Oracle's Hunt

by A. Claire Everward

  “Your line of thought, Agent Pierce, has helped us find a lead. A strong one, we believe,” Larsen said. “It has to do with an IDSD-led mission in Lake Chad—in Africa—a year and a half, no, almost two years ago.”

  “You should be getting the file from my office now, Donovan,” Evans said just as Donovan’s desk screen registered the incoming message. He didn’t open the file yet, wanting to hear it from them first. When people talked, they had a tendency to let slip things that didn’t appear in organized files they had time to review before archiving them. Or giving them to investigators. Trust in those who had kept information from him wasn’t high on his priority list right now.

  “About a year prior to that mission,” Evans continued, “our intelligence picked up some suspicious money transfers linked to Africa. They went through seemingly legitimate accounts, but we found they were being used to finance arms deals. Additional digging then linked these deals to a new group. NWM, New World Militants. We began looking for them in chatter but found them only when we looked deep underground.”

  Which meant, Donovan knew, that NWM had taken extreme steps to remain hidden. And there were too many ways in which militant groups could do that. They had been doing it long enough now to learn how the allies’ intelligence might find them and constantly devised new ways to conceal themselves.

  “We listened for a time. Just listened, so that they wouldn’t know we were on to them. We learned they were a group of extremists who understood they were getting nowhere after years of fighting among themselves and having to defend themselves against attacks by African governments trying to rid the continent of them. Their leader, a man named Sayed Elijahn, was born in Chad, and studied in England and then in Belgium. We know he was born into an affluent family, none of them militants themselves but his father and uncle had both made their fortune by dealing with them.

  “He must have seen his country and its neighbors torn apart by militants—much like those his family had been working with—during that failed war of the region’s governments against them, at the worst time for the already unstable region. Except that the effect of this on this guy seems to have been rather unique.

  “The way we profiled him, we believe that while he was in Belgium, in Brussels to be exact, he saw what the Internationals have achieved, and thought why not do the same with the militants—unite all independent militant groups, much like IDSD has united nations all over the world, pardon the crude comparison, and through this gain power, maybe ultimately take over some of the rogue and unstable regimes and destabilize the world again by going against the alliance.

  “By the time we found out about him and his New World Militants, he already had quite a few militant groups on his side. He was dealing arms and drugs, and getting funds from some of the wealthier groups that had begun taking interest. We even think a couple of regimes were already backing him. But the thing is, this Elijahn was also buying people. As in engineers. Weapons experts. Hackers. Data whizzes.”

  Donovan nodded. He got what Evans meant.

  “Back then, Elijahn wasn’t that powerful yet, but he was getting there, fast. He was using his money and preaching his plan quite cleverly, and eventually he built a base in a strategic, isolated spot near where Lake Chad used to be, in the Chadian territory side of it. By then much of the Lake Chad Basin was already deserted and for him it was perfect. There were no unwanted elements around to bother him—governments no longer had interest in the area, no civilians had remained there, all had long been displaced by drought and war, and any militants around had already joined him—and the place is at the junction of what used to be five major countries, so that whatever infrastructure still existed in the area allowed him convenient access to resources. A landlocked no man’s land, easy to protect, lots of empty miles to do with as he pleased with no one minding his business.

  “Those weapons we were tracking were going there, to his base, substantial amounts of them, some serious equipment, too, and that’s where he was training his people. Not that many yet, in the hundreds only. Quality over quantity, that was his motto. He amassed smart weapons and smart people, and trained militants at the level we do our soldiers.

  “He spent a long time just preparing. And then the chatter changed. He started hinting at a demonstration of his seriousness, his capabilities. And this guy’s smart, you see. He didn’t go around blowing up things like militants had been doing all along. This guy had a goal in mind and was willing to do what it took to achieve it. See, he decided to show the groups that hadn’t joined him yet and anyone else who might stand up to him that he could, and would, become the new international superpower. And so, in that base, at Lake Chad, he prepared his people to destroy IDSD’s headquarters in Brussels.”

  Donovan’s brow furrowed.

  “At that point, US Global Intelligence came to us,” Larsen said. “We alerted all the allies, and together we decided to finish Elijahn before he went any further.”

  “You attacked,” Donovan said.

  “Everyone participated in some function or another. IDSD took point.”

  “So what happened?”

  Larsen hesitated. Finally, she spoke. “Toward the end of the mission, a command drone went down. Malfunctioned.”

  “Okay,” Donovan prodded.

  “It was designed to automatically self-destruct when it falls. We thought it did.” Larsen paused. “The mission was a success. When our forces left, there was nothing left of Elijahn’s base, nothing and no one to salvage. But some time later we received a brief signal. The drone was activated.”

  “It didn’t self-destruct.”

  “No, not when it fell. But if this type of drone is activated in this way, not by its operators and not by its control center, an internal command comes online and any information in the drone is deleted, and a secondary self-destruct device is activated. We have reason to believe this second device worked.”

  “But?”

  “But we cannot be sure no data was downloaded in the interim. If someone succeeded in connecting to the drone before reactivating it, they could theoretically have downloaded part of the data before the self-destruct. Normally we wouldn’t think this possible, but in light of recent events, we have no choice but to assume that such a download was somehow successfully done.”

  “What makes you think this is the incident we’re looking for?”

  “The encryption basis for this type of a system, a command drone that must not fall into the wrong hands, is similar to the encryption we used in the data centers. The best encryption there is.”

  Not really, as it turned out, Donovan thought, but said nothing. From what he’d seen these past days, in all agencies, lessons from the break-in were already being implemented. Nobody took the data center incident lightly, and criticism about past mistakes would do no good at this point.

  “And,” Larsen continued, “the data taken from the data center contained missions that took place at around that time frame, of the Chad mission.”

  Donovan contemplated this. “You say the encryption of the data in the drone is similar to the data center’s encryption, not identical?”

  “Not identical, no. When we discovered the drone had been activated, we implemented a safety measure. We didn’t . . . it was, perhaps, an oversight, but we didn’t replace the encryption at that security level in its entirety. However, we did introduce some changes both in the encryption of field applications and in the data centers encryption, different changes to separate the two this time. As I said, the original encryption was already the best, and we thought the drone data files had all been destroyed, so that this was only a precautionary measure.”

  “So anyone breaking the original encryption of the data in the drone . . .”

  “Would not have to take that far a leap to decrypt the data stolen in the data center break-in.”

  “There was one word they certainly already had the decryption of,” Donovan noted.

  “Like I said,
we only made limited changes,” Larsen said. “And if they were targeting something specific . . .”

  “We should now assume they have at least part of the data that was recorded by the drone in the course of the Chad mission,” Evans said. “The drone contained both visuals and audios of the field-side of the mission but the visual data would have been the first to go when the drone fell, so they probably got only the audios, and likely only part of them before the drone self-destructed.”

  “Would the audios lead them to the data center?”

  “All we can surmise is that they were enough to lead them to look for something they couldn’t find, so they went to the highest-clearance data source. The data center.”

  “The US-based one.”

  “The drone was marked as belonging to IDSD-US, so that the mission would have been recognized as originating under IDSD Missions in the United States,” Larsen said.

  Considering how forthcoming both Larsen and Evans were being, and the fact that thanks to him they now had a strong lead on the identity of the perpetrators, Donovan would have liked to use the opportunity to ask what Oracle’s capacity was in that mission, why information about it was in the drone, and what it did that would make the perpetrators focus on it, but he didn’t. He didn’t give a damn about what he was or was not supposed to look for, but the one thing he understood already was that Oracle was not to be discussed on such a videoconference, not even over this secure line. Not while the people who were looking for it were still out there. The thing was, if his suspicions about what Oracle was were correct, he not only had a pretty good idea what it did in that Chad mission, he also knew now that it had to be one hell of a system. One that he himself agreed should be protected.

  “I’ll need to know more about the drone and what was on it.” His tone did not leave room for objections, and he didn’t care who he was talking to.

  Larsen nodded. “I’ll make it available to you in the morning.”

  “And you’re assuming the data center break-in is in fact NWM’s work. Elijahn.”

  “We’re still looking for other incidents that might fit, but yes,” she said. “The file we’ve sent you provides all the details of the Chad mission, including profiles that we prepared of the group and of Elijahn himself. Photos, too, we have those, although faces can be changed. We have no audio of him, and no biometrics.”

  “The thing is, Donovan,” Evans said, “we never found out if Elijahn was at his base or not when we attacked it. We have no indications from the pre-mission intelligence or the mission visuals that he was there. But we haven’t heard anything about him or NWM since, nothing at all, no matter how deep we’ve looked, so all we could do was assume he was dead and watch to see if he would surface. It looks as if he did. Now all we need to do is find him.”

  Before he finds your Oracle, Donovan completed the thought.

  “Are you sure?” Elijahn asked again, his voice sending everyone in the room into trembling silence.

  “Yes,” the young man intent on the computer screen said, again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It is still the only explanation.” The young man, an experienced hacker, did not allow impatience into his voice. Despite his importance to this job, the man beside him would not hesitate to kill him with his bare hands if he detected disrespect. Respect was big with this guy, but then that’s what this was all about. That, the hacker sighed inwardly, was why he was stuck in this moldy warehouse in this country he hated while back home summer still reigned, and his friends were probably having a lot more fun than he was. How the hell did he get into this? Money, he answered himself immediately. An obscene amount of money.

  Which did not guarantee he would come out of this alive. He wondered if he could, perhaps, find a way to leave, escape, when Elijahn and his men left to do their thing. Prayed that he could.

  “You heard the audios yourself,” he said, and cringed visibly when the burly man’s eyes flashed dangerously. “The voice was computerized,” he continued quickly, “so that has to be it, only something like that could do this. And this,” he said, indicating the data taken from the IDSD storage unit, “confirms it. This Oracle was there in the attack on your base and in the other attacks we got from . . .” He cringed again. Only two attacks, just two IDSD-led attacks against militants in which Oracle was involved, in the data they took from the data center. He was supposed to get more, but the encryption programmed into the medium he had prepared to search and download data from the storage unit turned out to be not quite the right one—something he hadn’t considered—which had limited his ability to immediately recognize what he was seeing, and of the few attacks he’d had time to get information on in the time frame set for him by Elijahn in his anxiety to get in and out, only two had Oracle mentioned in them.

  But what they did get, attack transcripts in which Oracle was mentioned, supported what the hacker had thought. Oracle was an advanced artificial intelligence that was behind the operations that destroyed their base and that had foiled at least two plans of their sister groups, and most likely others. Possibly, probably in fact, many others—the transcripts had a regularity about them, experienced efficiency.

  For the hacker, that was the amazing part. When he cracked the original audios from the destruction of their base at Lake Chad, he, like Elijahn, had expected to hear people’s voices, the voices of the enemy’s commanders speaking with the wretched soldiers who had destroyed all they’d worked for. Instead, there was only one voice. A computer. The hacker had thought it might be a disguise, the transformed voices of the people who would normally run such missions, but the words, the orders, were too consistent. And there were no delays, there was none of the hesitation that he would expect from a group of people discussing, perhaps arguing, a situation, no speech interrupting another. And the voice itself, it was too cool, too sophisticated, too quick—quick thinking, quick deduction, quick logic. That, and the versatile complexity of the orders it gave made him think it was in fact a computerized intelligence.

  The notion excited him. People had been dreaming about it for so long, so many had tried to develop artificial intelligence that would go beyond the commercial applications that were all too common nowadays, as in the autodrive of his parents’ car—he tried not to think now of their embarrassment at the life he had chosen—or the ones that controlled the service technologies in their home. What everyone wanted was to develop a thinking computer, one that could do a whole lot more than that. He himself had dreamed of it since he was a child, and had spent long hours online, where so many like him never stopped talking about what the future could bring. But so far no one had succeeded. Computers were fast and smart, but still had a long way to go before they could exceed their preprogrammed capabilities, and still did not have, were not close to demonstrating, the flexibility and creativity of the human mind.

  But this was military. No, better than that—this was IDSD and its allies working together. And even more, it was the Internationals, and no one pushed for progress more than they did. What if they had succeeded? What if they really had jumped light years ahead and created the artificial intelligence he had seen in the movies of his youth?

  He simply had to know. He spent many a night hacking universities, private labs, military research facilities. Searching, hoping to find it. Hoping to find something that would support what he wanted so much to be true, that what he had heard, the thing that had run the attack, was artificial intelligence. That a machine had guided those soldiers who had destroyed the base.

  But there was nothing. Nothing he found had come close. Yes, there were some developments out there, major ones he had not known about, but nothing close to what he had hoped. Nothing that would not merely serve as secondary support for the people who ran the show. If it really did exist, his dream come true, it was well hidden.

  At the same time, he had also looked for that name, Oracle. Elijahn had been livid after hearing the audios from the drone. He had bec
ome obsessed with it, with Oracle, and had ordered his people to find what was behind it, no matter what it took. The hacker had gone to him—when it was safe—and had told him that the voice in the audio files had to be a machine. Elijahn had told him to make sure, to find it. Whatever it was, he wanted it destroyed. And so, like the hacker’s peers, the other unfortunate minds working for Elijahn, the hacker had looked for it. But he had not found it, the thing the soldiers in the audios had called Oracle, the thing he wanted so much to be artificial intelligence. Still, he had not lost hope. Something like that, it would have to be a secret. The secret. And so he kept searching, kept digging for clues. Until the idea came to him where it must be hidden. And there he had found it. In that data center.

  And it had turned out to be everything he had dreamed of. The transcripts he now had, of those two attacks, had him elated as he realized he must have been right. The enemy had created the coveted technology. Oracle existed, and it really was a smart machine, an artificial intelligence like never before seen.

  True, the second of the two attack transcripts had him worried. There was a place in it, a short segment, where Oracle had spoken to an injured soldier. And the tone and words of that conversation made him certain that a person, a human, was dictating to the computer what to say, perhaps even using its voice directly to say it himself. But then he realized what it must be. This computer was state of the art, unprecedented, no arguing. But it would still need an operator. Someone who would accompany it, be there to watch it, step in if needed, be the human in the equation. Someone who knew it enough, worked with it enough, to do so seamlessly.

  The hacker wanted, needed so much to know more. He had pushed to be near Elijahn, to be the one good enough and trusted enough to be taken along on this job, just so that he could be nearer to it. To the machine. To Oracle. Still, what he wanted would not interest Elijahn. Elijahn wanted Oracle eliminated. And thanks to the hacker’s brilliance, his idea to go for the data center and his plan how to get in, they were on their way to finding it.