Disc

by Laurence E. Dahners

  Another man had come in the door with Vaz. Tiona thought he was probably her dad’s keeper like Jiao was her keeper. He and Jiao were talking to one another, presumably conferring about them.

  Still holding on to her father, Tiona saw the new man step away from Jiao and stalk toward them.

  Sounding angry, he said, “Hey! What going on? You American perverts having father-daughter sex?”

  Vaz jerked away from Tiona and at first she thought he might be embarrassed to have been holding her, but then she saw his face, incandescent with rage. He pivoted and slammed his fist into the approaching man’s stomach, folding the guy like a broken doll. As the man collapsed to the floor like an empty sack, Vaz stood over him with fists that slowly unclenched and relaxed down to his sides. The red anger left his face to be replaced by a peacefully contented look. Gazing down at the man, Vaz simply said, “No.”

  Jiao had danced back when Vaz attacked. He began shouting frantically at his AI. A siren sounded and a red light started flashing over the door. The door slammed open and a troop of six men came running in with batons.

  At first Tiona feared they might beat her father, but instead they chivvied him away with the ends of the batons. She got the impression that the batons were something like cattle prods. When they stuck Vaz with the batons he grimaced and moved away. However, he moved in his typically deliberate fashion, rather than cringing or jerking back like she would have expected.

  Evidently the Koreans found his responses unusual as well. One of them lifted his own leg and poked it with his prod, then howled and hopped away grasping his calf. From this reaction, Tiona decided that the prod must be fully functional, but that her father’s reaction to it was atypical.

  Jiao came over, grasped Tiona’s elbow and tugged her away from the confrontation, saying, “Your father, he mus’ be better behaved.”

  With Vaz braced up against the wall and four of the guards standing around him with their prods, one of the guards knelt to look at her father’s keeper. Tiona looked at the man too. She’d been thinking he’d had the wind knocked out of him and would soon be getting back to his feet. However, he remained curled on his side, grasping his own stomach and looking pale. He gasped a few words to the guard in Korean, then the guard began speaking on his AI.

  About ten minutes later, more men came in through the door carrying a stretcher. They loaded up the “keeper” and took him away. A few minutes later, the six guards who’d entered appeared to be getting ready to leave when Jiao began shouting at them in Korean. Tiona didn’t know what he said, but he kept glancing at Vaz.

  The guards stayed in the room rather than leaving and Tiona got the impression they were going to be guarded from inside the room from then on.

  Jiao sidled over to Tiona. With a nervous glance at Vaz, he said, “What is deal with your father?”

  Wanting to make sure that both she and her father held value to the North Koreans, Tiona said, “He knows some parts of how to build the thrusters and I know others.”

  “No, I mean, why he go crazy and try kill Chin?”

  “Because, Chin accused him of incest.”

  “Incest?”

  Tiona found herself explaining the word to Jiao. Jiao said, “That bad thing to say, but not so bad he should hit Chin.”

  Tiona gave Jiao a look of disdain, “My father and I never did anything to you people, yet you’ve kidnapped us!”

  Jiao gave a little shrug. Tiona wasn’t sure whether he was acknowledging her point or downplaying the seriousness of kidnapping.

  After a little time for everything to calm down, Jiao started asking Tiona again for a list of equipment she and Vaz would need to build a flying car. It continued to surprise her how focused he was on the application which would make a car fly rather than any of the other uses for thrusters.

  Until then, Tiona had been answering noncommittally and somewhat nebulously in an effort to delay any transfer of the technology. Vaz suddenly spoke, “I can give you a list.”

  Tiona and Jiao both turned to stare at him, then Jiao stepped forward quickly and eagerly. He stopped suddenly before he got very close, evidently thinking of Chin and deciding he didn’t want to be within arm’s reach. “Yes please, Mr. Gettnor! Give me list.”

  Vaz looked at him for a moment, then began speaking, giving him the name and model number of a very modern, very high end computer system which he wanted already loaded with the software for an extremely sophisticated AI. He followed this immediately with the name, brand, and model number of a pH meter and of a laboratory scale, then he began listing glassware.”

  “Wait! Wait!” Jiao said, “Slower, I mus’ write down! Is first item computer?”

  “Yes,” was all Vaz said.

  “We get you computer, but not specific model. We get you what we have.”

  Vaz’s expression didn’t change. He said, “If you want a paper airplane, you can just get me a sheet of paper. If you want a flying car, you’ll have to get me what I need to build it. We must have high-end computers loaded with sophisticated AIs that are connected to the internet at a very high speed and have excellent graphic HUDs.” He proceeded to tell Jiao that if he couldn’t get that particular computer he could get a competitor’s product. He gave another name and model number.

  Jiao had been staring at him. He exclaimed, “No! Absolutely no internet connection!”

  “No, absolutely no flying car then,” Vaz replied calmly. “I have to connect to the computer in my laboratory back in Raleigh to download the specifications for the thruster discs, power converters, and batteries.” He tilted his head as he looked at Jiao, “Unless, you’re willing to wait 20 to 30 years for us to repeat all the experiments necessary to develop these technologies in the first place?”

  “But you can’t connect to the internet! You would call for…”

  “I would call for what? Rescue? I thought you people said that I would like it so much here that I wouldn’t want to go back home? I thought you told me that once I’d spent enough time here to understand how good things are in your country you would set me free to leave if I wanted? If those things are true, surely you don’t care if I call home, do you?”

  Tiona stared at her father. He rarely strung together so many sentences or tried to argue to make a point. Even more astonishing, when Jiao glanced away, Vaz winked at Tiona.

  Jiao said, “No internet. You might cause trouble in many ways.”

  Vaz shrugged, “You can bring in a computer expert to watch me any time that I’m connected to the internet. He can make sure that I don’t do anything to cause trouble. Or… you can tell your bosses that I can’t build a flying car for them.”

  Jiao stared at him for a long minute, then said, “Give me rest of you list and I write down. After that, I talk to boss about computer.”

  Tiona listened in growing amazement as her father listed the name, brand, and model number of well over 100 pieces of scientific equipment. Many of them were items of equipment that Tiona felt fairly certain were in her dad’s lab back home in the basement. Some were equipment that she was fairly certain he didn’t have. Jiao kept stopping him to check that he’d written down numbers correctly and to opine that it might be difficult to get so much equipment. Vaz continued adamantly warning Jiao that without the equipment he wanted, he couldn’t build a flying car.

  Finally, Vaz finished his list by saying, “That’s all I can remember. Once I get the internet connection, I’ll look up the rest of the stuff we need and add it to your list.”

  When Jiao left, he gave Tiona the distinct impression of a beaten dog with its tail between its legs.

  ***

  Dante sat down across from Nolan and studied his face. He looked drawn and had puffy eyes. Dante’d been thinking of Nolan as Tiona’s somewhat serious boyfriend who might or might not last the next few months. He supposed that might still be, but Nolan looked really broken up about her kidnapping. Nolan said, “Have you heard anything new?”

  Dante s
hook his head sadly, “General Cooper assures us that they’re doing everything they can to find her and my dad. The government apparently considers them to be a ‘national resource,’ so they’ve got that going for them. The State Department is trying to open negotiations with Pyongyang, but you’re probably aware that our two governments don’t get along, so just getting the North Koreans to talk about it is apparently a real problem. So far, of course, they claim they ‘don’t even know who the Gettnors are.’ Even if we got the North Koreans to acknowledge their presence, there’s a real question whether we could do anything to get them free without an invasion.”

  Nolan’s shoulders drooped, “Yeah, I was wondering how we could apply leverage, but apparently the US has already arranged severe trade embargoes through the international community. There’s hardly anything more we could threaten to do to them that way.” Sounding really depressed, Nolan said, “And I suppose that invading them to rescue two scientists is a little bit too much to expect.”

  “Yeah, that’s about what Cooper said. He did talk about a possible ‘covert extraction,’ whatever that means.”

  Nolan said nothing for several minutes, so Dante decided he needed to broach the subject he’d set up the meeting for. “Nolan, I hate to bring this up, but there’s a lot of people counting on the thruster technology. I’m supposed to be CEO of a company founded just to exploit the thrusters and I have a lot of employees depending on the attack now. Unfortunately, it’s become more and more obvious to me that we might not know how to build thrusters without my sister and father. I’ve got to ask, do you think you could figure out how to build them?”

  Nolan seemed to pull himself back from far away. After a few moments, he said, “Well, I certainly know how to make the graphene, though I really don’t know how Tiona was doping it. I certainly don’t know any of the characteristics of the current that produced the effect. I know that Tiona came across that current by accident and that it isn’t anything that anyone would normally think to apply, so that might be a real problem.” He brightened a little, “But, I’m sure I could do it with access to her notes.” Then Nolan frowned, “But maybe we shouldn’t? If we figure out how to make thrusters, our government wouldn’t have much impetus to rescue them from North Korea.”

  “Yeah,” Dante sighed, “I worry about the same thing. But if we can never get them back, I still feel some responsibility to the people I have working for me. Tiona’s and my dad’s notes are both encrypted on their computers with a system my dad came up with himself. I’ve tried to figure it out myself with no luck and even bought a high-end commercial decryption program, which failed. The general has the NSA going over it at present and they’ve assured him that they’ll crack it, probably later today, but at worst before Friday.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure I can build a thruster if I have their notes, but I’ll still be worried about whether it’s the right thing to do.”

  ***

  Landon glanced around at the rest of the people Dante had hired for GSI, wondering how they were taking this. Dante had just told them that the company didn’t really know how to build thrusters now that his sister and father had been kidnapped. There were several possibilities that might let GSI go forward. One was, of course, that the Gettnors would be released by or rescued from North Korea. A second possibility was that Nolan Marlowe would be able to figure it out once the NSA had decrypted Tiona’s notes. A third possibility would be that Marlowe could figure it out even without her notes, especially if GSI hired some more researchers to help him. Unfortunately, they probably wouldn’t have a lot better chance than UNC did at figuring it out, and if UNC beat them to the punch…

  Looking pretty down, Dante wound up his little talk by saying, “So, GSI will be happy to keep you on salary indefinitely while we look to find a way to go forward, hopefully through their return from North Korea. Meantime, we’ll be working to replicate the thrusters by other methods on the sad chance that we never get them free. But, believing that honesty is always the best choice, I wanted to let you know what the situation was. We won’t hold it against you if you decide to look for other positions.”

  Rachel said, “I don’t know about the rest of these lunkheads, but I’ve never had so much fun as I have working here at GSI. Admittedly, this is a huge setback, but I’m certainly going to stick around until I’m positive we can’t make it work.”

  “I don’t know,” Gary said, “I’ll hang on a little while. At least until NSA decrypts those files and we figure out whether Marlowe is going to make any headway, but,” he shrugged, “I’ve got to think of my wife and kids.”

  Your wife and kids could live just fine on what GSI’s paying you, Landon thought. Out loud, he said, “I feel like Rachel. I’m staying until we’re absolutely sure we can’t do it.”

  ***

  Cooper got a call from his contact at the NSA, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  With a sinking sensation, Cooper said, “You’re not going to tell me you can’t decrypt them, are you?”

  “I’m afraid it’s worse than that. The data files on those two computers are essentially gibberish. There’s no pattern detectable and they’re very small—too small to contain the kind of information you’re looking for. Essentially there’s nothing there to decrypt. Evidently someone got to the files before we did, presumably the Koreans during the kidnapping episode. They probably copied the data before overwriting the data in the files with random garbage.”

  “I thought you guys could even extract data which had been deleted?!”

  “Yeah, that’s because when you delete a file, you’re only marking it so that the computer can overwrite it the next time it needs to store data. If it hasn’t actually been overwritten before we get to it, we can unmark it and read it. In this case, someone overwrote every byte of data with random gibberish.”

  “If they only overwrote some small files with gibberish, maybe the actual data is somewhere else?”

  “Yeah, we thought of that and even analyzed the empty memory, it’s also random garbage.”

  ***

  Lisanne sat staring out the kitchen window. For days now she’d been gripped by despair. Once again she tried to focus her mind on something proactive. The saucer was parked in Johnsons’ garage, she reminded herself. She could be in Korea in an hour or so. She’d gone so far as to climb into it late one night and confirmed that its AI would respond to her commands and that it could plot itself a course to Pyongyang.

  She tried to tell herself that somehow that saucer was the key to rescuing her husband and daughter.

  She just needed to figure out how.

  The most important “how” related to finding Vaz and Tiona once she arrived in North Korea. Anytime she had contact with people from the government, she asked them if they’d figured out where her loved ones were being held. Either they didn’t know or they wouldn’t tell her.

  Eventually, her mind circled back to a painful cycle where she berated herself for continuing to the basement while her family was being attacked. Yes, Vaz had told her to go there. Yes, he was the one who’d successfully defended the family last time. Yes, he was the fighter… but she should have stayed and at least tried to defend her family. She felt tremendous shame that she’d fled to the basement while her loved ones were in danger.

  Lisanne’s AI chimed, “A text from your husband has appeared in my files.”

  Heart in her throat, Lisanne turned to the nearest screen saying, “Put it up!”

  The message was typical Vaz. No greeting, no statement of love, all it said was, “Please turn on the computer in my lab.”

  “Oh Vaz!” she said getting up and starting toward the stairs, “Are you and Tiona okay?”

  There was no reply, so Lisanne said, “Send that as a text message also. And ask him if he and Tiona are being treated well?” She practically ran down the stairs.

  Her computer said, “I’m sorry, the message from him just appeared in my files without apparently
coming through any messaging program. I cannot reply.”

  When they’d been dating, years ago, Vaz had often made messages pop up on her screens without sending them through any messaging programs. She’d never been able to figure out how he did it. “Just append the reply to the end of his message. He’ll extract it back out of the file.”

  Vaz still hadn’t responded by the time she’d powered up the basement computer that his AI resided in. She said, “Text him that I’ve powered the computer up, but that I don’t think it’ll do any good because someone deleted all of his data.”

  Lisanne sat waiting, hoping for some reply, but nothing ever came. Eventually, she said, “Tell him I love him too.” She slowly made her way upstairs and cried herself to sleep. She’d tell General Cooper about the bizarre message in the morning. She had a feeling that if she told him now, an NSA team would come over in the middle of the night and camp out to watch every last thing that happened on the lab computer. Or, worse, they might power it off to keep the North Koreans from forcing Vaz to extract data from it.

  ***

  Khang sat watching suspiciously while Gettnor worked at his computer. Khang was one of North Korea’s premier hackers and was pissed that he’d been assigned to come to this facility twice a day just to babysit this American.

  It seemed his second most important task was to connect the fiber optic cable at a physical switch outside the building. Only after he’d arrived and was sitting beside Gettnor was Gettnor to be allowed to connect to the internet. Khang was to watch everything Gettnor did on the computer during the time it was connected to the fiber. The most important responsibility he had was to be sure that Gettnor didn’t use the computer’s internet connection to contact anyone in America. Khang had been working as a hacker for his government for 10 years now and felt fairly certain that this man couldn’t slip anything past him, however, he’d been warned that the man was a genius.