by F X Holden
“This is my project,” he said, looking a little forlorn. “Guy called Farley did all the groundwork. But he’s gone now. Dead. The only people he shared his ideas with were me, and Congressman Winter. Now that I proved the concept works, I’ve used it to pull some data from the Deep Core, so the world can see it needs to take it seriously. I do that, I can get Winter to help raise this in Government, because this goes way beyond being able to dive the Deep Core. I need people to take it seriously.”
“Take what seriously, exactly?” AJ asked.
“This vulnerability...” Warnecke said, agitated now, speaking fast. “If I could use the exploit for this, an enemy could use it too, to bring the Core down. But here, you can read it, read for yourself.” He patted the papers, “It’s all there, all the proof anyone could ever need that this works,” he said. “You can look at it and organize it without caching it right?” He sounded worried now. “If you commit any of this to the Core, you could be signing Coruscant’s death warrant. That means you too, cyber.”
AJ opened the folder and looked at the page lying on the top of the stack, the title ‘The FO Exploit and Core Death’. He pulled his eyes away and put a hand on the pile, “The only way I can do this off-Core is if I drift, then look at this for you, try to get it all organized and then delete it from my cache before I drift again. That will prevent it going to Deep Core, but only until I re-integrate. It gives you about ten years.”
Warnecke looked at him with a sad smile, “That will be just fine.”
AJ took his hand back, “Look, it would help me if I could also look at the Q-code behind this work. Without it, I only have your word that it works, and I know nothing about how it works, so it will be hard to evaluate what’s in the text.”
They took a pull in silence, Warnecke still standing. He glanced over at his bookcase, then back. “No. I don’t want you to ‘evaluate’ it, I just want you to organize it,” he said. He finished his beer with one long chug. “Trust me, when this comes out, there will be no shortage of ‘evaluating’. I’ll leave you to it. I’ll just be in the kitchen making myself some dinner, you need to ask anything,” he said.
“I’ll have a look, OK?” AJ said, flipping the pages. “I’m not sure I can get it all done during my drift window.”
“It’s not the blasted Illustrated History of the Commonwealth,” Warnecke said. “It’s just text, written so any Joe or Jane can read it. Just get it in a semblance of order,” Warnecke told him. He went over and locked the front door. “And don’t even think about leaving here with it. You do, I swear I’ll shoot you and tell the cops I thought you were a burglar. Then when you recycle as a baby I’ll hunt you down and kill you again.”
AJ didn’t want a physical copy of the damn thing anyway. He could delete his cache and the scan would be gone, but he’d still have his biological memory. There was no way anyone could access that, but no way for him to delete it either.
AJ held up his hands, “It’s OK, Citizen Warnecke,” he said. “I’m staying right here.”
“Damn straight you are,” Warnecke said, walking off to his kitchen and muttering. “Shoot you dead. See if I wouldn’t.”
AJ watched him shuffle out, then leaned back on the sofa, the manuscript in front of him. Last chance AJ. Get up, walk away. Sell your bandwidth back to the Core, stop digging into Farley’s work and leave Troy McMaster to sort out the Congressman’s troubles.
Good advice. But too late. He already had the hook through his gills.
He drifted to reset his window to 20 minutes, then flipped quickly, page by page through the manuscript. It seemed to be all there with the exception of the chapter he’d given to Winter; messed up, with hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages numbered in a nonsensical order, but there. Too tantalizing. He got started, and immediately got absorbed by the first page he picked up.
Thirty years ago, a brilliant quantum coder by the name of Farley O’Halloran posed himself a seemingly absurd question. If the Deep Core was unhackable, accessible only to the Core, then could the Core be tricked into hacking itself?
He shared the idea with two close friends, Kevin Winter and myself, and we mocked him.
Then later, we killed him. I will detail exactly how.
Farley’s question did not die with him, it kept gnawing away at me, until one day I determined that I’d try seriously to explore whether it had merit. I reviewed all of his notes and snippets of alpha code. Then thirty years ago, cradling my newborn son in my arms, I suddenly saw how it could be done.
To see a path is easier than to walk it. It took ten years before I could operationalize what I came to call the Farley O’Halloran Exploit. I had a simple ambition, to unlock centuries of data that a succession of misguided governments had deemed the Coruscant public did not deserve to see. This manuscript will show that in diving the Deep Core I obtained data showing that:
1) The first President of the PRC, Stanley Ho, was assassinated by agents of his own government and not by the group of radical anti-Core activists whose leader was convicted for the crime
2) The drug LPA-2, or Blue, is dangerously ineffective in protecting against gamma radiation and this lack of protection is the primary cause of transient and permanent global amnesia
3) Neither Tatsensui nor PRC intelligence services have any credible information indicating that New Syberia is militarizing its presence on Orkutsk, and that the current investigation into the President of New Syberia is part of an agreement between the Tatsensui and PRC governments to pressure New Syberia to abandon its policy of autonomous cyber AI development in favor of chaining New Syberia to the Core.
These are but three of the hundreds of revelations obtained from diving the Deep Core, but chosen for their historical and political relevance both to their times, and also to events today. The full documentation supporting these claims is included in this manuscript.
However, in achieving the seemingly impossible, I realized that my single-minded pursuit of this goal had exposed a glaring vulnerability in the design of the Core, arising from its evolution over the last several decades, and which could be used to compromise its most basic life support functions.
In other words, I had created a weapon which could be used to destroy the colonies of Tatsensui and PRC and because they are entirely dependent on each other, by default, also that of New Syberia.
This manuscript is not therefore just about the secrets the Coruscant government has been keeping from its people. It is about Core Death, and the risk to the entire Commonwealth, of a Core AI which we have allowed to evolve into a dangerous and unstable entity.
For us to survive, the Exploit must be controlled. As long as I am alive, it can be. But when I am gone, there will be no one left to control it.
What?! AJ blew out a breath, leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Looked at a clock. It had taken ten seconds to scan this page. He quickly calculated whether he could read and reorganize the entire manuscript inside 20 minutes and decided that he had to try. He could worry about what he’d read later. He leaned back in the sofa, hands behind his head, causing it to creak.
From the kitchen Warnecke called out, “You need something? Another beer?”
“No, all good,” AJ said, though he was feeling far from it. He started speed scanning the pile of paper and then got to work organizing it into a coherent narrative. It took him about ten minutes. He sat trying to process what he’d read, imprint as much of it as he could in his biological memory. Most of the manuscript was focused on the revelations from the Deep Core that Warnecke claimed to have fished out, and AJ had to admit, there was a wealth of ‘source material’ for his claims – thousands of communications, memos, voice and VR files, classified intelligence reports and in the case of LPA-2, clinical research reports and epidemiological data. The focus on this was probably just a reflection of where Warnecke had spent most of his time and effort over the years, before coming to the belated realization that diving the Deep Core was just one side of what
his exploit was capable of. The rest of the document was devoted to the implications of what else might be possible – seizing control of Core climate management functions such as rainfall and atmosphere composition, disrupting or disabling communications systems, subtly influencing AI research results … it seemed the possibilities were endless.
There was just one problem. No, two.
Nowhere in the document did Warnecke explain exactly how he had achieved what he’d claimed to have achieved. How did the FO Exploit work, how had it been implemented, how might it be so easily perverted? Because without knowing any of that, it was impossible to say that once the Core became aware of it, it could not just as quickly find a defense against it, and life would continue untroubled and uninterrupted.
And secondly, nowhere did Warnecke explain, as he had promised to do, how he and Winter had ‘killed’ Farley O’Halloran.
“I’m done!” AJ called, with about five minutes remaining.
Warnecke came rushing in, wiping his hands on a towel tucked into his waist. AJ stood and handed him the sheaf of papers.
“In narrative order,” he said. “I took the liberty of altering the page numbers so that they are sequential now.”
Warnecke beamed, “And what do you think? Not some crazy old guy after all, right?”
“Well,” AJ paused, “If all the backing documentation you included in there is authentic…”
“It is,” he insisted.
“If it is,” AJ continued, “Then I understand why your Congressman friend is not keen to discuss any of it. This could potentially bring down governments across Coruscant.”
“Exactly!” he said. “But … I’m sensing you’ve got some reservations.”
AJ checked the time, he had one minute before he had to wipe his cache if he was going to keep his word to Warnecke.
“Well, you don’t describe this mysterious FO Exploit, which you will have to do if you want the reader to believe it’s real, and that you dived the Deep Core and didn’t just get the data some other way. Which you have to do, if you also want to convince people this is some bigger existential threat.”
“I know that,” Warnecke said testily. “But to even discuss the smallest detail of how the exploit works, is to reveal it all, and I can’t do that until I am completely ready to go public.”
Twenty-five seconds, “OK, also you wrote that you’d explain how Farley was killed, but that’s not in there.”
“I’m saving that too,” Warnecke smiled. “That one’s personal. If the Congressman gets behind this, I might let it lie. Now wipe your cache.”
Ten seconds. He could just tell Warnecke that sure, he’d wiped it, but keep a copy on his cache. Try to firewall it so it wouldn’t go Deep Core as soon as he drifted, but what if… What if Warnecke could do what he said he could do - if he could search the Deep Core at will, could he also break down AJ’s cache encryption and see that he’d lied? That was a risk he didn’t want to take.
He deleted.
“Done,” he said. “All I have left now is my biological memory about this.”
“I’m OK with that,” Warnecke said. “I’m an expert in how messed up biological memory can get.” He looked at his papers again, and tapped them against the nearby kitchen table to straighten the edges, then looked over at AJ again. “Thanks for doing this.”
AJ was clearly being dismissed, so he stood up. “OK. That’s all then?”
“For you. I’ll take it from here,” Warnecke said. He flapped his manuscript in the air, “This is nearly ready for release. I’ll go to Winter one last time. He either gets on board, or he goes under. I can’t wait any longer.”
It sounded too easy. AJ wanted to be sure. “OK, so, we’re quits? You don’t need my help anymore?”
Warnecke waved a hand at the door, “Yes. I already said thanks didn’t I? Goodbye.”
To anyone else, it would have looked like AJ followed his normal work routine, packed his tools away, locked up his workshop, dropped by Admin to chat with Cyan and then shared a ride back home, like it was any other weekday.
But he was jacked, and had bandwidth to spare. So while he walked and talked and sat and stared into space, he archived and then cross-referenced every clue he could remember from Warnecke’s manuscript with those parts of Farley’s basic research he’d been able to find, or with the published code of other Q-programmers who’d speculated about Deep Core hacks. It was a whirlpool that just led him further and further down, but that was OK. There was precious little that was public, so mostly he was taking what he could find and running thought experiments on it. If Farley was thinking this, then could it lead to that?
Close to his usual sack time, he decided he was just going in circles, and called Cassie to give her an update.
“Ho was assassinated, LPA-2 causes TGA, and Tatsensui and PRC want NS to join the Core?” Cassie asked. “Only one out of three there is newsworthy, the other two will just make people shrug.”
“I don’t think he’s going for headlines, just to prove his exploit works,” AJ said. “He made me delete my cache so I can’t call it up, but behind every accusation was a mountain of evidence he said he’d dredged up from the Deep Core.”
“Yeah, but why choose those?” she continued. “There’s not a person alive who doesn’t already believe Ho was assassinated, and a 200-year-old murder is hardly current affairs. Blind Freddy knows the other two colonies want NS to fall into line on cybers. It’s part philosophy, part politics, and almost like religion. They cooked up this investigation to put more pressure on NS? Well, duh. Only the TGA thing has any legs – that’s going to get people angry and scared.”
“You’re thinking like a reporter,” AJ said. “I’ve been looking for other themes. These are all things that are going to shake people’s faith in the Core. It’s always been this benign presence; part mothership, part protector, part genius. Every couple of decades it drops some big new innovation on Coruscant like a cosmic magician – poof, the Skycap, poof, Blues, poof, the NS Shield, organ cloning, tissue regen, peace through interplanetary interdependence economics, universal VR, robotic agents, cybers ...” He paused. “By claiming there is truth in these big conspiracy theories that people believe anyway, you shatter the image of the Core itself. It’s been wittingly or unwittingly hiding these terrible secrets, how can you trust it with anything?”
Cassie wanted to dig a little more into Warnecke’s background while AJ was digging into Farley’s research, but he told her what he really needed to do, was sleep, so she gave him a virtual hug, and logged out.
In ten minutes he was fast asleep. Two seconds later, or so it seemed, he heard his earbud buzzing on his bedside table. He reached over and fumbled it into his ear before the call alert in the house comms system started chiming.
It looked like a Capitol ID. Voice only. He checked the time. Three a.m.? Seriously? He tapped his earbud and coughed then answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is this AJ?” he heard the voice say.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, this is Congressman Winter’s adviser, Troy McMaster,” he said.
To his surprise, AJ didn’t freak. It was probably the bandwidth boost. The endless scenarios and probabilities he’d run and was re-running. This was not a surprise. And he had a plan for how to handle it.
AJ checked the time again, “I’m sleeping, Citizen,” he mumbled. “Can this wait?”
“Oh, shoot,” the guy said, not very convincingly. “Sorry, I forgot what time zone you’re on. The day isn’t finished here.”
“Right,” AJ said, not believing him for a moment. He triggered a small adrenaline bump. “So...”
“Sorry,” McMaster said again. “Look, I’ll get straight to it. The Congressman has a favor to ask.”
That, at least, was straight out of Leon’s playbook. AJ had been expecting it. “Uh huh?”
“He needs the rest of Citizen Warnecke’s manuscript,” McMaster said. “To be able to see what so
rt of wild claims might be in there, to judge whether we have time to deal with this carefully, or do we need to take urgent action.”
“He should just call him and talk about it,” AJ said. “Citizen Warnecke wants that.”
“That might just … complicate matters. You have access to Citizen Warnecke’s house, right?” the guy said. “You could just go in, make a copy.”
“Copy it,” AJ repeated. “Steal it, you mean.”
“No, just access it,” McMaster insisted. “You’re a cyber. Scan and make a copy – just a local copy in your own cache that you could print it from. We don’t want it on the open Core any more than he does. Just print a copy, wipe your cache and keep it for us to collect. It’s not stealing, you’re not breaking any laws.”
AJ was human enough to spot BS when he heard it, and cyber enough to be very careful about his reaction.
“Uh, look,” AJ said. “The Congressman and Citizen Warnecke are friends, right? He told me yesterday he’s going to approach the Congressman directly again with this, to talk about it. He’d probably give him a copy if he just asks nicely.”
“Yeah, about that,” McMaster said. “This is a crazy busy time for the Congressman, with the investigation he’s leading. You said you know about that?”
“Into President Vologodsky of New Syberia?” AJ said. “You could say, yeah. He’s accused of militarizing Orkutsk with some kind of cyber army, right?” Falsely accused? Accused so we can find him guilty and drag NS into the Core alliance? That investigation?
“Yes, but between us AJ,” McMaster said, “We think he’s making a bigger play. Maybe going after Coruscant itself.” He said it like he was letting AJ in on a big secret.
“Wow,” AJ said, not very convincingly.
“Exactly. So Congressman Winter really can’t just cut all his appointments in the Capitol and head over there on a small personal errand. That’s why we we’re hoping you’ll help out.”