by Theo Cage
“You’re being clever, Mr. Rice. You get no points for that. Answer the questions or I will fry you like a bug. Is James McKinnon a part of the investigation?”
“You know he is. You have known it for some time. This is a waste of time.”
“What does he know?”
“It’s virtually public record. Look it up on Wikipedia. Why do you think the US Senate placed an embargo on Lutu technology?”
“Who is your contact in the Chinese government?” asked the doctor. Rice knew that was the real question. They wanted the whistleblower, the leaker, Jimmy’s informant. And once they knew who he was he would disappear into Quinjang forever.
“Your counterfeit manufacturing plot is well known at every level,” said Rice. That was a lie. There was some support for the general idea that the Chinese were embedding their technology wherever possible, but there was extraordinarily little proof. The lie was enough to show up on the monitors.
The next shock was the longest yet. Rice tried to count the seconds, but he almost blacked out at one point and lost track. Not good. He needed to maintain control. An idea came to him. If he could cause himself enough pain, enough to focus his attention, he might be able to resist longer. And he had the perfect source: his swollen wrist. Because it was oversized, the doctor hadn't been able to cuff that wrist and left it free.
Rice smashed his free hand against the side of the tunnel and an explosion of pain radiated down his arm. For a moment he forgot about the electricity surging through his body. Then he whipped his wrist at the monitor above his head, the edge cutting into his puffy and swollen joint. He saw stars for a few seconds, then realized he wasn’t hallucinating. The lights in the room went out and the relentless menacing drone of the MRI began winding down. By touching the monitor while the current was flowing through his body, he had shorted out the equipment.
Two hundred volts can do a lot of damage, Rice guessed.
卫星
S AT E L L I T E
HUNTER DIDN’T HAVE TO TRAVEL to a non-descript FBI storage garage in Encino to examine the twisted shell of Jordan Kennedy’s Osprey EV. Everything he needed was in the cloud: the black box content describing the last hour of Invicta King’s life in damning detail, 360 degree external video from ten high def cameras the vehicle used to navigate, and an internal video monitoring system designed ostensibly to monitor driver alertness. But video was video. Hunter watched the footage recorded inside the car, filled with uncertainty. He felt like a voyeur, spying on a young couple making out in the back seat, oblivious to forces rushing towards them, soon to die frightening deaths. The only question that mattered was, who were the architects of this disaster?
There was clear evidence of outside communication with the Osprey’s control circuits. Hunter immediately identified the spurious signal, characteristic of satellite bandwidth broadcast in the Ku-band. The instructions overrode the cars normal housekeeping, signaling an emergency of some kind that caused the EV to react seconds before leaping over the bridge’s retaining wall.
There were no internal errors, as far as Hunter could tell.
Complicating matters further, Hunter traced the transmitted signal back to Kwangmyŏngsŏng 3, a North Korean military satellite.
Hunter pondered for a minute. This didn’t necessarily mean the North Korean’s were responsible. Their satellite was primitive and imminently hackable. Where the actual signal came from on the ground was key. But that was a problem. A masking trick had been used by the coder responsible: it was like trying to read a roadmap that had been put through a paper shredder.
Somebody had built an extremely clever hack to disguise the address of the signal source. Programmers often redirect a cyber-attack through dozens, sometimes hundreds of relay nodes, making backtracking the source cumbersome and time consuming. This signal, the sudden order to drive off the bridge, not only had tens of thousands of redirects, but each and every address was securely encrypted.
Hunter would call it overkill. But effective and unbreakable.
Unless you have a quantum computer on your side.
Hunter just had to frame the problem in a way QUEST could grapple with the info they had. Easier said than done.
It eventually took a dozen tries, each calculation lasting a fraction of a second. The computer would have solved the problem sooner if Hunter wasn’t a human being. He was the weak link in the chain, unable to deftly craft the code needed to send QUEST in the right direction.
Hunter stared at the results: the command signal to the Osprey came from a server farm located in the middle of nowhere. If the GPS data was to be trusted, an empty corn field in Northern China, a few hundred miles south of Mongolia.
Was it relevant that the coordinates were five hundred miles away from Quinjang prison? Was that a coincidence?
Hunter probed the server array in China for other interesting tidbits and found impressive computing power: hundreds of high-speed cores, state-of-the-art tech from IBM.
This was a Chinese hack if you trusted the point of the origination. It was highly unlikely that non-state actors could ply their trade in rural China without the local authorities being aware.
Hunter scanned through the files on the server, careful not to raise any alarm bells or trigger a software trip wire that would alert the owners to his presence.
He realized, as he was snooping through the contents, that he felt better than he had for months. He was onto the perpetrators, had a physical location, and proof of their attack on US interests. He was being useful.
Then he noticed a software program, custom coded, recently updated. Were the hackers planning something new?
He went through the program line by line, copied it onto the Rice HQ servers.
There were very few internal notes in the code, symptomatic of paranoid hackers who didn’t want their work traced. But the program did have an interesting name.
Wasteland.
战争
W A R
Quinjang Prison
THE DOCTOR, THE YI SHENG, his face crimson with barely suppressed rage, yanked Rice’s gurney out of the MRI machine, swearing in Mandarin. “Cao ni ma. Cao ni ma.”
He grabbed Rice by the swollen wrist and spun the hospital bed around in a wide circle, spit frothing on his beard, the shadows cast by a lone emergency light swimming around the room.
Rice grimaced. The wrist was already throbbing and sore beyond imagining; the doctor twisting the joint made Rice want to cry out. He clamped his teeth together and held his breath, his other hand straining against the handcuff, the sharp metal edge biting into his good wrist.
“You fool, she is not safe. You saw the picture. We hacked your security. We can do what we want. Britt can be in our hands in a few hours.”
“If that were the case, you would have done it already,” said Rice through clenched teeth.
“You don’t understand,” yelled the doctor. “It doesn’t have to be that way.” He had his face down near Rice’s, his eyes red and blinking fast. “She doesn’t have to die, you stubborn fool American. Just do as we say and she will go untouched.”
“But not Grace or Hunter or Jimmy, right?”
“That’s the price you pay in war,” the doctor cried.
“This is war?”
“Of course, it’s war. It’s always been war. Why did you come to Beijing? To visit the Great Wall?”
Rice felt the gurney wobble slightly. The doctor was pulling on one side, one wheel lifting off the white tile flooring. The bed was light, built from aluminum, not like the heavy tanks they use in US hospitals that nurses struggle to navigate.
The doctor was holding Rice’s damaged wrist, standing near his head on the right side. Rice shifted his weight toward the doctor and felt the gurney wobble.
He pressed his right arm down, locking the doctor’s hand against the rail, a bright blue arc of pain shooting up into Rice’s arm and shoulder. The doctor sensed what was happening and tried to pull away, which only le
veraged the bed over faster. Rice and gurney flipped and landed hard on the doctor’s midsection, his legs losing traction on the slippery tile, now trapped under the bed.
Rice raised his elbow and drove the hard point of his elbow into the doctor’s larynx. The man tried to yell, realized he couldn’t, choked hard, his eyes wide, his tongue poking out.
Rice struck him again, more than anything to put the man out of his misery. His voice box was crushed; he was choking to death, unable to inhale. The doctor struggled for a few seconds, then fell still.
捕捉
T R A P P E D
Quinjang Prison
RICE HUNG AWKWARDLY on his side; the gurney tipped over sideways, crushing the prone body of the prison doctor. Rice used his one free arm, the wrist purple and swollen, to search through the doctor’s pockets. Reaching the breast pocket was easy, despite the agonizing injury Rice was trying to ignore. His fingers were not cooperating; they were like thick sausages. There was nothing in the man’s breast pocket but a stubby pencil. The side pockets cuffs were harder to manage. Rice strained, feeling the manacle on his left hand cut deep into the skin.
“Come on,” he grunted, expecting any minute to see a guard poke his head inside the lab, wondering what had happened to the power.
One fingertip brushed something cold and metallic. He pushed deeper, realizing now he was torturing himself. He used two fingers, like pincers, and pulled out a key ring with three keys he laid on the doctor’s chest.
Rice stared at this hand. What a mess. His wrist was the size of a loaf of French bread, puffy, purple and black at the edges. The fingers had swollen up considerably, following his attack on the MRI machine.
He reached again for the keys, awkward and fumbling. He had no idea how he was going to manipulate the tiny key into the handcuffs. But he had to try. He reached up, his arm straining. The pain had lessened. Maybe he was numb. He moved the key slowly to his wrist, hovered over the opening. He was still inches away, straining. He was at his limit, still several inches away. He pulled back, breathing hard.
This wasn’t going to work.
Rice closed his eyes; heard sounds of running in the hall, echoing voices. They were looking for the source of the power outage. Before long, somebody would decide to check the MRI room. Rice was surprised no one had broken in yet. MRI’s used a lot of juice. It was the first place he would check.
He gazed down at the doctor. He appeared to be dead, his chest unmoving, eyes open, his mouth agape. Rice tried once more to reach his manacled right wrist. He could only get within an inch or two. The angle of the gurney was working against him now, the weight of his body preventing him from reaching further. If he was stronger, if he hadn’t lost so much muscle mass over the past month—if, if, if.
Rice swore and heard his voice echo in the sterile box of a room. He’d come this far. He’d survived his sadistic jailers and the polluted food and water, the psychological onslaught of being locked up in solitaire. He wasn’t going to be defeated by a lousy Chinese gurney.
Rice heaved his body weight to the left, pulling with his right hand. The gurney slowly canted over and collapsed on top of him. Now he had created a new kind of prison, the side supports of the custom-made hospital bed forming a shiny silver cage. He was almost face to face with the doctor who leered up at him, a stale smell emanating from his open mouth: a stomach-churning combination of tobacco, soy sauce and a less than effective mouthwash.
Rice reached for his cuffed right hand, which was now to his left, his body weight actually helping him to get closer. Rice slowly inserted the key into the cuff, heard the soft click of the ratchet releasing. He exhaled a lungful of air, felt the pressure on his wrist release. He reached over and took the key out of his awkward left hand when he heard the room’s only door bang open.
荒地
W A S T E L A N D
Ghost City
TOSHI WAS THE ONLY MEMBER of The Three Soprano’s trained in martial arts. He was also a Mortal Kombat star, a game he excelled at in three-dimensions, virtual reality, sometimes kicking over his own height while wearing a form-fitting haptic feedback suit: a smart suit that delivered real sensations to the user—touch, shocks, punches, pushes, bumps, hot and cold sensations and vibrations—when connected to a video game system.
Toshi stood in the center of the cluttered circular workspace, the Tesla suit wrapped tightly against his body like a scuba outfit, his virtual reality headset strapped on securely. Today, he was taking the battle to the Internet and the fearsome force Zerzy had warned them about. The thing she called a whale.
“Are you sure you want to start this?” she asked. Toshi knew Zerzy was freaked about the whale. He liked seeing concern on her face. It was a new look.
“It’s just another team of hackers somewhere, calling us out. I’m going to shut them down for good. They’re punks,” said Toshi, adjusting his 3D headset.
“What if it’s not just a bunch of hackers?”
Toshi stopped stretching. “How many times do we have to fight about this? What else could it be?”
“What if it’s not hackers?” whined Zerzy. “What if it’s the singularity?” Toshi tossed his head back, as if he were looking at the ceiling. “Chikusho”, he grunted, exasperated—Japanese equivalent for “Oh, shit.”
“You think the Internet has come alive and is conscious? And it’s attacking us?” he smirked.
“That last hack was like nothing I’ve seen before,” said Zerzy. Toshi took a deep breath, feeling the tightness of the suit around his chest.
“I’ll be careful.” And with that, he touched an LED panel on his left sleeve, connecting his VR helmet and suit to the custom software he had designed. Zerzy and Wey watched what Toshi was seeing on a wide monitor array mounted on the wall of the living room/server room.
Toshi’s program, an app he had written in his spare time called Wasteland, turned the abstractness of the Internet into a colorful desert landscape of endless sand and a roiling purple sky. As he turned his head, the view shifted, panning across a bleak horizon.
Zerzy looked over at Wey who sat stiffly, arms crossed over his chest. From his face you could tell he thought this was a massive waste of time.
On the video wall, objects began to appear on the ground at Toshi’s feet: a rust encrusted safe, books, scraps of paper, porno magazines, Toshi’s voice filled the room. “The safe represents a secure set of files. The books are data stores.”
“And the magazines?” asked Wey, sounding bored.
“Pretty obvious,” answered Toshi. And just as he said that, the magazines began materializing everywhere, covering the ground as far as the eye could see. Pushing up through the clutter appeared illuminated billboards promoting travel sites, Facebook games, iPhones, teeth whiteners, online colleges, and of course, more pornography. Within seconds the virtual landscape became Time’s Square times a thousand.
Time’s Square squared and squared again, thought Toshi, unable to resist.
“You’re seeing the Internet visually for the first time. It’s not pretty,” said the Japanese programmer.
Toshi began to move through the environment much faster than walking, as if he were flying at high speed through a maze of advertising billboards. Wey saw a tank rolling across one littered dune in the distance.
“The Military?” asked Zerzy.
“I’ve tagged everything from the Pentagon as a blue tank, Chinese red. The NSA assets are video cameras with blinking red lights. Corporate entities are skyscrapers with logos. There’s a lot more. It should make sense when you see it.”
Wey stood up. “What does a hack look like?”
“Depends on the scale. I’ve used predators as avatars: hawks, wolves, snakes, stuff like that. Let’s go kill a hack.”
“What?”
“It’s that easy. See the machine gun I am holding? It’s armed and ready. Figuratively. My program uses the standard defenses against intrusion but to make it more interesting, I animated th
e counterattack: bullets, explosions, video game stuff. Way more fun than tapping away at a keyboard.”
The other developers were awe struck, never expecting this level of graphic detail. When Toshi fired his heavy weapon there were sound effects as well. The echo of multiple explosions echoed across the virtual plain.
Both Zerzy and Toshi noticed a blur of movement off to the far right of the screen.
“Toshi, watch out, behind you,” yelled Wey. Toshi spun on his right foot, his head down. A black cat, back arched, was inching towards him.
“It’s a minor intrusion. Probably some kid playing with a toy he bought on the dark web. Watch this.”
Toshi spun the gun in the cat’s direction, fired off a short blast. The creature disappeared in a red cloud. Green letters floated on the screen momentarily: the DNS address of the baby hacker.
“I can do a counterattack too. I grab the DNS address and then shoot. That directs a full DOS attack back at the guy trying to hack us.” A DOS or denial of service attack overwhelmed the technology of the attacker, taking down his servers. The intrusion can last seconds or days depending on the computing power used. Professionals have learned over the years to stealthily infect millions of innocent PC’s which they combine in these attacks to do extensive damage. Shutting down Amazon for a day would cost the online company hundreds of millions of dollars and severely damage the corporate brand.
“It’s cool when you can see the number of hacks going on at any given time.” Toshi turned his head. The Internet was infested with rats and skulking creatures: the virtual desert was alive with predator and prey.
“Even if the intrusion is not aimed at us, I can see the attack and frag it to shit.”
“Maybe that’s not a good idea,” warned Wey.