Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  “Just ten more minutes until we reach the airfield,” Forrest said. “You can check then.”

  “If we can’t reach the key vault, we could reach one of the update servers,” Mike said. “Assuming we can reach a server. Don’t you have any idea what the government shut down?”

  Doug sighed, but pulled out a tablet and scanned it. “No technical details. Just reports that Tapestry is down. Tons of rumors and discussion about the Chinese front angle.”

  “How are you getting that feed?” Igloo asked. “What about no internet connection?”

  “It’s broadcast only,” Forrest said. “A satellite subscription to a chat channel. Read only. Doesn’t give our location away.”

  “Clever.”

  “The government gets a few neat tricks in exchange for your trillions of tax dollars in support.”

  Igloo suppressed a grumble. She should have become one of those conscientious tax objectors.

  The van slowed.

  “Shut down that laptop,” Forrest ordered. “No connections. Everything back in your shielded bags.”

  Carly and a few others put their laptops away. Only after everything was safely stowed did Forrest knock on the door.

  The door opened from the outside, accompanied by the immediate smell of ocean air. A Coast Guard prop plane stood a few dozen feet away.

  “That’s what we’re going on?” Igloo said. “I imagined some sort of jet. You know, something fast. In case we need to get away.”

  “Nothing is going to outrun an air-to-air missile, so forget about that,” Forrest said. “This will keep your signal moving, and that’s what matters.”

  “Let’s load up, people,” Doug said. He started to usher people onto the plane.

  “Wait up,” Ben said, grabbing Igloo and Forrest at the same time. “If we can’t access the cloud key vault, or any of the update servers, there’s still one other option: we have the master key signing certificates stored offline in a safe at Tapestry headquarters. We can regenerate the private keys we need for the update.”

  “We need to get you on that plane,” Forrest said.

  “But once we’re all on the plane, it’s not like we can just get off, can we? We’re stuck up there.”

  Forrest nodded.

  “Let me go back to Portland, get into the offices and get the keys.”

  “That’s stupid,” Forrest said. “You’re going to get picked up.”

  “Not if you take me,” Ben said. “You could get me inside. Dress me up like one of you.”

  “You’d still need access to the physical safe,” Igloo said. “It requires biometrics from two officers of the company—”

  “Exactly. Pointless.” Forrest shook her head. “It’s a stupid idea.”

  “Except that I have a passcode that will get you in,” Igloo finished.

  “See?” Ben smiled at Forrest.

  “But I should go,” Igloo said. “It’s my risk to take.”

  “Now you’re being stupid. They need you to lead them,” Ben said, pointing at the plane. “T2 needs your vision. I’m expendable.”

  “Can you get him inside?” Igloo asked Forrest.

  Forrest ran her fingers through her hair. “Yes, I can.”

  “Do it then.” Igloo gave Ben a hard hug. “Thank you.”

  “Go. Hurry.” Forrest pushed Igloo toward the plane.

  Doug waited in the doorway. Igloo climbed the stairs and turned back to see Ben and Forrest getting back into the van.

  Doug pulled her over the threshold and slammed the door shut. A uniformed guardsman secured the locking mechanism, and the engines spun up.

  “Show us how to operate the directional antenna,” Doug said to the guardsman. “Then please clear out of the cabin. This operation is need-to-know only.

  “Yes, sir.” The guardsman indicated the relevant workstation.

  “Carly, can you work with them?” Igloo asked.

  Carly joined Doug and the guardsman. A few seconds later, the plane accelerated down the runway.

  Igloo wished Angie were there. She would have loved this. She reached over, squeezed Essie’s hand. Essie squeezed back, and they sat holding hands. She let herself have a moment to think about Angie, then pushed her memories aside. She needed to focus.

  A few minutes later, the guardsman disappeared through a crew door.

  “Okay, folks,” Carly called. “I’m locking on our first connection. It’s a microwave tower, and it’ll be good for twenty minutes or so.”

  “Finally,” Mike said, his computer ready to go in his lap.

  Igloo pulled out her own computer, set it on the counter that ran down the length of the plane.

  “Tapestry’s down,” Mike called. “Checking backup providers…. Also down. All data centers.”

  “So much for multi-region fault tolerance,” Diana said.

  “What’s this mean?” Doug said.

  “It means it’s a good thing Ben didn’t get on this plane,” Igloo said. “But now we need to wait until he drives to Portland, reaches the offices, accesses the safe, and transmits the keys to us.”

  Igloo couldn’t resist checking the headlines. News of the Tapestry downtime and rumors about the company were everywhere. Tomo usage had spiked in the wake of the world-wide outage. Fuck. Three years of work evaporated overnight due to a handful of people in the government unilaterally deciding to end Tapestry.

  “Two hours, folks.” Igloo had to yell over the noise of the plane. “Then we bundle a release to get it ready. We do everything we can, and as soon as we get the keys from Ben, we sign and push it.”

  “Essie!” Igloo yelled.

  “Yes?” Essie was right behind Igloo, and she jumped.

  Essie was holding a paper cup of coffee balanced on the palm of her hand, while holding herself steady against the movement of the plane.

  “Where’d you… never mind. I’ll take it.” Igloo grabbed the cup. “How’s the manifesto coming?”

  “It’s done. Everyone has reviewed it. I took some liberties, given the recent developments. Want to see it?”

  Igloo nodded.

  Essie retrieved a laptop and slid it in front of Igloo.

  Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States justified its proclamation of independence with these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

  * * *

  In today’s age, we cannot have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without certain foundational communication rights, including the right to privacy, to own and control our own personal data, to read and to publish unbiased sources of information, to free and unfettered communication and association with anyone we choose.

  The document went on for another page. Igloo read the entirety, her amazement growing. At the end, she stopped, and went back to the beginning and read it all over again.

  “Oh. This is totally unlike anything Angie or I would have written,” Igloo said. She saw Essie’s face drop. “I mean, it’s wonderful. Way better than anything we would have written. This is worthy of being read by millions of people.”

  Essie wriggled in delight.

  Chapter 52

  Enso was in the FBI’s mobile command center, two blocks from Tapestry headquarters. He looked at the cup of coffee, and decided against it. His stomach was in knots.

  He hadn’t heard from Robin in over thirty-six hours now. What the hell had happened to her? Had she been discovered? If they were dealing with terrorists, he might wonder if she’d been killed or kidnapped, but these people were software developers. Angie wouldn’t have hesitated, but she wasn’t here, and he didn’t think Igloo had it in her.

  Damn that girl. Even he was referring to her by nickname now.

  Forrest entered the command headquarters. She looked haggard.

  “Where have you been?” Enso said.

 
“Nice to see you, too,” Forrest said. She took a chair without invitation and slumped into it.

  “No, seriously. Where the fuck have you been?” Enso pointed outside. “You were the ranking FBI officer. You should have been the lead on taking over the offices.”

  “First off,” Forrest said, “you don’t get to tell me how to do my job. Yes, you’re running this operation. Yes, you set the direction. But I know how to do my job. Second, you’ve got media up and down this street. I run undercover ops on a regular basis. You don’t put me out in front of the cameras. And third, you took over a fucking IT company’s headquarters. What are you afraid of, office workers with nerf guns? You could have sent in any two agents with one handgun between them and they would have secured the building.”

  “We needed a coordinated takedown so members of the T2 team wouldn’t be able to access Tapestry resources, share data, or notify other members of the team.”

  Forrest shook her head in dismissal. “Really?”

  Enso threw his hands up. “What’s so complicated to understand?”

  “We’ve had the building under constant surveillance for four days. We’ve chased the T2 members all around this city. None of them are in their headquarters.” Forrest nodded toward one of the aides. “Some coffee would be great, when you’ve got a moment, please.”

  “If you’re so smart, Miss Deputy Assistant Director, then where the fuck is the T2 team? How could you have all these resources out here, and not be able to pick them up?”

  “They’re a slippery bunch. You ever consider that maybe they turned your mole? Because I don’t know how they’re doing what they’re doing.”

  “That’s preposterous.” Enso was suddenly uneasy. Maybe that was why he hadn’t heard from Robin. The thought never occurred to him that she might actively betrayed him.

  “Look, give me the current rundown, and let’s decide what to do next.”

  Enso grated at taking orders from Forrest, but it was the logical thing to do.

  “Headquarters is secured,” Enso said. “Only a handful of employees were inside, and we’ve removed them. We’ve isolated their headquarters from the net. We shut down all their data center assets from six different locations around the world.”

  “And the NSA search?”

  “The data analysts are still brute force searching. The T2 team connects to the network only intermittently, but each time they do, their location has changed. All in this general region, which the data geeks say means that T2 has found a way to hijack connections into the backbone. The analysts think that T2 is sitting somewhere on one of the regional backbones, inserting their own traffic and masking it so that it looks like it is coming from one of these other locations.”

  “Clever,” Forrest said.

  Enso nodded dismissively. “Our air search team is flying a coordinated pattern searching for T2 along the routes of known backbones.”

  “What are they searching for?”

  “Radio emissions, mostly. They’re at the level where they can detect individual computers running, even without wi-fi, just from spurious electromagnetic emissions. We’re also feeding all surveillance camera data into Utah, scanning realtime for facial recognition.”

  “Can’t keep it up forever.”

  “No, but they’ll be forced to move soon. The counter-terrorism analysts say that without the update servers and update server credentials, T2 can’t be released. Igloo and the team are going to get desperate, and when they do, they’ll make a mistake. All we have to do is be ready.”

  “In the meantime, Tapestry is down. How long are you going to be able to keep it that way? They’ve got to have lawyers fighting you tooth and nail.”

  Enso wished she wouldn’t have gone there. The pressure from back home was intense, which was more than half the reason he was out here. If he’d been in Washington, he’d be getting chewed out by multi-star generals and legal counsel on an hourly basis.

  “We’ll keep it in place as long as we need it,” he growled, without meaning to. He tried to relax his jaw.

  “I’m going to take a team and scout around the headquarters while we have free rein. I want to see if there’s anything that will clue us in as to where they went. Especially Igloo’s office.”

  “Go ahead. The initial team didn’t find anything.”

  “The initial team wasn’t me,” Forrest said. “I’ll find something we can use.”

  She probably would at that. Enso didn’t like her, but everyone said she was a miracle worker, solving cases the rest of the FBI had given upon on. As long as she’d been forced on him, he might as well make the most of it.

  He turned to the agent overseeing site access. “Damion, make sure Forrest and her team get access to the building.”

  “Yes, sir.” Damion picked up his phone and made a call.

  “Go do your thing. Let me know what you find.”

  “You got it.”

  “And Forrest…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let me know what you find before you run it up the chain, okay? I know Griz is your boss and all, but I’m in charge of this op.”

  Forrest nodded dutifully. “Give us an hour or two, then I’ll let you know what we turn up.”

  Enso glanced at the clock. He had less than twenty hours to crack this before he’d be pulled off the operation, and everything would get booted upstairs. There’d be hell to pay if he couldn’t button everything up by then.

  Chapter 53

  The constant drone of the engines gave Igloo a headache. Why couldn’t the military take a cue from civilians and make their planes quieter? People had to work, dammit.

  She rubbed her head.

  Tapestry was completely shut down by the government. Had been now, for twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, the government fed journalists a non-stop stream of misinformation indicating Tapestry was a Chinese front, either terrorist or military. Either way, this was fucking with Igloo’s plan.

  She could circumvent anything the government could do from a technology perspective. They could push out the T2 release even though the government had shut down all the update servers. They could recreate the signing keys necessary to allow the current update client to accept the T2 update. They could get T2 to work through almost any port, or type of communication channel available to them whatsoever. They could make it work without any servers.

  But if they didn’t have public opinion on their side, their effort would be worthless. Igloo wasn’t going to force the T2 client on people. If the public believed the government’s lies, they might uninstall Tapestry or simply mistrust any information they received via Tapestry.

  Igloo glanced back at the rest of her team on the plane. They’d been through hell and back, and they looked it. Doug had passed out military-grade stimulants from the flight deck emergency kit to fight exhaustion. With the aid of the chemical boost, they churned through the last of the crucial changes, and now were cranking through lower priority stuff while waiting on the update signing keys from Ben and Forrest. The drugs had worn off now, and everyone was flagging again.

  She looked back at her laptop.

  Angie, unwilling to leave another election to chance, had placed the backdoor in Tapestry that would allow her to sway public opinion, believing that anything and everything that would ensure a more positive outcome was justified. Igloo had been opposed, and so, despite Angie’s wishes, she’d already removed the backdoor.

  But Igloo realized that if she pushed out this update now, as it was, it might be too late. The government demonstrated that they were willing to lie to stop her, and she might never be able to sway public opinion back when it came to Tapestry.

  The original version of Angie’s content modification code had a backdoor that would allow someone with the right secrets to change the rules about what content was prioritized. It would allow Igloo to subtly change what Tapestry would show. But the backdoor was also vulnerable. Vulnerable to another hacker figuring their way in. Vulnerable to
being exploited by the government. Vulnerable to Igloo herself, should she ever act in anger.

  She stared at the right-hand window on her desktop. She had a different set of patches. Code changes that kept the core of Angie’s content modification algorithms intact but eliminated the backdoor. Instead, this set of code would place the content modification under the control of Igloo’s chat personalities. Those personalities were already wired to help people, to converse with them, to coach them, to be friends with them. Those personalities could, with the small set of changes Igloo created, also pick the optimal content for each person. In effect, it would be an AI-driven, tailored educational program designed to help people grow as individuals. To become better. More thoughtful. More insightful. More empathetic. It would correct fake news stories. Eliminate content that contributed to fear and hate.

  Once released, Igloo wouldn’t know what was happening. She wouldn’t be in control. In fact, the personalities were already evolving beyond Igloo’s understanding, and growing beyond their original programming. No one could say for sure what the AI might do with this power to change what people read.

  Worse, because of the way her changes were woven into the code, and because of how the code would be under scrutiny in the future, it wasn’t even clear that she’d be able to release an update that would turn it off.

  She had to make the decision now. She clenched and unclenched her hands. She was contemplating manipulating everyone in the world. Exploiting people ran counter to everything she stood for.

  She took a deep breath. Her options sucked. She wished she could simply release T2 as it was originally intended. It would have been a beautiful thing for the world. But if she did that, the government would win their propaganda war against Tapestry, T2 would die, and in the process, people would lose ownership and control over their own data and communications. Maybe someday they’d regain it, but years of progress would be lost. They’d regress to a Tomo-controlled world, where people were vulnerable to corporations and the government.