When she’d wakened that morning the events of the night before had taken on a surreal quality. If she was being honest, she doubted her own recollection. Had it really been Claire? The glimpse of the girl’s face had been all too brief. Her main concern was that whomever she told would laugh in her face or worse, report her to DI Fuller. She had decided to speak with Ed first. Once she proved what she saw was technically possible then she could report it officially.
She had known Ed since he was a teenager, back before her divorce when she and John were newlyweds. They had been neighbours. Ed’s father abandoned his family shortly after Ed was born so it was just Ed and his mother in the terraced house. As new arrivals in the area, the locals were keen to let Louisa and John know how reassured they were to have a police officer close at hand. That, and to fill her in on the neighbourhood gossip. Most communities tended to have a family who didn’t quite fit in socially. Ed and his mother filled the niche. Louisa was told on several occasions how Ed ‘wasn’t quite right’. His mother was shunned by the cliquey neighbourhood wives and Ed was teased relentlessly by the local kids. Louisa always made a point of stopping to chat with his mother, not caring a fig for what the neighbours thought. But it was Ed she felt sorry for the most. Teenagers could be such little shits when they wanted to. Ed seemed normal enough, if a little awkward and lonely. He spent most of his time in his room tinkering with his computer and electronics projects.
A few years later after finishing secondary school with average grades he was still living at home and seemed incapable of holding down any sort of job, no matter how menial. Louisa and John moved away after Jess was born but Ed’s mother called her one day out of the blue. She was desperately trying to get Ed out of the house and settled in a steady job. She’d got it into her head that Ed wouldn’t be able to cope when she died and had worked herself into a real state. She thought he was turning into a hikikomori, destined to be housebound and shunning the outside world.
At the time, the MET was having trouble recruiting decent tech experts for the newly formed SIU. They couldn’t compete with the packages offered by the Portal and the big global web corporations. Louisa pulled a few strings and got Ed an interview. The interview didn’t go so well but he scored off the charts in the technical assessment so they gave him a trial run. It quickly became apparent that, social difficulties aside, Ed was the most capable technical expert they had in the SIU. He’d thrived in the role.
As she passed by each cubicle she stole a glance inside. They were like a messy teenager’s bedroom, littered with junk food wrappers, decorated with posters of old sci-fi films or games. Some even had an assortment of what appeared to be toys, but Louisa now knew to be ‘valuable collectibles’ after a fraught conversation with one of Ed’s colleagues when she’d likened them to the dolls Jess used to play with.
Unlike his peers, Ed’s desk was neatly ordered and scrupulously clean. There were three large screens set up before him but only one was currently active. Ed didn’t look up as she stopped beside him. He was fiddling with an old pre-nanoware terminal and had removed the back casing, exposing its circuit board and the hydrogen fuel cell.
She could have stood there for hours and Ed probably wouldn’t have noticed her. They’d had a fire drill once and the building had emptied apart from Ed, who was found by a fire marshall still at his desk. When the marshall angrily asked Ed why he hadn’t left, Ed had looked up, bewildered.
That was Ed to a tee. He had an uncanny ability to completely devote himself to one particular activity at a time. It would invariably be related to some new technology and he would talk non stop about it to you if you let him, completely oblivious to the fact the person he was speaking to might not want to spend hours discussing the latest nanoware revision’s security features, or an optimisation he introduced to a CADET algorithm.
Right now Louisa faced a challenge if she was going to divert his attention towards what she wanted him to look at, namely what had happened to her profile the night before. If she did manage it though, Ed wouldn’t stop until he found out the cause. His other work would immediately be forgotten as the new obsession took hold, firming in his mind like quick-dry cement. She felt a sudden glimmer of guilt. Guilt because you’re using him? Or guilt in case he realises what you’re doing? That gave her pause. Isn’t it the same thing? But she wasn’t manipulating him as such. Ed wouldn’t devote himself to something he had no interest in. All she had to do now was find a way to derail his current train of thought.
‘Ed,’ Louisa said, ‘I was wondering if you knew anything about—’
‘Stick this in your mouth.’ Ed held up a cotton swab.
‘Sorry…what?’
‘I need a sample of your saliva. Oh—and rub it against the inside of your cheek.’
Louisa shook her head but did as he asked. She was getting a surreal feeling again. She handed the swab back to Ed. He flipped over the partially deconstructed terminal and rubbed the cotton end across the screen. The large desk screen came alive. A deluge of hexadecimal characters appeared and streamed downwards.
‘Ed, wha—’
‘Shh,’ Ed said.
Louisa stood patiently waiting for an explanation but his attention remained fixed on the screen. She leaned on his partition. She hadn’t had her morning coffee yet and was in desperate need of a caffeine hit.
Ed looked up and grinned. ‘Isn’t it great?’
‘Um…yes. What exactly am I looking at here?’
‘It’s the stream of raw data this terminal is synching with my Portal profile.’
Louisa had another look at the screen but she still couldn’t discern any meaning from it. ‘And this data means what, exactly?’
‘It’s the chemical breakdown of your saliva. Also potentially your DNA, but I haven’t been able to isolate that part yet. There’s a graphene membrane covering the screen which permits molecular diffusion. Every terminal has a built-in spectrometer allowing it to determine the chemical composition of anything passing through.’
‘You can’t be serious.’ Louisa had heard some whack-job conspiracy theories with regard to what information Portal was secretly recording on its users but even for Ed this seemed a little far-fetched.
‘I’m totally serious.’ He had a confused expression on his face, as if he couldn’t understand why she didn’t believe him.
‘Even if what you’re seeing here is true, Portal can’t go collecting this sort of data from people without their consent. It’s one of the mainstays of the CSCA.’
‘But they do have your consent. You agreed to a personal biological sample being taken as part of the terms of use update three years ago.’
‘Those things are over a thousand pages long. No-one ever reads through all of them.’
‘I do.’ Ed picked up another terminal and navigated though a few menus. He brought up a document and flicked through it before handing it to her. ‘Here it is. Section 43 Subsection 15. Relating to the Ownership Resolution functionality. I quote: “In order for the Ownership Resolution functionality to operate the terminal user agrees to allow a biological determination to be made by Portal in order to ascertain a baseline for the physical state of the terminal user. By allowing this sample to be taken the terminal user waives all legal recourse to—”’
‘Okay, okay. Christ, what else did I agree to?’
‘Quite a range of things but the sampling was the main feature. When someone picks up a terminal, their unique biological pattern is determined. If the pattern doesn’t match the baseline registered against the owner’s profile then Portal shuts the terminal down. It’s the composition of the pattern I’m trying to work out. Even by simply holding the device you’re exposing a huge amount of harvestable data. Body temperature, the chemical breakdown of your sweat, heart rate, Portal can utilise any of them to establish who you are.’
Louisa thought about Jess and Charlie. Their terminals were rarely out of their hands. ‘Why wasn’t this reported on the news fe
eds at the time?’
Ed shrugged. ‘It got a mention, but then Portal launched the perception feed extension and it stole all the headlines. It’s a big deal amongst the community. We’re all trying to figure out the algorithm Portal used but it’s tricky given the amount of data they have to work with.’
‘What community is that?’
Ed wrung his hands. It was a mannerism he exhibited when he was worried about something. ‘Just a group of us who closely follow Portal technology developments.’ He turned back to his screen. ‘I’m writing an extension to make use of the data. It’s going to revolutionise medical diagnostics. I can show you it in action if you like.’
Ed was frequently convinced he was suffering from some weird life-threatening condition. He practically lived in the local hospital’s casualty department. The last time she visited The Cave he thought he had a lymphatic infection. Something to do with a parasitic Asian worm. She couldn’t remember the specifics but he blamed it on a takeaway he’d eaten the night before. She knew she would regret asking but she couldn’t help herself. ‘All right. What’s it telling you at the minute?’
Ed switched to the terminal he had brushed with the cotton swab and activated an extension. Several windows appeared. One streaming with more random hex characters but the rest had human-readable text and one even displayed a few graphs. ‘Hmm…I’m a little dehydrated at the moment.’
‘It’s saying you’re thirsty?’
‘Yes, dehydration was the easiest sequence to isolate and extract meaning from. Do you ever get served adverts for energy drinks between screencasts when you’re thirsty?’ He tapped the screen. ‘This is how they know.’
‘I’m more of a mineral water kind of girl myself.’
‘The next step is use a subcutaneous implant to monitor blood chemistry.’
‘My daughter has one of those to monitor her blood sugar levels. Jess is diabetic.’ Louisa frowned. ‘But she uses a licensed extension to access the implant’s data. Her GP had to prescribe it for her. I don’t see your doctor authorising an implant and an extension just so you can mess around.’
‘Well…I plan on circumventing the normal implant appropriation channels. I know someone who can get me an implant and I’ll be writing the extension myself. It’s really quite a simple procedure to bypass Portal’s safeguards and install an unofficial extension. You simply have to clone an authorisation token from an extension you already have installed and attach it to the new one.’
‘Great—first my nine-year-old and now you.’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind. Do you really think it’s a good idea to mess around with black market implants, Ed? It might not be safe.’
‘Portal only says that so they can control the supply. I plan on using the data provided by the implant to query the diagnostic algorithms the NHS Subnet utilises. They run the algorithms against hospital patients on admittance to check against the course of treatment recommended by the doctors. The difference here is my data will be sent continuously. This extension has the potential to provide real time feedback on my health, without a single visit to a doctor.’
‘Ed, I—’
‘You could screen for disease, catching early signs of cancer. Viruses as well. What if you knew everyone who had the cold or flu in London? You could quarantine the sick and stop the spread. It could result in the end of the common cold as we know it. But medical extensions are the tip of the iceberg. How about one that tests your blood-alcohol level before you were allowed to manually drive your car? Or what about a—’
Louisa nodded along under the barrage of Ed’s verbal onslaught. His eyes were bright and she knew he was on a roll. He’d continue indefinitely, bouncing from topic to topic, unless she either shouted at him to stop or walked off.
‘Ed, I saw Claire Harris on my home screen last night.’ The words came out of Louisa’s mouth before she had a chance to think about what she was saying.
Ed mouth hung open, mid-sentence. He closed it with a plop. She waited for him to grin or laugh, but instead he stared back at her, his face unreadable. ‘Alive or dead?’
Relief flooded her. ‘Very much alive. She was walking down a corridor somewhere. It was a first-person feed.’
Ed nodded. ‘Describe what you were doing when it happened.’
‘I was watching a newscast on the living room screen. Benoit Walsh was blabbering on about the Portal expansion. Then I heard a high-pitched noise and the video feed of Claire appeared. It lasted for under a minute and then the screen reverted to the interview.’
‘Is there anyone else who has authority to pair with the screen?’
‘My kids, but they were in bed at the time. Besides, they wouldn’t know anything about Claire. Could my terminal have been hacked?’
Ed shook his head. ‘It’s unlikely. The screencast you were watching was being relayed to the screen via your terminal directly from Portal’s server farms. It’s the way things work. Your terminal is only a piece of hardware producing and consuming data. It does little processing as such. What revision is it?’
‘The thirty-second.’
‘Well that rules out physical manipulation of your terminal. After revision 20, Portal started making extensive use of nano-technology. The micro assemblers do a good job of scrambling the insides if you start to tamper with the device. Has this happened at any other time?’
‘There was a strange incident with VANS last night when I was driving home. I heard the same noise and then VANS cut out. There was visual distortion but I didn’t see the feed with Claire in it.’
Ed sat silently for a moment. ‘Someone could have interfered with the data your terminal was fed from Portal. But the stream is encrypted, with the symmetric encryption keys generated from your biological baseline. It makes man-in-the-middle style hacks impossible. Unless someone had your private key, of course, but it’s buried deep within in your terminal’s nanoware, and it’s never transmitted to Portal. So that points at your profile been fed a stream originating from outside Portal’s content delivery system.’
He turned to face the three screens and tapped away on his keyboard. He refused to use any of the other Portal data input methods like voice recognition or motion detection. He told her once they were too slow. ‘Your Portal profile isn’t simply a record of your name, address and your favourite flavour of ice-cream. It’s a fairly sophisticated piece of software which alters itself over time to become unique to a particular user. Some people think it’s bordering on sentient, but I wouldn’t go so far. I think of it purely as an algorithm that’s really good at determining what your Portal experience should be based on the information it knows about you.’
‘So it’s responsible for tailoring your Portal experience?’
‘Yes, but it also acts as a conduit for any content you consume on Portal. That means it has a record of everything you’ve watched on your home screen. We have a tool Portal loaned us a few years ago called Virtual Profile Diagnostics. You can load it up with fake profile data and then use it for testing. We used virtual profiles to test our history graph code. You can use real profile data also, but the owner needs to give permission.’
Louisa’s terminal pinged. A profile access request from the Metropolitan Police had opened in a window on her screen. Ed wanted her to grant him direct access to her profile. It was the one thing you were never supposed to do. Louisa knew married couples who would never consider granting access to their partner. They were so afraid of what their other half might uncover.
‘Okay,’ Louisa tapped an acceptance, ‘but keep your searches to within the timeframe I saw the feed. No rooting around my profile, all right?’
Ed gave her a confused look. ‘I’d never do that, Louisa. Besides, searching through someone’s history graph is practically the same as having access to their profile. I access hundreds of graphs a week. I don’t even see the details any more, only colours.’
‘Colours?’
‘Yes. Most profile
interactions are tedious day-to-day stuff like paying for a bus ticket—they’re shades of grey. Behaviour outside the norm, like gambling, inter-marital affairs, or any sort of criminal activity, stands out as bursts of colour. I’d say yours is practically beige.’
‘Thanks,’ Louisa said sarcastically. Was she really so painfully boring?
‘What time did the incident take place at roughly?’ Ed asked
‘Around eleven in the evening.’
‘I’ll roll back the simulation to last night. I can view what was being sent to your profile on the monitor here.’
One of Ed’s other screens activated and Benoit Walsh’s face appeared.
‘That’s it,’ Louisa said. Then it cut to the break and Louisa got a sinking feeling as she recalled what adverts had been shown. Sure enough, she appeared on-screen running along a beach in a bikini. A deep flush slowly spread upwards from Ed’s neck to cover his entire head. ‘You can move to after the adverts, Ed. That’s when the signal changed.’
‘Um…okay.’ Ed tapped a key and the video jumped forward. ‘So far everything appears normal. The content is all being streamed from the standard Portal screencast servers. Hold on though…’ He leaned in closer to the screen. ‘There does seem to be another feed source in the mix now. It’s audio-only at the moment.’
Louisa recognised straight away the noise from last night. She could hear it clearly now that she was expecting it. ‘Can you hear that?’
‘Yes, that’s quite irritating.’ He turned the volume down. ‘Video is coming through now as well.’
Goosebumps prickled along her arms and up the back of her neck as the screen pixelated. Then, as abruptly as before, the video was replaced by the view of the corridor. Her whole body relaxed as a tension she didn’t even realise she was carrying melted away. There had been a nagging doubt in the back of her mind, however small, that she’d imagined the whole thing.
‘Er, Louisa?’
The London Project (Portal Book 1) Page 9