InterstellarNet: Origins (10 page)

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

A.D. 2050

1

There is no good way to learn your best friend has died.

Justin Matthews stared at the now-blank screen of his personal digital assistant, numb from an overload of unwelcome information.

“Alice didn’t suffer,” Alicia’s lawyer had said. Justin hoped the attorney had a better grasp of his other facts than he had of his client’s name. “Hit and run. There hasn’t been an arrest yet.”

Dead at the age of thirty-seven—his age, too—in a senseless accident. In his mind’s eye, Alicia Briggs remained twenty-three, their ages when they’d met at MIT. In truth, she hadn’t changed much for as long as Justin had known her: short, wiry, and athletic. Mischievous. She was an extraordinarily accomplished software engineer who tackled projects with a tenacity that approached the mythical.

How could she be gone?

To the extent that, in his shock, his thoughts had focus, he wondered mostly how in an era of automated cars such an accident could have happened. He worried about how Alicia’s sister was taking the awful news. He tried to grasp the notion of life without his long-time friend.

Those sad reflections left only one corner of his mind to consider an oddity. Why on Earth had Alicia named him the executor of her estate?

Technomics
: the synergistic combination of the engineering and economic sciences. Technomists seek to understand the economic impacts of major technological changes of the past and to predict the consequences of prospective new technologies. Technomists are employed in government and industry.

Xenotechnomics
, a prominent subspecialty within the discipline, focuses on the economic implications of possible technology exchanges with humanity’s extraterrestrial trading partners. See related entry, “Interstellar Commerce Union.”

—Internetopedia

Countryside slipped past the express-train windows at 500 kph, too fast for details to be discernible even had Justin’s attention been directed toward the scenery. It wasn’t. He was focused instead on the screen of his personal digital assistant. The whisper-soft quiet of the maglev train was interrupted only by his occasional spoken requests to the PDA to navigate through data or download new files.

A spidery bridge caught his eye as the train whipped across. “Leo super-steel,” he identified reflexively. As a xenotechnomist, he was highly attuned to applications of ET technology.

“Too broad a topic,” answered the PDA. “Please refine your query.”

“Cancel request.” Justin smiled at his reflection in the train window. Far above the blur of farmland, sun glints from hundreds of aircraft caught his eye. The high-density, crisscrossing highways in the sky were made practical by—he managed not to vocalize this thought—Aquarian flight-control algorithms. The high-temp superconducting magnets that helped make this train possible: Centaur technology. The ultra-light, high-energy-density fuel cells that powered the train: another Leo innovation.

A discrete trill from the PDA announced an incoming email, interrupting Justin’s woolgathering. The ring tone told him the communication was personal, rather than work-related. His mind wasn’t on work today anyway. “Display new message.”

“Request approval to decrypt.” On the screen only the send and receive addresses were in plaintext. He knew who he was, and the ostensible sender was a popular email anonymizer service. The real sender’s identity would be shown inside the encrypted message.

Strange. His business email was often encrypted; his personal messages rarely were. Pressing his right index finger to a sensor pad, he enunciated softly, “Go for it.” His words, fingerprint, and voiceprint together authorized the conversion.

“Justin…if you’re not seated, find a chair,” Alicia’s image said from the PDA.

“Stop.” Here he was, the reluctant executor, en route from his Richmond home to Boston for Alicia’s funeral—and here was an email purportedly from her. Although the nearest passenger was across the aisle and two rows away, Justin was uncomfortable airing here what might be Alicia’s last words. He put in his ear piece. “Play from the beginning.”

“Justin…if you’re not seated, find a chair.” She flashed a half wry, half weary smile. “Delivery of this email means that something has gone badly wrong, that I’ve been unable to reset the timer that controls the message’s release. The reason for my unavailability may be totally innocent, however unpleasant the implied mishap is for me. It may not. To help you decide which is true, I’ve attached some items that should be useful.

“I’m truly sorry to say this in so impersonal a manner, but I’ve always cherished our friendship. I know I can trust you to do the right thing, whatever this situation turns out to be.”

He displayed the three attachments. The first was a ’net address that he recognized, that of a data archival service. She presumably kept backup files there. Next came a user ID / password pair for access to the archive.

The final, and by far the largest, item looked like gibberish. It was labeled as Alicia’s private encryption key, and with it he could impersonate her, could legally obligate her, anywhere on the ’net. If this really was her private key, and not some sort of sick joke.

All keys look alike, like random nonsense, so there was really only one way to be sure. He needed to test the key.

Security keys came in pairs. One key was called private and (normally) kept secret, under personalized biometric protection. Justin stored his private key on his PDA, accessible only via a fingerprint scan, a code phrase, and a voiceprint match. The second, or public, key was published to the ’net. Anyone could send Justin a confidential message by scrambling a plaintext using his public key; only someone who knew his private key could recover that message. It worked both ways: A message encrypted with a private key could be decrypted with the corresponding public key. In the latter case, the mechanism served as a digital signature.

Justin encoded a test message with Alicia’s supposed private key. He had his PDA decode the result with Alicia’s published public key. The resulting file matched the one with which he had started. He repeated the decryption using several different public-key repositories. The outcome was unchanged.

Justin didn’t much care for any of the logical explanations for his test findings. Once more he found himself staring at the countryside as it streamed by. Alicia was a hacker for hire, and one of the best in the solar system at that. Either the e-commerce infrastructure of the world had been compromised—and how was
that
for paranoid thinking?—or someone had sent him Alicia’s private key.

It was simply impossible that his friend had innocently lost control of her private key. To take her message at face value meant believing that she had implemented the failsafe delivery of her private key. If so, something had had her
very
worried. And to doubt the message’s authenticity while accepting that the attachment was her private key? That would imply that the key had been coerced from her with intent to mislead him. Again hard to believe.

What
had Alicia been up to?

Maybe once he could answer that question he would also understand why she had named him as her executor.

2

Alicia’s memorial was held in the chapel of a funeral home, amid hushed whispers and sad, soft background music. Her parents had died years earlier in a mountain-climbing accident; her only close relative was a sister, Barbara, who had flown in from LA. Most of those in attendance seemed to be Alicia’s neighbors or local friends; they chatted among themselves, leaving Barbara and a man whom Justin did not recognize alone in the chapel’s front row.

The room was three-fourths empty. This, thought Justin, is what comes of being married to the job. A bit of that sadness was for himself. Had the gathering been for him, how many people would have come?

But it
wasn’t
about him. He squared his shoulders and went to the front of the chapel. Barbara stood as he approached. They hugged. “I’m so very sorry for your loss,” he told her.

“Thank you, Justin.” Subtract the freckles and two inches of height and add some curl to her hair, and the visual result would be Alicia. “And I’m sorry for you, too. I know how close you and my sister were.”

“She was a special person.” True, but hardly sufficient. Still, he didn’t know what else to say. “Justin Matthews,” he finally offered to the silent, still-seated companion.

“Dan.”

The silence stretched awkwardly. “I’d like to ask you a question,” Barbara said finally. “How should I put this? Were you and Alicia more than just friends?”

His long-ago suitemates in the grad dorm had badgered him into wondering whether the relationship had any such potential. He remembered asking Alicia if she felt any chemistry between them. Alicia’s answer: “Yes, but it’s all inorganic.” She had been right.

“No, Barbara. We were too much alike for anything beyond friendship to work for us.”

“Then can you explain why Alicia went outside the family for an executor?”

Outside the family meant: not Barbara. Justin shook his head. “I wish I did know.”

Interstellar Commerce Union
: the administrative body within the United Nations with responsibility for oversight of humanity’s commercial communications with extraterrestrial species. The ICU reviews and must approve all candidate technologies for import, having as its primary goal the avoidance of unintended and unanticipated economic disruptions (such as the energy glut that followed the initial ET contact). See related entry, “Lalande Implosion.” The ICU also authorizes all technology exports to other solar systems.

—Internetopedia

An armada of sail- and powerboats swarmed in Boston Harbor, like so many bathtub toys in the eighteenth-floor perspective from Alicia’s new condo. Justin hadn’t managed to visit in person since she’d moved here; the virtual-reality tour she had given him had failed to do the place justice. He had always known she was very good at what she did, but he had not realized quite how well it must have paid. Not that the money would do her any good now.

“Where’s Allie’s computer?”

Justin turned. Barbara used the childhood nickname that Alicia had hated. “I wouldn’t know where she kept it.”

“I
do
know were she had it,” Barbara said, pointing to an uncluttered expanse of desk. She had accepted his invitation to help inventory the things in the condo. The boyfriend, whom Alicia always dismissed as “the Insignificant Other” had lived down to her expectations. Dan had taken the first flight west after the funeral. “I used it the last time I visited. It’s not here.”

Justin rubbed his nose pensively. Per Alicia’s lawyer, her PDA had not been found at the accident scene. He didn’t much care for the pattern. “Is anything else missing?”

Barbara walked from room to room. Drawers and cabinet doors squeaked and slammed. “The only things missing that I can tell are the living-room 3-V and an
objet d’art
or two.”

“Jewelry? Silver?”

“They’re here. Ditto an envelope with about fifty dollars in a kitchen drawer.”

Alicia and her junk-food habit. She was always prepared for an emergency pizza delivery. Too wordy: She was always prepared, period. Witness her
post mortem
email. “It sounds like someone stole the computer, then took a few obvious things to make the break-in look like an ordinary burglary. The notice of Alicia’s memorial service would have told whomever when the apartment was likely to be empty.”

Barbara steadied herself against the dining-room table. “But
why
, Justin?”

He thought again about Alicia’s final email. “I don’t know yet…but I will.”

■□■

The Boston police were less than uninterested in Justin’s call. Nonviolent break-ins fell somewhere near missing pets on their priority list. He got a case number and the advice to change the lock and contact Alicia’s insurance company. The police did promise to scan for fingerprints, without committing to a date. If that visit were ever to happen, about which Justin had serious doubts, they would contact the building superintendent for access to Alicia’s unit.

He ran across business records in a filing cabinet while looking for insurance papers. The drawer held invoices and bill-collection histories, one hanging folder per company. The invoices were for unnamed “professional services rendered.”

To his surprise, there was no Interplanetary Space Industries file. He knew for a fact that Alicia had consulted for ISI, his employer. Justin’s PDA still sat open from his unhelpful call to the police. “Display twenty largest global megacorporations. List alphabetically.” His eyes switched between the screen and the open file drawer. Among the top twenty, two were missing: ISI and Trans-Solar Corporation.