by Theo Cage
“Which is interesting because Rice has been mostly uninvolved with the project right from the beginning.”
“Are you and Jimmy and the State department correct? About the technological infiltration by Lutu?”
“Absolutely.”
One of the researchers glanced at his monitor. “QUEST is ready and online. All data feeding into your implant will go through the program we have running on the Quantum computer first.”
“Are you ready, Mr. Hunter?” asked the second researcher.
Hunter didn’t respond right away. His eyes were open and unblinking. A sign of serious distraction.
“Let’s do this,” responded Hunter. Grace frowned. He was brilliant, but he was also by nature overconfident. Plugging your brain into an electronic firehose was a gigantic risk.
One of the researchers tapped his keyboard once and looked over. Grace expected a noise, flashing lights, a reaction. There was nothing. Just the suspended breathing of everyone in the room.
“Do you feel anything?” asked Grace.
She patted his artificial hand. He curled his black magnesium fingers. Then his hand spasmed. She knew then that Hunter had entered a different world. And wondered if he would come back the same person he was.
妖怪
B O G I E
High above the Florida Keys
THE F-35 LIGHTNING was wings up over the Gulf of Mexico at eight hundred hours, Staff Sargent Lacy Drudge on the stick. This was her third test flight with the new attack jet, one hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of pure aggression, bristling with enough processing power to run a small city.
Drudge felt like a bystander more than the pilot. The ship was clearly smarter than her, reacted more quickly, and was frankly better looking. She enjoyed the ride, nonetheless. This was what she was born to do: rocket across the ocean at twelve-hundred miles an hour. She didn’t care if the ship knew more than she did. It was an honor just to be buckled in beside her.
The flight was routine: part of a test protocol and debugging routine carried out on all new military assets. So far, the Lightning had completed all tasks flawlessly, testimony to the engineers, designers and programmers who had spent a decade perfecting the new fighter.
Flying this jet was so natural, so easy, she thought. She quickly achieved ‘sensor fusion’; she became one with the plane. In her helmet, which was laser scanned to match the shape and size of her head, was a state-of-the-art virtual display system. The F-35 had six high-def video cameras mounted on the wings and fuselage giving her a 360-degree view of the operating theatre. When she looked down, she didn’t see the base of the cockpit, she saw the earth below, like the jet was invisible. When she rotated her head, the computers not only gave her a complete 3D view of the surroundings, they overlaid everything of importance onto her 3D display: sensors on enemy equipment and radar, navigation and altitude info, an electro-optical targeting system for all mounted guns and missiles. She could aim, lock on and fire any weapon just by turning her head. She was in ‘see and not be seen’ mode, piloting the stealthiest tool in the Air Force’s military shed.
Two hundred miles out of Eglin AFB in Florida, at an altitude of 11,000 feet, her optical targeting system visually announced a bogie at three o’clock. Sargent Drudge turned her head to gain more information and an audible alarm, announcing several more, rang in her ears.
Laid out behind her, according to the F-35’s artificial intelligence, were four fifth-generation Soviet Sukhoi Su-57 fighters, all gaining on her. Impossible. She was flying in US Airspace. Soviet fighters above the Florida Keys would launch Defcon four. Something was clearly Charlie Foxtrot. Totally fucked up.
“Come in base,” Drudge spoke into her comms, breathing evenly, but ready for anything. “Top Gun 5-5-4-2. Do you see what I see?” said Drudge.
“Say again, 5-5-4-2?” The tower responded.
“Four bogies, repeat, 4 bogies on my six. Six angels.” Angels referred to elevation. Six angels meant six thousand feet. There was a delay before the tower at Elgin responded.
“Repeat 5-5-4-2.” Drudge gave an update on the four enemy fighters closing in.
“No confirmation on our readout, 5-5-4-2. Are you having tech diffs?” Drudge blinked. Technical difficulties? She’d heard stories about these kinds of snafus but never experienced anything like this before.
“Bogeys jinking to the north, Angels 5000 in descent. Taking her down. 49 miles now. I’m going down to three. 30% offset now. Bogeys jinking back into me again. Speed 500.”
“Roger. Nothing on our end 5-5-4-2. Please stand down.”
She waited for more information. Base was trying to make a confirmation but clearly struggling. “Closeout. Weapons hold,” she confirmed. Then “Bogies. Noses on. Thirty-five miles. Taking another offset. Starboard to starboard.”
“Do you have visual, 5-5-4-2?” Visual was the problem. Most pilots wouldn’t be able to see an enemy fighter inside of a few miles. The challenge with the F-35 was the 3D visual system inside the pilot’s helmet painted representational imagery on the wrap around display visor. So, Sargent Lacy could see four enemy gunships, she just didn’t know if they were real. They seemed damned real.
“Bogies at 4700 feet heading 3-4-zero. Inside twenty miles. Centering up the T. Now eighteen miles on the T.”
“No confirmation, 5-5-4-2, our radar indicates nothing on your six for fifty miles.”
“Bogies nose on fifteen miles, tower. Taking another offset. Starboard to starboard.” Drudge was maneuvering out of the line of flight of the four enemy aircraft.
“5-5-4-2. We see no bogies. Repeat. No bogies.”
Drudge looked down into the ocean thousands of feet below. The sky was blue, the sun was behind her shoulder. The tower couldn't see anything on her tail, yet one hundred million dollars of stealth fighter was reporting a Russian airborne attack just south of Miami. She normally wouldn’t depend so much on ground support, but this was a training run. Could they be testing her?
“Call the coneheads,” she radioed. “The radar is tits up.” Time to knock it off and cease maneuvers, she thought.
Drudge was banking to the right when the jet did something she had never experienced in her long flight career. The entire ship went dark. The impressive wrap around multi-colored display panel just blanked out, went black. The two Rolls-Royce engines flamed out together and the cockpit went silent. Modern jets weren’t gliders. They were angular hunks of composites and aluminum with flight characteristics wholly dependent on ten thousand horsepower of burning jet fuel plasma. Without thrust, the unpowered F-35 shortly becomes five tons of tumbling, uncontrollable space junk.
“This is 5-5-4-2. I have no power up.” The ship didn’t respond. She felt the nose of the jet began a slow decline. “I have no power. Repeat. Zero power.”
“I hear you 5-5-4-2. Engage reboot sequence. If no go, we can take over from here.”
Drudge reverted instantly to her simulator training. A reboot involved a power down, using a bridged toggle with a warning voice command. Since the ship was already down, she reversed the procedure to power up. She held her breath. The ship didn’t respond. The nose of the jet continued to drop.
“Reboot is no go, base. Repeat. No go. Request override.”
“Overriding now.” There was a long pause, the silence in the cabin deafening. The ship was slowly yawing to the right as the airspeed dropped.
“5-5-4-2. Advise you ready ejection system.”
“Roger base. Hate to let this bird go.”
“Not your fault, Captain. See you on the ground.”
Drudge reached down to the side of her chair and released the safety bar on the eject system. The ship was almost vertical now, on the verge of a roll that would turn into a high-speed spin making ejection extremely dangerous or impossible.
She pressed the activator.
No response.
Even the explosive bolt system that released the canopy and shot the pilot and her chair out
into space, was nonresponsive. As Drudge thought this, the thin atmosphere surrounding the jet grabbed the leading edge of the wings, flipping the jet over into a violent spin. The G forces caused Drudge to black out within a few seconds, gravity did the rest when the falling jet keened into the choppy swells of the Atlantic Ocean in a fiery ball of expanding superheated jet fuel.
洪流
T O R R E N T
RICE HQ
HUNTER WAS SWEPT ALONG by a torrent of freezing water, tumbling through an icy maelstrom, his arms and legs swinging wildly. Was he lost in a nightmare?
His tracker was gone, the computers that kept him alive and mobile torn from his body. He tried to focus, tried to understand how he had suddenly found himself tossed around in an underwater storm: a flash flood of water so dense it was like cold opaque syrup.
He struggled to breathe and for some reason breath finally came to him. He gasped. The tube that supplied him oxygen was still attached. How was that possible? He tried to right himself, but the pressure was unrelenting, sucking at him, driving him down into even darker depths.
It came to him then—he had opened the tap, had allowed the Internet data feed to pour unhindered into his consciousness: the damned dark web. He was drowning in input. What made him think he could handle this onslaught? His arrogance, of course. It had got him into trouble before. Maybe more than a few times.
He took another anxious lungful of air and closed his eyes. There had to be a way to deal with this, he thought, aware that no human had ever faced this challenge before.
He had to separate the junk from the information he could use, and fast. Tune out the propaganda, the conspiracy theories, the pornography, the hate, the relentless flood of social media pablum, a sticky mix of uncountable selfies and whining and mindless chatter.
He gritted his teeth, something he had been unable to do since he was a teenager, his jaw muscles atrophied and unplugged by his nerve condition. He wanted to smile. It felt so good clamping down, a simple pleasure restored if only in his subconscious.
The torrent began to subside.
He needed to find real information, actual data, something he knew was available but buried in a spurious tsunami of useless garbage.
He sensed something then, a barely invisible web woven through the miasma: solid, flexible. Then he recognized it for what it was: geographical data points. Some GPS based, others linked to location services—cell phones reporting positioning, photographic satellites tying in route data to other kinds of hard information. Hunter caught glimpse then of vehicles moving across the grid, crawling from point to point. And there was other data blinking in and out of focus: license numbers and personal data, phone numbers, credit card balances.
Hunter was aghast. He had no idea that all this information would be so readily available. But it was still useless to him. There was no rhyme or reason to what came tracking across his consciousness. He sensed much of the video imagery came from the UK, which made sense. There were hundreds of thousands of security cameras in London alone. Then he recognized the Washington monument, like the flash of a camera had caught the memorial in a second's brilliance. Then an African landscape, a Russian streetscape, a Tokyo suburb from the sky.
His stomach lurched and he choked.
Hunter tried to talk, tried to recapture the link with his voice system he had lost when the data wave rolled over him and pounded him senseless.
“Too much,” was all he could gasp. And it was that gasping sound that came out of the speaker attached to his tracker, his computer’s AI picking up his disorientation.
“Too much what? What can we do?” asked one of the medical aides.
Too much what, indeed, he thought. Too much awareness. Too much knowledge. He never thought he would hear himself say that. How could there be too much information for a data junkie like Hunter? He’d obviously found what he had spent his whole life looking for. And he was drowning in it.
混沌
C H A O S
Richard Yang
President, Lutu Technology
Beijing
ONE FLEA CAN DRIVE AN ELEPHANT insane. That phrase kept rolling about in Richard Yang’s highly structured brain. He had repeated that lament a hundred times over the past week. In this case, he was the elephant: Lutu Technology was a twenty-billion-dollar company with over one hundred thousand employees worldwide. And the flea was a small security firm out of the US.
The telecom company had been a juggernaut over the last five years, absorbing technology companies all over the globe, growing prodigiously. There was only one Chinese company bigger in revenues: The Bank of China, unashamedly piloted by the Chinese government. Lutu was less transparent. Richard himself was an Army Engineer and hundreds of company execs were ex-military. They pretended to be a public organization, trading on the Chinese stock exchange. But the reality was far more complex and nuanced.
A country's security was totally dependent on technology—who built the networks, the phone lines, the switches and routers that controlled communications and data flow. Power systems were managed over the Internet today, nuclear plants, military installations, air traffic control, bank transfers, the stock markets.
China realized in the nineteen eighties they needed to have absolute control over these sensitive networks. Most of the rest of the world seemed blissfully unaware: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them. Lutu was at the forefront of a strategy to dominate communications globally.
The tactic wasn’t that complicated. First, buy a small telecom company or cell phone manufacturer, then convert the hardware to Lutu technology. Finally, sell the products below market price and destroy the competition.
Norcom was a perfect example. The phone builder in Europe was losing money to competitors like Apple and Samsung. Richard picked up the struggling phone company for two hundred million dollars and immediately moved assembly to a factory in Shenzhen. The phones were reengineered to use a family of integrated circuits designed by Lutu engineers. These chips could be reprogrammed on the fly via the 4G phone signals used to power the phones. Within a few years, by engineering features on the phones and drastically lowering the price, Lutu sold over ten million into European markets.
Every single Lutu phone had the capability to not only record conversations taking place over the phone and transmit the file to a Lutu data center but had the capability to steal data from other competitor's phones in close proximity via Bluetooth. The data center could also steal passwords and pin numbers from the phones, disable them at will, even cause the built-in lithium battery to overheat and explode.
Richard liked to joke he had converted five million Lutu cell phones into stylish hand grenades. And he controlled the detonator.
In the past decade Lutu had purchased and merged with over a dozen cell phone companies. The number of hand grenades in his control now exceeded fifty million.
Lutu was busy on other fronts: purchasing technology companies in countries like France, Canada and the UK gave Richard access to the US military via their allies' supply channel.
The newly manufactured F-35 stealth jet utilized video display modules supplied by a successful bidder in Ontario, Canada. These modules contained graphics chips supplied by a small startup in Wales that were manufactured in an electronics factory in Huaqiangbei. These chips were made and designed by Lutu, then labelled as made in Britain. The chips contained a sophisticated virus that could be activated by satellite signals from one of dozens of Lutu communications satellites used to manage Internet traffic globally.
Canadian and United Nations military transport planes contained counterfeited Lutu chips, as did US drones, missiles, electrical transmission control centers, internet hubs and routers, cars manufactured in Germany and Japan weaponized airbags, passenger jets, driverless transport trucks—the list was endless.
Thus, the expression: A flea can drive an elephant insane. These chips, no bigger than a fingernail could drive an oil tanker aground, bring down
a 747, accidentally launch a Polaris nuclear missile.
But a sword always has two edges.
Security services in the United States were suspicious but lacked solid proof. The embargo by the US Senate was a nuisance, nothing more. But there were other fleas of greater concern.
The other group that aggrieved him even more was Hunter & Rice, a small security operation out of Phoenix led by a former CIA operative named Burroughs Rice. They had been keeping a very close eye on Lutu for years, chipping away at efforts to compromise US politicians.
Richard had their leader, the annoying agent called Rice, locked up in a government prison in Quinjang. Breaking him was proving difficult. But they had time on their side.
“Yè cháng mèng duō - the longer the night, the more dreams there will be.”
Richard had another weapon at his disposal: a team of brilliant young hackers. They were deployed in a secret location and wreaking havoc on his enemies. He called them The Three Sopranos, a private joke of his. As fully capable of murder as the famous American TV series family, yet so young, they sounded like children on the phone. Children who could destroy the world. Children with the sweet voices of sopranos.
严刑
T O R T U R E
Quinjang Prison
CIA AGENTS TRAIN FOR THIS SORT OF THING, thought Rice, trying to recall the course, the facilitator, even a few words of the written material. Not that he thought it would be helpful. ‘Surviving Imprisonment 101’ was long forgotten.
He did remember that most of the presentation was about psychology. And that was exactly why most of the content escaped him now. When he was younger, he had zero interest in talk about PTSD or depression or dealing with your personal demons. That was all voodoo and witchcraft in his view. A prison was a challenge involving walls and locks and guards and weapons. Where did the subconscious fit in?