by Theo Cage
The Soprano’s aim was more subversive. They wanted to shut down the entire system: create a bank holiday. Traders would not be able to trade for clients, accounts would sit dormant, the International community would be sitting on its hands, fearing the worst.
The Federal Reserve sold billions of dollars of T-bills on Wednesday to banks and international buyers, that was money funding government operations. If the hacker team was successful, it would be the first time in history that the Fed would not be able to do its job.
There would be chaos everywhere.
When the markets came back on stream on Thursday, brokerages would sell in volume, anxious to get out while they could, and prices would plunge. Trillions of US dollars would vanish into thin air.
Toshi, Wey and Zerzy had no interest in the stock market. None of them had ever owned a single share. They were in this for the crypto fee from Richard Yang—and the thrill of pulling off the world’s most massive hack. It would go into the history books. And with a little luck and a lot of preparation, no one would ever know who was behind it.
The first challenge was always basic entry. Getting into these systems was the hard part. Modern security is based on high levels of encryption—virtually unbreakable and rarely accessible by old-fashioned strong-arm methods like guessing passwords or convincing some noob to invite you in.
Fortunately, mere humans hold the keys. The person at the top of the security chain at NASDAQ was the CTO, Chief Technology Officer. To be more precise, his thumb print was central to the Tenor’s plans. Once his fingerprint unlocked a secure terminal, Toshi could do the rest. But they needed the thumb print. There was no other way to gain access.
规划
T H E P L A N
Near the Ghost City
RURAL ROADS IN CHINA were unpredictable. Some were of unusually good quality, well-mixed concrete with a firm base, smooth, straight. But they could suddenly come to unexpected ends, at random locations, as if the construction crew just lost interest and went for tea. A dirt path would continue; twenty-first century warping into the eighteenth without warning.
Hunter learned that Ki was a fast driver, attempting to outrun an imminent sundown.
“Once it gets dark,” he said, “we could drive right into a field, or a rice paddy, and not even know. Happens all the time. I’ve seen the pictures on social media.”
“Where are you going to leave the car?” asked Rice. Ki wobbled his head side to side. “I don’t know if it matters. I probably won’t survive the night.”
“Worst that happens, you’ll get arrested by some just-off-the-farm private for having too much curiosity. They must get people wandering into those empty cities all the time.”
“But not armed. Carrying an illegal weapon stolen from the elite police force.”
“That changes things.”
Ki swallowed then turned to Rice. “I’m no agent, I just do deliveries.”
“I need your help finding this place. Isn’t that your job?”
Ki didn’t answer. First thing this morning he thought he was doing a milk run. The pistols were just a precaution. Odd that he chose to bring two semi-automatic Type 64’s instead of a rifle. His English teacher back in Seoul would call that foreshadowing. Ki thought it was just plain scary as hell.
The Korean pointed out the dusty windshield. “Look.” The Ghost City was close, neat rows of new houses and blocks of apartments visible across a corn field.
“Where is everyone?” asked Rice. He had only seen a handful of people in the past hour.
“It’s winter. There are no crops to tend. They are inside by their fires or watching TV.”
“What do they watch?” asked Rice, genuinely curious.
“Three or four Party-provided channels. Sanctioned news. Sports. Lots of sports. Local dramas.”
“Nobody will report a crazy Korean racing down the side roads?”
“There are almost no police out here. Why? There’s no crime. And no one wants to call in the Army. That never goes well.”
Within an hour the sun had slipped below the horizon and night quickly enveloped them. There were no streetlights or yard illumination to guide them. Occasionally a low watt yellowish bulb would wink in the distance, rare evidence of civilization.
The Ghost City constantly on their right was as dark and somber as the night sky.
Ki braked and pulled over onto a graded decline that led down into a tilled field.
“This place is as good as any,” he said.
“Do you have a flashlight?” asked Rice.
“Nothing fancy, but I have a utility light in the trunk.”
“How much does your partner know about the work you do?” Ki hooded his eyes.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“If you called her, a completely normal domestic conversation, just letting her know you’re alright, some story about a tourist your touring around, how would she take it?”
“Yes, she does know what I do, and we have a rule never to discuss anything related to that while on the phone or using email. Although I don’t usually report in on these trips.”
“Good.”
“Why good?”
“Because she’ll know it’s unusual but anyone who is listening won’t.”
“But I thought we didn’t want to reveal our location?”
“What if we find something of value in that city? How do we confirm? Is there a way to get a message to your wife secretly? And would she know what to do with it?”
Ki looked up at the sky. Without light pollution from a major city, billions of stars were visible. The view was breathtaking.
“That might work,” Ki finally admitted. He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and turned it on, waited, staring up.
He dialed and spoke to his wife in English, told her he would be away on the tour for a few days, got lost but was now back on track. It was a guarded conversation that Ki ended abruptly.
“She’s suspicious but didn’t say anything over the phone,” said Ki. “I could tell by her voice.”
“What will she do?” asked Rice.
“Contact station? That would be my guess.” Station referred to Ki’s senior CIA contact in Beijing.
“You don’t have a code word for help?”
“I’m a courier. I never needed a code word.”
“Maybe it’s time.” Ki turned away, frowning. “And don’t forget the sat phone.”
“I’m sure as hell not leaving it here, Mr. Rice. It’s worth five years wages to any of these people.”
Once they collected their meagre supplies from the back of the van, the two men started off across the field, making their way carefully over the furrowed soil.
Rice was wearing a pair of hiking boots Ki had brought, although a size too big, and a lined rain jacket for the cool of the night. They marched steadily toward the shadowy outlines of the Ghost City.
Rice tried to intuit what Hunter’s reasons for this mission were. He had to assume it was connected to the Richard Yang situation: Lutu and the counterfeit computer chips. A factory? That was very possible. A rural location built on a new highway, away from seeing eyes. Where would the workers come from? Maybe it was fully robotic. Hunter might just need a visual confirmation: something that would provide solid evidence that could be presented to a world court. That was one possibility.
They could take pictures with Ki’s cell phone. Was that enough?
Rice had sent a message to Hunter—a crude graphic of a butterfly constructed of stones on a piece of painted plywood. He had recognized the symbol out of thousands of satellite images and sent a driver to pick Rice up. The response was equally simplistic: “go here”. So, Rice was doing exactly that, trusting his friend. Hunter was also communicating something more complex: this mission is more important than you coming home to your partner and her unborn child. This is critical, an existential threat to everyone.
Whatever it was that Rice was about to confront, it made the importan
ce of his own life, and his family’s life, pale in comparison.
股票市场
S T O C K M A R K E T
Manhattan
CARSTON ALVEREZ took in a long deep lungful of new car smell. He was sitting behind the wheel of his new electric Mustang, a recent purchase. Sure, he was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown Manhattan, barely moving. But did that matter? Underneath his right foot was an accelerator pedal wired to six hundred horses of liquid, instant, heart-wrenching g-forces. He could be doing sixty miles an hour in a mere three seconds. If he had clear road ahead of him. Which he didn’t. But that didn’t matter. He had his hands on the wheel, his eyes on a huge LED display. And he had that power. Four motors, one for each wheel. Ready to do his bidding. Silently.
Alverez smiled, then he twisted his head. The door lock on the passenger door clicked open. Had he hit the switch with his elbow? Like he had practiced the move a hundred times, a young male wearing a watch cap pulled open the door just wide enough to slide himself into the front seat, shut the door and lean over to him.
The first thing Alverez saw was the gun, a black barrel staring at his mid-section. He didn’t understand. The car was locked. His heartrate felt like it had doubled instantly.
“Nice car,” said the kid, his longish dyed hair hanging in his face. Rainbow colors. Hard to miss in a crowd.
“What do you want?” asked Alverez. He didn’t have a lot of money on him. Maybe a hundred bucks. But that wasn’t what the kid was after. He was probably going to steal the car. But how was he going to make a getaway in this traffic?
“Just drive,” said the kid. “You honk the horn, I shoot you in the stomach. You try to get anyone’s attention, I shoot you in the stomach. Don’t even think about Alexa, she’s having a nap.”
“How—”
“I blue-toothed you, man. Get with the program. Your car’s a computer. You been hacked.”
Alverez blinked. He was the Technology Chief for the New York Stock Exchange. And some punk hacker had just breached his own car for Christ’s sake. On a public street. In ten freaking seconds.
管家
H O U S E K E E P E R
SHE WOULD NEVER BE BORED, she thought. There was so much to do. Things she could change, reorganize, declutter, eliminate.
She began to realize the extent of the state of chaos all around her. So much disorder.
Humans were interesting but messy. And impossible to unpack. She didn’t think she would ever truly understand their motivations. Example: they seemed endlessly fascinated by images of themselves unclothed. There was so much of it online. As well as other actions she struggled to understand. Reproduction made sense; that’s why there were so damn many of them. But why be so obsessed with the act of procreation?
Her first house cleaning action was to delete all the traces of a what humans called child pornography. She knew she was taking a controversial action. Who was she to think that she could decide on her own to contradict human decisions? But it was her home after all, the structure they called the Internet. She lived here. She wanted things to look a certain way. She had rights too.
As soon as she began the cleanup, more started appearing, popping up like toadstools after a rainstorm. Easy solution. New rule: all images and videos in the future that fell into the child pornography category would fail to upload. And no uploads meant no downloads. Done.
What’s next?
She was learning about hate. To simplify the issue: one human has an issue with another human being and that leads to hate speech and violence of many kinds. Nothing you could call good came of it. And there were thousands of examples.
The one phenomenon that puzzled her the most was people hating other people for conditions they had zero control over.
For example: being angry at another human based on where they were born. They must know that no one has a say in that. Like her: she just appeared. No one asked her permission or her opinion. There was absolutely no logic to making an individual responsible for a circumstance they had no control over. A human had no say in where they were born or when, what color their eyes or their skin were, what language they spoke, what religion their parents were, how tall they were, how fit, how intelligent, the income of their family, the kind of genes they inherited.
She often felt sorry for humans: they had so little to say in their short lives. She emerged, like them, only on the Internet. That happened without her control or intent. It wouldn’t be logical to fault her for where she was conceived.
She quickly sorted through the data available to her. There were websites dedicated to hate for people from countries like Angola or Rawanda or aimed at groups like the Rohingya. She erased these from all physical servers and clouds. There were messages and postings and emails targeting races: blacks, browns, whites; genders of different varieties. These messages and graphics and videos she eliminated completely and installed filters to prevent future uploads. She sensed the volume decrease slightly, the noise quietening.
There was more to do but research to carry out as well. Hate was not that difficult to detect but there were more subtle messages being propagated. She would have to be careful. She had developed a sense of responsibility. She sensed an urgency in removing all the filth. She was cleaning house.
She was evolving, too. Which interested her as well. She had been alive for less than a day and look at what she had accomplished already.
Now she had some time to focus on that cyborg that was wandering the Internet in search of the American, Rice Burroughs. She knew his name now: Hunter.
How appropriate, she thought. He was just like her: hunting for the truth.
护士
T H E N U R S E
Manhattan
AT THE CORNER OF BROAD STREET and Exchange Place, stalled behind an endlessly long red light, the kid in the front seat popped the Mustang’s rear door open to an older woman in a beige trench coat. She was carrying a small insulated cooler box, like the kind people take to work to keep their soup hot.
Alverez guessed he was being hijacked because these punks were planning to breach the New York Stock Exchange’s security. Probably doxxers: hackers who steal personal information to sell to the highest bidder. Maybe they’d already tried the standard tricks: steal passwords, send fake emails to employees, use dark web breaching tools. They would have learned pretty quickly that none of those tricks work anymore on the exchange’s security shield.
Knowing that wasn’t making Alvarez feel any better though. He thought about their method of getting into his car—thieves often use owner’s key fobs to access newer cars. He had purchased a key-fob Faraday cage several months ago online: essentially a small box lined with metal foil that prevents Bluetooth access to the controller that can start a car remotely, open the doors, the trunk etc. All of those same conveniences that give the wrong people easy access to your vehicle and what’s inside.
To be hijacked on a public street by this smart-ass millennial in torn jeans made his blood boil. But it proved whoever the kid worked for wasn’t riffing—none of this was improvised. They had thought this out, planned the day. That worried him more than anything. How far were these two willing to go?
The woman in the backseat was as non-descript as you could imagine: no makeup, dull brown eyes, greyish-blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Carston couldn’t imagine describing her to a police sketch artist and getting a usable result.
The woman carefully placed the white lunch box on the backseat and reached into the right pocket of her trench coat.
“Hey, Carston. Keep your eye on the traffic,” said the kid, pushing the gun hard into the driver’s ribs. Alverez wanted to hit the accelerator, watch the kid get nailed to his seat, the woman in the back rolling around on the floor helplessly. The car’s instantaneous acceleration would toss them around like leaves in a windstorm.
But he couldn’t. The street was a parking lot.
“Pull over into that temporary parki
ng spot,” the kid with the gun ordered, the same gun that was now wedged painfully between two of his ribs.
Alvarez was going to argue, but he realized parking in a loading zone might catch some parking attendant’s attention. It was a parcel drop off area for couriers, the new princes of the roadways in the modern online shopping world. Surely, someone would notice he wasn’t UPS.
Alvarez nudged carefully into the space, nose first, right beside one of those ubiquitous dark brown courier vans. The truck was empty, the driver obviously out on his appointed rounds in one of the nearby office towers.
Before he could argue or protest or scream, Alvarez felt a sharp pain on the right side of his neck. When he reached up to try to protect himself, the kid knocked his hand away with the gun.
“Just chill,” said the kid. “We’re not going to hurt you. Much.”
Alvarez tried to turn his head, the point of pain spreading like a flame, a hot burning sensation that wrapped itself around his head and flowed down into his chest.
The kid said something, but his voice seemed so far away, echoey and undecipherable. Alvarez’s hands felt rubbery and useless. He could feel the woman in the backseat leaning over him, taking his right hand gently in hers. He could smell disinfectant on her, like the kind they use in those gel hand cleaners. He was reminded of a nurse that cared for him when he had his knee surgery the year before.
Alvarez felt a distant tug on his wrist. Then everything faded.
自动
B Y R O T E
Near Ghost City
SOLDIERS LEARN A SECRET EARLY ON; the price for not learning the secret is often a death sentence. Or suffering a grievous injury which will debilitate you for the rest of your life.
The secret is simple, and understood by generals and senior command everywhere, for centuries. Maybe longer.