Anarchy- Another Burroughs Rice Mission

by Theo Cage

  Hunter stepped forward, crunching over the broken glass to the bank of elevators. Was that something Toshi had programmed? Would he spend hours working out small details like that? Hunter wouldn’t. He didn’t have the time. Someone else then?

  “Are you ready, Grace?” he asked, distracted by all the questions he had about the world he was stepping into.

  She joined him in front of the stainless-steel door. Hunter pressed the elevator UP button. There was no response. He tried again. Nothing. Maybe the elevators were never fully installed or had been deactivated. That made sense. Why keep elevators powered up in vacant buildings. But where to start searching then?

  The hackers would be using the stairs. Would they choose the first floor for their office? Too easy; too vulnerable. And they would always have some kind of security in place. Hackers were paranoid by nature.

  The luckiest number for the Chinese is eight because it sounds like fortune in Mandarin. Hunter was willing to bet his adversaries were on the eighth floor. No problem to climb for teenagers climb but inconvenient enough for anyone else and easy to secure with cameras in the stairwells.

  “We’re taking the stairs,” said Hunter.

  “Want me to lead the way?” Grace asked.

  “Let me. I know that’s your specialty but when will I get a chance to do this again?” Grace held out her hand, prompting him to take the lead. In the corner of the lobby was an exit door to the stairwell.

  Hunter paused before opening the door; he hadn’t climbed steps since he was seventeen. He couldn’t wait. But he also had to remind himself—this wasn’t real. He was plugged into a virtual world. Security cameras in the stairwell would not pose an immediate threat to him or Grace but would for Rice when it came time for him to enter the building. The cameras were real. But the signal they sent to the hackers upstairs was digital. That was something Hunter could interfere with.

  He entered the stairwell off the lobby, steps leading up and down ahead of him. He craned his neck up into the stairwell where he saw the first camera, aimed down at the entryway.

  The video unit was out of reach physically, but that was no impediment to Hunter. He focused his attention on the electronics and an IP address appeared in glowing green letters. This was the identifying information for the device, which allowed other technology to communicate and locate the internal processing unit.

  Grace could see the information as well. “We can see where the video feed goes?” she asked.

  “The program we’re using tracks everything. Video. Data. Phone lines. Internet. WiFi. Electrical. Even plumbing.”

  They followed the signal upstairs, a glowing green line snaking up the wall. The camera was hardwired via Ethernet cable, connected to each floor’s individual security box like a daisy chain. Hunter proceeded up the stairs, listening for sounds of occupation, Grace a few paces behind.

  As they reached the third floor, the building shook again. Hunter touched his head, rubbed his eyes. He needed to check the code. The same way he had interceded on the virtual desert by hacking into their ‘game’, someone else was doing the same here. They were creating the effect of a massive tremor, upsetting the balance of the virtual world Hunter and Grace were walking through.

  The more he tried to understand how a programmer could do that, the more impossible it seemed. Is it possible he was being attacked? And who was behind the hack?

  The building shook again, a steady tremor that lasted at least fifteen seconds. Hunter lost his footing and reached for the railing but missed. He was out of practice. He fell sideways, landing on a lower step. Then he fell backwards and tumbled down the steel risers. He caught a glimpse of Grace reaching out for him but for some reason, her hands passed right through his avatar, as if he wasn’t even there.

  He continued to fall, rolling, unable to stop himself, the stairwell a blur of passing railings and painted concrete until everything went completely black.

  He floated there in a dark vacuum, unable to speak or move or connect back with the Internet for what seemed like forever. Hunter had totally lost track of time; he began to panic.

  He had made a terrible mistake.

  What if he had just been hacked while in VR? His brain, jacked into the Internet, was vulnerable like all computing devices. Could someone backdoor his mind?

  Without control he might be trapped in this state forever, lingering in an endless coma, unable to communicate. A digital purgatory.

  炮

  G U N

  Near the Ghost City

  HOW LONG HAD IT BEEN? At least two years since Rice had held a gun in his hands. He had examined the Type 64, a Chinese made semi-auto pistol. He wasn’t a gun nut by any stretch of the imagination, but he had spent weeks of ruthless beatings in prison, unable to defend himself. How different would it have been with this in his hand?

  “Do you know anything about this gun?” he asked Ki, as they drove down the paved two-lane road, north.

  “I know they are not inexpensive. Very hard to come by. And they seem too big for my hands.”

  “How many rounds do we have?” Ki gave Rice a sidelong glance as if to ask, what have you got planned?

  “I packed seventy-five. That’s five magazines worth.” Ki noticed Rice turning the gun around and feeling the grip. “You push that safety lever down, right by your finger, after the first round, the hammer keeps re-cocking. Bang bang bang. Very fast. Very loud.”

  Rice pushed the handgun under the front seat. “What do we do if we’re stopped by the authorities?”

  “Smile. Be polite. No worries.”

  “Except I don’t have any papers.”

  “Oh sorry, I forgot. Look in the glove box.” Rice popped open the door. There was a plastic baggie filled with documents. He opened them, found a passport with his photo. The name on the ID was Henry Holt. Rice smiled. Hunter must have found the travel information he used to get to Beijing.

  “They were done very quickly. Do they look proper?” Ki shrugged. Rice examined his picture. “Where did you get the photo?”

  “The dark web. It’s the only way to get pictures into China without alerting the authorities.”

  “This is me, but I remember smiling in the original.”

  “It’s a deep fake,” said Ki.

  “I thought that trick was only used for video.”

  “They take your picture, smiling in the sun. Take another photo of man like you, serious. And the deep fake app makes a new picture, combining the two, for the passport.”

  “I hope it works,” said Rice, putting the papers back.

  “If not, you have seventy-five bullets.”

  Rice grimaced. “Ki, you are a barrel of laughs.”

  Ki smiled. “Okay, I get it. A barrel full of laughs. That is so funny. They told me you American soldiers have no sense of humor. They were wrong.”

  “It’s the Russian soldiers who have no sense of humor: it’s always cold, the Vodka is too expensive, and they have to buy their own bullets.

  “Yes. I have heard that.”

  “I was going to say it cost an arm and a leg, but I wasn't sure that would translate.”

  “I lived in California for four years. I went to UCLA. Now that cost and arm and a leg.”

  They passed more corn fields, more dusty yards filled with chickens, the occasional emaciated cow.

  Ki turned to Rice. “How much news have you heard about back home?”

  “None,” said Rice. “I was locked in a prison cell. And I heard very little English.”

  “Then you don’t know about President King’s daughter.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was killed in a car accident. In California.”

  Rice shook his head. King was one of the good guys in his estimation. He had worked personally with several Presidents over his career, not all good experiences. One tried to have him killed along with Britt. King was bright and a true leader. “Horrible,” he said.

  “It was an autonomous veh
icle on autopilot,” added Ki.

  Rice sat up in his seat. “What kind of EV?”

  “An Osprey Sport.” Rice mulled that over. He came to Beijing to talk to a whistleblower about Richard Yang’s counterfeit chip technology. The Osprey was a joint US-Chinese collaboration. He couldn’t remember if the company was on Jimmy McKinnon’s list of infected products.

  Could Richard Yang have planned the death of King’s daughter?

  “How far is this ghost city?” he asked.

  “A day. Maybe eight to ten hours.”

  “Do we just drive in?”

  “The Army will be there, protecting the main road from looters. We will take a wide detour around and enter the city from the south side.”

  “Where there will be more soldiers.”

  “Exactly. But it will be nighttime. We will have to be stealthy.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  “Ghost Recon,” answered Ki.

  “What’s Ghost Recon?”

  “A video game by Tom Clancy. That mission was all about stealthiness. And I’ve played it through twice.”

  士兵

  S O L D I E R

  RICE HQ

  HUNTER OPENNED HIS EYES. Or someone else did; he couldn’t be sure. It took a computer instruction or a voice command to activate the tiny electrodes that stimulated his eyelids to open or close. Most people wouldn’t give a trivial subconscious action like lifting an eyelid much thought. But this was a big deal for Hunter. Just as important to him as making sure his ventilator was working and the batteries were charged. He wouldn’t last long without breathing assistance.

  He found himself back in his lab. Grace was staring at him, worry lines wrinkling her forehead.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  There was a click, then a burst of static from Hunter’s voice synthesizer, like the whole system had rebooted and was slowly chugging coming back to life.

  “I was totally out. Shut down.”

  “From the fall?” she asked.

  “I don’t see how a virtual fall—no, it had to do with the earthquake.”

  Grace shook her head, never taking her eyes off his. “Can you hear yourself? An earthquake? In a video game? Do you know how serious that was? You were lost to us, Hunter. We couldn’t communicate with you. Everything was shut down. It was like you were in a coma.”

  “I was hacked,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Like a kiddy scripter. I modified that hacker’s program, but I didn’t protect my code. Someone came in and tried to backdoor me.”

  “In human language?”

  “They got inside my head.” Grace raised both eyebrows. “I couldn’t turn off the connection,” he said. “That was the strangest feeling. You can’t imagine—”

  “No, I can’t imagine. Hunter, this experiment of yours has almost killed you a couple of times. In a matter of days.”

  “I was almost there. I was only a few floors away from cyberwar central.”

  Grace stepped back and put her hands in her pockets and paced in front of him. She knew that drove him crazy. It wasn’t easy following her with his eyes. “How many scientists have died doing experiments on themselves?” she asked.

  “Surprisingly few,” he answered. “Zheleznyakov, the Russian who invented nerve gas. Another Russian who gave himself one of the first blood transfusions. But it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know that the volunteer blood donor had malaria. Then the American, Midgley, who was working on a pulley system to help lift people out of bed, died of strangulation.”

  “By the same pulley system he invented. And don’t forget Madame Curie.”

  Hunter didn’t respond. He didn’t like losing arguments. He wasn’t going to win this one.

  “My favorite is the inventor of the Segway,” added Grace.” He drove himself off a cliff.” She turned back to Hunter. “Like you did today.”

  Hunter didn’t respond. He thought the analogy was apt. He did drive off a cliff. A virtual reality cliff, but a cliff none-the-less.

  “I made a mistake. Thankfully, you saved me.”

  “No more surfing. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Grace, I know you’re worried about me. But Rice needs help. He’s all alone in a totalitarian country with no backup. I promised I’d be on his six.”

  “There must be another way, Hunter. You are here because of your brain. I’m the soldier. Send me in to do the brute force. You stay here and guide me.”

  Hunter’s speaker was silent. Grace watched his chest, saw it rise and fall. It was the only way she had to know if he was alive when he wasn’t talking. Which was rare.

  “I agree. We need to get you to Rice’s side,” he finally said. He sounded confident but that wasn’t the way he felt. Having your brain hacked was a nightmare. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t communicate. Without Grace he might be locked in that state for hours, days even. He was glad to avoid virtual reality until he could figure out a failsafe, some switch he could pull if someone came after him again.

  Despite his concern, he was still glad they had VR to work with. Getting to Rice’s location by commercial jet and other conventional transportation would take over twenty hours not counting check-in and customs and the timing of flights. The distance was over seven thousand miles. The fastest military plane in the US arsenal was the 108 Rapier, which could reach speeds of just under two thousand miles an hour. That would shorten flight time to three and a half hours. But the maximum internal fuel range of the Rapier was forty-three hundred miles, a little more than halfway to China. Distance was clearly an issue.

  Grace would have to help Rice by virtual reality. There was no other alternative.

  b计划

  P L A N B

  Near Ghost City

  EVEN FROM A DISTANCE, the Ghost City appeared surreal. The four-lane highway they were driving on arrowed off to the horizon; in the cool distance tall buildings of glass and steel punctured the sky, surrounded by deserted fields of corn and rice. A metropolis planted in the middle of rural farmlands. It reminded Rice of a scene from The Wizard of Oz.

  Ki stopped the car. He didn’t even bother to pull over; the highway was empty, spotless, appearing as if it had never been used before.

  “The roadblock is another two to three miles down the road,” offered Ki. “Nothing fancy. A guard shack and four soldiers working twelve-hour shifts. If they were to raise the alarm, there are Black Whirlwind helicopters at Guangdong that could be here with a full platoon in about two hours.”

  “How many in the city itself?” asked Rice.

  “A few hundred soldiers. But considering the city will one day house over a million people, they are pretty spread out along the perimeter. And these grunts aren’t elites. They’re kids from the farms in the area. Four weeks of basic training, then basically security guard duty.”

  “Do you know where we’re headed?”

  “I have a coordinate. A building.”

  “What are your instructions?”

  Ki lifted his head. “Instructions?”

  “I received a coded instruction from Hunter. What is your mission?”

  “My job is to take you to the appointed drop off point. From there, you’re on your own. Didn’t Hunter say something about Pips? Whatever a pip is.”

  Rice stared at his tour guide. True, he didn’t look like he had ever received military training.

  “How did you avoid the compulsory draft in South Korea?”

  “University in the United States.”

  “Do you know how to use a handgun?”

  “I’ve been on a range.”

  “You’re an NOC right?” NOC was ‘non-official cover’, civilians operating covertly for the CIA. Ki nodded, both hands on the wheel, shoulders slumped.

  “Why?” Ki asked.

  “My instructions are minimal. Get me to the drop off point and we’ll work things out from there.” Rice could have said we and spread out the blame. But he wanted Ki to un
derstand that they were operating on very limited intel.

  “Maybe there are instructions there,” offered Ki.

  Rice shook his head. “Here’s the problem. I can call my team on your SAT phone. But the Army will track down the signal. They know I’ve escaped from Quinjang and can easily put the two together. A call made this close to their shiny new Ghost City could set off alarms. We’d be up to our necks in PLA and Black Whirlwinds in no time at all.”

  “So, what do you suggest?”

  “We, both of us, go to the waypoint. If we can’t intuit what the next step is, we try plan B.”

  “What’s plan B,” asked Ki.

  “I’m working on that.” Both men sat quietly for a moment. Ki sighed and turned to Rice.

  “I had a feeling seventy-five rounds wasn’t going to be enough.”

  指纹

  F I N G E R P R I N T

  Ghost City

  TOSHI STAYED AWAY from his Wasteland project, believing that the program was inactive, that he had some level of control now because it was closed.

  Meanwhile, the Three Soprano’s began the process of shutting down the US stock market. They were targeting three systems: thee NYSE, NASDAQ and the Federal Reserve.

  These organizations had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on security over the years to prevent such a breach. They were still being hacked daily: unsuccessfully, but each entity was well aware of the threat and was prepared.

  The Three Sopranos were not interested in stealing user data, which was a typical target for criminal operations. They could make billions if they could acquire access to thousands of pension accounts and mutual funds, however the personal data of individual investors was highly secure.