InterstellarNet: Origins (12 page)

“Dr. Matthews.” The stranger stepped from behind a pillar. He was dressed in gangster-chic: trench coat and fedora. One hand was in his coat pocket; the visible hand was gloved. “May I have a word with you?”

Justin nodded. If the aim of the visit was intimidation, he was duly concerned. He was not, however, too spooked to think. He sidled toward his car and was rewarded when the stranger, turning to follow, presented a more face-on view to one of the security cameras.

“Dr. Matthews, it would be in your best interest to be expedient in wrapping up your executor duties.”

Matthews leaned against his car. “I don’t understand.”

A humorless smile briefly manifested itself in the shadow of the hat. “Let’s not waste time. The names of executors are matters of public record. So are burglary reports.”

“I see.”

“A certain corporation would prefer that one of its consulting assignments remain confidential. They feel very strongly about this point.” The thug took his hand from his pocket. It clasped a thick envelope rather than the weapon Justin had been expecting. “Naturally the corporation wishes to reimburse… the estate…for past services rendered.”

The estate, huh? Justin took the envelope, wondering about the etiquette of bribery. Was a verbal response expected? After a long silence he decided that it wasn’t.

“We appreciate your cooperation.” With that his visitor turned and strode swiftly from the garage.

■□■

Barbara peered dubiously from Justin’s living-room 3-V at the stack of thousand-dollar bills piled in front of him. The session was doubly encrypted, using his private key and hers. The computational load from double decryption made the image jerky.

“I could use a little more input here,” he finally said.

“This payoff is from TSC?”

“My visitor hinted as much without making it explicit. I don’t know that I believe it, though. The mystery is in ISI’s clandestine use of the radio parts.”

“Are there any hard facts besides the money?”

Alicia’s long-ago annoyance at Justin’s career change had come mostly from the loss of a kindred spirit. Well, he may have chosen not to program, let alone hack, for a living, but he still had the knack. The security system in his apartment complex had been no match for his skills.

Justin scanned backward through the garage’s surveillance records to earlier that evening. His subterfuge in the garage had not worked. The thug’s face was shadowed by the brim of his hat, his features indistinct. “Mr. X here is a fact, merely not a useful one.”

“I’m not so sure. Maybe I can do something with that. Send me copies?” Barbara hummed to herself, toggling between digital frames of Justin’s visitor. “I have software that can probably clean up the images.”

To his mystified look she explained, “I used to teach media studies at UCLA. Once upon a time movies weren’t digital. Sometimes I recover old film, dusty reels no one has seen in decades, stuff that’s cropped up in Hollywood estate sales. That old celluloid is generally in horrible shape. Allie did up some image-enhancement software to my specs. Give me a sec.”

The humming resumed, ending after a while in a satisfied, “Ah.” Barbara transferred an enhanced image file to Justin’s workstation.

The face of Justin’s caller, slightly blurry but now quite distinct, popped onto his 3-V.

“Good work.” Justin studied the face, far clearer than it had been in person in the dim garage. Would TSC care if their dealings with Alicia became public? He saw no reason why they should. “Maybe it’s time to play a hunch.

“Computer, log onto the ISI intranet. Download the group directory for the Security Department. Does the enhanced image from the apartment security system match anyone there?”

Their suspect’s face remained shadowed and blurry, so Justin wasn’t surprised when the search took a while. He found he wasn’t surprised either when it turned out his visitor worked for Michael Zhang.

“There are too many odd circumstances surrounding Allie’s death. I can’t believe it’s an accident,” Barbara said.

“I don’t know if we can be sure of that yet. What does seem clear is that Alicia discovered something very embarrassing, if not illegal, at ISI. Something
major
. Even if her death was due only to a traffic accident, these people at ISI, whoever they are, still want to keep their actions secret.”

“What actions?”

Justin closed his eyes in thought. “I’m working on that.”

5

Justin sat in his office, drumming his fingers on his desk, lost in thought.
What
was going on here at ISI?

It wasn’t an easy question. ISI was a big company, with hundreds, maybe thousands, of projects under way at any time. Justin could not possibly be aware of them all, and surely Alicia had recognized that.

What Alicia
had
known with absolute precision was what he did at ISI: xenotechnomics. He pondered the technologies that the various ETs had disclosed, and how ISI might best leverage them. He tried to infer from what was already known what
else
of value the ETs might have, and then helped lobby the ICU to order that. He tried to anticipate ET responses, to get a jump on competitors who were more passively waiting out the next years-long interstellar messaging cycle.

Huge sums were involved in being first to market with new ET technologies, and in knowing ahead of time what markets to vacate because ET was about to make them obsolete. There was also gamesmanship: Can you get the ICU to order specific technologies that ISI might be able to exploit faster than its competitors?

What did ISI secretly ordering TSC radio receivers have to do with any of this?

Sigh. For absence of a better idea, he fell back onto another of his basic principles: If it can’t hurt, try it. He was the only xenotechnomist at ISI, but he didn’t exactly work alone. He worked routinely with a number of artificial intelligences, AIs. What with his computer-science background, before (as Alicia had put it) he’d turned to the dark side, Justin had implemented several personal AIs. Maybe one of them would see what he was missing.

Only none of the AIs knew any more about ISI’s interest in radio receivers than did Justin. Damn. To be thorough, he had them run self-diagnostics. All were fine. To be even more thorough, he made a final check. Every system he had ever built maintained a transaction history file, simply good programming practice in case of a system crash or subtle bug. As long as the programs ran smoothly, he had no need to check these files. He hadn’t examined some of the logs in years.

Perhaps he should have looked sooner.

One of his AIs did first-pass translations of messages from ETs. Over the decades, the intelligent species in the nearby solar systems had developed and continued to evolve a common trade language.
Decode
was very efficient at conveying mathematically or physically based information, less capable with regard to abstract concepts like commercial terms. Most people found the language a nuisance to read and write.

Decode was, to Justin’s mind, still experimental. Certainly its automated translations were often quite curious and needed his critical review. Justin had made no attempt to keep Decode a secret; it was just something he had written to work more efficiently. On the other hand, he had not considered it ready for use by anyone but himself.

So who was this Kyle Fletcher whose name was all through Decode’s history log?

Justin caught himself before querying for the name in the intranet directory, instead paging through the Fs. Feeling paranoid, he picked a vaguely familiar name, Ernie Franks in Atmospheric Physics, and left a message about Aquarian algorithms.

The directory remained open on his screen, showing several Fletchers, but none named Kyle. A consultant then, or a very recent hire. Only one way to find out surreptitiously came to mind. Even in death, Alicia seemed determined to keep him involved in hacking.

■□■

When under surveillance, you don’t hack from your office or your home.

Justin hit an ATM for cash, bought a calling card with cash at a convenience store three klicks away, then drove to the Richmond airport. He used the calling card to rent an hour on one of the ’net kiosks there. He was glad to see that the rent-a-comp had a keyboard, in part because he did not care to speak aloud what he was doing, in part because the airport was so
noisy
.

One of computing’s periodic crises, the one Dad insisted on calling “Y2K, the sequel,” had occurred earlier in Justin’s career: January 18, 2038. The venerable Unix operating system measured time’s passage by counting the seconds from the onset of 1970—and on Unix Doomsday the seconds counter of the oldest Unix versions had run out of bits and rolled over to zero. The worry had been that old Unix applications would think the date was once again New Year’s Day, 1970.

Like the Y2K crisis before it, Unix Doomsday had, for a while, briefly preempted some of the attention of virtually everyone who could spell “computer.” At the height of the panic Justin had been drafted to help validate some of ISI’s Doomsday fixes. In support of that temporary but urgent assignment, he had been given sysadmin privileges. As sysadmin he had encountered several trapdoors built into applications: gaping security holes that enabled the vendors to troubleshoot and upgrade their products remotely, over the ’net.

Like Y2K, Unix Doomsday proved to be mostly hype.

The sysadmin password would surely have been changed many times since Doomsday, but Justin suspected that some of the trapdoors remained. He certainly hoped so.

He began with an employee-benefits application that interfaced to a third-party payroll service. No luck: The program must have been updated or replaced. The meeting scheduler was an entirely different app from another vendor. He fared no better with software for accounts payable, receivable, and general ledger. He tried yet again with a system he vaguely remembered had something to do with authorizing and vouchering employee travel.

Sixth time was the charm. Once Justin had penetrated an ISI mainframe application at the maintenance programmer level, it was easy to gain access to other apps.

Kyle Fletcher didn’t show up in recruitment records, so he couldn’t be a recent hire.

Fletcher did appear on an invoice in ISI’s accounts payable. The consultancy billing for Fletcher was not a unit of TSC. Justin was not lucky enough to have that sort of closure.

Fingers flying, he kept looking. By the end of the process, he had uncovered two interesting facts. First, Fletcher was a technology consultant, expert in several fields but notably in nanotech research. Second, the requester on the purchase order for Fletcher was the head of ISI Security.

Michael Zhang again.

ISI had shunned investments in nanotech for years. The company’s executives had made it clear that they considered nanotech a laboratory curiosity, too fragile and unpredictable for commercial use. They had brushed aside Justin’s periodic recommendations for pilot projects that might help nanotech graduate into production.

So why hadn’t he been told of the interest in nanotech? Why would Security retain the consultant? And why was Fletcher secretly using Justin’s ET translation program?

Setting aside the inexplicable Security connection, Fletcher
could
conceivably be practicing with the Decode AI to prepare for an alien message. The TSC radio receivers that Alicia had been tracing
could
be of use in capturing an alien message.

It was the secrecy that was so puzzling. Even the most tightly focused signal beam dispersed over interstellar distances. Incoming beamcasts were received across the whole solar system. For that matter, listening to ET didn’t take supersensitive receivers, just a bunch of home satellite dishes in an array. That had been true even at first contact, in Justin’s parents’ era. So, when an incoming ET message
couldn’t
be a secret, why would ISI keep their lone xenotechnomist—himself—in the dark?

The more Justin learned, the denser the fog he was trying to penetrate.

6

On the suborbital hop to visit his parents in Geneva, Justin had time to review more of Alicia’s files. Most of her clients were Earth-based, but she had several with offices in Earth-orbiting habitats, four headquartered on the moon, and one each on Mars and in the Belt. All had to be advised of her death. Sad though this task was, it was an almost-welcome change from the sleuthing in which he had become so unexpectedly mired.

He found his parents loitering in their car at the spaceport arrivals area. Dad had brought the internal-combustion antique. The pollution permit on the windshield never averted hostile stares from passersby. “It’s a gesture,” is the only explanation Justin had ever gotten for his folks keeping the car.

They whisked across town to his childhood home. “We’re so sad about Alicia,” were the first words from Mom’s mouth. “Sorry we couldn’t get to the funeral.”

“I appreciate it. Thanks for sending the flowers, too. That meant a lot to her sister. I understand that you being there wasn’t practical. So how was your trip?”