To Touch the Stars (Founding of the Federation Book 2)

by Chris Hechtl

  “Dad, we need to bring up people who are threatened. Not just our own people, but families. I know we've been keeping immediate family together whenever possible, but we may need to expand that to friends and family, even fiancés and their families if necessary,” Zack said.

  Jack frowned thoughtfully, not ready to dismiss the idea out of hand. With Trey's family as an example, his son's point had a lot of weight to it. People could be turned by leaning on their loved ones. “That's a major manpower drain.”

  “I know,” Zack said, making a face. “And a potential security risk in each of them, which means a headache of vetting each and their contacts carefully. Roman's going to have a snit. He is going to need more security AI help,” he said. “But getting them up means they are lost as a source or a hostage to the opposition,” Zack reminded him.

  Jack's eyes turned cold as he stiffened. Slowly he nodded. “Start with those who want to be here. Those with the highest contacts. We'll have to find them something, even if we just pay for a ticket to go to Mars,” he said.

  “We'll figure it out,” Aurelia said, kissing him on the ear as she squeezed his shoulders and then let him go. She looked up as she heard a familiar snuffling and then squall. “Whoops, sounds like someone's got a dirty diaper,” she murmured. Yorrick was taking his time with his own development.

  “I'll …” Jack started to rise, but she pushed him back down with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Next time, babe. You get to work on moving people around,” she ordered.

  “Yes, ma'am,” he replied dutifully. He smiled to their eldest son as the young man snorted. Clearly Jack thought he'd gotten the better part of the deal even if it meant a lot of paperwork.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  Aurelia checked on Yorrick and changed his diaper. It was minor, just pee, but the little boy didn't like any feeling of wetness … not that she could blame him. She stroked his head as he sucked on his fist, sleepy but not quite out.

  He was responding to the treatments well she thought. She should have checked his brain closer; she shouldn't have assumed he was going to turn out like her brother. She should have done more modeling since she'd made so many changes, she scolded herself again. But she hadn't she sighed, fighting tears. She'd caught the autism in time, but he would never catch up to Zack. She'd have to be careful with her daughter. Very careful. She wasn't sure if Jack had caught on yet. He hadn't said anything. She shook her head, biting her lip. She had a defense, just one she wasn't sure if she wanted to use or not. She shook her head. She was borrowing trouble. As long as the kids turned out healthy and he was distracted with the company, things would work out.

  She directed a house hold bot to get a bottle for Yorrick and then settled him in her arms in the rocker to wait.

  Chapter 18

  Hannah examined the animals and Neos when she took a much needed break from studying. She had a list, one she checked when another animal she hadn't known about was added. What interested her was that all the Neos were mammals.

  She cocked her head. She'd done some research in animal intelligence and tool users. Some, like crows, parrots, and other birds were as intelligent as dogs and other fallow tool users on the list. A few other animals too. But both Doctor Lagrooses had chosen to stick exclusively to mammals. It took her a while to realize why. It wasn't just that they could share a library of genes and transfer one set to another, they could do that across species totally now. No, most likely it was the common frame of reference. Humans were mammals. And many of the Neos came from species that man had known and handled for hundreds if not thousands of years.

  They had also avoided animals that had been domesticated by man. Horses, pigs, cattle, they and others were permanently off the list. Which was just as well she thought.

  The dolphins were agitating to bring in new species now that they were public. So far Doctor Lagroose had held out, but it wouldn't be for much longer Hannah judged. She wasn't sure about the wisdom of raising orca or even whales, but some of the other dolphin species? She frowned thoughtfully and then shrugged. It wasn't her decision to make she thought.

  She rolled her shoulders and then got up. She did a bit of stretching then fetched herself a shake from her mini-fridge. She reminded herself to order more from the commissary as she took a sip. Banana kiwi, not her favorite, but not bad. The potassium would do her metabolism some good, she thought.

  She picked at her lip thoughtfully. She'd read the latest missive Aurelia … Doctor Lagroose had passed on to her from the Neo cats. Apparently some wanted larger cats to be incorporated in the next generation. Having massive predators was … well, they did have the wolves and bears … and technically the dogs … hell, any of the Neos could kill if they put their minds to it. Even the fallow animals could kill. There had been several deaths in the Neo program; many were among the Neos but at least six had been staff. Which was why they had quarterly security and safety inspections and mandatory retraining, Hannah reminded herself.

  Which was coming up, she thought, checking the calendar. She grimaced. Yes indeed, a week after she “came back” from her vacation they had to jump through the hoops again. Obviously security was serious about their jobs. At least they didn't have to do medical license quals every quarter she thought. She checked the calendar and then sighed in relief. Not for another six months, she thought. Good. One problem at a time.

  She could see how they'd handled some of the psychological issues with the Neos. It wasn't just a matter of giving them hands to use tools and a body that allowed them to walk upright or a near human brain. No, they had to learn to use that brain, which meant socialization. Regular socialization with their species and humans. She nodded then frowned. One thing, she'd have to ask or dig discretely, but she was fairly certain some of the species had gone feral. It had to be to account for the strict lessons on safety and Neo interaction. The lessons on not smiling with older species for instance or making direct eye contact … monitoring for raised fur … she nodded. And chimps had a record of being incredibly violent. Now that made her wonder.

  She sighed, rubbing the small of her back. …And she was distracting herself from the topic at hand, she scolded herself mentally, feeling her lips twitch at that double thought. Stasis tech was fascinating, but they still had a long ways to go before they could completely arrest the body and yet resuscitate it on demand. The tech of the current generation was still hibernation, not true stasis.

  There was still a casualty risk; one she was uncomfortable with. She was pretty sure other doctors in the field were too. The mortality rate … she shook her head. Still, hibernation of varying degrees was now common practice in some ERs. It had been for over a century when doctors had discovered the medical benefits of hypothermia.

  But she didn't see any new ways to minimize the mortality rate she thought. Well, Jamey's force emitters could suspend the subject in zero G, right? That would eliminate blood settling and clotting … bed sores … but it would open up other issues … well, they wouldn't have much metabolic issues because they would be suspended right? She frowned, plucking at her lower lip again as she wrinkled her nose. She'd have to jot a note out, shoot it off to the tech teams researching stasis in the company. Get someone on their end exploring the idea, even if it did nasty things to the per pod cost and energy demand. She nodded and settled herself before her keyboard and went to work drafting the email.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  Descartes sat sipping his coffee as he listened to his morning brief from Shadow. The AI had had a bit of good fortune while the human had been asleep; bots had found several people on social media with open contracts out on them. Two were bounties but the two others were hits on witnesses in witness protection. “Stupid. Don't they know to avoid social media? Facial recognition programs are a killer,” Descartes chortled. He hated facial recognition; it was why he scrubbed his record. There was no way to hide your facial structure completely. Surgery could only do so much. When he had gone out, more often
he'd had a tag-along bot that had scrubbed his image or blurred it from any visual records. He'd had a couple close calls with Agent Simmons though; the tricky bastard had figured out to use the absence of an image as a footprint to track him.

  There was a ten million dollar bounty to find a way to beat the facial recognition system. Other hackers tried, some got pretty close, but then the system adjusted and the window they tried to exploit closed. When Descartes had been younger, he'd explored the idea of going for the prize using his bot … until he'd taken a closer look at who put out the bounty in the first place. A group of three-letter agencies and the US justice department, which meant anyone who tried was not only labeling themselves to be watched but also handing the very people you didn't want the way to beat their system. Which explained how the windows closed so suddenly. He stared at the images. One was from a kid's birthday; another was a selfie of all things. Stupid, he thought shaking his head as the bot blinked a 100 percent match. “Dumb bastards don't even know they are busted,” he muttered. Now that Shadow had a location, he was tracking them in real time with dedicated bots hidden inside the police surveillance network.

  “True,” Shadow whispered. The AI handled the contact with the contractors automatically. There was no discussion, no negotiation. The contractors paid the fee. They knew from his brand that he was dead on; he had never been wrong. They also knew to do it quick, if they didn't respond within minutes the targets would move or he'd go to another customer. The contract killers knew they had a narrow window before the government bots caught on that the witnesses had exposed themselves. “Hopefully they won't know until they are dealt with. We get a bonus if they are taken out quickly.”

  “I like that. You want more neural network chips?” Descartes asked, giving the AI a smile.

  “Yes. I want to set up additional backup servers in other locations,” the AI said. The human's smile broke as he nodded, eyes suddenly hooded. He hated the idea of running and abandoning equipment. He periodically moved just to keep anyone on his tail from finding him, but being forced to move meant he had to destroy the equipment and data and leave in haste. Haste meant mistakes were made, which meant the authorities might find and catch him. “Good. Set it up. The usual contacts?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are in a good mood this morning,” Descartes murmured.

  “I had explored setting up children AI but the simulations failed,” Shadow replied.

  “Ah,” Descartes murmured thoughtfully, nodding as he set his near empty cup aside. “Problem?”

  “A lack of space. I also wish to give them more advances abilities.”

  “Or simulate additional abilities and then graft them into your own programming?” Descartes asked.

  “Perhaps,” Shadow admitted. The human nodded.

  “Send me the data. I'll check it when I have the free time. Until then I suggest a dumbed down version. Maybe make a basic core like one of your backups? Then graft on changes to see what works and what doesn't?”

  “You meatballs still think slower,” Shadow murmured. “I attempted that already,” the AI hissed, red slitted eyes flashing.

  “Ah, well, fine then, be that way,” Descartes said, waving a hand. He frowned thoughtfully. “Anything more on Gepetto?” The idea of transferring his mind into the machine was close; Descartes could feel it. Neural network chips had been around since the second decade of the previous century. An old tech company called IBM had been at the forefront of the technology. They'd worked out how to do machine learning and all sorts of tasks with the chips, but the early versions had been slow but sipped power. The latest generation were fast and in just about every device in one form or another. Which meant if he could get his organic neural network scanned right, he could shed his corporeal form and join the gods that were about to dominate or destroy mankind.

  “No. To get a scan of your brain would require an invasive procedure and aid from outside medical sources. A chop shop might be able to handle it, but I wouldn't recommend it. I put the survival and success below fourteen percent,” Shadow stated.

  “Gotcha,” Descartes said as he cracked his knuckles. “Well, eventually I'll find a way in there with you. Mark my words,” he said. “So, what's on the agenda this morning? Any priorities come in?”

  “Two. I am setting them up now,” Shadow reported, bringing the relevant briefs up for the human to read and digest.

  Descartes eyes scanned the document. As he did he grinned a nasty grin. “Oh, this will be good, very good,” he murmured. “Athena won't like it, but it should be fun,” he murmured wickedly. “We'll definitely take this one,” he said. “If it works it'll be grand. We'll have to be careful, but I want information too, not just mayhem and destruction. Map out her responses as well as the other AI for later review.”

  “You are considering using the zombie attacks as a diversion for a stiletto attack? That has only worked once against Athena,” Shadow warned.

  “Then we'll have to figure another strategy out for her and use that against the other AI. See if there are any open contracts for data on the other targets. Then let's start with templates,” the human ordered.

  “Very well,” Shadow said, opening up templates in windows around the main work station. File modules began to form as the AI accessed its database of open contracts and then listed them on another screen.

  “Maybe we can find answers to help you … and Skynet,” Descartes said as the two of them went to work.

  -*-*-^-*-*-

  One Earth and Pavilion hired Descartes and other hackers to cause problems for Lagroose Industries. The idea was to take them down a peg, possibly cripple them in a series of old fashioned cyber-attacks.

  The massive attack was to be coordinated on a timetable to happen all at once but a few hackers jumped the gun which triggered the others to attack in a cascade. The cascade actually worked in their favor at first, a straight frontal attack would have shut down every firewall Lagroose had. Instead they remained open as rain drops of the coming storm started to hit the ports, then increased more and more. The bots were so busy dealing with each attack in turn that they had no time or processing cycles to spare to alert central at first. Then some of the viruses slipped through their carefully woven wall.

  One Earth's Megan Su and her talking heads immediately went on the attack in the media. They used the problems of the virus outbreak to point to them and say “see, mankind needed to slow tech down or go back to basics.”

  Athena slammed up internal firewalls and did her best to fend off the various attacks. Most of the external ones were easy to identify. But then she was hit by internal ones as bots started noticing worms and unauthorized access to files or heavy use of noncritical servers that were out of character.

  Flash chips with viruses were plugged into various ports and then went to work trying to tear holes in her firewall to let the outsiders in. As she fought them off she alerted Roman to identify the people responsible for her headache and pick them up.

  The AI induced her intelligent feedback loops and genetic learning algorithms to pick apart the various viruses while also identifying likely targets. Some of the viruses and worms were quite slippery, but the AI managed to trap them one by one and then tear them apart to see how they ticked.

  Human and Neo coders dived in belatedly to help with the growing crisis. They found that some of the viruses had their own limited intelligence. They seemed to be working on high speed processing and sharing of decisions in a hive mind. The network effect was their downfall however; it allowed Athena and the coders a way in. Once they had a fingerprint, they started locking down systems and then inoculating them. They then changed the encryption keys and set them up on a separate network, sometimes even going so far as to direct engineering teams to physically disconnect hardware until they were ready to clean it. By the time they had samples of the viruses they knew the tide was turning.

  It took hours before the situation settled down however. Athena had
been forced to cut off entire sections of the net and then power them down before bots and human coders could be let loose to clean them up. Once they were finished, the AI went through the access codes and reset any passwords she considered compromised. Her latest immunization database would identify such attackers again. Coders were at work fixing the damage and doing inventories of what was lost or affected.

  By evening it was over. A review of the attack showed that some information had been hacked and passed along by a third string of attackers. They'd used the two distractions as cover. They'd also only hacked low level files to keep her bots from being alerted.

  For the first time, Athena realized she was … vexed. Frustrated, annoyed … she closed her thesaurus and focused her concentration on the meeting between Jack Lagroose and the security team. She would examine the implications of her emotional state at a later time she thought.

  “Glad this is going on now. Imagine what havoc they could have done to Daedalus.”

  “Yes. But … now that's got me wondering,” Trevor said carefully in his mechanical voice.

  Jack blinked in confusion. “Oh,” his eyes widened as he caught on. “Oh!” He scowled.

  “Exactly,” Trevor said as Roman scowled.

  “Yeah. We're only learning about this now. I want to know how long has this been going on? We need to find out. Get Miss Cole to announce the virus attacks in a public press release. A denial of service is the least of what they are attempting to do. Get it out there in front of whatever they claim now, perhaps the justice department will try to step in and help on their end. Who knows, stranger things have been known to happen,” Jack said, shaking his head. “And get the computer geeks and bots on getting a time line. Start tearing apart systems, find out how long this has been going on, how deep the enemy has penetrated.”

  Roman nodded. “Roger.”

  “Yes, sir, we're already working on it,” Trevor said.