Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

  “Yeah, man, the internet attacks. Surprised me, too. Kinetic kills. I thought it was going to be cyber,” Soxster said nervously as he poured two shots of the Scotch.

  “So you expected attacks on the beachhead routers and switches?” Susan asked, taking the glass.

  “Expected something. Not that. The way they’ve been hiring black hats and gray hats the last year or so, something was up.” He sipped the whiskey and rasped, “Coulda made me some real money, but I don’t break the law and I like to know who I’m working for, you know?”

  “Somebody’s been hiring hackers?”

  “Yeah. Half a million bucks a year and more, plus five-star room and board somewheres nice. Problem is you don’t know where,” Soxster said, parting the curtain and looking out on the cold night.

  “How did you hear about this?” Susan pressed.

  “IRC, hacker chat rooms, e-mails. At first just rumors from some of my more interesting contacts and friends. Then some other folks and I started to be approached over SILC, IRC, some closely guarded private mailing lists. You know, encrypted e-mails through anonymous relays. They seemed to know all the usual suspects, everybody that can get in places, slice and dice code.”

  “You know anyone who joined up?” Susan asked.

  “Hell yeah, one guy used to hang with us, but we didn’t trust him. He was breaking the law. Haven’t heard from him or seen any of those guys on the Net for months. It’s getting a little lonely out there,” Soxster said, and laughed.

  “Think you could help us find some of the hackers who’ve been hired?” Susan asked.

  “Yeah. We could try, but what was it you said a little while ago about CAIN? Megs just mentioned you were working on the truck bombs, the beachheads. Sign me up if I can help you on CAIN—that was such a disaster. I’d love to get the guys did that.”

  “Why? Was CAIN so much more of a loss than the beachheads?”

  “CAIN made the Living Software. It can fix everything. Look, since the internet began, earlier even, man has been writing code. And a few chicks, okay. But humans suck at coding after a million lines or so. Errors, sloppy drafting, stupidity. You get up to fifty million lines like in the Sytho routers and SofTrust operating system, they’re like Swiss cheese or a colander. The code hangs up, breaks down, anybody can hack it, nothing can work seamlessly with it. Problem was almost all the PCs were running SofTrust and almost all the routers were Sytho. There was a monoculture. So somebody figured out two Zero Day worms, surprise attack hacks, and we got the Cyber Crash of 2009.”

  “And why isn’t Living Software going to be just like that? Won’t everybody use that and make it a monoculture? I don’t know much about it,” Susan was chagrined to confess.

  “Shit, no. The Living Software kernel generates flawless code to do whatever it is you ask it to do. It’s software that writes software, flawlessly. None of the millions of mistakes like in SofTrust. And the kernel clones itself. So all the kernels talk to one another on the Net, so that they learn what has already been done. They learn, like in Open Software, and fix past mistakes. They know how to plug and play with each other’s work like its like one big organic code.” Soxster was definitely excited. He took another gulp of the Balvenie.

  “So when Globegrid was connected, it would have been the smartest thing that ever existed. All that incredible processing power, working in parallel, with Living Software writing new code, monitoring what it wrote. Even if ninety percent of the Globegrid was working on studying reverse-engineering the human brain and the genome, with just ten percent running on the world’s software problems, they’d all have been fixed. All anyone has to do to be part of it is just buy a Living Software kernel. So we’ll still get there. Just take longer without Globegrid.”

  Susan rose and stepped closer to the fire, feeling its heat on her back. “Living Software, when paired with the Globegrid, would have put hackers out of business. You’re a hacker.”

  “Yeah, it’s my hobby. Hacking means slicing and dicing computer code, not doing things that are illegal. The media uses hacker to mean cybercriminal, but few of us are. With flawless software available, I wouldn’t have to go ’round finding stupid mistakes in programs. I could ask the Living Software for new software to do all sorts of shit. Make the world a lot better place.” He looked out the window again. “Not only put hackers out of work. Woulda put a lot of government types out of work, too. How do you think all the electronic spy agencies around the world get in to systems? Through glitches in the software, mistaken or intentional. The same way I…” Soxster turned from Susan and looked to the window.

  Susan was taking notes on her PDA. “The world was about to change in a big way, and suddenly the computers that were going to do it, at least some of them, burn up. The fiber-optic connections that would have linked the supercomputers globally get cut. Then, just for extra measure, the satellites that might have been used as a backup disappear. Would China want to do that?” Susan asked.

  “Maybe. China has been trying to lace our computer networks with back doors for years, but they can’t keep up with some of it. Could have felt left out. Maybe they didn’t want a U.S. software monster taking over the world, again. But maybe it was NSA. Your own spy agency might not have wanted the world to have flawless software. How would they hack into places?” Soxster said, putting his glass down on the mantel. “Look, so why don’t we invite him in? He’s going to freeze to death out there.”

  “Who?” Susan asked.

  “The big guy in the doorway across the alley. He’s with you, isn’t he?” Soxster said, parting the curtain. Susan stood next to him and saw Jimmy hovering across the narrow alley in the doorway of a dress shop.

  She bent over and cracked open the old window, shoving it up about a foot. “Foley, come on up. You’ll be frozen into a statue out there.”

  Two minutes later, Jimmy was warming himself by the fire. Soxster offered him three fingers of the Balvenie, which Foley quickly gulped down. “I was just passing by…,” he tried.

  “Yeah, whatever. What’s that you’re packing, dude? Looks like a Sig,” Soxster said, pointing under Foley’s jacket. “Those things are mean mothers.”

  Foley gave him a questioning look.

  “Jimmy, Soxster was being very helpful. He was telling me about how the world would have changed if CAIN and the other nodes on Globegrid had propagated the Living Software,” Susan interjected, getting the subject off Jimmy’s gun.

  “The whole world would have changed, huh? Isn’t that just a touch melodramatic there, buddy?” Jimmy asked, reaching for the Balvenie bottle.

  “Hell no, man. The Singularity might have actually happened. The Borg, the Terminator, the Matrix!” Soxster gestured wildly, half mockingly.

  “Okay, okay,” Jimmy started waving his hands, too. “The Borg, Terminator, Matrix. Got all that. What’s the Singularity?”

  “Kurzweil. Brilliant local guy.” Soxster was on a roll. “The Age of Spiritual Machines was seminal. Back in ’99, he theorized about what would happen when computers became smarter than humans, in like five years from now. Then he wrote The Singularity Is Near. His theory, seven years ago, was that the only way mankind would be able to compete with smarter computers was to merge with them and that this would set off a period in human history where change would happen so fast and be so profound that we would not even be able to comprehend it—where humanity would be altered to the point at which we would not be able to understand the present in terms of the past. So far, the only thing Kurzweil was wrong about was the timing. With Globegrid we could get there tomorrow.”

  “Science fiction,” Jimmy sneered. “I read all those plots, saw the movies. Machine versus man and man loses. Matrix, Terminator. Bullshit.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly sounds like everything was coming into place to find out,” Susan suggested. “The Globegrid spreading Living Software sure sounds like the thing that this Kurzweil guy was afraid of.”

  “He wasn
’t afraid of it,” Soxster answered. “He wanted it. Thought it was the next step in evolution. But, an odd coalition of right-wing nutbags, evangelicals, and spiritual humanists did get pretty worked up about it.”

  “And Megs Myers thinks that there is another whole layer of technological advance that the public can’t see, gone underground, modifying the human genome,” Susan interjected.

  “Whatever. The fact that the Globegrid was going to go live sounds like motive to me. Blow up the computers, cut the connections. Slow the acceleration of technology. Give China time to catch up,” Jimmy insisted.

  “Save China or save the human race?” Susan interjected.

  “Or keep it sick and stupid,” Soxster shot back. “Look, even if the Singularity did not happen in one flash when Globegrid went live, the point is that the things that Globegrid is going to do in genomics and brain study will change the world,” Soxster asserted. “They are into reverse-engineering the human brain, downloading the brain, adding memory boards to the brain with nano, altering the genome to create a self-diagnostics and healing system in our bodies. They’re going to change the world, dude.”

  “Who are the ‘they’?” Jimmy asked.

  “You guys. The government, man, all those letter agencies. DARPA, NIH, and NSF giving billions to all the profs in Cambridge and California to do this shit,” Soxster smirked. “It’s the guys that run those federal agencies that are moving technology fast while the politicians and the clergy and all have no clue.”

  “And I’ll bet we’re leaving China in the dust with some of that research, just when they thought they were catching up. Motive,” Susan thought out loud.

  “I know some of the stuff that DARPA’s doing will definitely leave China, Iran, everybody in the dust,” Jimmy interjected. “Guy I knew from when I was in the Marines is in this program at Twentynine Palms where you wear a spacesuit-like thing that makes a grunt infantryman into Superman.”

  “Twentynine Palms. That’s a place?” Soxster asked.

  “Yeah, California desert,” Jimmy replied. “Why?”

  “I thought it was a program. One of the hackers I know from the Dugout, TTeeLer, before he disappeared last year, said he was going to keep an eye on the ‘two niner palm program’ for whoever it was hired him.”

  “Keep an eye on, not be part of?” Susan asked. “So we may know where one of the hackers disappeared to? We need to find him.” She stretched and yawned, looking suddenly like an eight-year-old past her bedtime. “It’s possible, then, that China hired American hackers, maybe without them knowing they were working for China? We’re making progress today, boys. We have leads on who did it and ideas about what they might hit next.”

  “Yeah, we may be making progress, but the Bureau ain’t. Tommy McDonough told me that the FBI can’t get anywhere with the Vehicle Identification Numbers on the truck bombs,” Jimmy said, smiling. “VINs are supposed to be a unique number on every vehicle, seared into the chasis frame by lasers. Turns out all the bomb trucks had the same number and so do a lot of other trucks.”

  “So we’ve got somebody at Dilan University in China fooling around with Boston gas lines and blowing up a node on Globegrid. Hackers hired for big bucks and then disappearing. This stuff on the VINs. Not a bad start for one day’s work,” Susan said, picking up her coat and heading for the door. “But its not going to be enough for Rusty. Not enough until we stop whoever it is that’s smashing our crown jewels. Hopefully, before they smash some more…”

  As Susan walked down the warped stairs in Red House, the cop turned to the hacker. “Sox, there’s almost half a bottle of whiskey left there, man, and I still don’t understand how a bunch of different trucks can end up with the same VIN.”

  The hacker’s smile looked evil in the light and shadows from the fireplace. His hand went out for the bottle, “So let me tell you how you hack VINs, flatfoot….”

  3 Tuesday, March 10

  0730 EST

  Ballston Neighborhood

  Arlington, Virginia

  “Ten-minute delay on the Orange Line due to a security sweep at Rossyln…” the public address system was repeating as Dr. Freda Canas stepped onto the up escalator at the Ballston station. “Be sure to report any suspicious activity. If you see it, say it.” Freda hated to be late to anything, and she almost never was, but the Washington Metro was getting fairly unpredictable. She was especially concerned about being late today, the second Tuesday of the month. She knew that Dr. Harry Shapiro and Professor Ahmad Mustafa would already be there. She also knew they would not start talking about the research until she arrived, but it was embarrassing to be the last one arriving when your office was the closest.

  Two years earlier, they had chosen the Pancake Factory as their meeting place because it was two blocks from her office at the National Science Foundation on Wilson Boulevard and four blocks from DARPA on Fairfax Drive, where Shapiro worked. Dr. Mustafa’s National Institutes of Health office was fifteen miles away in Bethesda, but his town-house home was only a five-minute walk from the big blue-roofed restaurant. Freda had dubbed the informal coordination sessions “Science and Syrup,” but she joked that the name hadn’t been sticky enough. It had become known to their staffs as “The Billion-Dollar Breakfast.” Today’s was more important than most, because they were going to talk about the Work-Around Plan, how to go ahead with Globegrid despite the internet connectivity problems. As Dr. Freda Canas, director of the National Science Foundation, left the Ballston Metro station, a surveillance camera scanned her face. She hurried to the restaurant.

  “Adding an extra pair of chromosomes to the embryo will allow us to modify the genetic makeup of children without upsetting the delicate balance developed over eons in the other chromosomes. They’re like genetic scaffolding, you can add any number of characteristics with little risk,” Dr. Mustafa was saying as Freda arrived at their usual spot, the large corner booth. “Ah, Dr. Canas, we have already taken the liberty of ordering your usual, with the blueberry sauce.” Freda Canas placed her laptop on the table and began unbundling her scarf and parka. “So much for globe warming, huh, Freda? It must be twenty Fahrenheit out there this morning,” Mustafa chided as the door opened and a student with a large backpack walked in.

  “Ahmed, I’ve told you it’s no longer a theory. We know. The National Science Foundation runs Antarctica for the U.S. My stations there can’t keep up with the glacial movement. Big shifts that used to take generations,” Freda asserted.

  “The Navy has asked us to do a model that will show where the coastlines will be ten, twenty, and fifty years from now,” Dr. Shapiro joined in. “It ain’t pretty. Under the worst-case scenario, fifty years from now, half of Florida is under water.”

  “Maybe the future humans will evolve their gills back, Harry, or maybe we will have to add them back to the human genetic code,” Mustafa joked. “Changing topics, Harry, tell me—whoever hacked the commercial communications satellites over the Pacific, why didn’t they hack the DOD birds, too?”

  “Thank you for asking. Our birds now use an unbreakable encryption for station-keeping updates, quantum cyphers shot up to space by laser,” Harry Shapiro said, scribbling a depiction on a napkin. “And who came up with that, you ask? Why, DARPA, of course. Ahmad, you can be my straight man anytime.”

  Mustafa chuckled and said, “Just call me Ed McMahon.” His smile faded as he saw the look on the face of the man heading toward the corner booth, young and clean-shaven, but a wildness in his bulging eyes. Ahmad Mustafa thought somehow the man might be Pakistani. He noticed how the man was struggling under the weight of the backpack. Suddenly and too late, Dr. Mustafa knew.

  To the Arlington Police video-surveillance camera atop the traffic light across the street, the flash was yellow, then orange. The flash jumped out through the picture windows of the Pancake Factory, across the parking lot, and into Fairfax Drive, as large chunks of blue roof tile shot up and out. The camera could not hear the noise, but windows shattered in
the tall buildings within two blocks, and plate glass rained on the sidewalks.

  What the camera saw, its intelligent surveillance software converted to digits, was ones and zeroes. It moved them to a WiFi transmitter sitting above on the traffic pole. From there, the digits moved through the air on a radio frequency, 802.11, to another WiFi box on a light two blocks away. They flowed down the pole on fiber-optic cable that ran into a router under the street. From there they shot up Fairfax Drive on fiber to Clarendon Boulevard and east to Arlington Police Headquarters. In the headquarters, the digits were routed to an intelligent surveillance server. The server processed the digits and ran the image they created against the way the pancake house normally appeared. It ran the image against other known images and recognized that what it saw now was not normal; indeed, it was not good. Then the analytical software sent a signal to the large flat screen in the center of the police operations center. The image on the screen quickly changed from the normal scan of traffic on the Key Bridge into Georgetown. Now the screen showed a single word in large orange font: ALERT. Less than one second had elapsed since the flames shot through the windows of the restaurant.

  A computerized voice spoke the word “Alert” twice over speakers in the room. Then the large screen dissolved to a feed from the camera across from the blast. The camera showed a dust cloud billowing out of all the windows of the pancake factory. There were fires inside and fires in cars in the parking lot. A man was staggering out of the doorway, coughing, choking, bleeding. One corner of the restaurant was missing, the wall having been blown out by the force of the blast near the big corner booth.