In My Memory Locked

by Jim Nelson

  “All we’re asking is to set aside your other work and put us first,” Clift said. “Find the intruder. Learn if he has our data. Persuade him to return it to us, its rightful owners.”

  I didn’t care for the word persuade. He emphasized it in a way that belied Dr. Clift’s performance of civility. “Know that I’m not in the business of persuasion. I don’t twist arms. I don’t put the hurt on people.”

  “Of course,” Clift said. “Do you know people who can ‘put the hurt’ on our hacker?”

  I strolled to the picture window. Storm clouds poured across the top of the San Francisco skyline like gray smoke from an oven rolling out the kitchen door.

  “Your intruder may well be more than one person,” I said. “And they might be anywhere in this world.”

  “We’ll cover all travel expenses,” Clift said.

  “If they’re abroad, I might need to hire agents in your attacker’s country.”

  “The fewer people involved the better,” Clift said. “We’d prefer if you alone saw this to its conclusion. But any contingencies you bring to us, we’ll certainly give them our full consideration.”

  “If your hacker won’t listen to reason and he’s not persuaded by the threat of broken hands, you’ll have two options.”

  “Name them,” Dr. Clift said.

  “One, we go to the authorities. Two, we break his hands.”

  Without hesitation, Clift said, “These data breaches cannot be made public.” Broken hands it was.

  The last of the port went down as easily as the meal, the coffee, and the dessert. Otherwise, my afternoon on the island had been less-than agreeable. I don’t like being railroaded. No one does, not until money appears. Money changes minds. That’s the purpose of money. It changes minds.

  “Normally, I require my retainer paid in full before beginning work, but I'll make an exception." I nodded to my equipment satchel on the floor. "Before I leave, I'll throw a network monitor on your Nexternet transformer. If he attacks again, we’ll see what my equipment detects.”

  “I don’t like the idea of playing the waiting game,” Clift said. “It’s like sacrificing one more hen to catch the fox. You must also find other avenues to explore in the meantime."

  I paced away to peer through the research room's open doors. The cell block was visible down the hallway.

  “I didn’t notice any physical security here,” I said. "No security on the doors. A handful of closed-circuit cameras from what I've seen so far."

  “The island is our physical security.” He motioned toward the choppy bay waters past the windows. “The waters that kept the prisoners on the island now keep intruders off the island. We have the biggest moat on the planet for protection.”

  “I can walk up to any of the data servers without a badge or biometrics," I said. "All the cell doors are wide open.”

  “The best security practice is to hire people you trust,” Clift said firmly.

  As a computer security consultant, I can’t say I concurred with Clift’s philosophy. People you trust will turn on you. People will turn on you with no detectable provocation. Years of faithful employment, a decade of spotless workplace behavior…all of it can be abandoned in a flash ignition of inner fury. A man is passed over for promotion—a woman overhears a manager slight her religion or politics—it will fester for years, growing from a scratch to a boil. And there’s always the more traditional reasons for data infiltration: A gambling problem solved by selling trade secrets, or taking an internal project to another company for a better position on the corporate ladder. Pride, envy, anger, sloth—in my trade, the Seven Deadly Sins are checkboxes to tick off with a pencil.

  “You trust your remote researchers?" I asked. "You don’t suspect any of them?”

  “Not in the least,” he said.

  Brill stood at the wet bar waiting for his next order. I sauntered over.

  “How long have you been on the island?” I asked Brill.

  “Long enough not to be under suspicion,” Clift said.

  “You’ll vouch for him?” I said to Clift.

  “I personally guarantee Brill. I trust him as my own son."

  Zero reaction from the mute intern. Brill’s features were of a moody teenager, red-flushed cheeks and razor burn and dim bulbs for eyes. Acne scars ran down the corners of his drooping mouth. The smell of his hair cream was stronger here than in the mess hall, ripe and astringent. His brown hair appeared shellacked to his scalp.

  The port wine made me a tad punchy. I said to Clift, “You're in control of a major research hub, you have all this money coming in to support your lifestyle, but you can’t imagine a single person you’ve rubbed raw in last ten years? Someone thirsty enough to cut your Achilles’ heel?”

  “What are you asking?” Clift said, amused.

  “You talk like you have no enemies.”

  “A person in my position has enemies he’s never even met,” he said. “Someone on the outside is trying to prove a point. Maybe make a name for themselves. Maybe worse.”

  “How many attacks have been made?”

  He hesitated. “One so far.”

  “Any money lost? Has the hacker gained anything financially?”

  “There’s nothing of base value here to steal,” Clift said. “All our data is made freely available to the public. In fact,” he said, voice growing louder, "that's perhaps the most puzzling part of this. The stolen data was not secret or private in any way. It had been on the Internet for decades, and available publicly here for another ten years. Why it was deleted is a bit of a mystery to us."

  “What about bragging rights?” I said. “Have you discovered anyone on the Nexternet thumping their chest and bragging they’ve broken in?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “We were hoping you could make those sorts of inquiries.”

  “Hackers make drive-by attacks,” I said. “They find a weakness, exploit it, and move on out of boredom. One attack sounds random to me.”

  Dr. Warwick had joined Dr. Marker in a second tartan easy chair, the twin of the first. Between them stood a rough-hewn rock fire hearth with a chimney rising up the wall. Brill was crouched at the fireplace adding kindling to a modest pile of flames. Dr. Warwick spoke up from his chair.

  “Tell him,” he said to Clift. “Tell him about the Blessing girl.”

  Clift pursed his lips. “It’s not worth mentioning,” he replied.

  “I want to hear about it,” I said.

  After a moment of consideration, Clift began speaking softly. “Leigh Blessing is a graduate researcher from Stanford. She was selected among many applicants to spend two years here performing research relevant to the Old Internet. She was developing a historical reconstruction of the Internet as a cultural force between 2006 and 2016.”

  “How does this application process work?”

  Clift was caught off-guard. “Which process?”

  “You said her application was selected—”

  “I know what I said. She, ah…her work was sponsored by a nonprofit.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Chancellor Foundation,” Dr. Warwick said after Clift hesitated too long.

  “Have you worked with this Chancellor Foundation before?”

  “No,” Clift said softly. “It was our only interaction.”

  “Where are they located?”

  “In the city.”

  “Was this Leigh Blessing living here? Or just coming out during visiting hours?”

  “She lived here off-and-on for most of the two years,” Clift said. “Ten days ago, she and the Commission had a falling out. We asked her to leave.”

  “And the breach occurred about this time?”

  He hesitated. “We believe it occurred a few days earlier.”

  “’We believe?’ What, you don't know the exact time?” A proper computer security system could pinpoint a breach to the nanosecond.

  Pink in the face, Clift said, “No.”

  I put that a
side. “What was the nature of this falling out?”

  “Philosophical,” Clift said with a hand wave. “Academic. Questions about methodology.”

  “Does she have privileged credentials to access the internal network?”

  “She did. We revoked them the day she left.”

  “Could she have minted additional credentials for herself? Or installed a rootkit to activate from the outside? Maybe she punched a hole in your bridge.”

  Clift blanched a bit with each aired possibility. “I can’t deny any of those possibilities with utter certainty,” he said. “But in Leigh’s defense, I simply cannot imagine her doing such things. She is a staunch friend of the Old Internet.”

  "She drank that blue stuff," Dr. Warwick said.

  It caught my attention. "Blue Pharjé?"

  "That's it," Dr. Warwick said, voice dry. "She drank it like a fish. She hid her bottles in her suitcase when she came across the water."

  "How do you know?"

  Clift said reluctantly, "We would find her empties in the recycling bins. We were not snooping. It was merely something we all noticed on separate occasions. The only way she could have brought them to the island was in her luggage."

  "She would be loopy just about every night after dinner," Dr. Warwick croaked. "That blue drink turned her brain to mush."

  "And her boyfriend was a nuisance," Dr. Marker added from his easy chair.

  “What’s that?” I said. “A boyfriend?”

  Clift searched the air for a way to phrase his answer. “He was an unpleasant person. He struck me as a man capable of great violence.”

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It was the impression he made," Clift said.

  “Can he use one of these terminals?” I nodded at the computer workstations on the long beech table.

  “He’s an ogre,” Clift said. “I’d be surprised if he could count his change.”

  I pushed it around in my head for a moment. "Word of advice?"

  For the first time since meeting him, Clift was surprised. "Advice?"

  "Underestimating people is a good way to lose your shirt," I said. "Maybe this guy is as thick as you say. But if he's not, who knows what he's capable of."

  Clift didn't care for my advice. "As I said: I honestly don't believe Leigh had any involvement in any of this."

  “I'll need her contact information.”

  Clift’s hesitation grew with each question about Leigh Blessing. “Yes," he conceded. "Brill will supply you with whatever you need.”

  I pushed my empty port wine glass into Brill’s hands. “She sounds like the place to start. I’ll see where she leads me. First I'll throw my equipment on your transformer. But to do that, I'll need my memex back."

  Drs. Marker and Warwick slumbered in their club chairs. The bisque dots on Dr. Warwick’s chin had dried to pink buttons. Clift motioned for Brill to approach. He spoke in a low voice to the plum-suited young man. Brill emotionlessly nodded agreement and hurried from the room.

  Clift turned to me. “Do whatever you must to squelch this. This is important: Whatever you do, whatever methods you employ, any ugliness cannot come back to the island.”

  Brill returned with my memex on the bread plate. In my fingers, the neuro-mimetic tendrils excited with anticipation, stiffening and spiraling themselves to a point. I pushed the fleshy thumbtack into the pinhole drilled in the back of my neck. In a flash, my mind filled with the background noise of the Nexternet, the world's population all talking at once.

  4.

  Every computer system of sufficient complexity has its dark corners. Every software project I’ve worked on, every data center I’ve toured, no matter how elegant its design and well-organized its designers, there’s at least one ugly patch, usually a dozen. This is where the shortcuts are made. This is where decisions of convenience, not principle, are made. This is where the warts and toadstools grow. Michael Aggaroy didn’t teach me that. I learned it on my own, from forty years of programming experience.

  For the Old Internet Preservation Commission, their dark corner was a data closet in the prison house, a cramped room off the boulevards of monolithic data servers. The data closet was a nine-by-six room, dusty and poorly-lit, with cabling and fiber snaking in from all four walls and dropping down from the ceiling. All the equipment was homebrew, Frankenstein’s monsters of spare computer parts assembled to bridge the divide between the Old Internet’s packets and bytes and the Nexternet’s neurotransmission protocols.

  It took two hours to trace the cable jungle filling the room. Finally, using hard traces and a hand-drawn wiring diagram as a map, I located the master transmission port going out to the worldwide Nexternet. With a bit more detective work, I found the master switching bridge for all the servers in the cell blocks beyond. This sheet metal box, large enough to hold a beach ball, contained the necessary hardware and logic to convert old-style Internet signals to and from modern Nexternet neurotransmission. The bridge throbbed and hummed. Its metal skin was hot to the touch.

  Clift monitored my work standing just beyond the door of the data closet. He confessed at the outset not to know anything about the layout of the room. He also excused asking Drs. Warwick or Marker for assistance, as it was their nap time. As I prepared to attach the traffic analyzer to the sheet metal bridge, Clift stepped inside the closet and paused my work.

  “You’re sure this won’t disrupt access from the outside world,” he said.

  “It’s a passive analyzer. No one will know it’s attached. It’s undetectable.”

  “And how will you know what it finds? With your memex?”

  “It’s not connected to the Nexternet itself,” I assured him. “I’ll have to take the boat over and read it myself. Allowing for a security monitor to be publicly accessible would be a security risk in itself.”

  “I see.”

  “Trust me, I don’t relish the thought of riding that boat over here any more often than I have to.”

  Finished with the hardware, I emerged from the dusty closet with watery eyes and a scratchy throat. I’d spent the morning on hands and knees and my lower back was wrenched tight. I packed up my equipment case and pulled my jacket back on. Clift appeared satisfied but ill at ease with the foreign device clamped to his precious network.

  “I’d like to go over whatever security logs you keep,” I said. “Particularly on the day of the breach.”

  He led me to another room, an old guards’ station now filled with modern display screens and memex-based controllers. The clicking of his walking stick reverberated throughout the cavernous prison house. The enormous facility was dead empty save for the napping grey beards, Clift, Brill, and myself.

  The access logs were as clean as bleach. I spent two hours poring over them. It was like reading a nanosecond-accurate play-by-play of a magic act. One moment the historical data was present, the next it was gone, poof, deleted. It made no sense at all.

  “As you can see, the intruder was thorough,” Clift said. “And virtually undetectable.”

  “It’s a pro job,” I said. “The device I threw on your interconnect should give us better information next time.”

  “Next time,” Clift echoed. “It feels like an admission of defeat to simply wait for our attacker’s next move.”

  “It’s the way these things work,” I said. “Not unless you’ll let me audit your entire security system and propose changes.”

  Dr. Clift blanched at the word audit. Hell, I knew he would never agree to such a thing before I uttered the word. A security audit can be more intrusive than a security breach.

  “It’s your choice,” I said. “You can have the devil you know or the devil you don’t.”

  “A Hobson’s Choice if there ever was one,” he said.

  Outside the guards’ station, Brill crossed the prison house floor pushing a cart laden with equipment. Clift turned to see what I was looking at.

  “Most likely replacing a data brick,” he explained. “Would y
ou care to see?”

  I said I did, and we followed Brill to a cell on the ground floor of the prison house. A monolith stood inside the dim cell. Blue slits of light blinked across its chest. Up close and with the overhead service light switched on, I realized the chests of these monoliths were checkerboards of data bricks, blocks of hardened neuro-mimetic gel capable of storing the Nexternet's signals.

  Although I'd worked with them for eight years, I picked a spare data brick from the cart and lifted it for its heft. It was heavier than a red clay brick and not as a heavy as a gold one.

  “We’ve repurposed Nexternet technology to store the bits and bytes of the Internet,” he said. “Dr. Warwick’s greatest contribution to our cause was devising a system to store legacy digital data on a quantum media designed to store human emotions and thoughts.”

  “That’s quite a trick,” I admitted.

  “A brilliant man,” Clift said.

  Brill removed a data brick from the chest of the monolith before us. The hardened translucent gel glowed an aquamarine color, still energized from the neurotransmission backplane sending and receiving quanta. The gel had been doped with mercury flakes, and they sparkled silver-blue from the neural energy still flowing through it. Detached from the machine, the brick’s glow faded until it was dark.

  “Faulty brick,” Clift said. “We burn through ten or so a day. They have to be replaced manually, unfortunately.”

  “What happens to the data that’s on it?” I asked.

  “We destroy it,” he said. “It would be a problem if the data was leaked. That’s part of the data integrity we offer. If someone were to obtain a discarded brick and recover some of the historical images, they could conceivably alter it and serve it on the Nexternet as the genuine article.”

  “Rewrite history,” I said.

  “In theory,” he emphasized. “No one’s managed such a trick, of course.”

  With a pleased air about him, Clift went into his professorial routine again. “You’re probably wondering, why couldn’t someone access our public data, alter it, and serve it to others as genuine Old Internet pages? The reason is—”