by Theo Cage
Grace took the headset from the researcher in the white lab coat, examining the strap and the cable running to a black box mounted on the wall rack behind her.
“That’s just a computer,” Hunter said, his voice flat and atonal. Hunter thought that mode of speaking calmed people. It wasn’t working.
“For Rice,” she mumbled, finally pulling the gear over her shaved head. Her perfectly shaped skull, thought Hunter. He wished he could run his hands over it. If he had hands. An unspoken fantasy of his.
When they were both plugged in, Hunter got Simon to flip the system on. That was his fail safe now. The researcher was told to stay close. If anything happened to cause them to lose control of the situation, Simon was to pull the plug and bring them back to reality.
Hunter heard Grace gasp. He expected that. They were standing on an empty boulevard in the strangely silent and nameless empty Chinese city, a cloudy sky glowering down on them.
“Hunter, this is amazing. This is so real.” She turned, raised her hands.
“I know.”
“Can I walk around?” she asked.
“Sure, Simon will make sure you don’t walk into anything in the lab. We have sufficient room.”
Grace lowered herself to the ground and ran her hands over the crushed rock sidewalk. “It’s strange. I can feel resistance but not the texture.”
“We’re working on that.”
“What do you mean working.”
“QUEST is improving the program, making it more detailed, smoothing out the visuals. It’s an ongoing process. But so is someone else.”
Grace jumped up to a standing position, swivelled her head around to scan the area. “Someone else? That sounds ominous.”
“This has become a collaboration of sorts,“ explained Hunter. “It’s just that we don’t know who exactly is adding the code. Some of the changes are ours, some from an unknown source.”
Grace stood up. “And you think this is a good idea? What if this other coder decides to attack you. Couldn’t you have programmed a weapon for me? I thought that was pretty standard kit in a video game.”
“If things go wonky, Simon turns the switch off and we’re back in the lab. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“That simple?”
“Enjoy the experience, Grace. This is unlike anything a human being has seen before. The detail and control is unprecedented. You’ve got a billion-dollar quantum computer taking you on the world’s best rollercoaster ride.”
“That’s great. Too bad I don’t like rollercoaster rides.”
Hunter took her hand in his, something else he had always wanted to do. They walked together up to the apartment building.
“Is this a real city?” she asked.
“Yes, all the detail is coming from video surveillance and satellite and drone footage. We’re in Northern China. The apartment block right there? That’s where the Osprey hack originated.”
“Is it your plan to go inside?” she asked.
“If we can.”
“Why not? Let’s just take the stairs and surprise the hacker’s ass.”
“It depends. If there is no data about the inside, maps or photos or security footage, there will be no there to go there to.”
“Screw that.” Grace leapt up and raced towards the apartment. Hunter caught up easily, grabbed her arm.
“There are three hackers, not one. And another person I haven’t identified yet.”
She turned to him. “How do you know any of that?”
“I just do. It’s the interface, the quantum computer, my brain adjusting to the steady flow of data. There’s a Russian hacker, a Japanese coder and a Chinese national with expertise in security and encryption: three young people with a long rap sheet of cyber related terrorism. And an older woman, maybe their supervisor.”
“Hunter! Are you saying you don’t know why you know this?”
“It’s the quantum effect. This stuff just pours in through the implant. Some of it sticks. That’s the best way to describe what’s happening to me. It’s pretty cool, actually.”
“Cool?”
Hunter ignored the comment. “Here’s what I know. The hacker team’s last gig was to hold the Missouri government for ransom, shutting down all state-owned websites and online operations for days. They released files and control back to each department only after receiving five hundred thousand dollars in crypto currency.”
“And they work for the Chinese government?”
“That’s not as clear. But makes sense, though. Why else would they be here?”
“Well, are we going in?”
At that moment, Hunter felt another shove from behind. He spun on his foot. Nothing there. Again. What the hell?
Then he looked up and froze. Floating above the apartment, hundreds of feet in the air, was a young man. He took Grace’s arm and pointed up.
“Can he see us?” she asked.
“No.” Hunter wasn’t sure how he knew that. But he felt certain he was able to block their presence from the hacker suspended in the air. A simple software adjustment he could do in his sleep. “That’s one of the three.”
“What the hell is he doing floating in the air like Chris Angel?”
“He wrote the software we are using: Wasteland. He can go anywhere in virtual reality: Up, down, underground, fly. Goes with the territory. His name is Toshi.”
“He’s checking out his perimeter,” commented Grace, clearly fascinated by this world.
“I think you’re right.” Hunter watched the teenager move through the air like a wraith. He was sure the hairs were standing up on his neck. He just didn’t have the nerve endings to feel them.
“We’ve got to shut them down,” said Grace. “Do they know where Rice is?”
“If they even know who he is. Or care.”
“Do you? Know where he is?”
“I have a theory.”
“You’ve always got a theory.” Hunter’s avatar smiled. Grace looked up at him, surprised. “I’ve never seen you smile before.”
“What do you think?”
“I could get used to it,” she said.
“Let’s go back to the lab. There’s data I want you to see, last night’s satellite pass. Then we’ll come back here and clean house.”
通讯
M E S S A G E
Lui’s Hut
RICE RUMMAGED THROUGH the detritus stored and lying loose in Lui’s backyard. He found a sheet of thin white plywood close to the size he needed. On the front were a few truncated symbols of Chinese products: a local toothpaste called Darli, a cola drink called Tingyi. The back of the board was empty.
Rice climbed up on the roof of the farmer’s humble little shack. The roof surface was cement, roughly poured, apparently finished with a straw broom when it was still wet. Probably fifty years ago. Rice positioned the plywood on the flat surface. He stood back. This was his message board. He had no confidence this would work. It was the longest of long shots. He could try a larger surface, use more symbols or letters, but the more obvious the information, the more likely Chinese Intelligence would see the message first.
Rice had to communicate directly to Hunter with some specialized esoteric code that would completely escape Chinese surveillance. And the Chinese were very advanced in that area; a thousand years using complex symbols for communication made them world-class code breakers.
Rice crawled back down onto the rocky ground and began collecting rocks. He chose the darkest, of uniform size and shape. He wrapped them in his prison shirt and bundled them up to the roof. He stared at the plywood sheet.
A message to Hunter that no one else would understand. A message brief enough that he could complete the code in three or four days? Any longer and he was sure the army would be here. It was just a matter of time.
He laid the rocks out on the rough surface of the roof.
Hunter! I’m here. Come and get me. Rice rubbed his beard. What could be simpler? It was so tempting. How long
would it take for the Chinese to figure it out? Maybe hours. They might be doing low level photo reconnaissance with drones right now, looking for escaped prisoner. Just being on this roof might alert the army to suspicious behavior.
Rice took the stones and arranged them carefully on the board, stood back, readjusted several. The width of each line formed by the stones needed to be at least two inches in width to be identified as a separate stroke by the satellite cameras. Any wider was wasteful. Any narrower was invisible.
When Rice was satisfied with his artwork, he crawled down off the roof and returned to the front yard.
Lui was gone. Hopefully, to visit a neighbor, not walk into the closest town to notify the police or the local head of the Communist party that he was harboring an American prison escapee.
家
R O O F
Lui’s hut
RICE CRAWLED UP ON THE ROOF before dawn and moved his stone message around under the light of the waning moon. This time he had to be patient. The first image was simple, essentially a vertical line. The second was more complex. He was no artist. He took his time, added more stones, sliding them around on the board. He had no talent with design and was growing certain that this effort was a complete waste of time. But there were no other options.
He was surrounded; he needed help.
Last night Lui found a way to make him understand that the people’s army was everywhere. He had taken the three-wheeled Mazda to the town of Nanguanyuan. He saw a lot of military activity, soldiers scrambling around like ants on a broken mound. Eventually they would find their way north to the village.
Lui took Rice on a walk, showed him the pathways up into the mountains. They visited a local cave where Rice would need to hide if the soldiers came. Many of the farmers in the area knew about him now, assumed he was a tourist. Once the army explained who Rice was, they would no longer be happy to have hm around. Any escape would be brief. There simply was no place to go and the locals would be too afraid to provide shelter or food.
Rice stood back and examined his handiwork. It was the best he could do with rocks and a piece of surplus plywood.
His message was specifically designed for Hunter. The software he used to analyze satellite imagery compared the photos of one day compared to another. Surveillance analysts looked for changes: a truck that moved, a building modified, troop movements. Assume a series of high-resolution photos taken every day at noon. Less detailed motion capture was possible if the user knew a specific time and location, but Hunter didn’t have that intel. He would be scanning a large area, far too vast for human analysis. The software would identify changes from day-to-day and alert agents trained in reading geospatial data.
If Rice was successful, which was a stretch, his changing message board would trigger Hunter’s software. But it would also alert Chinese surveillance technology. Hopefully, the Chinese would see nothing of interest. Hunter, on the other hand, would instantly recognize Rice was signaling him, which would give him a location for an exfiltration. And rescue.
卫星
S A T E L L I T E
GRACE WAS KEYED UP, ready for a fight, her pupils dilated, her fists like knotted rope by her side.
“Why did you pull us out of there?” she asked Hunter. “We were so close.” They were back in the lab Simon checking out Hunter’s rig. She had the VR goggles pulled down and hanging around her neck.
“We can go back in a matter of seconds,” said Hunter. “And we will. The overnights are just coming in. I wanted you to see them.”
“The spy satellite photos?” Grace didn’t look happy. She had seen Hunter pour over those types of images, sometimes for hours: millions of black and grey pixels signifying nothing to her. It made her eyes bleed just thinking about it. Hunter earned access to the sat technology through DARPA. Another of his many hobbies.
“There was an image I picked up in an area called Liaoning province,” he said. “The area used to be called Manchuria in northern China. Near a village called Nanguanyuan.”
“What kind of image?” asked Grace.
“I’ll show you.” Hunter brought up a graphic on a large screen monitor in the lab, a black and white photo of low mountains, ridges and narrow roads.
“This was yesterday’s sat photo. An algorithm I wrote pulled this out of hundreds of these images. We would never find this the old-fashioned way.”
“Which is?”
“NASA and the US military use something called image destriping to eliminate large masses of land data where there are no significant daily changes. But even with neural networks and AI today there is just too much information to absorb. Years ago, intel services had thousands of people staring at photos with magnifying lenses looking for troop movements. Now it’s all about computer power.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Right by that cluster of small huts. I’ll zoom in.”
Grace leaned into the monitor. She could make out three small buildings with flat roofs. As Hunter slowly enlarged the picture, she could see what looked like a small fuzzy square white space on one of the roofs. On the surface of the board were dark grey dots formed into the rough shape of a line.
“Pretty amateurish drawing,” she said. “And that means what?”
“Here. Watch this,” he said. The screen fluttered then zoomed in again until the white square filled the monitor. The line turned into a crude shape, then back to the line again, then the crude shape. Without flipping the images back and forth, the two alternating shapes were meaningless. But animated, like a primitive cartoon, the intent of the designer was clear.
“It’s a butterfly,” she exclaimed. “Someone is animating a butterfly flapping it’s wings?”
“And it’s exactly the right size. Anything even a tiny bit smaller would not have registered on the photos. Whoever did this, knew what they were were doing. They even knew the pixel count for a US K-class military satellite.”
“But what were they doing?”
“The book I’m working on right now? Remember the cover? It’s a photo of a morpho peleides, a Blue Morpho, one of the largest butterflies in the world. Rice knows I’ve been obsessed with butterflies for the past year. He couldn’t put out a message that the Chinese would recognize like ‘Hunter come and get me’. So, he drew a butterfly in flight. This message is meant only for me. We’ve found Rice!”
蝴蝶蝶泳
B U T T E R F L Y
Lui’s Hut
THE CAVE CROUCHED AT THE SUMMIT of an awkward climb over a low sandstone hill covered in pine trees. Rice was shown the shrine by Lui the day before. He told Rice the shrine had magical powers, that it would keep him safe. At the wide slit-like mouth were piles of rough stones pierced by dozens of bamboo sticks, blackened and burnt. The local farmers lit fires here, praying for a good harvest. Deeper into the cave was a natural hot spring that extended back under a low hanging shelf of rock. Lui told Rice the spring would be a good place to hide if the Army came. And they had. That morning two armored cars rolled into the center of the village just after dawn bearing six uniformed members of the People’s Liberation Army. (PLA)
Lui had shaken Rice awake, pulled him jarringly out of a peaceful dream about Britt, and pushed him out the door.
“Dong-She”, he whispered several times. Cave. Rice knew what he meant. He crept around the back of Lui’s home and began the climb through the tall grass and trees to the village shrine. He could hear shouting: voices he hadn’t heard before, the growl of a diesel engine.
Rice was always aware of the danger he presented to innocent people here. If the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army, felt the villagers had protected him it could mean imprisonment, even death. Lui had tried to keep his confidence but occasionally a villager or child had seen Rice in the Chinese farmers yard. Rice didn’t expect the people of the village to lie for him. He would have to move on, find his way north. But in the meantime, the cave was the only secure hiding spot.
The entrance w
as low. Rice had to bend at the waist to make his way deep into the cave. Several natural steps down he came to the pools edge. The water was deep green, warm to the touch, sulfurous. Rice carefully made his way over rocks smoothed by thousands of feet, down into the natural spring. How many years had locals used this grotto? Thousands? Towards the back, a dozen feet from the edge, the cave roof pitched down and the water became black and bottomless.
Rice paddled his way to the far side and turned toward the light of the cave entrance. The rough ceiling just touched the top of his head as he pushed himself backwards into the darkness.
Rice treaded water slowly, breathing in the steamy atmosphere. He was a trained Navy Seal who had spent hundreds of hours in near-freezing water. But this was different. The temperature in the pool was at least one hundred degrees, possibly more. He could feel the prickle of heat race across his arms and legs. He felt his way back, to where the roof met the water’s surface. If the soldiers came, they would need time for their eyes to adjust to the dimness of the interior. Rice could slip under the surface, push himself into the blackness. He was an expert diver: could he hold his breath long enough time for the soldiers to grow bored with their search and move on. Rice couldn’t imagine them getting their uniforms wet. He took a deep breath and pushed his head under the surface. The warmth washed over him. He opened his eyes and looked up. The cave entrance was a gauzy glow of green rippled by the water’s movement, punctuated by spots of brightness, pin pricks of white.
Rice shook his head. He wasn’t happy about the sparkling lights. He had seen them before. They were the symptoms of hypoxia. Lack of oxygen.
He rose to the surface and breathed out, took in a lungful of air. Something wasn’t right. He felt sleepy and sluggish. A small bird flew into the cave’s entrance, flapped about, then dropped to the water’s edge and dipped its beak into the warm liquid. Rice studied the bird, a small wren, maybe some local variation. Then it launched into the air and fluttered near the cave roof as if it was lost or confused. Then the bird spun and collapsed into the pool. Rice swam over, plucked the tiny animal from the surface of the water before it sank.