Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  Igloo crossed her arms and stared out the window.

  “There are some interesting parallels between you and Angie,” Maria said. She set her coffee down and came to stand next to Igloo. “You believe in the power of psychology and embody it in the work you do on chat bots.”

  “They’re not chat bots,” Igloo muttered. “Call them personalities.”

  “The personalities are based on cutting edge psychological research, and we’ve got a dozen psychologists on staff. Yet you won’t see a therapist yourself because you had a negative experience in the past. Angie won’t accept your BDSM activities because she has past experience with abuse. You consider her behavior irrational and illogical, but you don’t question your own.”

  A pit grew in Igloo’s stomach. “I sound like an idiot when you put it that way.”

  “No,” Maria said. “Just a human being, like the rest of us. Look, I’ll offer you a little trade. Forget about sending Angie any scientific evidence. That’s never going to work. Instead, I’ll go talk to her and see what I can do to encourage her to move in the direction of acceptance. It’s not going to be overnight, and you shouldn’t expect it to be.”

  “What’s the trade?” Igloo said, fearing the answer.

  “You agree to look for a kink-friendly, poly-friendly, queer-friendly therapist. Of which, I am sure there are many. This is Portland, after all. Give therapy a genuine try. Even if you decide it’s not for you, at least you’ll have tried it.”

  Chapter 23

  Igloo woke, her mind racing. It was sixteen days since the FISA court order had been delivered, and they had about two weeks left before they’d be forced to turn over their internal architecture. Before then, they had to completely revise Tapestry so there’d be nothing left in the clear for the government to spy on.

  She talked briefly with Angie last night, and they were going to spend the morning working together. Angie had promised to answer her questions about the elevator shaft.

  Essie entered the bedroom, carrying Igloo’s coffee. She climbed into the bed and waited in presentation pose. Igloo stroked Essie’s cheek, then took the mug.

  “Thank you,” Igloo said, releasing Essie.

  “You’re welcome,” Essie said, and she nestled in the crook of Igloo’s arm.

  Igloo leaned in close and breathed deeply, inhaling Essie’s scent. They’d had a few days of relative peace, and it was nice to feel close to Essie again.

  “Do you want to go to Sanctuary tonight?” Igloo asked. “We haven’t played out in a while.”

  “Just you and I? No surprise visits from Charlotte or Heather or anyone else?”

  “Just the two of us.”

  “I’d like that,” Essie said.

  A few hours later, while Igloo was at work, Angie texted her to meet in the elevator. They went in together, and Angie punched a sequence of floor numbers. The elevator descended to the basement and then kept going for a moment longer. When the door opened, there was a couple of feet of bare concrete floor, and then a metal door.

  After years of visiting different safe rooms and secret lairs, Igloo was ready to take it all in stride. But she didn’t understand why Angie had kept it secret for so long. If she hadn’t told Angie about Ben finding the door, would Angie have ever revealed the room to her?

  Angie unlocked the door, and they entered the room. It was on the small side, maybe eight by twelve feet, but there was a desk along one wall with several computers.

  “EMF proof?” Igloo asked.

  Angie nodded. “Pull up the code you’ve been working on. Show me what you’re doing.”

  Angie made maximum use of the space, pacing back and forth across the diagonal, while Igloo brought up the onion routing code and showed Angie the simulations she’d been running.

  “This is the real issue,” Igloo said. “I made no changes, but packet latency went up consistently across the board.”

  “You confirmed these numbers?” Angie asked. “It’s always half a millisecond?”

  “Yes. Someone swapped out a router or something,” Igloo said. “We shouldn’t be surprised. We never expected Tapestry’s internet connection would be secure.”

  While the room was secured from casual EMF transmission through radio shielding, they had a conduit to the outside world via a highly secured network using multi-hop VPN. Igloo felt a little guilty when her phone buzzed with an incoming notification from Essie.

  She checked it out anyway. Essie had sent a selfie in fishnet stockings and high heeled boots.

  Essie: You like this for tonight?

  Igloo suddenly wished she could be home with Essie. Yes, she’d enjoyed the novelty of both Charlotte and Heather. But there was a richness to her play with Essie that she couldn’t get elsewhere, and she realized how much she missed that. Playing with Essie meant so much more to Igloo, and now, that was all she could think about. She hoped they would play hard, and then cuddle together afterwards, talking long into the night.

  Igloo > I love it. I can’t wait to see you. I miss you so much.

  “I don’t care if it’s compromised,” said Angie, “but I do care if they’re increasing surveillance. It’s the trend that matters. They’ll maximize surveillance before an operation.”

  “Angie, you’re basing that on what you’ve seen on TV. You know a lot about hacking, but you don’t actually know how the government works.”

  “Don’t tell me what I don’t know. I’m reading the situation. You’d see it too if you weren’t so distracted about going home to fuck your girlfriend.”

  “Sorry,” Igloo said.

  “It’s fine,” Angie said. “Not like our lives depend on this or anything.”

  “Damn you, I’m here. I want to fix this as much as you do.” Igloo wrote a few more lines of code. She’d repurposed one of the chat personalities to be able to mimic a given person’s tone and style of communication. All it took was a history of messages to analyze.

  It had been Angie’s idea that they could train the AI on whatever public messages they could glean from the heads of the assorted intelligence agencies. When push came to shove, they might be able to insert the software into a government communication, and either gain new data or buy themselves time by inserting contradictory orders.

  For a number of reasons, the latency just being one of them, Angie’s paranoia was at an all-time high. The government was truly after them, but sometimes Angie’s paranoia was like a soldier in battle yelling “Grenade!” all the time. Yes, there really was a threat of grenades, but keeping everyone panicked wasn’t constructive.

  “It’s ready to go,” Igloo said.

  “Test it on me,” Angie said.

  “You’ll know it’s the chatbot. That’s not a test.”

  “No, have it mimic me on chat, and talk to everyone else. Maybe it can take over my job and I can do some real work.”

  “People will be suspicious if you start replying to all your chat messages.”

  “Make it simulate my normal response time.”

  “You only respond to eleven percent of your chats, and your average response time is two days. I had to override that behavior for your simulation to actually get something useful.”

  “Eleven percent?”

  “10.4 percent to be precise. I was being generous.”

  Angie’s shoulders slumped. “I wasn’t always this way,” she mumbled.

  “You weren’t always a CEO.”

  “This is hard. I want it to be over sometimes. I want to be done. To go home, be with Thomas, just be an ordinary person again.”

  Igloo rubbed Angie’s shoulder. “I’m not sure you were ever an ordinary person.”

  Angie turned to look at her. “Sometimes I see you, distracted with Essie or Charlotte, and I get so frustrated because I want all your attention on T2. Then I remember that the reason we’re doing any of this is exactly so that people can have what you have.”

  “You know about Charlotte?”

  Angie stared
at her and raised an eyebrow. “You told me you were seeing other people. You think I wouldn’t dig?”

  “I know, I know. I’m just surprised you haven’t hassled me about it. You gave me such a hard time over the BDSM stuff. I figured poly would set you off.”

  “I’m trying to be cool with it,” Angie said. “I don’t understand a lot of what you do.” She took a deep breath. “To me, sex and intimacy is scary. Threatening. For years I couldn’t even handle Thomas touching me without asking first. To be so casual, so trusting about it, especially with people who are almost strangers, is completely foreign to me.”

  Igloo laughed. “I didn’t start out trusting, you know. I’ve had my share of crappy experiences.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Not just my dad. Practically every male I encountered. Other kids. Other adults. Sometimes I wonder if I had a sign on my back that said ‘molest me’ when I was growing up. But being in the scene has taught me how to how to negotiate for what I want and need.”

  “Which is some fucked up shit.” Angie stared into Igloo’s eyes. “Look, I talked to Maria, you know, and she encouraged me to think a little more objectively. She says it’s my responsibility to deal with my reaction to activities, not yours. I’m trying, okay?”

  Igloo checked out Angie’s face. She let go of the defensive reaction she’d instinctively reached for. “Thank you. And yeah, I guess I like some fucked up shit. Look, I’m sorry I’m so distracted with my whole weird life.”

  Angie smiled a sad smile. “I’m glad you have a life to be distracted by.”

  “We’re up against so much, I’m not sure we can afford my level of distraction.”

  “I am confused, you know,” Angie said. “You were so concerned about Tapestry being an egalitarian company. About fighting the patriarchy. Equality above all else. How did you get from there to where you are?”

  Igloo took a deep breath. The same question plagued her. “My relationship with Essie isn’t equal. She gets me coffee, she takes care of me, I get to make certain decisions she doesn’t get to make. It’s not fair according to the way I used to look at life. But it is equitable. We each get something out of it. We both find it desirable. Hot. Full of passion.”

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Igloo wondered if she was describing now or sometime in the past. Their relationship wasn’t the same as it once was. Everything was so complex with poly. But she wasn’t going to downward spiral. They were still together, ergo there was still hope for the future. Heck, they had plans to play tonight.

  “Essie doesn’t want me to take care of her. If I get her coffee, it does nothing for her. Whereas if she gets me coffee, I get…well, let’s not go there. The point is, we each want different things. It’s not the same for each of us, but we each get something we want out of it. Equality is not always best.”

  “Strange words, coming from you,” Angie said.

  Igloo nodded. “For so long I was pushing for one thing, thinking it would lead to a better life, because that was what I’d been told by society. But it turned out that something else was better for me.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Imagine if we didn’t have to fight the government,” Angie said. “Imagine if the government was actually on our side, and we were working together to make the world a better place.”

  “This is the only world I’ve ever known. I can’t imagine it otherwise.”

  “When I was young and naïve, I assumed the government was on our side. Sometimes I wish I could still be that innocent.”

  “Angie Benenati, innocent? I can’t imagine that.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Are we done here?” Igloo gestured toward her screen.

  “Yeah. We’re going to be ready in time?”

  “Two weeks. Yeah, we’ll roll out T2 three days ahead of the general release. Let a limited beta group test it.”

  Angie shook her head. “We can’t do that. No early signals to the government.”

  “We can’t roll out an entirely new architecture to three hundred million people without a test deployment.”

  “What if the governments stops us before we can deploy to everyone else?”

  “How will they stop us?”

  “Assume they can and will do anything. Court order. Shut down our servers. Arrest us all. Blow up this building if necessary.”

  “We’ll do a dead man’s deployment switch. If we aren’t actively stopping it, T2 will roll out to everyone.”

  “The current version is vulnerable,” Angie said. “If the government gets wind of what we’re doing, they could take over our update servers, push out their own fake 1.x release, and change the update mechanism so that it’ll never download 2.0.”

  “So on top of everything else you want us to roll out a more secure updater ahead of the T2 release?”

  “Do you see a way around it?”

  “No, but…” She realized she was tired and overwhelmed. That was not going to get them anywhere. “I guess we can take the work we did on T2 for the updater and port it over to the V1 update mechanism.”

  Igloo added it to her mental to-do list. She’d ask Ben and Diana to work on it with her. They’d have to get it done over the next couple of days, on top of everything else they had to do. She’d work late tonight.

  No, wait. She was going out with Essie tonight. She couldn’t let Essie take second place to anything. Their relationship couldn’t afford any more neglect right now. Igloo thought about the photo Essie sent. A sudden fantasy of her lips running over the softness of Essie’s thighs. Sigh.

  “The T2 update should go out the same day as the Tapestry party,” Angie said.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s going to be media coverage of the party. I’ll make a brief statement to the press. Since we can’t hide the release, then we need to make it as public as possible.”

  “That party is supposed to be a private employee event,” Igloo said. “A celebration of hitting a half billion users. Don’t use it as a platform.”

  “Everything is secondary to getting this release out before the FISA compliance date. If we make a public announcement to coincide with a scheduled event, it furthers the cover story that this is all part of a preexisting plan. The party has been planned for months, since well before they hit us with the court order.”

  “Plausible, smausible. Who cares? If we have a dead man’s switch, then the deployment is going out regardless of what they do.”

  “Yeah, but I’d still prefer that I don’t go to jail for failing to obey a court order.”

  Oh yeah. That. Igloo’s heart thudded. She’d done many things she could go to jail for, and while she and Angie took exhaustive steps to cover their trail, it was always something she was aware of, somewhere in the back of her mind. But this went beyond anything they’d done before. And she’d never had so much to lose. Her new life. Essie. Not to mention Charlotte and Heather and a world of kink to explore. She was finally living the life she’d always wanted to live. It was suddenly very, very important not to go to jail.

  There was so much to do, so much that had to go perfectly. Angie, for all her craziness and paranoia, was the only one who could orchestrate a plan to pull it all off. Igloo studied Angie’s haggard face, the bags under her eyes, the tension in her temples. Angie had to keep it together for the next couple of weeks.

  Chapter 24

  Robin sat in front of the cameras, waiting for them to come alive. The Faraday curtains rustled softly, the ventilation system causing them to move in the air current. She needed to get back before she was missed.

  The screen flickered, and Enso appeared, alone.

  Robin was slightly let down, expecting at least to see someone else from the intelligence community. Not every briefing could involve the Deputy Director, but she figured that Tapestry was at the top of the government’s list right now.

  “Good afternoon, Robin.”

  “Enso.”

&nb
sp; “I saw your last report. You’re convinced they’re going to evade the FISA court order.”

  “Yes, Sir. It’s obvious that T2’s entire purpose is to create a technological solution that makes it impossible for Tapestry to comply with the FISA court order.”

  “T2?”

  “The internal slang for Tapestry 2.0. The official project name is Tacenda, a word which means things not to be discussed, but I recommend not using the term in any documentation. My guess is that they’re using Trojan horse code names, same as us. It’s a rarely used word. Assuming they’ve compromised us, they could mine our database and know we’re monitoring them.”

  “There’s no way they could get inside our systems. China is attacking us 24/7, and in the last six years they’ve penetrated to this level exactly zero times.”

  Robin shrugged. There was no way to prove how she felt.

  “You have specs on T2?”

  “Only what I could glean from discussions. There’s nothing written down anywhere I can find, no central repository.”

  “But you’re convinced that it’s more than just the…” Enso glanced down to review his notes. “Client-side containers?”

  “Definitely. At a minimum the work they’re doing involves onion routing, IPFS and bit torrent, distributed ledgers, and the containers we talked about. Exactly how all that fits together isn’t obvious, but the pressure to develop this before the deadline is very high, and yet they’re intentionally only involving a select few employees.”

  “What if we bring Angelina Benenati in for questioning?”

  Robin laughed. “You’d have more luck squeezing single malt from a stone.”

  “If we have to question her, what approach should we take?”

  “She’s too aware of the government as a threat. We’re not going to trick her. There’s nothing she cares about more than the company and what it’s doing. There’s no leverage to trump that.”

  “What about the husband? She seems pretty attached to him. If we threatened to harm him?”

  Robin tried to imagine what would happen. She shivered at the thought of Angie lashing out.