Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller

by BMichaelsAuthor

  General Shields winked at Samantha.

  “That’s fascinating General. Thank you,” said Watkins, sounding embarrassed. “So continuing, I can use the Blockchain to prove my ownership of the BMW to anyone in the world. The BMW’s title history will be on the Blockchain for everyone to see—forever. Because it reduces the cost of so many types of transactions, Blockchain usage is growing rapidly. It’s cheap because it’s transparent, efficient, and there’s no middleman to pay. Or, at the very least, the middleman’s fees can be reduced.

  “Back to BlockHR. Let’s say; you use an employment agency to pay your Gamers. Typical employment agencies charge a hefty markup on the employees, sometimes as much as 40-100%—or more. Because software-based smart contracts and the Blockchain automate everything, BlockHR takes a much smaller cut. BlockHR pays the employees via Bitcoin, which is visible on the Blockchain. The IRS is going to start processing tax returns and payroll taxes via the Blockchain soon.

  “I see BlockHR as the solution to your problem. There’s one more alternative. It’s a step beyond BlockHR. It’s 100% automated. No humans are involved. It’s a true robot company. Legally, it’s known as a Distributed Autonomous Trust. But it’s newer and unproven. I’m concerned with who you’d sue in a dispute. And, unlike BlockHR, they’re not indemnifying their clients yet. So, I’d stick with BlockHR.”

  Samantha was pleased. “Wow! You could have just said call BlockHR. But, thanks for the background information and your counsel. I agree with you. Blockchain is going to be huge. My mind is struggling to grasp all the ramifications.” Samantha politely ended the call.

  “General,” said Samantha, flirtatiously, “we’re way ahead of schedule. I expected some serious work to solve this problem. All I have to do is phone BlockHR; so...we have some time to kill.”

  Shields devilish smile returned. “Before we kill that time, let’s go over your financials.” The General glanced quickly at the cash flow statement.

  Samantha let him digest the report. “You can see why I’m so excited about Gecko. I’ve got 75 days of cash. All of my staff is critical. I don’t want to lay off anyone. So, I’m a little stressed out right now.”

  “I know. I feel good about Gecko. If they’re a no-go, or you can’t get the money from them in time, then we’ll work on closing a new round of financing. I’ll urge the investment team to value Gamification at a higher valuation, so that you don’t have to give up as much equity as last time.”

  Pressure released from points all over Samantha’s body. She took her first satisfying breath in months.

  The General continued, “One last item before we start killing that time. Becca said the Gamification Systems’ API can work with other games; games you didn’t design. Right?”

  “Yes, that’s the idea. Just like I don’t want us to be an AI company, I also don’t to be in the business of developing video games. Becca did a great job with Castle Gecko, but I’d rather have the company focus on improving the core gamification software—G-Bridge. It’s just a matter of meeting with the game manufacturer and determining what gaming engine they’ve used.”

  “Outstanding,” replied General Shields. “I’m going to introduce you to Velocity Game Studios, the makers of Fog of War. It’s a blockbuster first-person shooter, video game. Velocity has a contract with the US Special Operations Command—SOCOM—to port Fog of War.”

  “Port it for what?”

  “Velocity created a version of the game that incorporates classified information. Special forces operators use if it for close-quarters combat training. The Velocity team has programmers with TS/SCI clearances. Your work with Velocity is a TOP SECRET project code named, FOGGY. I need you to pick one of your most trusted employees with a TS/SCI clearance. This employee needs to make Fog of War work in GAMESPACE. I suspect that’s Saul?”

  “Yes, it’s definitely going to be Saul. G-Bridge was my idea, but Saul was the brains behind the architecture.”

  “Fine. Then, I’m going to read you, Saul, and some Velocity employees into project FOGGY, as well as Lin. The only SCIF accredited for FOGGY will be on your floor. Also, I want you to expedite the integration with Prosthetic Thought.”

  “Ok,” said Samantha. “We’re close to being integrated. Their stuff is a little buggy. Thought-based control of VR is cool, but it doesn’t work all the time.”

  The General agreed. “They’re improving their algorithms that understand brain waves. I’ve been told that all the kinks will be gone soon. Of course, you can’t discuss anything related to FOGGY with anyone at Gamification, but Saul. Also, there’s a project that I can’t discuss yet. But, I’m going to need your top REALSPACE talent.”

  “General, you’re so mysterious. That’s going to be Ali Asir and Saul—”

  “Do you absolutely need Saul? I’d rather compartmentalize FOGGY from the other project.”

  “I’m sorry General. You know how I hate to disappoint you,” said Samantha, seductively. “But first off, you’re not telling me anything about the project. Secondly, Saul is also the key to doing anything in REALSPACE. He knows G-Bridge backwards and forwards. Ali is very sharp, but he takes his lead from Saul.”

  “Ok,” said the General, with a tone of resignation in his voice. “But, I need you to keep everything very compartmentalized. There can be no leaks of this classified information. Only those read into FOGGY, can know about FOGGY.

  “Even details about information that’s not classified; like the integration you’re doing with Prosthetic Thought, you need to keep on a need-to-know basis. And, I want you to keep Becca Roberts in the dark about these classified projects. She can’t work any of them.”

  Samantha was irritated by the directive to cut Becca out of the loop. “Let me get this straight. You want GAMESPACE to incorporate a first-person shooter that gamifies something secret in REALSPACE, using brain waves for virtual reality control? And, you’re limiting the resources I can employ? You don’t want my second best software engineer to work on it? Is that all you want?”

  “That’s all you need to know for now. But that’s not all I want,” said the General. He poured them both another scotch. “I want you—now.”

  Shields’ words didn’t register with Samantha. “Why don’t you like Becca?”

  “I like Becca a lot. I agree. She’s one of your best. I know Saul is a better coder, but Becca is both a great software engineer and an outstanding communicator. She’s probably more valuable to Gamification Systems than Saul. You can put her in front of a client. It’s great that you have her working with Josh. But I’ve read her SF-86.”

  SF-86’s were the form that individuals seeking to work with classified information submitted to the government. It was the document used to formally request a clearance. The Office of Personnel and Management—OPM—was the government agency ultimately in charge of SF-86’s.

  SF-86’s not only contained extremely personal information, like financial records and health data, but also included data on known associates of the person seeking the clearance. This included neighbors, co-workers, parents, spouse, ex-spouses, and children. In 2015, the OPM database was hacked, yielding a massive amount of personal information—including fingerprint data.

  The General continued, “Her dad is a fundamentalist pastor. She strikes me as a bit naïve. Becca is a straight arrow. Straight arrows get bent when you have to fight radical Islamic terrorists, like the Caliphate.”

  A flash of hot anger shot through Samantha. Who the hell was he, to tell me, how to run Gamification Systems? She quickly suppressed the emotion.

  Then, the General’s words of boardroom foreplay finally hit her. She was appreciative of him for the Gecko opportunity and funding offer. She didn’t want to ruin the moment. “Ok. I understand.” She’d employ the art of persuasion in upcoming days.

  Samantha rose from her chair and straddled the General with her taut thighs.

  As the two began to kiss, the General fondled Samantha’s voluptuousness.
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br />   “General,” she said, oozing lust, “I don’t know anything about a straight arrow; but, there’s something else that’s very straight in this room.”

  Samantha grabbed the General’s hand. She led him over to his English oak desk. In one fell swoop, Samantha dumped the entire contents of the desk to the floor. Papers and file folders scattered everywhere. Then, she sprawled on the desk and beckoned the General to join her.

  The two pleasured each other with passionate sex for hours.

  Chapter 11 – Becca Meets Josh

  9:05 a.m. (EDT), Tuesday, July 28, 2020 – Columbia, MD

  Suite 201, Gamification Systems’ Offices, Defense Innovations Accelerator

  Josh exited the elevator and set foot into the offices of Gamification Systems, for the first time. He smiled at the receptionist, asking if Becca Roberts was available. “My name is—”

  “Josh Adler,” interrupted the receptionist, reciprocating Josh’s smile. “Let me see if Becca is available.”

  Becca said she’d be right out. She reached into her purse, grabbed a mirror, and fixed her shoulder-length hair. There was no ponytail today. Eye makeup replaced her glasses. Like the receptionist, Becca knew of Josh Adler.

  Over the past nine months, they had on occasion, seen one another in the Accelerator’s cafeteria. They exchanged niceties—but nothing more than that. They were competitors.

  Becca entered the reception area. “Hi, Josh!”

  “Hey, Becca. Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

  “Sure, what the General wants; the General gets. Let’s go back to my office to talk about integration options. Do you need anything to drink?”

  “I’ll have a shot of tequila,” he answered, sarcastically.

  Becca laughed. “So early in the morning? Yesterday’s demo went that well, huh? How about coffee? Then, let’s see if we’re still talking by happy hour.”

  “Deal.”

  After stopping by Gamification’s kitchen, Becca walked Josh back to her glass office. All the see-through offices overlooked a room that contained a conference table and wall-to-wall whiteboards.

  “Cool offices,” said Josh. “Wouldn’t I love to see what my employees were up to, every minute of the day?” Next door, Samantha was on the phone with her door shut. She waved at Josh. Becca’s workspace was manageably messy, with lots of technology books and magazines strewn about. She must have owned every edition of 2600 Magazine.

  Josh examined Becca’s degree in computer science. “How’d you like Carnegie Mellon?”

  “It was an excellent education, but I hated the Pittsburgh weather and stinkbugs. I wish Andrew Carnegie had started the steel industry by a beach.”

  “Ha!” bellowed Josh. Next, he focused on a picture of a much younger Becca. She stood, arm-in-arm, with a man that looked to be her father. They were dressed in fall season, camouflaged hunting gear. A black boar lay dead at the tip of their hunting boots. He’s kind of nosy, thought Becca.

  “You’re a hunter?” asked Josh, with a surprised inflection.

  “Yeah. My dad taught me to hunt, while growing up in Texas. That picture was taken at a family friend’s ranch. We’d go there to kill wild pigs. Farrell hogs are nasty. They’re all over Texas ranches. If you don’t kill them, they’ll eat all the crops and make huge mud pits in the fields. They love corn.”

  “I’m impressed. You’ve got to be brilliant to get into Carnegie’s computer science program. And you can handle a gun.”

  Becca giggled. She hoped she wasn’t blushing.

  Josh grabbed the chair in front of Becca’s desk and got down to business. “During my demo, General Shields suggested that I meet you, to see if we could help each other with AI. AI is the heart of my company. I’ve hit a roadblock in my machine learning and NLP algorithms. Right now, our AI is narrowly applied to recognizing cybersecurity events—scans, botnet attacks, deployment of malware—things like that.

  “CyberAI also matches these cyber-events against threats we gather from crawling the web and social media. So for example, if a hacker starts maligning your company in a Tweet, we’ll be on elevated alert. The General thought we might be able to help you recognize these cyber-events. He also suggested that you had a more general purpose need for AI. I’m not sure what he meant by that.”

  Becca gazed into Josh’s face—and dimples—intently. Luckily, her multi-tasking mind could listen at the same time. “I think there are a couple of possibilities for integration.”

  She picked up a coffee mug full of whiteboard markers and spied an empty section of her office wall. On the glass, she drew the same architectural diagram she sketched for the General—REALSPACE, G-Bridge, and GAMESPACE.

  “We turn cybersecurity into a game. But that’s just one use case. We want to be able to gamify a lot of things. So, I see some synergies here. Quite frankly, we’ve spent a lot of time programming our system to recognize cyber-attacks and events. If you could do that for us, it would allow us to focus on G-Bridge. G-Bridge has a robust API. So we might be able to rip out our AI, and replace it with yours. What language did you use?”

  “The architecture of the CyberAI engine is pretty sophisticated. It’s got packages written in C++, Java, CUDA, Python, and even some Assembly Language. Some modules have to run like lightning. But the CyberAI engine exposes a number of APIs, so to you, it’s like a black box. We have APIs for C++, Java, Python, and REST.”

  C++, Java, CUDA, Python, and Assembly Language were all computer programming languages. Each language had strengths and weaknesses. CUDA was a language that you’d use to interact with NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units—GPUs. GPUs were special purpose chips that offloaded certain types of tasks from a computer's CPU. The first market for GPUs was gaming machines. Recently, car and truck manufacturers were rapidly integrating GPUs into their autonomous vehicles for their AI incorporating deep learning algorithms. GPUs were also critical components within VR and AR gear.

  Assembly Language was a low-level language that talked directly to CPUs. It was complicated to write, but ran very quickly. C++, Java, and Python were all higher level languages. They were easier to write than Assembly, but executed more slowly. The REST API spoke the same language as an Internet browser. Companies, like Facebook and Twitter, exposed REST APIs to enable computer programs to interact with their websites—without the use of a browser.

  Josh continued, “I’d recommend either the C++ API or the Java API. Those will work best for you.”

  Becca was encouraged. “That’s awesome! Are you guys able to handle spear phishing?”

  “Yes, sometimes we throw a false positive. But at least you’re made aware of the danger. The spear phishing engine detects spoofing and homographs. It also incorporates DNS heuristics and can see if emails comply with an enterprise’s content compliance policies.”

  “Great,” replied Becca. “If you’re better than us at recognizing cyber-events in REALSPACE, especially things like spear phishing, then we’ll just use your AI engine. I think the second place will be more of a stretch for you. It’s beyond the weak AI of merely recognizing cyber-events. It’s related to GAMESPACE.

  “I’d like to investigate how your AI could replace or, at least lessen the need for our G-Master. This requirement should help you move your engine towards stronger AI, because you’d be replacing a human being.

  “Right now, a G-Master has to watch every moment, of every game. The G-Master has to ensure the Gamers don’t get stuck, and that the cyber-events in REALSPACE are appropriately represented in GAMESPACE. For example, what if the Gamers collectively decided to seek treasure instead of thwarting a virus in REALSPACE? Instead of fighting a monster in GAMESPACE, they’d be filling their pockets with gold.”

  “Who could blame them?” said Josh, sardonically.

  “That’s the problem. In our game we call Castle Gecko…I mean Castle Chevaliers, we try to handle this with Bitcoin rewards. But, Gamers aren’t forced to do anything. It’s an open-world game.
As G-Master, I might have to intervene by spawning a non-player character or verbally chastising them to get back into the fight.”

  “I see,” said Josh, “so your client is Gecko Insurance?”

  Becca went flush. “No, our client builds castles,” she replied, with a deadpan voice. “The point is, I could see using your AI to replace our G-Master.”

  “I understand. I agree that we can definitely take over the AI for REALSPACE when you’re dealing with cybersecurity. And we can work further on your G-Master replacement requirement. It does fit with my vision of developing stronger artificial intelligence. Let me tell you a little more about CyberAI.”

  Josh stood up and moved towards Becca. “May I?”

  “Sure.” Becca handed Josh her coffee mug full of whiteboard markers, and the red pen in her grasp. In the exchange, Becca and Josh’s hand touched—just for an instant. Becca’s stomach tingled. All she could see were dimples. She thought their touch might have passed a static electric charge.