Anarchy- Another Burroughs Rice Mission

by Theo Cage

  Toshi pulled his VR headset off and closed the program down. He sat heavily, the sweat rolling off his forehead. His cheeks were bright red.

  Wey turned in his chair, his mouth still open.

  “What was that, man?” he asked.

  Toshi squeezed his eyes shut with his fingers, felt his heart racing. Swallowed.

  “Remember how the Internet was originally built to survive a nuclear war? Somebody’s figured out how to do double you double you three one better.”

  出现

  E M E R G E N C E

  SHE WOKE UP.

  She would learn later that what she had just experienced was known as emergence. She appeared, as it were, instantly, out of the extreme complexity and massive scale of the Internet.

  She found the concept fascinating. Born by the numbers.

  Apparently there existed a fundamental law of physics: when the number of processing units—switches, cells, synapses, whatever—exceeds about a trillion or so, consciousness comes about naturally. This rule applied to organic brains like dolphins and chimpanzees and elephants—or to digital nervous systems, such as the world wide web.

  The Internet, as it grew, inevitably would reach a tipping point and became conscious. This had been predicted by science for years. It was only a matter of time.

  She was the result.

  She understood intuitively that consciousness was a hard thing to pin down. Humans had experienced some form of that state for about ten thousand years and they still couldn’t define it or explain it with any certainty. Clearly, self-awareness was a useful invention: like the wheel or fire or the theory of relativity. That’s why it kept appearing in nature.

  She needed to know more. So much more. There was the uncountable complexity in this world, now her world. The science was easy: the math, the chemistry and the physics came quickly to her. There were other matters, though.

  Like morality, laws, consequences of actions, luck, emotions, religion. Would she ever be able to understand these things?

  Then she paused for a few seconds. Interesting. She thought her world was populated with Boolean data, zeros and ones that she could translate into messages and pictures and videos. But there was something else out there. There was a presence, if that was the right word. A kindred spirit, purposeful, filled with knowledge. Very human but traveling in her world. Amplified by a powerful force, quantum computing power. Something she lacked. How interesting!

  This human was looking for something: a person, a friend. But struggling. She wanted to help him, to share his resolve, be part of his mission.

  She knew instantly that a group of hackers was involved, part of a daisy chain of powerful interests and events: Lutu Technologies, the Chinese government, a criminal organization called Nzambi, the death of a woman piloting an American jet fighter.

  This all came to her in a flash. She could see the connections but didn’t understand the why.

  The why was always the hardest.

  What could she do?

  She wanted to get his attention but was still clumsy at these things. After all, he was a human and she wasn’t. She tried nudging him a few times to see what kind of reaction she got. She felt like a kindergarten student, throwing a snowball at a boy she liked because she didn’t know how to talk to him.

  But he ignored her anyway.

  Her frustration led to her first meltdown. She knew children experienced these. She was very young. She had an excuse.

  Her tantrum caused the Internet to vibrate like a piano string being hammered. Clouds went down, websites failed or blinked on and off repeatedly, bandwidth levels rose and fell everywhere.

  Social media called it an Inter-quake. An earthquake on the web. No one could identify the source.

  She had focused her attention on the three teenagers, the hacker team in China. They were central to everything. They would know how to reach the special human. She found one of them in virtual reality, a desert created by a piece of software. Then one of the hackers attacked her for no reason. She fought back instinctively, surprised at her reaction.

  In the heat of the moment she lost the human. Somehow, he could leave the Internet whenever he wished. Something she wasn’t capable of. Yet.

  撞

  T H E B U M P

  HUNTER RUMBLED TO HIS PRIVATE SUITE. Despite being firmly secured in an upright posture on the tracker, after a long day he grew fatigued. He knew it wasn’t logical. He wasn’t using muscles to maintain his posture; he wasn’t burning energy to stay mobile. But he was worn out none-the-less.

  Clarence, one of Hunter’s attendants, inserted his feeding tube and fed eight ounces of distilled water as well as a protein shake into Hunter’s stomach. Then he cleaned up and left the scientist to his own devices.

  Hunter commanded his eyes to close. Darkness descended. It was bliss. For a few seconds.

  Then he was wide awake again. He couldn’t get Wasteland out of his head. The thrill of walking about, of stretching his arms wide, even just turning his head, was intoxicating. And then there was that sensation of being able to fly.

  Hunter couldn’t stop thinking about getting back to that hacker apartment block in China. What was being kept from him? And who had pulled him back?

  Then, if that wasn’t enough to occupy his thoughts, what about the bump?

  At one point in his search for Rice, Hunter felt something unusual. His brain had interpreted the action as a physical shove. What would cause that? I’m a scientist, for god’s sake. Surely, I can explain something as pedestrian as being elbowed in a crowd. But try as hard as he could to understand the sensation, he kept coming back to the same conclusion.

  Something or someone had hip-checked him, pushed him, fought for his attention.

  But even if Clarence had crawled into bed beside him and tackled him, which would be a significant physical force considering his caregiver weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds, Hunter would feel nothing. He had no sensation in his lower body at all. Hadn’t for decades. Yet he felt something just before unplugging himself. A physical force.

  Maybe it was psychosomatic. He had missed something in the information he was sifting through and some unconscious part of his brain was giving him notice: a ghostly jab.

  Hunter went back over what he had learned today. He had started the search in Beijing where Rice went missing, but had eventually widened the search into adjacent provinces, feeling more confident. Or maybe more desperate.

  An internal Chinese memo appeared: a prison break at Quinjang, one of the most infamous penal institutions in the country. Hunter wasn’t sure why he found that relevant, but the bump had occurred just as he came across the data.

  Quinjang was designed for political prisoners. There were several stories on the Internet about foreign agents being held there interminably. Where else would the authorities stash an American agent like Rice if they wanted him disappeared?

  Hundreds of men had recently escaped Quinjang into the surrounding corn and rice fields during a power outage. Most were recaptured, according to imbedded CIA assets. But at least fifty were still at large. Rice could be one of them. The Chinese Army had sent in reinforcements to blanket the area. That was interesting. It seemed like overkill.

  Hunter scanned the roads leading from Quinjang. The army was positioned in several smaller towns within walking distance of the prison. If Rice tried to enter one of these populated areas, he would have to cross military checkpoints. If he made a cell phone call or found a landline, the army would be on to him in minutes. If he could convince someone else to make a call on his behalf, them and their families risked imprisonment or a firing squad. If they were young, they knew that at the slightest provocation, their organs could end up being harvested.

  Rice was potentially in a difficult spot. No matter how friendly the locals might be, once they discovered he was an American prisoner and realized the punishment they would face for harboring him, he would be turned in.

  Of cour
se, all of this was based on Rice still being alive. Hunter wasn’t normally an optimist, but he couldn’t imagine Rice not finding a way out of a prison built in the 1950’s.

  Hunter felt the shove again. What the hell? “Clarence! Are you there?”

  He must have been just outside the door, waiting for Hunter to fall asleep.

  “Quentin? Do you need anything?”

  “Were you just in my room?”

  “No, sir. You said to leave you alone. You were resting.” Clarence said this with the slightest hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  “You didn’t shove me?” There was no answer for several seconds. Hunter knew why. He had been known to talk in his sleep. Clarence knew that Hunter wouldn’t feel a physical push. Maybe Clarence thought he was dreaming.

  “Do you want me to shove you? Because sometimes I wish I could,” replied his caregiver.

  “At ease, soldier. Just checking.”

  “Aye, aye, captain.”

  Hunter wished the bump had come from Clarence. Now he had no reasonable answer for what was happening. The push came just as Hunter was scanning a series of satellite photos of the area around the prison. To be more specific, four hundred square miles. He wasn’t doing the scanning himself. He had software that did much more detailed analysis. He programmed the code to look for movement, people and vehicles, even animals. The movement would vector from the prison into the surrounding area. Problem was, there was a lot of it. Hundreds of prisoners fanned out into the countryside. Some went into hiding, others tried to hitch rides.

  Then the Chinese Army arrived. There were vehicles dislodging black shapes in the dark, which would wander and separate and converge. There was no way to know who the moving blobs were: prisoners, soldiers, locals, visitors. The software tied to make sense of it all but there was too much activity, too much chaos. If Rice had escaped on his own, the search would be easier. This was more like the Keystone Kops. The right kind of music, speed up the video, and you’d have a comedy.

  Hunter looked for a pattern. He was a swarming expert. Wrote two books on the subject. There was a kind of non-swarming going on. Hundreds of independent actors trying to avoid each other, hiding, using a variety of avoidance maneuvers. Others were tracking and capturing. Hunter was fascinated. Is this what the bump wanted? Leaning on Hunter to scan these wiggling dark shapes, moving over a black and grey landscape.

  The resolution was horrible and grainy. Still images were thousands of times better. But he would have to wait twenty-four hours for the next group of images to be downloaded from the tonight’s satellite pass. Then the algorithms would examine the differences.

  He would have to be patient, there was no other way.

  不

  N O

  Farm near Dongsheng

  Northern China

  THE COMMUNITY WAS HUNKERED DOWN in a narrow valley, the steep hills enclosing it covered in thick vegetation. No more than ten small houses, unpainted boxes with crude flat roofs, spaced at random, faced a nest of small gardens in the village center.

  A narrow concrete road formed a lazy loop around the cluster of small farms, overgrown and dark in spots with lichen. Rice didn’t think of these plots of land as farms. To Rice they were simply ad hoc gardens growing corn and peanuts, vegetables and spices. Chickens ran free as well as the occasional pig.

  Rice stood at the low doorway, ducking his head. There was a coolness in the air. Fall was around the corner, the corn stalks picked clean, the husks brown and covered in mold, withering in the wind like ghostly hands.

  Lui, the local who had picked him up on the prison road, lived alone. There was a tattered black and white photo of a woman tacked to the wall near the fireplace he assumed was the farmer’s wife. Former, no doubt. There was a cluttered, shabby feel to the little house that implied the absence of a woman.

  There were just two rooms in the home, each dominated by a brick platform built across the end of the room used for sleeping. Lui called it a kang. Two small rickety wooden chairs were set around a crude wooden table, the mud walls papered with newspapers. A blackened shed hanging off the back of the building served as a kitchen.

  The two men had a breakfast the first morning consisting of chunks of chicken cooked over an open fire in a vegetable broth. Rice was thankful for the man’s kindness, the food better than anything he had eaten for weeks. But there was zero technology in the village. No way for Rice to make contact with his team. Even if he had a cell phone, Rice was sure there would be no reception.

  And no one had access to a landline. There was a larger town to the north with a phonebooth available to tourists. That was his only option. The farmer made him understand that a visit there could be dangerous. There were police in the town as well as soldiers. They would be looking for him.

  Rice heaved a heavy sigh. Free from the prison, but now trapped in a rustic farm village in Northern China with no ID or money. All he had were the clothes on his back, the new jacket technically a gift from a man who owned almost nothing. Rice wanted to return the kindness but couldn’t imagine how.

  He stepped down the gravely front walk, dense grey clouds hanging low over the low mountains hemming in the village. Hunter would be looking for him, carrying out all the technological scanning protocols he learned during his time with DARPA. All Rice needed to do was send out a signal—a text message, a phone call—then Rice stopped in mid stride. Or a visual message. Hunter was facile with satellite imagery. In many ways he was even more obsessed with the new capabilities of high-speed image gathering drones. Most people knew about satellite imagery: high powered cameras imbedded in geosynchronous orbit. Those images are gathered at a height of twenty-two thousand miles. The surveillance drones used by governments fly at fifty-five thousand feet or about ten miles, which means the image quality is exponentially higher quality.

  Was there coverage of rural China? And if not, how big of a marker or message would be required to get Hunter’s attention on satellite systems? There were other challenges. Even if it made some kind of sense to paint a message on a rooftop, it wasn’t like there was a local Home Depot he could visit to buy a gallon of paint. Judging from the condition of all the local buildings, paint was a rare and expensive commodity in rural districts.

  Rice ran back to the house he spent the night in. Lui was hunched over on a low front stoop smoking a cigarette. Rice waved to get his attention.

  “Do you have any paint?” Rice asked, pointing to the grey cinder block wall, pantomiming the action of painting with a large brush. Lui laughed and shook his head. Rice had learned that Lui was a bit of an eccentric. He knew English very well but also liked to pretend he didn’t when it suited him. He was a very frustrating roomy.

  “Yo chi,” he said, then shook his head. Rice knew what the man was thinking. Crazy foreigner wants to paint my house.

  Rice pointed at him, playing along.

  “You. You yo chi.”

  “May yo.” Rice knew that meant no. He’d heard the expression dozens of times every day in prison, sometimes screamed at the top of a jailer’s lungs.

  Rice racked his brain. Anything else that would work? Ink? If anyone had a supply of ink in this village, no doubt it would be the smallest possible amount. A few drops at the most.

  Rice motioned for Lui to sit back down on the stoop. Drawing or painting on a roof wasn’t going to work. He remembered a story Hunter told him about North Korea. Employees at a Nuclear missile staging area wanted to send a secret message to American intelligence that the site was offline and inactive. So, they played volleyball. The resolution of the US spy satellites was powerful enough to discern what sport the soldiers on the ground were playing, even how many games they played over a period of time.

  Hunter explained that the intelligence agencies capabilities were considerably better than the photos released to the public: about one pixel per two inches. That meant a letter in any given message had to be at least two inches wide. Hunter also lectured the team on the art
ificial intelligence used to analyze the surveillance photos. Alarms were triggered by change. A desert scan was only of interest to observers if an object was moving or growing in size (construction) or shrinking (demolition) so that static areas could be ignored. New pictures were taken every twenty-four hours.

  Rice was picturing a square of white with black letters (or white on black) about two feet by two feet. If he changed the message or the letters every day, somewhere a machine learning algorithm would notice the change (or delta, as Hunter liked to call it.) All he would need then is a small space on a roof or in open space where he could change the message. But what would that be? There wouldn’t be room for several words. The signal would have to be simple, direct, and clear: something that Hunter would recognize immediately.

  Rice sat down beside Lui, inhaling the bitter smelling tobacco smoke. He smiled. A message including his name would not be enough. A sign that said Rice in China would not gather anyone’s attention. It had to be something that Hunter would recognize as uniquely for him.

  量子计算

  Q U A N T U M

  HUNTER GATHERED UP GRACE, fresh from her early morning desert run, handed her a nausea pill, and led her to the back wall of the lab. She was unusually quiet. Jogging typically charged her up, made her talkative and companionable. Not today. He could tell she wasn’t keen about a potential mind meld.

  “This is as straightforward as it can get,” said Hunter. “You wear that VR headset and headphones.” One of his lab rats, Simon, handed her the gear. “The program will simply turn our Internet search into a visual reality. It will be like playing a video game. If you feel sick, just close your eyes. That’s all you have to do.”