Anarchy- Another Burroughs Rice Mission

by Theo Cage

The driver guffawed and lifted one hand off the wheel. “See the ink on my fingers? The New York Times. the Washington Post. We have libraries here too.”

  Rice was impressed. A man who read newspapers.

  “Why are you here?” the farmer asked.

  Rice didn't answer automatically, which was not the correct way to respond, the way he had been trained. But he hesitated anyway. He felt tired to his bones and wanted to close his eyes. But that's not why he thought about his answer. He sensed intelligence in the other man. He would see through a shallow lie.

  “I was kidnapped,” offered Rice.

  “And you escaped?”

  “Is that so surprising?”

  “No one escapes from Quinjang.”

  “I thought you were clever. And yet you believe that.” The driver laughed. Rice noticed his yellowing teeth, several missing, a wide gap in his smile.

  “What the government tells us doesn't count. I've lived here my whole life with hundreds of relatives and cousins, and no one has ever told a tale of an escaped prisoner hiding in the fields. That would be too good a story to pocket.”

  “Then you'll have a great tale to tell,” declared Rice.

  “How did you—”

  “There was a power outage.”

  “It was just the prison then. The electricity in the village was uncharacteristically consistent.”

  “That would be why. Where did you go to University?”

  “I told you: The New York Times and the Washington Post.”

  “No schooling?”

  “Lucky me,” he said, deftly dodging an ugly pothole. “You must be a spy, then. An American man in Quinjang—there would be no other explanation.”

  “The People's Liberation Army thinks all Americans are spies,” answered Rice.

  “See how you answered that? If you called me a spy, I would laugh until my sides hurt. You didn't even smile.”

  “Are you a spy?” asked Rice.

  The driver laughed out loud. “That is a hilarious proposition for a poor farmer surrounded by hectares of struggling rice seedlings.” Rice knew a hectare was the metric version of an acre.

  “But we believe all Chinese are spies.”

  “You are not so cleverly changing the subject.” This time Rice laughed. How long had it been since he last smiled? Weeks in prison messes up with your perception of who you are and where you find happiness.

  “Why were you in prison? What pretense did the government use?” questioned the driver

  “What’s your name?” asked Rice.

  “Lui,” said the man. “A very common name in Liaoning province. And you?”

  “They call me Rice. “

  Lui laughed again. “You are in the right place.” He pointed at the fields. “Here there is rice everywhere. It will be easy for you to hide.”

  “You won't alert the authorities?”

  “That would earn me nothing. If I turned you in, what kind of story would I tell? Best to extend the tale. My friends will have to provide me with many free drinks if the story is especially good. “

  “Well, happy to oblige.”

  “Good. Now let me show you my beautiful home.”

  之字形

  Z I G Z A G

  HUNTER OPENNED HIS EYES and scanned the second-floor lab at HQ, his heart racing, perspiration running into his eyes. That was a rare experience. Hard to get your pulse up when you’re hogtied into a titanium cage, he thought. It’s not like he could just step outside and go for a jog. Like Grace did every morning. Which he envied to no end.

  He watched his three researchers going about their tasks totally unaware of what had just happened to him.

  He had kicked ass.

  It was exhilarating.

  That program, Wasteland. What a ride!

  He was waiting for an update on last night’s satellite feeds when he decided to poke around the program he had downloaded from the Chinese server farm. It was fascinating. The programmer’s goal had obviously been to turn the Internet into a virtual reality (VR) playground. Instead of typing a search command into a keyboard, the user could walk through a virtual library, pull books down from shelves, watch YouTube videos, play music.

  If you wanted to visit another Internet site, Hunter discovered he could simply will himself there: he could walk, run, hell, he could even fly inside the program.

  Normally to access VR you needed a special headset with dual color screens that sent a different moving image to each eye, creating the impression of three-dimensions. Hunter didn’t need the headset. His direct brain implant plugged right into his visual cortex. All he had to do was close his eyes and call up the program.

  Hunter had started up the application and was instantly dumbstruck.

  He had legs again.

  He could walk, run, dive to the ground and roll, pull himself up again with his arms and hands and leap forward. Intoxicating, he thought, even though he knew it was a fantasy. Was this some semi-dream state, he wondered, facilitated by the neural interface? Within seconds of turning on the program, he awoke in a different world. He was restored, youthful, full of energy.

  He looked down at his body, touched his fingers and hands, waved his arms about. So real. He could make out the tiniest details, fine hairs, the pores in his skin. Somehow his brain had generated a new reality. He was moving through the Internet via the interface, but his body was there too, his original body, fully functioning and alive.

  He looked around. No longer was he the victim of an onslaught of sounds and images and data. He was simply a man in a vast museum/library, surrounded by shelves, doors to other rooms, display screens. He took a deep breath. He scanned the books on the shelves: classics, novels, scientific documents, medical papers, pornographic videos, movies and songs; all random, unorganized. He shook his head. How could he find anything in this chaos?

  He had walked the aisles for several minutes, as if in a lucid dream. He even wiped one finger across a bookshelf looking for a layer of dust. There was none. This world he had created in his head with the help of Wasteland was pristine and neat. But he didn’t want to forget why he was here. He was doing this for Rice and for Grace: find the non-state hackers who had killed the President’s daughter. Now that he was here, plugged in directly to the web, he wasn’t sure where to start.

  He stopped and turned. The aisles went on forever. Walking through a virtual library with hundreds of millions of records would get him nowhere, although walking was a wonderful novelty. Hunter knew the human mind was a specialized mapping computer evolved to manage movement and location is several dimensions. He needed to apply that highly developed skill to his present problem.

  The hacker in China had taken pains to hide his footsteps, that was a common technique for these cybercriminals. They would create dozens of false addresses and then ping pong their commands through the maze they had created. At ground level, looking at each location and then tracking down the next would take forever. But Hunter had a sense that if he could look down at the process, like a helicopter pilot following a getaway car, he could see the bigger picture.

  So that’s what he did. He lifted himself up above the stacks, until the aisles below became lines on a map spreading out in every direction. Where was the last intrusion made by the hacker? On the Pacific coast highway north of LA. What was the data and time? Just grasping for that information made the map spin.

  A thousand bright lines of possible interconnection coalesced into one bright green vector. That line ended at a location in Seattle. A major Internet node. It was also a location of highest probability, a locus used by the dark web.

  More lines darted across the map. To Ireland, then Israel, back to the US, to Bosnia, Dubai, Sydney. The United Emirates. Each location appeared faster than the one before, the bright green line now a blur. The information had always been there, buried in the clutter and the hum of data flying in a million directions. But Hunter’s mind partnered with the AI his lab was using, the pairing of a
human and the Internet, isolated the hacker's intentions.

  The zig zagging vector stopped over the Chinese mid-west. Hunter zoomed down. The library was gone here, only a wide plain existed: fields, rice-paddies, low mountains, a river—and a complete city including a downtown with skyscrapers and parks and modern rapid transit. All still, frozen in time.

  As Hunter drifted down from the upper atmosphere, he realized the city was uninhabited. How strange. Deserted freeways and open spaces, office towers, thousands of brand-new suburban row houses. Not a single vehicle or person on the roads: a modern version of a ghost town.

  He stepped down on a sidewalk in full shadow, a twenty-two-story office building towering over the street. The entry door was glowing red. Like a scene in a video game, he had located one of the treasures.

  Hunter walked up to the glass door, his heart thundering in his chest. He expected his hand to pass through the glass, like a phantom, his dream about to end. But the door arced open. He felt the coolness inside, heard the echo of his shoes on the white marble. This world was too real; his mind unable to identify any glitches or insufficiencies. He could live here, he thought, do his work, his research, go for a walk when he needed a break. Could Grace join him? Was that possible?

  He paced over to a bank of elevators, expecting to confront security guards or maintenance personnel. He had to remind himself this wasn’t real. This was only a representation of reality, modified and articulated by massive computing power—the equivalent, in fact, of millions of computers.

  He pressed the elevator button. The door opened and he stepped inside. He stared at the bank of floor numbers. Floor seven lit up.

  That must be where the hacker lived. The program had taken him right to the cyber terrorist’s front door.

  Then the lights flashed on and off in the elevator and he was whisked back to his lab and the real world before he could react.

  免费的

  F R E E

  WEY SAW HIMSELF AS THE LEADER of the hacker team since his uncle was high up in the party and he spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese. In reality, the orders flowed to them via a Russian mob connection in Moscow, which made Zerzy the go-between, as she was the only Soprano that spoke fluent Russian.

  The first order of business had been the hack on Kennedy’s Osprey EV. The Three Sopranos were hired because their attacks were untraceable. And they had proven themselves: ransom attacks on Deutsche Bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Apple, Novartis, Mastercard and many more netting tens of millions of juicy American dollars.

  Hacking wasn’t that difficult anymore—you can buy all the tools you need on the dark web for untraceable crypto. Leaving the scene of the crime without clues being left behind was another thing entirely. That was why countries like China preferred to hire non-governmental operators like the Three Sopranos. Red Dragon was the Chinese government’s cyber army. But they rarely stayed anonymous long, after clomping around the Internet, leaving clumsy muddy boot prints everywhere. Troglodytes.

  Zerzy’s contact, a Russian operative stationed in Iceland, was overjoyed with the Osprey hack.

  “The President's daughter AND a baby billionaire. The media is making it look like an autonomous driving error. That will hurt Osprey, tank their shares and make billions for our friends shorting the stock. The President of the United States will be grief stricken. A win-win-win as they say.”

  And no blowback. Their ID isolation trick guaranteed that. There was never a direct connection between the commands sent from the Soprano HQ to Jordan Kennedy’s car.

  Most hackers use a technique where they send the commands through hundreds of different servers making the process of tracing laborious and time consuming. But a dedicated detective, with enough time, will always eventually track down the source.

  Wey’s system was untraceable. No return addresses. No breadcrumb trail.

  Wey built the hack when he was in grade school and surprisingly, kept it to himself. As a result, he was a multimillionaire at the age of seventeen. No one knows that other than his Three Soprano pals. All the money sits in bitcoin accounts.

  The Russian operative was not happy about the F-35 attack, though.

  “The crash wasn’t ordered. You were supposed to take control. That was all.”

  “And what makes you think we terminated it?” asked Zerzy, her voice full of suppressed rage. Although she distinctly remembered Yang betting her she couldn’t.

  “Who else? Two days after the Osprey takes a dive into the ocean, an American fighter jet claims Russian fighters are in US airspace and then crashes into the Gulf of Mexico. The media made the connection right away.”

  “Buzzfeed made that story up. It’s what they do.”

  “You’re saying you had nothing to do with the crash?”

  “Did you pay us for that?” the Russian paused. She had a point. Zerzy was as mercenary as they get. And even if they did, kids playing with their toys, no one could trace it back to the three Sopranos anyway.”

  “Maybe it was a freebie.”

  “I don’t know what that word means.”

  “Freebie. For free.”

  “I just said, I don’t know what that word means. The word free. Nothing is free. Ever.”

  “Fine, but the Americans are pissed. Super pissed. Your isolation system fails and there will be no place for you to hide.”

  “It won’t fail.”

  “Good. I’d hate to lose you.”

  “We go to next item?”

  “Yes. You have authorization.”

  “When next transfer takes place?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “What’s the release code?”

  “Ready to write this down?” asked the Russian agent. “Here’s the code: Don’t fuck up.”

  “Very funny,” grunted Zerzy.

  语图

  S O N O G R AM

  HUNTER TEXTED GRACE as he raced from the main lab at Rice HQ to one of the smaller meeting rooms on the second floor. The annoying squeak of the nylon track on the marble floor irritated him more than usual. He had worked on that problem in the past but was unable to come up with an easy solution. He tried silicone spray but that only resulted in him pirouetting in circles until he wore off the lubricant. He didn’t need to have people alerted to his whereabouts. Today he desired stealth. Somebody, some staffer or technician was going to ask him a question if he passed him in the hall and Hunter was going to explode. “I’m not Alexa,” although sometimes he sounded like one of those brainless robotic household appliances.

  If he had regular hands and fingers like most humans, he would be happy to type the question into a browser or a search engine. But he didn’t. So just leave me alone. I have things to do, dammit.

  He rolled into meeting room B. No reason. It was just close. And no windows. He didn’t want to be distracted by a troop of hungry javelinas scrounging for food. Or a scrawny coyote. Or a fascinating formation of cumulonimbus rumbling high over the desert floor.

  The text to Grace was direct-to-receiver or DTR. He simply thought a phrase and the text was transmitted from his crowded cerebellum to the digital implant in his shoulder and out through the office Wi-Fi to Grace's iPhone. Could the NSA capture the send? Probably. Their Wi-Fi was reasonably secure. But the NSA weren’t reasonable. And they were everywhere, the bastards. Using circuitry and programming DARPA had developed a decade earlier, some engineered by Hunter himself. He was young and foolish then. And he also knew that was a poor excuse for believing bureaucrats had his best interests at heart.

  The text to Grace said:

  Need to see you now. Urgent.

  Then he sent a location:

  Meeting room B.

  Following the message, Hunter had to squint as hard as he could, not an easy task considering he had no muscular control of his forehead. What he called a squint was him activating a kind of data brake. He was stopping his consciousness from inadvertently sending more text to Grace’s phone than necessary. Hunter
’s DTR was sometimes like a pump that wouldn’t stop pushing water. Once the communication line was open, his thoughts tended to keep tumbling through. Just thinking about her sometimes began a process of flipping on all the switches. Hunter could see her in his mind’s eye—her purposeful walk, her predatory focus, a rare flash of a smile—and all the alarm bells would start to ring. Hunter wasn’t sure what the resulting text message would look like, but he knew it wouldn’t be good. Honesty was important. But not that kind: not an unvetted stream of need and desire and hopeless reliance blasted at the woman he loved.

  If he could, he would have shuddered at the thought.

  Grace stepped into the room, a black armored tablet in one hand. “What’s urgent?” she asked, obviously unaware of what he had been thinking.

  Hunter turned. She was wearing a simple black tee and dark grey jeans. He stared at her for a moment, trying to get his bearings, but not succeeding. She was beautiful.

  “Close the door, Grace.” She frowned and did as he asked, stood at ease beside the rooms’ single table, waiting.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  Her face fell slightly. “You couldn’t find anything on Rice?” She obviously didn’t think the news was good. She was analyzing his stony expression. Not much help there.

  “Well—” and before finishing his thought, he rolled away from her, considering the best way to explain his discovery. And to get her to come with him on his next search. “This is my proposal. I want you to join me on the Internet. The two of us. A deep dive together.”

  Grace cocked her head to one side. “Hunter, if you think I’m going to do some weird mind meld with you—”

  “Mind meld?” he said, “I don’t even know what that is. I’m talking about virtual reality.” Although the thought of a mind meld with her sounded sexy as hell.

  Grace sat down at the boardroom table, laid the tablet down. “You mean wear those goofy goggles that make me sick to my stomach?”