by Tony Teora
"Hum, this is interesting. If Schwartz is convinced of hackers, then he is convinced those chips are compromised, right?"
"That would make sense, sir."
"If we had control of those chips, we could Psych Ops anyone in government, couldn’t we Bud?"
"Yes, that’s the theory. "
"And take over the government, right?"
"Newt, we have taken over the government. You are the president and we control the military"
"No Bud, you don’t get it. If I let Schwartz go to Defcon-Two, he gets to send out bombers, send troops on alert. With control of Net-Chameleon he could do anything. This is not good. Jesus Christ, Bud, I put him in charge of the CIA and NSA because you said we couldn’t trust those agencies, now didn’t you Bud?"
"Well Newt, I used to be the CIA head working for your father, but the agency seems to have a mind of its own. I thought if we put in a General, someone we could trust to oversee, things would be better."
"I don’t know Bud. I kind of liked this Net hacker thing but if it’s used against us, hell there’s no way of telling what’s really going on. You know, Bud when I read the news now I know half of it is bullshit. But if someone’s in my pc, Jesus! What am I to believe? How do you know your e-mails and reports are right Murphy?"
Bud knew Bush’s son was a little over-reactive, but gladly took the Defense Secretary’s position. "Newt, listen for a second. We have actual physical meetings at the Pentagon. We have systems that check for inconsistencies in our data, for data intrusions. We have some of the best people working for us. We’re pretty safe."
"What if those chips are changed Bud?"
"That’s almost impossible, but even if it was done, we have other checks."
"Well, I want to know by Friday how we are going to stop our own hacking software from hacking us, got it Bud?"
"Yes Mr.President."
"I told you not to talk like that -- I have twenty or so agents looking for something to do," said Bush smiling.
"Well with all this shit, a bullet is sounding better and better."
"Let’s call Schwartz and get this done. Maybe we can get another hour of sleep before the day starts."
"Sounds good to me," said Bud finishing his coffee.
Chapter 13: The Weatherman
Date: February 15, 2021
Place: Earth
Location: Tokyo Japan
"The weatherman is the only person who can be wrong every single day and still have their boss tell them ‘see you tomorrow’." - unknown
Norton sat in his Michigan two-story log cabin home on the couch looking out the window. His seven year-old son Chuck sat near the fireplace resting on a bear rug fighting with his younger brother Mike over a card game. In between the fight they would ask questions about the snow. "Daddy, when is the snow coming? Daddy is the snow starting yet? I think I saw a snowflake Daddy! Daddy, how come we don’t have snow? You said it was gonna snow Daddy!!
Norton could not answer, and the snow was already three hours late. The F-Caster was usually correct, especially for short-term forecasts, those within a few hours. Screwing up the weather forecast this bad would give Amanda Fletcher the ammunition to get him. She did not like Michigan or him, and he’d already made the one mistake he’d never make again, dating her. "Never date a co-worker," his father had said. His father had said it a thousand times, but Norton never listened to his father. His father had married his own accountant, so what did he know?
Being divorced and also being a man, Norton initially had a liking for the looks of Amanda. He asked her out but problems started immediately. It was the choice of the restaurant -- he knew it. One wrong move, one bad first impression and blam! They cut your balls off. He took her out to a local restaurant and she complained to the owner about how the steak was cooked, and then that the steak wasn’t real tenderloin, and that the wine list was too short, only no-name Californian Beringer Merlot and some Australian Jacobs Creek.
Norton tried to get Amanda to relax, but she complained about everything. At the end of the meal she complained more.
"Why should we accept such service?" she said to Norton. If we complain maybe the next time they’ll get some real wine. Why not?
Norton looked humble, and drank his wine; he liked the wine. He wanted to tell Amanda that she shouldn’t complain because his parents owned the restaurant.
Norton eventually got this news in to Amanda, but was too late. Amanda had complained to the waiter, and then his mother. Norton’s Mom received an apology, but later privately said to Norton that the woman belonged in New York, and that she had to be stupider than Fred Junket who accidentally blew off one of his nuts hunting for frogs with Jimbo. How could she not know that the "Norton Steak House" might have something to do with her son, Bob Norton? Norton’s dad liked Amanda but that did not matter. His mother put the kiss of death on the relationship when Amanda complained about the homemade cheesecake that didn’t taste exactly like NY cheesecake.
Anyhow the news was not good for Bob Norton. The snow was not coming, thanks to Eddy Flint, and the relationship was not coming either, thanks to NY cheesecake.
Robert did not look forward to the meeting with Gill. Gill put a knot in Robert’s stomach that never unwound until he walked Buddy. Inside the kitchen Robert was the first to wake: 6:00 a.m.
Instinctively Robert channeled to the Michigan news. It was almost time for Bob Norton to do the weather.
"And now we move to the evening news and weather."
Out walked Norton in his weather prop, a white polar bear suit. He waited for Amanda’s cue wearing a polar bear mask that tightly covered his head.
For the first time in years the MicroIntel F-Caster software had totally miscalculated the weather. Not only did it miscalculate amount of snow; there was no snow at all, not even a dusting! Bob Norton felt embarrassed, just like during dinner at his parents’ restaurant. He walked onto the set, tried to explain, but couldn’t. The mask was getting hot inside; he needed to finish the weather quickly. This was Amanda’s chance to get back at Norton for dinner. His ratings might go down, maybe really go down. He saw that she was looking forward to it.
Once Amanda finished the evening news, she glowed. Next she would introduce the weather. She couldn’t wait.The euphoria so overwhelmed her that she didn’t consider her listeners. The words might make sense to her, but not to her viewers, and certainly not to Norton, who was in a self-enclosed daze inside the polar bear mask. The bear hat was getting unbearably hot. The faulty F-Caster report filled part of the hot haze of the consciousness that was Norton.
Amanda smiled brightly. "And now we go to the weather with Bob Norton." She turned to him. "So Bob, where was that 9 inches you promised me last night?"
Norton stirred. "Excuse me Amanda?"
Amanda stifled her laughter. "Yeah, you promised me 9 inches last night, where is it?" Norton made the polar bear suit shrug. A male newscaster sitting next to Amanda started to smile.
The Sports reporter giggled, then the crew burst out laughing.
No one could see Norton’s smile inside his mask. He smothered a laugh; it was really hot in the mask. He yelled out, "You wanted 9 inches?"
It finally dawned on Amanda. The whole studio was in an uproar.
She blushed, and shuffled her papers. "Ah forget it Norton, ah….9 inches of ah…snow."
Norton lost it. He laughed so hard that it became hard to breathe. He tried to take off the large bear mask. It wouldn’t budge. Laughter turned to panic. He started yelling frantically: "Get it off, get it off me now!"
Amanda started sweating. The TV crew looked puzzled. Norton started to run, grabbing his head. He passed out next to the news desk, relaxing peacefully next to Amanda.
The cameraman cut to a commercial.
A support staff pulled off the mask. A standby nurse applied oxygen to Norton. The managing director said to Amanda: "You two guys should really try to get along."
Norton’s ratings flew t
hrough the roof. He became the number one weatherman in America. There were reports of a movie in the making: Michigan Weatherman: The Whole Nine Inches. The bad news was good news, except for MicroIntel whose stock took a nosedive upon the F-Caster software bug.
Robert Davichi watched Norton pass out on the weather set like a fat bear shot in the ass with a tranquilizer.
Passed out because of a faulty F-Caster report.
Robert’s first big project was the F-Caster weather system. It linked up to 200 special worldwide weather satellites with over 2,500 land-based weather stations. Connected to Big Blue, and with over a hundred trillion calculations per second, the weather reports were perfect for short-term forecasts. Maybe a miscalculation of an inch here or there, but never nine inches!
The Michigan situation made no sense. Was the pass-out scene all a set-up to distract attention from the mistake? The error meant trouble. Gill would flip. Big Blue and this hacker were causing heaps of trouble, trouble they did not understand.
From upstairs Robert heard footsteps. It was Jimmy.
"Morning Dad," Jimmy went to the GE Fridge and hit a button on his wristwatch. It was a CompuWatch. "Shutting off food tracking," echoed a sound from the watch.
Robert had not seen the watch do that before. "What’s that Jimmy? What did you just do?"
"Ah, it’s nothing Dad, Mom’s driving me nuts with this calorie food tracking fridge crap. I downloaded a GE fridge code-sleeper to my watch; it shuts the GE tracking off."
Robert hated the GE tracking too, but did not know a person could stop it so easily.
"Where did you get the program? They need to hack the GE source code to do that."
"Dad, where have you been? This shit is all over the FreeNetOrg."
Jimmy grabbed the milk and some cold meatloaf. Robert looked on as Jimmy went for a box of cereal too.
"Son, what is wrong with your stomach?"
"Nothing Dad, just getting my protein and cereal at the same time, better than the bacon shit you eat."
Robert looked at his son. The synthetic meatloaf was healthier than bacon, but man should not give up good old bacon and eggs for genetic beef, protected from mad cow disease and with low cholesterol.
"I have some things to talk to you about, Jimmy."
"Sure Dad, go for it." Jimmy sat at the kitchen table and poured milk on his cereal.
"I traced our MicroIntel hacker’s e-mail correspondence to you. Are you using the MI eViro software?"
"Sure Dad, I didn’t get any virus or anything strange except for a guy named Eddy who I chat with. He checked out as a MicroIntel employee, nothing funny about that."
Robert had expected this. The guy passed through the eViro because he had set up an account as an MI employee.
"Son, do not correspond with this guy anymore. He’s not an employee, he’s a hacker. He probably caused the problem on the plane."
Jimmy looked up. He knew about the weather hacking, but not the plane. Shit, this guy Eddy is good, thought Jimmy.Jimmy could not tell his father everything. Eddy was in big trouble and he had to warn Eddy to stop.
"Wow Dad, how’d he do that?"
"Son, I don’t want to get into that but…" As Robert talked, he heard an alarm ring on Jimmy’s watch. The watch spoke. "Yuki is up, Yuki wants to play. Yuki is coming to Jimmy, Yuki---"
"Jimmy shut off the watch!" Robert looked at Jimmy who was eating his cereal.
"Jimmy…who is Yuki?"
From the stairs a barking dog came running. It ran to Jimmy, bit his pajama pants and barked. It looked just like Yuki.
"I was at the Aibo Store and Gill called looking for you. I told him about Yuki and he said we should get Shun another dog. Gill bought one too.
"Check this out Dad! Yuki, go porcupine."
The dog blew up like a porcupine and bloated out in an unreal position and playfully barked. Jimmy smiled.
"Jimmy stop that!" yelled Robert.
"Sorry Dad, I trained him to do another trick, he can fart just like…"
"Jimmy, get the dog back to normal." Robert was not amused.
Jimmy pushed his watch and spoke. "Yuki, stop the porcupine."
The dog deflated back to a normal looking shape.
An Aibo3000 was not a real dog. It acted like a real dog, played like a real dog, looked like a real dog, but did not shit like a real dog, and if you ran it over, electrical wire and gears fell out. Why anyone would want an Aibo made no sense to Robert. Robert was a bacon and eggs guy; a friend of the old fashioned Norton, a friend of the untouched woods. The job at MI had changed all that, and now his son was turning into a robot puppeteer.
Robert looked at Jimmy who did not seem very concerned. The New World was part of Jimmy. It was all he knew. Getting old, being an adult had never really hit Robert until now. The constant force of the world is change, but is all change good?
"Son, I have to go to work to meet Gill and I will be out late. I want you to send your secure code to my CompuWatch. That way we can have a secure channel via satellite."
Jimmy looked at his Dad as if Robert had shaved one of his eyebrows.
"Dad, a secure satellite link is expensive. It’s not in my allowance, plus the regular crypto shit was written by you guys -- are you telling me you don’t even trust your crypto code?"
Robert’s son was young and his intelligence had been diluted by the mixing of Robert’s genes with Susan’s genes, but sometimes Robert thought Jimmy was a lot smarter than he looked, and knew more than he told.
"No son, I don’t trust our crypto codes. I’ll pay your CompuWatch bill this month, OK?"
"Yes! Thanks Dad, now you’re talking! Can I use it for the new MI GameBoard trials? It will be a lot faster."
Robert needed to go to work and time was important. "Yes, but Jimmy please keep your CompuWatch on. I may need to talk to you if there is an emergency."
Robert gave Jimmy some instructions on some new security requirements. Robert knew he had to get Eddy before too much damage was done.
The mainframe had a peculiar breach. Jimmy knew of the breach but would not tell his Dad because he and Eddy had become friends. Jimmy would try to stop Eddy, first by reasoning, but if this didn’t work he had some ideas too. He really did not want his father in trouble and he also did not want Eddy to go to jail.
Chapter 14: BOARD MEETING
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce." Watson says, "I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life." Holmes replied: "Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!"
-- LaughLab 2002, World’s Funniest Joke
The Zok race had found their man. According to the telepathy translations, Robert Davichi was the most important guy on the planet earth. They needed him, and they especially needed Big Blue.
Arriving in the Earth’s solar system, and finding this great thinking machine created a quantum shift in the Zok spirit. They now had their Zeitgeist by the tail. Life had zipped and zapped with new ideas. For a Zok, this was like giving a cherry bomb to a twelve-year-old on the Fourth of July.
The Zoks as a species were smart and evil, or as the Oh would say, "lacked internal wiring for moral turpitude."
Early in the Zok evolution natural childbirth became impossible because of all the pollutants in the environment. Being smart, the Zoks decided to clone themselves, but the warring factions worried that one faction might discover a way to clone super warriors. The Zoks fought over cloning and subsequently bombed most facilities into Kingdom Come. This was the only way left to reproduce, but it did not faze the Zoks, who wouldn’t let reproduction get in the way of a good war.
When the Zok race was ready to die out from lack of reproduction, one smart Zok professor, ZipN
it, (IQ of 195), secretly created a device to quick-clone himself. Unknown to ZipNit, the Zok military pumped genetic material stored from thousands of warriors into his cloning tubes. They created 50,000 copies of a warrior ZipNit. This soup produced a Zok with a general IQ of 150 and a social interaction IQ of minus 5. The clones grew fast because the ZipNit system allowed rapid tissue generation, (a ten-fold increase of natural growth) and within 6 months there were 50,000 smart, cloned misfits. ZipNit designed a rapid education to bring the clones up to speed, but before the class was completed the clones organized and killed ZipNit, then wiped out the other Zoks.
Once the Zok clones had wiped out their brothers, a relative peace lasted for 240 years. Then the clones found defects in the cloning system. Sometimes of these were extreme. The Zok clones realized that the only person who could fix the system was Professor ZipNit who they’d killed. Attempts to clone ZipNit did not work well as the only DNA left from ZipNit came from his foot. A form of athlete’s fungus had changed this DNA. Another problem was that even if they could clone ZipNit, they needed a way to get his memories and knowledge. They’d turned this part of Professor ZipNit into ash when they shot off his head with a blaster over 200 years ago.
Current clones looked humanoid and stood at almost 5 feet in height. They had an exact 150 IQ, vision like an eagle, hearing like a deaf mute, and no sense of smell. A house could be burning cow shit and sewer gas next a to Zok and the Zok would continue to breath normally thinking it was a fresh spring day in the countryside. He might notice some ash in the air, but this would be the only clue that his ass was on fire.
The IQ was misleading. Although higher than on many other planets, it did not allow an Einstein-like person to be created. With Earthlings, IQs could range from 80 to over 200. The average was 100 to 120. The problem for the Zok clones was they needed to fix certain genetic problems that required more brainpower than the 150 IQ allowed. They had the history and the many years of technical knowledge, but they were stalled in development and in creative ideas.