Cyberdrome

by Joseph Rhea

  Unable to log into the global database for verification, Alek quickly sized the man up. He appeared to be Native American, with rust-colored skin and black hair worn in a short, military cut. With broad shoulders and a wide neck, he looked like an ex-soldier—probably a Seal or Special Forces. All of this combined with his gray and black civilian uniform at least gave him the appearance of a security chief.

  Alek toggled his chair a half meter toward the intruder. “So, you work at my father’s company. What the hell gives you the right to break into my home?”

  “You’re the creator of the Cyberphage program which attacked our system, aren’t you?”

  Alek looked away from the man and realized that he was in trouble. “I think I should talk to an attorney before I say anything.”

  Cloudhopper leaned in close to Alek and bared his teeth. “If I thought you were responsible for the attack, I would’ve yanked you out of that damn chair and hauled you back to headquarters myself.” He stood back up. “Instead, I am politely asking you questions. Question number two is: how did your program get into our system?”

  Alek realized that he had nothing to hide and told him about the woman in the coffee shop.

  Cloudhopper circled around Alek, entering the living room. “You didn’t bother to get an I.D. on her?” he asked while looking at the TV.

  “By the time I discovered her identity, she was gone,” he said as he retrieved the Piggyback module he found in the coffee shop. “I did find this, however.”

  Cloudhopper turned around and grabbed the module from Alek’s hand. He glanced at it for only a moment before responding. “This isn’t a lead.”

  Alek raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think it’s odd that someone used a device made by your company to steal a program that was used against your company?”

  Cloudhopper tossed the module back to Alek. “What I think is odd is that someone would leave such an easily traceable device behind for you to find,” he said.

  “Misdirection,” Alek said under his breath. Three days after the theft, and Klaxon was still making him look like an amateur and a fool. He looked back up at the man. “So, what exactly did my Cyberphage do to your system?”

  “It brought in what appears to be an intelligent retrovirus which altered the primary instruction set of our supervisor program,” Cloudhopper said, turning back around to face him.

  Alek almost laughed out loud. “Forgetting for the moment that what you described is actually impossible, why didn’t you shut down your system and reboot from a backup? You obviously know computers, so you must know that’s standard procedure for any massive viral infection.”

  Cloudhopper leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “There were a number of our personnel hooked into direct neural interface when the attack occurred.”

  “So, why don’t you just unplug them?”

  “The infected supervisor program is holding our people hostage. If we shut down the system, the hostages will die.”

  Alek shook his head. “You know, I might not have as much experience in this field as some, but I’m not a complete novice. Everyone knows that you can’t die from pulling out of a neural interface.”

  “Come tell that to the person in charge,” Cloudhopper said as he glanced toward the door. “She’s having a meeting at Cyberdrome headquarters in a few hours and you’re invited.”

  “You mean in Nevada? You want me to fly down to Nevada with you? Right this minute?”

  “There’s a private shuttle waiting for us. If it’s money you want, I have been authorized to pay you for your time.”

  “You’re damn right you’ll pay me,” he said as he headed toward his bedroom. A minute later, he returned with a small travel bag and rolled toward the front door. “And just for the record,” he added, “the clock started the moment you entered my house.”

  Cloudhopper reached in a pocket, pulled out a small datapad, and tossed it to Alek. “Read this. It will bring you up to speed before you meet with the others.”

  Alek turned the credit card-sized device over in his hand. “Tell me something,” he said as Cloudhopper opened the front door. “Will my father be at this meeting?”

  Cloudhopper turned around. “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” he said as his face twisted into something resembling a grin. “Your father’s one of the hostages.”

  FOUR

  The flashing seatbelt sign and alert tone woke Alek up. He lurched up in his seat, not sure where he was. He remembered walking somewhere—actually feeling himself standing upright and moving again. It felt so real—it was irritating to learn that it was just a dream.

  He looked up and saw Cloudhopper’s face staring at him through the forward curtain. “Landing in ten minutes,” he said. Before Alek could respond, he ducked his head back through the curtain.

  Fifteen minutes later, he followed Cloudhopper silently down the stairs from the shuttle and into another van. It was pitch black outside, but thankfully, his chair negotiated both the stairs and the van without anyone’s help. As they drove along the tarmac, he could just make out some of the nearby buildings. Obviously, the place used to be a military airport.

  “So, this is Area 51,” he said.

  Cloudhopper sighed. “The Air Force decommissioned and abandoned their test facility several years ago. It’s now the Groom Lake Industrial Park and is owned and operated by a number of private companies. One of those companies is Cyberdrome.”

  The van turned off the tarmac and drove toward a small hangar. Alek thought that it seemed too small to be the headquarters of a company like Cyberdrome, but then realized that it was just a garage. When the van stopped inside, he steered his powerchair out of the van and followed Cloudhopper into a waiting elevator.

  He felt lighter as the elevator began dropping. Cloudhopper stood beside him with his hands behind his back. His demeanor had changed since entering the facility. He seemed smaller now, more subdued. Gone was the fierce warrior who had broken into his house demanding answers.

  Alek had a few thousand questions to ask him, but felt hesitant to break the silence. A full minute later, the elevator door opened to a lobby protected by armed guards. After having his wrist computer confiscated, he followed Cloudhopper down a series of long curved hallways to a large circular door that looked a great deal like a bank vault.

  “What is this place?” Alek finally asked.

  Cloudhopper turned toward him. “This is the headquarters of Cyberdrome,” he said dryly.

  “I know, but it feels like I’m inside a spaceship. Is it just a coincidence that you work inside a buried spaceship at Area 51?”

  Cloudhopper touched a pad on the door and it began to split open down the middle. “Architectural design isn’t in my job description,” he said, then turned and passed through the open doorway.

  Alek sighed as he followed him into a large circular room with a two-story high domed ceiling. In the middle of the room, a meter-wide glass tube filled with what looked like fuzzy green water ran from the floor to the ceiling.

  “Wait here,” Cloudhopper ordered as he walked past the tower and passed through another circular door on the far side of the room. When the door closed behind him, Alek took a moment to study the green tower.

  “I take it you’ve never seen a Fluidal Computer before,” a tall kid said as he approached from the side.

  Alek’s mouth fell open. “Fluidal? As in fluid memory? As in DNA-based liquid memory?”

  “That’s it,” the teenager said, then added, “I’m Freddie, by the way.” He reached out his hand.

  Alek shook it. “I’m Alek.”

  Freddie’s eyes widened “Holy crap! You’re Alek Grey!”

  “The last time I checked,” Alek said. “How do you know my name?”

  “You created the Cyberphage,” the boy blurted out. His grin had spread from ear to ear. “I’m a cryptologist here. My team decoded your Phage and found out who built it.” He looked suddenly embarrassed. “I’m sorry I got you into
trouble.”

  Alek shrugged. “I got myself into this mess,” he admitted, “and it’s not exactly the first time.” He glanced around the room. “So this is the heart of your company’s digital think tank, isn’t it? You’ve got a bunch of A.I. programs living in Earth-based simulations coming up with technological innovations for you.”

  “Actually, it’s not A.I.,” Freddie said, pointing up to the Fluidal computer. “We are growing the world’s most advanced ALife in there.”

  “You mean Artificial Life, right? You use genetic algorithms to grow and evolve all of your programs—even the human simulations?”

  “Of course,” Freddie said. “Classic Artificial Intelligence is a dead end—at least as far as creating something that can closely mimic a human’s thought processes. ALife is the real deal now in our field.”

  Alek looked back up at the green tower. “So that entire thing’s filled with liquid memory? It’s huge!”

  “Biggest in the world.”

  “Well, now I understand why your facility’s so far underground. From what I’ve read, DNA-based memory can’t handle any sort of vibrations or even slight temperature changes.”

  “It’s unstable in other ways as well,” Freddie replied under his breath.

  “That’s right. It’s also biochemically unstable,” Alek said. “From what I remember, you have to program all of the global variables for your simulations when the DNA strands are initially formed. Then if you accidentally break even a minor one of those rules, it starts a cascade failure and the whole thing crashes.” He looked at Freddie. “That’s why everyone stopped using liquid memory years ago. So, how did you solve that problem?”

  Just then, a door on the far wall opened and Cloudhopper motioned for Alek to join him.

  Freddie put on a fake smile and reached out to shake Alek’s hand. Before he turned away, he whispered, “Who said we solved it?”

  As Freddie walked away, Alek stared at him for a moment before rolling his powerchair over to join Cloudhopper. Whatever Freddie was hinting at could wait, and probably didn’t concern him anyway. His job was to determine what happened to his Phage, deny any wrongdoing, and get back to his life as soon as possible.

  As he passed through the open door, he noticed a plaque on the wall that said “Cartography.” Inside he found a room filled with three holographic display tables. A large gridded sphere floated over the central table. Cloudhopper walked to the side of the floating sphere and stood next to a middle-aged woman with silver hair. A younger woman sat at a console next to them—Alek did a double take when he realized that it was Maya.

  Her hair was longer than back in college, cut in a sort of layered style. She also looked a little thinner than he remembered, and in great shape. She had obviously kept up her swimming regimen after college.

  The silver haired woman reached out her hand as he approached. “Mr. Grey, my name is Rebecca Leconte. I’m the Chief Administrator of Cyberdrome.” She gestured toward Maya. “I believe you already know your father’s assistant, Dr. Rivero.”

  “I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “My father always liked you.”

  “We don’t have time for this, Rebecca,” Maya said, ignoring his statement. She glanced at him briefly but then looked back at a display on her console.

  Leconte frowned at Maya, and then turned her attention back to Alek. “As Maya pointed out, we do, in fact, have very little time. Can I assume that you have read the datapad that Mr. Cloudhopper gave you?”

  Alek nodded his head. “I understand that your supervisor program’s being controlled by a computer virus, and that you think my Cyberphage brought it in. I can assure you that didn’t happen.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Cloudhopper asked. “Your program was designed to transport other programs. It could’ve been filled up with any number of items by the woman who took it.”

  “Not possible,” he said confidently. “There’s no way for someone on the outside to place something inside.” That’s the truth, he thought, but not the whole truth. No need to tell them that it was already filled with cargo. “And regardless of how a virus got in to your system,” he added, “what I still don’t understand is why you haven’t already shut it down to get rid of it.”

  “It’s complicated,” Maya said.

  He turned to look at her. “Cloudhopper told me about the so-called ‘hostages.’ Do you really expect me to believe they will die if you pull them out of interface?” He looked at the others in the room. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  There was a moment of silence in the room, before Leconte finally spoke up. “You might as well tell him, dear,” she said to Maya. “It’s his father’s work, after all.”

  “Tell me already,” Alek said.

  “Your father designed a special batch of nano-scale medical robots called ‘neuroprobes’ which act as brain-enhancers,” Maya said, still avoiding direct eye contact with him. “We inject several billion of them into the bloodstream and they take position in key areas of your brain during interface. For reasons we still don’t understand, the neuroprobes in our people are refusing the recall commands.”

  “How can they do that?”

  Maya shrugged. “They have somehow been reprogrammed to remain active until each person’s online Avatar is removed from Cyberdrome.”

  He looked around the room. “Why would they be tied to the Avatars?”

  “We don’t know,” Leconte said.

  “So, what would happen if you simply unplugged someone?”

  “The neuroprobes draw energy from an inductive current inside the interface chambers,” Maya said, glancing at him briefly. “If we pulled someone out, the neuroprobes would shut down and begin to clog up the tiny capillaries inside the brain. The person would die within a matter of minutes from massive aneurisms.”

  “I’ll remind you that you signed a non-disclosure agreement when you entered this building,” Leconte said. “What you have just been told is highly classified.”

  “Not to mention highly illegal under the current administration,” he said. “But, don’t worry, I don’t agree with the ban on nanotechnology anymore than my father did.” He glanced around the room. “All right, the way to get your people back is simple.”

  “Is it?” Leconte asked, glancing first at Maya and then Cloudhopper, before turning her attention back to Alek. “Do tell us, Mr. Grey.”

  “The datapad you gave me mentioned that all of your simulations can be accessed through backdoors in your root memory, what you call the Core.” He began. “All we need to do is get your people’s Avatar programs out of the simulations and into Core memory. That’s simply a matter of breaking whatever encryption your supervisor program put on the data streams. Then, when the Avatars are all safely out of the simulations, we do a secondary system reboot.”

  “How would that protect our people?” Leconte asked.

  “Core memory is separate from the data space used by your simulations, so any programs inside it will not be affected by the secondary reboot. If what you said about the Avatars is true, then once the supervisor program is offline, the neuroprobes should leave your people. Problem solved.”

  Leconte scanned the faces in the room. “Why has no one else thought of this?”

  When nobody answered, Alek spoke up. “Don’t blame them,” he said. “It’s a ‘thinking inside the box’ idea. Most people spend so much time trying to think outside the box; they forget that some of the best ideas are the simple ones.”

  Cloudhopper raised an eyebrow. “It’s a clever idea, Grey. The only flaw with your plan is that the supervisor program has locked us out of the simulations. We can’t locate or transport anyone from the simulations to the Core.”

  “Give me a week or two on one of your direct terminals and maybe I can break through your supervisor’s defenses,” Alek said.

  “There isn’t time,” Maya said, still sounding irritated. “The neuroprobes were designed to operate
for a week at best. Our people have already been interfaced for three days, which means that we will start losing people if we don’t get them out within the next three to four days.”

  Alek studied her further, and realized that maybe she wasn’t mad at him after all. Maybe she’s just tired. If this accident happened three days ago, it was a good bet that she hadn’t slept since then. “So, what do you propose to do?” he asked.

  Cloudhopper walked over to the large rotating sphere. “This is a simplified rendering of Cyberdrome,” he said. He made a hand gesture and the front half of the sphere vanished, revealing a series of concentric circles, much like a cut-a-way diagram of the Earth. The image zoomed in towards a hollowed-out central structure in what would be the planet’s core. This was Cyberdrome’s Core.

  As the image continued to magnify, five flashing dots on the inner surface of the Core became visible. “These are control nodes which surround and protect Ceejer’s cognitive processing memory,” Cloudhopper said. “Our plan is to interface directly with the Core, locate and attach deletion routines to each of these five nodes, and then activate them simultaneously. Deleting the nodes will cause a cascading reformat of Ceejer’s CPM, which should disable its control of the interfaced personnel.”

  “Once we have control,” Maya added. “We should be able to pull everyone out safely.”

  Alek thought about it for a moment. “It sounds plausible, but I have one question. What’s to prevent your supervisor program from detecting what you’re doing and stopping you?”

  “That’s where we got lucky,” Maya said. “There’s a diagnostic sweep occurring at 3:00 A.M. tomorrow morning. During this period, every program inside the Core will be suspended for approximately two minutes, including Ceejer. We believe that anyone interfacing during this period will go unnoticed by Ceejer when the system starts back up.”

  It took Alek a moment to understand what she said. “You’re planning to send humans inside to do this?”