Crisis- 2038

by Gerald Huff

  “I have let him know. More tea?”

  “No, thank you.” Frances spent the next hour on her PNA, getting more details and theories from Jill and Roger, who had been reading all the public literature they could on quantum computing. Finally, the door opened around 7 p.m. and a tired looking group of managers and techs exited the office. Livingstone himself appeared at the door and waved her inside.

  “Frances Chatham, right? Mentapath acquisition? Sorry to keep you waiting for so long, but I really don’t have time for you today. We’re overwhelmed with multiple crises. In fact, I’ve got another team coming up in ten minutes. Andrew! Can I get some more coffee please!”

  “Mr. Livingstone, I understand the circumstances and appreciate you taking the time. I have some advice for you.”

  “I’m sorry, Frances, but I’m not sure how your background in sales and marketing systems or bioinformatics qualifies you as a counter-terrorism expert.” Andrew, the assistant, entered with a coffee pot and refilled David’s mug. “Just leave the damned pot,” growled his boss.

  “My advice is more strategic than that,” said Frances, waiting until Andrew had closed the doors behind them. “And it has to do with Building 42.”

  “Building 42? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We don’t have time for bullshit, David. Building 42 houses your top secret quantum computer lab. The one where your scientists have found a way to use time crystals to build a million qubit quantum computer.” She delivered the bluff like a pro poker player, with a knowing smile and a steady gaze. Perhaps it was the exhaustion of the last two days, but he couldn’t hide his astonishment. “How could you, who told you—”

  Frances held up a hand. “David, that’s not important. We don’t have much time. Let me tell you what you need to do. You need to stop hoarding this technology for RezMat’s private gain. You will immediately disclose its existence to the authorities in the States and let them use it to track down and stop LKC. After providing advanced access to security firms to avoid massive disruption, you will then open source your quantum stabilization techniques for the good of humanity. When we reverse climate change and cure the mental diseases of aging you will probably win a Nobel Peace prize.”

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” said David, regaining his composure. “Marching in here with a made-up story about non-existent technology and making demands on the CEO of the largest corporation in the world?”

  “Yes, well then,” Frances replied calmly. “You can certainly go that route. But then after a single phone call MI5 and GCHQ will raid Building 42 and everyone will learn that you had the means of stopping the worst global terrorist attacks in decades and providing endless bounty to the people of the world, but did neither, for the sake of more obscene profits going to the richest people in the world.

  “When that happens, I don’t think your vaunted security robots will be able to save you from the hordes coming to burn down this building. You think you’re in a crisis now? You may be the largest company in the world, but you’re also the most hated. Your precious company won’t last a week. Not to mention the national security investigations into you and your executives.

  “David, you can go down in literal flames or you can rescue this institution and, just maybe, capitalism and democracy, by doing the right thing. I’ll give you an hour to decide.” Frances stood up, hoping she hadn’t overplayed her hand. “Do the right thing, David. I’ll let myself out.”

  WASHINGTON

  “Do you have any idea what this is about?” asked Kara Morrigan, US Chief Technology Officer.

  “No idea,” replied Mark Geiger, Director of the Domestic Terrorism Task Force. “Just got an urgent call from the Situation Room to get on this holoconference.”

  “Yeah, me too. While we’re waiting, Mark, I’ve been trying to reach you for days. We need to talk about this DTTF access program. I heard from the President—”

  “Sorry I’m late,” said a voice. A new image merged into their hologlasses. “I’m David Livingstone, CEO of RezMat, based in London.”

  “Oh, hi David, it’s Kara.”

  “Ah, Kara, I was hoping you could join. Nice to see you again.”

  “Mr. Livingstone,” interrupted Mark. “As you can imagine we’re all quite busy here. Can you explain why the White House put this call together?”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Geiger is it? I’m actually calling to offer the services of RezMat to help in your current crisis.”

  “I believe we already spend tens of billions of dollars on your equipment and services, Mr. Livingstone. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a lot of RezMat gear that’s been compromised in these attacks.”

  “There is a lot of equipment from many vendors that has been compromised,” David retorted. “And I would lay odds some of the backdoors you forced us to embed may have actually enabled this whole attack.” He took a breath. “But, I’m not here to discuss that. One of our divisions has just recently made a breakthrough. While the technology is still quite rough, we want to make it available to you to help you track down LKC.”

  “What kind of tech?” asked Kara.

  “Well. Yes.” He paused. “We have a working version of a million qubit quantum computer.”

  There was dead silence. Kara spoke first. “What did you just say?”

  “We have a million qubit system.”

  “That’s what I thought you said,” Kara replied. “But that’s impossible. We barely have a 25K qubits running in our labs. Completely unstable.”

  “Kara,” said Mark, “is he talking about what I think he’s talking about?”

  “He’s talking about a system that can crack any existing 5K qubit code,” she said, her voice rising. “He’s talking about a fucking weapon of mass destruction.”

  “That’s what I thought. Mr. Livingstone, I’m messaging MI5 as we speak. You will connect them with your security and operations team and cooperate fully with them to secure the facilities that house this system and the personnel who work on it. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, I understand Mr. Geiger. But I would urge caution. If you keep this quiet, you can gain an asymmetric advantage over LKC. But if word of this should leak out, they will go underground or switch to non-digital communications. They currently think they are safe, but we can give you the tech to track them down. As long as it stays secret.”

  “I see your point,” said Mark. “But no corporation will be allowed to keep this technology.”

  “Yes, quite right. Our intention all along was to perfect it and then open source it after providing global security infrastructure enough time to adopt it first. This technology is too important for all of humanity for any one company to own it.”

  “That sounds like total BS, David,” said Kara. “But it’s a workable plan. Getting at least 50K qubits into security infrastructure should be enough to prevent the whole world from cracking open. But I’m dying to know—how did you do it, David? Zero Kelvin? Magnetic fields?”

  “You won’t believe it, Kara. It was time crystals.”

  “Holy shit! Those were so hot for a while, then everyone abandoned them.”

  “Yes, exactly. It turns out we needed to add another—”

  “There’ll be time for that later,” interjected Mark, “how do we use this to find LKC?”

  “If you pipe your surveillance firehose to us, we can use Colossus to decrypt the 5K qubit packets and filter for the LKC content and trace it near real time.”

  “You must be crazy,” said Mark. “We’re not going to send you all the encrypted traffic in the US, every financial transaction and government communication, now that we know you can decrypt it all. We want your tech here, on our premises.”

  “It’s extremely fragile, Mr. Geiger. That could take months. You have food shortages and riots in the streets today. We just don’t have the time I’m afraid.”

  “Damn it. I’m going to send our best
people over there to supervise. If you siphon one single bit of information out of that stream, I’ll personally have you extradited and arrested.”

  “I understand. We shall cooperate fully.”

  “Then on behalf of the United States government, Mr. Livingstone, let me thank you for your service to our country. I’ll go now to start making arrangements.”

  “It’s our honor, Mr. Geiger. We just wanted to do what’s right.” Once the DTTF Director had signed off, Kara bore in.

  “You may be able to fool him with that ‘doing the right thing’ bullshit, David, but I know RezMat better than that. How long have you really had this tech?”

  “Kara, you know I can’t and won’t say anything more about that. What I’ve told you is what RezMat will tell the world in a few weeks. And that’s that.”

  “Fine. But David, really? Colossus?”

  “What about it? That was the first code breaking computer at Bletchley Park back in the 40s.”

  “Did you know it was also the name of a super-intelligent computer that took over the world in The Forbin Project, a 1970s movie?”

  “Oh that. Well, you know engineers, Kara. They have a quirky sense of humor.”

  “Let’s hope it’s humor and not prophecy, that’s all I can say. Good night, David.”

  “Good night, Kara.”

  “And let me add my thanks, David. I don’t know why exactly, but you and RezMat are in fact doing the right thing.”

  LONDON

  When Jill and Roger strolled into her office holding hands Frances arched an eyebrow and said, “Well, well, what have we here? Perhaps I should add matchmaker to my resume!” The couple separated, blushing. “Oh, posh, you two, I couldn’t be happier for you. Maybe at least something positive can come out of this disaster.”

  “Oh no,” said Jill. “Does that mean you didn’t convince RezMat? Were we wrong about the quantum computer?”

  “What? No. I meant the whole situation. Thanks to you I did convince Livingstone. He called me a bit ago and said he’d already been on with Washington about using their tech to track down LKC. You must have been spot on because he folded immediately. I think it was the time crystals that did it. Such an unlikely tech. How on earth did you think of it?”

  “Well,” said Jill sheepishly, “it was actually my boss who let it slip a while back. We were terribly backlogged on some problem and he said ‘where are the goddamn time crystals when you need them’. I remember it distinctly because it was such an odd technical reference and he acted very strangely when I asked him about it. I even read up on it that night, but other than some fifteen-year-old experiments with quantum processors, I couldn’t find any recent mention of them. Always stuck with me, I guess.”

  “Well I’m glad it did,” said Frances. “It must have given him the impression that I had far more information about Building 42 than I actually did.” They sat for a moment, each reflecting on their role in forcing RezMat’s hand.

  “So what do we do now?” asked Roger.

  “We wait and see,” said Frances. “If they can shut down LKC it will remove a major destabilizing force. Then we’ll just need to assist Sara’s supporters as best we can in their mission.”

  “I saw the stream from California,” said Roger. “Governor Rajashankar came out very strongly for them, but then the cyberattacks hit and have dominated every news cycle.”

  “Exactly,” said Frances. “That’s why stopping LKC is so important. And if RezMat follows through on its promise to release the tech, the movement Sara started can regain its momentum.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  LONDON/HOLOCONFERENCE - JANUARY 30

  LONDON

  It required three forms of biometric data to access the center of Building 42. Once his retina, voice, and palm print had been verified, Bradley Childress walked through a ten-foot-long millimeter wave scanner tunnel under the watchful eye of both RezMat security and newly-arrived armed MI5 agents. They ensured he carried no personal electronic devices of any kind.

  The Colossus control center was a cavernous room filled with dozens of rows of computing workstations and huge screens thirty feet tall covering every wall. The normally calm room had become chaotic, even now after 10 p.m., and the slate gray sound-absorbing carpet was having trouble containing the din. FBI scientists and engineers were playing catch-up with their RezMat counterparts, racing back and forth between workstations with their petabyte storage devices. Despite the pleas from Washington, Bradley had refused every request to run a hard line or any other wireless data transport into the facility, known as the Sphere.

  The number one rule when building Colossus had been to keep it completely isolated from the internet, following the 2023 Asilomar Safe Artificial General Intelligence Principles to the letter. If that meant engineers were downloading petabytes of data outside and hand-carrying it in for Colossus upload using one-time-use disposable storage devices, so be it. And no device brought inside ever left the Sphere either, to prevent Colossus from creating a program that could be let loose outside. The risks of a super-intelligence gaining unfettered access to the internet were too great to ignore.

  Bradley saw a group gathered at the primary training workstation so he headed there immediately. “What’s the status, Jason?” he asked the lead engineer.

  “Good news, sir. Colossus is now able to differentiate 5K encrypted chat, video, and holoconferences from all other binary protocols. We’ve just made the haystack significantly smaller, sir.” This had been the first major problem for Colossus to tackle. The vast majority of 5K qubit encrypted packets were generated by the internet of things and corp-to-corp data transmissions. They were making a simplifying assumption that LKC was not piggybacking on one of those protocols, but using direct communications tech.

  “Can Colossus generate filtering algorithms that can be applied outside the Sphere to reduce the volume of data we need to upload?”

  “Already done, sir. The team from the States is applying them now, so all new uploads should be communications packets only.”

  “Very well then. So how is phase two progressing?”

  “Reverse engineering the encryption waveform and decoding the communication packets is already done. The latest uploads are being keyword searched right now.”

  “So then the final piece is the packet flow analysis?”

  “Yes, if we get a suspect communication we can give Colossus the packet metadata from peering data centers to pinpoint the real world locations they are coming from. That will give us the locations of the LKC terrorists.”

  HOLOCONFERENCE

  “Let’s get started”, said Ellul. Only fifteen members of the Collective were online. While they all had battery packs and generators for electricity, some were located in areas where the communication grid itself had gone down.

  “Good morning,” said Pam and JT from Salt Lake City.

  “Hey,” said Miles O’Connell.

  “Thoreau! Surprised you could join us,” said Ellul.

  “Yeah they’re giving us five hours a day to sleep and my break happened to line up with this call.”

  “Excellent work with those worms,” said Othello.

  “I just launched ’em,” said Miles. “Credit to Zurich for creating them. I’m really surprised how effective they’ve been.”

  “Me too!” said JT. “I think the auto-mutation algorithm is keeping them ahead of the security systems. And the fact that so many interlocking systems are impacted at the same time is making things really hard on the repair teams.”

  “That’s for sure, that’s what we’re seeing in DTTF,” said Miles. “By the way, management finally decided to shut down the backdoor access. So we’re no longer able to inject new worms. There’s a major hunt underway inside DTTF right now trying to find me and my systems.”

  “We’re incredibly grateful to you, Thoreau,” said Pam.

  “Agreed. I think we need to do an assess
ment of where we are,” said Ellul. “This attack has been successful beyond our expectations. But I’m seeing reports of increasing collateral damage. A nursing home in Duluth lost power and heat and six of its elderly residents died. Several hospitals have run out of backup generator fuel and dozens of ICU patients have died. I know we all acknowledged this consequence, but we may be looking at thousands of casualties.”

  “Isn’t that exactly the wake-up call we wanted to send? How dependent we’ve all become on technology?” asked Miles.

  “Yes, but we run the risk of focusing all the anger at LKC instead of the technology,” said Artemis.

  “We need to cure people of their addiction,” said Othello. “Once they get a clean break they will understand what’s it like to live free again.”

  LONDON

  The initial flurry of encrypted communications identified and decoded by Colossus gave the tired scientists and engineers in Building 42 great hope, but they soon discovered that thousands of legitimate holochats and video conversations matched their key words. While a team of investigators reviewed each one, the exhausted technical crew tried to enhance the filtering.

  Just after 11 p.m. one of the FBI investigators jumped out of his chair and yelled out to the room, “Holy shit! I think we found them!” A crowd immediately formed around his workstation, then he swiped his monitor contents to the big wall display so everyone could see. There were fifteen holoconference windows filled with a mix of camouflaged people and computer-generated avatars. He disconnected his earpiece and the conversation rang out across the large work area.

  “…but we run the risk of focusing all the anger at LKC instead of the technology.”

  Bradley Childress ran over. “Freeze that conversation and keep recording. What’s the timestamp?” He was joined by Mark Geiger, Director of the Domestic Terrorism Task Force, who had evidently just woken from a nap.

  “Twelve minutes ago,” said the investigator.