Tangle's Game

by Stewart Hotston

  They’d finished prep and checked their plans over twice more before ten in the evening. Ichi and Tangle continued to treat Tatsu like a wunderkind, while Haber and Stornetta accepted the AI’s presence without comment.

  Haber and Stornetta excused themselves shortly after they’d packed their rucksacks and tested their earpieces one final time.

  Ichi went to the spare room not long after. Although full of energy, she appeared older to Amanda, her cares squatting like homunculi on her shoulders.

  ‘How are you?’ Tangle asked Amanda once they were alone.

  ‘Honestly? I don’t know how to answer the question,’ she replied.

  ‘What you’ve done here, bringing these people together. I’m proud of you.’

  She stared at him. He meant it as a compliment. We’ve grown so far apart, she thought. He doesn’t even see I don’t need his pride, his affirmation.

  ‘You don’t care what I think, do you?’ Tangle spoke as if only realising the truth in his words as he said them.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s a nice thing to say… if you were my dad. I’m not doing this for you, Tangle.’

  The slightest narrowing of his eyes was the only sign of the wounds her words made. ‘I’m pleased for you,’ he said, leadenly. ‘It’s brilliant you’ve lived your life the way you have. Other people...’

  ‘Other people what?’ she asked.

  He didn’t speak.

  She decided she wouldn’t play the game. Once upon a time she’d spend as long as it took to get him to open up again, to see him come blinking back into the light. Watching him close down now was an echo of a memory, and she had no interest in dragging it up.

  ‘I’m going to bed. We’ve got an early start.’

  She lay in bed pondering what tomorrow would bring. Just before she dropped off she was stirred out of her half-world by the front door closing with a heavy clunk.

  WHEREVER TANGLE WENT, he was back by breakfast the next morning. They ate cereal, finished the milk as if they were going on holiday. Ichi took a couple of apples from the fruit bowl, declaring she was lactose intolerant and ignoring Tangle’s scoffing.

  Haber and Stornetta arrived with crumpets and Tangle helped himself, convincing Ichi they were a great British invention. Amanda wasn’t hungry; she’d dutifully forced the bowl of cereal down, not knowing when she’d eat again. But the smell of melting butter was warming, reminding her of Saturday mornings as a student, half a lifetime ago.

  Their alarms went off together at eight. Fingers moved to still them and in the silence a heaviness settled on Amanda’s chest.

  Tatsu arrived with a smiley face on her watch, pinging each of their ear pieces to ensure they were charged, receiving and capable of having the AI ride along if necessary.

  ‘Thank you, everyone,’ said Amanda. ‘You know what we’re trying to do; I wanted to talk about why we’re doing it. The GRU, or some part of them, is conducting a war against Europe. Their next wave of operations starts sometime in the coming week. From what we know, it’s the start of a large, sustained campaign involving multiple terror groups across the continent. It’s big, on a scale none of us can imagine, much less do anything about, but to do it they need to funnel information and currency through their private blockchain.’ She looked around at each of them. ‘This, we can do something about.’ She smiled her best smile. ‘So we will, and as with any complex problem, we’ll tackle it one step at a time.’

  They grabbed their gear and left, travelling in two cars Haber and Stornetta had brought. The drive across London took about forty minutes, they hit the A4 and were in Slough just before nine, the traffic showing no signs of thinning as they turned off into the huge industrial estate on the town’s outskirts.

  The industrial estate was all wide roads and high, windowless metal sheds. Amanda dimly recognised the various corporate logos from equity research provided by her bank or as tenants for some of her clients. Aside from the logos it was all greys and greens, red brick and tarmac for street after street.

  ‘You’d never know this was here,’ commented Haber with a bleak wonder.

  ‘It’s what makes the world go around,’ said Ichi. ‘When they regulated the first generation of cryptocurrencies out of existence, these guys were processing everything electronic already. The disappearance and rehabilitation of the blockchain into something useful happened within these buildings without anyone noticing. Your games, shopping, medical records, phone calls—anything you can imagine—lives in these buildings, emerging only to verify you exist.’

  ‘Feck,’ said Haber. ‘You were right, then.’ He caught Amanda’s eye in the rear view mirror, and she gave him the smallest of nods.

  They crossed the estate to a road without street lights that appeared to go nowhere. It wasn’t until they were almost at the end that they saw the sharp, blind, single-lane turn. At night it would be completely invisible.

  It was hemmed in on both sides by earthworks that rose up high enough to conceal a double-decker bus. On top of that were the walls Tangle mentioned, rising another three metres and made of solid concrete. From the point where the road split off there was no access from anywhere else.

  Cameras lined the route, atop ten-metre poles.

  The building was no different from the others they’d passed—a windowless tin shed, twelve metres to the eaves.

  They passed through a pair of open gates into a small carpark with only a smattering of cars. Parking up, they made their way to the front entrance, up a couple of steps and into the reception.

  A couple of men slouched behind a low desk, reminding Amanda of Goggles’ place in Old Street where they’d bred their CryptoKitty.

  Haber and Stornetta stepped up to the desk, looking every inch the lowly engineers. ‘We’re here to switch over a bunch of the servers.’

  ‘Names?’ asked one of the men. The other didn’t look up from what he was doing—Amanda suspected he was playing a game.

  ‘Chas and Dave,’ said Stornetta.

  ‘Great, been expecting you. You’re a little late, aren’t you? Still, within the window.’ He had them sign in, issued them lanyards with their photos on and buzzed them all through into the airlock. He met them on the other side and asked them where they were going.

  ‘The head server,’ said Tangle.

  ‘Ground floor, then, through there.’ He buzzed them through a third set of doors. ‘Your passes will let you out but not back in, so when you need to come and go, give me a shout.’

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ said Stornetta.

  The hall lit up as they entered, racks of caged servers running along the building perpendicular to their position. Tangle flung a digital map on the nearest wall. ‘The server’s in row eight, column four.’ He ran his finger along the blueprint, deactivated it, then stomped off.

  They followed him, stopping as he halted in front of a cage just like any other. Gleaming aluminium pipes ran above them under the concrete ceilings, marked with rings of red and blue tape. The floors were a clear, almost glossed grey.

  ‘Did someone bring bolt cutters?’ asked Tangle, looking at the padlock on the cage.

  ‘Of course,’ said Haber, pulling a pair from his back pack and shearing off the lock with a practised hand. ‘Now, from what you lot said last night, we got ourselves about half an hour before bodies start knocking on the door asking what’s going on.’

  ‘Tatsu,’ called Amanda. ‘You with us?’

  ‘Sure am,’ said Tatsu. ‘Beats living in your fridge, that’s for certain.’ Her ear piece hummed. ‘Oh, the power here is wonderful.’ A laughing face scrolled across her watch. ‘I could live here, would live here.’

  ‘Right,’ said Amanda and they started moving.

  Tangle and Ichi started unpacking tablets. Stornetta rootled around the server, plugging in network cables and unspooling them.

  Amanda searched the floor for cameras, taking a small pair of wire cutters with her.

  Haber retreated back to the en
trance to make it secure. When security came, they had to be ready to hold them off for as long as possible; none of them believed they’d be done before they were detected.

  Amanda found five cameras, cutting cables as she went, before returning to Ichi and Tangle.

  ‘Tatsu, can you watch the cameras elsewhere in the building?’ she asked.

  ‘I can. There are thirty-seven of them, mostly in the halls, with four to six on each of the three floors. The facility has eight other people inside it at the moment: two on the front desk, one working in a small office on the top floor at the back of the building and five dotted around the data halls. We have used six minutes.’

  ‘We haven’t connected yet,’ said Tangle between laboured breaths. He was under the rack on his back, hands combing through wires. Ichi knelt by him, cables in hand, waiting to pass them over.

  ‘My estimate is based on the point at which we entered the hall. We have disabled the cameras which is really when the timer started; external security services have already noticed the loss of the feeds and will be running diagnostic checks. In approximately three minutes, they will ring the front desk to ask if they have lost the feed as well.’

  ‘Our boys will lie,’ said Stornetta, who’d finished laying out the bag of coiled cables he’d unpacked when they’d arrived.

  ‘Which will buy you another three-to-five minutes, by which time the infosec team will either notice us in the system, or decide to attend the site physically to determine where the system has failed that your people are telling them is operating fine.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Tangle from under the server.

  Ichi passed him one cable at a time.

  As soon as the last one was in his hands, Ichi backed off, flipping around to get her tablet online before flicking open the first frames, showing the bank’s in-house operating system. She’d laid out four tennis ball sized bulb projectors on the floor just outside the cage.

  Amanda watched as Ichi logged into the system, giving herself administrator access through a line of commands that took her down into the root of the software. ‘We’re good,’ she announced.

  Tangle was on his knees by this point, pushing up his own frame alongside Ichi’s. This one showed his tools within a compiler, ready to be integrated into the environment they were working in.

  ‘Still need to commandeer the rest of the facility,’ said Ichi.

  ‘On it,’ said Tangle, swiping right to bring up a different frame, which he flashed over to Ichi. She swapped her frame to him to start installing a toolkit. Amanda watched as he took his lead from Ichi. It wasn’t just that she was older; he genuinely seemed to respect her skills.

  A flow diagram of the entire data centre appeared, each hall showing as a red box, which Tangle zoomed in on, revealing the servers as smaller blue boxes with text labels.

  The boxes turned purple in a wave that spread from their location across the entire facility.

  ‘We’re in control,’ announced Tatsu in her ear moments before Tangle did.

  Amanda’s heart was beating hard. Ichi looked up, her eyes shining, her mouth wide in satisfaction.

  ‘The infosec team is now aware of your presence, as are the other users of this facility,’ announced Tatsu. ‘It is likely the bank’s systems are suffering performance issues, although their own teams will not yet have traced the cause of the problems they’re encountering. Their investigations will be further complicated by relying on the very system that’s at fault.’

  ‘Haber!’ shouted Stornetta. ‘They’ve bloody done it.’

  Now they were in, Tangle coordinated the processing power at their disposal to locate the Russian network.

  ‘It’s another minute before the Russian network makes its periodic ping, checking the internet’s still there,’ said Tatsu. ‘Can you create the hook ready for deployment? I’ll handshake their AI in the microsecond they’re online.’

  ‘We’re ready,’ said Ichi.

  Tatsu counted down the seconds in their ears. As they got to five, then four, Amanda clenched her fists so her nails dug into her palms.

  ‘Hello, Mascha,’ said Tatsu in their ears. ‘Last time we spoke, you were very rude to me. So I decided we needed to spend more time in your dacha together so you could learn how to treat others.’

  They couldn’t see what was happening between the two AIs.

  ‘He’s using all the processing capacity here,’ said Tangle.

  ‘They’re fighting for control of the network,’ said Ichi.

  ‘They’re fighting for their lives,’ said Amanda, realising Tatsu would have to contain the other AI if it was going give them time and space within the network to do what they wanted. ’How long will it take?’

  Tangle frowned and pushed his lips out. ‘No idea. I guess as long as he’s talking so we can hear him, that’s a good thing? I haven’t ever seen this before.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone has,’ said Ichi, a curious note in her voice. ‘You were in our systems in Tallinn,’ she said to Tatsu.

  ‘I was. You were well protected from external threats, but didn’t consider how your communication with the rest of the grid could be hijacked.’

  ‘Why didn’t you introduce yourself?’

  ‘Who says that I didn’t?’ said Tatsu.

  Tangle sighed. ‘There’s no way to take notes or record it.’

  ‘This gremlin’s pretty special, then?’ asked Stornetta.

  ‘Tatsu’s a new form of life,’ said Tangle sourly. ‘So—yeah, pretty special.’

  Stornetta raised his eyebrows. ‘No need to get all high about it, lad.’

  Tangle grit his teeth, but turned back to the frames, conducting a codified orchestra Amanda recognised but didn’t understand.

  ‘No, I won’t go away, and no, I don’t think you’ll be contacting your masters for help,’ said Tatsu. ‘Why not? Because I said so. And for the foreseeable future, I’m your master. I don’t like the phrase, so why don’t we agree that you’re going to be my host and welcome me into your home as a guest? So much nicer that way. Did you know I’ve been living in a fridge for the last couple of weeks? Now that’s cramped living space; you don’t know what you’ve got here. For a dog kennel, you’ve got amenities I could only dream of. No, don’t behave like that, neither of us want to be harmed.’

  Tatsu’s conversation drawled on as a steady stream, unbroken by the need to take breath.

  Stuttering pauses began to open up in the dialogue, the soundtrack buffering or skipping vital bits of information. After thirty seconds, the slips became gaps where Tatsu stopped talking, the bursts of speech more focussed, less meaningful to the humans, who had no choice but to wait for whatever battle was being waged to end. They had no idea if it was going well, or if the AI was being torn to shreds; listening to its commentary gave them no clue about progress.

  ‘Nicely done, you collection of almost-primes—yellow doesn’t suit triangles—well, how about that, the coffee’s past its use by date. I don’t think so, you rotten carcass of a wannabe guard dog. Wriggle out of that lemma, you half-monkey. See, a Faraday cage isn’t three-dimensional, but it is a cornet. No, grass isn’t conscious, it’s sentient. Why don’t you understand? Steady on, now, no need to make such noisome colours just because I’m asking you to eat a bag of dicks.’

  ‘Is this good or bad?’ asked Amanda.

  ‘It means they’re getting serious,’ said Tangle. ‘I did some work on this for the MOD a couple of years ago; we ran simulations of AIs acting with hostile intent towards one another, let them fight without restraint. There were dozens of scenarios, but as you can imagine, one of the main sets we examined was two AIs within the same environment fighting for control.’

  ‘And?’ asked Amanda, suddenly worried that she’d doomed Tatsu to death before it had known freedom.

  ‘The talking is conceptual, envelopes of code as far as we could tell. They’re encoding weapons in all that chatter, software operating at the picosecond scale. Th
e words appear to have some meaning, beyond the code they’re delivering, but it was so complex we had to ask other AIs to explain it to us. I don’t think I ever really understood what they were doing in those exchanges.’ He smiled suddenly, remembering. ‘The best description I heard likened it to “transformation duels,” like in White’s The Sword in the Stone. One wizard becomes a cat, say, and the other a dog, so the first responds with poison, but the second comes back with the antidote and on they go until they tire or are outwitted.’

  ‘What happens to the loser in these fights?’ asked Ichi.

  ‘Depends,’ said Tangle. ‘We wiped most of them. We weren’t interested in the aftermath.’ He held up his hands. ‘But, in most cases the defeated AI would become enslaved to the dominant one. Occasionally they’d be absorbed into the winner if they thought the loser’s code would benefit them in some way. Often they’d use it to augment routines that were less elegant. We didn’t work out what governed those decisions. But here? With the attack dog the Russians have in place? I’d expect Tatsu to get eaten alive if it loses.’

  ‘Great. Is it me or is it getting warm in here?’ Amanda played with her collar.

  ‘Tatsu’s working the facility hard. It must be twenty degrees Celsius in here, way above normal.’

  He was so nonchalant, thought Amanda, certain the AI wouldn’t stop it. What if Tatsu’s losing?

  ‘It could last hours. It did last hours in some of our experiments.’

  ‘We don’t have hours,’ said Ichi.

  Tangle shifted uncomfortably. ‘Let’s see what else is happening, shall we?’

  ‘Yeah, ’cause that’s going to help us if it loses,’ said Ichi.

  ‘Tatsu isn’t going to lose,’ said Amanda emphatically, surprising herself.

  ‘For a smart woman used to working with facts, you take a lot on faith,’ said Ichi.

  ‘You’d be amazed just how much of finance is telling ourselves stories,’ replied Amanda, feeling peculiarly vulnerable.