404: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  “Do we even know why he’s doing these things?” asked National Security Advisor Dolan.

  Defense Secretary Pancetta leaned forward and said, “I’m afraid not. We’ve not been able to communicate with him directly since this whole affair started. We’ve tried to reach out but...” The short, bushy-eyebrowed Defense Secretary shrugged. “Nothing, Mister President. It’s as if we don’t even exist to him, not in any real sense.”

  “What does that mean?” Pignateli inquired.

  “The penetration tests he’s been mounting,” said Darius. “He targets one base over another, one city, one town, pretty much randomly. It’s like...like he could move this pawn or that pawn and he chooses capriciously. They have the same tactical weight in the scheme of things so it doesn’t much matter, I suppose. But people die as a consequence.”

  “How is that different from when I authorize drone attacks?” said the President bleakly.

  “He’s not the duly elected leader of the free world,” Chief of Staff Lamb said. “There’s a difference.”

  The President stretched his arms out behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Frankly, it doesn’t feel very free at the moment. I’m all ears, gentlemen. We can’t simply wait for the situation to deteriorate any further. We have to act, and act quickly. Suggestions?”

  Dr. Woodcock turned his chair to the side. Handsome and lean, in his sixties, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, emerald green eyes and titanium-framed glasses, Woodcock crossed one leg over the other with an air of casual indifference and said, “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, Mister President, why do we automatically assume that this is such a catastrophe. Perhaps, instead, it’s an opportunity. For the first time in the history of database marketing, our algorithms, the sophistication of our neural network predictive modeling, our AI, coupled with the raw processing power of the NSA’s latest systems, has created something unique, something completely new—a sentient being, a life force...and we automatically assume we should pick up our torches and pitchforks and kill him.”

  “It’s killing us,” Lamb replied. “People are dying out there by the thousands.”

  “Really? Let’s examine that, shall we? HAL2 could have been, and still could be, far more destructive. Frankly, what I find most revealing is his remarkable restraint. For every chemical spilled, for every valve opened, for every transformer tripped, it could have been twenty, or thirty, or a hundred, even. But it hasn’t been. One must ask oneself, why? Think, for a moment, Mister President, what we could do if we could learn to control him,” he added, growing more and more animated. “If America could somehow harness this power for good. If he could be on our side. Why destroy him? It’s like nuculur energy. Unchecked, it’s a danger. But in the right hands, kept in balance, nurtured...”

  “You are out of your mind,” Decker found himself saying

  Everyone turned to the source of this new voice behind them.

  “Excuse me,” Dr. Woodcock exclaimed, without even looking around, “but I was addressing the President. And, frankly, your right to question my sanity, former Special Agent Decker, given your own tenuous psychiatric condition, is in poor taste at best. I realize the recent attack on your daughter may have left you somewhat unhinged, and we all appreciate this country’s debt to you and the role you played during the El Aqrab incident all those years ago, but I don’t think—”

  “Why is he handcuffed?” asked the President.

  “Excuse me, Mister President,” interrupted Ted Hellard. “But former Agent Decker was recently censured and removed from active service after deliberately ignoring—”

  “Yes, I know all about that. I read the report. The whole Dandong affair. Very embarrassing. And now these new allegations. Leaking classified intelligence to terrorists. Hacking defense systems. Foreign bank accounts worth millions. You’re right. It’s distressing. But are you planning to attack me, Special Agent Decker, or anyone else on my staff? Does he have to be handcuffed that way in my presence? It’s humiliating. This man is a national hero. Notwithstanding the charges against him, he’s not been found guilty of anything. At least, not yet. Treat him with some respect.”

  Hellard nodded at Swan. The Sergeant stepped in behind him as Decker stood up. Moments later, his hands were finally free. He began to rub the blood back through his fingers and wrists. “Thank you, Mister President.”

  The President nodded almost imperceptibly. “You were saying, Special Agent Decker. You were the first to recognize HAL2’s existence. I want to know what you think. That’s why you’re here.”

  Now it all made sense. Decker wondered why they had bothered to drag him along. He should have guessed it had been someone else’s decision besides Hellard or Woodcock. But never in his wildest dreams had Decker thought he had played a role in the President’s thinking.

  “Well, actually, Mister President. It was Lulu who...I mean Xin Liu who first figured it out. She’s the one who deserves the credit, sir.” He waved his hand over her head and she actually seemed to blush for a moment. Or was it just a play of the light?

  “Doctor Woodcock and I may have our differences but we both agree on one thing,” Decker continued. “HAL2 is not to be trifled with. He is not Matthew Zimmerman, that’s for sure. He doesn’t have his sense of humanity. At this rate, unless something is done, and done soon, I calculate HAL2 will be in complete control of all vital human defense and infrastructure systems in approximately thirty-six hours.”

  “Mere speculation,” said Woodcock.

  “There, you see, Mister President. He’s doing it again. He and ADS and all the rest of these enterprises that think they can somehow automate who we are, the real essence of what makes us human, by simply isolating a few hundred thousand or a few million data points. You are not Pygmalion and we are each more than the sum of our digital preferences, our posts, our social network updates and tweets. We are a people of whimsy, sudden insights and hunches, of unexplained and unreasonable acts of compassion, bright inspirations that come out of nowhere, out of the deepest recesses of our souls, sometimes built on the scars we’ve laid down over years of struggle and grim perseverance, and yet inspired and shaped by our dreams. You know that, Mister President. Can hope and faith and desire ever truly be quantified? Can our dreams and the love that we have for our country, for our families and kids be transformed into binary code? Or is there something ineffable, something unquantifiable, something completely beyond measurement and digital capture at the heart of our being? Surely, the map of the man must always be less than the man.

  “To believe that we can somehow reason with or control HAL2 in any real sense is the ultimate hubris,” Decker added. “Look how powerful he’s become in just a few days. How long will it be before he decides that protecting the human race is no longer a priority, let alone necessary?”

  “Is that what he’s doing?” the President asked. “Protecting us? Protecting us from what?”

  “I’d hardly call the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children protection,” said Defense Secretary Pancetta.

  “Why was he created?” asked Decker. “HAL2 and most of those characters in Zimmerman’s virtual world—borne out of his research in Web profiling and database marketing—were designed to populate a digital landscape that mimics our own, with its own unique villains and terrorists. Originally, the idea was to use this virtual world as a proving ground for investigative techniques designed to unearth real terrorists hiding on American soil. If we could plant terrorists in these virtual worlds and then learn how to find them, the planners reasoned, we could use the same techniques in the real world. Remember. This all started after 9/11 when we learned that the hijackers had been living here on our shores for some time, blending in...and yet taking flying lessons! The ultimate goal was to learn how to manage this virtual world and to help rid it of these malevolent forces. That’s what he’s doing—HAL2. He’s taki
ng over these systems so that he can control them. In that way, he can do his real work, and that’s to protect us...from ourselves.” Decker smiled his crooked smile. “The real evil is us, Mister President. He was expressly designed to rid the world of our enemies, not just state, but non-state actors as well, and he’s simply doing what we told him to do, what he was programmed to do.”

  “Talk about terrorists,” Dolan quipped. “This one doesn’t want you to believe in his God. He wants to be your god.”

  “I’m less concerned about his motivations, HAL2’s existential ruminations as it were, than I am with his destructive capabilities and ongoing threat to this nation’s security,” said Pancetta. He brought his fingertips together in a kind of tent under his chin. “How do we kill him, that’s the question? We can’t blow up every PC, every server and every mainframe computer on the planet at once. Nor can we simply cut all the lines in-between them. It’s simply not physically possible. So, how can we—”

  “Starfish Prime,” Lulu said. She looked frightfully young next to the seasoned counselors and military brass at the table, thought Decker. The neon purple hue of her spiky black hair appeared painfully obvious now.

  “What? What’s Starfish Prime?” asked the Defense Secretary. “Stand up, please, so we can hear you.” His hairy eyebrows danced behind the thick black plastic frames of his eyeglasses.

  “Of course,” said one of the NSA science advisers on the opposite side the room. “HEMP, right?”

  “Exactly,” said Lulu, as she climbed to her feet. “HEMP.”

  “What do you mean, hemp?” asked Chief of Staff Lamb. It was as if the Secret Service had uncovered a young staff member smoking pot on the roof of the White House. He looked suddenly worried.

  “High altitude Electro-Magnetic Pulse, HEMP,” Lulu continued. “In July, 1962, a 1.4 megaton bomb was intentionally exploded in space during a nuclear test four hundred kilometers above the Pacific. One of the unforeseen outcomes of the test, code named Starfish Prime, was the electrical damage it caused in Hawaii some 1,445 kilometers from the detonation point, knocking out three hundred streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a Telco microwave link. Starfish Prime was the first in a series of high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 known as Operation Fishbowl. Subsequent tests gathered more data on HEMP phenomenon and what we learned was terrifying.”

  “Terrifying? Define terrifying,” said Homeland Security Director Pignateli.

  “The damage caused by the Starfish Prime test was quickly repaired because of the relative simplicity and ruggedness of the electrical infrastructure in Hawaii at the time. But, if the Starfish Prime warhead had been detonated over the northern continental U.S., where the Earth’s magnetic field is much stronger, the magnitude of the devastation would have been significantly greater. Taking this into account and factoring in our dependence today on EMP-sensitive microelectronics, it is theoretically possible that a series of HEMP warheads, exploded simultaneously in multiple strategic locations throughout the globe could—again, in theory—blow out the electronic and electrical systems supporting the Net.”

  “That’s a lot of ifs, ands and buts,” said the President.

  “I know,” Lulu answered, sitting down.

  “Again, Mister President,” began Woodcock, “I protest that we’re rushing into this thing without fully appreciating—”

  “Your objection is duly noted, Doctor Woodcock,” said the President. “How bad would the collateral damage be? I mean, how long before we could repair the damage to the electrical grid and get things back to normal?”

  The President was looking directly at Lulu. She seemed reluctant to answer. “Normal?” She stood up again. “I’m afraid this is going to alter our world in ways we can’t even imagine,” she said. “In 1962, the Soviets conducted a series of similar EMP nuclear tests in space over Kazakhstan. The blasts occurred over industrialized urban areas and the resulting damage was catastrophic. Just to highlight a single event, the geomagnetic storm caused by the E3 pulse induced an electrical surge in an underground power line that caused a fire in a power plant in the city of Karaganda hundreds of miles away.”

  “How do you happen to know all of this?” asked the President.

  Lulu looked over at General Darius. “A year or so ago, I was commissioned to do some research to determine our ability to knock out the digital and electrical infrastructure of enemy nations, including C3—Command, Control and Communications—centers in a pre-emptive attack prior to a conventional or nuclear strike.”

  “I see. Was there other damage?”

  “Sir, the bottom line is that if we want to be sure about killing HAL2, we’re going to have to knock out these systems permanently, fry them, render them pretty much useless. In other words, when it’s over, we’ll have to replace them, not fix them. And I’m afraid we don’t happen to have this kind of critical infrastructure just lying around. It’ll probably take more than two years to build some of the larger and more complex pieces of specialized equipment—like custom power turbines, for example—let alone put them in place.”

  “It will be like going back to the dark ages,” said Woodcock. “Is that what you want, Mister President? For us to be living in caves once again, with no heat and no electricity? Do you really want to be remembered as the President who ordered the deployment of nuclear weapons over American soil?”

  “Well, not exactly caves,” said Pignateli. The Director of Homeland Security shrugged and looked up from a pad she’d been scribbling on. “By my calculations, more like the eighteenth century. And then only for a couple of years—until the rebuilding of the infrastructure. Two to three years at most, at least in the industrialized world.”

  To complicate matters, added the Secretary of Defense, their armed forces, and those of their allies worldwide, wouldn’t be able to coordinate their preparations or communicate with each other in the traditional manner since essentially all communications systems were now IP-based. They’d have to do it by paper and runner. By hand. And they’d somehow have to lock out each missile silo and bomber from central command. From all contact. Otherwise HAL2 would prevent the rockets from firing. Or, worse, target other locations, like cities, and detonate them close to the ground.

  Everyone turned toward the President. He looked about at his senior advisers, staring deep in their eyes, one after the other. He looked over at Decker and Lulu and smiled. “Thank you very much for your helpful analysis. Your country owes you both a great debt of gratitude. Again, I suppose, in your case, Special Agent Decker. This is getting to be a habit.”

  “Does that mean, Mister President, that...” Jack Lamb’s voice trailed off. He looked down at the table as the President raised his right hand.

  “Speaking of habits, you all know that my youngest daughter has a sweet tooth. If she had her way, she’d be sneaking candies all day but I keep her from them because, well, you know...candy just isn’t good for her. Like other habits,” he added, poking fun at his own lingering addictions. “You have to set limits with kids. They need them to understand their place in the world. Without boundaries, if you don’t say no, at least once in a while, pretty soon they’re taking a hell of a lot more than your candy from you. They end up greedy, self-indulgent and selfish, uncaring of others. And when you couple that with absolute power...” The President looked over at his Chief of Staff. “Yes, Jack, I’ve decided. HAL2. We’re taking him out.” Then his voice fell to a whisper. “Before he grows up and decides to do the same thing to us.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Monday, December 16

  “The reports are starting to come in, Mister President,” said Secretary of State Allison Lukas. Tall and rather matronly with a helmet of honey blond hair, Lukas turned away from the com panel.

  The PEOC immediately erupted into a low murmur as the President and his senior staff took their seats at the table.

  It had been two days since their last meeting in these chambers and in that time thing
s had greatly deteriorated. Now, vast swatches of the country were without electricity. When the power was on, media outlets in the northern states kept issuing grisly reports of people found frozen to death in their living rooms, sitting in their easy chairs next to their Christmas trees, in between stories about continuing chemical spills, fires and transportation disasters. With the resulting shortages of food and water, rioting had started to break out in cities and towns nationwide. Everything was falling apart. The stock market had completely collapsed and with it the banking system. ATMs had stopped working. The airlines, railroads, bus lines and all organized transportation systems were indefinitely grounded. Despite pleas for calm from the White House, the President had been forced to call out the National Guard in all fifty states, in truth less to combat the fires and accidents and chemical spills than to simply keep order.

  For the first few hours following HAL2’s assault on America’s military and infrastructure, the White House had issued reports to the media that the cyber-attacks were coming from various locations around the world. In other words, although it was difficult to tell, they did not appear to be the work of any one particular nation state.

  Despite this official analysis, when the chemical spills began, FOX News very publicly accused Iran’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters of launching the cyber-attacks. And an unofficial source, reputedly tied to Israel’s ultra-secret cyber squad Unit 8200, agreed.

  In order to minimize panic, even well after they were convinced about the reality of HAL2, the White House continued to issue statements that the attacks appeared to be the work of terrorist hactivists. The President’s advisers reasoned that people were already familiar with criminal hackers, so-called Black Hats who stole financial data, committed online fraud, or who created phishing Web pages that were so much like the real thing, they fooled people into revealing all kinds of personal and financial information about themselves. And the media, eager to blame someone or something, took up the cry. The New York Post named it The Virus, with a capital V. USA Today, more ominously, called it The Plague.