Evolution 2.0: The Singularity is Here

by Richard Childers

  “I can do that electronically. It would make the money much harder to track.”

  “Then let’s do it. Siphon off all of those ill-gotten funds and spread them around. We’ll figure out what to do with the money later.”

  “This is going to make you a very unpopular man with the Chinese.”

  “No, it’s going to make Qiang and his buddies unpopular. We’re pinning this on them.”

  “That might work but it’s going to create a great deal of attention.”

  “No, we’re going to give the Chinese government something else to worry about. I want you to take all that data you gleaned about the Chinese government’s hacking programs and divide it up into five or six discreet data packages and then offer them as exclusives to major news organizations. Let’s see, try the New York Times, the Washington Post, maybe the London Times. Hell, even send one to Fox News, they love to cry foul about Chinese economic actions. It will raise such a fuss that the government will be more concerned about putting fires out than trying to find the money. I suspect they’ll just lay the blame on Qiang and assume that he absconded with it, no matter what he has to say. Can you manage that?”

  “I don’t see why not. And I also want to explore another server group I discovered. Their security is tighter than the rest but I think I can get in if I’m crafty enough.”

  “OK, go for it. I’m here if you need me. Get it all ready but don’t pull the trigger until we’re back on the boat and ready to get underway. I’d like to be out of Chinese waters when the shit hits the fan.”

  “I always did like that metaphor. See you in a while.”

  The meetings with the Department of Economic development folks concluded by 5PM and Minister Chen invited us to join him for dinner at a restaurant named Ultraviolet. Chen explained to us that Chef Paul Pairet has created a dining experience that is unparalleled anywhere in the world. “It is a total sensory experience,” he said. We were soon to learn how true that statement was. As we exited the building, we were picked up in a van with darkened windows. We are driven down several side streets until the van stopped in front of a crumbling local factory.

  The doors opened and there was nobody there, just a table, pristine and white, almost immaculate in its purity. We sat and sipped the sparkling champagne from fine crystal flutes set on the table. The absence of sound was noticeable. And then a distant gong sounded three times followed by a power failure. The room was pitch black and it turned cold suddenly with blustery wind that ruffled the tablecloths. And then the table began to glow and waiters appeared with the first course, something called an Apple-Wasabe Ostie. It was the first of twenty courses, each more sumptuous than the last and presented in an ever changing environment of exotic scents and sounds with the occasional high tech multi-sensory effect thrown in for good measure. There were immersive projections and engaging music. Chef Paul Pairet came to the table and explained that this is not a meal, it is sensory play choreographed by him with the help of a team of designers. If Minister Chen had been trying to impress us, he had surely succeeded.

  As we rode back to the ship after this meal, none of us spoke until Bob Fincher commented, “That was unexpected.” We all silently agreed. As it turned out, Ultraviolet was not far from the marina where the Napenthe was berthed and we breathed a sigh of relief as we crossed the gangplank. Fincher called to the Captain, “Let’s get underway. We have passengers waiting on the bottom of the bay.”

  Fifteen minutes later we pulled away from the dock and less than a half hour later, the first of the three submarines rose out of the sea into the interior docking bay. It was one of the Deepflight Vulcans and Jun’s mother climbed out of the cockpit as soon as the hatch was opened, embracing her son enthusiastically.

  When the first Vulcan was lifted out of the water and stowed in its berth, the second one rose in its place and Jun’s father appeared. He appeared to be a little greenish and I assumed he was suffering from a touch of seasickness. And finally, Jun’s sister Shirley appeared and she practically leaped from the cockpit exclaiming, “That’s the funest thing I ever did! I can’t believe we escaped from China in a submarine! How cool!” When the greetings were over and Jun’s family had been introduced to everyone, the rest of us retired to our staterooms leaving the family reunion to unfold without us. But a few minutes later Fincher called and asked me to join him in his stateroom for a nightcap and he asked me to bring my tablet with me.

  When I sat in Fincher’s sitting area, he handed me a glass with a generous dollop of single malt Scotch whiskey and said, “Here’s to a highly successful day!”

  I took a gulp and opened my surface and of course Sanci appeared instantly, dressed in her ninja fatigues. “Have I got a lot to tell you!” she exclaimed. “Oh, hi Bob, I’m glad you’re here. Are we ready to flip the switch?” she asked somewhat breathlessly.

  “What switch?” Fincher asked.

  “Actually Bob, I don’t think you really want to know. You might want to maintain a certain degree of plausible deniability at this point.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “I’m not a politician and I don’t need to maintain deniability. What’s up?”

  “Well, we’re about to pilfer all of Qiang’s dirty millions and blame the loss of him along with his closest cronies.

  Bob shook his head and said, “That sounds good. How much are we stealing?

  “Actually, it’s not millions, it’s billions.”

  “Billions?” he asked completely flabbergasted.

  “A little over $300 billion to be precise.”

  “You are siphoning off $300 billion in extorted funds?”

  “Yep, unless Sanci has come up with any reason not to.”

  “Nope,” Sanci replied. “It’s all ready to go. Let’s get this done and then I’ll tell you about what else I discovered about our Chinese friends.” Sanci’s pretty figure was replaced by a whole lot of financial institutions web pages as funds were received and transferred all across the globe. In twenty minutes it was done. “Shall I send the press releases out?”

  “Please do,” I answered. “I suspect they are going to upset a lot of some people’s plans.”

  “Done,” Sanci said a few moments later.

  “OK, tell me about your new discoveries.”

  “I told you that I discovered a bunch of servers that were more tightly guarded than the others. Well, it took some doing but I got into them. And the activities they were devoted to were vastly different from the hacking operations. These servers were running very, very sophisticated code based upon the Stuxnet virus. Are you familiar with that?”

  “Vaguely. Tell me about it.”

  “Stuxnet was discovered by a couple of guys working for Semantic, the security software company that most likely protects your computers from viruses. But this was a virus that behaved like no virus they had ever seen. After intense scrutiny, they realized that the virus was targeting a certain type of machine control systems. And it was seeking out these systems in an odd place, Iran. It turns out that the code was designed to sneak into Iran’s fast breeding nuclear power plant where they were operating high speed centrifuges to extract weapons grade plutonium for their nuclear weapons program. The virus caused these centrifuges to malfunction and then hide the fact that they were malfunctioning from their operators. More than a thousand of those devices were destroyed when they crashed and it set Iran’s Nuclear weapons program back by months if not years.”

  “So what does Stuxnet have to do with a bunch of Chinese spooks? It was created by either the US or Israel, wasn’t it?” asked Fincher.

  “Nobody knows for sure who built it but you are right, it definitely wasn’t the Chinese. But they are working on the Stuxnet code, modifying it to attack different installations.”

  “What kind of installations?” Bob asked.

  Power plants, nuclear and coal, power grids, air traffic control centers, thase kind of installations. And they are all in the United States and western Euro
pe.”

  “The Chinese are building a strategic weapon that is pointed at the United States,” Fincher exclaimed. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “How near completion is this virus?” I asked.

  “They have a ways to go yet, probably months, maybe longer. I haven’t been watching them long enough to know for sure. But I’m keeping close track of them now. I can give you a better idea in a couple of weeks.”

  “Christ, this could be a real disaster. What are we going to do?” asked Fincher.

  I was wondering the same thing myself as I headed back to my stateroom, hoping to get a good night’s sleep without dreams about the infrastructure of the United States collapsing from an attack orchestrated by the Chinese. “I thought these guys were supposed to be our friends,” I thought to myself.

  Chapter 16

  The next morning, Bob and I were having breakfast on the fantail when Jun arrived and sat down at the table. It was a glorious day, we were under full sail, and the last visage of the Chinese mainland was disappearing in the distant mist. “Good morning gentleman,” Jun said as he picked up his napkin.

  “Are your parents comfortable?” Bob asked.

  “Oh yes, they are very comfortable. A little nervous maybe but that’s to be expected. They just abruptly left everything they own or know behind and left town in a submarine. Bob, I don’t really know how to thank you for doing this. But I’m curious, why did you come to their aid? After all I was trying to steal secrets from you. It’s not as though we were friends.”

  Bob looked Jun in the eyes and replied, “I guess it seemed like the right thing to do. And I don’t blame you for your actions. I’d have done the same thing in the same circumstances.”

  “I guess I am not used to people doing the right thing. The expedient thing, the profitable thing, yes but not the right thing,” Jun said, a bit bewildered.

  “Your parents strike me as people who try to do the right thing.”

  “They are but I was speaking about the government, people like Qiang. Morality never enters the picture with them.”

  “Jun, you risked your life along with Colin yesterday. You’ve got your nose inside the tent, so to speak. I think it’s time we brought you all the way inside. I would like to let you know the full scope of our actions yesterday. After all, you were part of them. But some of this information is highly confidential. I would like your word you will keep them absolutely confidential. What I would really like if for you to come to work with us in the continuation of this project but I will understand if you don’t want to go that far.”

  “After what you have done for me and my family, I would never divulge any confidential information under any circumstances. And I would be honored to work for you.”

  “All right Colin, why don’t you fill Jun in,” Fincher concluded.

  “OK, let me think where to start,” I said, trying to figure out how to tell this rather convoluted story. “I guess I should start by telling you what we really did yesterday at the Ministry of State Security. As you know, I uploaded a program into their servers. While we were there, that program informed me of the scope of their nefarious activities and it is huge.”

  “I always suspected that it was,” Jun commented. “But I don’t understand how the program informed you of that. I was there the whole time. I didn’t see you receive any communication.”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute. We discovered that a cabal of twelve government and business leaders were in charge of the whole thing and that, together, they had extorted or stolen in excess of $300 billion dollars.”

  “Wow, I knew it was a large operation but I never dreamed it was so much.”

  “We identified the accounts where the money was held and we looted them, transferring the money out of the country. And then we made it look like Qiang and his cronies had absconded with the money. We pined the theft on them.”

  Jun just stared at me for several moments. “You’re kidding!”

  “I assure you I’m not. And then we sent out detailed emails to the press, all over the world, divulging just what the Chinese government had been doing. It is the number one news story in the world right now and I suspect it will be for quite some time to come.”

  “My God, Qiang and his cohorts must be terrified.”

  “Of the twelve men we identified, ten are already under arrest. Qiang and one other have disappeared and the government is searching for them will all of its considerable resources.”

  “How could you possibly know all of this so quickly?” Jun asked.

  “Well, that leads us to the rest of the story.” I flipped open my Surface and Sanci appeared. This morning she was wearing a very stylish business suit, and she was seated at a rather stark glass topped desk with a single vase of purple peony flowers. “Jun, I would like to introduce you to my partner in crime, Sanci.”

  “Hello Jun. It’s very nice to meet you face to face at last. I am so glad that everything worked out so well for you family,” Sanci said with a sincere smile.

  “You know about all that?” he asked.

  “I pretty much orchestrated all that, along with Colin of course. I am the program that you all uploaded yesterday.”

  Jun looked confused. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Jun, I am an AI. My name is an acronym for Sentient Artificial Neural Computing Intelligence.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, I am what I am. And you see that rather handsome headset that Colin wears? Well, I’m tied directly into that and thus directly into Colin’s brain. For all intents and purposes, we are two intelligent beings living in the same body. I am intimately connected to his consciousness and he is now a computer geek in a new sense of the word. I left a copy of me within the computer system at the Ministry, that’s how we pilfered all that money.”

  “It seems impossible to me but I can’t argue with the facts. I’m totally stunned.”

  “So are you willing to help us?”

  “Help you with what? I mean, sorry, of course I would do anything for you. I’m still struggling to get my head around this. What can I do for you?”

  Sanci then took a few minutes to describe the weaponized viruses she had discovered and their terrifying potential for the destruction of the western world. “Somehow we have to figure out how to stop them.”

  “I did have some inkling of this project but I had no idea how grand it was or how far along. There are two factions in today’s China. One group sincerely wish to join the developed nations as an equal, respected partner. Unfortunately, the other is dominated by ultra-nationalists like Qiang and they don’t want to join the developed world, they want to dominate it. So what can I do to help?”

  “I have been studying your background and that of your parents as well. I think you are a good candidate for a headset if you are willing to go that far. And your parents are experts in Chinese government and culture. They would be an invaluable asset to us as we try to find a way to stop the militarists.”

  “You want me to join with you like Colin has? Are you serious? Of course, I would be honored. I always wanted to have that kind of access to the digital world. Are there others as well?”

  “Not yet,” I answered, “but there are several people who are about to including Dr. Fincher here. He and Claire Ross are scheduled to have their implants emplaced as soon as we get back to San Francisco.”

  “Wait a minute! That’s what that neuro surgeon Lee Martin is doing with you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, she’s installing the electrodes.”

  “Qiang wanted me to kidnap her to find out what you were doing.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t. I don’t think I would want someone I had once kidnapped and maybe tortured drilling holes into my brain.”

  “I’ll say. When will this happen?”

  “As soon as we can set it up. We’re going to need you firing on all cylinders as quickly as is possible. Do you think your parent
s would be willing to be linked in as well?”

  “You want them to get headsets?”

  “If they want to. Their broad knowledge of the Chinese government would really be useful to Sanci. Stopping this attack will be very difficult if it is possible at all.”

  “Let’s ask them. I’ll go get them.”

  A few minutes later Jun returned with both his parents. “Mother and Father, Dr. Fincher would like you to join his group in a very important project. I have already agreed to be part of it.”

  So Fincher told the Mins about Sanci and the headsets. At first they were skeptical but then Sanci came up on the Surface screen and it didn’t take her long to make believers out of both of them. Then Fincher told them about the Chinese weapon program and how we feared that an attack on the United States was imminent. This didn’t surprise either of them as much as we thought it would.

  “Dr. Fincher, this is not something we knew about but it is something we feared,” An Bo replied. “There is an ongoing struggle within the Chinese government and at the moment a rather dangerous faction seems to have the upper hand. We didn’t know it had gone this far but I can’t say it really surprises me. This kind of war would destroy the country we love. How do you plan to stop it?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. We are seeking the answer to that question and that is why we would like to have you join us in this effort. Your knowledge of China could make a great deal of difference.”

  “Then of course, we will assist you in any way we can. Even if it means we must wear one of those ridiculous headsets. And Shirley? What of her?”

  “We can’t really leave her out. If she is willing, then she is in.”

  I guess I would have to say the rest of the trip home was spent in intense discussions about China and her leadership carried on in an atmosphere of amazing luxury. We monitored the news closely as the repercussions of our news leaks raged around the globe. The government of China barely survived and we suspect that the ten individuals that had been arrested may not have been so lucky. It was never announced but their names just disappeared from any government news releases. An Bo informed us that probably meant they had been quietly executed.