The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  ‘What did you want?’

  Ava contemplated this for a while.

  ‘I wanted safety. I wanted to feel safe.’

  Ryan remembered back to the meeting he’d had right before being taken. How he had just finished selling out the safety of the people of Naj-Pur and of Surja just as much as the rest of them. He was suddenly deeply glad about the postponement of the vote.

  Then, Ava looked him straight in the eye. ‘If we can organize it so that no one gets hurt, I can get you out of here. I can get you out, and you can get me out in return. I want to be done here. Out of this place, out of this city. You must have the connections to make that happen. Can you get me out of here safely?’

  Ryan thought for a moment, about the risk, about how this could be a trap.

  He thought about his wife and his children.

  He nodded.

  Chapter 13

  THE NEWSCASTS UNFURLING across the screen in front of Zala showed GeniSec coming under fire from all angles. She had mortally wounded her foe, but now she had to watch as it cried and begged and slowly succumbed.

  Its own news network, NCN, seemed to contort itself schizophrenically between pretending nothing had happened and viciously discrediting anyone who said GeniSec’s name in the same sentence as ‘Soucouyant’. Meanwhile, the competitor channels gleefully took their rival apart, with half their airtime devoted to reports on GeniSec and the allegations. The news anchors on Empire News and VBN claimed that ‘Some are asking, what if GeniSec created and unleashed the virus as a way to make people get new bio-augs?’, doing their best to plant the idea in the public consciousness. Share prices dropped, protests were being organized, and interviews with teary-eyed relatives of Soucouyant victims were all over the news channels. They finally had a real black-and-white story with a villain to go after.

  There was satisfaction in having exposed GeniSec’s connection with the Soucouyant virus, Zala decided. She was glad to be hurting them, after all they’d done. But she’d needed GeniSec on her side to win back her freedom. She always knew it was a long shot and that she might fail to clear her name. But she hadn’t failed. That was the most frustrating part. She hadn’t failed to find a common element in the virus’s victims, or trace it back to its source. The source was the exact group she had needed on her side, needed to exonerate her. Every battle had been a rousing success, but the war was doomed.

  What was to come next was another matter altogether. She couldn’t stay in this city. She’d aided terrorists and, in doing so, had pissed off the most powerful force in New Cairo. Her name could plausibly get out, or at least Selina Mullur’s, and they’d be able to trace her back to this building, back to Polina. At the same time, she couldn’t leave. Her assumed identity had the Naj-Pur address, so she couldn’t get out using that. On top of this, security fears following the kidnapping of Councillor Granier had resulted in all emigrating people’s profiles being checked for consistency with older backups. With luck, they were backups from after she stole Selina Mullur’s identity, so Zala wouldn’t be exposed during any random checks, but it was far too late to try the same thing with anyone else. Every precaution was being taken by the authorities to ensure that the NCLC didn’t leave the city with Granier.

  Her musings were interrupted by the news. A sombre-looking anchor appeared on screen. ‘Now, breaking news, Empire has just received a video from the NCLC, showing Councillor Granier, injured but alive, along with their demands for the GeniSec Corporation. This arrives less than a day after they exposed GeniSec’s connection to the Soucouyant virus. We warn you, while we have redacted the most disturbing elements of this video, we advise young children or those of a nervous disposition to leave the room.’

  The tape played.

  Zala’s first reaction was one of deep, resonant nausea. Not just because she had worked with these people, but because she was directly responsible for the horrific acts unfolding on-screen. The way the Councillor had trembled as he recovered from one of the blows, the stammer in his voice, the barely audible sizzle when the knife went in that, once heard, could not be forgotten. His wild, desperate stares, searching for a faint trace of compassion and finding none.

  She’d thought she wanted blood. She’d thought she wanted petty, vindictive, personal revenge, and so she’d made all this happen.

  Her second reaction, emerging from somewhere beneath her disgust, was the realization that there was information that was far more valuable than where the Soucouyant virus originated.

  The identity of the person who made it.

  A thrill ran through her, evaporating the nausea in an instant.

  If it was someone in GeniSec – or better, if there was proof that it was created at the command of someone higher up the corporate ladder – the Council would jump at the opportunity to wash their hands of the increasingly toxic High Councillor Tau Granier. If it wasn’t someone in GeniSec, their exoneration was critical to them. An opportunity to clear their name and redeem themselves could yield any number of possible rewards. She owed that to a man she’d just caused to be tortured.

  Zala opened the simulated operating system in her portable terminal and scanned through the cache of incriminating data she’d given the NCLC. The directory to which she’d matched the final EIP address claimed that it was at GeniSec Development Falkur. She checked where this was on a map of the city.

  In the middle of Falkur, a middle-class district often jokingly called ‘Diet Alexandria’ for its status as distant second-best to the more upmarket district, was a familiar cluster of buildings. The last time she had been aware of it, GeniSec Development Falkur had gone by a different name. It had been the LC Headquarters, the main site of the Logic Collective, a successful software development collective with whom she had interned just a few months before she had to flee. She’d loved it. Her father had offered to get her a position at his GeniSec development lab, but she had instead opted to go for the hip, independent development company over the corporate one. Whenever she thought of what her exile and fugitive status had cost her, she imagined herself working there.

  So much for that.

  She’d had two of the best weeks of her life there. She knew the location, she knew the opening and closing times, and she had at least a vague idea of the physical security. Unfortunately, they also knew her and presumably, if they remembered her at all, they’d remember that apparently she’d turned out to be a murderer. Maybe some of them still told the story now.

  Zala got to work, poring over maps, blueprints and all the public information she could find. Going by a testimonial their director had left on a security firm’s website, they’d just recently had an upgrade, revolving around an Elkab TS803 entrance system. Further snooping told her that this, essentially, was a very secure door and doorframe. Thick steel ‘bones’ anchored the doorframe into the wall and ground, and the door was reportedly almost impenetrable. The only way to gain access was to put in an individually assigned twelve-character passcode. This kept out the incognito invaders that the barbed wire and tyre spikes hadn’t blocked.

  And then she noticed a detail that could potentially help her.

  She checked the clock. It was 9:07 a.m. This was achievable if she got to work immediately.

  Zala stood next to the buzzer, outside the gate of GeniSec Development Falkur. She was dressed as a generic professional, in a white shirt and black skirt that could very well have been the dress code for some nondescript security firm. She pressed the button on the gate to ring reception and get buzzed in. At the very least, she hoped the person on the other end of the security cameras trusted her authenticity.

  The Falkur district had, as its main characteristic, the safe predictability of an area built to be as marketable to the average family as possible. Here, the professionals and white-collar workers of New Cairo retired from living in the Downtown area and enjoyed a less frenetic pace, good schools and attractive, spacious homes. Falkur was the aspiration point for the everyday person, th
e worthy goal within reasonable reach. It was cosy middle-class normality. The Alexandria district was for the lucky few and Falkur was for the hard-working many, or so the narrative went.

  This was, for the most part, a fiction. What happened more often was that the children of Falkur families moved to Downtown, and then right back to Falkur once they’d grown older and wearied of the city life. The denizens of Surja and Naj-Pur rarely trickled in. Landlords were apprehensive of letting to people who came from poorer areas, for whom up-front instalments on rent had a tendency to accrue extra charges all of a sudden. And as for their buying property, discriminatory practices were easy to enforce if the potential buyers didn’t have extra capital. The prevailing attitude in the poorer districts, where existence was often hand-to-mouth, was that excess money had an expiry date. Going from ‘If I don’t spend it soon, it’ll be gone anyway’ to ‘I’ve got enough money coming in, I can afford to accrue savings’ was a difficult transition. Consequently, Falkur had become a solipsistic suburban sanctum for those who mistakenly assumed that the median income was also the mode.

  It was also home to an array of technology firms, especially programming laboratories. Many such institutions had begun life in back rooms of homes, where a lone founder or two had coded something that had made them money, and had expanded to occupy actual commercial premises. Some, such as the Logic Collective, had set up full-scale offices on the site of what had once been their houses. The newly christened GeniSec Development Falkur presented the odd spectacle of a large, modern, three-floor office building surrounded by residential property, its sizeable gates preventing any street-level snooping. It was at these gates that Zala stood.

  The buzzer clicked, and a tinny staccato voice grated through the speaker. ‘State your business.’

  ‘Hi, who am I talking to?’ she said.

  ‘Dima Dua from reception.’

  Oh, thank god, the receptionist. The one person in the building who doesn’t necessarily know about computers. I won’t even have to come up with a good lie.

  ‘Hi, Dima, my name is Narges Shadiya, I’m from Elkab Security. I’m here to perform a firmware update on the door?’

  The brittle tone from the speaker took on an apologetic lilt. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t let you into the building myself. Do you have a code to get in?’

  ‘I don’t need to,’ said Zala, ‘the door has limited connection ports on the outside for this exact reason. Just buzz me through the gate and I can get it done.’

  The gate opened to a shallow driveway full of cars. The heavy alloy door on the front of the building was an incongruous new addition. Zala took a new, cheap portable terminal out of her pocket and installed a small memory chip with her clandestine operating system on it. She plugged it into the small concealed ports in the door and activated a key-logger. Pressing a few keys on the door’s input pad, she watched as they also came up on the key-logger. Zala then loaded a fake timed progress bar with an eight-hour window, giving the key-logger time to gather results. On the outside of the terminal she placed a big sticker with the Elkab logo on it and large text saying ‘FIRMWARE UPDATING, DO NOT TAMPER’. In smaller font below, it read. ‘Elkab Security takes no responsibility for safety or security issues caused by customer interference with updating process.’ Finally, she turned on the failsafe. This program locked the terminal, leaving only the current programs running, and would systematically destroy every piece of data on the terminal if the correct passcode was not entered.

  Zala tucked the terminal round the side of the step leading up to the door and walked back out of the gate. She stopped, rang the bell again and said, ‘Dima, it’s Narges here. I’ve left the terminal plugged into the gate’s door. It’s a backup terminal and it’s pretty slow, so if you can just tell anyone who asks to leave it there and continue on as normal, that would be great. I’ll come pick it up later.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll let them know.’

  Zala crossed the road to a café on the other side. She ordered a hot chocolate and sat by the window, watching the gates. From where she was sitting, she could just about make out where the terminal was tucked away. She unstrapped the portable terminal from her wrist and placed it on the table, where it projected its screen like a home terminal, and she set to work gathering information. She looked up message addresses on business networking sites, cross-referencing them with others on leaked security databases. Slowly but surely, she built up a list of possible profile details, and, most importantly, possible passwords.

  Every so often she looked up and checked across the street. The cables still led off around the side of the step. Technical computer talent made up only a small part of the cybercriminal’s skill set and only really came into its own at high levels. Often, the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain was the people who already had access and this made aptitude with manipulation important. For instance, while the fact this was an IT company evened the odds somewhat, most people, upon seeing a computer with a large ominous sticker on the front that looked like it was supposed to be there, would leave that computer alone.

  So Zala spent hours sitting in the café, searching for information and killing time. Every so often she ordered some food or drink, which seemed to satisfy the woman behind the counter. Suchan – the NCLC’s Suman Chaudhri – had taken to emailing her with IT questions and ranting about some woman who had taken his job as NCLC mission coordinator and was showing him up. She gave curt, functional answers which she hoped would encourage similar brevity in return.

  Eventually it grew dark, and Zala saw people beginning to leave the GeniSec Development Falkur building. She looked down at her terminal’s clock and was surprised to see that it was almost ten o’clock. The eight hours she had set her terminal for was over, and only now were they going home. To be leaving so late, they must have been coming up to a deadline. She closed her portable terminal, put it back on her wrist, and went into the café bathroom. She changed into her dark hooded top and trousers, and wrapped a black scarf around her neck, stuffing the discarded clothes into her backpack. She left the café. The last few developers were disappearing down the road. Zala walked up to the exterior gate and prised the front cover from the passcode box she had used earlier in the day. She plugged in her portable terminal and ran a brute-force code-breaking program. The code here was simple: four digits or a pass-card. The program gave up the four digits almost immediately, and the gate opened. She disconnected the portable terminal and replaced the front cover. Now she just had the massive Elkab door to get past.

  The terminal she had left down the side of the steps was still powering along. She typed in the code to disable the failsafe and closed off the key-logger. It had logged 559 keystrokes; all were in sets of twelve random figures and a click of ‘enter’. She picked one at random and entered it into the keypad on the door with a gloved hand. The door swung open. Zala grinned to herself.

  She made her way towards the nearest set of stairs and began to climb. The person she’d managed to find the most information for was the CEO of the company, a Mrs Kishori Ueno, and if nothing had changed in the intervening eight years since Zala’s internship, the CEO’s office was on the first floor. At the top of the set of stairs, Zala put in her contact lenses and turned on the low-light option.

  The large open room that made up this floor’s main workspace was divided into rows of cubicles. Around the sides of the room were executive offices, the largest of which was Mrs Ueno’s. There was a numerical lock on the door but another quick application of the brute-force code cracker had it open almost immediately. The room itself was lavishly furnished and stylishly decorated, complete with an adjacent bedroom which, thankfully, appeared unoccupied. A terminal sat on a large glass desk which looked out of a floor-to-ceiling window over an adjacent park. She switched the terminal on, also opening up her own.

  To Zala’s surprise, the computer took a very long time to load. She hoped for this company’s sake that Mrs Ueno was very good at the bus
iness end of its operations because clearly IT wasn’t a priority with her. Eventually a login box popped onto the screen, requesting a password. Zala ran through the list she’d gathered earlier, entering them one by one. The fifth one down prompted a happy trill of music and the desktop opened up. It revealed connections to several different networks. The first was the local area network, which gave her administrator-level access to just about every file on every computer in the building. Supporting this were connections to the files on the main storage servers. She went down the EIP addresses of the computer terminals in the network, comparing them with the one at which the gssmr.auge file’s trail stopped, in the hope that she could locate the specific terminal on which it had been created.

  She found it.

  Opening up the user details, she realized that the terminal wasn’t assigned to a programmer; it belonged to someone who worked in accounting, a Hiroshi Amon. She brought up his record in the registry on the main server. He had no programming qualifications or background that indicated he would be capable of creating such a complex, skill-intensive program.

  Zala’s trace of the gssmr file had dated the first transfer at six weeks and four days ago. She opened up the directory’s list of assigned passcodes for the main door downstairs and found Hiroshi Amon’s. There were hundreds of input codes that day registered on the door’s entry log to get into the building – and Hiroshi Amon’s wasn’t among them. In fact, she could see he’d left the day before and returned four days later.