6 Friday, March 13
0822 PST
Marine Base Hospital
Twentynine Palms, California
He was aware of a humming and then of that feeling in his left arm that meant he had an intravenous feed. He tried to open his eyes and succeeded only in raising his left eyelid. The light coming in through the window was too bright, forcing him to quickly shut the lid.
“You’ve always been a very good patient, Jimmy, and there you are waking on cue from the stimulant.”
He recognized the deep tones of Dr. Mark Rathstein. Without again attempting to open his eyes, Foley tried to talk. His mouth and throat were bone dry. He whispered, “Update me, Doc. What happened?” He felt a plastic straw on his lips and sucked in some water from the bottle Rathstein was holding. “Thanks.”
“It’s been a long night. We got you in here about twelve hours ago. Slight concussion, cuts, but your Mark II personal optic had been shattered by a piece of the metal roof, like a little dagger. Thank the gods it stopped at the back of the optic orb and didn’t keep going into the brain.” Rathstein spoke slowly, calmly. “I replaced the optic with a Mark V. It’s much more capable, but you will have to get used to it once the swelling goes down and you take the dressing off in a few days.”
Foley struggled to speak, coughing and clearing his throat. “Guess if I was goin’ to be stabbed in my superman eye, this was the best place in the world for that to happen. Thank you for…” He coughed again. He remembered now how much he hated the struggle to get rid of anesthesia in his body. It took days last time.
“This time we will have to tell your civilian employer about the eye. There is little chance now that they will seek to disqualify you from your job. The enhanced personal optics have an established track record and you now have the state-of-the-art model. Would have cost you a bundle in the civilian world. I’m writing it off as research here. You’re the first case of an upgrade from the mark two to the mark five.” Rathstein was keeping the discussion to the implant. “You will notice that it has greater telescopic range and clarity, better low-light vision and infrared. The interaction with the brain is the same, through the optic nerve. You can also link directly to a helmet and a visor to do split screen, including from the camera on the back of the helmet, so you literally have eyes in the back of your head. And you can feed what you see through the visor to the Net so that you can let other guys in your squad or back at headquarters see what you see.”
“No X-ray vision yet, Doc?” Jimmy asked, half joking, as he slowly opened his left eye, his human eye, again. “No way to use stem cells to grow me a new eye?”
“Not yet, but we will use stem cells to grow you back a tooth for the one you lost. No X-ray vision yet, either. Haven’t been able to deal with the power problems, although there is a millimeter wave experiment that is interesting,” Rathstein said, offering the water bottle again. “The primary power source for the Mark V is solar. There are nano-photovoltaic cells on the surface of the unit. A secondary power pack for low light conditions is in the same place as the old one, behind your collarbone.”
Foley raised his right hand and felt the bandaging below his neck. “How often does it need to be changed?”
“It doesn’t,” Rathenstein said. “The biomotors program finally produced the results we were looking for. It runs off of ATP, a nucleotide produced naturally by your body for intracellular energy transfer. Welcome to the molecular future.”
“Better living through chemistry, I guess,” Jimmy said with a weak smile. “Jess?”
“I spoke with your wife. She took it all quite well, considering. I told her you would call her around noon and then we would be getting you on your own personal VLJ home,” Rathstein continued.
“I shouldn’t put her through…” Foley could not finish the sentence and began to cough again. He thought of what time it must have been in New York when Rathstein had called. His job kept interfering with hers. As an investment banker, she made more than ten times his police salary. “I need to call her. And Susan, see what trouble she’s up to.”
“By the way, Jimmy, speaking of your family, I think I may have some possibly good news about your dad. I called his doctor on Long Island after you sent the doctor the e-mail authorizing me to consult.” Foley had almost forgotten their conversation about his father’s Alzheimer’s. Rathstein was sounding almost excited, which was unusual for the normally cautious doctor. “They have tried all the drugs and they’ve cleared some of the plaque, but they have not tried the continuous deep electrical stimulation or, of course, the experimental nano. So I persuaded my colleague at Cornell Medical Center to take him on as part of their test program. It may not work, but it’s definitely worth a try.”
“Mark, I can’t begin to thank…I mean…” Foley struggled for words. He held up his arm, reaching toward the doctor. Rathstein moved closer and let Foley grab his arm. Jimmy’s grip was still strong.
Rathstein noticed Foley swallow hard. “The others, Doc,” Jimmy rasped. “What happened at the raid?”
“You will have to talk to the naval investigators. They want to see you, but I told them you were being medevaced to your civilian medical system in New York. A buddy of mine at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan is taking you. He has worked with the new optic.”
Foley grabbed the bedsheet tightly with his right hand. “What happened?”
“The buildings were booby-trapped. Somehow the Bombot sweeps didn’t catch them. They all went up. We had about ten guys in emergency. Lot of surgery last night. I did two other eyes. Altogether, we installed an enhanced leg and two arms, three eyes.”
He paused. Jimmy opened his left eye and stared at him. Then Rathstein admitted, “We lost two Marines. They were not in the exoskeletons.”
To the doctor it looked like the news had put his patient in physical pain, clutching harder at the bedsheets.
“If they had been in the suits, none of them would have expired. I have to get the suits recertified for use. Maybe now that you have found the guys that were hacking into our net…” The doctor grimaced and looked out the window at morning sun, now beaming directly into the hospital room. “How can we do Netcentric warfare if…”
“We didn’t get them,” Foley whispered. “But I will, Doc. I will. I will find out who the fuck they are. And we will get those superman suits back on our Marines. You guys gotta be able to secure the link. No more wards filled with gyrenes without limbs. Not again. Not next time.”
1005 PST
The Café at The Hotel, Mandalay Bay
Las Vegas, Nevada
Susan heard Soxster behind her. “Jimmy’s offline, flying back to New York, and you jet off to Vegas with Gaudium. Is the threat from China over and you didn’t tell me?” She was sitting in the upscale snack bar of the hip hotel in the Mandalay Bay complex. Unlike the theme-park hotels on the strip, The Hotel had no ubiquitous slot machines or other gambling paraphernalia. It could have been in Tribeca or on the Sunset Strip: quiet and elegantly cool. “How is The Breakfast and The Coffee?”
Susan smiled at Soxster’s lack of opening small talk as he appeared from behind her. Then she smiled at his red T-shirt, which read “Infocon Alpha 2012” and “I am not a Fed.” Below the words was a drawing of a cartoon figure in a trench coat, wearing a stethoscope and listening to a box connected to several telephones.
“You like it? All the federal law-enforcement and spy agencies come to Infocon to learn our latest techniques. I thought of getting you a Not Fed T-shirt, too, but…don’t you just hate people who lie with their T-shirts?” He rustled in a plastic bag and produced a folded blue T-shirt, which he passed across the table. “Instead, I got you this one.”
Susan unfolded the shirt. It read “I am not a terrorist” and had a drawing of Osama bin Laden with a red X across it.
“Good morning to you, too. And thanks, I guess, for the T-shirt.” Susan leaned across the small table. “Jimmy is doing fine. I just talke
d with him and he’ll be back to duty next week. Although my bosses want me to crack this case by Sunday for some reason. Fat chance.
“And, yes, we still have a real problem with the Chinese. I’m trying to find out what’s driving them crazy and get to their next targets before they do, instead of at the exact same time, like at SCAIF. It’s just possible that the hidden technology Gaudium knows about is that target.” She paused. “I can see what he’s talking about, you know. If we move ahead with Living Software, with Enhanced people, we’ll leave much of the world in the dust. We could also leave humanity in the dust.”
“Whoa, humanity in the dust?” Soxster mimicked. “Did Gaudium get you to drink some of his Kool-Aid? Talk about sleeping with the enemy.”
“Will is not the enemy,” Susan shot back, and then regretted it. “Fuck you. Look, mind your own business.”
“Wow, just a figure of speech,” Soxster said, backing away. “And what makes you think the Chinese aren’t doing this technology stuff, too?”
“They aren’t. I checked. The Chinese are good at large-scale implementation, but not big on innovation. And because the rate of technology acceleration is itself constantly increasing, once you get ahead, you stay there. Unless someone goes around blowing your shit up.” She had said all of that very quickly and then took a deep breath and slowed down. “No Kool-Aid, either. I just think that some of the issues Will raises are important. But for now, I’m just trying to get him to tell me where some of this technology is. Besides, you told me to go to Infocon.”
“Yeah, it’s a good place to learn what’s going on. Every cracker and hacker is here somewhere. Remember the difference?”
Susan sighed. “Yes, Sox, hackers are people who can take systems apart to learn how they work and break. Crackers are criminals who do the same thing with illegal intent. Do I get a star? More to the point, do you get one? Have you learned anything so far?”
Soxster put his right hand up to cover his mouth and spoke softly. “TTeeLer was hired by whoever was looking for hackers last year, around the same time as seven other top skill guys. They were all given tickets to L.A. Then they disappeared. Aside from TTeeLer, none of them has surfaced on the Net or in the so-called real world since…”
“Since what? Come on,” Susan insisted.
“Easy, easy,” Soxster countered. “Okay, so one of the other guys in the group with TTeeLer was Packetman. He’d been saying what a great hack it would be to take control of all the stupid robot canines just to show how bad their security is and how ridiculous an idea it is to have a dog as an automated personal assistant. He’d been working on the code.”
Susan saw from Soxster’s smile that there was more. “And…?”
Soxster rubbed his hands together gleefully and got that evil smile on his face again. “So I thought I would just look for Packetman, the way I found TTeeLer. I know his PGP key, so I thought I would put out some Netbots to see if I could find it anywhere and, eureka! He was in a secure chat room, but I got in, never mind how. And he’s talking about he got a big reward for penetrating the Man-O-War project. What’s that, some super-secret plan for a stealth destroyer or something? Apparently, they’re going to do something to stop it.”
“Got me. It means nothing to me.” She could see how disappointed Soxster was that his research had not been useful. “But I suppose what you found out does maybe tell us that the attack of the killer robot dogs was designed as a message about how bad our security is—how they can get through it, listen in to our offices, mess with our systems. It doesn’t make sense as anything else. But it doesn’t sound like a shot across the bow by China….”
“Maybe it does,” Soxster replied. “The robot dogs were all assembled in Guangzho, probably with a little extra programming in their firmware so they could be accessed and controlled later on. You guys ought to look at the pieces. Guess what else is assembled in places like Guangzho? Sytho routers and firewalls.”
“Sox, everything is made in China.”
“Yeah, but when that specific everything can connect to the internet, it gets worth their while to slip in a little extra on the motherboard, some little circuit we didn’t ask for that acts like software, opens up a hole in any firewall, responds to coded packets by opening up the control plane in a way that only they can issue it instructions.” Soxster sketched a circuit design on the back on a napkin. “Next thing, they can copy any packet moving on our systems, or replace them, or black-hole them.”
Susan frowned in confusion. “So you’re saying that the Chinese may have placed back doors in some electronics sold by some American companies?”
Soxster shook his head. “No. Not some. Most, if not all, the computer systems running our internet, our phones, our power grid, our trains and planes. Remember, Sooz, ‘everything is made in China.’”
“Touché,” she conceded.
“Infocon Alpha is starting up ’bout now. Let’s go hear your new buddy. Will? Was that what you called him?”
“Piss off,” Susan said, smiling.
Amid the crowd of T-shirt-and jeans-clad guys in the Mandalay convention center, Susan stood out because of her sex and her business suit. Soxster stood out because he was with her. They passed booths and tables set up by people who ten or twenty years earlier had been showing off their science fair projects in high school. Now they had freeware, shareware, and some special programs available for a price. The vendors and the attendees were the strangest set of conventioneers she had ever seen or could imagine. She suddenly had a sense of déjà vu. Sam Benjamin loved the old Star Wars movies and had made her watch them with him too many times. This was the cantina scene on Tatooine come to life!
Gaudium had just been introduced as they walked into the hall. He was walking up a set of stairs that rose up from the back of a very deep stage. An aging heavy-metal band was crashing out its noise, and there were literally smoke and mirrors. Blue smoke wafted up from below stage and ancient disco balls were spinning. The scene was replayed on two giant screens, one on either side of the stage and, also on the screens, streams of greenish numbers and symbols scrolled down and a sentence blinked on and off at the bottom. “Is he The One?” The crowd roared. When they quieted down, the band stopped and the disco balls ascended out of sight. The last whiffs of blue smoke floated out into the hall.
Will Gaudium began. “It’s time for humanity to take the red pill!”
The crowd roared again. Susan yelled in Soxster’s ear, “What does that mean?”
He looked incredulously at her and yelled back over the crowd noise, “The Matrix, sister. The pill that lets you see reality? Seriously, Susan, you gotta get out more!”
Gaudium continued. “We have seen a revolution in our time. The IT Revolution. It has made the world a better place. It has allowed us to share knowledge, strengthen free speech and human rights. But now it is going too far.
“The hardware and software I and others invented was for human use. But now we are giving control of IT over to the machines. Machines that write software humans can’t read or understand. Machines that run everything we rely on all day, every day. Machines that spy on what we say, what we write, what we eat, what we buy, what we do.
“Now IT is busy creating nanobots to enter our bodies and probes that will connect our brains to cyberspace. Science fiction? No! As a result of the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project, hundreds of humans have already downloaded much of their memories and thought patterns onto computers.”
The crowd buzzed.
“Now IT is joining up with genomics to create Enhanced humans—if we can even use the word ‘human’ to describe creatures with forty-eight chromosomes instead of forty-six. Science fiction? No! I know for a fact one laboratory has been generating just such creatures ever since last year!”
The buzz grew to a roar. “What’s he talking about?” Soxster asked Susan.
“Beats the shit out of me,” she replied, “but this is certainly not him in his mellow winemaker
mood.”
“My friends, this is all no longer theoretical. The technology is accelerating every day. Most of the breakthroughs the public does not fully understand, and many they do not know about at all. If they even know about Living Software, they think of it as some benign way to make our programs run smoothly—but I am telling you: When a machine is as smart as a human, it will not be long before no human is as smart as a machine. If we allow Living Software loose in cyberspace, it will take over like kudzu in Carolina, like zebra mussels in a pond. The machines will no longer be our servants—they will be our masters. The Matrix? Science fiction? Not anymore!
“Four years ago, when we crossed over from eliminating genetic defects to creating Enhanced humans, science went over the line. Bio Fab and Synthetic Biology, which should be an oxymoron, is over the line. When they link up Globegrid and let Living Software run loose on it, we will cross the final barrier. We will have reached the Breakpoint!”
The crowd was quiet now, trying to absorb his words.
“We face a Hobson’s choice. As every new advance fundamentally alters what it means to be human, we will either destroy ourselves…or somewhere along that path, something will go very, very wrong. The only thing that might save us from destroying ourselves completely could be an event so terrible that it shocked us out of our complacency. Without Hiroshima, the Cold War might not have stayed cold. We do not wish disaster upon ourselves—we cannot—but in the world that we are creating, would it be the lesser of two evils if it wakes up and saves humanity from its own enslavement?”
“This is starting to creep me out,” said Soxster. “Can we go?” Reluctantly, Susan agreed. In the corridor, she said, “Sounds like your fellow hackers aren’t as willing as you to let Living Software put them out of business.”
“Yeah, well…” Soxster looked puzzled. “I have no idea what half of that stuff was. His Breakpoint sounds like Kurzweil’s Singularity, but downloading human brains onto computers? Forty-eight-chromosome people? Got me. I’d say he’s let the alcohol content of his pinot get too high.”
Breakpoint Page 16
