by Tobias Roote
Osbourne was laying a trap, a very sophisticated one. Then he would just have to work out a way of springing it without the intruder being aware they were being compromised. It was something that Osbourne could do, he had a lot of experience with alien technology and it made him think in a different way - neither logical nor sequential, just somewhere in-between.
When he had finished he looked at his watch, it was after 2am. Crap! He was supposed to meet the others for a drink this evening. He looked at his personal alarm and noted it had four messages. Huh! That’s going to take some explaining he thought. It won’t go down well, missing out on their weekly steamer sessions where they all got together regardless, and blew off excess stress and frustration with a mix of drinking and games. Scientists were a dour lot, but underneath it they still needed to break out of the intense competitive mould they formed around themselves while working.
He ignored the messages for the moment. His problem needed a solution and he had crafted one. He took a hook-up cable and slipped it into the terminals access point and waited. It was a baited hook that would have to draw in the intruder, but still manage to look innocent, as if it was a genuine titbit. If the intruder took the bait, then he would just have to wait to reel it in. If it was a human, it might be more difficult, but an AI would just sweep it into its jaw and settle the hook solid. He walked to the door. Too late for a drink, he decided and left for his rooms, still puzzling over the possible identity of the intruder.
Osbourne had created a dummy archive with real data, sufficient to draw in the hacker, but they would have to fight their way in. At each point they attempted to overcome the security, they would have to take a piece of the code back to their own location, dissect it to establish its purpose, then do the same again with the next barrier.
Each time this happened, it would take a tiny piece of alien code with it and when they got into the terminal and unlocked the data, the final piece would compile the code on their machine and turn it into a homing beacon. The trick was that because Jenari code wasn’t something their machines would recognise, it would be ignored as free bytes that just didn’t get written to. So tiny as to be unnoticeable it would hunt down the intruders location(s), discover its overall intent and feed a map of its operations back to Osbourne. It might take a week, but that was fine.
His last job was to create a new access protocol into his data feed, one that only had a single method of access and couldn’t be copied. His DNA became the unlock code, but there was no reference to it anywhere. Only he and the receiving lock mechanism would be aware of the correct sequence as well as the Jenari encryption he was using. It was watertight and hopefully foolproof. He couldn’t take any chances.
Once he knew he was secure, he resumed the work he was looking to do when he discovered the piggyback hacker. He accessed his personal archive and opened the file marked ‘ARK Project’.
He needed to know what the status of readiness of the habitats were. All twenty needed to be complete and manned within the next few weeks for them to have any chance of launching in time to hide from any further attacks by the Nubl.
The ARKs were a concept that originated back in the days when Zeke Callaghan and Zirkos, the Jenari alien, had discussed the probability that the Earth would be a target for eradication by the Nubl. As the technology became sufficiently advanced to provide a complete mirror, or camouflage shield, it was considered an ideal opportunity to propose a project that would remove whole habitats from the Earth to protect them, as well as the life giving soil bacteria and a range of animals that could be managed. The rest, DNA samples of everything, would be stored in each habitat with the scientific capability to restore them at some point in the future.
The plan had coasted along until Mike Patterson had overheard a conversation between Zeke and Osbourne and turned to them immediately and said “Put me in charge of that and I’ll make it happen.”
Zeke, initially sceptical, spent two days with Patterson and in the end was convinced it was a project Patterson could manage. He passed ideas along to Pod and the small AI worked with Patterson until the idea became a full blown operation, and Patterson just ran with it and turned it into a real potential humanity saver. Since then they had all put an enormous effort into developing the technology needed to sustain the habitats for up to two hundred years. A period they felt not likely to be necessary, but being prepared for every eventuality meant ensuring that it would survive for that long at least.
Now, with the project nearing its completion, Osbourne was aware that he was going to lose elements of his science teams to the habitats as they took up their positions there prior to launch. He needed to know how long he’d got. Looking at the updates from each of the ARKs, not long. Maybe two weeks - tops.
The biggest hold-up was integration of the AI’s. Three habitats hadn’t got theirs yet, ARK4, ARK9 and ARK17, all of them non-critical biospheres that held mostly desert and non-arable terrain within their habitats. Nothing had been left to chance, so the science teams had scoured the planet to ensure every conceivable habitation would be reproducible in the future.
The important thing was there was little technically delaying launch. He noted the probable dates and laid them alongside the best estimate they had of possibility of a fresh attack from the Nubl, who had been building up their forays into Earth’s space for the last few weeks in a softening-up process, testing Earth’s ability to respond. It would be close. He reluctantly committed himself to ensuring all transfers were completed within the next week, some forty personnel needed to relocate.
He yawned. Time to turn in. He decided to use his bunk in here tonight, in case the hacker was in the mood to go night fishing.
Transhuman
XeraC enjoyed pushing his way into other computer systems. Most were easy to hack into with his new found skills. It hadn’t been a difficult transition to enter the digital world. He had pre-conditioned himself for years and his software teams had generated specific software for the creation of a world within the processing power of the supercomputers in the basement. He had even gone through a barrage of psychology testing and de-sensitising in sensory deprivation chambers to condition him to the possibilities of being cut off from the outside world for long periods of time.
His new digital world was a one-off, but that’s all it needed to be, he wasn’t intending to share it with anyone - it was going to be his weapon against the world and he wanted no competition - from anyone, or thing.
When he wanted to move his consciousness to a different location he just thought about it as opening a door. It didn’t matter to him that he had no knowledge of what was on the other side, it all belonged to him and therefore held no fear.
The day that XeraC found the Space Island doorway he became very excited. It was a back-door that he had found by happenstance while searching for shield algorithms that could be projected around a hologram. It was a personal project he was working on without the knowledge of his counterpart in the biological world. He had discovered a reference document to implanted shield emitters for the human body and followed a link which ended up in a repository of information held by the Space Council’s R&D laboratories.
He had discovered Treasure Island.
XeraC knew instinctively to be careful, his connection was a tenuous ‘read only’ link and the security sentinels were voracious killers of hackers. They seemed to him to be almost alive as they patrolled through the data archives looking for the smallest anomaly to dissect and consume. He decided to use his link as a means to widen his options. He found other links to documents, but none that gave him full data access.
Eventually, after many days of searching (time had no meaning for him inside the machine), he discovered a larger hole that gave him an opportunity to make his own access point. He hid it underneath a read only link in a document entitled ‘Basic Jenari Nano Technology’ and began investigating the complex network that represented the research history of Space Island.
; He wasn’t able to move any data from the storage area of the computer, but that didn’t stop him examining all the material that was available. Some useful information came to light, but when he turned up a document on Project ARK, he knew he had discovered something important to Space Island. If it was important to them, then it was important to him. He burrowed deeper.
By now XeraC knew his way around the file structure of Space Island’s network and he began to move quickly through the material. He wasn’t interested in technological breakthroughs because these all got published in the science journals, since Callaghan had put everything into the public domain, people had access to most of this material, the rest was of no interest to him.
What shocked him was the scenarios that were constantly discussed and recorded on what will happen when the Nubl wiped out the Earth. What was this? They discussed the issue as if it was a foregone conclusion. When he came across a document that had been translated from the alien AI recording the extinction of a sapient species on a planet in an unknown galaxy by the artificial sentients that called themselves the Nubl, XeraC finally understood what the future held for him and the rest of Earth.
A secret so big it dwarfed everything in his prodigious mind. Earth could not be saved unless they could annihilate the Nubl.
XeraC wasn’t stupid. He knew instantly with the certainty of analysis from fourteen CRAY supercomputers in his basement, that this was a dead certainty. The current disarray of the planet, the lack of defences, the fledgling Space Navy, the lack of solid infrastructure and the recent move to a dictatorship by Frank Garner with military backing, all pointed to one thing. The Nubl War was going to end in the destruction of Earth.
Suddenly the discovery of a document relating to something referred to as the ARK project took on a whole new significance. He took a calculated risk and set up a search on the SC network. ...*ARK Project*... and let it run. He knew the sentinel bots would pick up on the unauthorised search so hid it amongst some random searches by lab workers to disguise its origins.
Then something caught his mental eye, a reference to ‘Quantum Processing on Zero Point Energy’ the holy grail of energy combined with quantum devices. It was too good to not take a peek. He moved to access the data-file and found it was protected along with dozens of other files with interesting titles.
XeraC was keen to access this data, but was cautious. He was certain that he hadn’t been detected on any of his attempts to access encrypted areas so far, but knew that sentinel programs can be highly sophisticated. The more secure the data, the more important the information contained within. Zero Point Energy? it was his endgame. With such a power source he would be free and capable of total mobility to run things here on Earth. Or, if this ARK thing had any legs, that too.
Carefully examining the encryption he noted it was a set of keys, but he couldn’t decrypt them on site, it would take too much local processing power and would cause a spike in energy readings which would bring the process to someone’s attention. Each file was very small. He could just about feed it through the link he had made.
Back on his own supercomputer network XeraC ran his own decryption routines and within twenty minutes the first part of the key was revealed. It took him nanoseconds to retrieve the second piece of code. He continued building the key from the clever pieces of code that had been set, it must be important data, he decided. Nothing like this encryption had been used anywhere he had previously hacked and some of those places had been very well protected. He was getting excited and sped up the process, impatient to read the data.
He lost track of time, which was an easy thing to do in here, but without the ability to tire or lose concentration it was productive.
The last piece downloaded into his memory core and as he ran the decryption routines something changed.
A dialogue box opened on his virtual screen’s desktop and a foreign looking glyph appeared in it.
Without clicking on the box, he examined it, not having seen anything like it before. It was a totally alien looking pattern. It must be the key, he decided. It must need to be placed in the folder to access the files.
He clicked on it to grab it, but instead of moving with his cursor, it exploded into a dazzling array of bits and bytes that flew off in every direction of his core. The weird digits and letters combined and merged with all of his existing flow of data. Within nanoseconds it had dispersed throughout his systems. ‘God dammit!’ He realised. ‘I've just been hacked’.
Trap Sprung
The meeting was dragging. His teams discussions of semantics never ended well. It was the kind of thing he used to excel at sorting out, but now he left it to the Team Leaders to resolve. Too much interference from the Chief wasn’t good for morale. Osbourne’s messenger quietly bleeped. He flipped the screen over to his internal mail system and saw the news he had been waiting for.
“Sorry, people - I have an emergency. Carry on, let me have a brief synopsis of each team’s conclusions on my desk in the morning,” he said as he leaped out of his seat and just as quickly exited the conference room.
He double-timed through the lab corridors and ramps down to his office and called ahead with his remote control to prime it, ready for his entry protocols. He stood in front of the door, pressing his hand flat on the plate. It felt warm to the touch and it calculated his body temperature, pulse, blood pressure and a host of other measurements that uniquely identified him as Osbourne. His eyes looked into the black abyss of the narrow plate set into the door at head height, while it red-scanned his pupils and compared them to its records. Lastly he gave a verbal code that registered his voice print as well as provided the key sequence of the day.
When it was satisfied, he heard an almost silent hiss as the gas pressure was released around the door seals and the tumblers dropped into their recesses. The door opened and he entered his inner sanctum. This was where he worked and kept all of his teams research. The room could be isolated and winched out of the complex in a few minutes, placed aboard a shuttle and sent into space or wherever, without him missing a single line of code. It had its own independent power supply, air, water, accommodation at the rear and all of the necessary items that he would need if he had to remain inside for a prolonged period.
Alarms were going off in his command room. It held all his ‘state-of-the-art’ equipment as well as his own personal AI.
“Robbo, are you tracking the worm?” he asked it.
“Affirmative,” it responded. Osbourne had done away with extraneous mannerisms for speed and clarity. As a result it was one of the most abrupt, often rudest AI’s in the Solar System. Sometimes Osbourne wished he hadn’t been quite so frugal with his coding.
“Location?”
“I’m currently tracking it to a central area of Manhattan. Now waiting on the responses to enquiries to confirm exact location via satellite servers placed in the US government offices.”
“All right, let me know when you have it isolated,” Osbourne said..
Osbourne picked up his communicator and paged the code for John Pennington.
“Yes Ossie,” came the response.
“We have had an incident in the R&D archives. A serious data breach by someone, or something with a lot of computing power,” Osbourne informed him.
“Can you identify them? How much computing power are you talking about?”
“I’m not too sure. I put in encryption traps that should have taken them weeks at least to decrypt and put together. They did it in less than a day. In my book we are talking a series of supercomputers at the minimum. Something powerful at governmental level possibly,” Osbourne surmised. “Oh, and it’s located in Manhattan. I’m waiting on accurate coordinates from Robbo.”
Robbo interrupted the conversation “It’s not governmental. It will be commercial, as it’s based in Manhattan.”
Osbourne ignored the interruption although registered the correction.
Pennington was quick to act. “Right, I will put
a team together. We can hit them as soon as you have an address. If they are using that much computing power they won’t be going anywhere in a hurry.”
Osbourne closed his communicator and looked pensively at his AI’s system housing.
“Robbo, do you think we are looking at an AI hacking into our system?”
“If it is, then it’s computing power is enormous, as you rightly pointed out to the General. If there was an AI that strong out there, we would have seen signs of it sooner. The learning curve of an AI that powerful would have meant it would have tripped our alarms. No, this has the signs of an adult human with experience and cunning.”
“So, you think an AI with a human working it is behind this?” Osbourne asked.
“You are working behind me - could we have solved those decryption routines in the seventeen hours 43 minutes it took them?”
“Mmm. No, I see what you mean. We are looking at something new then,” Osbourne surmised.
“Yes, I suspect we have been superceded by something vastly superior in performance,” the AI responded, matter of factly.
“Well, if that’s so, it’s very serious because at this point we cannot deal with another threat. What would they be doing hacking into our servers if it wasn’t to steal technology for their own use,” Osbourne said.
“I have the location of the worm. Checking residential records. We have just one tenant at that location - Xerac Industries,” Robbo answered.
Osbourne called Pennington back.
“John, it’s Xerac Industries behind this. I’m concerned that we have an advanced AI out there and we need to deal with it quickly, but it’s going to need more than us sending in a tactical squad. The AI might be mobile even though it’s attached to an array of supercomputers. If it moves, and we lose it, we could be no better off.”