The Hidden Truth: A Science Fiction Techno-Thriller

by Hans G. Schantz

  “EVIL,” Amit explained cryptically, exaggerating the “ee” in evil. “You’ve been calling them the ‘electromagnetic villains.’ It’s clearly bigger than that, however, so I’ve dubbed our bad guys: EVIL – the Electromagnetic Villains International League. And let me tell you, EVIL IT is seriously hosed.”

  “How do you mean?” Uncle Rob asked.

  “Near as I can figure, EVIL IT at EVIL Headquarters makes EVIL minions in the field use their very own EVIL VPN – that’s a Virtual Private Network – for all their most secret and EVIL communications. It’s not like any other VPN traffic I can find mentioned anywhere. It must be some custom or proprietary stuff. Maybe it’s some kind of state of the art ultra-secure decryption-proof tunnel. I don’t know, but the lags are obscene. It must be a real pain to use.

  “I’m guessing EVIL IT doesn’t care at all about a quality user experience for EVIL minions in the field,” Amit continued. “They’ve got some kind of clunky word processing app minions are required to use called EMACS. I don’t know what it stands for – probably “EVIL Minion Archaic Construction of Strings” or some such because the EVIL minions can’t stop complaining about it. It’s obviously clunky and difficult to use, and they’re all required to draft their reports using it. And I’ll bet it’s really, really secure because it’s local to their laptops and guaranteed not to leak information anywhere online except through the ultra-secure VPN that is equally clunky.

  “Apparently one of our bright, but thoroughly EVIL, minions got a brainstorm and started to use some lower security, but much easier to use, cloud-based application to draft reports – Omnidocs, I think, but I’m not sure exactly. Since this runs right through the VPN tunnel, EVIL IT figured out what was going on and chewed out the EVIL minion for violating security policy. I got a copy of the EVIL minion’s acknowledgement to the reprimand. I’m guessing EVIL minions resent being chewed out. What’s more, I’ll bet it’s not much fun relaxing after a hard day’s work doing EVIL things when you’re trying to stream cat videos, online movies, and porn through the EVIL VPN tunnel that can’t possibly keep up with your streaming video. And then if you go to the Hook Up Landing site to try to score some local action, it gets you in even more trouble with those EVIL IT jerks at EVIL HQ who have no idea what it’s like being an EVIL minion out in the field, and who insist that your EVIL laptop must only be used for EVIL purposes.” Amit was getting animated now in his explanation.

  “So our EVIL minions, who actually are quite cunning in their own EVIL way, must have figured out that they can split the EVIL VPN tunnel to send only EVIL communications to EVIL HQ, and the rest of their Internet traffic through the local connection, where they can watch porn and cat videos to their hearts’ content through a standard web connection without all the clunky delays of their EVIL VPN. The EVIL minions type in their reports in Omnidocs, then copy the completed Omnidocs text to paste it into EMACS and then submit the report to Evil HQ. Were you aware that Omnidocs auto-saves your document to the cloud? The EVIL minion must really hate losing any work, because he set it to auto-save every five minutes. It’s not just an incremental backup – no, his entire document gets sent again and again and again every five minutes while he’s drafting it.”

  “You can read all these messages their computers are sending back and forth?” Mr. Patel asked.

  “No, not exactly,” Amit clarified. “The web connection is actually encrypted by default, but the encryption is nowhere near as complicated as I bet the fancy EVIL VPN uses. After all, the NSA doesn’t want to have to work too hard to decrypt all our web traffic. It’s secure enough that someone like me, who doesn’t have a supercomputer in my basement, isn’t likely, in principle, to crack it. In principle. All that depends on how badly the user abuses the encryption, though.

  “Ever hear of Venona? That’s the secret operation that became known a while back where the NSA cracked the Soviets’ codes and verified that there really were Communists embedded throughout the U.S. government right after WWII. Do you know how they did it? It wasn’t because the Soviets’ codes were bad. They used one-time pads. In principle, one-time pads are uncrackable because you encrypt a message with a unique random sequence that’s only used once. But, some enterprising KGB officer decided it was taking too much time and money to generate unique one-time pads for each use, so they saved money by using the same one-time pads multiple times. Even back then, the NSA was listening. They collected messages using lots of these ‘double-time’ pads, and that little bit of extra redundancy was enough to decrypt big chunks of many messages.

  “That’s exactly the vulnerability in how our EVIL minions operate,” Amit explained.

  “So, you’re able to hack all their communications?” I asked. “Sweet!”

  “Again, not exactly. It’s still way complicated to correlate and decode all the packets correctly, but I found a cracking tool on the dark web.”

  “Dark web?” Mr. Patel asked.

  “Parts of the web that aren’t normally accessible. You can use special web addresses to access dark web sites via Tor to find,” Amit paused, “well, in this case to find people talking and sharing hacking ideas and software. I found an application that takes encrypted web traffic streams, and if the same text strings pass through often enough, it seems to be able to recover most of the text.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean you’d get the early parts of the messages, but the latter parts that aren’t passed back and forth as often would be harder to crack?” Uncle Rob asked.

  “You’d think that,” Amit said smugly. “Only there’s a great new feature in the latest build of Omnibrowser. When people search, sometimes they copy and paste text strings into the search field, so some genius at Omnitia figured he could improve the search speed by automatically sending the contents of the clipboard straight to Omnitia every time you copy something. That way, Omnitia can pre-cache the results for you, instead of waiting to start the search when you actually paste something into your search field. Anything copied from an Omnidocs document is automatically sent to Omnitia over the network, and Omnitia sends the same string right back including the first page of search results to the local computer to enable pre-caching of search results. I think I’m getting most all the latest edits to the EVIL minions reports, because even the final version gets passed back and forth outside the encrypted VPN a couple of times.”

  Uncle Rob looked up from the message, “I hope you haven’t been using that laptop from the truck stop,” he told Amit, “because it looks like it’s all set to summon the EVIL hordes the moment it connects to the Internet.”

  “Yeah, I’d figured as much,” Amit said. “I’ve been afraid to turn it on for fear that whatever exploit they used to find us might somehow auto-enable the internal Wi-Fi that I disabled. I’ve been using my backup laptop, and I’ve begun routing searches, like for dark web tools, to different hotels here and there.”

  “Is that safe?” Uncle Rob asked. “Won’t they be able to trace it back to you? They clearly have tripwires around Xueshu Quan and other relevant searches.”

  “The virtual machine I’m using employs Tor. I tuned up the firewall and I’m blocking all cookies and scripts, so I don’t think they’ll be able to catch me using the same trick,” Amit assured him. “Even if they do, a couple of our hotels using my network administration software have conference and meeting centers,” Amit explained. “I found one hosting a big engineering technical conference, and I made my virtual machine look like it was a guest at the conference, using the conference Wi-Fi code, to access Tor. It could be any attendee at a conference with nearly a thousand people. Or anyone who got the access code from them. Or anyone at the hotel who happened across the access instructions that might have been lost or misplaced by one of the attendees. And if EVIL does get on my trail, I’ll know about it, because the first thing they’ll want to do is access the network log files at the hotel. Which will show them precisely what I want them to see.”

  It did appear
he was being very careful.

  “What do they mean by a ‘Nexus?’” I asked.

  “That one was tricky,” Amit conceded, “They toss the term around and take the definition for granted. It could mean something like an inflection point, an intersection or divergence, a change or a transition, but it may be something else entirely that we don’t understand. Whatever we were doing at the truck stop made this Nexus thing start, and there must be more than one kind because ours was the third type.”

  “Is that the kind of Nexus, or the intensity of the Nexus, or what?” Dad asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amit acknowledged. “It has something to do with how severe the Nexus is, so it might be intensity, or perhaps there are different types, some worse than others.”

  “These Nexuses – Nexii? – can be sensed from a distance, and sometimes they get false alarms from nuclear reactors like the ones at Oak Ridge or the TVA plant,” Dad speculated.

  “That was my guess,” Amit confirmed.

  “This local ‘Nexus sweep’ business is puzzling,” Dad noted. “So they can be detected from a distance but localizing them precisely requires a sensor to be in closer proximity. We need to figure this out if it’s somehow allowing them to trace you online.”

  “I think I discovered how they did it. They traced us by embedding an exploit of some kind on the Xueshu Quan web page we visited the other day. It infected my laptop and effectively broadcast our IP address to them,” Amit clarified. “This Nexus business is something else entirely.”

  “I think you’re all missing the most important point,” Mom noted. “EVIL – or whatever you want to call them – they’re still actively searching for our boys right here in town. The sheriff already figured out the boys are connected to this business. If EVIL or their Homeland Security or FBI helpers keep investigating here, and keep looking for suspects, eventually some bright minion will take a second look through all the leads they’ve already dismissed, notice the juvenile smokers, and when they ask around about our boys, most anyone in town will be able to tell them that story doesn’t add up.”

  “We need to divert them,” Uncle Rob said. “Give them a false lead to follow. Amit, why don’t I borrow your infected laptop and take it on a little road trip?”

  “You might want to wait a few days, Rob,” Dad advised. “Nothing has happened for a couple of weeks and then the ‘suspects’ start logging in all over the place the day after the sheriff confronts our boys and they have that assembly at the high school? Someone might connect the dots. The sheriff certainly will.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” Mom countered. “A couple of days, maybe, but it needs to be this week, and it needs to be during school hours so the boys have an airtight alibi.”

  “I don’t think a road trip is necessary,” Amit said. “I can ‘infect’ a virtual machine with the same exploit and set it to trigger at any of the couple dozen locations across the southeast where my software has been installed. Some of them are even using the default passwords for the admin page of their wireless access points and I can reconfigure them to log into the wireless network of an adjacent building that offers free Wi-Fi to customers.”

  “I appreciate the work you’ve done, Amit,” Uncle Rob began, “but I think it would be safer for me to go physically to the location with the actual laptop. Couldn’t the exploit relay the Wi-Fi access point signal strengths in the area and use it to localize itself to the hotel? You’ve opened up a great resource for us to know how ‘EVIL’ operates and what they’re doing. Let’s not jeopardize it and you by using your access if we don’t have to.”

  Amit and Uncle Rob arranged for Uncle Rob to pick up the laptop the following evening.

  “We also can’t keep meeting like this,” Uncle Rob observed. “It’s too easy to hide a tracker on your car and even a casual surveillance would note if you all keep coming out to my place. We can relay messages by hand and avoid surveillance. It’s slower, but more secure. The boys see each other at school and can keep us all connected. But we need a solution for quick communications in an emergency or if something urgent comes up.”

  “For a while now,” Dad explained, “Rob and I have been keeping in touch by amateur radio. We use low-frequency signals that bounce off the ionosphere so we can transmit out of Robber Dell here over the mountains, and back into town. We can get Amit set up at the hotel. You’re not supposed to use any encryption on amateur radio transmissions, but we worked out a code based on the frequency and the timing of the transmission so it’s not obvious. It rolls over every fifteen minutes. I’ll let you borrow an old transceiver and get an antenna set up on the roof of the hotel, if that’s OK.”

  “Sure,” Mr. Patel assured him. “Thanks.”

  “I can get you up to speed on how the code works, Amit,” Uncle Rob volunteered, “when I come over to get the laptop from you.”

  * * *

  Uncle Rob’s diversion appeared to work. The “cyber-terrorists” struck again, this time in New Orleans. Now we were apparently trying to blow up oilrigs. It was closer to the original Houston incident, so hopefully EVIL would think our activities were centered near Houston. The EVIL minions checked out of the hotel, and Amit lost track of them. He concluded they must have been staying at a different hotel chain or under a different identity. His network admin software would let him know if anyone started using the EVIL VPN at any of the hotels where his software was installed. The tension and anxiety began to recede, and I could get back to enjoying my senior year. After a few weeks, even Mom was willing to let me go out again. I fell into a comfortable routine.

  Now that I wasn’t taking honors math or science, my classes weren’t very time consuming. I was enjoying learning my way around the shop, making things out of wood, or designing and implementing electronic circuits. I actually hung around with the shop rats more than my usual, more academic crowd. They took me out one evening to a favorite hangout of theirs – the steam tunnels under the old Tolliver Tech campus. They used some loose access panels to enter the tunnels. They had designed and constructed a clever tool perfect for grabbing the corner of a panel and lifting it up. They knew which tunnel had a motion sensor that would summon campus security, but even avoiding the alarmed section, there was a lot of interesting infrastructure to explore. There were a couple of big open areas that probably held generators or some other equipment at one point. We explored most of the tunnel system.

  With Amit and Emma going to the Fall Ball, I felt left out, so I asked Sharon to go with me. We double-dated with Amit and Emma. For someone who’d agreed to go with me, Sharon sure didn’t seem to be enjoying herself. We ended up going back to Amit’s hotel and watching The Princess Bride on the big screen in the lobby under the watchful eye of Mrs. Patel. It was a quirky movie, but here and there, it had some great heroic lines: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Of course, nothing in real life could ever be as heroic as that. Or so I thought at the time. The movie was the highlight of the evening. Sharon rebuffed my attempt to kiss her when I dropped her off at her place.

  One Saturday morning in early October, we picked up an NVIS signal from Amit. He was calling in Morse code for anyone to answer, but the actual message lay in his choice of frequency and the time stamp. I looked them up in our codebook. “We need to meet. Come here, soonest.” Dad replied in Morse code precisely five minutes later and at a frequency offset to indicate we were on our way. Mom insisted on joining us. We headed on over to the Berkshire Inn.

  “Should we get started?” Amit asked Dad.

  “Rob’s out of town,” Dad explained. “What have you found?”

  Mr. Patel dimmed the lights in the conference room, and Amit connected his laptop to the projector.

  “Look at this.” Amit showed us all the web page he’d cached on his laptop. It was an eBay listing for the third edition of Modern Views of Electricity by Oliver Lodge, published in 1907. “This popped up last night. I asked the seller to email a scan of
pages 302 and 303 to my anonymous e-mail account. Remember how the Tolliver copy and the Omnitia scan both had the peculiar figure on page 302? The one that’s never mentioned in the text? This is what the seller sent me.”

  We looked at the scan glowing from the projection screen. The “diagram of the forces of electricity and magnetism” drawn by a “Mr. Trouton” was gone. The text missing from the Tolliver copy and the Omnitia scan but present in the eBay copy read as follows:

  Energy flows at a right angle to the direction of the electric and magnetic forces. Close to the oscillator, these forces sometimes agree and sometimes disagree in phase, resulting in an ebb and flow of energy. Far from the oscillator, these forces are in phase yielding an inexorable outward flow of energy. Following up on a suggestion by FitzGerald, Heaviside recently demonstrated that when two identical waves are coincident, they may add either constructively or destructively depending upon whether their phases agree or disagree, respectively.2 When the waves add constructively, their electric forces combine, and their magnetic forces cancel. All the energy is thus electric. When the waves add destructively their electric forces cancel, and their magnetic forces combine. All the energy is thus magnetic. Since the flow of energy requires both electric and magnetic force, the cancellation of either implies that the energy must be momentarily stationary. The energy, which hitherto travelled at the speed of light, comes to a rest and changes direction. The waves trade their energy. In effect, the energy bounces elastically as it is exchanged from one wave to the other.

  The eBay scan also had an extra footnote:

  2 “Interactions of Electromagnetic Waves,” Unpublished, 1905.

  Dad’s brows furrowed as he stood up and slowly walked to the screen. He stood there a while deep in thought. “Heaviside and Poynting came up with the theory of how electromagnetic energy moves from place to place,” he explained. “It’s called the Poynting vector, since Poynting came up with it a few months before Heaviside published his discovery. The Poynting vector says that ‘the flow of energy requires both electric and magnetic force,’” Dad explained, reading from Lodge’s text. “When waves interact and interfere, if either the electric or magnetic field gets cancelled out, the energy left in the other field has to stop moving. The waves themselves are travelling at the speed of light.” He pondered this. “If the energy stops, that can only mean that it changes direction. The waves have to swap their energy. I suppose in that sense the energy actually does bounce elastically.” He still seemed puzzled by it all.