Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  She had to form a rational plan of action. But she didn’t have much time. For a few minutes she had even seriously contemplated turning herself in and handing over the files. She was clearly out of her depth. But she doubted she’d have got away with a simple reprimand. After all, she couldn’t now unknow the contents of the files, nor could the authorities be sure she hadn’t already released them on the dark web. No, that wasn’t ever really an option.

  The only alternative was to make the files public and hope that there were still people in power uncorrupted by this secret and who could protect her.

  What would happen next, she had no idea, but the world needed to know. Later that evening she had confided in Hashimi and showed him the contents of the files. He had agreed it would be naive to think she could simply make them public by releasing them online. Their contents would be instantly discredited and branded as fraudulent – just another attempt by cyberterrorists to embarrass the global order alongside the millions of other conspiracy theories, fake ‘leaks’ and elaborate hoaxes that were part and parcel of the online world these days. And disseminating them across the dark web, which would have been very easy, was an even worse idea. No one would take it seriously. It would just be lost in the noise. No, the only way was for the files to be leaked by a source of utmost reliability – someone in a position of power who was beyond reproach.

  But finding the right person wasn’t even the difficult part. The files would have to be delivered in person. She couldn’t risk simply emailing them and hope they would be taken seriously. Besides, that would involve retrieving the files from the safe depths of the dark web and sending them across the surface web where they would certainly be tracked and intercepted by monitor AIs before they reached their destination.

  She couldn’t risk getting in touch with her parents herself, so she had asked Hashimi if he could do so as surreptitiously as possible, letting them know she was OK and warning them to go dark. She knew full well that they would have been watched very closely by Savak, but the one thing she was confident of was that her parents were more than capable of disappearing off-grid for a few days. She guessed they would know how to shake off Savak surveillance and head up to the mountains north of the city where they had friends they could rely on to hide them. She had begged Hashimi to share with them only the sketchiest of information – enough for them to take the matter seriously. The less they knew, the safer they would be.

  After a little digging, Hashimi had informed her that Majid had been released, causing fresh waves of relief and guilt to wash through her. Poor Majid. It wouldn’t have taken Savak long to get the truth out of him, or what little he knew of it. And they wouldn’t have needed to use force: a simple chemical relaxant that affected his higher cognitive functions, followed by an fMRI scan, would allow them to read his thoughts like an open book. It was hardly telepathy – all they had to do was to see which parts of his brain lit up in answer to yes/no questions. They’d have learned quickly enough that he was an innocent accomplice who knew nothing about the content of the secret files. She just hoped he would escape serious punishment.

  Now, she hoped, she had only herself to worry about. Almost anyone else would have been picked up within the hour: hooking up to the Cloud for anything as simple as purchasing a bus ticket or a sandwich would instantly reveal their location. It wouldn’t help much staying offline either; the thousands of miniature cameras hidden throughout the infrastructure of the city could locate anyone within seconds.

  But Shireen wasn’t just anyone.

  She would need to keep on the move, and to stay hidden from prying cameras. A simple disguise wouldn’t be enough to hide her – pattern-recognition software running Grover algorithms would sift through a CCTV database of twenty million people going about their daily business throughout the city to find her just by the way she walked.

  No, she needed a squelch jammer, an illegal electronic device that could disrupt the video-feed signal from any cameras close enough to biometrically identify the person possessing it. As a favour to her father and knowing how damaging her information could be for the hated Savak, Hashimi had provided her with his own jammer. But he had warned her that even being constantly on the move was risky – it wouldn’t take long for the trail of signal interference to be traced and extrapolated. The jammer needed to be used sparingly.

  He had persuaded her to get a night’s sleep first and had made up the bed in the back room, then cooked her a late supper.

  The following morning was the closest that Savak had yet come to catching up with her. She was awoken by raised voices at 5 a.m. The café couldn’t be open yet, which could only mean that they had found her already. She didn’t stop to think about how. Scrambling out of bed, she stood in the middle of the room among the stacks of cardboard boxes and tried to make out the conversation outside. Her eyes darted about the room for an escape route. Grabbing her shoes and the rucksack containing the jammer along with the few personal belongings she had with her, she ran for the small back window. It didn’t look locked, but still resisted her attempts to open it. She considered breaking the glass, but finally managed to prise it free of the rust and layers of paint that had kept it closed for what must have been years, and swung it part-way open. She couldn’t make out much in the darkness beyond other than that it gave onto a narrow alleyway.

  The voices outside were growing louder and suddenly the door to the room flew open. Leaping up onto the window sill, she squeezed her waiflike body through the narrow gap and out into the cold early-morning air in one clumsy motion and jumped down into the alleyway.

  She hit the ground running, stumbling over several garbage bags and just managing to stay on her feet, her arms cartwheeling about wildly as she ran, trying to regain her balance. Her surroundings took on a dreamlike quality, but this was no immersive VR game – it was really happening. Pure animal instinct took over and she kept running. The panic she felt made her chest constrict and she found it harder to breathe than the physical exertion of the running would account for. As soon as she had covered several blocks, she stopped to slip on her shoes, then pulled the rucksack off her back, reached in and flicked on the jammer.

  She then continued at a brisk walking pace. She needed to put as much distance as she could between herself and her pursuers.

  The last thing Hashimi had done the previous evening was give her a contact he said might be willing to help get her out of the city, so when she reached a local park, she had found a bench hidden within high shrubbery and sat down to gather her thoughts. She could no longer risk using her wristpad and AR – that would instantly give her location away. Instead, she had to do this the old-fashioned way. She pulled out the small tablet that Hashimi had given her and fired it up. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hide her position for long, so she simply displaced it. It was an old trick – a simple case of electronic ventriloquism: suggesting that she was accessing the Cloud from several kilometres away. For now, the best she could do was keep them at arm’s length and guessing what her next move would be.

  That had been Saturday morning.

  Now, forty-eight hours later, it seemed like a lifetime ago. She had hardly slept since then and was feeling cold, hungry and in desperate need of a shower, but she had so far stayed out of Savak’s reach. And she was at last about to meet the cyb whom Hashimi had recommended and who had thankfully agreed to help her. Her contact was a legend on the dark web and, despite her exhaustion and anxiety, Shireen felt excited to be meeting her. Known only as Mother, she never stayed in one place long and had evaded the authorities for over a decade, so Shireen had no idea whether the meeting would be face-to-face. Contact had been established on Saturday morning but they had exchanged very little information. Although Shireen hadn’t told her about the files, she’d got the impression that Mother knew more than she was letting on. What she had told her was that she needed to get out of the country and across to America. What she hadn’t told her was why.

 
; Shireen had chosen her target carefully, using Hashimi’s tablet to carry out a search of potential candidates around the world. It had to be someone she could entrust with the files, but also someone who fulfilled certain other criteria. A scientific training was vital, or they wouldn’t understand the implications of the satellite data. But it also had to be someone who couldn’t have been part of the cover-up in the first place, someone she might have a half-decent chance of convincing that the files were genuine, who could be then trusted to do the right thing and, most importantly, who would be listened to by the world’s media.

  If this was a worldwide cover-up then she couldn’t go to any one government since she didn’t know who was involved. No, it had to be the United Nations. She had discovered a new UN committee set up to tackle the weakening-field crisis, but it had only two scientists – the rest of its members being politicians. And it hadn’t taken her long to settle on the younger of the two: a British solar physicist by the name of Sarah Maitlin who, until a fortnight ago, had been an anonymous academic working at a research institute in Brazil modelling coronal mass ejections, who had been suddenly plunged into the media spotlight after the Air India plane crash and now seemed to have been recruited onto the UN committee that was examining future threats. The other scientist, a geologist by the name of Aguda, seemed to have the more relevant credentials, but he appeared to have been involved in UN work for several years, which meant he could conceivably also be part of the cover-up. Anyway, Shireen would trust a woman over a man any day. Had she had more time, she was sure she could have come up with a more foolproof plan than simply betting everything on someone she had never met, but this was the best she could do with her limited time and resources.

  Now, two days after establishing contact with Mother, it seemed half the global cyb community already knew Shireen very well. News spreads fast. The dark web was awash with stories about the young Iranian cyb who’d achieved what no one had believed possible: cracking a high-security quantum-encrypted website and gaining access to secret files, with speculation and rumours about their contents growing ever more outlandish.

  For her part, Shireen knew very little about Mother other than that the woman was Turkish in origin and was currently in Tehran – something that Hashimi must have known. The rest was a mix of mythology, rumours and conspiracy theories.

  Mother had agreed to meet her at a secret location – which was on the other side of the vast metropolis, but Shireen had managed to make it there on foot, resting overnight on park benches, mingling with the city’s homeless, always keeping her hood pulled up to hide her face and avoid any prying surveillance cameras.

  She arrived at the address just before dawn. It was an old apartment block on the corner of two quiet roads. Pausing for a moment at the bottom of the steps, she scanned her surroundings. There was no one in sight. The narrow door’s paint was peeling and the large brass knocker had seen better days. Just as she was wondering whether to knock, the door buzzed and she heard a lock click, so she pushed it open and ventured nervously inside.

  The hallway was in semi-darkness and she peered around her. Suddenly a man stepped forward out of the shadows, startling her.

  He was tall and spindly with a thick beard and shaven head. In the dim hall light he looked to be in his late twenties. He spoke softly. ‘You are Shireen?’

  She nodded. ‘Then please follow me. We must not keep Mother waiting.’

  Without waiting for her, the man started up the chipped marble staircase, taking the stairs three at a time, his footsteps echoing around the quiet hallway. Two floors up, at the end of a gloomy corridor, he stopped and unlocked a shabby-looking door.

  She followed him into a sparsely furnished apartment. There were no curtains at the window and the room was lit only by a street lamp outside. In the centre was a flimsy-looking table laden with electronics. The man directed Shireen to a chair next to it. ‘Please, sit down and put on the visor.’ She spotted the VR helmet and suddenly understood what this implied. Of course she would not be meeting Mother physically – how naive of her ever to have thought that. The cyb could be anywhere in the world. She felt an odd mix of disappointment and relief.

  Her guide then turned and left the room without saying any more, closing the door softly behind him.

  Picking up the visor, Shireen sat down on the edge of the chair and placed the helmet carefully over her head. It instantly moulded itself to the shape of her face, blocking out the light from outside and plunging her into darkness. She activated the switch beneath her left ear and her field of vision suddenly lit up. At first, she could only make out a kaleidoscope of colours, but they quickly resolved themselves and a virtual world came into sharp focus. She recognized the rudimentary details in the surrounding landscape. It looked like thousands of other generic virtual reality worlds both on the dark and surface webs and there was something reassuring and comforting about its familiarity.

  In fact, this one looked more basic than most. It was a bright, sunny day and she was standing in the middle of an empty courtyard surrounded by imposing grey buildings that could have represented just about anything, anywhere. A door in the building to her right opened, through which a woman appeared and walked briskly towards her. She was wearing a splendidly colourful long robe, a traditional Turkish entari, with gold buttons done up from the waist to the throat. Below the waist was an equally bright and patterned long skirt covering leather boots. Shireen knew better than to project a person’s avatar onto their real-life persona, but this woman was tall, elegant and handsome-looking – everything Shireen had imagined ‘Mother’ to be.

  The woman smiled and greeted Shireen in perfect Farsi, the software translating whatever language Mother was physically speaking in. ‘Hello, Shireen, I’m Evren Olgun. Well done for making it this far, but you are far from out of the woods yet.’ Shireen didn’t need to be told this. But at least she now stood a fighting chance of completing her task.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to help me. It’s a real honour to meet you, Mother … er … I mean Evren.’

  Evren’s avatar tipped her head back and laughed. ‘Well, Shireen, I am sure you’re smart enough to know that my motives are not purely altruistic. You have achieved something many of our smartest cybs across the world have failed to do – you’ve found a way to break through the tightest quantum encryption security. And, while I am certainly intrigued by whatever is in those files, I know that if everything goes according to plan then I, along with the rest of the world, will know about it soon enough. So, for now, what is of far more interest to me is how you did it.’

  Shireen had guessed all along that the price to pay for getting Mother’s help would be to share with her the details of the Trojan horse software. It made sense that Mother would want to make as much use of the quantum hacking trick as she could before the authorities discovered the weakness in the system Shireen had exposed and closed the door for good. But to do that they would have to catch her first. That was why she hoped she could trust Mother not to double-cross her. It was in her interests to keep Shireen from being captured for as long as possible.

  Evren continued. ‘You must know that we have very little time. After all, it’s not just Savak, or even Interpol, that you should be worrying about. At this moment there are many other special-interest groups and cyber cells trying to track you down too. Word will have quickly spread that you have a way of cracking encrypted secrets and everyone wants to get their hands on it. So, here’s the deal. I will get you out of the country and safely to America if you hand over the code. But it has to happen now.’

  The sudden insistence in Evren’s voice sent another wave of panic through Shireen. What if she told her everything she knew and then was kept prisoner in this room, a sure-fire way to guarantee her not getting caught. But she had no choice now other than to trust the older cyb. What other option did she have?

  A large transparent display screen appeared, hovering in the space between the two avatars. ‘S
o, show me,’ said Evren.

  It took just a few minutes for Shireen to access her Trojan horse software on the virtual screen within the virtual world. Line upon line of code scrolled down the screen as she explained, proudly, what she had done. When she finished, the older woman was silent for a few moments. When she finally spoke, Shireen detected more than an undertone of admiration in her voice, which had taken on an excited fervour.

  ‘This is astonishing! And you can be sure we will put it to good use, and it will help our cause immeasurably. There are too many secrets these days that are being kept from the people.’

  Shireen wondered what Mother would say if she knew the contents of the files she had uncovered – the biggest secret of them all.

  Evren’s voice suddenly softened. ‘You know, you really are a quite remarkable young woman and I’m sorry that you are in this situation. Maybe, if you succeed in getting the files’ contents out, we may one day be able to work together. For now, I must go, as there is much work to be done.’

  ‘Wait! What am I supposed to do now?’

  The point of the deal with Evren had been to receive help in getting to New York to meet Sarah Maitlin. Evren couldn’t just leave her now.

  As if reading her mind, the older cyb said: ‘Don’t worry. Lambros, the young man waiting outside, will give you a small gift from me that will help you get out of the country. You can trust him.’

  Without further explanation, Evren spun round, her robe twirling rather more impressively than it would in the physical world. Shireen watched the woman walk away, and she was suddenly consumed with doubt, and feeling more alone than at any time in her life. She lifted the VR visor off her head and allowed herself a few seconds for her eyes to readjust to the gloomy room.

  She walked to the door, half expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t.

  Lambros was standing just outside and nodded to her. Before she had a chance to say anything, he said, ‘She is quite something, isn’t she?’ The awe in his voice was obvious. ‘Now hold out your wristpad.’