by Paul Anlee
“There must have been some clues, some bit of shared information. Darya said you’d know where to find her. You will tell me or I’ll wring it out of you.”
Mary thought quickly. Something plausible.
“Second,” she said. “Darya said it twice; that was meaningful. She has a second route out of here besides that old service shed.”
“You’re lying. There’s no way she was able to program two secret ways to exit Vacationland.”
“Ha! You don’t even know her designation. You have no idea of her capabilities.”
“Hmm, we’ll talk about that little piece of information later. Eventually, you will tell me everything I want to know.” Trillian waved a hand and they were in Cloud 49 again. Mary exhaled in relief at the release of pressure on her cranium.
The Shard raised his eyebrows at her. “Do you think I am anything but your God inside this inworld?”
“You’d better be careful. How would Alum feel about you expressing such ambitions?” Mary asked with a wry smile.
“Alum’s feelings are none of your concern. I control your fate here. I control what you perceive, what you feel.”
“But not what I think. I believe we’ve already demonstrated that.”
“In time, I’ll break your defenses and your mind will be laid bare for me to read.”
“Unless I turn the tables on you, first.”
“As Darya said, I not only control your inworld experience but your outworld freedom.”
Mary couldn’t help but frown. “Darya will find a way to help me.”
“I thought she offered only meaningless platitudes. Your words, not mine.”
When Mary didn’t reply, Trillian continued, “Darya wouldn’t tell you about a second exit without specifying its location. The message must have told you where it is.”
Mary snorted. “You’re sitting on it.”
“What?”
“Look around. Remember, ‘Turn the tables’? I’m supposed to figure out a special way to move the tables here at the café to open the exit. Darya likes to encode these things with unlikely arrangements or motions.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Mary stood up. “Because it’s useless information, Trillian. She didn’t have time to tell me the details. You got there too fast. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do and no way to figure it out on my own.”
She took a step to the banister and stared at the sandy beach seventy meters below. From this distance, the sand below would be hard as cement on impact.
“There will be no escape for me. No rescue. No reunion with Darya.”
Trillian remained seated at the table. He showed no sign of concern.
She pressed on. “Darya’s real message is that there is nothing she can do, that it’s all up to me. I can choose my own solution.”
Mary took a step back. “And this is what I choose.”
She launched herself backward over the rail.
Trillian rushed to the rail and watched her fall, his face expressionless. A second before her body hit the beach below, he blinked once.
* * *
Mary opened her eyes. She was back in her prison cell, staring up at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and let it go. I knew he wouldn’t let me die. She closed her eyes and played Darya’s message again.
Darya, what did you leave for me?
There was nothing obvious but then there wouldn’t be, would there? The interpretation she gave Trillian had some merit. One could easily read Darya’s message as incomplete, an empty morale booster devoid of any meaningful content. A superficial analysis would easily support that conclusion. The problem was, as far as Mary could tell, deeper analysis didn’t reveal much else.
I hope I’m not just going on false hope.
Darya would’ve anticipated that Trillian would also receive her transmission and he’d suspect some encrypted content that would help Mary’s position. There are so many ways to hide information. How would Darya have done it so only the intended recipient could recognize and retrieve a specific message? That’s the question. At the same time, the transmission would have to be innocuous enough to convince Trillian it contained no useful content.
Mary measured the transmission frame by frame. The total number of bytes perfectly added up to the sum of all the video frames. Nothing hidden that way.
Whatever useful information it held had to be accessible by analyzing the content or maybe rearranging data. There’d have to be a key to reorganizing some part of a video frame into something else, and nothing added beyond that. Trillian wouldn’t be able to decrypt that. Clever, Darya!
Mary was sure there was something useful in the visual recording. But what? Darya never would’ve risked coming back inworld to her here if she didn’t have anything helpful to contribute. I hope. It wasn’t much to go on, but all she had was her faith in her friend.
The comment about “positive spin” stood out. Was Darya suggesting something about the quark-spin inworld processing machinery? Darya had to know what an advantage her friend would have over Trillian if she could just boost her CPPU power.
Maybe she sent me the code I need. There has to be a decryption key buried in the message itself. Nothing that depends on a clever analysis of the content; Trillian would have as much chance of figuring that out as I do.
Something unique to my experience, then. Something only I would know but not obviously so. I mean, Darya could have said “Remember the day we first met,” or, “Remember what you had for lunch at our last meeting,” but either of those would be something Trillian could extract from me. So, it has to be shared knowledge but less obvious.
She pulled up her detailed memories of the real fireside meeting in Lysrandia for comparison. She searched for something Trillian couldn’t possibly know, something subtle.
She filtered out the landscape. Trillian will have access to a complete detailed layout of our campsite. No, nothing there.
That left only Darya herself, the background noises of others in the group, and the campfire—the campfire!
Mary overlaid her original memories of that evening on Darya’s transmission. The campfire had moved. Not much. Maybe it could be explained by a slightly different perspective, from the point of view of the person that had sat to Mary’s left that evening. Surely, Darya would never make such a mistake. She knew exactly where I sat that night.
Mary measured the change in distance between her position in the transmission and the relocated fire. Okay, so the fire was moved exactly 21.10611405421 centimeters to the right. Interesting number. Tantalizingly close to the wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen in a vacuum, the so-called H-line. Coincidence? I doubt it.
A quick calculation showed the number was the product of two primes: 505709 and 4173569. Is it RSA encryption, Darya? With such small prime numbers? Maybe it wouldn’t matter if the person the message was being hidden from had no way to calculate the private and public keys.
So, if the H-line’s the modulus…. Mary calculated what her private key should be. Now which fire image to decrypt? There were a lot to chose from. At 30 frames per second in Darya’s 34-second video there were over a thousand individual images of flickering flames.
Pick a number between one and a thousand…but which number? First? Last? Or just go through them all?–Mary pondered.
There was an easy way to generate a number between one and a thousand, simply divide a smaller number by a bigger number to give you something between zero and one. Then multiply by 1,000 to normalize; it was guaranteed to work.
Could the answer be that simple? She divided the larger of the two primes into the smaller and multiplied by 1,000 to get 121 and some fraction. So, maybe…the 121st frame?
She pulled it up. What do we have here? It was exactly four seconds into the video, the single word, “function.” Potentially interesting but still meaningless.
What can I do with it? Darya’s pass codes often use repetition. Does the word “function
” repeat elsewhere in the video?
Four seconds later, on frame 242, the word “function” again. More than a coincidence?
Mary called up the two frames and isolated the flames of the campfire. If she scrolled forward or backward, the flame patterns didn’t fit. Would Trillian notice that?
Mary ran the digital encoding of the flames through her algorithm using Darya’s normal public key and the private key she’d just worked out. It kicked out two long strings of digits. Two long, equally meaningless, strings of digits.
She converted them to hexadecimal, the ancient machine language of computers and then into assembler. The resultant “code” was a mess; it didn’t fit anywhere.
What did I do wrong?—she wondered. She went back over her logic. The primes came out of the changes in the video from her memory of the real event. The indicated video frames of the flames were special; they didn’t follow the flow of earlier frames. Everything hung together. That can’t be a coincidence; they have to contain the message. What am I missing?
She couldn’t lie still any longer. She got up from the bit of floor she called a bed and paced past the window to Hell. She went over the numbers, over the data, over her logic.
Two different pictures of flames? On a hunch, she examined their digital encoding. Primes. They’re both primes. She did the obvious and multiplied them together. She ran the result through her RSA decoding algorithm, converted to hexadecimal, and then to assembler.
Well, I’ll be damned! It’s the BIOS routine for interfacing my concepta to my trueself computing substrate.
She’d been trying to adjust her interface routines for some time now. If she could get it to link to Alternus’ quark-spin lattice instead of the Standard processing substrate, the boost in processing power would be huge. But it was proving impossible, and, besides, messing with her own interface routine was risky. If she got it wrong, she’d be disconnecting her concepta and persona from either computing substrate and scatter her self—her essence—out among the electrons of the universe.
Now, Darya had given her the most difficult part, the code. There were still lots of other parts she didn’t recognize, though. With any luck, the routines would link her BIOS to the inworld BIOS; that would be the key to unlock her computational powers on Alternus’ own lattice.
She dove deep into her mind, calling up her gold-tinged concepta and persona structures. She drifted among directed graphs of conceptual data. On a plane below her, she placed the jade-colored code of her own BIOS. On a plane above, the BIOS of the Vacationland inworld, complete with intrusions from Alternus. She could interpret some of the machine code but not all; she hoped it would be enough.
There it was. Darya’s code spun slowly, tantalizingly, in front of Mary’s virtual visual field. Mary grabbed it in her virtual hands and flung it at the interface code it was intended to replace. It slipped into place with a satisfying snap.
The physical world wavered. Oh, no! She almost added a hasty, Goodbye, but then everything snapped back into brilliant clarity.
The new BIOS code shot a gleaming arrow from the lower plane to the code in the top plane. She hadn’t thought to look at that area before. She couldn’t see where the arrow connected; it was shrouded in gray mist.
More of Darya’s security? Ah, yes. If I can see how the new code connects the two disparate operating systems, Trillian will be able to see it from his external vantage point, too. Good idea to put a lot of security around that.
She felt faint for a second, and then her thinking processes came back with a leap in speed and clarity. She was filled with a mental vigor that had evaded her since capture.
That’s it! I’ve connected to the quark-spin hardware of Alternus. Oh, ho! It’s game ON now, Trillian. Get ready for a little turnabout!
42
“Okay. So, ‘A voice for all citizens,’ it is.” Stephen Humphrey pushed his seat back from the table and stood up, stretching out to his full six-foot three height.
“After only forty minutes,” Nigel Hodge muttered to Debbie Cutter, in the chair beside him. She stifled a laugh.
“Not the most inspirational of messages, but solid enough,” he added for the benefit of the others.
“I’m glad you approve,” Jared Strang replied.
Hodge mirrored Strang’s wry smile. “Well, it beats, ‘A solid opposition for a solid democracy.’”
This time, Cutter couldn’t contain her laughter. “Ha! That was a winner!”
Priyam Kaloor was not amused. “This one still sounds like we assume we’re going to lose,” he noted.
“You do realize that it would take a miracle to win an actual majority, right? A bona fide miracle,” Jenny Thurgood pointed out.
The seven members of the Election Committee of the Progressive Justice Party sat elbow-to-elbow around a circular table in the small meeting room. The room was lit by three overhead LEDs whose blinding light reflected off the table’s polished stone surface. Beyond the chairs, the light fell off quickly, leaving the corners of the room in darkness.
Only six of the seven attendees occupied a chair. DAR-K’s imposing two-meter spherical body, hovering a few centimeters above the floor, took up the last place at the table. The LED lights reflected dully off her matte gray finish.
Hodge was finally getting used to DAR-K being there. He hardly flinched anymore when she floated in for a meeting. In fact, he almost didn’t register her presence at all, as if she were a piece of furniture, until some brilliant analysis or other emanated from her speaker in Kathy Liang’s voice. He still got nervous when her voice emerged from near darkness on the other side of the table. That, he couldn’t get used to.
They were meeting at the back of the official party headquarters in the building next to Rumi’s Café. The location gave Hodge and Cutter a convenient excuse to be in the neighborhood. The quality of Rumi’s coffee and carrot-ginger cake was rapidly gaining renown throughout Vesta One, and it wasn’t all that far from the Vesta Project Management Tower so, all in all, it seemed like a natural place they might visit.
The fact that a supposedly permanently locked door joined Rumi’s supply room to an unused office in the party headquarters was a bonus.
Hodge and Cutter used the secret passage to attend opposition party election committee meetings without alerting Alum to their betrayal. They hadn’t publicly come out as candidates for the Progressive Justice Party yet.
Better to wait until Alum officially announced citizenship for the Cybrids and the incumbent rights that went along with their new status. The Cybrid Grand March was only a week away. Until then, discretion was critical.
All that would change after the Grand March, once the personhood of the Cybrids was formally recognized and their supporters no longer had to hide.
When Alum discovers we’ve switched support, he’ll remove us from the ruling party in the Governing Council faster than we can blink. I don’t think he’ll kick us off the Council entirely, though. Overly harsh retribution would give the impression he doesn’t tolerate dissenting perspectives, even from the opposition.
Hodge and Cutter could wait out the next few years on the Council sidelines rather than in the midst of the government. Life would be different for everyone after the election.
They could still just cross the floor to the other side once an official opposition was recognized. Alum had permitted Strang and associates from the old Administration to remain on the Council. He no longer sought their advice, but at least he’d let them stay on.
Strang interrupted Hodge’s musings. “If we were to win a majority, how would we make that miracle happen?”
“The one strategy that always works,” Hodge replied.
“Go negative?”
“We have lots to work with. Not the least of which is, the man really isn’t even human.”
“No. Absolutely not. We’ve talked about this before,” DAR-K reminded them.
“I realize Alum has as much potential to damage us with his o
wn negative campaign as we have to hurt him, but—“
“A negative strategy would destroy us both and throw Vesta into political chaos,” DAR-K interrupted. “That is unacceptable.”
“Surely there has to be a way to get a rumor out there, some way to make him reveal himself.”
“Reveal himself as what?” Strang asked.
“As the machine he is. The man’s not even human.”
“I’m not human either,” DAR-K pointed out.
“Well, then, we’ll at least level the playing field. The election will be between two different machine candidates.”
“Your insistence on the importance of computational substrate over cognitive structure in determining humanity has always been troubling, Nigel,” DAR-K said.
“See what I mean?” Hodge replied. “Nobody, no human person, would ever say something like that.”
Jared jumped in. “Listen, you two. We’ve already agreed to disagree on this. Nigel, we’re not going down that road in the campaign. Please give it a rest.”
Hodge held up his hands, fingers splayed, in front of his chest. “Very well. Sorry if I happen to prefer first place over second.”
DAR-K sighed. “We all like to win, but that’s not the way to get there. Alum is too autocratic for his own good. Sooner or later, he’ll show his true colors and when he does, we’ll be ready to appeal to the people.”
Thurgood frowned. “You’re assuming that people prefer the right to choose, over being ruled by a beloved dictator they see as their Spiritual Leader.”
“One has to have some faith in humanity,” the Cybrid replied.
“Perhaps I can help.” The voice came unexpected out of the dark.
DAR-K shot out four tentacles in a defensive posture and heads turned toward the corner of the room, craning to see who had barged into their clandestine meeting.
A middle–aged man with a moderately muscular build, softly chiseled features, and an air of gentle confidence stepped forward into the light.
“Who are you?” Strang asked.
“My name is Darak Legsu.”
“And how do you think you can help? More importantly, how did you get in here, and how long have you been listening?”