Sitting up in her bunk bed, she began absentmindedly combing her hand through her dark hair, going over her plan yet again. She had five minutes until her untracked hour began at 2:00 a.m. The plan was simple: Make her way to the classroom near the facilities hall, find the SolipstiCorp tech, and attempt to extract whatever data she could. Extra credit would be given if she could somehow find information on Dylan in the process, but she was pessimistic. As she weighed potential variables, she subconsciously whispered a bitter curse toward Simeon as her hand combed the air where her hair should have been.
Two nights had passed since her first contact with Simeon. The team had run two test trials during her previous two ghost hours, simple explorations of innocuous portions of the facility. If Sindhu had been caught during these tests, she could have feigned believable ignorance. Fortunately, those test runs had gone off without incident. All the network logs that Simeon’s team could access had showed Sindhu sleeping soundly in her small second-floor apartment.
Simeon had wanted to do one final test, but Sindhu had talked him out of it. Time was fluttering away, and somewhere in the cavernous confines of the Saint Titus wing of the Titus facility, Dylan had lain unmoving for almost four days. The team feared the worst. Though it wasn’t explicitly discussed, each team member was protective of Dylan; unlike them, he hadn’t volunteered for this operation. He was just a gregarious businessman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So when Sindhu played the Dylan card to get Simeon on board with her own, riskier plan, it hadn’t required much arm-twisting.
The smiling globe popped up in front of her again, and she realized she had already wasted two minutes of her ghost hour. Already clothed, she hopped lithely off the five-feet-high bunk bed. Her bunk was made of a metallic-gray, powder-coated material. It was strong and thin—industrial. Below the bed sat a small, similarly crafted desk and chair. She sat down and slipped on a pair of sneakers. She was wearing her typical running attire: loose-fitting black spandex and a simple matching top. She considered grabbing a sweatshirt, as the facility cooled off noticeably at night, but she figured she’d be moving quickly and soon be warm enough. Requiring nothing else, Sindhu walked three paces to her door, cracked it open, and glanced up and down the hall. She noticed nothing at all, just as it had been the previous two nights, and so she ducked out and began to immediately jog away.
The lack of obvious security within Titus had initially surprised Simeon and the team, but security was not always obvious. Jay-san had been the one to discover numerous data points buried deep in logs that revealed small mobile security units stationed all around the facility. These units each stood one meter in height, with a circular trunk one-half meter in diameter. Each unit’s legs formed a tripod, with joints in the middle of the two front legs; these allowed the units to climb stairs faster than any human possibly could. During the day, this covert security force fronted as informational holoPods, making friendly banter with inquisitive passersby; but when called upon, the holoPods could access outfitted technology for both “peaceful” apprehension and large-scale crowd control.
Sindhu was not excited to learn of this covert feature of the facility. Further dampening her spirits, the SOP team had postulated that a small minority of the present workforce might be androids blending in undercover. “There’s no more effective means of hiding than not hiding,” Simeon was fond of lecturing the team.
She jogged around a corner and a holoPod, detecting movement, promptly presented a smiling holographic head above its sturdy three-legged trunk. The holoPod head nodded a friendly hello toward Sindhu, and promptly blinked off as she moved away. Sindhu breathed a sigh of relief at the knowledge that the holoPods were not equipped with optic detection, so they could not identify Sindhu as she passed. According to the holoPod’s data, Sindhu was still fast asleep in her small workforce apartment. The holoPod, now confused, reported an error that unidentified movement had been detected, but, as SOP already knew, these errors were presently ignored owing to the skeleton staff and the many false alarms they always received (usually from the cleaning automata).
An ambient light bobbed in front of her now, and she ran toward it briskly but still slowly enough to keep her breath below a peaceful panting. The sound of running water welled up around Sindhu and began to drown out the sound of her breathing. Less than a minute later, she was running through the Silas Wright Titus water-themed courtyard.
Various aqueducts and waterfalls created an M. C. Escher–like three-dimensional park. In the middle of the park, which Sindhu avoided, sat a frozen, perfectly circular lake. It was made of obsidian, which caused the lake to have a uniquely devoid look. All of the running water throughout the jigsaw park ended up deposited on the frozen surface of the Black Lake. Ornate ice sculptures, enormous in size, acted as drains for the incoming water, eventually pumping it back to the tops of the courtyard.
Sindhu immediately felt safer in and among the watery piping, partially because the ubiquitous sound of running water helping to hide her footfalls, but also because the many structures that guided the water provided deft angles to help hide her as she ran. She took a circuitous route to avoid the chance of meeting anyone who might be out for a late-night stroll. Even so, while her time across the courtyard was not record-breaking, it was swift. She covered the five-kilometer length in just under fifteen minutes.
Once she was on the other side of the courtyard, a few hallways whizzed past her as she ran, and finally Sindhu ducked into a utility room just past the lecture hall’s entrance. She was breathing more heavily than she had hoped she would, and she took a moment to balance her weight upon her knees. Simeon, however, did not allow her respite, as an encrypted text chat popped up in her ocImps.
BEGIN 256 PETABYTE OpenPGP PUBLIC, PRIVATE, & AUTHORIZED ENCRYPTED CHAT SESSION . . . AFFIRM THREE TIMES TO ACCEPT PUBLIC KEY AND SIGNED CHAT FROM:
SIMEON:SIM_a8f3de13320b. . .<256PB>. . .34cf6
KRSDNA:KRS_e99235f8f3cb. . .<256PB>. . .cc8f2
[SIMEON 02:21:24] Sin, nice job. We’re able to watch you most places now, by the way. Jay-san is making headway; opening more access every hour. We’re starting to think they let us in initially, but they don’t know that we know that they did that. And we’re using that to our advantage now.
[SinTh3t!c 02:21:29] I still have only an hour?
[SIMEON 02:21:34] Yeah, well, 51 minutes now. We haven’t been able to extend your time limit. Jay and Grep are working on it.
[SinTh3t!c 02:21:39] Okay. And where are we with the SolipstiCorp tech? How do I get the training data to you?
[SIMEON 02:21:44] I’d like you to meet Kristina Hollerith. Kristina works at SolipstiCorp. She knows the tech better than anyone. She was our inside girl who helped Dylan use SolipstiCorp’s headgear the first time to meet me in our virt.
[KRSDNA 02:21:58] Hey Sin. I’m here. There’s no way you can send this amount of data back to us without them knowing about it, so our goal is to store the data with you, in your ocImps. When we get you back to us, safely, we’ll analyze the data then. We’re going to send you a small binary executable program for your ocImps. After you install it, we should be able to do a routine data dump from the SolipstiCorp headgear admin interface directly into your ocImps. Got it?
Sindhu had already seen the notification and was installing the executable. She glanced at her watch. Twenty-five minutes had passed. She had roughly ten minutes before she needed to head back. Any later than that, and she risked becoming a red, flashing warning dot in some AI’s navigation system.
[SinTh3t!c 02:24:28] I’m running out of time, people. Quickly settle my doubts about this admin interface.
[KRSDNA 02:24:39] I sent you instructions with the executable, Sin. It’s easy though. Just get to the login screen and execute the binary with the private key I also sent, it should take care of the rest.
[SinTh3t!c 02:24:44] Won’t this tip them off? Having us snoop around in the admin system?
[KRSDNA 02
:24:53] The binary I wrote should remove all trace of our presence. BUT, I don’t know how much they’ve modded the system. I’m guessing not much, cause in my limited work with our “customer” they’ve seemed pretty stoopid, technically speaking. But, you never know.
[SIMEON 02:25:05] Listen, Sin, Don’t screw around. Honestly, we have no idea what will happen with this. They could have all sorts of alarms over this backdoor. We just don’t know. Don’t push it tonight, play it safe. Get the dump, and get back safely. If this works, we can come back tomorrow and do it all over again.
[SinTh3t!c 02:25:12] Aww, Simeon, you do care!
Without saying a good-bye, Sindhu darted out of the supply closet, quickly crossed the hallway, and flung open one of the two tall doors that marked the entrance to the classroom. The room itself was a vacuous, circular lecture hall. A sterile blue hue of night lighting provided a harsh but dim glow that highlighted the thousands of white ergonomic reclining chairs that filled the descending stadium seating, 360 degrees around the room. Each chair was form-fitted, with two simple armrests, head- and footrests, and SolipstiCorp headgear tech resting atop a small pole at the head of the chair. In the middle of the circular room was a state-of-the-art holoVid unit. Sindhu correctly assumed the holoVids were used before and after the virtTripping. She descended a few stairs, and then stopped due to how loud her footsteps sounded within the still air of the quiet room. She glanced around pensively then sat down, figuring the chair nearest her was as good as any other.
Sindhu grabbed the headgear off the pole and sat sideways on the chair—an inner recalcitrance ensuring she did not lie down; she refused to be made to lie down. With a heavy breath, she flipped the headgear on top of—
Instantly—so instantly it might have happened before the moment itself—Sindhu was surrounded by a blue ocean of water. She lay on the water and yet she was standing, as if the ocean was defying physical laws. In front of her, words floated; a welcome message greeted her, asking for her identification. She wondered if this alone would trigger an issue: Would the system be confused about why it couldn’t automatically detect her?
Sindhu opened her ocImp BUI interface (no simple feat, given her present discombobulated state). She first opened the instructions sent by Kristina. Sindhu was relieved to note that everything was proceeding as expected. She moved quickly, as her internal clock was counting down from ten minutes with precision. The instructions were clear and simple: A private key was listed in the text file, to be used with the executable. She copied the private key into the interface and then executed the program. And then she waited.
The welcome message dissolved and was replaced by a simple menu with only five textual options:
1) Status
2) Config
3) Network
4) Debug
5) Help
Never one for instructions, Sindhu felt confident enough at this point to eschew her BUI—it had only been distracting her, anyhow, floating above the admin menu. She worked quickly. First, out of habit, she clicked Help, not intending to read it, then smiled when the screen told her: Help?? What do you think this is, a customer interface? Read the code!
She clicked Debug next. Three options were displayed:
1) Export logs
2) Export
3) Full dump (hah-hah)
She clicked Full dump and the system shot back at her: No session data loaded.
She snarled angrily. She was moving too quickly. Swiping backward, she tapped the Config option, and saw several options:
1) Environment variables for U-E837F-FA839 (this unit)
2) Global Environment variables
3) Load Session deathTrip
4) Close Session deathTrip
Clicking Load, she was presented with twelve different virt experiences, all numerical, the first labeled: Titus_DT_WorkClass_001
Sindhu sighed as there appeared no method to export all of the files at once. She picked the first, swiped backward, then forward, and began a full export of the data. A progress bar floated in front of her, showing the completed percentage of her data export. As the percentage climbed, she calculated internally how many exports she could do with her eight-and-a-half remaining minutes. She guessed three, assuming all the virtTrips were similar in size.
She would grab Titus_DT_WorkClass_012 next. Her strategy was to get the first, the last, and the middle virtTrips, surmising that this would provide them with the best random sampling. She had hoped to have time for more than three, but was becoming convinced three would even be difficult, as the transfer of number twelve was taking longer than the first.
After what seemed to be a mind-numbing amount of time, the transfer eventually completed. This time, however, Sindhu decided to dig a little deeper. Rather than simply transfer the last virtTrip, she navigated into the compressed data that made up the worker-class training virtTrip number twelve. Her eyes glossed over as she quickly scanned rows upon rows of inscrutable binary data resources. Frustrated, she began guessing at common interface gestures that she hoped developers had added into the system. She smiled when, after waving a magnifying glass into midair, a common search box appeared in front of the resource list. The box was a common search protocol that allowed for the creation of complex regular expressions. With the deft flick of her fingers, she quickly searched the millions of binary objects for metadata specific to multimedia files.
Success! A smile pursed her lips. A few keystrokes later, and Sindhu had uploaded and replaced all audio files contained within the virt file Titus_DT_WorkClass_012 with copies of her own favorite song. She quickly and smugly backed out to the main menu and began transferring file Titus_DT_WorkClass_006. Once started, she opened her BUI to find out exactly how much time she had left: just under one minute.
I can sprint. Her lips moved subtly as she talked to herself. I can make it back in less than twenty-five minutes. I can push close to fifteen if I had to. I’ve nearly done ten through the courtyard before. I’ll go straight through this time.
When the file was at 90 percent complete, she clicked her BUI off. She was three minutes off her schedule; thirty-eight minutes had passed, leaving her twenty-two minutes to get back to her bunk bed. One more, she thought, I can get one more. She randomly grabbed number nine, and the transfer seemed to be going quickly.
She opened her BUI.
Eighteen minutes left, precisely.
I can make it in fifteen if my life depended on it.
She set up a countdown timer and left her BUI on. The timer floated in front of the deathTrip admin menu, and displayed a time of 17:53 as the transfer progress hit 100 percent. She was about to exit when it struck her that she hadn’t clicked on the Network menu. Water droplets from the vertical ocean dripped directly away from her when, with a flick of the wrist, she opened the Network menu. A new menu materialized in front of her:
1) Connection Status
2) Active Local Sessions
3) Network Map
She clicked Active Local Sessions, and a screen with a myriad of data utilizing a small font materialized in front of her. Within the data, she quickly discerned that she was looking at a listing of the lecture hall she sat within. There were nearly 4,999 inactive sessions and one active session: her own. She swiped back and clicked Network Map. The next screen was another listing of inscrutably small text. It took her a moment to discern that she was looking at rows of networks; she guessed most were classrooms similar to the one she was sitting in. The first column was labeled ID and included what Sindhu guessed to be a text identifier for the specific networks. Glaring with a focused intensity at the ID column, she quickly decided the text field represented some kind of location numbering system. Listed on each row, among other data, were the active sessions in that network. Using this, she spotted her own room quickly due to the one active session listed next to it:
SESSION:
Titus_H2O_WorkClass_LectureHall_245.600.503
UNIT:
U-E837F-FA
839
She continued scanning the data, looking for anything that could help her learn—outliers—when her eyes were suddenly forced to focus upon a strobing flash emanating from her timer: sixteen minutes remained.
Her lips moved slightly as she swore in her native Tamil tongue. Resigned to acquiescence, Sindhu raised her hand to exit the system—and then she froze. Nearly every row was the same: cryptic text identifier, followed by columns of zeros. Except for Sindhu’s row . . . and one other row. There, toward the lower half of the rows upon rows of data, Sindhu’s eyes were locked upon a row with one active session:
SESSION:
Titus_StTitus_Exec_Lab_000.999.599
UNIT:
U-E837F-FA839
With a blink, she was back to full speed. She tapped the session row and a new listing appeared:
Active Sessions for:
Titus_StTitus_Exec_Lab_000.999.599
23FF787EA8B998 2:34:43:23.2139
Total Sessions: 1
Clicking the session enacted a new menu that befuddled Sindhu, which read:
Session:
23FF787EA8B998 2:34:43:23.2139
Location:
Titus_StTitus_Exec_Lab_000.999.599
1) Monitor Session
Idempotency Page 31