The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “Do I get some kind of desk? A computer? A place to work?”

  He looked up, as if considering my request. “There’s a table in the server room, and a couple shelves of PCs in the back. Get one set up for yourself.”

  After the first computer failed to boot and the second didn’t seem to work at all, I realized I was working from his junk pile of problem computers. I took the network card from one that didn’t work at all and tried it in a computer that wouldn’t connect to the network. Success! Then, I started looking through the email printouts – automated notices of printers with low toner levels.

  “What now?” Mr. Humphreys did not deign to look at me.

  “Where do I find the toner cartridges I’ll need to replace these?”

  Humphreys sighed deeply in frustration at being saddled with an intern who couldn’t figure things like this out on his own. “There’s a storage cabinet in the server room. Look there. The empty cartridges go in the bin in the server room to be recycled.”

  “Thanks.” I found the stash of toner cartridges. There was a plastic cart in the server room, so I loaded up the five cartridges, consulted my building map, and headed out on my rounds.

  My first stop was in one of the temporary, modular buildings that had taken over the parking lot next to the main building. I doubted I had solved the traveling salesman problem and identified the optimal route between my destinations, but since I was trying to understand the layout of the place, I didn’t mind.

  I poked my head in the door. “Hello?”

  A young woman with her hair tied back in a long ponytail popped up from behind some clutter. She reminded me of one of the meerkats at the Nashville zoo scouting for predators. “May I help you?”

  “I understand your printer needs a new toner cartridge?”

  “It does?” she asked.

  “Automatic notice,” I explained, holding up the printed email notification the printer had sent.

  “Oh. Over there. She pointed behind another stack of boxes to where a printer sat in the corner.

  I wheeled my cart in, wondering how anyone could accomplish anything in a lab full of clutter. The only work station was her desk, itself piled with books and papers. “So, what do you do here, if I may ask?”

  “This is the Space Elevator Lab,” she explained proudly.

  That didn’t make sense to me. “Elevators for space stations?”

  “No,” her eyes lit up at the prospect of explaining her work to someone new, “it’s an elevator that goes all the way from the ground up to a counterweight space station in geosynchronous orbit. It’s the easiest and most cost effective way to lift people and cargo into space. By the time you’re in geosynchronous orbit, you’re more than halfway to most anywhere in the solar system!”

  “That’d take a heck of an elevator cable,” I noted.

  “Exactly!” She beamed at me. “I have the solution. See everyone else is working on a cable to go all the way to geosynchronous orbit. There’s nothing known that can handle the strain of supporting its own weight over that distance, let alone carry any cargo.”

  “You invented a stronger cable?” I thought about some of the work I’d been reading about. “Carbon nanofibers, or something like that?”

  She nodded. “Exotic materials are a part of the solution,” she confirmed, “but the real answer is to use a shorter cable.”

  “How can you use a shorter cable? Geosynchronous orbit is a fixed distance, isn’t it?”

  “The cable only has to be long enough to accelerate the propulser to escape velocity.” She smiled with delight at sharing her clever idea. “See, everyone is trying to use beamed power solutions with lasers or microwaves. It’s not terribly efficient. My idea uses the cable itself to guide RF power from the ground to the propulser.”

  I hadn’t heard of a ‘propulser’ before, but it was clearly some kind of a rocket.

  “There’s a concept called a ‘G-Line’ after Goubau, the guy who discovered it. You can send RF power up along a single cable with the right properties. Beam power up to the propulser, accelerate at about 10 gees, and you can hit escape velocity in a few hundred kilometers instead of needing thousands of kilometers of cable.”

  “So, the rocket, or ‘propulser’ has a big spool of this cable that it…”

  “No!” she interrupted me. “The cable is all on the ground. No sense making the rocket carry the dead weight until it has to.”

  I could see how that did make sense.

  “You beam the power up to the rocket. See, exhaust velocity is proportional to the square root of the temperature. There’s only so hot you can get it with chemical fuels. There’s no particular limit with the microwave thermal propulsion concept. For example, using hydrogen, you can get a specific impulse of 700–900 seconds and a thrust/weight ratio of 50-150.”

  That may have meant something to her, but I was no rocket scientist. I had her print a test sheet to confirm her printer was good, and I needed to be on my way to my next stop. “So, how do you work on this stuff here in this lab?” I gestured toward all the clutter.

  “I’m packing up and moving out to the Nevada Test Lab!” She was clearly excited about the possibility.

  Another one? The Civic Circle’s Technology Containment Team had a very specific MO. If they caught researchers moving into dangerous areas, they gently dissuaded them or gave them excellent opportunities to discontinue problematic work – time to drop what you’re doing and accept this fellowship to work in an exotic locale doing something completely different! Of course, scientists and engineers being who they are, often become attached to their ideas and want to see them through no matter what the costs. Then the Civic Circle arranges for an appointment to their Nevada Test Lab, so the work can be kept bottled up.

  Of course, if you got too far along paths they didn’t want followed before they noticed you, they terminated your project – and you, and your collaborators – with extreme prejudice. That’s what happened to my parents. Maybe I could dissuade her.

  “Are you sure you want to go out to Nevada?”

  “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” she replied enthusiastically.

  “Good luck with that!” I offered as I wheeled my cart out of the room and into the hall. Maybe I could warn her? She didn’t seem the least bit troubled by the prospect – she seemed genuinely excited about the opportunity to work in the Civic Circle’s technical gulag. It troubled me, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do.

  At my second stop, I fumbled with the printer until I figured out how to remove the toner cartridge.

  “It doesn’t need to be replaced,” the man sitting in the office across the hall said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s printing fine,” he explained. “It isn’t even low yet.”

  I double checked the email printout. “I got a report that this printer needed a new cartridge.” I handed it to the man. “Am I at the right printer?”

  He looked at my printout. “Yeah, you got the right place, but you can’t trust those printers. A couple weeks after a new toner cartridge goes in, they start complaining about low toner, but they’ll go months without a problem. Even then, you can usually shake the cartridge and put it back and get another few days out of it.”

  “Thanks.” It hadn’t occurred to me that the printer might be biased toward false positives in reporting low toner status. I continued my rounds, checking all the printers on my “low toner” to do list. Sure enough they printed a test sheet just fine. Even the one cartridge I’d already removed worked perfectly when I popped it into a printer to check. I decided not to open any more new toner cartridges to replace ones that still seemed to be fine. I needed to ask Mr. Humphreys whether he wanted me to really replace toner cartridges that were still working.

  When I got to his office, Mr. Humphreys was gone – his door closed and locked. I still had another hour on the clock, so I unlocked the server room, and I settled in. That took all of five minutes.
I went down the hall and helped myself to some office supplies – a pad of paper, a couple of pens, a pad of Post-It notes and my very own red Swingline stapler. Fifty minutes to go.

  I remotely logged on to all the printers that reported low toner, and I made a note of their page counts. I wanted to see how many more pages they’d print before they really needed new toner. Forty-five minutes left.

  I logged on to the servers and started poking around, trying to figure out what they were all doing. Not much, it turned out. Three racks of servers, about twenty-five servers in all. I amused myself by logging the available disk space and CPU usage. One was being used as a file server and had duplicate hard drives running a backup routine. It had quite a few open shares and the drives were a bit over half full. Another server had Quickbooks and finance data and about 25% usage on the drive space. The rest? They were mostly idle.

  I found only one server chewing up any significant amount of CPU time. It was running a program called “VirtualDan.exe.” There was a compiler on the server, and the source code was there as well. I started taking a look and found script after script concatenated together. Individually, each one was pretty simple. One script checked for activity on Mr. Humphreys’ PC. If there wasn’t any by 9:00 am, it first checked his vacation and holiday schedule, then sent out an email to his boss, “Running late this morning,” along with a randomly selected reason drawn from a large list of options. If his computer was active after 5:15pm, it sent a text “Finishing up something important at the office, home soon,” to a particular phone number. Activity after 6pm triggered a “Taking longer than I thought,” update to the same message.

  One script scanned incoming email for keywords like “problem,” “trouble,” “fix,” “broken,” and a host of others, waited five to ten minutes, and then sent out a randomly selected message from a list including, “I’ll take a look,” “I’m on it,” “I’ll look into it,” and a bunch more.

  Another script automatically performed a database backup restore whenever another email address sent a help desk request. Then, this script sent a randomly selected reply from another list: “No problem, fixed it,” “Try it now,” or “Let me know if that fixed it for you.”

  Continuing down the list, it was clear Mr. Humphreys had completely automated his job. Anytime he did anything for anyone, he wrote a little script that would do the process automatically the next time. Forgot your password? Virtual Dan would email you a reset link with a “personal” note admonishing you to be more careful in the future. Printer not working? Virtual Dan assured you he’d take care of it tomorrow, unless it was Friday, in which case he’d work on it Monday. The script even checked holiday and vacation schedules and used appropriate versions of the messages.

  By that point, I’d put in my eight hours, and there wasn’t more I could accomplish today at work. I headed home to be greeted by my barren apartment. I made a quick check to confirm all the little tells I’d deposited – the fingernail clippings and so forth – were still in place.

  I was exhausted. It wasn’t that I felt physically tired. Instead, I felt soul sick as I surveyed the ruins of my plans. My easy vacation until I got to the Civic Circle’s Social Justice Leadership Forum on Jekyll Island was no more. It didn’t look as though I’d get to go at all, thanks to Travis Tolliver and Rachel deciding to “empower” Kirin by giving her my job.

  I could probably get Uncle Larry to help, but I was supposed to keep that relationship secret. Our deal was that I should show up to Jekyll Island as an “independent” observer and use my involvement with TAGS – Tolliver Applied Government Solutions – to funnel insights and intelligence back to him. In exchange, Larry had offered me a nice chunk of cash that would completely cover a year at Tech – even more if I continued to hold on to my Social Justice Initiative Scholarship. I got the feeling he didn’t completely trust Travis Tolliver, and he wanted me as a back channel. I’d never met Travis so he didn’t know me from Adam, and there are any number of Burdells in the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia. I didn’t think he’d make the connection between me and the arcane Tolliver family lore about my folks. Still, if I asked Larry to directly intervene on my behalf, my pretense of anonymity would be gone, Travis Tolliver would know there was a connection, and I could kiss Uncle Larry’s cash goodbye.

  I thought about what to do.

  I had to find out about the TAGS contract with the Civic Circle. I didn’t have to be Travis Tolliver’s personal assistant to get there, only figure out how I could get on the install team. I probably had a decent shot, since I was working in IT already, and any big job needs lots of cable pullers to do the grunt work. That thought made me feel a bit better.

  I reheated the spaghetti I’d packed for lunch and ate it for dinner. I couldn’t solve my problem and get a ticket to Jekyll Island tonight, but there were things I could be doing, and I needed to start doing them. I’d feel better for having accomplished something productive. I removed my secure laptop and my directional antenna and went wardriving.

  I waited until I was a few miles away from my apartment to start searching. I quickly found a number of residential WiFi nodes that were completely unprotected – people not bothering with the extra hassle of securing them. My problem was, I didn’t want to park on a residential street, have the neighbors get suspicious and call the police on me. Finally, I found a coffee shop that seemed to have a couple of unsecured networks available from the parking lot. I went inside, bought a cup of decaf, and got to work. I was still able to close the link using my high gain antenna pointed in the right direction.

  For the first time in a couple of days, I had an anonymous Internet connection. I fired up TOR – The Onion Router – to bounce my traffic through its network of anonymous nodes. That would make it much harder for anyone to trace my traffic back to me.

  Amit’s family owned the local Berkshire Hotel franchise near our hometown back in Tennessee. He parlayed his experience helping his folks run the place and developed a software package to help hotel managers monitor their networks for criminal behavior. It had been adopted throughout the chain. He’d leveraged his access to keep an eye on the Civic Circle’s field agents. They seemed to be a secret society within the FBI and answerable only to the Director and the Inner Circle of the Civic Circle. When Amit found one of them staying at a hotel running his software, he arranged for them to get promoted to Double Platinum status in record time. He then collected all their data packets. Lots of it was encrypted, but Amit managed to crack a good fraction of it and keep an eye on what they were up to. If nothing else, we usually had a good idea of their activities and travels.

  In addition, Amit set up a Virtual Private Network or VPN at certain hotels. Amit’s hack allowed us to log in to the hotel’s server and then access the Internet, distributing our traffic across the profiles of the hotel’s guests. I logged into one of Amit’s hotels and from there reconnected to TOR for my outgoing traffic.

  The resulting link was slow, but as secure as we could make it. The Civic Circle had tracked us back through TOR once before, using a clever exploit. We weren’t going to fall for that particular trick a second time. In case they had some other devious ideas up their sleeves, we wanted their trail to lead somewhere safely far away from our actual location. If that failed, I was in a coffee shop a good block away from the homeowner who left their Wi-Fi unsecured. I’d have a decent warning to pack up and clear out if one of their tactical teams swooped in looking for me.

  I found Amit’s update from earlier that same night. He’d arrived safely and was in a hotel. To be safe, he’d found a deli and logged in to an open WiFi across the street. He’d been by the apartment building where the Civic Circle had arranged accommodations. It had an excellent line-of-sight to other nearby apartment buildings, so he didn’t anticipate any trouble finding an open WiFi node and checking in regularly. Amit had already set up a dating profile using photos he’d found and biographical information from Hungarian supermodel Reka Koz
ma. “It’s only been up an hour and I’m already getting hammered with messages from hungry guys,” he complained. I looked at one of the pictures of her in a bikini, and I could see why. Using the handle “Sapiosexual Gal,” Virtual Reka said she liked older, more mature men, with a deep commitment to social justice. I had to go to the dictionary to discover that “sapiosexual” meant she found intelligence attractive. Amit had loaded Sapiosexual Gal’s profile with all the terms Gomulka was using to search the site. If he didn’t find her himself and reach out in a week, Amit would have Reka ping him.

  I wrote up a brief note to Amit and Rob. I summarized my meeting with the Red Flower Tong. The operation was a go, and I gave Amit his deadline to get Professor Gomulka to fall for “Reka.” I passed on the new insights about the secret war against the Circle and how the Circle was keeping an eye on Marlena’s apartment and credit cards. I also noted, for Rob’s benefit, that I wasn’t happy being the unwitting object of Rob and Rick’s secret “op.” We could discuss that later, though. Local HR had blocked my attempt to go to Jekyll Island as Travis Tolliver’s assistant, but I’d be working on going anyway as an IT grunt. Not much to report.

  I unplugged my laptop, and I was about to power down and head home when I recalled my promise to Marlena to check out this anonymous writer friend of MacGuffin’s, “Jorge.” I searched “Jorge Buenos Aires writer library,” using Duck Duck Go – a search engine that, unlike Omnitia, didn’t log all searches by user and pass the results on to Homeland Security.

  I stared a moment at the results on my screen. Then, I plugged my laptop back in. This was going to be a long night.

  Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer and a giant in Spanish-language literature. Perhaps it was just a coincidence? Jorge isn’t that rare a name. I dug deeper.

  Borges began working at a municipal library in 1938. That aligned with MacGuffin’s description. Then I saw it: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a short story from 1941.

  In Borges’ story, a Chinese professor, Dr. Tsun, living in England, serves as a spy for the Germans during the First World War. Having discovered the location of an artillery park, his attempt to communicate the location is thwarted. Evading capture, Dr. Tsun goes to the house of Doctor Stephen Albert, an eminent oriental scholar.