by D S Kane
It took just a minute before he received the encrypted return message from his handler. Using the instructions he’d been given, he decrypted the reply. He bought a chocolate bar from the snack machine and sat back down to eat it. At least the chocolate tasted good, diverting his attention from the ugly task before him.
“Close to the prime objective.” How could that be? But, that’s what he’d told the Russians. Glen knew he needed some way to escape their influence, but with his mother under their constant observation, their threats still held currency with him.
He still couldn’t believe he was doing this. He felt disgust with himself, and now the candy no longer tasted sweet.
* * *
Dave Nordman wasn’t a pathological liar. But he knew when someone was trying too hard to glean secrets from him, and he knew how to lie. As he walked from Glen’s apartment to his dorm room, he chuckled at his lie. In fact, Ann’s team was lost among the groups. He didn’t expect them to achieve anything close to a success. All we’ll get is credits toward our diplomas, but that’s enough.
He wondered if any of the teams would achieve success. Maybe the one from Google or the one from Microsoft. When he climbed the stairs to his floor in the dorm, he passed several students he knew and he nodded and smiled at them. After closing the door of his bedroom, he made a call. “Hi, Ann. It’s Dave.”
“Dave? What’s up? Is there something I need to handle?”
“No. But I have something you might find interesting.”
“Okay. What?”
“Your former beau, Glen, just tried to pump me regarding our status.”
“He what?”
“You heard it right. Anyway, I told him we’re really close to achieving a miracle.”
“Why?”
“Come on, Ann. Relax. What difference would it make if I told him a lie?”
Ann was silent for a while. “Please, don’t do that again.”
“Okay. G’night.”
Dave ended the call and chuckled. He imagined Glen worrying about how his team was about to lose the contest.
CHAPTER 17
Stanford University Seminar Classroom,
Stanford University, CA
October 1, 9:01 a.m.
Dave Nordman sat at the back of the class in the seat closest to the door. Every other seat in the class was taken, just as he’d hoped. Now, if he drifted into sleep during the lecture, perhaps no one would notice. As long as he didn’t snore.
He had a clear view of the professor, the whiteboard, and all the students. Especially Ann. The professor seemed to be wrapping up the morning’s lecture on the perils of Artificial Intelligence. The professor reminded them all that their midterm papers were due at the next class, and Dave watched as his note-taking dictation software typed the professor’s reminder word-for-word into his notebook. He closed its lid and reached to the floor to retrieve his bookbag.
As he placed his computer in the bag and rose to leave for his next class, he saw Glen Sarkov walk over to Ann. Dave pulled his cellphone from his pocket and opened the video recorder app. He recorded Glen’s voice and image, then stopped the app and pocketed his cell. He was sure there was enough content there for him to finish his self-assigned task.
Late that afternoon, he returned to his dorm room and used the recordings of Glen’s voice to craft a complete vocabulary of Glen’s speech patterns. He uploaded the vocabulary and the photos into the AI prototype. Then he used C++ to flesh out how the face muscles should move as the AI spoke.
He prompted the prototype’s code within his notebook: “Speak to me.”
The prototype replied, “Slooshly enturg Ratsmith.” It sounded just like Sarkov. But more important, its face looked just like Sarkov.
Dave chuckled. Damn! Won’t Ann be surprised!
Then he had second thoughts about showing her what it had taken less than an hour for him to complete. What if she doesn’t like it?
He replayed the conversation he’d taped between Glen and Ann to decide whether his modification of the AI prototype would make her happy.
The recording had Glen asking Ann, “I’d like to have dinner with you. Can we meet later this evening?”
Ann had replied, “Glen, you and I both are leading teams competing in the DARPA contest. So, no. We’re competitors now.”
Dave realized she wouldn’t be amused at his prank. He decided to delete the changes before anyone on the team saw them. But by the time he was able to reload the modules to modify their code, it was too late. Everyone on the team had seen and spoken with the prototype. Including Ann.
* * *
Arcady Kaslov faced the cryptographic telephone encoder and smoothed his hair into something more presentable than his usual wide-spiked haircut. He pressed the connection button and waited for the telecommunications handshake.
He heard the brief click and saw the image of Director Ivan Tranovich, his handler in Moscow, several thousand miles away. “It’s Kaslov. I sent you a video a few minutes ago. You can see for yourself, Director Tranovich. The prototype can speak.”
“Yes, but it says nothing but garbage. It’s not as advanced as your little spy says it is. Right now, the world believes we have the only sentient AI. And as you know, ours is a subterfuge and nothing more than garbage. If the Americans are closer to a breakthrough, we need to stop them. We must get there first.”
Kaslov sighed. “What about the Chinese? They claim theirs is more advanced than the Americans’.”
He saw the director’s face flush. “We have another team working on that. Not your concern. You must handle the Americans. Stay focused. The Sashakovich team seems to be closer to its objective than any of the other teams.”
Kaslov nodded. “But, theirs is getting closer. We need a copy of the code.”
“No. Don’t do anything that leaves a larger footprint. We’ll have to clean up the mess when we’ve finished. The fewer bodies we leave behind, the better.”
Kaslov reluctantly nodded back. “As you wish, Director.”
* * *
Laura sat at the table across from Dave. She liked him even more this evening. She felt his stories were filled with humor. Very different from Frank, her boyfriend last year. Frank had turned out to be a drug kingpin and he’d been involved with some incredibly violent people. Dave made her feel safe. But she wanted to be honest with this new guy. And her secrets would be painful to tell. She took a very deep breath and her smile fell away.
“Listen, Dave, I like you. But if we’re to be more than casual acquaintances , I want to tell you about my life. It isn’t pretty. Sure you want to hear this?”
Dave nodded. “Yeah. I’m tough enough to listen.”
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see his reaction. “I’m not sure, but I believe I murdered my mother.”
“You what?”
Laura opened her eyes and recoiled at Dave’s expression of horror. She forced herself on. “My mother beat my father. Physically abused him every chance she got. I don’t know why he didn’t run from her. But it got worse every time. He was a doctor. He should have known he couldn’t change her. One night, I saw her holding a chef’s knife in one hand and a wrench in the other. I thought she was about to finish him off. He was on the floor, barely conscious. I was ten years old. I loved them both, but I couldn’t let her kill him. I remember nothing that happened after I saw her standing over him. But when it was over, all I remembered was my mother’s head barely attached to her neck, her body bleeding from several stab wounds, and my father calling the police. He told them he had killed her, but I’m sure that wouldn’t have been possible. He’s serving life in prison. Inmates have beaten him up many times and I doubt he’ll live to see freedom.”
“So, you have no proof that you were responsible for her death?”
Laura nodded. “And that’s not all. My last boyfriend was a criminal. Someone came to kill him and I killed the person before he could. I’ve killed twice. I might not be your best cho
ice of girlfriends.”
“Wow. I’ve got to think about this. Have you thought of a career as a bodyguard?” Dave smiled. “Only kidding. Have you looked at the menu? Some of the dishes are unusual.”
She sat, stunned and silent. Then she did look at the menu. There was nothing unusual in the appetizers or the mains. Then she got it. He’s being funny, trying to take the heat off me. She smiled back.
* * *
William and Betsy walked from the SUV to the garage entrance of Mossad headquarters building and took the elevator to the street level, then left the building through its front door. They walked away toward the street, their heads swiveling back and forth like hunted animals. “Pretend we’re carefree, Betsy.”
“Fuck you.”
They turned the corner into a side street. “If they’re gonna go for this, they’ll do it soon.”
“Don’t remind me. I hate this.”
They heard and saw a van come screaming around the corner and each one tried to seem unaware of it. In seconds it stopped, the side door boomed open, and three powerful men pulled masks over their faces, then loaded them in and slammed the door. William thought, Phase one of the mission from hell is now complete.
CHAPTER 18
Stanford University Co-Ed Dormitory,
Stanford University, CA
October 2, 6:40 a.m.
Dave Nordman’s cellphone chirped his wakeup alarm. He poked his head up off the ratty pillow and looked out the east window of his dorm room. It was just after sunrise.
He’d stayed up way too late the night before, playing the new release of Doom, an upgrade of the classic first-person shooter he’d downloaded through a game company’s website that he’d hacked. The game had been fun, but now, bone tired, he regretted his bad behavior.
He rose off his bed and staggered into the bathroom, thinking about Laura Hunter. Was she serious about her crimes, or was she just trying to see what his reaction would be? He thought about asking Ann about her roommate. Will that get back to Laura? Dave had no answer, and no other thought of how to resolve his dilemma. Do I want to date a murderess? What if the relationship develops into something neither of us can end? Do I want to marry a murderess? What if we have children? What would our family become? He stopped brushing his teeth and stared into the mirror. Who the fuck am I? What will I become?
He finished in the bathroom and headed to the fridge, where he removed a jar of cold-brew coffee and poured himself a generous cup. Then he dressed and sat at his notebook computer.
The team hadn’t progressed very far since their last status reports three days ago. They hadn’t met due to exams and papers now due.
Dave reread the paper he was writing for a political science elective. As the coffee boosted his brain into overdrive, he examined the due dates for his school assignments against those for the project, then imagined the situations for his team members and realized they’d all be overrun by midterms. There just isn’t any way to fix this.
When he scanned the TensorFlow code for three of the programmers, in the blink of his eyes, he realized that the code for the AI prototype had been altered sometime since yesterday afternoon. The main module had been cut into pieces that made no sense. He tried running several modules and found they no longer worked at all. He felt his palms sweat.
He paged through the source code for fifteen of the other modules and saw they’d also been altered. He hoped everyone on the team had updated off-site backup files—this would be a disaster if any of the other programmers had produced work they hadn’t copied to the team’s offsite backups.
He reloaded the most recent backup files and then checked to ensure that the modules worked. They did. He breathed a sigh and sent emails out to all the other programmers and to Ann, stating the obvious. Catshit on a marshmallow stick. I think we’ve been hacked!
He called Ann. “Did you see the message I just sent you? We’ve been hacked. Don’t worry though, I scrubbed the backup files and then restored their code. Listen, Ann, I think we weren’t the only team who have been pwned. Either one of the other teams hacked us, or it was the result of a hacker challenge.”
Ann seemed distant. “I’ll check around the other teams. Make sure you create an additional set of offsite backups with no link to the primary code base. Then get back to me.”
He heard the click as she ended the call.
Dave set to work on this new, additional task.
He estimated that restoring the program code for all the modules, and then checking it by completing an end-to-end test, would take at least two days. Two more days lost! I may flunk out of Stanford.
* * *
A conversation at the 4Chan message board:
Slashdot14: Vidi, Vinci Wowzer. Put down three darps last night.
Prozac92: Procs, please.
Slashdot14: PM to you with full set.
Prozac92: Death to AI! Death to darps!
Slashdot14: Hacker challenge! Git em all. About 60 targs.
Prozac92: I’ll spread the word.
* * *
Dr. Linda Beam arrived at her desk an hour late. She should have thought twice about adopting a dog, but since her job had systematically eliminated any chance of a social life, Curmudgeon seemed like her best option two years ago. And this morning, Curmudgeon had enjoyed the outdoors for well over an hour without getting the point that these trips were for him to empty his insides, not chase butterflies.
She logged in to her DARPA server and saw her screen blink on and off with a one-line message:
You will not expect us. You cannot prevent us.
We will pwn you all. —Indigenous
The devastation was thorough. Everything that had operated before was now scrap.
She sat in silence for a long time. When she finally toured the database to inspect the damage, she found herself filled with a war of nasty emotions. Rage and fear faded into depression.
She was sure she’d be demoted for her failure to anticipate the hack. Worse, she would be the focus of a system-wide review and, much worse still, a systems audit. It would take weeks to return everything to its pre-hack state, and by then she’d be unemployed and her reputation would keep her from ever being employed again.
She rose from her desk and walked toward the elevator. Her superior in the chain of command was two floors above her. She would need to give him her career-ending news. But, as she passed the other cubicles, she saw people running around, their faces showing the same war of fear and rage she had just felt, and she heard them cursing. Passing, Linda examined a few of their screens. The hack wasn’t just the AI contest. It was all of DARPA.
The relief she felt combined with a sense of guilt from realizing her career wasn’t necessarily over. But her superior’s career might be. She found herself smiling ear to ear.
CHAPTER 19
Cecil H. Green Library, Small Conference Room,
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford University, CA
October 2, 9:21 a.m.
Ann read through over sixty pages of C++ code from the backup files and tried comparing them to the hacked code. “Looks like you got them all, Dave. That was a narrow miss.”
Dave nodded. “What did you find out about the other teams?”
“Most have realized they were hacked just as we were. A few didn’t realize it had happened until I asked them to take a look. I spoke with Glen Sarkov. His team is now trying to reconstruct their working code from the remnants they had backed up. But I just saw a news story that claims all of DARPA was hacked. So we would have realized the problem existed soon even if you’d not noticed before. I think we should encrypt our code to make it less likely someone can modify the subsystems again.”
Dave took notes on his computer. “Yeah. I should have done that before.”
She closed the lid of her notebook. “Please make sure we’re covered.” She turned away, and looked at her wristwatch. “I’ve got class now. Bye.”
* * *
Linda Be
am prepared to leave her office just before midnight. She was dog tired from the long list of fixes her programmers had crafted and she had tested. She wished her boss had accepted her recommendation many months in the past to let her hire several new program coders and testers. But it was too late now. She would wait to ask him again until after this debacle was in the rear-view mirror. She had printed out copies of all the correspondence between her and her boss, just in case she needed evidence that she wasn’t at fault. Her boss would take the blame. That is, if her boss was still working at DARPA.
She walked from her cubicle toward the elevator when she heard an alarm beep from the computers in the nearby cubicles. Knowing that this indicated another hack, a blizzard of curse words erupted from her as she rushed back to her desk. It was another prank from Indigenous. Now she’d be pulling her second consecutive all-nighter. She felt her stomach burn with acid from the pressure of the day. Damn Indigenous, those crappy cyber monsters. They’re a cheap imitation of Anonymous, but they’re all capable and very active. I’m sure every one of them is a CypherGhost, all untraceable hackers.She prayed the FBI could delete them from the planet.
On the screen blinked an image of a clown holding a megaphone and laughing into it. “You is fucked by Indigenous twice in one day!”
Linda stood up and turned away from the cackling clown and his bragging rights.
* * *
Ann’s anger at how fate had made her startup team’s work so much harder stood in conflict with her frustration at having done her best, to no avail. And there was a third, stronger feeling, causing her to wonder if the hack was really for the best.
After the hack, it had taken several days for them to reconcile versions of the code and get back to where they were before.
Quitting now would be so simple. Her studies had suffered. Her grades were a shambles of what they’d been last semester. She sat alone in her apartment, her head in her hands.
When Laura opened the door and entered, she paused to study Ann. “What happened? You okay?”