“A giant’s size perturbs his flexibility,” Seee said.
“The giant is like an octopus arm. You cut off one tentacle, and it simply grows back.”
“When a giant falls, expect the ground to shake as he gets up to chase you, not yet realizing he is already dead.”
“I can think of nothing that could kill the giant,” I said. “The government is ubiquitous, all powerful.”
“The government holds the illusion of power, but it is the people who truly possess it. Otherwise, why would the State need to plot against us? Their weapon is fear, and with fear they try to cow us into submission. But if the State can be shown as weak, out of control, then the spark is lit, the fire takes birth, and it is then the government must bend the knee to the people instead of the reverse.”
“And is it the purpose of The Minutemen to bend, or break it?”
“Do not misunderstand our intentions. We want to preserve the Union, not destroy it. Are we not all Americans? What is needed is surgical removal of the rot, the detritus of those choking our Homeland and enslaving the people. But we do not want the nation falling into the chaos of factions and street anarchy, yet there lies the path already in front of us.”
Our voices echoed off the stone and funneled to the surface as we dove ever deeper. We had gone perhaps seven stories down, and still I did not see a bottom. Not long afterward, I finally saw a floor, a long slab of rusted iron. I dropped down onto it. A dull thud from my footsteps was not the clanging echo of something hollow I expected underneath. The floor was solid steel, thick enough to take a direct hit from heavy artillery. Another flash of red light, and the sidewall opened. We ducked under the entrance and moved into a little cave, the door of iron closing behind us. A hatch in the iron floor took us down one more level to a lockout trunk. We crawled through another steel hatch and then slid into a darkened hall. At the end of the corridor, a loaded Dillon Aero Gatling gun with a string of ammo attached pointed at us, the ammo looping down to a box on the floor. Seee led me through a door into a plain-looking room stacked with boxes of supplies (I guessed ready-to-eat meals). We paused in the next room, which had a thick steel vault, high enough for a man to easily step through.
Seee turned to face me. “Our control room. Only a limited few have ever seen it, besides those who work here. With trust, comes honor.” He placed his hand to my heart in a Yoncalla sign of respect. “The only wall that can stop you from doing great things is the one you build yourself. Remember to use all three of your eyes, Cerberus.”
It was the first time I had heard my hacker name spoken in many years. My Anonymous name, once upon a time spread throughout the fabric of the Underworld, the three-headed Hellhound raining chaos on the financial elite inside the Internet. A rebel against Wall Street, a Main Street protector, fucking with HFT algos, juking them at their own games, bankrupting their over-leveraged positions by pushing a snowball off a mountaintop, watching from the summit as it rolled over all of them.
Seee punched digits on a wall keypad and the vault opened. We stepped into a dome-shaped room, a lecture-hall feel to its rounded architecture. Long tables faced toward the front of the room. Workstations spread all over the place, outnumbering the people—enough for fifty, but only fifteen were present—some at holographic touch-screens, others at terminals. Some paused pulling at images floating in the air. A few faces turned to gawk at me, and like The Time Machine, they stared at me as if I were an Eloi from above.
A series of wide steps led down to the viewing wall where the largest ten-foot screen displayed a black image. From the top of the stairs, I could see the caption on the lower left—Montgomery 02:30:11 EST—as the seconds ticked along. Ten other screens surrounded the larger, each monitor flashing a different location. Places within The Abattoir—two shots within the jungle, one high on a cliff close to where we were dumped for Nature training, another on the outskirts of another perimeter. Another showed the quarters of the Tree House where we were first delivered. Another the Laddered Pit. Others showed thermal images of tunnels—one of them from the well we had just descended. Still others were nighttime images, city images far away from this one.
Seee weighed the reaction on my face. “We modeled it after Langley, but of course some of the design we’ve given our own personal touch. As you see, we have room to grow.”
“So you want me working down here?” I asked.
He smiled at my incredulous tone, my eyes of disbelief. “Only for a week or so. Then you will have another assignment involving some of your old skills as well as some of your new.”
Seee led me down the stairs, where from a circular desk on the lower floor with large monitors on top, a man stood from behind one of the screens and approached. A frail man, short and lightly bearded, as if someone had peppered it with snow, he smiled slightly when he got near. Hair flowed to shoulder-length, but strands of oily brown bangs flowed clumsily into his eyes. He stood with his hands behind his back, inching toward us in small steps, as tiny as a geisha’s. Seee announced him as Promiscuous, and when he did so, the man raised his pale lips delicately into another fragile smile. Dipping his head so slightly, it was unclear if it had been a bow. The name was known widely in the Underworld, a name that circled around the infamous virus Stuxnet, the cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. His name had been associated with the NSA, the Tailored Access Operations, a group of cyberwarriors, hackers, and programmers. They were the hitmen of the Internet, layered deeper than all others in the skeins of cyberspace.
The frail Promiscuous held out his eggshell of a hand, and I took it lightly in my palm. His wrist was made of bird bone, his palm so delicate I wasn’t sure if I should kiss it. He wore a custom-designed Anonymous T-shirt, the question mark notably larger above the flamboyantly bulbous head of the black-suited man in the logo.
“Promiscuous is an Anonymous name, is it not?” I asked.
“It is. And yet, I’ve been called worse.”
Promiscuous was a network mode activated when a sniffer went online within a segment. I had always found the name quite clever, and for the first time I was meeting a face from the Underworld, one for whom I had deep respect. He was a legendary mind, his knowledge vast and broad, a brainchild of tactical cyberwarfare and one of the cleverest worm writers I had ever known.
I nodded respectfully. “It is a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“Likewise,” he said. He removed one of his hands from behind his back and tapped his finger on his lower lip. He glanced at Seee, and as if he were coming to a conclusion, said, “You’ve been out of the game for quite some time, Cerberus—a long, long time.”
“Yes, sir. Three years.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Three years, two months, and five days in fact, if your time away from an Anonymous login is any indication.” He paused, fingering the air in a small arc with his pinky, as if there were a clock measuring time in front of him. “Much, much, too much time I would say.”
“I was caught,” I said.
“Only by Datalion.”
“It was enough to get me blacklisted across Silicon Valley, and beyond.”
“You were trying to hack Blake Thompson’s personal computer, weren’t you?”
“I was unlucky. The machine was being fixed by the IT department at the time.”
Others in the room became intrigued by the conversation. In front of me, faces popped up from behind glowing monitors. Some people got up from their seats to stare. Others descended the stairs to introduce themselves.
“What were you after on Mr. Thompson’s machine?” Promiscuous asked.
“Something I didn’t get.”
This statement put another thin smile on the gaunt man’s face. “We believe this is something he still has. But more on that later.” He was waving at others to join. “From what I have seen, your time away from a machine has flared up quite a bit of violence in you. Perhaps your mind is not as sharp as it once was.”
“I have always been a fighter
, sir. No matter the capacity. I am sure my mental facilities can still be of some use.”
Promiscuous nodded to Seee, seemingly pleased with the response.
An older, white-haired man leading a troupe of others descended the stairs. He had glassy yellow eyes, and a leathery, dried-out face. He was introduced as Cetus, and he was someone I recognized. Shuffling back in my memories, I remembered the farmer waving to Merrill as we stood on a hill in observation. A man both Morlock and Eloi, he was coming above ground for the life of the ancient world, only to descend into the world I stood in now.
Others were introduced after the old man—Toorcon and Vines—names infamous in the hacking world years ago, but since gone off-grid. The Anthill had gobbled up others I didn’t know and had never heard of. There was Eros, Sputnik, and two women in the crew whose names were Nyx and Lady X.
After the introductions, Promiscuous said, “We are called The Anthill not because we are buried underground, but because we work like the insect Formicidae. We work in groups, each assigned an area of expertise. We require a very special expertise from you, Cerberus. You have intimate knowledge which we do not have concerning Datalion’s security systems.”
“It would be an honor to help,” I said.
But Promiscuous was eager for more information, a sense of hacker impatience in his voice. “We’ve duplicated some of the NSA client programs that have been created internally and used only inside Bluffdale. After decompiling them, we understand how they work.”
“Bluffdale?” I asked.
“The NSA SIGAD site in Utah. Stellar Wind? I do hope you can remember a few things, being out of the game.”
“I know of Stellar Wind,” I retorted. “I just didn’t recognize the town. I am also quite aware of the new quantum computer running there.”
“The QX. Yes. But singular, it will not be. It will be many, and they should help tremendously in their quest to blow away the few grains of privacy still left. There will be no more latency within the Leviathan.”
“Is that what you’re calling Stellar Wind, the Leviathan?” I asked.
“That’s what is. Is it not? Every bit of your life will be present under their roof. They will sit on top of you, using the information as they please to squeeze you to their will.”
“Yes,” I said.
“How do you think they are getting names for what they are calling the Uplift Programs? You know what they are, don’t you?”
“I’m not very aware—”
“Of course you’re not aware,” Promiscuous interrupted. “We urge you to go see for yourself. They are constructing camps in South Dakota, Idaho, and eastern Oregon.”
“Only Idaho and Oregon are operational at the moment,” Cetus interjected. “Some of our friends have been taken there.”
Promiscuous said, “When you come out—no, no, let me backspace—if they let you out, you will be pacified. As good as lobotomized by their drugs; the drips of which come from a surgically implanted port that can be refilled with a doctor’s visit. It is a mega-dose of valium for the population.”
“They are starting with persons of interest,” Seee said. “But most certainly they will enlarge the beta program as civil disobedience grows.”
Promiscuous tapped his thin lips again. “Internally at the NSA, much has changed since whistleblower Edward Snowden had his day. They have zipped their vagina tight with a chastity belt. They have gone through great pains to make Stellar Wind secure. Like Fort Meade, data can come in, but it can’t get out. But it’s worse than that.”
“He hasn’t seen what their true capabilities are yet?” Cetus asked.
“No,” Promiscuous said. “Indeed he has not. Vines, queue up the video. Let’s take a look at how good they’ve gotten.”
As we waited, Promiscuous placed his fragile hand on my shoulder, squeezed it, and said, “For some years they have had the ability to turn on your phone’s GPS, video and audio devices, tap in to your Google glasses, and use CCTV cams within the vicinity. Now, they can wire into everyone else’s devices too within your vicinity. They don’t even need feet on the ground anymore. They are following you with micro-UAVs. They are as small as a blue jay, and to the unsuspecting eye, can look like them too.”
“But we are one leg up on them there,” Cetus added.
Promiscuous nodded, raising a hand for Cetus not to say any more. Then he pointed at the screen as the video began. “But now this—”
On the screen was Titus Montgomery speaking with an aide. The aide told him that he had Ron Pelletier on the phone, asking for progress on the Linked Language case.
“Tell him we have linguistics on it,” Montgomery said.
“He persists on speaking with you,” the aide said.
“Tell him I’ll call him back on a secure line.”
Montgomery picked up the receiver of his STE voice-over IP telephone and put the KSV-21 crypto card in the PC slot. When he got Pelletier on the phone, he said, “Ron, we’ve talked about this before.”
An incoherent voice came across the line, muffled and distant, but it was one I recognized. I gazed around the room, but all eyes were on the screen.
“I know I only gave you a minute before, but that’s all I had. We’re working on it, Ron.” More words came from the incoherent voice. “It’s intricate. It’s amazing we even caught it. It was in six pieces, each piece encrypted differently and simply a mosaic of an image, each with separate originating IPs, each going to separate email accounts by separate providers, disseminated in chunks all over the place. That’s what we’re talking about here.”
The voice of Pelletier came back, and then Montgomery said, “Some genetic algorithm caught it running on the QX. We’re quite pleased with the catch. The link was so obtuse our guys don’t know how it was done—each message received at separate Internet cafés, but all in the same vicinity within the same timeframe. Where is the link in that when all of the data is encrypted bits? We’ve cracked the encryption, but the language itself—we don’t know what it is. Linguistics is on it. They’re looking at dead languages, but the accounts they were using are all dead now. Nothing else is coming out, so we don’t have much to go on. We’ve gone out a few degrees for a link on each account, but it’s turned up nothing.”
The video paused, another aide barging into Montgomery’s door, a face frozen in time.
“That’s what Turbulence can do,” Promiscuous said. “It can create associations that are invisible to us. It’s snooping in whole other worlds we can’t see, hear, or taste. It’s worming its way into other dimensions of data and coming back to the NSA with answers. And here we are, thinking we were clever with what we were doing. But Turbulence proves it can find even the tiniest of cracks in the architect’s masterpiece. In short, we have been outsmarted. It is only Yoncalla, our paranoia, and this surveillance video that has saved us. Rest assured the same pattern would certainly be found again.”
Pelletier had perhaps linked some things together, dead languages, The Abattoir, a cryptic message—an informant, perhaps CIA—a patriot turned traitor or vice-versa. If one Minuteman had turned, then how many were there? The Company perhaps infiltrated. But where was the proof when the program was working? Who would have the nuts to tell the Deputy Director their best HumInt guys perhaps had a second agenda? And who was doing counterintelligence within The Abattoir? Who had been told, and what were they doing about Pelletier?
Promiscuous brought me back from my thoughts. “We take extreme precautions, but it’s the telescreen, Cerberus, except with far better reach. They are a spider, able to cast a very large web to catch any bug that resists them. We think they’re storing terabytes for a single person, exabytes within their ultracloud. Can you imagine? How do you search it all to build your persons of interest with so much data? The QX is the only way without significant latency. Without the QX, they can only be looking into the past.”
“Once, we were able to crack through the first firewall undetected,” Cetus said
.
“Yes,” Promiscuous said, “but we didn’t have access to the database or the QX and we won’t get another shot. Now in the subnet there is a biometric password expiring every ten minutes stored in shared memory on the server, but the encryption algorithm on the wire is in constant flux. We can’t crack what’s on the wire as it’s always changing.”
“It’s part of Rose,” I said with a faint smile. “Rose is the cloud controller among other things. Three of us worked on her. Rose cannot be killed without taking down the cloud. She is the atmosphere, the weather, a genetic algorithm, always changing, always learning, seeking out new threats to the system, donning out resources, handling database activity. It was the fruit of my thesis I took into Datalion.”
The faces around the circle were in a state of dejection. I added, “She does more than just security. But if you could crack her, what is your intent? To destroy the database?”
“Disruption is our best weapon,” Cetus said. “Leviathan cannot be killed, only wounded. The best we can do is put an end to the past, but we have no control over the future. Any destruction of data, or sloshing of data together, would soon be detected. Most likely, the system wouldn’t be recoverable, but all we would gain is time. People’s actions are habitual. They won’t banish technology. The data will keep coming.”
Promiscuous paced the room toward the darkened screen with Montgomery captioned on it. He stood in front of the screen, bending his neck to look up at it, hands behind his back. “That’s our secondary goal. Our primary goal is to obtain a few secrets. For that we need a sniffer, but we have been unable to be promiscuous, so to speak.”
The circle giggled at the remark.
“Perhaps I can help you with Rose,” I said. “There is an internal mechanism inside that can be activated. Commands can be sent to it with the right client software. Data would be stored internally, buried in one of the system tables.”
Promiscuous motioned for Seee and me to follow. Led out of the room through a side door, the others wandered back to their desks. We strolled into a hallway of a mini-warehouse full of humming machines. The room in front of us had a glass window separating their server room. Racks of computers with a thousand green blinking lights flashed before us. An old Cray-2 in an octagonal shape shimmered in blue directly in front of us.
The Cause Page 17
