"That's just wonderful." Laurence walked up behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. "I think this is going to be perfect." He smiled broadly as he patted Brad on the back. Brad grinned at him, obviously proud of their operation, then suddenly he felt woozy and his eyes rolled back as he sank to the floor. Laurence capped and pocketed his tiny toxin delivery device and stepped over Brad as the COO went into full cardiac arrest.
He deftly placed his flashdrive into the server port and retrieved the project file that was set up for Steven. With a few rapid keystrokes, Laurence sent a delete command to the backup server, then activated a destructive malware program that set up a virtual operating system in memory and repartitioned and deep-formatted all of the server and backup disks and media. It began writing to all their sectors over and over again perpetually while also wiping any volatile memory of all processes but that which the malware occupied. Once the destructive process was completed the malware was set to disable safeguards and continuously cycle the disk read-write heads until physical failure then delete itself from memory, leaving completely bricked systems. Satisfied with his success, Laurence tucked the box of lithographs in his briefcase and calmly walked out, making sure not to trip over Brad's body.
Steven sat back after an hour of solid coding, looking out the window at the meadow below. It was spring and flowers were starting to bloom, but it wasn't the same as he remembered before. His heart ached a little for days long gone and he heard hints of whispers of Asherah and the occasional giggle. Her presence was even stronger with him today. It never went away, even with the tea. But the tea did take the edge off. He fervently missed his tea and reminded himself not to forget to hit up James for more. The pain was distracting.
Sighing, Steven got back to work, hoping to get engrossed in the project enough to not think of his imaginary romance. Even with the tea, and knowing it was all a fantasy, he still missed her and the meadow terribly. He suspected his godparents even tried to set him up with dates, but it never quite worked out. None of the girls even remotely matched up to Asherah and Steven felt ruined by his fantastical love. How badly had the fantasy set him back when he couldn't even date? Two years of therapy still hadn't made a dent in that problem. So he focused on his school work and his search, and kicked that can farther down the road, hoping that time would be the main factor to his healing. He was furious with himself to have fallen this deeply for something so imaginary when every other aspect of his life was solidly rooted in science and fact.
Shaking his head, Steven leaned back into his work. Once he mapped out the junctures to the technology underneath the circuitry and the abstraction layers, writing drivers for it was trivial for him. Regardless, it was still some of the most advanced coding he had written. He was basically writing software that will run not just off the hardware, but under the hardware on layers of hardware that wasn't fully defined, all based on how the two meshed together. He had done something similar with some old Department of Defense chips that turned out to have Chinese backdoors hardcoded into them so this wasn't entirely new, even though what he was currently writing was way beyond anything he had seen before.
He tweaked his driver and application many times, recompiling and retesting, trying to get into the hardware underneath. It was a typical process of reverse engineering that he was so familiar with since his ten year old self had to modify drivers to overcome hardware flaws and allow him to connect to the internet. He was seeing hints of that same sort of process now. It required a high level of patience and brute tenacity that seemed to come natural to him.
After yet another recompile, the driver suddenly opened up an entirely different sort of wireless network with a bandwidth higher than his equipment could measure and seemingly with no limit. Steven sat back and held up his hands, surprised at the breadth of the results. "Wow." That was about all he could utter as he stared at the logs that documented the access to the hardware under the chips.
Steven pondered on the ramifications as he rewrote part of his code to exploit that network. The flood of data coming in was extreme and he had to slow it down and filter it to keep his computer from completely choking on it. At his fingertips was a network that surpassed any nonphysical network he'd ever experienced before. He worked the driver to explore the processing capabilities, and suddenly his powerful server configuration was completely eclipsed by the tremendous computing power he had unleashed by accessing the mysterious technology. He went with it and reduced the filters to find the balance between what his hardware could physically handle and more importantly what he himself could handle.
The new network was a complete mystery to him. It didn't use any of the wireless technology he had become so familiar with. In fact, it didn't even use radio waves at all. He was at a loss as to just what it was. The only thing he knew was that it worked and it was phenomenal. There seemed to be no upper limit to it. At one time, Steven had found advanced research on quantum entanglement during his online explorations and even wrote a report on quantum entanglement based on the limited published articles for one of his classes, and he wondered if what he was seeing was something like that. In short, it was the entanglement of two atomic particles across vast distances where what happens to one particle is mirrored by its entangled partner.
As the changes to his software compiled, Steven started mapping what he could access currently. The map grew and grew, touching nearly every computer and computing device worldwide, regardless of whether it was on or off. His mouth went dry. His own networking had already slipped underneath much of the common infrastructure out there. But it did so by taking advantage of parts of the circuitry that he was now finding out were secondary to their primary purpose. He had been exploiting properties of this secret circuitry all this time and didn't even know it. He was rewriting his driver even as it was compiling on previous revisions to explore even more of the network.
Using the entanglement network as a sort of bridge, Steven pulled up several devices that were connected, including smartphones. He listened in on ambient sounds as he accessed phones that were just sitting in purses, and followed conversations of phones actively in use. A few of those conversations made him blush and he moved on quickly. He was even able to explore countless texts, not just in the phones, but in the texting servers themselves. It seemed nothing was denied to him now, and the power of complete and unfettered access scared him. He already had extensive access and thought he was the king of the pile. But this new power of access humbled him.
The addressing was completely different from what Steven was used to and as he worked to reverse engineer it, it dawned on him that the deeper parts of the hidden circuitry didn't run binary code, but a form of ternary code. Binary was bits of information that were simple ones and zeros. Ternary code added a third bit to that and with a variable value as well. But this seemed to go beyond even that. The first and second bit were variable as well. Not just ones and zeros but the entire spectrum of numbers. He rewrote part of his driver to reside within the abstraction layer of the chip to translate the ternary code into binary code as best as it could and suddenly the technology opened up to him even more. With refining, accounting for just a fraction of the infinite levels of variations these bits could adopt, Steven was able to see and map vast data streams from on and off Earth. He had to customize his software to interpret those data streams and spent much of the afternoon programming just on that.
A section of the data streams seemed to come from much farther away. He focused on those and was able to pull a video out of the millions of streams that were flooding in. His jaw dropped as he watched the video. It was like watching through the eyes of a person. This person appeared to be walking down a very modern looking hallway and entered into a vast room that was so big he couldn't see the opposite side. Within the room were hundreds of large vehicles that looked like naval troop carriers, except they didn't look like anything he had seen before. As he leaned closer to see better, the stream suddenly ende
d. He examined the stream and it appeared to have shifted and he lost it in the jumble. He pulled up another stream and saw what appeared to be a detention cell. In it were a couple who were sitting at a table eating dinner. They looked very much like his parents in the security video, but the details were much clearer. A hand reached out and put a pitcher of liquid on the table, then the view turned and left the room before that stream also blinked out.
Steven sat there for some time, replaying the video he captured from that stream over and over. He was dumbfounded by what he saw. The first part looked like something the military would put together, but was obviously beyond anything that has been published or even hidden away on the servers he had previously visited. But the second part looked so much like his parents that he was sure he had found them. He tried for a long time to recapture that stream to get more but was unable to get it back. His parents, alive, today. It looked like they were incarcerated somewhere, but otherwise healthy.
Steven felt a tingle on the back of his neck, knowing that he had made a significant discovery. He started to get up but a wave of vertigo forced him back down. Another astonishing breakthrough with regards to his parents and totally by accident. It was starting to sink in, and he sat there for a long time, trembling, looping the video over and over again. He remembered the other videos he had stumbled upon and how he felt then. With a shock he remembered Asherah there as well, and he tried to suppress that recollection as his heart ached again. He refused to let that overshadow his thrill at finding his parents. This time it wasn't some old security tape, but a mysterious video that had all the earmarks of being live. He felt it in his gut. His parents were alive and his resolve to find them and rescue them exploded and consumed him. Someone had taken them and were holding them and he didn't care who they were. He was going to make them suffer for what they had done.
The tree house seemed to tremble with his growing fury and Steven closed his eyes and struggled to bring it under control. A drawing fell off the wall and he opened his eyes and looked at it. It was of his parents from a nightmare a couple of years ago. He picked it up and couldn't help but cry. He was so focused that he was having trouble processing the emotions. He was angry that they had been taken from him, and mourned the lost years that could never be recovered. He had lost his childhood in his obsession and they had lost his childhood altogether. He caressed the page sadly and looked at the video for a long while. He wiped his eyes and took a deep breath. It was time to do something. He wasn't sure what yet, but he had to share this with Dmitri. It started to dawn on him that Dmitri was right. These people would surely not want just anyone on their network or seeing what they were doing.
Steven suddenly felt very vulnerable. On the other networks, he could tell how visible he was and was able to evade other hackers quite easily, especially once he'd done it once or twice and learned how to distract them with decoys. It came naturally to him. There was one that seemed to be hunting him and he often found himself ducking out of the way, but it was easy to see that person coming a mile off. This network, however, was completely new to Steven. And the nature of it was exactly what his godfather hinted at, if not beyond. His legs got numb as he considered the possibility that he could have just spied on the very people who had abducted his parents. Suddenly Steven was faced with an entirely virgin network to start searching, one that transcended anything he had been on before. He had to show this to Dmitri. Perhaps this would change his mind, because he could really use his mentor's input on this. He felt so alone and overwhelmed. Those were his parents, that he was convinced of. But he still didn't know where they were and he needed all the help he could get to find them and free them.
Dmitri had just finished an early afternoon tea when someone dinged the bell on the library counter. He got up and looked out, and saw a very flustered looking Steven who looked like he had just come in from a long run.
"Steven? Are you okay?" Dmitri was a little concerned at the look on Steven's face.
"Don't be mad at me, okay?" Steven started off. Dmitri groaned inside. Usually conversations that start with that don't end well. He was sure exactly what Steven was going to say.
"Can I guess that you didn't drop the computer chip thing?" Dmitri looked at Steven over his reading glasses. What had Steven done that prompted him to run all the way back to the library?
"Oh, we are so beyond that, Dmitri. Way beyond that," Steven blurted out. He put his laptop on the counter and powered it up. "This is going to blow your socks off."
Dmitri gave him a look as he waited to see what Steven had come all this way to show him.
"Do you remember those structures we saw in the substrate?" Steven asked, referring to the image that he generated from his quantum scanning microscope. "Those are beyond anything I have seen before." Steven was impatient, waiting for the laptop to finish booting up. He looked intensely at Dmitri. "The junctions we saw were not just an interface, but a complete abstraction layer for a system that runs infinitely variable ternary software. Ternary!" Steven exclaimed. Ternary's third bit that could be any number of values vastly expanded on just how powerful software could be.
Dmitri was both terrified and fascinated. Whoever made this was far beyond anything he had worked with before. And whoever made this would surely not welcome strangers poking around their system. "Steven, you are crossing into very dangerous waters."
"You haven't seen anything yet." Steven was talking fast, hoping to get everything in before Dmitri shut him out. "The hardware underneath is all connected by a network that is totally different from anything I've seen. I'm guessing something using entanglement. Range is infinite, it appears, and instantaneous. I'm sending and receiving signals from around the world with zero delay!" The laptop finally finished booting up. Steven found the video he recorded. "And it gets even better. Watch this." He opened the movie and stepped back.
Dmitri's mouth hung open as he watched the video. "Steven. What have you done?" he whispered. His level of alarm rose when the video cut out. "Did you stop the video or did it stop on its own?"
"I kept losing the stream. I couldn't reconnect because I don't know how to identify them yet and there are so ridiculously many," Steven explained, hoping that Dmitri would see just what a breakthrough this was. "Dmitri, these might be the people who took Mom and Dad. Those are my parents there!" Steven pointed at the second part of the video. "Dmitri, I've found them!"
"Steven, you didn't lose the stream. They stopped it!" Dmitri almost yelled. "They detected you watching and cut you off." He was furious. "Don't you think as advanced as all this is that they wouldn't be able to detect someone snooping around?"
Steven was taken aback. He had never seen Dmitri so mad. He was usually a very even-keeled person. "I've not had a problem evading detection before, Dmitri." He was sure he wasn't discovered or tracked. After all, there were no black helicopters rushing in or flashing police lights.
"You are walking through a china shop waving a stick recklessly, Steven. You are so smart that you are behaving stupidly and don't even know it. These people may have been who took your parents. How do you think they found out about them?" Steven hadn't given much thought to just how his parents were discovered. Dmitri paced back and forth, very worried and very scared.
"You have got to stop this entirely. If they haven't tracked you yet, you need to lay low and stay off the net altogether," Dmitri nearly commanded him. Steven was appalled at the thought. He was so close to finding answers.
"Dmitri, you don't know what you are asking. I am so close to finding out what happened. Of finding where they are," Steven protested.
"Steven, you have no idea just how right you are. Literally. What happened to them could be what is about to happen to you. You have crossed the line." Dmitri shut down Steven's laptop and shoved it back in the bag. "Until I can be sure that they have not identified you, we are done here. I'm shutting down the wireless and everything."
"No!" Steven begged. "You don't know what yo
u are doing to me."
"Saving you. I hope. Steven, this might not even be enough. It might already be too late. You have got to lay low. Really low!" Dmitri handed the laptop to Steven and rushed him to the door. "Good Lord, Steven. What were you thinking?"
"I was thinking about my parents," Steven explained, shocked and feeling Dmitri was overreacting way too much.
"Your parents would not want you to fall into the same trouble they are in, Steven." Dmitri walked him outside, looking up and down the street. "Steven, I have been in some serious situations in my previous line of work. This is beyond that. Please trust me. Go home and stay home."
With that admonition, Dmitri shut the door, leaving Steven standing on the sidewalk wondering just what happened. This was all wrong. It didn't even remotely happen how he imagined it would happen. The sun was waning, so Steven started making his way home.
Dmitri watched Steven walk off. It broke his heart to have to be so hard on the kid, but Steven just didn't have any comprehension of the very real danger he was in. He looked at the phone, knowing what he should do, but hating the idea of having to do it. Steven's godparents needed to know. This was beyond sneaking scrap computer parts and various books to Steven. He walked over to the phone, brokenhearted. This will be seen as a betrayal by Steven, but he didn't have any other choice. Dialing the number, he waited until he heard someone pick up. "Hello? Mr. Crow? We need to talk."
Chapter 7
"Yes, sir." Laurence spoke into his cell phone succinctly. "No, I'm not at a terminal right now, but you should have my report." He had sent a diversionary report to his pseudo boss at the cyber security agency and was in the process of shutting down that operation. "Yes, that's the one."
He had just arrived at a small town in the northwest and was pulling into a parking lot near the square. It was evening and getting dark fast, and Laurence frowned at the distraction. But he still had to maintain his cover and not burn any bridges. "Yes, sir, that's correct. I'm zeroing in on a group that associates itself with the hacker group Anonymous." Laurence smiled. Those guys are easy to blame for hacks like this, even though the sophistication of the actual hacks were quite beyond any average computer geek. It was trivial to fake the evidence, however, and Laurence expected that case to be closed soon. "No, but it's just a matter of time. I have posted surveillance on several potential targets and have passed that upstream." Some of those targets were completely fictitious but would be filled with freshly cooling bodies when the time came to close this particular case for good. That detail he left to Jacob's discretion.
Crow - The Awakening Page 15