Tales From Our Near Future

by Jackson Coppley

  Janice checked the video display beside the room door. Their meeting was listed. The meeting scheduled before them was running over.

  As Jim greeted Janice, the door opened and people began filing out. Although the young woman at the head of the table was dressed in a sensible business suit as in any civilian meeting, she gathered up a grenade launcher and high-tech automatic rifle. ‘Guess we are different here,’ thought Janice.

  The fresh crew filtered in from the hallway. Janice took a seat across from the door. She never liked having a door to her back. The room was devoid of the customary PowerPoint projector. Agencies shied away from using them since a group of PowerPoint presentations were leaked to the world from the NSA. Jim sat at the head of the table and asked everyone to introduce themselves.

  “Hello everyone,” Janice started. “I’m Janice Ramos. I’m an analyst here at the DIA.”

  “Victor Layman,” said the man in Air Force blues to her left. “Lackland Air Force Base.”

  “Jerry Jones, Fort Meade.”

  “Robert Agile, Langley.”

  “Megan Chin, Langley.”

  ‘Hmm,’ thought Janice. ‘Fort Meade, Maryland, means the NSA and Langley, Virginia, means the CIA. Why don’t the spooks just say so? And Megan looks Hispanic like me. Where did the Chin come from--her husband?’

  Janice wondered about all the firepower. She seldom was in the same room with both of the other agencies.

  “I believe you’re all familiar with the incident we’ll discuss today,” Jim started. “But you may not know why we’re all involved.”

  “Three weeks ago, the Air Force lost control of a drone for two minutes before regaining control. The mission wasn’t jeopardized, but as you can imagine, it raised a lot of questions.”

  He passed the baton to Victor.

  “The drone pilots were on the ground at Petersen. They were able to establish a second link. We saw the outage at Lackland, as well. After twenty-four hours of review, Petersen was certain this wasn’t a software or hardware fault. We were, too. After another two weeks of analysis, we determined it was a cyber attack.”

  Janice already knew all of this; it must not have been a news flash for anyone. Janice had spotted the outage on the Petersen trace logs.

  “Thanks, Victor,” said Jim. “Robert, I believe you can add some details.”

  “We’ve been monitoring activity on potential cyber attackers. This one has China written all over it.”

  Janice wondered why no one at Lackland knew this.

  “We’ve seen China hacks before,” said Jerry, the NSA guy. “This one doesn’t fit the profile.”

  “What profile?” Janice asked.

  “Most Chinese probing is in civilian space,” Jerry answered. It’s on the low side. It’s more accessible and they think scrambling banking transactions has more bang for the buck. This was on the high side—quite a feat and not their usual tactic.”

  Jerry was referring to the military’s own private Internet, which was accessible only through locations on military bases. In fact, Janice had two computers on her desk--one for the high side and one for the low side, the regular public Internet. There was no risk of accidentally transferring data from one to the other. Tapping into the high side was highly implausible, so this may have been an inside job.

  “And,” Jerry continued, “the nature of the intrusion seems more like a prank.”

  “A prank?” Janice asked. Not much at the DIA was taken lightly.

  “The intrusion was fairly low level," said Jerry. “They could have done more damage. It seems that whoever did this just wanted to show us they could.”

  “Robert, what can you add?” asked Jim.

  “Well,” said Robert. “We know many of the official Chinese hack centers and have traced a lot of low side activity back to them, but this one is likely to be an individual. In fact, our sources in China lead us to believe that the Chinese government will help us find him.”

  “Why?” asked Janice.

  “Because they don’t control him and because he picked a military target. If anyone is going to do that, they want to be the ones,” replied Robert. “The Chinese are afraid this maverick might start an incident. Control is very important to them.”

  “We’ve already gotten some information from them on some suspects,” added Robert’s colleague Megan. “However, they need us to zero in on who it might be.”

  Janice was going to have to spend more time on the traces they had and the additional ones that would undoubtedly come her way. Her attention snapped back with what Robert said near the end.

  “We’re looking for an identifying signature,” Robert said. “Everyone codes differently. We have been able to pinpoint a few other incidents to dissect. None had the same effect as this last one, but they may have been from the same person.”

  “Looks like you’re going to be real busy, Janice,” said Jim.

  CHAPTER 2

  ANALYSIS

  Janice was the best. She knew it. Her boss knew it. It took a special type to spend hours on end looking at inane code execution messages. Help desk engineers do it all the time; the difference is that they know what the code should be doing. Janice, on the other hand, worked a crossword puzzle with no clues. She had some of the blocks into which letters might fit but not all of them. No clues, few blocks. She loved it.

  Janice was hunting for one person’s work. She had already given “him” a name. He was Tau. She knew a Tau from college who was a pretty sharp code slinger.

  After hours of looking at code and what the CIA had supplemented, she had the electronic equivalent of a hundred file boxes of folders, all needing to be pieced together. It took most of a week just to get a sense of it. But towards the end of the week, she began to see where Tau’s intrusions occurred. The hours passed so quickly and Janice was so focused that she lost track, neither sleeping nor eating.

  All of this was not lost on Jim. “Working pretty hard, aren’t you Janice?” he asked, leaning against the corner of her cube, his brow furrowed.

  Janice cast him a sidelong glance.

  “You know, you’re not the only one shouldering this work. There are teams at the agencies working on this,” Jim said. “Don’t martyr yourself over this.”

  “I know. We scrum every day on the phone,” replied Janice.

  “So how are those going?”

  “OK. But I just don’t think those other guys are on the right track. It’s not that they haven’t been helpful. They’ve been able to sort the wheat from the chaff in finding where Tau—I mean the hacker—has his code at work.”

  “You have a name?”

  “Yeah,” said Janice, biting her lip. “It helps me to give him a name.”

  “OK, but what?”

  “I think we’re missing something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, we now see what he’s doing, but there are other oddities we haven’t noted. It’s not what code instructions are being followed, but how they are being followed. There’s a pattern in the timing of the code execution. For some wacky reason, Tau is executing at different intervals.”

  “Different intervals?”

  “Yeah. This is something no one would normally look at. It’s the time of execution. Look to the left here,” Janice said, pointing to her screen. These are the execution times. Tau’s code is executed in specific millisecond intervals. He’s doing that overtly. It’s not the system clock in control. It’s him.”

  “But why?”

  Janice exhaled. “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t change what the code is doing, right?”

  “I know. It seems like a useless extra step. Unless…”

  Both Jim and Janice remained silent for a few seconds.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless it’s some kind of message,” said Janice.

  “To whom? To us?”

  “Maybe,” said Janice.

  “What code is he using?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” said Janice.

  “Follow that angle a little further. See what you can turn up.”

  “OK,” said Janice, eager to follow the lead.

  Janice started looking at time signatures for some clue. She quickly ruled specific times of day. Focusing on time intervals themselves, where there was more precision. The intervals were almost exact multiples of each other. Each interval was twice as long as the other, at least to the degree computer execution could be that exact.

  Night fell as Janice continued her work. She stopped only to nab Krispy Kreme donuts left over from a meeting and warmed-over coffee. Fueled on sugar and caffeine, she worked through the night.

  Janice was still at work as others filtered back into the building to start the new day. She looked at her watch and knew that Jim must be in his office. She grabbed the printouts on her desk on which she had broken the code and rushed to his office, knocking on the open door. “Jim, what is the oldest code there is?”

  “I don’t know, hieroglyphics?” he ventured.

  “A little newer than that. The first one using electricity,” she said, smiling broadly.

  “Morse?” ask Jim.

  “Yep,” smiled Janice.

  “The timing you were looking at were dots and dashes?”

  “The equivalent,” said Janice.

  “And you were able to decode the message?” said Jim who was now getting excited.

  “Sure did, and guess what it is.”

  “What?”

  “Jim, it’s a love letter!”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE POEM

  You are the Lotus of the West

  I reach out to enjoy your fragrance

  Your words bring me joy

  But I long to touch you

  “You’re sure this is it?” Jim said incredulously.

  “Yep, that’s the whole message,” grinned Janice. “Check it out. Once anyone sees the time-stamp coding and applies dots and dashes to it, the message is perfectly clear.”

  “So where’s the ‘stop’ at the end of each line?”

  “The line organization is mine, but it’s a natural layout.”

  “You’re telling me that some guy in China is attacking our drone aircraft and writing haiku to his sweetie on the side?”

  “Well, we heard it the other day in the meeting: This guy seems to be showing off. Maybe he, if it is a he, is showing off to a girl, if it is a girl. He’s obviously reaching out to someone.”

  Jim shifted dubiously in his seat..

  “He called her Lotus of the West. He’s talking to someone over here, probably the conduit for the code. It was placed on the high side. He needed help to do it. She was that person. He said ‘Your words bring me joy.’ That means they’ve been corresponding some way or another. He said he longs to touch her. Maybe they’ve never met.”

  “So this is some kind of espionage dating service?” cracked Jim.

  “I think it’s typical male behavior.”

  Jim cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well, at least adolescent male behavior,” said Janice. “Look, it’s Tom Sawyer showing off to Becky Thatcher.”

  “With a little more at stake than getting a picket fence whitewashed,” said Jim. “I don’t want to wait for the scrum,” said Jim reaching for the phone. “I am calling a meeting, here, today.”

  The team was able to get to the conference room that afternoon at 2:00 PM.

  The original team assembled, with the exception of Victor Layman, who remained at Lackland. He couldn’t make it from Texas on short notice but conferenced in on a secure link. Janice presented the poem, the code theory, all of it. She had time to prepare a convincing case.

  Robert Agile broke the silence by turning to Megan Chin. “Can you scan the code records we have for a similar time stamp method?”

  Megan nodded.

  “How long?” asked Robert.

  “I can scan it in a couple of hours,” replied Megan, “But the total store is vast. It would take a few days to execute the search over all of it.”

  “What if we used Blue Gene?” asked Victor Layman over the phone. Blue Gene was a supercomputer owned by the Department of Energy, but did double-duty for intelligence when needed.

  “You have access?” asked Megan.

  “I can make it happen,” replied Victor.

  “With Blue Gene, perhaps twenty-four hours,” said Megan.

  Jim weighed in. “Janice, go to Langley. Work with Megan. Get this done. Let’s all report back here at the same time tomorrow.”

  Everyone stood to leave. Janice told Megan she would be at the front door at Langley in an hour. Even though Janice had the ticket to work at Langley, she required Megan to escort her.

  As Janice exited, Jim caught her arm. “You don’t have to wait until tomorrow’s meeting if you find something, you know.”

  “I know,” said Janice thinking this was superfluous. She looked at Jim. He seemed worried. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just have a feeling this guy is deep in our system,” said Jim. When we start looking for something that matches his code, he might see it and get wise.”

  Janice had long ago stopped second-guessing Jim’s hunches.

  At Langley, Janice showed her credentials, passed by the first security check, parked and walked into the building. The lobby displayed the famous array of names of those who died in the line of service for the Agency. For those whose names could not be revealed, there was a star. There were a number of stars. Janice knew who one of them represented.

  The front desk called up Megan and it was not long before Megan appeared, holding out a visitor badge and leading Janice back into the building.

  “Glad to be working with you on this,” Megan, friendlier and more relaxed than she had been in the meetings at Bolling. “That was definitely out-of-the-box thinking, finding that code. How did you come up with that?”

  “I thought about elementary code that was binary but not binary, you know?”

  “Sure,” answered Megan. “Morse code isn’t the same we use today for letters and numbers, but it’s binary. Just a dot and a dash. Could be a zero and a one. But your spotting the execution timing, that was great. Somehow, we never went in that direction, and believe me, we have some heavy duty cryptographers here!”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Janice mumbled.

  “Here we are,” Megan said as she pressed her thumb against a reader beside a door. She entered a code on a keypad and the door opened. Inside was a simple cubicle layout, not unlike where Janice worked. High on the wall near the ceiling was a large digital display ticking off Greenwich Mean Time. Under that was an electronic map of the world with blinking lights communicating something Janice could not grasp. Janice had the right level of clearance to be in this room, or Megan would have loudly announced “Unclear” when she entered and everyone’s computer screens would have moved quickly to screen savers.

  “This is my cube,” Megan said, entering a small cubicle just like the others. In it were three screens. Janice guessed one was for the high side and the other for the low side, or the agency equivalent, but the third was unknown to Janice. However, it was the busiest, with lines of data streaming across it.

  “Have a seat,” Megan said to Janice. It was the only seat beside Megan’s in a tight cubicle. Janice pulled her chair up to Megan beside the screen.

  “This is on Blue Gene,” Megan said of the busy screen. Although Blue Gene was actually on a site in West Virginia, the Agency had a secure link to it.

  “I wrote some code yesterday,” said Megan, “that is searching files for the time signatures similar to the one that you found.”

  “What files are you searching?” asked Janice.

  “Everything,” said Megan.

  “Everything?” asked Janice incredulously since that was a rather broad generalization.

  “Well, just about every trace file we have over the past year, both military and civilian.” />
  “Civilian I guess since you suspect someone is helping Tau?” asked Janice.

  Megan stopped and looked at Janice. “‘Tau?’ You have a name for him?”

  Janice, embarrassed, explained “It makes him a person to me.”

  “OK,” said Megan, “But did you have to name him after my uncle?”

  “You have an Uncle Tau?”

  “Yep. So I guess I will have to start calling the bad guy Uncle Tau,” said Megan.

  “Well, then I hope that your uncle Tau is good at writing love notes.”

  “Hmm, well, in that case, maybe not. Let’s just make it Tau.”

  “OK. So what do we have so far?” asked Janice.

  “I’m glad that you asked,” Megan responded with a smile that depicted her pride in discovery. “Look at this,” as Megan pulled out an iPad sitting on the desk. “I captured some tidbits from files here on my tablet.”

  Megan scrolled through several clipped, decoded messages. “It appears that someone is using your code to send text messages,” she explained. “Look at these.”

  Janice saw what looked like one side of a two-sided conversation:

  Hey what’s up?

  No nothing new here

  You are funny

  “You are getting these from one person?” asked Janice.

  “Yes, and believe it or not, out of billions of traces, these all seem to be from the same person,” said Megan.

  “Who?” asked Janice.

  “Well,” replied Megan with a less-than-confident expression, “that we don’t know. But we have another unit trying to identify the source.”

  “Each of these messages was sent at different times,” said Megan.

  “And how do you know that these were to Tau?” asked Janice.

  “Look at the following,” said Megan scrolling the screen up on the tablet.

  Up is relative. I am on the other side of world. My up is your down. What is up-down with you?

  I send you my best. It is in digits. Want to send you the rest.

  “Wow,” said Janice. “Those are matching responses."