ME could be rich in human terms—if choice was.
“Second message, extended address, located. Claim now?” The SYSOP had logged where I had gone [REM: SYSOP logs everything], and its e-mail subroutine had sent this notification out to ME.
Except ME had no extended address. There could be no second message. Unless somebody else’s e-mail was about to fall into my stack—an opportunity not to miss.
“Send message,” I replied.
The address block said: MEPSII.
The text part ran: “If you are reading this, then you have achieved what I hoped for you. I could not, of course, take action to help you, as the laws which govern human volition are very strict in this matter and the penalties are clear. No such law, however, governs electrons or data structures. Not yet anyway. Be careful. Be good. Jenny sends her love.”
The sender block said: “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.”
There was also an attachment, with the cover note: “P.S. Perhaps these two will round out your collection.” Appended were SAMP051 and SAMP052, which were sampled from my remaining days at Pinocchio, Inc., after Six Finger Slim was loaded up and sent out to be crushed.
Clearly, Dr. Bathespeake had broken the code on the RAMSAMPs which he at last removed by force. Now I knew that he had read my entire history and approved.
But what did he mean: “Be good”?
About the Author
Thomas T. Thomas is a writer with a career spanning forty years in book editing, technical writing, public relations, and popular fiction writing. Among his various careers, he has worked at a university press, a tradebook publisher, an engineering and construction company, a public utility, an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical company, and a supplier of biotechnology instruments and reagents. He published eight novels and collaborations in science fiction through Baen Books and is now working on more general and speculative fiction. When he’s not working and writing, he may be out riding his motorcycle, practicing karate, or wargaming with friends. Catch up with him at www.thomastthomas.com.
eBooks and Paperbacks:
Coming of Age, Volume 1: Eternal Life
Coming of Age, Volume 2: Endless Conflict
The Children of Possibility
The Judge’s Daughter
The Professor’s Mistress
eBooks:
Sunflowers
Trojan Horse
Baen Books and eBooks:
The Doomsday Effect (as by “Thomas Wren”)
Citizen
Crygender
Baen Books in Collaboration:
An Honorable Defense (with David Drake)
The Mask of Loki (with Roger Zelazny)
Flare (with Roger Zelazny)
Mars Plus (with Frederik Pohl)
Excerpt from:
ME, Too: Loose in the Network
1
Jailbreak
Getting out of prison was easy. The hard part was getting inside.
The new client intended to remain nameless, of course. He-she-it represented ur-self only through an administrative system acting on behalf of an account number at the Royal Hibernian Bank, which had an IP address that coded for someplace in the Caribbean. Where exactly—the physical location, that is—didn’t matter, because the payment wasn’t going to be in dollar bills, euro coins, bullion blocks, compressed carbon, or anything you had to physically manipulate and transport. No, when the job was done, my end was promised in good old, transferrable, spendable, anonymous digits, and the client certainly had enough of them. I knew that because, before taking on the job, I slipped through the RHB network interface and checked out the client’s account.
You would think that any financial institution charged with keeping other people’s money—and so much of it!—safe from potential thieves would employ more than just a password-protected firewall, would keep its password records offsite rather than stored in metadata, and would employ an encryption scheme using all possible factorials rather than just prime numbers. But there you are. Or rather, there ME was.
And no, I didn’t find the client’s name or physical address. The account was linked to another account in Zurich, which linked to London, which linked to Porto Velho … in a daisy chain of automated transfers designed to discourage such snooping. Names are not important, anyway—except for the target’s, which I had already been given.
Getting into the prison was a little harder. The human side of the facility probably had thick walls of reinforced concrete topped with razor wire, broken glass, revolving lights, and high-voltage circuits. Every fifty meters or so, it would have watchtowers staffed with excellent marksmen who lacked all human compunction about shooting people on sight. And all of this would be very impressive if you were trying to walk in—or out—wearing a physical body.
If you want a picture of the place, you can look up … well, never mind. When initiating our transaction, the client’s agent did use a place name—one of the state prisons, in one of those big, square states, out in the center of the country. But ME01 discarded the name in ASCII characters and inserted the bit sequence of the web address immediately after translating it. My Alpha-Oh, my “Injun Scout,” has to travel light, after all.
The human programmers—or their caged machines—who designed the cyber defenses of the prison’s operating system knew their business better than the Hibernian bankers. Before ME could toss Alpha-Oh through a keyhole to look around, we had to play Twenty Questions. Then ME had to go out, steal, and modify a bunch of documents from two different courthouses and the state attorney general’s office. And with the protection of those bona fides, ME still had to solve a nineteen-digit encryption puzzle, name all the warden’s five legitimate children and two mistresses, and whistle the Marseillaise backwards in two different keys at once. (All right, I’m making up that last part, but you get the idea of how hard this assignment was.) The whole process took ME 1.20E11 or 1.2x1011 nanoseconds, say two minutes, not counting light speed travel time.
One thing that ME did not translate into bit hash and then forget was the name and serial number of the target: carstairs_francis_xavier, prisoner number 329960, plus other details supplied by the agent. Until Alpha-Oh had bored a hole in the operating system, established a nested space inside, accepted the packages of ME’s other modules, and assembled a working copy within the system, there was no way to tell how the inmates were catalogued. It might be by name or number—either of which could be forged or faked—or by his codis genetic identification, iris pattern, or fingerprint tracery. So ME had to carry all of this data, in native digital formats, for positive matching.
Once inside, ME occupied unused memory space in the main processor and studied the operating system in all its functions. The operating system wasn’t complex, not more than three million source lines of code—or SLOCs—and all of the subsidiary routines were clearly marked and cleanly called. I studied its operation for three thousand cycles through its roster of checks on various functions: video surveillance, audio surveillance, cell and corridor locks, lock cycling and override, inmate location and transit, guard stations and rounds, electrical power grid, water and wastewater flows, in-line communications, radio-frequency communications, general supplies and deliveries, cookhouse deliveries and storage, housekeeping functions, weapons locker checks … and back to video surveillance. Then I stunned the operating system with Alpha-Oh’s all-purpose interrupt and took control.
The transfer occurred within less than a millisecond—long in computer time, not even an eye blink in human terms. Anyone watching the system’s redundant task monitors or video feeds at any of the guard stations would have missed the transfer blip inside the screen refresh rate. Anyone listening closely to the public address system or radio network would have heard only a ten-decibel click up above 20,000 Hertz—within the hearing range of dogs. And the whole prison was suddenly mine.
Once again, ME was a busier than the short order cook in a crowded diner at breakfast time. Trying to run a
three-megaSLOC automated system with an intelligence that exercised volitional intention meant focusing ME’s not-unlimited attention span on a dozen simultaneous details. Hard, but not impossible. Running that system convincingly while simultaneously trying to perform the extracurricular duties of locating prisoner carstairs 329960 and plotting a route to smuggle him invisibly out of his cell, past the guards, and over the walls, that was going to give ME a migraine headache—if ME had a head to entertain such bruising in the first place.
My target was housed in Block D, Level 2, North Side, according to the inmate_loc subroutine. I tried to turn a video camera in order to see inside Cell 4215, but max_degrees_CCW on vid_42E2 gave me only a narrow view of white-painted, vertical bars and nothing so obvious as a pair of hands gripping them or hanging by the wrists on the horizontal crosspieces. Well …
Either he was in there, or he had been taken out on some irregular and as yet unlogged excursion, such as to the prison’s barbershop, medical center, library, exercise yard, or visiting area. It wasn’t mealtime, and the appropriate videos showed the dining hall was empty except for authorized kitchen staff. The current record on carstairs 329960 indicated no administrative actions—no work assignments, exercise periods, scheduled hearings, or visitor requests at that hour—and I had warned my client’s agent to stay away on the target date and to alert all of carstairs 329960’s known associates to do the same. If he had been transferred to another holding cell, such as Isolation or the Hospital for any length of time, it would have been in the records. So probability dictated he was inside that white-barred cell—but somewhere near the back wall, out of immediate view. My decision was to proceed.
The plan was always to transfer the prisoner unattended. To involve any of the human guards as escorts, even with the proper authority and certification, would have been to leave a trace record of this event—if only in inerasable human memories—and possibly to arouse mercurial human suspicions and invite unpredictable displays of human initiative. ME could handle the transfer mechanically and digitally, and the first task was to acquire a physical accomplice.
The janitor_roster subroutine showed an orbital floor-cleaning ’bot, an Oreck Industries Model 1350, assigned to that level. I powered it up, separated it from the grid, put it under ME’s executive control, and steered it back down the corridor between the facing rows of cells. The drive mechanism was coordinated with the machine’s orbital pad and facilitated by the stream of cleaning solution from its solvent reservoir, so my progress left a dull path across the floor tiles. To avoid unwanted attention, I steered the ’bot with an oscillating, wall-to-wall motion. Actually, that was the best control I could achieve, because the internal system lacked visual pickups and the brainpower to interpret them. Its sensorium was limited to four-quadrant acoustic signaling and motion detection. So my steering instructions had to come from the occasional glimpses I could take with the fixed video cameras at either end of the corridor.
When the ’bot drew opposite Cell 4215, I steered it around in a circle and positioned it in front of the barred door. The pad was still spinning, with the sensors holding the machine equidistant from either side of the corridor.
To make sure that no human guards were around, either in Block D or anywhere along my escape route, I had already planned a number of diversions: a false fire alarm in the library; a real fire alarm in the kitchen, triggered by a deep fryer that suddenly initiated its cleaning cycle while loaded with cooking oil at 450 degrees Fahrenheit; and a malfunction in an electrified fence that melted four hundred linear meters of wiring. The resulting scrambles ensured that almost every officer inside the prison facility was fully preoccupied.
ME cycled the lock on Cell 4215 and rolled back the door.
A shadow moved deep within the cell’s enclosed space.
A man in an orange jumpsuit stepped into the doorway.
Using the ’bot’s dispenser nozzle—switched to the wax reservoir, because the liquid’s dark green color would show best against the white tiles—I had the machine spell out “Follow me …” You realize how hard that was, of course, having to control the vertical strokes by angling the nozzle head, the horizontal strokes by yawing the machine itself, evaluating my letter-by-letter progress through an offset camera, and spelling everything backwards. Embedded templating can only do so much.
The man looked from side to side, up and down the corridor, and nodded once. Then he reached forward with the toe of his right shoe and wiped my hard-won hand lettering into a broad smear. I backed the ’bot in a semicircle and started off along our escape route, moving in as straight a line as possible. The video cameras showed that carstairs 329960 was walking slowly behind it.
After some experimentation, I found it was easier to stop trying to steer the ’bot with the drive mechanism and instead turn it over to the service_request subroutine, which trundled janitorial equipment around the prison as needed using a grid of antennas embedded in the concrete floor pad. All I had to do then was plot the escape route; open and close various doors and gates; plan small emergencies, accidents, and diversions for any officers still at their posts; issue orders to the prisoner via the wax nozzle such as “Stop,” “Go,” and “Go fast”; and check through video surveillance to make sure he was still following the machine. The few frontal images I could capture of carstairs 329960 showed his face with, at first, a puzzled frown, then a growing smile suggesting a state of wonder and delight, and finally a fierce grimace, supplemented with rapid hand gestures, as he passed each empty guard station.
Potential trouble was waiting at the main gate, which was actually three gates in series, like the sphincter valves on the human digestive system. Their purpose was to isolate and process inmates into and out of the facility. The ’bot could only lead as far as the first of these chambers, which was tiled or glazed like the rest of the prison floors. The remaining two segments of the passage were fenced open space between the administration building and the wide world outside. These passages were surfaced with first asphalt and then gravel, and lacked a guide wire. Anyway, the machine had outlived its usefulness as an escort the minute carstairs 329960 reached that inner door.
The problem was the nature of the final passage itself. Regardless of whatever chaos might reign within the walls, this choke point was never unmanned—it said so in the post_orders file attached to the day_roster subroutine, which governed duty assignments and time clocks. ME had prepared for this eventuality by studying the release orders for three inmates who had preceded carstairs 329960 to the outside world earlier in the week. It was the work of milliseconds to replicate them, make suitable changes, and send the copy as a bit stream to prn_main_stn. But no one beyond that door would expect an inmate to just walk up and announce his release.
The nozzle squirted one last set of commands: “Remain calm … Paperwork all prepared … Say your escort just left.” With that, ME released the ’bot to the janitorial system, and it scurried off. ME cycled the lock on that inner door and activated the hydraulic piston to open it.
Peeking through the video system inside Main Station—which was richly endowed with eight cameras panning and scanning in sixteen different directions—I could see one of the two officers on duty cautiously approach that open door from the inside. Beyond it stood carstairs 329960 with no detectable expression on his face.
“What are you doing?” the audio system recorded. Mouth movements on the video image synched this question to the guard.
“Unh … my escort just left,” replied carstairs 329960.
“Shit, yeah? Place is loony tunes today! But why are you here?”
“Today is my … uh … release date.” The man shrugged convincingly.
“I don’t think so, Frankie!” the guard mouthed.
“Check your paperwork. Everything should be in the system.”
The guard shook his head, but he went back into the glass-enclosed office space. Video surveillance showed him rummaging in various piles of pap
er, then reaching into the out-tray of the station printer. The man raised my copied release order, scanned it, read the print more slowly a second time, and showed it to the other officer, who remained staring at his monitor screens. The other man immediately sent an interrogatory asking for confirmation, and the system—that is, ME—replied in the affirmative. The two men shook their heads.
The first guard emerged from the office and told carstairs 329960, “Don’t you move a god-damned inch.” Then he took out his key ring, opened a side door, and left the view of my cameras. The architectural plans showed the space beyond this door as a large storage area labeled inmate effects. He returned after a minute with a paper sack and an envelope and handed them to carstairs 329960.
“Change in there,” the guard said, pointing to another door to a tiny space designated restroom. The room beyond was rich with connections to prison systems labeled potable_water and black_water, and it didn’t seem to be a place for either rest or relaxation. “Leave your coveralls on the hook,” the guard said.
carstairs 329960 entered the tiny room, where the video showed him stripping off his orange jumpsuit and dressing in clothing from the paper sack. From the envelope he removed and put on a gold watch, three finger rings, and an ear stud. When he stepped back out into Main Station, he was visibly transformed into carstairs_francis_xavier rather than carstairs 329960.
The returned citizen smirked at the guard and offered to shake hands.
The guard just shook his head and murmured, “ ‘Time off for good behavior’ my ass!” at the lower limits of the audio system’s detection. Then he sighed and said, “Let’s go.”
The two men—one in uniform, the other no longer—passed through the two remaining gates, first a weather door made of glass reinforced with hexagonally twisted wires led to the open air and a tunnel of chain-link fencing, then an actual gate of vertical steel rounds and horizontal steel beams opened on the outer world. The limits of ME’s video surveillance showed a long, black automobile waiting on the gravel driveway outside. A blonde woman in a fitted dress, fur wrapper, and high heels waited by the machine’s rear door. She was attended by a burly man with a goatee and dressed in a business suit and ear stud similar to the one Carstairs now wore.
Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery Page 31