Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel

by Suastegui, Eduardo

  He shrugged. “Sure. I’ll set it up.”

  She stood up and had to sit down again.

  “Whoa, you OK?”

  She sighed. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Why don’t I like the sound of that?”

  “Because it won’t suit you.”

  He came over, pulling a chair with him. “What’s up?”

  “You sure you want your world rocked?”

  “I’m sensing I don’t have much of a choice.”

  She nodded. “Ever wonder why they didn’t make me reveal what I did with all that stock market money the hack tapped?”

  He nodded back. “You gave it to the Ukranians. To get them off your back.”

  “I gave them a taste.”

  He sighed. “There’s more.”

  “If more equals a majority, then, yes. There’s more. But they’re not demanding it back, are they?”

  “They being—”

  “Your buddies. Robert Odehl, Stan, Cynthia. All of them looking the other way, not demanding I return all that money. Why’s that, Martin?”

  He frowned. Was he putting it together? She doubted it. If nothing else, he didn’t want to put it together. He wanted to keep pretending his windfall came based on merit and a little of good fortune.

  “Because they have the money already. Because they don’t need me to take them to it.”

  “Come on.” He leaned away from her. “You have proof of this?”

  “I’ve been poking around. As much as I can without getting burned. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  He nodded. His expression went blank, or almost blank. At least she wanted to believe she saw something of a bother in it.

  “Anything else?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. She shrugged. “Nah.”

  “You sure?”

  “That’s about enough for one day, don’t you think?”

  He shook his head and stepped away. Yeah, she’d given him enough truth for one day. Lowering her gaze to the floor, she decided that was as much truth as she cared to share with him for one day, or any day, for that matter.

  24» Trade and Barter

  Sasha found them on Google. The small gynecological practice occupied a converted house near the city border between Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. By the time she walked up to the receptionist, their computer system had gone down. All the way down, courtesy of one more Sasha Javan hack. The thought sickened her, though she preferred to blame the roiling in her stomach.

  “I have a nine o’clock appointment?” she said to the receptionist.

  The young woman looked up at her with frustration in her eyes. “I’ll have to take your word for it.” She gestured at her computer screen. “Our computers are down.”

  “Oh?” Sasha leaned over the counter to get a closer look. “Ooh, blue screen.”

  “I’ve rebooted it twice. Same thing. The other computers are the same way.” She raised her iPhone. “Our wireless router is down, too. Can’t even get on the Internet that way to send our computer guy an email. And that’s the best way we can get a hold of him, because he won’t answer his phone or return our calls. Bozo.”

  Sasha straightened up and reached into her purse. A second later she handed the receptionist a business card. “I do IT for a living.” She waited a bit, confirming her suspicion the receptionist wouldn’t know what she meant. “You know, computer repairs, network fixes, software updates. That sort of thing.”

  “Like I said, we have a guy.”

  Sasha cocked an eyebrow and gave the monitor a sideways glance. “How’s he doing for you?”

  “We called him. He should be here—”

  “Because if all your computers went down at once, that sounds like a nasty virus to me. Maybe even a malicious attack. Your patient and financial records could be compromised.”

  The receptionist’s eyes widened. “You think so?”

  “Perhaps I could talk to the doctor about it?”

  The receptionist hesitated for a moment. “Just a minute.”

  She went in the back, business card in hand. It didn’t take long for Dr. Tsai to come out. He opened the side door, extended a hand to shake Sasha’s and brought her back.

  “May I have her paperwork,” he asked the receptionist.

  “I’m a first time patient,” Sasha noted.

  “OK, so new paperwork, then.”

  Though Dr. Tsai asked her to step into an exam room, Sasha suggested she should take a look at one of his computers. Over the next few minutes she did her best impression of performing a scan on his office computer. She made sure she dropped an “Ooh, this is bad” here and there. When she thought that had gone long enough, she took her laptop out of her purse and propped it up. She made like she was copying a piece of fix-it code from it to a USB stick, when in fact everything she needed to undo the mess she’d created already resided in it.

  Two minutes later, the good doctor’s computer was booting up. Voila! Everything back to normal.

  By the time the office’s technical support arrived, all computers were running normally. The interlude between her repairs and his arrival provided Sasha plenty of time to highlight the computer network’s many deficiencies and offer several recommendations for improvements.

  Glad to be free of forceps and metal braces for her feet, Sasha got dressed and waited for the doctor to return. He delivered the news with the tentative unease of someone who doesn’t know whether the person on the other end will receive them with gladness or regret.

  “OK, so the home pregnancy tests don’t lie,” Sasha said.

  “They’re quite accurate these days. My test here is a little bit better, but I’m sure the full test will come back the same.” He tried to smile but failed.

  “Thank you for the quick turnaround.”

  This time his smile broke free. “One deserves another.” He held her gaze for a moment. “You’re quite good at what you do.”

  She nodded and looked around the room. Here she needed to proceed carefully. She needed to project hesitation. Maybe sprinkle in a little bit of apprehension. Come on too strong, and he’d suspect.

  “I don’t have insurance,” she said. “I can pay you for this visit, but not for the procedure.”

  “So you’ve decided already.”

  She gave him a blank look.

  “All right, then. It’s a big decision. Maybe you should take—”

  “You can do that here.”

  “We can, yes.”

  “How soon?”

  “Earlier is better. Fewer complications. But you’re early enough that you can take a week or two if—”

  “That won’t be necessary.” She forced a smile. “Earlier is better for me, too.”

  He scrunched his lips and nodded. “We accept credit cards.”

  “Unfortunately that’s not an option. I need some time to gather the cash.”

  He sharpened his eyes. “In fairness, I owe you at least an hour of work, don’t I?”

  Bingo. Now he’d made it his idea. Still, she couldn’t grab on too hard or quickly.

  She shook her head. “I’m sure that won’t even begin to cover it.”

  His eyes sharpened yet again. “Perhaps if we set up something longer term.” He waved at the door. “I haven’t been happy with our IT guy for some time. It took him hours to get here today. Good thing we didn’t have a lot of patients. Still, my billing assistant has lost all this time. That’s cash flow out of my pocket.”

  “In fairness, your equipment and software needs some refreshing.”

  He waved his hand again, this time nowhere in particular. “We could discuss that, yes. Hopefully we can find less expensive options than my IT guy offered.”

  “OK. If you think that would work.”

  He smiled and stood up with an extended hand. “Why wouldn’t it?”

  She shook his hand and released it. “One more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I�
��ll need this off the books.”

  He cocked his head sideways, quizzically.

  “I need total privacy on this.”

  “Our records are fully private, in full compliance with—”

  “I get that, but it’s more than that. I need absolute privacy. No records.” She paused to project as much pain as she could convey through her eyes. Surprised she didn’t have to work hard at it, she dabbed at her eyes. “I’ll get you a good deal on new hardware.”

  He squinted more than sharpened his gaze this time. It didn’t take him long to nod and say, “I think we can arrange that.”

  They shook hands again, the way people do when one opts to keep things off the books. No contracts. No paperwork. No reporting. Off-grid. Only mutual trust, the sort that comes through two hands linking it all up.

  Sasha gave him a soft, tearful smile while inside she told herself she’d profiled him right.

  Sasha stayed the rest of the day, installing this, tweaking that. By 3 PM she’d convinced Dr. Tsai to upgrade his firewall server. She would build it up to spec for him.

  She returned the following afternoon with said server. She gave him a great deal for it, at cost. He put it on the under-the-table ledger toward her procedure. She came back after the office closed and had it all up and running by 7 PM.

  The next morning, when she returned for her procedure, Dr. Tsai beamed with satisfaction. His office Internet connection had never run smoother. Faster, even, he kept saying.

  Yeah, amazing how that worked, Sasha thought to herself, lying on the bed, wearing nothing but a thin white gown. She closed her eyes and consoled herself with the thought that a fast Internet connection would serve her well, too. She’d get her procedure, free and off the books. In turn, Dr. Tsai got a secured office network with improved speed to boot, and she’d have an untraceable launch pad for whatever Cyber trickery she’d need to shoot off.

  Win-win-win, she told herself, even if here, inside the darkness behind her closed eyes, the whole thing smacked her like a complete loss.

  She squeezed her eyes tighter, trying to restrain the tears that burned through anyway.

  On her computer, Cynthia reviewed the files again. She replayed the surveillance video, choppy-sloppy thing that it was. One question kept coming up. Why had Sasha done all this in plain view, while getting the doctor to keep her procedure off the books?

  Cynthia flipped to that page again. Diagnosis: bladder infection. Prescription: something or other antibiotics. Fees: paid in cash.

  She stopped the video at the point where Sasha walked into the practice with a large box under one arm. Sasha hadn’t concealed that either. She’d gone into a computer chop-shop, purchased a motherboard plus memory, a case, a pair of high-speed network cards, a power supply. She’d assembled it all herself. She’d also brought in two high bandwidth network routers. She’d brought it all in plain view and walked into the doctor’s office, head held high, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. If she wasn’t mistaken, Cynthia even detected a measure of defiance in Sasha’s step and demeanor.

  All of that equipment she’d purchased with her credit card, again, without the slightest effort to conceal it. But she wanted the procedure off the books. That much she wanted kept secret.

  Why?

  Cynthia felt a pang of shame, even guilt that she should be asking. The answer should be rather obvious, shouldn’t it?

  Sasha had traded computer services for medical ones to have no record of her medical condition because she didn’t want Martin to know. More than that, she wanted no trace of it. Other than arresting that doctor and threatening him with all manner of career ending mischief, there was no proof. If the doctor and his staff kept their legal wits about them, keeping their mouths shut would seal it.

  Cynthia sighed. She didn’t want to go that route. Should she push it from a different angle? Should she order a tap into that new computer equipment to ensure Sasha hadn’t set up a new base of operations. If she did, people would ask why. They would require documented justification. Cynthia would have to state her suspicion, in writing. She could do her best to keep it compartmentalized, but did she want to chance the information getting back to Martin? How would he react? Would it unsettle him, make him angry at Sasha? Or would it embitter him to his place at InfoStream and what it had cost him? Would it send him into a tailspin and halt his future at InfoStream?

  Hell of a question, wasn’t it? Based on Martin’s profile, his past rebellious streak and his tendency toward emotional outbursts, she estimated his response would more likely fall along the lines of blaming InfoStream. Maybe even blaming her, perhaps.

  Still, it remained an open question.

  Cynthia knew she couldn’t answer it with certainty, and she knew she didn’t want to take the chance. She took the printed copies over to her shredder and fed them two and three pages at a time. Then she returned to her computer and entered the coded command to destroy all digital copies.

  Was she sure, the computer asked. She snorted a short-lived chuckle. Who could be sure of anything?

  25» Hooks

  Cultivation. That’s what Chana called it. Of course, she used that term to refer to how Sasha ought to “visualize” her work with Martin and team. But Sasha knew Chana very much saw Sasha and her development in that way. Sasha had to admit: the word carried the right connotation. It brought to mind the incremental work that might seem insignificant if stripped of the overall context. It told you about planting today, watering and pruning, over and over again, to harvest someday, a long way from now. It even suggested the inevitable setbacks and challenges a farmer faced.

  As Chana put it, cultivation required patience and determination. No, determination gave off too weak a vibe. Tenacity, dear Sasha. Tenacity.

  Chana practiced what she preached. She’d left Sasha alone for three months. Well, alone in the sense of zero direct communications. The sort of alone that involved lots of long-distance, hands-off, but never in-the-blind monitoring. During that time Sasha could drop roots and blossom. And she did, to the point where ankle bracelets fell entirely out of fashion with her American handlers. Even the monitoring—though still pervasive and ongoing—dropped off in intensity.

  For extra credit, she even shared a few nights here and there with Martin. Cultivation indeed, even if Sasha sensed the intermittent trysts would lead nowhere—not with Martin fixated on launching his InfoStream dream.

  “That’s how it works,” Chana said. “They’ll never trust you entirely. Don’t be fooled—”

  “I am not,” Sasha replied, foregoing the inclination to point out how Chana had cast the affair in a much more positive light at the start.

  “In their eyes you’re tarnished goods, only to be exposed to a few key things. A minimum and absolutely necessary subset. But at least we can meet without the fear of eyes on us, now, can’t we?”

  Sasha took that in, deciphering why Chana would turn this negative. Perhaps she was growing concerned over Sasha’s growing attachment to Martin? Too much of a good thing? Too threatening to what Sasha needed to do in the end? Taking too long to deliver the much anticipated crop?

  Sasha looked around the dressing room. Chana’s people assured her: the guy with “supervision duty” today had stayed outside. He’d parked himself outside the door, with no interest to go into a woman’s clothing store with her. It didn’t exactly feel to Sasha like they’d lightened up on the monitoring, but with her and Chana as the only two women in the dressing room, she supposed they had a private, ear-free enough place to chat.

  “Things going well, I take it?” Chana said.

  “Well enough.”

  “Ready to deploy?”

  “Went live with two intelligence networks last week, part of a testing program. If it goes well with them, we’ll roll out the rest.”

  “Exciting times, then.”

  “You’re going to want something like it,” Sasha said, getting right to the point where she thought all this was going. �
��Here’s the thing. I can’t. They’ll know.”

  “Our folks can make some differentiating modifications.”

  “You don’t get it. This thing is unique. Anybody deploys it, so much as tinkers with it, and it calls home.”

  “Nothing is that unique. And calling home requires an open line.” Chana smiled, the way she did when she wanted to let on she knew more than her non-technical background should allow. “Our people are sharp.”

  “Not sharp enough.” Sasha paused, regretting what she was about to say before it connected. “I can create our own version. One the Americans can’t mistake for their own.”

  Chana grinned. “We’d have to see it.”

  “Sure. On my spare time.”

  Chana’s grin twisted to the side. “To be honest, some people in Tel Aviv—the ones with purse and power—don’t think we should install anything at all. From the descriptions you’ve forwarded, they think the whole system packs too much backfire and blowback potential.”

  “Oh?”

  “Too autonomous. Not enough man in the loop, as they say.”

  So… they didn’t care for the artificial intelligence part. Of course they wouldn’t. They were too old school, and too paranoid. And sharp enough to watch from the side to see how well it went for the Americans before jumping in themselves.

  Sasha turned around to face the mirror and see herself in the pair of cargo pants she’d picked out. She wasn’t sure about the legs. They stopped around mid-calf. Strings hung down, tickling the top of her bare feet. She bent down to tie them, see if that improved the look any. It didn’t. It made her legs look shorter. Maybe if she added a medium heel boot…

  “You should try something more feminine,” Chana said. “Would you like me to go out and pick you something? A sun dress perhaps? Spring being around the corner and all.”

  “Tehran wants it,” Sasha replied.

  Chana stiffened. “Of course they do. The version of Martin’s white paper we forwarded on your behalf has piqued their interest.”

  Sasha shuddered. Tying off the last of the strings, she recalled how she’d smuggled Martin’s white paper inside her underwear. Of course, that version also featured a few edits, namely, Sasha’s. It included Sasha’s own—and real—concerns about the vulnerabilities of Martin’s invention, how the same safeguards that secured networks from Cyberattacks could flip on their heads should the technology fall into the wrong hands. Or if it outsmarted itself—if it self-morphed in undesirable, unpredictable ways.