Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  Lloyd had had to wait ten years for his Trojan horse to spread through the system. Andy wouldn't have to wait much more than ten hours for his code to be running on every ESS in the country.

  Then Lloyd was going to pick up a phone. Make a bus reservation, order a pizza. Call Time. Sooner or later, Lloyd was going to use the phone, and Andy pictured it as a pay phone in an anonymous hotel lobby in a city where he knew no one and no one knew him. He would drop a quarter in the coin slot, wait for dial tone, and punch in a number.

  Lloyd would be what Colson and Andy had defined, in their software documentation, as an unaware user.

  They were going to nail him with his own voice-mail recorded message. "You have reached Lloyd Narver's office at AT&T Regional Technical Assistance Center. I'm not at my desk right now but if you'll leave your name, number, and the date and time of your call I'll get back to you as soon as possible. You may leave a message after the signal tone."

  They broke down Lloyd's speech signals to produce a visual pattern of the sounds, a spectogram. A voiceprint. That part was a piece of cake.

  "...pattern matching..." Andy caught the words in the current of speech Amin was pouring into Nell's ear.

  Pattern matching was the real bitch.

  "So you're matching the words?" Nell was saying. "Lloyd's voiceprint to what he says on the phone?" She turned to face Amin; she was exactly his height.

  "Not exactly," Andy cut in, and she gave him a polite look of interest.

  "Miss Colson," Amin continued, classroom voice now, "we cannot match word for word in this case. There is such a system in use, most commonly to identify speakers who wish to transact their banking over the telephone. The user makes a statement onto tape, it is filed, and when the user wishes to gain access he makes the same statement over the phone. If the statements match, his identity is verified. Because he is aware of the identification task, we call him an aware user."

  "But that wouldn't work with Lloyd. He wouldn't want to be identified," Nell said.

  Amin beamed. Feferman grunted assent.

  "So what good is his voice-mail message? He's not going to call up and rattle off that message so you can match it."

  Colson leveled a look on his daughter. "Think, Nell."

  Andy snapped the quarter over in his palm. "Lighten up, Ray."

  Colson stared at the tape drive, mouth compressed. Nell glanced at Andy, her mouth twitching at the corners. Angry or amused? He still could not tell.

  "You're right," Andy said quickly, while she was still looking at him. "We don't know what Lloyd's going to say in any given call. But the only record we have of his speech patterns is the voice-mail message. The trick is matching the voiceprint we built from that to whatever he says when he calls. The words won't be the same, so we have to match the syllables."

  "To be precise," Amin broke in smoothly, "we used a technique that will break down the words and separately analyze each syllable's frequency response, and then match those of the voiceprint with those of the telephone call. A very difficult task," he said gravely, "a nontrivial task."

  "Bully for you," Feferman said.

  "Oh, no, bully for Andy and Ray. They did most of the work."

  It had taken all three of them, Andy thought, and Amin was dead right. It was nontrivial. He suddenly grinned. It had been a real bitch, and it was more fun than he'd had in a long time.

  "It's a damn fine piece of programming," Colson said quietly.

  Nell shifted her gaze to her father. "Let's just hope it works."

  Andy flattened the quarter between his thumb and forefinger and felt the eagle poised for flight.

  It was damned well going to work.

  They were going to nail Lloyd with his own voiceprint.

  Lloyd would drop in the coin and make his call. Meanwhile, the switch would be randomly scanning the lines, testing for channel noise, testing to be sure all was well, all part of the normal call processing. And, as the switch scanned and tested, it would perform one added task.

  It would carry out the instructions of the program that they had crafted. It would try to match the voice signals on the line to the digitized voiceprint of Lloyd Narver that was stored in its memory.

  Andy saw Lloyd calling. He made Lloyd call the drugstore to fill a prescription of Seldane; the man suffered from hay fever. If Lloyd made it a quick call, he might escape detection. A switch took several minutes to scan all the lines, especially in a high-capacity office.

  And, even if the random scan caught his call to the drugstore, he had to remain on the line long enough for the program to match the speech signals and verify his identity.

  And, given that the technique had a ten to fifteen percent error rate, on any given call the program might fail to identify him.

  Statistically, Lloyd could make quite a few telephone calls before being scanned and verified.

  Let him get his Seldane and go free, Andy thought, let him order his pizza and find out when the next bus is leaving town. Let him be blissfully ignorant that the telephone system he had abused was going to exact its toll.

  Because sooner or later, sooner in all probability, he would make the telephone call that Chief Special Agent Feferman and FBI Special Agent Dicker were waiting for. His speech signals, his cool mild voice droning into the phone, would be matched with his voiceprint on file, with his digitized fucking voiceprint as he would put it, and then the switch would freeze the call on the line, even if he hung up, and that would trigger an alarm in the switch room's master control center. And then a message would appear on-screen, identifying the telephone from which he was calling and instructing the switch office personnel to notify the FBI.

  They might not catch him the first time; he might manage to disappear before they arrived. They might not catch him the second or third or fourth time. But each time that the voice-print identified Lloyd as the caller, they would add one more data point to the map. Until they had a crosspoint.

  The way Andy pictured it, they would catch him on the phone. He would be in the grubby hotel lobby, still on the telephone, when the FBI and telco Security and the local police burst in and nailed him.

  Andy wanted the handcuffs to hurt, and he wanted Lloyd to learn that Andy and Colson from the old R-TAC team had done a spectral analysis on his voice and nailed him to the fucking wall.

  Andy and Colson and Amin had given their speech recognition program a name. Engineers usually named things with painful precision. They could have called it "A Speech Recognition Algorithm using the Hidden Markov Modeling Technique." They didn't. Sometimes, engineers named things with a painfully humorous pun, or a painful dose of sentiment. Andy and Colson and Amin had called their program "Can-dace."

  Candace, Andy thought, was going to nail him dead on.

  "Done," the supervisor said, snapping shut the panel on the processor.

  Andy slipped the quarter back into his pocket.

  They stood silent a moment, the way the team at R-TAC fell into silence after wrestling with a major alarm and retiring it, just taking a breath before congratulating themselves or going out for a beer or going home or scrambling to respond to the next alarm.

  Then the faintest of smiles broke on Colson's face. "Phone home, Lloyd," he said, and Nell laughed like a kid.

  Feferman made a sound like air escaping from a balloon.

  They headed out of the switch room, all of them but Amin, who spied an engineer he had met at the previous year's Globecom conference. Amin slipped an arm around his new chick and they walked down one of the aisles into the number five, disappearing into the blue and white army of switching modules. A network had to keep growing, Andy thought, or it lost its competitive edge.

  Outside in the parking lot, Andy fell into step beside Feferman. The big man threw off waves of heat that blasted Andy before dissipating in the night chill.

  "How long have you worked in Security, Feferman?"

  "Eight years."

  "Why?"

  Feferman
grunted in surprise.

  Andy could hear a murmur behind them, Nell speaking to Colson. "Why Security, Feferman?"

  "What is this, Faulkner, an interrogation?"

  "Humor me, please. Why Security?"

  "Because I'm big."

  "Feferman."

  "What is this, you figure I owe you this?"

  "I figure we're just about even. But I want to know."

  Feferman hunched his shoulders inside the roomy jacket; he'd finished throwing off heat. Andy pressed his arms in close to his sides against the chill.

  "What do you feel when you nail someone?"

  "Contentment," Feferman said, promptly.

  "Is that all?"

  "That's everything."

  "What about.... evening things up?"

  "An eye for an eye?"

  Feferman's Jag was directly in front of them. They stopped, both of them staring down at the Jag, at the baby-blue paint job turned to a noncolor by the halogen parking lot lights.

  "You're talking about a tooth for a tooth?"

  "Yeah," Andy said, "I guess."

  Feferman pivoted and leaned against the Jag. "Ask her."

  Andy spun around as Colson and Nell joined them.

  "Mr. Faulkner wants to know why someone goes into the security business." Feferman held his hand out to Nell; she accepted it and they shook.

  Andy stared at her hand, buried in Feferman's paw. Colson was looking too, but Colson might as well have been observing the kinetics of the human handshake as wondering why his daughter was shaking the chief special agent's hand.

  She let Feferman's hand go and gazed at Andy. "I signed up with Security."

  Security. The tailored dress.

  He flinched. He was struck dumb, he didn't know what to say and he couldn't form the words, the syllables, even if he had known what to say. Why was he always three steps behind her?

  Finally, he found a word and the means to produce it. "Congratulations."

  "I still have to get through training."

  Training. What could be hairier than pole climbing? "You'll be great."

  She stood at ease, settling her hands on her hips as if ready to loop her thumbs into a lineman's belt. "Tell the truth."

  Truth was, the first time he'd seen her, dressed as a lineman, he'd thought it was a joke and been dead wrong. He said good night to Feferman and Colson and walked over to Nell. "May I drive you home?"

  No anger or amusement to her mouth now, just neutrality as far as he could make out. It was too dark to tell what went on in her eyes, what shade of gold watched him.

  "Nell," he said, "the truth is, I really like you. I'm very attracted to you. And I want a chance to make it more than that."

  Still, she didn't smile, or speak. But then, neither did she walk away.

  "May I drive you home?"

  Night silence, then the roar of Feferman's Jag starting and the slam of Colson's car door.

  She must have heard it too. She nodded. "Sure."

  As they crossed the parking lot to his car, he angled closer to her and took hold of her hand. The warmth of her hand, their sudden closeness, brought the smell of piney after-shave to him. Feferman's handshake. Security. The truth was, he wished she had signed up to become an engineer.

  The fog had withdrawn to higher altitudes, shrunken into thin cirrus clouds. Now the mountains and the river gorge and the bridge, and his father in front of him at the rail, were lit in fierce clarity by the unobstructed sun.

  The sun broke the great spans of cable into hundreds of silver flare-ups that made his eyes ache, made him squint.

  His father was bent so far over the rail that his head had disappeared from view; Andy could see the hump of his shiny blue poplin jacket, then nothing. Joe Faulkner was stone-still, silent. He might have died right there on the rail. But that was not the way Joe Faulkner died.

  "Dad?"

  Nothing.

  Andy's heart raced, he was left behind. His father at the rail wasn't dead, but he was so absorbed in what lay below that he had forgotten his son was there.

  "Dad!"

  Andy heard the water crashing below and he tried a third time, roaring to compete with the river. "Dad!"

  Was the man deaf?

  Andy extended his arm, stretching all the way from his rib cage, but the form at the rail was out of reach.

  Without deciding, the way that he had stepped out of the woods onto the roadbed leading to the bridge, Andy stepped forward. He moved stiff-legged, his muscles in contraction, in rebellion. This time it would be terrible. More than dizziness or tremors, he feared he would spin completely out of control to fall and fall and never black out, just fall without end.

  Even as his breaths shuddered out, he moved forward toward the rail. His father's blue jacket grew in his field of view until his. vision was completely filled with blue and he was standing directly behind his father, staring down at the bent form. "Dad," he whispered, terrified.

  Nothing.

  He closed his eyes and put a hand out, feeling for the rail. He clamped on with one hand, pulled himself forward, clamped on with the other hand. Bless the solidity of steel.

  If he opened his eyes he would spin away and fall.

  "Look, son!"

  His eyes peeled open and Joe Faulkner was full face to him, not old, not even fifty, flesh still sculpted to the bones, lines just beginning to form around the mouth, a strong straight line between parentheses, and the eyes hard turtle-shell green. Then his father smiled, the parentheses deepened, and Andy saw what Joe Faulkner must have looked like as a kid, full of wonder at the way things were before he had ever thought to try his own hand tinkering with them.

  "Andrew, see this!"

  His father turned back to the river gorge. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, four hands lined up on the rail, hands nearly the same, broad across the palm, long fingers with prominent joints like hex nuts firmly threaded onto bolts.

  Andy raised his eyes beyond the rail and he saw the far end of the river gorge. The river was a twisting green ribbon that widened as he looked downward, finally fraying into white lace on the rocks directly below.

  Andy laughed out loud. He was leaning out over the rail like his father, looking down, far down, and not falling, not spinning away into chaos.

  He wasn't afraid.

  But that was not why Joe Faulkner had drawn him out on the bridge.

  "Son, look"

  Andy craned his neck and looked down, under the bridge, and he gasped.

  The tower piers were gone. The bridge was anchored to earth only by the roadbeds at either end; the load-bearing piers that should be supporting the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and concrete were simply not there. The bridge should have buckled in on itself, the spans should have broken and tilted and tumbled down into the river; without support, the weight was too great and the working stresses were too high and yet the bridge stood. With its feet knocked out from under it, the bridge still stood.

  They were floating above the river gorge on a bridge no engineer could have designed and no builder could have erected.

  "It's a miracle," Joe Faulkner said softly.

  Andy fought through the fog, out of the dream, sitting upright in the dark, and he still felt the unanchored bridge under his feet.

  So that's how the dream ended.

  He got carefully out of bed, so as not to disturb Nell, pulled on a robe, and stumbled into his workroom. By the dim light from the streetlamps outside, he found Joe Faulkner's old brown leather chair and sank into it.

  He was dreaming of miracles.

  A bridge with no means of support. That was like a telephone network with no means of transmission that nevertheless connected human voices.

  An impossible piece of engineering.

  Andy laughed softly in the dark. He had dreamed a child's dream and he tried to recall if he and his father had ever in reality shared a moment of wonder like that.

  But in reality, Andy did not believe in
miracles and neither had his father.

  What would Joe Faulkner have thought if Andy came to him in a dream, opened his hand, and said that he held there the basic switching matrix upon which the communications switching systems of the future would be built? His father would look into his hand and see nothing. Building a switch from nothing—a miracle, like building a bridge without support.

  "It's not a miracle, Dad," Andy would say. "It's a photonic switch, the next step into the future from the electronic switch. Photons are the fastest things in creation, and beams of photons—light, Dad—can pass through each other without interference. So thousands of information channels carrying photons can be packed together in a switching matrix so small you need a microscope to build it."

  And they would both look into his hand, and neither one of them would be able to see the miraculous switch.

  Maybe Joe Faulkner's dream bridge was not impossible. Who knew what the limits would be with high-tensile low-weight structural materials of the future? Maybe his father had dreamed of something like that.

  Andy suddenly grinned.

  His dream wasn't about miracles, it was a kick in the butt. Get back to work. It's over, Lloyd's good as nailed, he's purged from the system, he's a critical alarm that's been retired, now let him go and get back to work. Go build something that you can eat, sleep, and dream about, and get sentimental about in moments of exhaustion and utmost privacy.

  He wondered if anyone was working on a speech recognition system that could be hooked up with a TDD, so that a deaf person could talk rather than type and the system would recognize the speech and print it out on the other end user's screen. Applications like TDDs always lagged the technology....

  A ringing drilled into his thoughts, and he lunged out of the chair and grabbed for the phone. Feferman? No, he'd just left Feferman a few hours ago at the switch office, and they couldn't have any news yet, and he wasn't on call at R-TAC and no one phoned at this time of night unless it was bad news. "Hello?" His throat was dry.

  "Gloria?"

  Gloria. He let out a breath. Christ. "No, there's no Gloria here."

  "Um, this isn't Gloria Meacham's number?"

  "What number did you call?"