Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  It was a hell of a mission. And worse, they were going to have a showdown with the government sometime soon. It was inevitable that Tapestry would be served with a FISA court order. All the big Internet companies had to comply with the government mandated backdoors that allowed them to spy on whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted. When that happened, Angie would have to fight a war on two fronts.

  Finished dressing, she leaned over to kiss Thomas, who still slept, with only the slightest hint of a snore. She wanted to run her fingers through his grey hair but knew that would wake him. The thing is, he did get better looking with each passing year.

  She briefly had an urge to strip naked and climb on top of him. When was the last time she’d done that?

  She couldn’t remember. Besides, the whole point of getting up early was to get to work before everyone else and get something productive done. Otherwise, why get up by five?

  She looked at him once more. Time was finite. There were only so many days, and eventually the day would come when one of them was too old (or worse, too dead) for sex, and they would have made love for the last time. They wouldn’t know when that moment would come. Wouldn’t know until after it had happened, and only then would they look back in time and realize they didn’t even remember it that well.

  Ugh. Now every day she’d wonder if that last time was in the past.

  Fuck, she was morbid. What the hell? She was approaching fifty, not her deathbed. Why so focused on her own mortality?

  She knew the answer. Knew it when she saw the difference between what she could do and Igloo could do. Her days of all-nighters were gone. Her days of staying up-to-date on all the latest programming frameworks were history. What happened when she was no longer relevant?

  In the kitchen, she grabbed a jar of cold-brew coffee from the fridge, flipped the top open, and took a long swig.

  It wasn’t fifty per se, it was what her fifties represented. In her forties, she had the full vitality of adulthood. And she still did. But somewhere between fifty and sixty, there’d be a change. A sixty-year-old could still be vigorous, but only in the sense of a person in decline. And forget about seventy. At some point, what’s ruled out vastly exceeds what you can still do.

  She wished she were twenty years younger. Igloo had a reasonable chance of living forever if medical technology progressed fast enough, if the singularity came and accelerated the rate of technological change. Maybe Igloo would be uploaded into the net, or maybe they’d reverse aging at the DNA level in time to keep her biological body going indefinitely. Once Angie had been confident she would be alive then too, but now she was afraid she’d just barely miss it. How stupid it was to live to almost within the reach of immortality only to die before it was possible.

  She set the cold-brew down and shook her head. It was stupid to worry about what would happen over the next decade when she should be focused on getting through the next year, not inventing more problems. Hell, it was unlikely she’d survive the next few months, what with all the stress of work.

  She looked down at the coffee. Thomas wanted her to quit. Said it would help with her blood pressure. She picked it up and took another swig. She had too much to do for that.

  She briefly considered offloading some of her work to Igloo. No, she couldn’t do that. She was sure that her enemies, in the government or the hacker community, would leap on any chink in her armor. That included Igloo. She had to keep her distance from Igloo.

  She walked down into the garage. On one side was Thomas’s new BMW plugin hybrid she’d bought him for his birthday. On the other side, her totally custom, 3D-printed OSV Doctorow, an open source electric car made from public domain components.

  She loved the thing, knew every spec and component. She’d adjusted the body curves in their online editor, getting it all just so. She’d tweaked the component selection endlessly, to the extent that the final assembly had required weeks of firmware tinkering before she could get it to work reliably. But it was all hers, from top to bottom, and as open and DRM free as you could get.

  She slipped her bag into the vertical chamber she’d designed into the shell and climbed into the driver’s seat. She closed the door, fussing it a little to get the seal seated properly. The damn hinges weren’t quite up to spec. She hit the start button, then sighed as the Bluetooth authentication fumbled the handshake with her phone. Yeah, it was a little rough around the edges.

  Eventually the dashboard lit up from end to end, and she backed out, exposing the wireless charging pad on the garage floor.

  She arrived at work twenty minutes later, parked in the employee lot, and slipped into her office unnoticed. She refused to look at her email, although the temptation was overwhelming. She might make a dent in it, might even take care of some important work, but if she didn’t take care of the big rocks first, there wouldn’t be any room left in her day for them.

  The biggest rocks of all were the special projects she was hatching to deal with the inevitable FISA court order. Tapestry’s days of freedom were numbered. They’d grown big, and it had happened faster than anyone thought possible. That meant that any day now they’d get visitors from the government.

  Angie had to be prepared. What she needed to do couldn’t be reactive. The plans needed to be plausibly underway before the government came, and she couldn’t give away the nature of her scheme or the government would act preemptively.

  The onion routing project she’d given Igloo was just one part of a grander plan. Now she had to plant more seeds.

  She worked for an hour, then two.

  There was a knock at the door at eight, and Matt entered with fresh coffee and a package under his arm.

  She looked up, caught the expression on his normally cheery face. “What now?”

  “You were supposed to leave tomorrow, but I can get you on a flight out this morning. Then you’d have time for a stop in New York to talk to the CEO Roundtable this afternoon before heading to London.”

  She’d lose track of where she was supposed to be if it wasn’t for Matt. She missed the days where the only “admin” she would have thought of would have been a system administrator. Now her administrative assistant Matt was the only thing that kept her sane.

  “I’m already visiting four cities on this circuit. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Actually, you were already doing five,” Matt said, replacing her old cup with the new coffee. He deposited the package on her desk. “This will be the sixth. You said you wanted to talk to this group. It’s the multiyear strategic vision talk.”

  Angie glanced over at the door, saw her travel bag was ready. She’d taken to keeping a bag packed at the office and another at home, never sure when she’d have to travel. She looked down at her screen. She’d done enough on the special projects and could email on the plane.

  “Fine, change the flight. When do I leave?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  There was never enough time for everything that needed to be done. Ugh. Well, it wasn’t Matt’s fault. He’d probably been out there working on rearranging travel plans since he’d got in. “Thanks for squeezing this in, Matt.”

  “Sure. I’ll grab some breakfast for you to take to the airport.”

  Angie nodded, and bent to her computer. She had one more project she needed to dole out. Whom could she count on? So many special projects, and only so many people she really trusted to be both technically competent and totally discreet.

  She scanned through the short list of employees she’d already prefiltered. There…she’d be perfect.

  She remembered the package that Matt had left. She slid it toward her, pinned the envelope with her stump, and pulled the rip cord. She lifted the bottom and a mobile phone slid out. It was a uniform matte black, even the screen with its nanotech privacy coating as matte as the body, and she didn’t need anything else to know whom it was from. Nathan9.

  She stared at the device, not daring to turn it on. Some skeletons were supposed to stay in the
closet. She’d used Nathan9 back when she burned Tomo, and in doing so she’d ruined any chance at friendship or even alliance. It was a terrible thing to make an enemy of another hacker, let alone one of Nathan9’s caliber. But she’d done what she needed to do then, and now the only approach was to maintain radio silence.

  She was still at her desk replaying old memories, when Matt reentered ten minutes later. “Time to go. Car’s here.”

  She gestured at the phone. “Bag this and toss it into one of the equipment shredders.” Tapestry was always at risk of being infiltrated, whether by competitors or the government, and the massive shredder in the basement was designed to destroy hostile electronics.

  Matt nodded and went to grab an EMF-proof bag.

  She was out of her office in a flash. Walking down the hall, she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to Thomas this morning, hadn’t known she’d be leaving early. Sigh. She wished she had gotten back into bed with him.

  Chapter 4

  On the third floor, down the hallway from her office, Igloo punched the button for another two shots of espresso, adding them to the four already in the blender.

  Four hours of sleep was not enough. Last night she and Essie had stayed out late, then gone home and had sex for hours until they’d finally curled up in bed in a mess of sheets, blankets, and rope. Then the conversation about poly this morning when she was only half awake. She wasn’t sure what she was getting herself into, but she couldn’t deny the attraction of playing with other people. She wondered whom she could reach out to.

  She added two scoops of protein mix, two scoops of raw cocoa powder, ice, and water, then stuck the whole thing back on the base. She put one finger on the blend button, then stopped in the nick of time, and put the lid on.

  After blending the drink, she chugged a quarter of it.

  A loud talker on a phone call walked into the kitchen, just in time to see her walking off with the pitcher.

  He pulled the phone away from his face. “Hey, I need that,” he said, gesturing with his phone to the pitcher.

  Igloo scanned him. He wore slacks and a button-down shirt. Therefore, he wasn’t a developer, and his face didn’t appear to match any of the new executives.

  “I need it more,” she said. “There’s another blender in the other break room.” She took the pitcher back to her office and closed the door.

  Her stomach didn’t feel right. Old Igloo wouldn’t have done that. Taking the pitcher was essentially theft of common property. She didn’t have any more right to the pitcher than he did, regardless of how long she’d been here and whether he was an engineer or not.

  Ugh. Why did she react so selfishly? It would be easy to blame it on some change in the company culture. But maybe she was angry and looking for someone to take it out on. Or maybe she was just tired.

  She stared guiltily at the pitcher, swigged some more of the shake, and headed back to the break room. She poured what was left into an oversized coffee mug, washed the pitcher, and put it back on the base.

  She wasn’t at her best when she was sleep deprived. She made a mental note to herself to stop trying to get by on less than six hours of sleep.

  Back at her office, the massive quantity of coffee she’d dumped into her body was finally starting to take hold, and she paced the room thinking about Angie’s special project. From her past work with Angie, she was intimately familiar with the details of TOR, the onion routing network originally created by DARPA and the Navy back in 1998. TOR had two main weaknesses.

  If the exit nodes were compromised, an attacker could spy on all the traffic as cleartext. If the attacker ran their own TOR nodes, they’d be able to monitor whatever flowed through the nodes they controlled. TOR usually ran less than ten thousand nodes in the network. If two thousand of those were NSA spy nodes, they’d be able to spy on twenty percent of the traffic. They wouldn’t know who sent the traffic, but they could see what left the onion network and where it went.

  A different attack vector could correlate data packet sizes and timings. If the government was interested in a certain high-profile hacker’s board, and they saw a 2,500 byte packet exit TOR headed for the hacker’s board, they could identify all the packets originating elsewhere of similar size sent around the same time. There’d be millions, but if they repeatedly kept correlating packets, over time they would statistically narrow it down to one, or a few, sources.

  Angie had been aware of those shortcomings, which was why she’d built her own small onion routing network, where she was guaranteed to control all the nodes, and where her algorithm traded off performance for more randomness in packet sizing, timing and delays, in order to confuse traffic analysis.

  What Angie wanted her to do was integrate all these sophisticated counter-surveillance measures into the Tapestry client itself, so that every client became an onion routing node. What was different about this was the scale of what they’d be attempting. There were at least a hundred million people using Tapestry at any given time. For the government to compromise a Tapestry-based secure network on that scale…it would be impossible.

  Tapestry would be able to implement their own traffic variation algorithms, either padding packets, splitting them, or recombining them with other traffic, making it impossible to correlate traffic across the network.

  Igloo stared at the architecture drawings covering her office walls, the mug of coffee-protein-chocolate mix dangling empty by her side. The block diagrams leapt off the walls, filling her mind with boxes representing software components, connected with lines, symbolizing the interfaces between those models. In her head, she dragged the WebSocket layer around, merged it with—

  “Anything happening?”

  The unexpected voice startled Igloo. Amber must have snuck in when she was deep in thought.

  “I’m thinking through the implications of adding TOR to our communication layer.”

  “Angie’s special project.” Amber sighed.

  “You know about it?”

  “Yeah.” Amber stared at the ropes dangling from a support girder. “What’s this for?”

  “Swing,” Igloo said. That was her cover story at least. The reality was that she sometimes liked to practice self-suspension at night, when the office was empty, and she could lock the door and not be interrupted. She half wished she could come out and stop hiding her kink from everyone at the office.

  Igloo joined Amber next to the rope, and drew the two descending halves apart, to form a triangle in the middle. “Sit here.”

  “This is safe?”

  She nodded.

  Amber climbed in, got the rope situated comfortably on her bottom, and nodded. Igloo let go, and Amber took a few experimental kicks to get her momentum going.

  Once she established a regular momentum, Amber spoke. “IPFS support is just finished and reaping benefits. Sites realize they can cut their bandwidth costs by adopting a Tapestry-centric approach. We need to focus on speeding up adoption of IPFS, not adding unnecessary layers of encryption and NSA-paranoia levels of privacy. It’s hard enough to explain a peer-to-peer protocol like IPFS without extra complications.”

  Igloo sighed. “Data abuses are growing all the time. The NSA monitors everything, and they’re the supposed good guys. Corporations spy on everyone, selling not just their data, but all the insights they can glean, and that’s all legal. Can you even begin to imagine what the bad guys are doing with this data?”

  “But robust encryption protects against most of that. We don’t need onion routing.”

  “Encryption alone doesn’t provide anonymity. Nor obfuscation of websites visited.”

  Amber kicked more, her swings getting higher.

  Igloo wondered about dynamic load versus static load, and how much force was exerted on her lines while Amber was in motion. She glanced toward the plate glass window behind Amber. The rope should be strong enough. Right? She looked outside to the tree tops below the window.

  “If we get enough sites on IPFS, you know
what will happen?” Amber said. “Tomo will be forced to adopt Tapestry’s content network. We’ll have Tomo scrambling after us, instead of the reverse. That will be the real end for them.”

  “Sure,” Igloo said, trying to put the rope out of her mind. “That sounds nice. But what’s your point?”

  “I need Diana and Ben 100 percent focused on IPFS. I need the R&D team focused on IPFS. I need business development focused 100 percent on IPFS.”

  Diana and Ben were the two engineers Igloo would have wanted to work on onion routing with her. Experienced protocol developers, they’d not only reimplemented the IPFS libraries, they’d optimized the protocol interactions, speeding up data transfer 50 percent while reducing gross network load more than five times, with a more efficient way of finding nearest neighbors to download from.

  “Angie said she wants me to lead this team and that I could have anyone I need. I need Ben and Diana.”

  “You can’t have them,” Amber said. She stopped pumping, started slowing down. “I need them more. It’s critical to our success that I keep them focused on IPFS.”

  “Their work on IPFS is done. Everything’s implemented. It works.”

  “We have to be able to assure prospective customers of the benefits.”

  “You don’t need two expert developers to coddle our customers. Ben and Diana must hate that shit.”

  “It’s what’s most important to Tapestry right now.”

  “If that’s so important, then why did Angie tell me I could have anyone I wanted?”

  Amber put her feet down on the floor mid-descent and came to a sudden halt. “Angie’s a little out of touch with our priorities. Don’t you think?”

  Igloo thought back to yesterday’s all-company meeting, the ra-ra-ra session with the executives that she’d walked out of. It seemed stupid to her at the time, but Angie appeared pretty clear and focused when they’d met afterwards. Was she really? What did Igloo know? She was still programming, not running a company.