracurricular interests because they were so closely aligned with the courses she was taking at Tehran University. Still, she found that her thoughts were increasingly drifting towards her secret project, even during lectures. The only person who knew that her mind was elsewhere was her close friend Majid. And even he didn’t know the half of it.
Shireen was well aware she was far from alone, for there were millions like her around the world – though few were as smart – all obsessed with finding ways of cracking uncrackable codes, infiltrating the most secret recesses of cyberspace, whether by stealth or in the open. She hated the generic term ‘cyberterrorism’, which was used by the authorities to include anyone who preferred the anonymity of the dark web. At least it meant that cybersecurity remained a lucrative career of choice for many young computer science graduates around the world. But while Shireen acknowledged that there were people who wished to use cyberattacks to harm humanity because of some ideology they had bought into, she felt she was part of a more benign and altruistic movement of cyberhackers. She was a cyb, and she was proud of it. She saw the aim of the cyb movement as exposing injustices committed in the very name of global cybersecurity. Not that the authorities would see it that way if she were ever caught. She smiled to herself. I’m too clever to be caught.
Born in the early 2020s, Shireen had not known a time when quantum key distribution was not the standard means of securing online data. She knew from her cryptography classes at university that until the mid-twenties data had been protected online using public key cryptosystems like RSA. Several months ago, while staying with her elderly great-aunt Pirween in Isfahan, she had tried explaining encryption to her. ‘If I asked you to multiply two big numbers together, Auntie, say one hundred and ninety-three times five hundred and sixty-nine, could you give me the answer?’
‘Not in my head, dear, but I can do it easily enough on my tablet,’ her aunt had replied, holding up the old-fashioned device close to her mouth. It amused Shireen that the elderly woman, like many of her generation, still didn’t trust the technology of augmented reality, preferring archaic handheld tablets – there was even still a market for early-twenties smartphones.
Her aunt began speaking into her device. ‘Tablet, multiply one hundred and—’
‘—you’ll find it’s a hundred and nine thousand, eight hundred and seventeen.’
‘Did you just do that in your head? If so, I’m very impressed.’
‘Actually, no, Auntie, I’ve used this
example before, so I just remember the answer. Now, what if I asked you to work out the only two numbers which, when multiplied together, give a hundred and nine thousand, eight hundred and seventeen? Could you do that?’
‘Isn’t that what you just asked me?’ said her aunt, looking genuinely puzzled.
‘No!’ said Shireen, feeling a little exasperated. ‘The first time I gave you two numbers to multiply and asked for the answer, which is straightforward. But now I’ve given you the answer and I’m asking you to do it in reverse.’
‘Well, it’s five hundred and something-something times … I mean, if I had a pen and paper—’
‘Please, Auntie, I meant if I’d started the conversation just with the big number …’
The old woman had laughed. ‘I know, dear, I’m teasing.’
‘OK, bear with me. You see, the first problem: multiplying two numbers together, however big they are, can be done on any calculator. Lots of people can even multiply two three-digit numbers in their heads easily enough. But the reverse used to be an almost impossible task. It’s called finding the prime factors of a number. When you were young, that would have been how your credit-card details were stored securely online.’
‘Public key encryption. I remember it well. And I remember the panic when the first quantum computers came along, and nothing was secure online any more.’
‘Yup, they could do what no other computer had been able to do before, however powerful, and crack the problem of factorizing big numbers. So, quantum key distribution came along and was much more secure because—’
‘Because,’ her aunt chipped in ‘… because … wait, I know this. It’s because of quantum entanglement. If you try to spy on something you disturb it, however careful you are, and you set off the quantum alarm.’
This time it was Shireen’s turn to laugh. ‘That’s a pretty good summary, yes. The “observer effect”.’
Having grown up with it, Shireen felt completely at home immersed in the world of fuzzy quantum bits of information, a strange digital reality in which the binary certainty of zeros or ones is replaced by a ghostly existence of both at the same time.
Hers was a world within a world, the vast cyberspace – a universe made up not of physical particles, but of pure information, flowing, interacting and constantly evolving within its own dimensions. Shireen’s talents of course ran in the family. She was very proud of the fact that both her parents had been among the early whizz-kids of the Invisible Internet Project, the underground network that sat below the surface of the web and which had originally been used for secret surfing and information exchange. Her father had even worked on the anonymous communication software project, Tor, at MIT before returning to Iran to join the underground dark web movement of the early 2020s that toppled the Islamic regime. This meant he knew more than most about cybersecurity, anonymized communication, multi-layer encryption and so-called onion routing. Her mother had pioneered techniques for hacking public key cryptosystems with home-made quantum computers running codes that made use of Shor’s algorithm to factorize large numbers.
But Shireen was a child of the new world order, which was dominated by the code war. When pervasive computing took off in the early twenties, when she was a young child, it still had a name: it was referred to as the Internet of Things; but it was soon clear that it no longer needed to be called anything. In a world where everything was connected to everything else, only her grandparents’ generation still used phrases like ‘look online’ instead of just ‘look’. It had begun with home and office appliances linked wirelessly to handheld devices, but eventually everything was networked; sensors, cameras, embedded nano servers and energy harvesters were all ubiquitous and built into the infrastructure of the modern world, from buildings and transport to clothing and household items.
Eventually world governments and multinationals woke up to the desperate need for advanced cybersecurity systems, but not before the anonymous hacking of international cryptocurrency banking had brought the world markets crashing down in 2028, followed by the devastating cyberattack six months later on the AI system controlling London, one of the world’s first ‘smart cities’. That onslaught had infected many of the algorithms controlling the city’s transport, commerce and environmental infrastructures, sending ten million people back into the Stone Age for three weeks.
These events prompted action and led to the development of the Sentinels, cybersecurity artificial intelligences that would continuously patrol the Cloud, hunting for anomalies, viruses and leaks. They became the guardians of the larger AIs, or Minds, that ran everything from air traffic control and defence systems to power plants and financial institutions. And despite the cyberattack on London in ’28, most large cities were now run entirely by Minds. Since the mid 2030s, a constant battle had been raging between the Sentinels and the rogue AIs developed by cyberterrorist groups, sent into the Cloud to test them.
Shireen didn’t feel she truly belonged in either camp, but the code war fascinated her nevertheless. She rated her talents high, far exceeding those of her parents, which was why she had avoided any mention of her latest project – not because they wouldn’t understand the technical details, but because she knew they would have warned her off. In any case, she was now playing in the big league and it wasn’t just her own safety she had to think about; her parents would also be in jeopardy if the authorities ever tracked her down.
There was a knock on her bedroom door. ‘Come on down and eat, darling; it’s time you took a break from your studies.’ Wearing her VR visor, Shireen couldn’t see her mother, but knew she wouldn’t set foot in the room for fear of disturbing her daughter’s concentration.
‘It’s OK, Mum, you can come in, you know.’ Shireen had to smile. Her mother was the sweetest person in the world but could be so naive. She felt a pang of guilt, as she always did, that her mother had mistakenly assumed she was hard at work behind her visor. She blinked several times in rapid succession to turn down the volume of the music she was listening to. She was everything her mother wasn’t: brash, self-confident and subversive. On the walls around the house there were old hard-copy photos in picture frames, of her mother when she was a young student, around Shireen’s age, showing her still wearing a headscarf – the strict Islamic dress code that had been enforced in Iran for half a century. And here was Shireen in her shorts and T-shirt, with VR headset wrapped around her bright-pink cropped hair, and tattoos covering more than half her body. This played to her advantage: the more her parents focused on their daughter’s rebellious fashion sense the less they were likely to notice her cyberhacking projects. Of course, they knew she wasn’t spending all that time in her room on her studies, but they would have been mortified to discover what she was really working on.
She waved her haptic-gloved hands elegantly in front of her face and wiggled her fingers, touch-typing in a 3D virtual-reality space that only she could see, to iconize the multitude of windows and applications. She then removed her visor and stretched. Her mother was still standing smiling in the doorway. She cut an elegant figure – slim and considerably taller than her daughter. Shireen wondered if she herself would look that good thirty years from now. Her life was so much more comfortable than her mother’s had been at her age. The pace of cultural change in Persian society during Shireen’s lifetime had been nothing short of remarkable. In the space of less than twenty years, their country had gone from a conservative religious state to a liberal democracy with all the excesses and corruptions of any mid-twenty-first-century capitalist state. Many older Persians could even remember the time under the Shah seventy years ago and so had seen the country come full circle. Did being able to dye her hair, dress outrageously and be open about her sexuality mean that life was really any better now? But then she hadn’t lived through the Iran of her parents.
Even though they were only three, her mother always insisted on laying the table as though for a banquet. Even the large dish of rice at the centre of the table
was a work of art, with saffron-coloured grains piled in a neat spiral over plain white rice, and raisins and almonds sprinkled on top. Then there was the fesenjoon. She was again suddenly conscious of how hungry she felt. But, as usual, she knew that by the end of the meal she’d be so full she’d struggle to get up.
Her father, already seated at the table, looked up when she came in. ‘Ah, she’s back in the real world. Still busy trying to hack through the great firewall of China?’
To an outsider, Reza Darvish’s casual attitude towards his daughter’s hobby might have appeared at best cavalier and at worst shockingly reckless. But Shireen had gone to considerable lengths to ensure that, as far as her parents were concerned, she was indulging in nothing more than an innocent pastime.
‘Trying to hack through? I’m unstoppable, Dad,’ she replied light-heartedly as she shovelled a large portion of rice onto her plate. The smile disappeared from her father’s face and his voice took on a more sombre tone.
‘It’s a dangerous game, Reenie. A lot of cybs who get too close to secrets simply go missing. I’d hate to think you’re mixing with that crowd.’ He sighed. ‘And I should know,’ he added for good measure.
She hoped the meal wasn’t going to be accompanied by one of her father’s well-rehearsed lectures on cybersecurity. He could sometimes be infuriatingly old-fashioned in his views.
Her mother walked into the dining room with a large bowl of salad and caught the last few words. ‘Come on, Reza, Shireen’s smarter than that.’ She ruffled her daughter’s spiky hair affectionately as she sat down next to her. Shireen waved her mother’s hand away in mock annoyance.
‘Well, as long as you’re keeping on top of your studies, I suppose,’ said her father, his voice softening again. ‘I just wish you had other interests beyond your bedroom walls. You do know there’s a big world out there, full of art and music and literature and science?’
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