Don/Tom allowed himself a small, reluctant smile, but he still worried. The flying islands were just an expansion of the Besterian jauntbox program, really. Besterboxes allowed participants to step fluidly from one virtual reality to another, but no one had used the tech to combine such large and disparate elements into a single mass before—not even temporarily. Despite the fact that things were going well, he wondered what complex and unpredictable dynamics might be generated by the impromptu experiment they were conducting.
The Jed Astaires launched into their rendition of “The World Turned Upside Down”—a march played by Cornwallis’s troops when they surrendered their arms at Yorktown in 1781. Don/Tom looked up at the clouds again. A new, perfectly pyramidal island flew toward them.
Odd. Everybody who had been invited had already shown or sent their regrets. A party crasher? Or was this some unintended side effect of toying with Cybernesian dynamics? He hoped it wasn’t the infocops, come to bust their party.
No sooner did the island land in the bay and fuse with the rest of the temporary Cybernesian continent than the pyramid opened and some sort of holographic broadcast filled the sky. As if the entire world were, in fact, a stage, two characters appeared.
Don frantically searched his infosphere links, even checking Cybernesia’s South American backup servers in Tri-Border, in an effort to determine what the hell was going on. As he searched, his guests watched a gun-toting parachutist land in a garden among the clouds, listened to the parachutist and his paramour exchanging banter overloaded with allusions. The Cybernesia party ground to a halt.
The intruder-program and its characters morphed chaotically into heavily armed superscientists casually talking shop amid attacks by ninjoid commandoes.
Don’s searching yielded no answers.
“Isn’t this simulation a bit unusual, honey?” Karuna/Sally asked Don. “This doesn’t seem like you.”
“It’s not me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m not doing it. In fact, I’m trying to jam the holo-cast. Block the signal, somehow.”
“Any luck?”
“None whatsoever.”
In the sky above, Biblical garden imagery collided with laboratory milieu. Don, meanwhile, attempted to filter the broadcast out of Cybernesian virtuality, but found himself thwarted at every turn.
In the intruder holo-cast, high-tech death accompanied talk of “wellness plagues” and population-ratcheting. Speculative scientific scenarios were punctuated by explosions.
Soon the pair who had crashed his party were caught up in a chaotic, apocalyptic maelstrom of eclipsing suns and rumbling thunder. Nightmarish fighter aircraft screamed above, firing missiles and dropping bombs in a battle among the clouds.
“Great sim-within-a-sim!” said a Medusa-haired Medea πrate, sidling up to Don and Karuna in the party zone. “A bit anachronistic, though, isn’t it?”
Don frowned. Medea was e-bodied in a manner entirely too buxom, especially since, in meatlife, “she” was purported to be a skinny, crotchety old South Asian named Indahar Marwani.
Yeah, right, he thought. How much did any of them really know about the Ambiguous One?
“As I was just telling m’lady here, I’m not doing it.”
“Then who is?” Medea asked. Something rang false in the way she intoned the question.
“I don’t know. It may be an unanticipated effect of our having joined these islands together.”
“Ho-ho.” Medea laughed. “You mean the pirates have been pirated? How rich!”
In the chaotic world among the clouds, the man and woman ran and leapt for cover without even bothering to pause in their philosophical conversation.
“Wait a minute!” Karuna said to Don and Medea. “I think I know who the male character is! I recognize the underlayment. It’s that guy, what’s his name—Lok, or Kwok. The one who contacted us about the deep hack. The work we did for him is what gave me the idea for the island-merging software.”
Above them, the eclipse of the intruder-sun in the intruder-sky deepened. Lightning forked down out of distant clouds.
BUREAUCRATIC WEATHER
CRYPTO CITY
The stealth limo carrying NSA Deputy Director James Brescoll was quiet as a tomb—just the way he liked it at this time of the morning. Especially today, when he was supposed to be off duty. His wife and son, earlier risers than he was, were already out, and using the family cars, when the call came.
As the limo slowed, he glanced up from his briefing sheets. He had expected them to be about the ongoing low-intensity conflict in the Brazil/Paraguay/Argentina Tri-Border Free Zone, and some of the material did deal with that. The majority of it, though, was about a storm blowing in from China. Not the usual proxy-playing over Nepal and Bhutan or the Tibetan rebels, either, but a new storm altogether.
Jim Brescoll stared out the deeply tinted window, seeing darkly reflected in it the face of a graying and bespectacled black man with a scar on his left cheek. Through his reflection, Brescoll saw the southbound lane of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, not far from the small town of Annapolis Junction, Maryland. For a moment it was hard to tell whether he was passing through the landscape or the landscape was passing through him.
The vehicle, driven by a member of the Executive Protection Unit, was impervious to eavesdropping from just about anywhere along the electromagnetic spectrum. The stealthy car slid down a restricted Fort Meade exit ramp bordered by mature oak trees and heavy earthen berms, toward a graceful tangle of security hardscape: strategically placed landscape boulders, barbed-wire perimeter fences, cement barriers. Other security measures lurked in the surrounding landscape, less obvious to the uninformed eye. Telephoto surveillance cameras and motion detectors. Antitruck hydraulics. Eight hundred uniformed police, under Crypto City’s own law-enforcement authority, as well as a smaller but deadlier group of black-uniformed paramilitary commandos of the Special Operations Unit/Emergency Response Team.
As he and his driver were waved through the vehicle screening gate, past the bomb-sniffing dogs, Brescoll noticed that none of the SOU/ERT people were visible—no alert was under way at the moment. Everything looked lowkey this morning, despite the “special circumstances” that had brought him in on his day off.
Business was so much as-usual that it made him smile, taking undeniable pride in his role as “vice mayor” of this labyrinthine secret city, the highest-ranking civilian official in a civilian agency administered by the Department of Defense.
He’d done his military time, certainly. The scar on his cheek was an ever-present reminder of that—the product of close-quarters combat with Iraqi troops in the marshes south of Baghdad, more than a decade ago, at the end of his career in the reserves. Brescoll killed the soldier who’d laid open his face in their fixed-bayonet struggle, but he took no pride in the accomplishment, only a simple gratitude for his own survival.
His experience standing at the tip of the spear in two resource-allocation wars had left him with a profound distaste for the “hardwar” end of national defense—and more than a bit skeptical of gung-ho chickenhawks who had never seen frontline battle.
Not that he’d given up completely on the hardware, by any means. Shifting more comfortably into the seat, he felt the bulge low at his back. After active service in the Persian Gulf War, Brescoll had spent enough years in law enforcement to feel somehow naked if he were on duty without a gun. As one of the perks of his office he had obtained a concealed-weapons permit for the workmanlike Glock 9 he carried. Handguns, however, weren’t the core of his personal gun collection by any means. He didn’t consider himself a gun nut, but rather a “gunnoisseur,” inclined to rhapsodize over the stock woods, steel bluing, and butter-smooth bolt actions of great carbines the way some of his acquaintances did over the “nose,” “balance,” and “body” of vintage cabernets.
The quiet he treasured was shattered by the ringing of his phone. As he picked it up he clicked a small meta
l card into the side, which rendered the system secure in under a second. Fifty years ahead of anyone else, he thought. Almost enough to make him feel smug, but not quite.
“Brescoll here.”
“Wang, sir. Initial analysis is complete on the material from China. We’ve confirmed that it involves Jaron Kwok. Beech and Lingenfelter have been working with me on it the last few hours. The director is already here, waiting to see it.”
Steve Wang was a rare bird. The wiry and bespectacled Cryptologic Linguist was also a Cryptologic Computer Scientist assigned to NSA’s Communications and Computing Center, under the umbrella of Princeton’s Institute for Defense Analysis. Lingenfelter and Beech were similarly overqualified. Bree Lingenfelter, a tall, serious redhead, was a different type of twofer—double appointments at NSA’s Communications Research Division and its Laboratory for Physical Sciences, both at the University of Maryland.
Bearded, graying, and occasionally bespectacled, Baldwin Beech was the strangest twofer of all: holder of the Felix C. Forrest Professorship in Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins, and a CIA operative acting as a liaison between that agency and the NSA. A threefer, really, since he had some sort of medical background from before he got into the intelligence game.
A few years back the three had made a name for themselves when they collaborated on a major research project concerning the highly secret Special Computing Institutes. The SCIs, they argued, were China’s “Bletchley Parks.” They had traced Beijing’s emphasis on cadres of mathematicians and computer scientists back to a pair of papers published in the mid-nineties: General Wang Pufeng’s work proclaiming the need to excel in information warfare, and Michael Wilson’s “hardwar/softwar/wetwar” trichotomy analysis.
Beech, Wang, and Lingenfelter had suggested that the upper echelons of the Chinese government and military had looked to their own history when searching for ways to prevent global capitalism from winning over Chinese hearts and minds with consumerist ideas and imagery. The rulers had thus built the Great Firewall to control infosphere access, while also strictly controlling the dissemination of “approved truth” for internal consumption.
The Chinese had come to believe they could counter American hard-tech superiority through targeted “soft” or information-war programs, as the British had counterbalanced Nazi Germany’s hard-weapon superiority during World War II through programs like radar, range finders, and especially the cryptologic work of the Bletchley Park code breakers. Or so Beech, Wang, and Lingenfelter claimed.
Reading their work, Brescoll had immediately taken steps to corral the three to work for him. The best and the brightest of the best and the brightest, but there were times when he wished all of them better understood chain of command.
Part of it was his own fault. He’d allowed them far too much autonomy. As deputy director he remained their nominal supervisor, yet he barely knew what they were up to much of the time. An impulsive bunch, in any case—especially Wang. Bringing the director in on this had to be his idea.
Janis Rollwagen’s tomahawklike visage wasn’t what Brescoll himself would have gone looking for this early in the day—unless he’d had no other choice.
“I’ve just come through the gate,” Brescoll said, keeping the irritation out of his voice. “Don’t hold up the show on my account. You can catch me up when I get there. By the way, where is there?”
“Instantiation Room C in Tordella.”
“Very good. See you in a few.”
He directed his driver toward Ream Road and the Computer Operations Command Center. Brescoll hoped that, whatever this was all about, it was worth the director’s time, and his own—or someone was on the road to getting reamed indeed.
The limo threaded its way among dozens of buildings and complexes. Supercomputer labs and living quarters. Offices and anechoic chambers. Factories and 10K clean rooms with air ten thousand times more pure than the atmosphere he breathed in his limo. More than three hundred acres of parking space for forty thousand employees, who were in turn served by Crypto City’s own post office, fire department, encrypted television network, university, banks, libraries, drugstores, barbershops, waste disposal and recycling services, as well as by Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and scores of intramural employee sports programs and clubs—including the Arundel yacht club, the Good News Bible Club, and the Alan Turing chapter of the Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Employees club, GLOBE.
Leaving the car, Brescoll wound his way to Tordella’s fifth floor, past exotic machines “super” and “massively parallel” in their info-crunching capability. He nodded at innumerable blue-badged employees as they passed him in the halls. At last he reached the door to Instantiation Room C. A small plaque on the wall indentified it without any particular fanfare.
He cleared room security with his personally coded magnetic passkey and fingerprint/DNA scan biometrics. Entering, he was once again surprised at the cavernous nature of this particular I Room. The effect was enhanced by the holographic display at the center of the room’s perpetual semidarkness. The three-dimensional graphics presentation here was reputed to be the best in the world. Based in software that allowed the National Reconnaissance Office’s computers to combine multiple-angle satellite imaging, the system “embodied” its 3-D imagery by using ultrahigh-frequency sound waves to distort the air itself, bending it enough to form holograms.
All that still didn’t explain the strange impression of sheer size in the room itself. As the door closed behind him he saw that a fully dimensional worldmovie was running on the holographic projectors, casting bizarre images of a deepening eclipse, thunderstorms, and meteors streaming by overhead.
Noting Brescoll’s presence, Wang paused the image, which flashed a series of alphanumeric codes, time stamps, and words such as NSOC and Umbra and Zarf. Highest-level signals intelligence, beamed to the downlink center at Fort Belvoir by eavesdropping satellites, and eventually checked through to the National Security Operations Center. From the time stamps, Brescoll guessed that Kwok’s location in China was eight hours ahead of London and GMT, thirteen hours ahead of D.C.’s time zone, and sixteen hours ahead of Los Angeles time.
“For the main male figure here,” Wang said, “we’ve identified the underlying electronic embodiment as Jaron Kwok. We think the female figure is based on Kwok’s estranged wife, the sinologist Cherise LeMoyne.”
“Where’d it come from?” Brescoll asked.
“We aren’t certain yet. Some of it seems almost like a projection of Kwok’s own psyche, but it also has elements that can only have come from the grid-computer matrix he was accessing, or perhaps controlling as some sort of superuser.”
Wang set the airborne holomovie in motion again. Brescoll watched as the meteor he’d seen earlier exploded in the air some distance away. He listened to the main characters discuss “programmable cellular machines” and the “last plague of Egypt.” They were accosted by an older man dressed in a fire-singed white robe, and dragging a parachute.
Now it was Beech’s turn to pause the intercepted ’cast.
“We set some of the IBM Deep Computers on data-mining a source for the older man here,” said the fringe-bearded CIA liaison, adjusting his stylishly retro eyeglasses on his nose. “The best machine matches indicate that he’s based on sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno.”
“Who is relevant…how?” asked Director Rollwagen.
“Not known. At one time or another, Bruno was excommunicated by the Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, before being burned alive at the stake in the Roman Flower Market on February 17, 1600.”
“The computer’s best match for the forest burning beneath a meteor blast,” Wang added, “is the Tunguska event, in Siberia, June 30, 1908.”
Rollwagen and Brescoll nodded as the holo-cast resumed. The deputy director watched and listened and scratched his head as the supercouple went on about their workaday speculations in the midst of various signs of the Apocalypse. Then a virtual twin of Kwok’s avatar appeared, likewis
e armed with a machine pistol, only darker complected and garbed in black, instead of red. As he did so, the destruction grew more pronounced and the speculative discussions grew weirder—reality as a simulation, the Fermi Paradox, the universal quantum computer….
Bree Lingenfelter hit PAUSE this time, freezing in bent air an image of alien creatures walking forward under storm-ridden skies full of shooting stars.
“Despite the chaotic nature of the scenario,” Lingenfelter said, “we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of what’s being talked about here—particularly the reference to ‘binotech enhancers.’”
“What exactly was Kwok working on?” Director Rollwagen asked. To Brescoll, it looked as if she wasn’t underestimating the importance of the holo-cast, at all.
“The history of algorithm complexes originally found in documents Felix Forrest willed to the CIA,” Beech said. “Secondarily, solutions to those algorithms. We decided that work was a priority after we saw increased activity involving sections of the documents the Chinese also possessed, particularly those relating to Matteo Ricci, Ai Hao, and memory palaces.”
“Do those documents have anything to do with quantum computing?” Rollwagen asked. “Or advanced binotech?”
“I don’t believe so,” Lingenfelter hedged.
“Yet here it is,” Rollwagen said. Then she nodded distractedly. “Perhaps you mentioned something along those lines while briefing him?”
“No,” Lingenfelter replied. “I was responsible for his initial technical briefing a year and a half ago. When I first met with Kwok, all he knew about the fusion of biotech and nanotech was what he’d seen in the media—communications implants, cell repair, cancer treatments, and gene fixes. He knew even less about quantum computing’s espionage applications. Didn’t show much interest in either of them, at first. But as his research progressed, he became fascinated by both. Rather quickly, too.”
“Apparently he’s got a hell of a learning curve,” Brescoll put in. “Binotech binding—particularly that linking quantum electronic components to DNA strands—is critical to the future of code making and code breaking. It’s also among the most highly classified of our efforts. What was the man thinking, allowing this to spew out over the infosphere? What we’ve just seen here doesn’t speak well for Kwok’s sanity—or his life span.”
The Labyrinth Key Page 3