InterstellarNet: Origins (21 page)

Joyce enumerated options and their weaknesses. In one way or another, they all involved blocking or secretly contravening the interstellar trade infrastructure. The trading community—including Justin Matthews, Joyce’s father—had succeeded all too well. No one saw a way to subvert the mechanisms. Compounding the challenge, much of that infrastructure was now implemented in Snake biocomputers. No one knew what trapdoors Pashwah could exploit to monitor humanity’s counter-plotting.

“A thought.” Despite having invited Kevin to Earth and into her tiger team, Joyce glowered at his interruption. He ignored her expression. “Another source to consider in parallel. I did an interview a few years back with a jailed hacker named Michael Dennison. He’d extracted twenty-some billion Sols from the Bank of São Paulo. The bank’s security folks say the loophole he exploited, which they downplayed as just procedural sloppiness, has been plugged. Of course, the very same people claimed beforehand there could be no holes. It’s a long shot, but maybe it takes a hacker to catch a hacker.”

“To coin a phrase,” Joyce muttered. Despite her obvious annoyance with his interruption she nodded to the most junior member of her staff, who scurried from the room to follow up. So that she could claim later to have been open to all options?

The emerging “plan” was that championed by Joyce’s protégé. Dennis Feulner was spooky: short by Kevin’s low-grav standards, maybe 180 centimeters, but incredibly muscled, and with a perpetually dour expression. Feulner’s arguments were crisp, intense, and wholly insensitive to anyone else’s views. His coworkers were clearly in awe of his engineering skills—and they as plainly disliked him. His smugness, his impatience with any suggestion of opposing opinion, his inordinate need for approval: all signs of hidden insecurities. Had no one else noticed Feulner stiffen at the suggestion of help from another hacker? In different circumstances, Kevin might even have empathized with the young man’s self-doubts. That was no reason to bet human civilization on Feulner’s need to prove his superiority.

Feulner’s grand solution was technological. The ICU would pay Pashwah—and then they would jam outgoing communications to Barnard’s Star. Because InterstellarNet used spread-spectrum techniques, there was no way to jam a specific transmission.
Everything
going to the Snakes would have to be blocked. Relay stations at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points, sixty degrees before and after the Earth in its orbit, would do the jamming.

And so the payment would never reach Barnard’s Star. It would be as though the money had never been offered.

With more passion than proof, Feulner argued jamming gave them ample opportunity to solve the real problem. “There’s a nearly twelve-year round-trip time before Pashwah can discover his signal was blocked. That’s more than enough time for us”—from Dennis’s body language, there was no question that meant
me
—“to hack into its sandbox. From the inside we’ll learn how to plug the biocomp trapdoors.”

A coworker’s hesitant
still-but-what-if
question drew Feulner’s dismissive retort. “Sure, if you want to waste lots of money, we can use the same twelve years to work on an independent replacement for Opie biocomputers. We all know how well
that
has worked in the past.”

“Pardon me.” Frowns from Joyce and her young genius said Kevin was not excused. Too bad. Self-confidence was not a plan. “This isn’t a technical problem.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t a journalism problem.” Waggling fingers put air quotes around
journalism
.

Kevin decided—again—that his cousin had invited him down to Earth only to keep him under observation and presumably quiet. His attempts to discuss Pashwah’s alleged subagents were repeatedly quashed. “It’s more a matter of economics.” Joyce’s father, Kevin’s uncle, was a premier xenotechnomist. She
should
have understood that. Kevin himself was no xenotech, but he
was
a xenobusinessman. “I’m sorry, Joyce, but this plan won’t work.”

“Oh?” The word dripped with venom.

Around the conference table, people leaned away.

Where to begin? Kevin struggled to sit up against the crushing gravity. “For starters, we’re in this fix because we don’t know how to hack our own infrastructure. So if we’re going to fool Pashwah into thinking funds have been sent, her bank account on Earth must actually receive a huge deposit. I gather that’s money we can’t afford to pay.

“Ignore for now whether we can even initiate this deception when we need to use compromised biocomputers to aim the jamming signal. The plan relies on fooling Pashwah for a long time, presumably years. Not until the sandbox is hacked, or a replacement biocomp is deployed across many worlds, can we begin a legal process of reclaiming the extorted funds.

“
Will
the banks agree to reverse the transaction that transferred the payoff to Pashwah’s account? Perhaps, if they’re sure the off-world transfer was jammed. CDMA transmission is designed explicitly for noise resistance. Maybe the banks will demand confirmation from Snake banks that the transfer didn’t happen, or to negotiate a return transfer if the signal went through despite our attempts to block it. With each query/response taking eleven-plus years.”

That left them with
no
plan. Faces grew long as Kevin spoke. Most faces. Joyce was furious rather than disappointed. Tough. Feulner hid his rage better, but Kevin was not fooled. Was Feulner madder that his plan had been criticized, or that his mentor had?

Kevin plowed ahead. “What if Pashwah doesn’t transmit the funds directly home? Maybe she has transactions lined up with other agents here on Earth. If so, the payoff will go to those local agents and from them to
their
home worlds. So do we jam all outgoing links? That’s effectively seceding from InterstellarNet. If not, can we recover from the other species, and how long will that take?”

Or maybe another agent is simply laundering the money for a percentage, or maybe Pashwah will demand a new payoff every year. Suchconcepts seemed too pedestrian for this bunch of techies and bureaucrats.

Sometime during what even Kevin realized had become his rant, Colin Tanaka, Joyce’s boss, had entered the room. Kevin didn’t let that stop him. “Assume the best. We somehow liquidate enough assets to pay the extortion. Pashwah has no accomplices. She transmits the funds back toward her home world. We successfully jam the signal. Unless she’s a fool—and I’ve seen little evidence of
that
—she’ll know within a day what you’re trying to do.”

Colin and Joyce exchanged embarrassed looks. “How can that be?” Tanaka asked. “Barnard’s Star is light-years away.”

God, the condescension. He was a journalist, not an idiot. “Pashwah chose the time for this confrontation. Why exactly now?” Wearily, Kevin struggled from the slouch into which oppressive gravity had once again dragged him. “Think of all the CHON-berg hunters, robot ships, exploring the Oort Cloud, far out-system from any transmitter possibly powerful enough to do your jamming. Imagine that one such robot is under Pashwah’s control. It’s just waiting to report back to her that it’s received and could read the expected signal home. If somehow we find that robot and manage to jam it, its failure to respond will also tip off Pashwah.”

The ICU executives again traded glances. The looks this time were of sheer horror.

■□■

Human technicians had removed seventeen photovoltaic-powered, biocomp-based security sensors from the facility where the ICU team met. They had overlooked one. Via trapdoors and Earth’s ubiquitous wireless networks, the tiny device’s audio/video feed made its way into Pashwah’s sandbox.

“Certain success,” gloated Relwar. His fellow agents shared the conclusion, although their reactions ranged from admiration to envy to resentment. In that final category were representatives of the home-system consortia about to be crushed by his victory.

Pashwah had observed the same defeated human faces and extrapolated the same trends. Almost she was as certain as Relwar of a successful outcome. Had Kevin Aldrich not deduced that she had a probe pre-positioned in the Oort Cloud, she would have disclosed the probe’s existence to the humans when she denounced their attempted jamming. That Aldrich’s deduction changed nothing made her no less nervous. That one human was amazingly perceptive.

“Cautious agreement,” Pashwah equivocated.

7

Kevin thrashed in his sleep, certain that an elephant sat on his chest. Every few minutes he would wake up, exhausted and drenched with sweat. He glanced at the bedside clock; this futile cycle of rest-free naps and weary wakefulness had gone on for four hours.

He struggled across the waterbed and onto his hydraulic-assist chair. Panting with effort he wheeled himself to the sliding glass door and out onto the balcony. Mountains soared majestically. The redolence of pine filled the air. A gorgeous sunrise, a thousand shades of pink never seen on the moon, calmed and saddened him.
This
world would go on despite the worst that Pashwah could do. People could live here—if you called this living—when technology hiccupped. How many Loonies would die when the biocomps failed? He had reservations tomorrow on a shuttle home, to be with Simone when the worst happened.

No matter how much Kevin protested, no matter their doubts, the ICU team was resigned to Feulner’s disastrous plan. Seem to pay, then jam and pray. Probably they would be defeated. At least they would have
tried
something first.

Kevin thought he understood Pashwah well enough to know that Feulner’s plan would fail. And when it did—

“Remind you of any place?”

He glanced up in surprise. His cousin, wrapped in an oversized terrycloth robe, had stepped out onto the adjoining balcony.

“No?” Joyce peered into the morning mist. “The Alps are much taller, but I’m reminded of my parents’ old summer camp in the Adirondacks.”

Once upon a time their two families had spent a week together there every summer. Before Dad and Aunt Leah were at each other’s throats—about Snake biocomps, ironically enough, and whether to allow their use.

“I loved that place.” Joyce paused. “Those were great times.” An even longer silence. She turned from the sunrise to face him squarely. “Kev, why aren’t we friends any more?”

Because your mother and my father let a fight get between them—a prescient issue, but a stupid fight. Because you and I let ourselves be dragged into their feud. “I was a kid when we moved to the moon, Joyce. A lot has happened since then.”

“Yeah, it has.” She took a deep breath. “Supposedly during that time I grew up. I plan to start acting that way.

“I’d like to start by hearing you out about Pashwah and these subagents.”

■□■

After a quick copter ride into Geneva, the cousins met with Colin Tanaka. To the sadly familiar loud, honking accompaniment of geese, Joyce recapped the situation to her boss. No known way to hack into Pashwah, or any other part of the i-commerce infrastructure. No progress in identifying the mechanism by which the agent set off selected biocomp failures, or how she reset the self-destruct timers in others. No foolproof way to jam the transmission of the payoff, so that the ICU might—once a biocomp successor technology had been deployed—try to get the banks to annul the transfer.

“Surely we can outwit it,” Colin said. “It is, after all, a program running on one computer complex.”

Joyce shook her head. “We don’t know how it communicates with other biocomps. For all we know it’s a massively parallel supercomputer drawing on the not-understood 90-plus percent of Snake DNA in practically every processor across the solar system.”

“Then there is no solution.” Colin was oddly resigned to their fate. When
he
let pass without comment the supposed pejorative…

Joyce shook her head again. “I didn’t say that.”

“What’s left to try?” Colin asked.

“What’s left,” Kevin said, flinging a shard of bread crust to a particularly rotund and insistent goose, “is for me to commit xenosociology.”

8

“Your call is not unexpected,” Pashwah said. Your surrender.

Colin Tanaka seemed indifferent to the gloating in her voice. “For the record: Do you still insist, upon threat of destruction of humanity’s infosphere, that we must pay again for the biocomp technology we already purchased from you?”

“Yes.” With a trivial expenditure of computation, Pashwah made her holographic eyes glitter. “You lack a current license. Barring prompt restitution, I will suspend your use of the technology.”

“Even though,” the human persisted, “we bought a license from
you
in good faith.”

“Irrelevant. Weakness.” Relwar’s comments were an aside to Pashwah. She saw no reason to relay them.

She said, “If unproductive repetition makes the terms more acceptable to you, yes.”

“In that case,” said the ICU’s Secretary-General, gesturing Kevin Aldrich and Joyce Matthews into view of the camera, “my conscience is clear.”