Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  One day one of their agents caused one of the users in the second layer of the TESS outer onion to receive a bottle of free vitamin water from a machine in the cafeteria. The water made the TESS member regurgitate violently within five minutes. They puked beautifully for the next half hour too and then abandoned all hope, called in sick and went home. With smooth precision one of Li’s agents entered their now empty office and entered their machine using bug-stolen password access codes. They now had access to the mail of an authorized sender from a legitimate computer on the outer network that would talk to the inner layer next to the TIOC core. Using a stolen secure jump drive allowed them to load up a special software package into an e-mail that noted it might be of interest to the inner circle IT personnel. Ironically the subject and content of the message was regarding a plot to commit espionage against TESS. If contained multiple references to various TESS concerns worldwide. It worked. The second layer addressee read it, thought it important and forwarded it inside the cave’s walls for evaluation. That e-mail held their weapon which was launched with that mail into the TIOC for screening.

  The e-mail contained a capsule of under-Java coding that instead of being carried as an attachment was inter-levered into the e-mail’s actual code and made to reassemble itself into an operational whole on triggering. Several security features missed its presence because of this. Other precautions did however detect the larger size of the file’s code structure and shunted it to a secure holding area on the server for review. Software began scanning it for key features that were markers of viruses. This close inspection by anti-virals was the actual trigger mechanism for the script to reassemble its pieces and direct the anti-viral program itself to deliver a little known routine report. The anti-viral obeyed using a small code set that could not harm a conventional computer and was therefore not blocked. It displayed results which popped up as a primitive RAM driven screen common to many anti-viral software packages at their lowest level and begin displaying it. This window was yet another marker of a threat and four out of five people manning the TIOC sat up on seeing it open and began intently watching their screens to see what it said. Professionals all they were trying to make head or tails out of the text that was flowing across the screen. It was an impossible task since it was simply a regurgitation of text snippets from various randomized ROM memory file locations on their own hard drives, but it appeared as a continuously flowing stream of data that seemed to convey something that might have meaning. Apophenia went wild. They stared intently at their screens.

  Unknown to the TIOC personnel the program had begun its true task. It was transmitting through the speakers on their computers. It was a sound pattern in the Extremely Long Frequency range near 9.023 HZ. Using a well known biological phenomena the frequency “entrained” their minds causing the brain waves of their Neo-cortex to fall into frequency vibration at the same wavelength—all four began to feel sleepy after a couple minutes of peering intently at the code and trying to puzzle out a pattern that did not exist in the words that were scrolling rapidly past. After a twenty seconds the images of the words on their screens began to flicker as the monitor ran through various color ranges and varied light levels. The observers thought it some kind of result of viral activity and they were right. What they did not realize was that that the light jumping created a dissonance pattern that was additionally hypnotic in some cases.

  The combination was successful because operators ignored the flickering since none of the TESS guardians had ever encountered software that might not be assaulting their machine software, but was actually targeted against the operators themselves. The combination of audio and visual assaults lead the TIOC personnel from an alert Beta brain wave activity “down scale” to Alpha… the realm of suggestion. Essentially the virus was programming their minds to revert to their edge-of-sleep region and providing them with a single repeated subliminal message. Their conscious mind relaxed into a state of what they took sleepily to be true and original inspiration. Foremost was a desire to ‘do what they usually do.’ Victims one through three succumbed in less than four minutes and executed the single urged command ostensibly arising from their own impulses and forwarded the e-mail message on through the particular gateway they guarded with the flick of a finger on their keyboards. The human equation is always complicated. Victim four was more problematical. Her brain waves entrained like the others but through some genetic mental twitch rather like an eye blinking she would occasionally drop the viruses entrainment and her mind would struggle to realign and stagger back up from the Alpha wave activity only to drop back down again after a second or two. Her mind fought the battle and lost, but the battle for her brain took three minutes longer than the others. It did some good. Eventually she too fatefully pushed the send button and sent the message forward just like all her compatriots. The delay made hers the last message sent. Two things happened then almost simultaneously. The message penetrated through this final ‘gate,’ now forwarded from all the TIOC outer guardians to the dragon at the treasure. It reached the inbox of the impatiently efficient Lieutenant 3 Van Ziegler who noticed them, finished his current task hurriedly and opened the latest of the packets first. His monitor lit up as the TIOC personnel’s had. He began to review the screen while his brain waves were aligning quickly to those put out by the software and dropping him down into half dreaming state just like all the others. Simultaneously back in the TIOC a fifth shift operator returned looking down to make sure his fly was zipped and paying little attention to his monitor or compatriots. It took him thirty seconds of fooling about with his coffee cup and finding the right track on his media player until he turned to tell victim number two the joke about “What is forty feet long and has five teeth” that he had heard the night before. His look of eager anticipation of the giggle he would get at the ancient punch line of “The line to the funnel cake stand at the Wisconsin State Fair” changed to an atavistic shiver when he realized that his mate was visibly drooling and his head was lolling against his headrest zombie-like. He had a sightline to victim three and realized she too was demonstrating much the same behavior and in a rush of adrenaline got good and properly freaked, the R-region of his brain triggering something very like the “snakes at your ankles” reaction which rippled like a thrill up his spine. The adrenaline rush probably saved him. He realized both the others were staring at their screens and rather like the cute girl in a horror movie told not to go into the scary dark basement he could not resist and looked over at his team mate’s screen. He realized text was scrolling past but missed at least some of the impact of the dissonance pattern because he was looking at it from the side and had missed staring directly at it over time. He felt the tug of the impending entrainment fugue from the audio, but in his hyper mental state it had the opposite effect by making him detect the tug on his brain and translate it into a good old fashioned panic attack and a rearing back in fear from a threat.

  Fear is helpful in some circumstances. Each operator had a “Reboot” switch hard wired on their consoles with a trigger guard over it something like big red button in a missile silo. Shaking his head and blinking furiously he lashed out violently and triggered it—severing all connection between the outside world and the bat cave TIOC and dropping all computers back into their base load. It was exactly the right thing to do as a sleepy Van Ziegler was at that moment reaching out to press a button and open up the super secure servers next to his office to the Chinese agent crouched in the outer circle. Had the drama unfolded one minute longer he would have handed over the TESS plans to the hyper drive.

  Van Ziegler would never know how close he came.

  The Red Queen Effect ensures that the relationship between humans and viruses vary from person to person depending where they stand balanced on the co-evolutionary defensive lever that acts as a teeter-totter between humans and deadly microorganisms. Each striving through evolution to position the survival fulcrum to advantage over the other. 15 percen
t of Northern Europeans are resistant to HIV while 1 percent are flat out immune since they lack the CCR5 receptor that allows HIV to burglarize cells presumably because in the distant past one of their ancestors had experimented with the lack of T cell receptors as a defense against one of several iterations of the black death as it wandered through Europe every few hundred years. One variable result of re-mixing human genes every generation through binary sexuality was that biological viruses just have different effects on different humans. Computer viruses are faster than biological ones, but essentially not different in their results. Variation meant that some human computers are Microsoft, but a small subset are Macintosh or Unix with variations in operating system. Those variations make all the difference in the results of an attack. Afterwards, two of the TIOC operators suffered a modest degree of nausea but recovered fully in three hours without any apparent harm. A third one vomited violently for three days off and on as if his inner ear was sitting on a keel-less boat in a heavy storm, but eventually he also came out of it. The fourth operator actually felt slightly dizzy for about fifteen minutes and then felt absolutely great, actually achieving a state of mild euphoria for 48 hours as if he was smoking some first class canabanoids every couple hours. And then there was Van Ziegler. He had splitting headaches for 12 hours that got worse and worse until he passed out from the pain. Doctors did what they could but he slipped into a coma a day later while hurried MRI and CT-scans showed an ugly riddling of various functional areas scattered across his neo-cortex as if replicating vectors were creating shotgun patterns of tiny brain tumors. Where ever they clustered the brain functions of that area stuttered or ceased and medical personnel could only stand by and flap their hands helplessly. Three days later the limbic system showed a similar pattern as the effect spread. One night four days after that the computer virus penetrated his breathing functions in the reptilian portion of the brain and he just stopped doing it. Van Ziegler had lacked any natural immunity to the Chinese viral computer attack and like a native-American in the face of smallpox simply succumbed.

  My own teeth hurt two days later from grinding them in extreme frustration as I attended Van Ziegler’s funeral—burying his remains in the cliffs above the bat cave next to Baxter in the place reserved for the original Q-Kink members. By then we knew it had been a computer borne virus. My guys had isolated it and picked it apart to find out what made it tick. We now had defenses but we caught no one. Those who had planted it were long gone.

  I was mad as hell and sick to death of watching my people die.

  I did what I could. I ordered all TESS personnel, especially Q-Kink team members brought into a protected status immediately. When we took a head count I realized I was just too damn slow.

  At the end of the roll call, Jeeter was missing.

  I felt my stomach drop… the old bastard was not as a good a pilot as he liked to think or he would have had a big letter ‘S’ on his chest and I had come to love him like a second father.

  My teeth were getting shorter. No more Mr. Nice Guy… time for TESS to speak up.

  Tanya Mathers staggered as the four men and a single woman wearing black shirts and suits took her from the men in guard uniforms who had frog marched her from the security holding cell at TESS academy where they had been holding her for the last ten days after discovering she had turned data over to the FBI. The new bunch were wearing civilian clothes and slapped cuffs on her resisting wrists behind her back. They shoved her forcefully through two more cleared corridors to a loading dock and then into the back of a windowless panel truck.

  She was frightened.

  She had been a candidate at the FBI academy, set to graduate fourth in her class and first among the female candidates when she had been approached for a special undercover operation they had in mind. She had agreed in principal, flattered at this sign of trust and seduced by the romance of movies depicting a life undercover. After a couple short and intense mini-undercover orientation courses she was briefed on her mission. Having gained some trepidation and tarnish on her image of her near future by increasingly envisioning insinuating herself into the bed of some lunatic Hispanic drug lord or Mafioso crime ring Tanya was rather relieved when she found out they intended that she enter the TESS enlistment and training program instead. Space beckoned. She had done it gladly only to find that the program was right up her alley. Instead of rubbing shoulders with sleazy goombas and tawdry crooks trying to set the bar as the lowest forms of humanity she was now rubbing shoulders with highly motivated and intelligent people reaching hard for a lofty goal of pushing humanity deeper into outer space than it had ever been. It was exciting and interesting and she was having a ball. She kept filing her reports through drops with her FBI control almost automatically, but the human capacity for self delusion was as strong in her as anyone. She kept thinking her reports could do no real harm to her new friends. Being sharp she had done well in the TESS training and was approaching the end when she was shunted into a ‘special’ briefing reserved for the those they were being considered for service with the fleet… the big rock candy mountain dream of every TESS applicant around her. She’d realized she had internalized and embraced space service as her personal goal as her well. She had been truly torn when TESS gave her access to classified data. Her loyalties were stretched thin at that point between country and constitution juxtaposed against the heights of the new dream of taking humanity to the stars. Ultimately she realized she had to submit the information to the FBI or they would simply reveal she was a plant and her try at TESS would end anyway. By that time she rather desperately wanted to go on and make it into outer space. Ten days later after a short vacation given to all approaching graduates she had returned to the TESS university complex eager for the future. As she had entered the graduation ceremony building a man she did not know had met her and identified himself as being from human resources. He told her he was there to take her to a conference about her “future” TESS assignment. He had led her down a short corridor and before she could react several large security men surrounded her and hauled her struggling and protesting to a short row of cells for a further string of indignities as she was forcibly strip searched and given a loose orange jump suit. The guards fed her and treated her well enough, but she was allowed no communication with the outside world. It had slowly begun to sink into her consciousness that she had joined an extraterrestrial organization that as a legal entity was extraterritorial too. It owed allegiance to no nation’s legal system on or off the planet Earth. By all the lights of TESS they could hold her incommunicado indefinitely if they wished and make it stick too. No phone call for her. She was suddenly very afraid.

  Then today, the men and women in business suits crammed her into the unmarked truck. She expected them to take her far away but was surprised to find the drive only lasted a an hour and half with two stops and then they off loaded her and pushed her along through a corridor into what could only be a extension of the famous bat-cave where the original Q-Kink team had built the first space drive. She knew then even the two hour’s drive had been a smokescreen. She was less than two miles from her start point. She was seriously struggling in panic when she was half carried past a man wearing an aloha shirt who was holding a heavy door open. They pulled her into a long series of deserted tunnels that zigged and zagged until they dumped out into a chamber where a series of large cells had been constructed in a hurry. They were well lit and she felt a breeze. They took off her cuffs, thrust her into one of the cells with a steel roof, a steel floor, three steel plate walls showing recent weld marks, one stone wall, a bunk, bedding, table, chair, a stack of books, a television and a shipboard comfort station complete with toilet and shower. She turned to protest as they firmly slammed the door in her face. A steel panel in the metal door was slid aside and one of the suits spoke to her for the first time.

  “You will get three meals a day through this slot.” It was one of the woman. “Not a bad life for a
traitor. You get to live. Welcome to TESS… . you bitch.” The panel slid back across and she heard the snick of a hasp. She pounded on the metal door of her durance vile in despair for an hour and then collapsed on the bunk unable to control the tears.

  I was looking at Murray through a video link to the caves. I had cut away from viewing the video of Agent Mathews blubbering in a cell that was deeper inside the Bat Cave than I had ever ventured myself. I sneering at myself with distaste. Like Craig I was kind of old school too. Real men hate to make women cry.

  Then I remembered the drooling death of Van Ziegler and the fact that Jeeter was among the disappeared and clenched my jaw purposefully. This was an extension of the overall war being made on TESS and this woman was a mere pawn in it. A soldier in it I corrected myself. I would defend TESS at all costs. Her personal discomfort was worth it in the equation of the great game.

  “So is it absolutely certain she is FBI? You’ve cross verified?” I asked.

  Murray gave me a jerk of his head that I took to mean ‘yes.’

  “Interrogate her then… NO torture allowed, but find out what she knows. I do not believe in too much coincidence. At this point I am assuming that the attack on Van Ziegler and his TIOC crew were timed in close proximity to an FBI agent penetrating us and the kidnap of Jeeter. It was not much of a reach to believe the FBI engineered the TIOC viral attack at just the correct time to mask her graduation from TESS academy. They might gain the drive with a lucky stroke during the raid on the cave’s data through Van Ziegler and we would have missed her in the resulting mayhem. Classic misdirection OSS style. It’s just so… so… CIA! Murray, I can picture gray suits huddled in some high rise game planning this operation out while sipping frou-frou coffee. It smells. We are busy reacting to the hail-mary pass they made in the TIOC that assassinated Chief Van Ziegler and with our eyes on that event we allow her to graduate and penetrate us as a plan ‘B.’ Based on that logic I assumed they would also have taken Jeeter as an additional appendix, a plan ‘C’ if you will. They wanted to sow so much confusion we miss one of these plans in the kafuffle. I want Jeeter back as soon as possible too!”