by F X Holden
“No one can do that,” AJ protested. “With a warrant he might be able to hack my personal cache, but if anyone tried to intercept my uplink, it would be noticed.”
Leon said nothing, just looked him like he was a simpleton.
AJ blinked, “Alright, so what? He can listen to these conversations and see I’m innocent. He can dig into any corner of my life looking for leverage, if that’s what you’re saying, he’s not going to find anything. I’m boring as hell.”
“Little mister pure,” Leon said dryly. “Don’t ever visit no dark-Core sites?”
“Nothing that would even get my Ma upset,” AJ said.
“Leverage isn’t just dirt,” Leon explained. “Leverage is them knowing what you care about. Or who. Your Ma, for example.”
“They’d go after an 80-year-old woman to get at me?”
“AJ, you’re still not getting it. Let me draw you a picture in black and white. Winter has brought in a hardcore badass to work his side of this. That tells us he sees this as more than just a minor inconvenience. Which means this goes two ways I can see. One morning, you wake up dead. Or you wake up with Troy McMaster knocking on your door looking for answers, making threats or asking for favors.”
“Then what am I hanging around here for?” AJ asked, suddenly exasperated. “If these guys are out to kill me, I should be getting out of here, trying to hide out somewhere until this whole thing blows over.”
Leon gave him a pitying look, “If you were a citizen, you could try that. But you’re a cyber. Every 20 minutes, every time you drift, they know where you are. You try not to drift, go somewhere you can unchain from the Core, you’ve got two hours until you’re dead anyway.” He put down his coffee cup and stood up. “Sorry mano, but you got to stay and play. Boost them self-defense protocols, get ready to do a deal of some sort with McMaster if he comes calling about this Warnecke thing. Which I’m betting he will.”
“If I die, you lose that bet,” AJ pointed out. “And I’ll be back in my next life to collect.”
“I’ll tell that joke at your funeral, fun guy,” Leon said. “I’m going home to sleep, you enjoy your day.”
Leon left AJ with some pretty clear advice. Firewall everything to do with Warnecke, Winter and Farley. Bury it in your cache with quantum level real-time mutating encryption so the only way anyone can get at it is to get a court order.
Until now, he’d had no reason not to send everything he cached straight to Deep Core, but he could see Leon had a point. He did as Leon suggested, compartmentalized and encrypted his private cache. It was his data, so he had rights about how it was stored and used, even by the Core. He was required to drift several times an hour and a backup copy of his feed was always kept by the Core, but he could choose exactly what he released to Deep Core while he was alive, and what he kept in his private cache. If he died, or when he was re-integrated, everything in his private cache would be moved to Deep Core, but until then, his data was his data.
There had been a lot of legal argument about whether a cyber should have the right to delete, modify or encrypt the data in their private cache – they had free will, so what if they were involved in a crime, and were destroying evidence? But cyber advocates had successfully argued that citizens were not required to keep a copy of every and all audio and video recordings they made of their lives, and they had the right to store and delete personal data as they wished. It was ruled that it should also be that way for a cyber.
On the question of his personal safety, he ran a risk analysis and decided to stay put, but take some extra precautions. If the Congressman really was thinking in terms of ‘first strike options’ he had to be prepared. He’d already reviewed his defense protocols and optimized his resting hormone balance for visual and aural acuity, and physical reaction speed. He’d bought back all of his bandwidth and hadn’t allocated it all, so he had reserve capacity if he needed. Then, in addition to his reconfig, he’d tagged every interaction he had had with and about Warnecke, including his meeting with the Congressman, for automatic transmission to friends and media outlets in the event of his death.
AJ could feel his mind whirling and kicked up his klotho levels by eight percent, carefully putting all of the different thought streams into order until he felt more settled. He wasn’t used to stress. In fact his trajectory in life, if you could call it that, had been all about avoiding it. He had cruised through high school, used college to explore what he liked and didn’t like and made his grades, made nice friends, found the job he wanted and stayed with it. Dated, both seriously (Henni) and unseriously (Cyan). AJ saw himself as a river in motion, and if there was a rock up ahead, he just slid around it and kept moving. This Warnecke thing, it would be the same, he just had to go with it, not fight it. Leon was making such a big deal of it, which was cool. He was showing AJ he cared for him, in his Leon kind of way. It was payment for how he’d covered for Leon these last couple years, he got that.
Depending on how you looked at it, his situation wasn’t that complicated. He’d be careful, and he’d get through it. Or he wouldn’t, and he’d die, which just meant he’d re-integrate a decade early. Which would suck, but make little difference to the universe, in the grand scale of things. As cybers across the centuries had always said in the face of tragedy and unexpected death – he would be missed, ‘but the Core will abide’.
About mid-afternoon he sent a short message to Cassie and then took Brownie’s advice and slept a solid 12 hours, made a big breakfast and then went for an early morning surf.
As he started work, he was feeling a full-on psych buzz. His bandwidth boost had really kicked in and he was processing at speeds light years beyond his normal Sol Vista maintenance tech state. To any outside observer, he was following his normal routine. Checked in with Brownie, did his decon, changed, walked the Gardens at Sol Vista. But with the extra bandwidth he’d allocated himself, he was working one question above all – was it feasible to use the Core to dive the Deep Core? To use one part of the world-spanning AI to hack itself? As he walked the gardens, he’d isolated the main themes from Farley’s six publications, two thousand odd discussion threads, sub-threads and three unpublished doctoral theorems and isolated the hypothesis he was testing in his PhD. It came down to this: identify a legitimate query from the Core to its Deep Core databases, intercept that query and modify it to conduct the search ordered by the hacker. Siphon away the data before it hit the Core query engine again. The Core query would report a search failure and then (successfully) retry its search. AJ broadened the search to historical data sets going back two hundred years to the creation of the Core. It was a concept that had been tried before but which had been caught by the Core’s defenses.
It relied on three separate attacks to succeed:
The hacker had to be able to isolate a ‘legitimate’ Core query to the Deep Core
They had to be able to modify the search query to a query of their own
They had to be able to intercept the data after retrieval but before it hit the Core query engine again, in a way that the Core would interpret as a system error, and not an external attack.
AJ found that previous attempts to use this exploit had failed at one or another of all three phases of the attack, most often just falling at the first hurdle because it was almost impossible to identify a Deep Core query within the billions of lines of code the Core was running at any particular moment. Let alone modify that query without detection.
But it had been done. Once. Thirty years after the Core AI had achieved self-actualization, a cyber-defense white-hat hacker working to identify any vulnerabilities, had managed both to isolate a Deep Core query and to modify it without detection. He was not able to isolate the data after it had been fetched and reassembled for reporting, but he had reported his success to the Core defense team and together with the AI itself they closed the vulnerability.
That was back in the day when citizens were still able to teach the Core anything. Being aware of it, t
he Core had since worked further to ensure it never happened again, and more than a hundred and seventy years later the Core’s defenses had been updated and improved a vigintillion-fold.
But one thing stuck with AJ. It had been done, once. And military attack AIs, of the kind Farley would have had access to, had also improved beyond the comprehension of that white hat hacker of 173 years ago.
If a single hacker, working with primitive tools at the dawn of the Core had been able to do it, then it was not unreasonable to conclude it would also be possible for a single hacker working with advanced tools in the modern era to do it too.
A thought that made AJ suddenly both very curious, and very scared.
Cyan caught up with him on her run through the Garden.
“Well hey AJ,” she said, running to a stop beside him. “Was that you whistling?”
“I guess,” he said. He hadn’t realized it, but maybe he was. Multi-tasking had small side effects.
“Okay! AJ’s in love again!” she said.
“What?”
“Haven’t heard you whistle since Henni,” Cyan pointed out. “That’s a long time between whistles.”
“You are the weirdest boss,” he said. “Let’s talk about your love life.”
“Let’s not,” Cyan grimaced, stretching. “If I don’t land my soul mate pretty damn soon, I’m going to lose my deposit on the world’s best wedding venue.”
“You already booked your wedding venue, before you even found your soul mate?” AJ asked. “That’s optimism.”
“Well, you want the Panorama Room over the Frozen Falls, you have to book years ahead AJ,” she said. “When I booked it, it seemed like plenty of time. Now, not so much.”
“That’s a totally Cyan thing to do,” he said.
“Yeah well, don’t let your daughters grow up to be cowboys, AJ,” she sighed. “Not that you … ok, sorry about that. So, what needs fixing today?”
AJ went through the maintenance list with her and they talked about when would be the right time to completely drain the lake, check the piping and clear the filters. How to do it cheaper this time. He was thinking about that, about how last time some of the residents started a petition to save the fish, they had to pay a wildlife rescue group to come in and capture all the fish first. Those traps had to be out two weeks before they could get started, so maybe he could do that himself and … he worked that thought in the foreground while testing Farley’s published code strings and university research in a separate stream.
As he opened the door to the workshop, it jammed against something, so he pushed harder and the door opened, pushing something in front of it.
Another roll of paper.
After he smoothed it out and turned on the text he saw it was another chapter of Warnecke’s manuscript. A different one. This there was a note pinned to the front.
I can’t remember if I gave you this. This is what I want you to take to Winter, the note said.
OK, so, the guy had pulled another chapter from the manuscript and given it to AJ. He hadn’t forgotten all about it, even if he couldn’t place AJ this morning at Fatty’s. In fact, seeing AJ there probably jogged his memory. That wasn’t unusual for someone with TGA, things and people out of context were hardest to remember, then suddenly things jumped back into focus after some sort of trigger event. The guy was clearly further advanced in his TGA than his doctor suspected, behaving the way he was.
AJ speed scanned the page, to see if it added more detail to the work he’d already read. It automatically went into his private encrypted cache. And reading it was like Warnecke’s text was a medium, helping the dead Q-programmer Farley reach out through the intervening years and talk directly to AJ
ON THE POWER OF THE FO EXPLOIT
You will demand proof of the capabilities of the FO Exploit, I understand that. I am in a position to provide you with multiple proofs. But first consider this. Consider the nature of the Core.
The Core has one prime directive: ‘To secure and improve the habitability of member moons of the Coruscant system for the benefit of all citizens and the perpetuation of all Commonwealth of Coruscant civilization.’ Put simply, it does nothing more than run and try to improve the running of, the life support systems of Tatsensui and PRC, and by extension, New Syberia should it choose to become a full member of the Commonwealth.
And in its constant, single-minded quest to be the ‘Gardener of Coruscant’ as a poet once called it, the Core has expanded its capabilities beyond anything its creators could have imagined, so that it can fulfill that directive. First slowly, and then at an exponential rate, it has made breakthroughs in science and engineering that have turned the moons of Coruscant from barren spheres on which the citizens of the Commonwealth had only the most tenuous of footholds, into thriving, productive, interdependent colonized worlds, all the while preserving their unique environments and all too precious life forms.
It gave Tatsensui first the city dome, then the Skycap. It found water and other liquid gases under the surface of the desert moon of PRC and engineered the technologies to allow these to be converted to a sustainable, breathable atmosphere within domes especially adapted to the climate of PRC. Though not strictly under its care, it came up with the concept of adapting the Alcubierre Drive into a shield, to protect the passage of New Syberia through the Coruscant Asteroid Belt and eliminate the threat to that colony of a destructive asteroid strike.
Frustrated, in the true sense of the word, by its reliance on the citizens of the Commonwealth to interact physically with the universe around it, it created first machine agents, and then more socially acceptable biological agents, the cybers, to populate the worlds, mingle with their citizens and learn how it was to live on the worlds in its care so that it could continue to improve them. Citizens and cybers now live in harmony, growing, learning and advancing society together.
The FO Exploit utilizes a fatal vulnerability in the design of the Core.
It is specifically designed to dive the Deep Core, looking single-mindedly for data that has been tagged Not For Disclosure: ‘NFD’. It reassembles and decrypts it and enables the light of public scrutiny to shine on it, at last. When I began this work, I believed that would be enough. To bring data to the surface that had been buried for hundreds of years. But in successfully doing so I have exposed a vulnerability in the Core that could be used to destroy it. And with it, all life in Coruscant.
You are reading this because the FO Exploit has already been deployed. I make no apologies for that. It cannot be rolled back. I did not intend the Exploit to be used as a weapon, but now I can see that without me to control it, it might.
The Core has grown all-powerful and all-pervasive, and that very power has become its fatal flaw. The FO Exploit is real.
Core Death is now possible.
That’s where it finished, Warnecke’s next chapter. More mind bombs. Core death? That sounded a little dramatic. Warnecke warning that his exploit was unstoppable now that it had been deployed.
Stuff and nonsense. It must be, or surely Winter would have had Warnecke thrown into a deep, dark hole a long time ago, friend or not.
Except... Winter thought his old friend was obsessive and delusional. He hadn’t believed Farley had a viable theory about how to dive the Deep Core forty years ago, and he certainly didn’t believe that ice planer engineer Dave Warnecke could have found a way to make it real. So he had turned first a deaf ear, and then his back, on his old friend.
Even now. He was treating Warnecke as an irritation, an inconvenience. A very serious one, at a time when relations with NS were on a knife edge, when the last thing he needed was a suicidal paranoid old man making wild accusations and dredging up his past. So serious an inconvenience that he might possibly feel the best way to deal with it was to throw both Warnecke and anyone who he had been speaking with (aka AJ) into a deep dark hole. But the fact AJ was still walking around with life and limbs intact told him Winter probably didn’t consider the FO Explo
it to be real.
Yet? Winter hadn’t seen this latest document.
AJ was hooked, and he knew it. He was deep into Warnecke and Farley’s world now, trying to find the flow.
He wanted to talk to the author, not literally of course, but an AI built from his Core cache. But Farley was no cyber, and he had died before caching was an option. All AJ had was a few undergraduate papers and discussions by Farley, and Warnecke’s made-for-the-masses storytelling text which intimated that Farley’s Q-code exploit existed. AJ ran a hand across the page, willing the programmer to rise up out of it.
Except he couldn’t. Because they’d left him behind on the ice.
11. WHEN A SPOOK COMES TO CALL
AJ put down the page, looked up at the ceiling of the workshop, the bright diodes burning above him. What would you have done AJ? Out of food, out of hope. Would you have left him on the ice too?
He was thinking about that and Farley’s theorem, lost in the drift, when his comms buzzed.
“Hey Maria,” he said, recognizing the ID.
“Hi,” Leon’s wife said. “How you doing AJ?”
“I’m good, what’s up?” AJ had been waiting for Leon to turn up so they could talk over this latest development.
“Leon is not coming in to work today,” she said.
“No? OK,” AJ said, trying not to sound too disappointed. “I’ll cover for him, no problem.”
“I think it may be more than a couple days this time,” Maria said. “He did not have a good night, AJ.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“AJ,” the woman said, and he could hear the strain in her voice. “I want you to know, I appreciate it, what you do for Leon.”
“Don’t worry about it.”