Control

by David Mack

  Nine

  Knowing the cold was coming didn’t make it any less of a shock when it hit. Bashir had steeled himself as the transporter’s golden glow faded, braced his nerves for the change—but still he winced as he and Sarina were slashed by the kind of icy gale that flays wind-burned flesh from the bones of the dead. He and Sarina had come dressed for the subfreezing temperatures, but the winds at this latitude were cunning—they always found a way to plant their cold kiss on flesh.

  Sarina set her gloved hand on his shoulder. He turned to face her. She pointed at a nearby building, a small automated weather station. Parked outside the facility was a transport pod whose exterior, except for its thrusters, was already covered in a thin shell of ice.

  Though she had to shout over the wind, her voice was muffled by her insulated face mask. “Looks like she’s already here.” She studied Bashir, her blue eyes hidden behind ruby polarized goggles. “This feels off to me. You sure you want to do this?”

  “I doubt a journalist of Graniv’s stature would bring us all the way out here without good reason. At any rate, if the alternative is staying out here, I think I’d prefer to be inside.” He trudged through knee-deep, fresh-fallen snow to the shack’s only door. Sarina followed a few steps behind him, close enough to remain in his peripheral vision as they neared the shack.

  The door was unlocked. It slid open when Bashir pressed an amber pad on its frost-covered control panel. Dim lighting and deep shadows dwelled inside the weather station. Its single room was cramped with banks of computers and specialized sensor equipment, most of which were dotted with displays that shone green. Open panels on the sides of several tall computer banks revealed circuit-packed interiors aglow with hues of crimson.

  Seated in front of a console at the far end of the room was Ozla Graniv and a second person Bashir had never seen before. The pair beckoned Bashir and Sarina with urgent gestures. “Come on,” Graniv said. “You’re letting all the heat out!”

  Bashir stepped inside and shut the door after Sarina. When he faced Graniv and her associate they both had stood and stepped forward to greet them. As the duos neared each other, Bashir realized the stranger in the room was a Cardassian man.

  Graniv made the introductions. “Doctor Bashir, Ms. Douglas, I’d like you to meet Nyrok Turan. Formerly of the Obsidian Order, now on the payroll at the Federation News Service.”

  Turan shook hands with Sarina, then Bashir. His geniality seemed authentic. “A pleasure to meet you both, but you especially, Doctor. I’ve heard quite a bit about you through the years.”

  The one-sided familiarity left Bashir ill at ease, a condition he reflexively masked with self-deprecating humor. “I always dreaded the day my reputation would precede me.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Bashir realized Sarina was studying the outpost’s ceiling—in particular, a run of wiring that encircled its perimeter and crisscrossed its center. Neither Graniv nor Turan seemed to note Sarina’s subtle observations. The Cardassian prompted Graniv with a look before he returned to the consoles at the back of the room. The Trill journalist beckoned Bashir and Sarina with a tilt of her head. “Follow me.”

  The trio huddled behind Turan, whose hands were poised and ready above the interface for the outpost’s master terminal. “Once I get started,” he said, “we won’t have much time. Ten minutes, to be precise. Everybody ready?” He looked up and noted the collective nods of assent. “Here we go.” He keyed in a series of commands. It took only a few seconds. Then the master console’s main screen went gray. “I’ve just cut this station off from the outside. No signals in or out, and all its sensors and internal systems are shut down.”

  Sarina cut to the chase: “You’ve made the shack into a Faraday room.”

  “Exactly.” Turan disconnected a pair of wires from the viewscreen above his station and patched them into a small device similar to a padd. “But if this station is off the weather grid for more than ten minutes, a repair crew will beam down from an orbital facility. So let’s talk fast.”

  Graniv cut in, “I’ll start.”

  Bashir listened as the journalist raced through her account of meeting the forensic data scientists at the Dresden University of Technology and their discovery of a centuries-old AI, one made for surveillance and hidden not just in an antique computer drive but lurking throughout the Federation, in everything from starships and government facilities to such mundane items as padds and replicators and credit chips. It was an outlandish tale, verging on preposterous—but his experiences battling the shadowy cabal embedded within Starfleet and the Federation made her account sound alarmingly plausible.

  “This thing—Uraei—it sees everything we do, in public and in our homes. It hears every word we say, reads everything we write. It knows where we go, what we buy, what we eat, what we read, and who we associate with. Even worse, it’s made to share that information—with local law enforcement, Federation security, Starfleet. If we’re right about this—”

  “And we’re pretty sure we are—” Turan added.

  “—then billions of beings throughout the Federation have been living in a surveillance society their entire lives, one more pernicious and invasive than anyone ever dreamed.”

  The guarded look on Sarina’s face told Bashir that she knew, as he did, that Graniv’s worst fears weren’t just possible, they were entirely likely. But confirming that for her here, without a plan for dealing with the fallout, would likely only get her and Turan killed.

  And now possibly us as well, he realized.

  Sarina feigned incredulity. “Those are major accusations. But how could a program like that work? It violates multiple sections of the Federation Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If the Federation was running this kind of surveillance on an interstellar scale, someone on the Council or someone in Starfleet would’ve exposed it by now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Graniv said. “For starters, it might not be illegal.”

  Bashir thought he’d misheard her. “Excuse me?”

  “Purely on a technicality,” Graniv said.

  Turan added, “It’s not clear who made it. But it doesn’t belong to any agency, or receive input from any official, elected or appointed. As far as I can tell, it’s completely auton­omous.”

  “From a legal standpoint,” Graniv said, “it doesn’t constitute a governmental invasion of citizens’ privacy because no one in the government has control over the program.”

  Unless an extralegal agency somehow compromised or co-opted such a system for its own purposes, Bashir brooded, before deciding to keep that insight to himself. “So the law would treat this spy program like any other piece of malicious software?”

  “It might not even be able to do that,” Turan said. “Thanks to recent rulings on the rights of artificially sentient beings, Uraei would be considered an independent, virtual citizen.”

  “Wonderful.” Bashir noted the timer counting down on the master console. Their meeting was almost out of time. He asked Graniv, “Why bring this to us?”

  “Because I know Ms. Douglas works for the Federation Security Agency. And I’m fairly sure you both have connections in Starfleet Intelligence. And since you’re kind of a celebrity, you might be able to make discreet inquiries without being disappeared.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that.” He frowned. “I’m not sure—”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Sarina interrupted. “I have a few ideas, but Julian and I need some time to gauge our options. Until we get back in touch with you, don’t write anything about this, and don’t discuss it with anyone.” She asked Turan, “How soon can you set up another meeting with us here on Andor?”

  “Give me two days and I can make a safe room on Hiloshaal Island.”

  “That works. Meet us there in exactly forty-eight hours.”

  “It’s a date,” Graniv said. “But we’d better go.” She
ushered Bashir and Sarina out into the numbing midnight deep freeze while Turan stayed behind to bring the station back online just shy of its ten-minute downtime limit. The Trill bade them farewell with a wave. “Until next time.” Then she climbed inside her transport pod and started its engine. Moments later Turan exited the station and climbed inside the pod with Graniv. It lifted off into a flurry of falling snow, then sped away and melted into the darkness.

  Shivering and impatient, Sarina elbowed Bashir. “Are we going or what?”

  “Sorry.” He dug the transporter recall beacon from his pocket and switched it on. They stood and waited for the transporter beam to enfold them.

  She shot a curious look his way. “What were you waiting for?”

  “I was hoping to wake up and find out this was just a nightmare.”

  “Bad news, sweetie: we’re wide awake.” Sound and color washed over them as she added, “And it is a nightmare.”

  • • •

  It took half an hour to get home from their arctic rendezvous, and Sarina had found it worrisome that in that time Julian hadn’t said a word. There had been no one to overhear them, since they had made use of uncrewed vehicles and facilities borrowed from the Federation Security Agency—resources she herself had secured against eavesdropping.

  Not until the door of their home closed and locked did Julian speak. Then he erupted with anger. “Are you mad? Why did you set another meeting with them?”

  His vitriol took her by surprise. “What? Why are you so angry?”

  “Couldn’t you tell I was trying to steer them away from this?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then why set another meeting? We should’ve discouraged her. If she pursues this, it’ll lead her to Thirty-one. It has their stench all over it.”

  “Of course it does. Why do you think I’m pursuing it?” Sarina took a bit of satisfaction in his livid double take. “This is an opportunity, Julian. Maybe the best we’ve had yet.”

  Rage and confusion left him scrabbling for words. “I—! . . . What? . . . How—?”

  “Think about it. If this Uraei code is everywhere like Graniv says, that would explain what happened to our data chip and padd when we tried to look at our Thirty-one intercepts.”

  He paced in the middle of the living room. “And that helps us how?”

  “Now we have the source code. If I’m right, Thirty-one uses that code for almost everything it does. Which means Graniv has the key to all of Thirty-one’s secrets.”

  Bashir stopped, pulled his hand over the front of his beard. It was a pensive gesture, one Sarina had seen him use to signal that he was thinking and about to respond. “If that’s true, she’s in more danger than she can possibly know.”

  “True. But it also means she’s in a position to help us get our hands on that code.” She moved close enough to take hold of his arms and force him to look her in the eye. “Think about what we could do with it. We could gain access to all their information, pinpoint all their people. This could be the weapon that lets us take them down for good.”

  He broke free of her and resumed pacing by the front window. “I don’t like it. It feels like a classic Thirty-one trap. They dangle something like this. Something they know we can’t resist. And fools that we are, we jump at it. Every. Time.”

  How could she persuade him? “I know we’ve been burned before. But think about all the variables, Julian. A junked computer core salvaged by an academic researcher? Who contacts a journalist with a handwritten note? How could Thirty-one have arranged all that?”

  “Maybe one of the scientists is one of their agents. Maybe they both are. Or maybe they turned Graniv.” The speed of his pacing increased; his affect was becoming almost manic. “It doesn’t feel right. It’s too convenient. Too expedient. We’re being set up.”

  “No, you’re being paranoid.”

  That stopped him in midstep. He faced her wearing a wounded expression. “After all we’ve been through, can you really tell me my fears are unjustified?”

  “I’m not saying we shouldn’t be cautious.” She pressed her hand to his cheek, hoping it would calm him. “We have to keep our guard up. I know that.” She moved closer, until she knew he could feel her breath upon his face. “This might be the best advantage we’ve ever had. But I agree—we have to proceed with caution. So I suggest we try a carefully limited experiment.”

  He matched her whisper. “Such as?”

  “We study Uraei. Learn how it shares intel on the Federation’s comnet without being detected. Then we use that knowledge to reverse-engineer a way to passively monitor its activity and analyze it for patterns that might lead us to Thirty-one.”

  Bashir considered her proposal. “It’s risky.”

  “That’s what makes it worth doing.”

  A grudging nod. “All right. We’ll try it. But if this gets us all killed—”

  “I know,” Sarina said. “You get to say you told me so.”

  • • •

  Barely a speck of frost-covered dirt amid the ice floes of the La’Vor Sea, Hiloshaal Island qualified as “tropical” only in the sense that it was located a mere nine degrees and six minutes north of Andor’s equator. Its surface area was less than eight square kilometers, it had no official inhabitants, and its only feature of note was an automated navigational tower that helped direct the planet’s marine and aerial traffic. It was one of the least-visited pieces of real estate on Andor, and perhaps in all of the Federation.

  Which made it the perfect locale for a secret meeting.

  As promised, Turan had converted the signal tower’s basement into a Faraday suite in record time. The basement was cramped and dingy, with cold cement walls and floors reinforced by duranium rebar. Its absence of windows made it as dark as a grave, and it was colder than one to boot. A signal-proof space had been erected in the middle of the underground level, tucked between the tower’s load-bearing support columns. Prefabricated walls of wire mesh and signal-blocking gadgets had been arranged to create a “zone of silence,” as Turan called it, roughly nine square meters in area, with a low ceiling. Just as he had done at the weather station, he had tapped into the tower’s existing comnet links to create encrypted channels to the outside.

  Inside the claustrophobic workspace, Graniv, Turan, Douglas, and Bashir were all but on top of one another. The Trill stood away from the technobabble-infused conversation between Douglas and Turan and tried to mask her boredom, though knew she was failing.

  “But if we already have Uraei’s source code,” Douglas asked with rising fervor, “why can’t we extract the string for—”

  “Because it’s not coded that way,” Turan said. “I understand what you want, and why you want it, but I’m telling you: it can’t be done.”

  Doctor Bashir sounded unconvinced. “Can’t be done? Or can’t be done by you?”

  Turan was offended. “Does that really make a difference at this point?”

  Graniv rolled her eyes. Please let me die before they sink back into jargon.

  “It shouldn’t be this hard,” Douglas said. “Just isolate its decryption protocols and packet trackers.”

  Her suggestion further rankled the Cardassian. “How am I supposed to do that without the developer key? This is compiled code buried inside seven more layers of legacy compiled code. Even if I had access to military-grade decompilers, it would take me weeks to unpack all this.”

  So much for not sinking back into jargon. Graniv thumb-massaged her aching temples. “Is there any way you can crack this without having to involve the military?”

  “I doubt it,” Turan said. “If we took it back to your friends at the university, maybe they could help. But given what I know of civilian-grade tech, it might take them a decade to break this out. Which is fine with me—I’m in no hurry to mess with this.”

  “But we are,” Do
uglas said. “Finding out what makes this tick could help us—” She stopped in midsentence, as if reconsidering what she meant to share. “Let’s just say there’s a lot more riding on this than you might think.”

  Turan nodded. “Okay. So you want to expedite the extraction.”

  Bashir struck a conciliatory note: “If at all possible.”

  “In that case,” Turan continued, “you’d need a computer genius. And I don’t mean the kind of so-called genius you find in every high-end lab. I’m talking about a savant. A person with the kind of gift for computers that comes along maybe once every few generations. Someone with expertise in circuit design, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. And if they know a thing or two about networked consciousness, so much the better.”

  Graniv felt compelled to add, “And they’d also need to be completely trustworthy. With morals and ethics above reproach.”

  Douglas met their conditions with a disbelieving stare. “A saint who happens to be an unrivaled expert in multiple high-tech disciplines? Is that all? If only you’d told me sooner. I could’ve put an ad on the comnet: ‘Position available for spiritually pure computer supergenius. Perks include possible premature death. Submit cover letter and résumé with references.’ ”

  A coolly arched brow signaled Turan’s lack of amusement. “No need to be snide about it. You asked what was needed. We told you. Good luck finding it.” He stood and packed his kit, then said to Graniv on his way out of the tower, “See you at the pod.”

  Graniv, Douglas, and Bashir watched the Cardassian leave. After he was gone, Graniv faced the two humans but was unable to hide her waning optimism. “Well, I’m out of ideas. Do you have any? Or is this whole thing dead in the water?”

  Douglas sighed and stared at her feet, clearly at a loss for a solution.