Crisis- 2038

by Gerald Huff

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Mark Geiger, Director of the Domestic Terrorism Task Force, sat in the DTTF situation room at the head of a long wooden table. Staff members were arrayed around the table, talking into headsets and manipulating information on their monitors. Geiger nodded to the communications officer, who opened a secure line to the White House.

  “Good morning, Madam President.”

  “Not so good from what I hear,” replied President Amanda Teasley, whose image appeared on the central monitor across from his seat. “What do we know?”

  “LKC has claimed responsibility for a coordinated attack against the Midwest electrical grid. Twenty-four transmission towers were taken out by explosive-carrying drones. We’ve got millions of people without power.”

  “How long will the power be out?”

  “It’s going to be three or four days minimum.”

  “Damn it. What’s the impact?”

  “The first day or so we’ll see massive inconvenience and some hospital evacuations. FEMA has mobilized to bring generators, water and food to the affected area, but that just covers essential services. If it stretches to a week there’s likely to be rioting in several states, but the National Guard should be able to get that under control. Overall, I think the biggest impact is going to be psychological. And political.”

  “Yes, I’m well aware of that.” Teasley was a Democrat from Georgia who had narrowly defeated a law-and-order Texan who attacked her endlessly for being too weak on crime and terrorism. The emergence of LKC halfway through her first term was already driving the right wing media into a frenzy. “Do we have any leads?”

  “Not yet. We are collecting drone fragments hoping for trace materials to tell us where they have been or where they were made. The Semtex explosive is widely available on the world market and we don’t have fingerprinting that can get us to the source. Given the rural locations of the attacks there is almost no surveillance footage available. We have a few eyewitnesses that saw the drones, but no indications of the launch points.”

  “Can we protect the grid, Mark?”

  “Madame President, there are more than two hundred thousand miles of high voltage transmission lines in the U.S. There’s no feasible way for us to monitor all of them.”

  “So you’re saying LKC can knock power out to major cities all across the country for weeks on end and there’s nothing we can do about it?”

  “LKC hasn’t made any mistakes yet. But the more actions they take, the higher the probability we get a break. A surveillance drone that sees a vehicle launching an attack. Or an unencrypted message with operational details. People and organizations aren’t perfect. Trust me, eventually they’ll slip up and we’ll track them down.”

  “Mark, I don’t need to tell you things are on a knife’s edge right now. Eventually isn’t going to cut it. So far, LKC’s not targeting people. But if these attacks continue, someone’s going to die. And then the shit’s really going to hit the fan.”

  “I understand, Madame President. There are some things you could do to help us find them, to free us up from constraints. We’ve discussed these in the past.”

  Teasley’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I recall. Let’s talk offline on the specifics.”

  “Yes, Madame President.” The line disconnected. His staff turned their heads towards his end of the table. “Well you heard the lady,” Geiger said, “let’s get these bastards.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  LOS ANGELES - OCTOBER 24

  Melissa thought back to the day she’d met Jacob, at the Haro Burger protest. That’s when he had hatched the plan to engineer a one-day shutdown of most of the Supernova kiosks in the city. She had thought he’d been joking and assumed he’d drop the idea. But as they spent more and more time together over the last two weeks, he kept pursuing it and eventually convinced her that this kind of non-violent action would get a lot of attention.

  So Melissa had researched the kiosks. Since Supernova had recently strengthened their software security, she decided the easiest approach was to block the kiosk serving doors. Melissa designed a device to jam the doors that was about the size of a thumbnail and just a few millimeters thick. It had two chambers separated by a thin membrane that was kept rigid by a tiny electrical current.

  The chambers were filled with two chemicals that were harmless if separated, but created a very hot reaction when combined. When the tiny battery in the device ran out of juice, it destabilized the membrane, allowing the chemicals to combine. The intense heat of the reaction melted the hard plastic of the device, as well as some of the soft metal of the serving door, creating a small plug strong enough to defeat the servomotors that opened the door.

  Jacob had sent the design to be printed at a 3D print shop in Mexico and shipped to a post office box out of town, all paid for with anonymous q-coins. Jacob tapped into the local anti-technology network and recruited a dozen activists to help them. The team had spent several days filling the tiny chambers and practicing sticking them on replicas of the serving doors. Now they were out placing them at over two hundred Supernova kiosks, each of them buying different drinks and paying with anonymous q-coin tokens. They were all wearing PPF cloaks and gloves to minimize the chance of being identified.

  Melissa paced around Jacob’s small living room, checking her dark PNA compulsively for progress updates from the team. This was a burner unit not biometrically linked to her. Jacob kept telling her to get rid of her linked PNA because it was a security risk. But, unlike him, she still had lots of friends and family not in the movement that she liked to keep in touch with.

  He had also suggested that she follow his lead and disable her medplant. But if she disabled it she wouldn’t be allowed to turn it back on for three years. She had waited for years to get one, since full-time workers had priority and got subsidies from their employers in exchange for monitoring rights. As a freelancer she had to scrape together the down payment and monthly fees on her own. It was particularly important to her because the maternal side of her family had a history of cancer. Anyway, she told Jacob, medplant data was the most secure and private data on the planet.

  When Jacob returned to the apartment a few minutes after midnight, he was triumphant. “Went off without a hitch,” he said. “There are a surprising number of late night PPF-cloak-wearing Supernova customers. I don’t think someone in our group was the only cloaked customer at more than a dozen of the kiosks. Should make it very hard to trace who placed the devices and when.” He threw off his cloak and pulled her toward him. “This is going to be epic.”

  Melissa was too hyped up to sleep. She envied Jacob as he dozed on his leather couch. She watched the big-screen monitor full of news channels with the volume off, waiting. Finally, at around 4:15 a.m., she spotted the first image of a Supernova.

  “Jacob, wake up!”

  “What?” He rubbed his eyes.

  “I think it’s starting!” She gestured the volume on for one of the channels.

  “…two Supernovas on Wilshire, one at Stanley, and one a few blocks down at Crescent Heights, and four in and around Venice Beach. Again, there seems to be some malfunction at these kiosks. They’re not dispensing coffee, so if you’re planning on getting some caffeine this morning, better plan on another location. Wait, what’s that?” The anchor was listening to his earpiece. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now getting reports that these seven kiosks are not the only ones involved. It appears that this is a system-wide outage. We’re contacting the company for more information.”

  Melissa and Jacob exchanged high fives and a deep kiss. “You’re a genius!” he whispered in her ear.

  As the minutes passed, more and more of the local media outlets played images of Supernovas all over the city. One showed a Supernova self-driving truck as it drove up to a kiosk and a small maintenance robot rolled out of the back. It plugged a sensor into a diagnostic port at the bottom of the kiosk, then withdrew it, moved over, and
extended a camera that panned slowly around the serving door. The camera retracted, and a small arm with a multi-tool package emerged from the center of the robot. The arm targeted part of the serving door, poking and sawing repeatedly at one spot. But the door remained shut. After a minute, the robot moved back to the diagnostic port and inserted its sensor. After just a few seconds, the robot disconnected and rolled away, back to the self-driving truck.

  “Yes!” shouted Jacob. “Did you see that?”

  “Fantastic!” said Melissa.

  If the maintenance bots couldn’t dislodge the plugs they had created, it would take many hours for Supernova to find, hire, and dispatch humans to all their damaged kiosks.

  By 7 a.m., the national networks had figured out that this was a big story. Jacob and Melissa sat on the couch and channel surfed.

  “We’re getting more reports from Los Angeles that a major act of sabotage has taken down many of the Supernova kiosks in Los Angeles. Evidently all the serving doors have been jammed in some way. The company is pledging to get them working as soon as possible and calling for law enforcement to investigate this act of terrorism.”

  “Terrorism?” said Melissa. “What are they talking about? It’s an act of civil disobedience!”

  Another channel showed a man in a Supernova uniform working on a kiosk.

  “Yeah, you got some kind of plug jammed in here real good,” said the worker.

  “How did it get there?” asked a reporter.

  “Damned if I know. I can tell you it ain’t chewing gum or something. This thing is real hard. It’s gonna take me a while to saw through it. And then it smells to me like the door servo might have burned out. Can’t tell that yet.”

  “When will this kiosk be serving coffee again?” she asked.

  “It might be hours.”

  “Excuse me, are you a Supernova customer?” the reporter asked, turning to a young man in the small crowd gathered around the kiosk.

  “Yeah, what’s going on?”

  “The kiosk is broken, something jamming the door. We have reports that it’s happened all over the city, in a coordinated attack.”

  “No kidding? Who would do something like that? Supernova is awesome.”

  “We probably should have posted a statement somewhere,” Melissa said. “You know, how this is a blow against the robotization of America and the world.”

  “Isn’t that the obvious message?” Jacob said.

  The news anchor continued the story. “In all, over two hundred Supernova kiosks have been vandalized and are not operating at this time. Supernova has issued a statement saying that it is the victim of a terrorist attack that will cost the company millions of dollars in repairs and lost revenue, and that it is working as quickly as possible to restore service. The LAPD says it has opened an investigation and invited the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Task Force to join them.”

  “Why do they keep calling it terrorism?” said Melissa anxiously. “We’re activists, not terrorists.”

  “It’s just establishment tactics, Melissa. Keep people scared. Keep them distracted from the real story.” She nodded. But she worried that their prank was being blown all out of proportion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 25

  President Amanda Teasley sat on the blue couch in the Oval Office opposite Mark Geiger and Attorney General Emma Wilcox. The three of them had been reviewing Geiger’s requests for extraordinary powers to be granted to the FBI and Domestic Terrorism Task Force for more than half an hour.

  “Now tell me about this last one,” said Teasley. “Accessing corporate systems?”

  “Yes,” said Geiger. “We have special keys that enable access to corporate systems without the usual blockchain digital warrant protocol. But we need your approval to invoke them.”

  “I’m not sure I completely understand how that works. Perhaps we should bring in Kara Morrigan to review this piece.”

  “Madame President,” said Geiger with a sigh. “With all due respect to the U.S. CTO, her background at Facebook and Amazon hardly qualifies her to perform a national security assessment. You kept me on for my expertise in tracking down terrorist organizations. You asked for my advice on what we need at DTTF to find and eliminate the threat from LKC and I’m giving it to you. If you give us these tools, just on a temporary basis, it will help us tremendously. If my advice is no longer valued, perhaps you’ll want a different Director at DTTF.”

  Teasley didn’t get along with Geiger, a holdover from the previous Republican administration who she had felt obligated to retain for “law and order” credibility. She also knew full well he was trying to manipulate her. But the last thing she needed was for her terrorism head to resign in the middle of a crisis.

  “Now Mark, I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Teasley.

  “Madame President,” said Wilcox calmly, “you brought me on to advise you on legal matters, and I can tell you what Mark is proposing is unlikely to be upheld by a court as constitutional. It doesn’t matter how temporary it is or what crisis is happening. Circumventing the First and Fourth Amendments has never been justified.”

  “What if we begin working with Congress on legislation in parallel?” asked Teasley, searching for a way through this political and constitutional minefield.

  “Working with Congress is the only correct path, Madame President,” said Wilcox.

  “But that’s too slow,” said Geiger, leaning forward on the edge of the couch. “It will take them six months to agree on the damn title of the bill. How many more attacks by LKC and the lone wolves they are starting to inspire is it going to take? How much lower can your approval ratings go, Madame President, before your whole first term agenda is dead in the water?”

  “We don’t measure the constitutionality of executive orders with approval numbers,” said the Attorney General. The President sat for a long moment, weighing the decision before her. She wanted to reject Geiger’s transparent arm-twisting. But she wouldn’t put it past him to leak her refusal to give DTTF what it wanted.

  “Approval numbers do, however, reflect the fear of the American people,” said Teasley. “We have to get this situation under control. I’m willing to grant these powers and start working with Congress to get them officially legislated.” She looked at Wilcox. “Write that directly into the executive order. I want the record to show these are temporary measures.”

  The Attorney General began to protest, but realized her boss’s mind was made up as soon as Teasley stood up to dismiss them. “Yes, Madame President. It’ll be on your desk in an hour.”

  EXECUTIVE ORDER 14412

  ——————

  PREVENTION OF DOMESTIC TERRORIST ATTACKS

  ——————

  CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET

  By the power vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

  Section 1. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and its Domestic Terrorism Task Force are hereby authorized to temporarily use all means at their disposal to identify the individuals and groups responsible for or planning domestic attacks against the people and institutions of the United States and corporations operating in the United States.

  Section 2. The means available to the FBI Domestic Terrorism Task Force shall include but not be limited to (a) the right to intercept, decrypt and analyze any communication traveling through the air and over any physical network medium without a warrant, (b) the right to covertly access medplant databases to identify potential terrorists without a warrant, (c) the right to disable or remove “personal privacy” garments being worn by suspects attempting to evade identification, (d) the right to covertly access the camera, microphone, and geolocation of any device within the United States or in possession of a United States citizen without a warrant, (e) the right to covertly access corporate information systems without a warrant.

&nbs
p; Section 3. It is the intent of this administration to replace these temporary powers with legislative authority as soon as possible.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  OCTOBER 25, 2038

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  BOSTON - OCTOBER 28

  The advance team had done well again. The large hall on the University of Massachusetts campus was filling rapidly. The highly targeted omnipresence campaign had been helped by the fact that half a million people had already connected to Sara’s Message in OP. This had been supplemented by old fashioned posters plastered all over campus.

  By 2 p.m., the hall was full and the audience buzzed with energy. Sara entered to loud applause and sat in the comfortable chair at center stage.

  She sat silently for a moment, then smiled.

  “Thank you all for coming today and for your warm welcome! I am so pleased to be here in the United States for the first time. I believe this country has a special role to play in the history that is about to unfold. And you, the young people of this country, will be the catalyst for the change that must happen.

  “So now I’d be pleased to take your questions.”

  A half dozen young men and women in dark grey hoodies stood in the aisles. Sara pointed to a young woman, and one of the assistants handed her a mic.

  “Thank you for coming to U. Mass, Sara! We’re so happy to see you in person.”