by Taiyo Fujii
Akari scanned through the project results, clicking the Buy button on item after item. “Looks like someone commissioned a similar program but split the task up,” she said. “Most … no, almost all of the parts we need are here. Surprising. The design is a little old-fashioned, but I know how to use nearly everything without modifications. Even the naming conventions are familiar.”
Akari opened the source code she had downloaded and began to combine it into a single program. A sphere popped up on the whiteboard. A blurred photograph appeared pasted to it on an angle and then disappeared.
“Well, I’m done,” said Akari. “All I did was join the libraries together, mind you.”
She tapped one final key on her keyboard. A small window containing “Building project …” appeared, and then the whiteboard was awash in blue. A rainbow-colored balloon spun on the screen as the image began to divide into four, then eight, gradually taking recognizable form.
“Whoa!” Bruce said before he could stop himself.
In two blinks, the whiteboard was displaying a high-resolution image of the Earth. They could see the breathtakingly beautiful pattern of the oceans and the billowing swirls of storm cloud on the horizons. And a single small but brightly shining white spot in space. Then another white spot appeared beside it. To judge from their location, the bright spot was probably SAFIR 3, while the one beside it was the orbital hotel.
Daryl peered at Akari’s hands. “A light field,” he said. “Photographs overlaid to create a 3-D space.”
“Yes,” Akari said. “I joined together the eighty thousand digital cameras inside the space tethers’ terminal apparatuses. This image might have been taken by the largest camera in history.”
The image grew more vivid even as they spoke, revealing the Earth in finer detail than they had ever seen. The swirls of clouds bathed in morning sunlight looked like they might move at any moment—no, they were moving, turning slowly in the sun’s rays.
“This is a feed?” Bruce asked, astonished.
“From a few hours ago,” Akari said. She pointed at the whiteboard. “Our point of view is above the Pacific Ocean. The camera is pointed toward Seattle.”
Chris stood up from her boss’s seat and gazed at the whiteboard from beside the table. “So that swirl is the blizzard we’re in right now?” she asked. “Does the camera move, Akari?”
“Of course. It’s a 3-D light field. I set it up so that you can stand here and move both your hands to rotate the Earth.”
Chris waved her hands. The Earth lurched. The feeling of actually being in orbit looking down at the Earth was so strong that Bruce gasped.
“Akari, is this only for looking?” he asked. “No two-way interaction?”
“Right.”
“How, and why, is this kind of data being sent back? It makes the transmissions bulky. Must eat up the batteries, too. And wouldn’t it also increase the risk that the messages would be detected?”
“It’s obvious why they’re doing it,” Akari said. “They want to see Earth.”
That was it? Bruce was about to raise an objection when a husky voice spoke from the monitor. “What am I looking at? You say this image was taken from space tethers? Overlaying individual photos to create three-dimensional Earth? This is possible in theory. I know that, but …”
Jamshed’s eyes were wide open, face in close-up after he had brought it right up to the camera. The knuckled fingers raised before his face were trembling. This was bad. Akari had stepped into a domain Jamshed was not prepared to understand.
“The space tethers can be used this way too, then, Doctor Jahanshah?” Bruce asked.
There was a pause. “I did not realize this,” Jahanshah said finally. “It never occurred to me.”
“Please, come to America. You’ll find it a very inspiring place for ideas,” Bruce said.
“You think so?”
“Of course,” Chris said. “Environment is everything.” Despite her efforts to smooth things over, the shock had not left Jamshed’s features. They needed a topic where he was a crucial player, and fast, or he would start to feel worthless.
“Next I will identify the transmitting stations,” Akari said, determination in her voice. “Chris, can I show the base station locations to Professor Jahanshah? The data has geographical information from the CIA’s Internet positioning system attached.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Chris granted her permission. Yellow dots appeared all over the projected globe.
“Six hundred thousand transmission stations,” Akari said.
“These are the base stations?!” Bruce exclaimed. It made no sense. North America, Japan, South America, Africa … Yellow dots shone almost everywhere there was human habitation. How could North Korea possibly have built a worldwide transmission network like this—in secret?
“Bruce, you saw the live feed earlier,” Kazumi said. “That video could only have been shot from the space tethers. There is no mistake. There are this many computers exchanging data with the space tethers.”
“All right, fine,” Bruce said after a pause. “But where are they?”
“Why don’t we take a look?” Akari waved her arms and spun the Earth to center on Seattle. Hovering over it were billowing storm clouds and a dense field of hundreds of dots. She zoomed in on the swirl of the blizzard. It filled the screen, and then the familiar Google 3-D map appeared.
“Functionality from the original game engine,” Kazumi explained to the surprised team members.
Near the Seattle landmark that was the Space Needle, a single point was displayed. Akari increased the zoom ratio.
“Hey!” said Bruce. “That’s our hotel!”
Akari moved the mouse on the table until the arrow was directly over the Western Days. An IP address and port number appeared.
“I see that the router’s IP masquerade table is already decoded,” she said. Benefits of working with the CIA. “The original address is 10.0.0.2. That’s the lobby.” Akari crammed a Raspberry Pi that had been lying out on the table into her pocket and stood up. “I’m going to go find it,” she said.
“Akari!” Kazumi tried to follow her out of the room, but Chris stood in his way.
“Kazumi, you stay here,” she said. “Bruce!”
But Bruce was already dashing out of the room in pursuit. The elevator had left the floor. Bruce pushed open the fire doors that led to the emergency staircase.
“Who are these people?” he muttered as he began to descend. “It’s only day two!”
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 10:32 -0700 (2020-12-16T17:32 GMT)
Peterson Air Force Base
“Lookin’ good, flyboy,” said Madu, pounding Ricky on the shoulder.
Unfortunately, as he was just then being lowered by crane into his aircraft while strapped into an ejector seat, this caused him to swing and spin like a pendulum, stretching the writing on the preflight checklist stuck to his thighs.
“Hey, no jostling,” he said. “I’ve still got some checks left.”
Madu waved over her shoulder and disappeared behind the F-15 Eagle in the direction of her own ride, the latest F-22 Raptor. A gigantic reconnaissance pod hung from the belly of the fighter. Definitely not standard issue.
“Ricky, we all like to play Tarzan, but try to stay focused here.”
Gehner, the maintenance crew chief, stopped Ricky’s wild spinning. Looking down, he called “Clear!” and pulled out two ribbons. There hadn’t been enough space in the cockpit for the compressor that pumped oxygen into the pressure suit, so they’d had to bolt it to the base of the ejector seat.
Ricky raised his head. The runway extended out from the hangar’s entrance, and in the distance beyond that rose Pikes Peak, pure white with snow. The sprawling mass below it was Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD had once been headquartered. Though inhabited now only by mice, during the Cold War th
e underground complex had been filled day and night with hundreds of operators, all monitoring the Soviets.
Ricky’s beloved F-15, greatest fighter plane of the twentieth century, his orange pressure suit, and the original form of the ASM-140 now loaded into the F-15 were also products of that era. They had all been developed in an age of intense competition to soar higher, move faster, hit harder than the other side.
Anything, anywhere, anytime: the fundamental attitude of the US Air Force was the same even today in the twenty-first century, when there was no one left to compete with. But how it operated in practice had changed profoundly. Today it was all about stealth fighters like the F-22, drones, and cyberwar. Once Operation Seed Pod was over, even this spectacular F-15 would be restored to its standard equipment profile and added to the wait list for retirement from service, just like Ricky himself.
Ricky dropped his gaze to his thighs and began filling in the checklist, picking up where Madu had interrupted him. He was just considering the possibility that this would be his last real mission when Gehner called out to him.
“Check it out!”
Ricky raised his head and saw a few crew members stenciling something onto the F-15’s nose cone with spray paint.
“Clear breach of regulations, but they insisted.”
One of the crew members brandishing a template waved in Rick’s direction. The letters now painted on the nose cone in gray paint were sharp and clear: shooting star.
“Once Seed Pod is finished, we’ll add a big star and take a photo together,” Gehner said. “This is the first time a plane has ever taken down a satellite. I want a picture of me alongside the pilot who shot down the highest, farthest target ever.”
Ricky stretched his back. The smooth material, so different from that of his usual pilot suit, caressed his entire body. Their target today was the North Korean Rod from God. He would go up there for the sake of Judy Smark and her angry upraised finger, for her father, and indeed to restore the freedom of space itself.
“All right, let’s go. If the visor’s ultraviolet shield gets in the way, just pull it off.” Gehner placed the transparent helmet over Ricky’s head and locked it into place at his shoulders. “All clear. Take him up!”
The winch groaned and the seat was hoisted into the air, Ricky and all. He saw the F-15’s main wing spread out below him. So large it was known as the “tennis court,” it smoothly merged with the fuselage to create one unified winged form, giving the fighter a balance of power and agility. Enjoying the rare view, Ricky clenched his gloved first tight.
A monstrous orbital weapon: another idea from the Cold War. Fitting that he was flying out to meet it in the greatest fighter of the Cold War era, if not the entire twentieth century. He was going to take his F-15 up there and annihilate this Rod from God completely. The F-15 deserved no less for its final send-off.
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 10:15 -0800 (2020-12-16T18:15 GMT)
Western Days Hotel
Hearing a knock at the door of their suite, Chris rose to her feet, checked the image from the security camera, and opened the door to allow Bruce in. He was pushing a luggage cart with a computer on it.
“Kazumi,” said Bruce, “can you have a word with your girlfriend? She’s out of control.”
Akari slunk in after him.
“What happened?” asked Chris. “Isn’t that the computer from down in the lobby?”
“You should have seen her down there,” Bruce said, pushing the cart up against the table with a wry smile.
He had arrived at the ground floor, he said, to find Akari already clinging to the front desk engaged in a shouting match with the clerk. While he was explaining things to the clerk and peeling Akari off the desk, she had knocked over a hundred thousand–dollar white speaker, had moved the sofa, and was pulling up the carpet in the lobby.
To calm the uproar from the guests and staff members who didn’t understand the situation, Bruce had said “Metropolitan police investigation!” and flashed the fake badge he’d used to apprehend the illustrator Jose Juarez in Los Angeles.
“Unbelievable,” Bruce finished. “Good thing none of the guests realized it was an LA police badge.”
“And did Akari find the base station?” Chris asked.
“If she hadn’t, I’d be kicking her out into the blizzard right now,” Bruce said, flashing his dazzling smile. He pointed at the computer on the luggage cart. “They were using this to control the audio in the lobby. Akari left them a replacement she made with her Raspberry Pi.”
“The audio?” Chris said.
“We know what the base stations look like,” Akari said.
Bruce lifted a thickly insulated USB cable from the cart. Just under an inch in diameter, the cable had a D-Fi logo printed on it. When Bruce drew the cable through his hand to smooth out the twists, Chris got a whiff of the same rosy fragrance she had smelled in the lobby.
“A USB cable?” Chris said.
“Yes, the best audiophile USB cable money can buy,” Bruce said. “Sold by a Japanese company called Sound Technica. The technology they use was developed by a Portland audio research lab called D-Fi based on analysis of sound data from around the world. It uses audio profile information to open up the high-frequency range. A two-foot cable costs $300. They were discontinued recently, but they’ve been popular for a long time. Maybe a million sold in all?”
“You’re oddly knowledgeable about all this,” said Chris.
Akari laughed. “He told me he owns one,” she said, pointing at Bruce.
“You believe that audiophile woo?” Daryl laughed.
“Oh, so you’re on her side too? Yeah, you got me—I fell for it. But I just called my housekeeper and had her pull the cable out.”
Bruce scratched his head and put the D-Fi cable on the table. Then he produced a pocketknife and cut into the cable’s insulation to pull out not only the vinyl-covered USB cable itself but also a long copper wire that came with it.
“This is the antenna,” Bruce said. Then he cut into the USB terminal itself. He twisted the tip of the knife, and a tiny chip tumbled out. It was a black resin package with a European chip maker’s logo printed on it. “And this is a VHF transceiver. That settles it. This cable itself is the antenna, and the transmitter-receiver circuitry is built into the USB terminal.”
Akari placed the computer on her desk. “When you plug this USB cable into a computer, D-Fi’s audio drivers are automatically installed,” she said.
“Plug and play, eh?” said Daryl.
“Except what gets installed is the space tether base station software.”
As Akari explained, once resident in the system, the D-Fi drivers sent the space tether telemetry received via the USB cable antenna to servers scattered around the world. When they received orbital-maneuver commands in fragmentary form from those same servers, they transmitted them back into orbit. Genuine drivers from approved manufacturers ran on PCs with administrative privileges, so security software did nothing to stop this.
Bruce went to the kitchen and started making some coffee. “Akari’s explanation came as a surprise,” he said. “They manufactured their own hit product just to install a Trojan … That’s something the CIA should put in their textbooks. We ought to have Akari come lecture on it, too.”
He returned with several cups of espresso and lined them up on the table. “Let’s take a breather,” he said. “Not much point in being in Seattle if we’re going to drink coffee from a machine, but once this is all over we can go out to celebrate at the original Starbucks at First and Pike.”
“I saw that yesterday,” Kazumi said. “With the brown logo, right?”
“Nope,” Bruce said. “The real one’s farther in. Tastes the same, though,” he added with a wink.
“Bruce, you have work to do,” said Chris. “Raise a research request for information related to this D-Fi place
.”
“Already done,” Bruce said. “Fast service back at headquarters, day or night.” He took his seat and touched his mustache to his espresso cup. “These cables were made by an assembly company in Singapore called Falang. Three years ago, it started buying up smartphone boards by the thousand. Tens of thousands in all. And do you think they ever shipped a single handset?”
Daryl took a break from his work and sat down at the table, coffee in hand. “So they were actually making space tethers,” he said. “Do you think they knew that?”
“You’d have to ask them,” Bruce said. “Seems they were also buying up a lot of graphene, which Dr. Jahanshah said would work for the tether component. You have to admire whoever thought that strategy up. Building orbital weapons right out in the open in a civilian facility. Manufacturing costs were probably about a hundred bucks a tether, given five-digit production volumes.”
Bruce took a sip of his espresso, looking more than satisfied with the taste.
“One more fun fact,” Bruce said. “The address D-Fi give for their research lab in Portland is a dummy, but they did rent a warehouse on Pier 37 in Seattle. And according to our sources, it’s still piled high with containers returned from Sound Technica.”
Chris picked up a coffee cup. The resinous scent typical of capsule coffee machines mingled with the fragrance of roses. She took a deep breath. “Did you say that these cables cost $300?” she asked.
“Please, don’t ask,” Bruce said. “I thought it improved the sound. But it was just a regular USB cable inside. I was imagining it.”
“I doubt that’s all there was to it.”
“But the data comes through exactly the same.”
“That’s right,” Akari pouted. “Only data in standard USB audio formats comes through.”
Chris picked up the cable and squeezed it in one hand. The scent of roses grew stronger.