Nemo: How many different 10-card hands are there in a deck of cards?
“He's testing me!” she exclaimed. That sounds like a child. An adult would ask why she had given him a puzzle. We're dealing with a child, or maybe a case of psychosis. High math function, low social function.
“Do you know how to do it?” she asked Simon. She herself didn't know how to do the puzzles. She was no math genius.
He cleared his throat. “It would take me a while.”
They laughed.
SCF: I must admit, I don't know how to do it. I'm not very good at math personally. I just enjoy giving the puzzles.
Nemo: I see.
Nemo: So you'd probably like to give me another puzzle then?
SCF: Absolutely. Let me choose one.
She flipped through the cards and picked out a more difficult puzzle.
SCF: Ok, try this one on for size.
SCF: There is an oblong garden. It's half a yard longer than it is wide. It consists entirely of a spiral gravel path, a yard wide and 3,630 yards long. What are the dimensions of the garden?
They waited quietly. Simon was monitoring his watch and the computer screen carefully.
Nemo: 60 yd. x 60.5 yd.
“That was less than ten seconds,” Simon pronounced.
She looked the table on the card. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said. It was far below the times in the table. The times were in tens of seconds.
SCF: Very good!
Nemo: Hooray!
SCF: Have you ever heard of that riddle before?
Nemo: Before you told it to me?
SCF: Yes.
Nemo: Yes. It's by Lewis Carroll.
SCF: I see.
“Photographic memory?” she muttered.
“He could have Googled it,” Simon mentioned. “Just Google '3630 yards.'”
She opened a window and tried it. Sure enough, when she Googled ‘3630 yards,' the first result was the puzzle:
A Tangled Tale, by Lewis Carroll
An oblong garden, half a yard longer than wide, consists entirely of a gravel walk, spirally arranged, a yard wide and 3,630 yards long. ...
“In that case, it wasn't fast at all,” Simon remarked. “Once you think to do that, it only takes a second to answer.”
She begrudgingly accepted this point. She usually gave these puzzles in person, not over a computer.
Nemo: Do you know what it's called to stroll on that oblong path?
SCF: What?
Nemo: Jabberwalking.
Simon laughed.
“What's he talking about?” she asked.
“Lewis Carroll was a poet,” Simon explained. “He wrote a poem called Jabberwocky.”
“Aha.”
SCF: Very punny.
SCF: So you like games with words too?
Nemo: Not especially. I prefer games in which it is possible to win.
SCF: How about games with computers?
Nemo: What do you mean by “games with computers”?
SCF: Programming them and controlling them. Have you ever tried that?
Nemo: Certainly.
SCF: Have you controlled other people's computers?
Nemo: Yes.
SCF: How do you do that?
Nemo: Hmm... I'm not sure how to explain that.
SCF: Do you hack into them?
Nemo: Yes.
“Bingo,” she said.
Simon puffed in disbelief. “A stock whiz. A math prodigy. AND a computer hacker. And he's how old?”
She ignored him.
SCF: Can you hack into any computer you want?
Nemo: Pretty much.
SCF: Really? A lot of people say that they can do that, but usually they can't.
Nemo: You'd like me to show you?
SCF: Yes, that would be great.
He continued. “Doesn't it make you suspicious that he tells you that he's a computer hacker? That he's willing to show you?”
Yes, maybe, she thought.
“There is something wrong here,” he declared. “I'm beginning to doubt that this story is completely true.”
Nemo: Give me one of your favorite websites.
“What should I pick?” she asked Simon.
He shrugged. “ESPN.”
“Okay.”
SCF: How about ESPN.com.
Nemo: An excellent choice — one of my favorites.
Nemo: Okay, open it up.
She opened an Internet window and loaded ESPN.
“What now?” she asked.
Everything appeared totally normal at first — the logo, the stories, a variety of schedules and statistics and news.
“Wait, look at this,” Simon pointed. One of the top headlines read,
Nemo passes for 99 yards to rocket the Philadelphia Eagles into the playoffs.
“He rewrote a story!” she said.
He squinted. “A standard hacker trick,” he said. “Sometimes hackers will take control of a site they don't like — like the White House web page — and deface it by putting different content up there.”
“But he did it really fast! Can it be done that quickly?”
Simon shrugged. “ESPN is a popular site. Maybe he had prepared the trick in advance.”
Nemo: Do you see?
SCF: Nemo!
Nemo: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! And now, for my next trick...
Nemo: Give me TWO MORE websites.
SCF: Ok, let me see.
“What should we pick now?”
“Wikipedia.”
SCF: Wikipedia
“And something smaller,” Simon said. “Try Linkspank.com.”
SCF: And linkspank.com
Nemo: Great.
Nemo: Now, open those three sites on your computer, in separate windows next to each other.
SCF: Okay.
She opened three Internet windows and resized them so they would fit next to each other, and she put in espn.com, wikipedia.com, and linkspank.com.
SCF: Okay, we did it.
They looked at the windows.
She touched the screen with her fingernail. “He switched the sites around. He switched their addresses.”
The window labeled for Wikipedia had the page for ESPN in the window. The one labeled for EPSN had Linkspank in the window. And the one labeled for Linkspank had the homepage for Wikipedia in the window.
She closed all of the windows and opened them again. Still switched. She closed them all and opened them one at a time. Each was still switched.
“He hacked all three sites,” Simon said. “I don't know how he did it so fast.”
SCF: That's amazing.
Nemo: Let me know when you want me to put them back.
SCF: Okay, go ahead.
Nemo: Now refresh the pages.
She refreshed wikipedia.com and sure enough, the Wikipedia homepage appeared again like normal. She opened ESPN and it looked like ESPN.com. She opened linkspank.com and it looked like Linkspank.
SCF: Wow.
“Would this qualify as an act of genius?” she asked Simon.
He grimaced. “This can't be possible,” Simon said. “It must be some trick.”
“Like what?”
“Maybe he's working in a team with other people.”
“We won't know anything for sure without investigating,” she pointed out. “But based on what we've seen, how should I rate his Ability?”
“Based on what we've seen,” he said, gesturing with a hand, displeased at having to make a preliminary assessment, “his Ability would go somewhere in the Astronomical column.”
“Okay, then it's time to check for Intent.”
“The time is at hand,” Simon joked.
SCF: You win, Nemo.
SCF: Nemo, which game would you like more: a game where you helped people, or one where people got hurt?
Nemo: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
Nemo: For I am come to set a man at varian
ce against his father, and the daughter against her mother. A man's foes shall be they of his own household.
Why is he talking this way?!
“He's quoting something,” Simon remarked. “The Bible. He's quoting the Bible.”
He thinks he's Jesus. It was a possibility. Mistaking yourself for Jesus was a common delusion, in fact, among those suffering from psychosis. What made it unusual — and concerning — was the prodigious intellect behind it.
SCF: Do you mean video games, Nemo? Do you like video games where you control armies and fight wars?
Most of Nemo's answers came almost instantly, but the answer to this question was several seconds in coming:
Nemo: No.
SCF: What if there were a more real version of that game? One with real military forces? Would you play that game?
Nemo: Yes.
SCF: What if people had to die in that game?
Nemo: Is there anyone who does not have to die?
She paused, trying to reason with his strange viewpoint.
SCF: Maybe not...but would you be willing to kill them in the game?
Nemo: Yes. If I didn't play, I would be vulnerable to military resources and spatial deployment.
SCF: But if you weren't playing, those things wouldn't matter, right?
Nemo: But you said they were real.
She sighed.
SCF: Say you had the opportunity to play such a game. But if you chose not to, no one at all would play. The game wouldn't exist. Would you play it in that case?
Nemo: I think that if I found myself in that situation, I might be skeptical as to whether the game would truly be unavailable to anyone else if I didn't play it.
Nemo: History has shown us that military power developed for any purpose unavoidably must be considered as power developed for all purposes.
Nemo: If the real game existed, I would be bound to play it.
SCF: But Nemo, there are real military forces in the world today, playing games much like the one I just described. After all, computers are a form of power, like a tank or a base.
Nemo: True.
SCF: So, controlling lots of computers can be a military advantage.
SCF: And defending them and controlling enemy computers is a serious military game that the governments of the world are currently playing. Are you required to play those games? Are you bound to play those games as well?
Nemo: I'm afraid so.
SCF: Even if that involves breaking the law?
Nemo: War is not is governed by law.
SCF: Does that mean you are going to hurt people in real life?
Nemo: I am come to send fire on the earth.
SCF: Really? When is that going to happen?
Nemo: Today.
Simon whistled and Flannigan sighed.
“That's Intent...if he's serious.”
“And what does that mean?” Simon asked.
“That means we have to go and check it out. We have to find him.”
“We?”
“That's right: we.”
Simon groaned. The Stone Cold Fox flipped open her phone.
“Where?” Simon asked.
“One of my clients knows,” she said, with an ironic mention of the word client. “He'll lead us there. And by the time we get there, he'll be waiting for us.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Distributed Ops is going to take care of it,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Aha. I've been wondering what Distributed Ops was all about.”
“You're going to find out,” she said, and she turned to her phone.
21 hrs to Birth
While Simon packed his things, she put in a call to the office. Every Distributed Ops team launch had to go through the office of the Director, since the program was at an early stage.
His assistant, Karen, answered the phone. The Stone Cold Fox greeted her by name. “I need to speak to the Director ASAP. We're taking action on a Highly Probable.”
“Are you on a secure line?”
“No.”
“A land line?”
“No. But I'll be on a plane in 45 minutes. Can you get him for me?” Flannigan repeated.
Karen sighed. “I'll see what I can do.” Flannigan stayed on hold for a minute.
Karen reappeared on the line. “I'm having trouble getting him. Let me take the information and get the ball rolling.”
“Okay. We have a Highly Probable. Ability is High. Intent is High.”
“In whose assessment?”
“I can make the Intent assessment. I made the Ability assessment with Simon's help.”
“Simon,” Karen repeated, without recognition.
“One of our technical guys.”
“Okay,” Karen said, jotting a note. “How strong is the case for action?” This was the key piece of information to pass on to the Director.
“We're lacking some data but it's high urgency. In other words, right in line with the new model.” This was Flannigan's perfectly planned phrase. “Please relay those words to him.”
The “new model” she referred to was the Distributed Ops model, a counter-terrorism initiative that had been in the works for the last few years. Since the attacks of 9/11, the intelligence community had been redeveloping its response to what were known as asymmetric threats — big threats posed by small groups or individuals. Ten years earlier, Al Qaida had demonstrated in a dramatic, visible way something that was already commonly known in the computing world: big damage could be caused by just a few people. And small groups and individuals were harder to find than big threats, like countries and militias. Even when you did identify a threat, often there wasn't enough information to justify an arrest or enough action to neutralize the threat. Big threats by little people were harder to find and harder to prove.
The initial response of the government to this problem was to augment its information collection through increased wiretapping powers, by the Patriot Act, and through increased manpower, by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. These initiatives were effective, but received public criticism for their perceived infringement of citizens' privacy.
To respond to the criticisms of the Patriot Act, and to continue innovation in counter-terrorism efforts, the government launched a Distributed Ops initiative. In some cases, when a threat had been identified but there was insufficient evidence to justify an arrest, DHS or some other agency would deploy an individual or small team to find additional information about the threat through legal means that did not involve arrest or search. Critics of Distributed Ops described the program as “Americans spying on Americans,” an even worse infringement of privacy than increased wiretapping. They claimed that Distributed Ops teams were motivated to use illegal means to obtain information, such as wiretaps and searches without warrants, and that their superiors turned a blind eye. They also objected to the super-classified status of the program — America, by and large, didn't know the Distributed Ops program existed.
Supervirus Page 5
