Domain code, p.15
Domain Code, page 15
Garcia thought again about what Daelia had said. “They, uhh, tell you anything? About what to expect up there?”
“Not much. You probably know more than we do,” Justin said. “Do we have a launch time yet, Pallas?”
“I have no idea,” the abiota said, and stepped aside, hooking one of the kugu’s hands under Garcia’s arm. “Now, if you would, Technical Sergeant Ivan Garcia, show me what kind of a mess the Army has made of the cyber infrastructure here. Before the Envoy gets here, if you would, please.”
“The Envoy’s coming?” Justin asked, excited now.
“As soon as she’s done with her visit over at Bellona Robotics,” Pallas said, and yanked Garcia away. He didn’t speak again until they were well clear of the Canadian.
Garcia tried to pull away once they reached the doors back into the office area. “The problem hookup is out there,” he protested.
“Yes, I understand that,” Pallas said. “But as soon as I fix that problem, the Army will want me out of here.”
“Okay,” Garcia said, not really understanding.
“Show me the comm closet first.”
The place was empty when they arrived, Army sergeants out setting up in the main bay, Dixon mercifully absent. That guy was really starting to get on Garcia’s nerves.
“What are you looking for here?” he asked as Pallas began methodically going through the messy racks.
“Just watch for the Army lieutenant, please. I have had enough foolishness for the morning. You would not believe how long it took me to access this compound.”
“If you tell me, maybe I can help,” Garcia said.
Pallas pulled the kugu back, considering him, one eye-lens opening and closing slowly. “I am looking for a greenhouse bottle,” he finally said.
“A greenhouse bottle?” Garcia repeated.
“Yes, a greenhouse bottle. You know what it is, yes? A suite of equipment that serves as the origin point for a predictive. It hosts a bot and forces it to grow in a very specific direction,” Pallas said. “They are commonly used in—”
“I know what it is,” Garcia interrupted, almost offended. “Who wouldn’t know that? But there’d be no reason to have one here. This is just for the purposes of giving the Army some secure comm and letting Adrasta have access to the Idisi.” Pallas was still staring at him. Some of Garcia’s self-assured resolve broke. “Right?”
“Yes, one would assume,” Pallas said, and then yanked the back off one of the small equipment cases. “Ah. Here. Yes.”
Garcia went over. Looked. The tags on the front of the main blade server were unmistakable. “That is—”
“A greenhouse bottle, yes,” Pallas said. “If I’m not mistaken, this particular model hosts a bot-seed from Galatea.”
Garcia frowned. There was no need for something like that in this network.
“Thoughts?” Pallas pressed.
“Umm, maybe it’s Army standard to have an onboard data manager for a network like this?” Garcia guessed. There were a lot of possibilities, a lot of ways to grow bots. Galatea bot-seeds were normally used to develop search- or admin-capable predictives.
“It is not Army standard. In fact, it is directly against Army regulations to have such a thing anywhere near a classified network connection,” Pallas said, and replaced the case. “So I am ordering you, Technical Sergeant Ivan Garcia, to speak of this to nobody. Do you understand?”
“No,” he said before he could stop himself. The abiota glared at him. “I mean, why… why not…whatever? What’s the point of not talking about this? If it shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t we get rid of it? Blank’s going to shit a brick if he finds out that—”
“Sometimes we learn more by allowing a thing to play out,” Pallas said, “than we do by stopping it.”
“Is this some kind of state versus fed issue? Because right now, I’m not under Air Guard orders,” Garcia said, “I’m—”
But he didn’t finish his sentence.
Because Pallas grabbed him. Hand-to-throat grabbed him and slammed him back against the wall.
“I know your reputation, Technical Sergeant Ivan Garcia,” the abiota hissed in his ear. “I know your reputation. You are a disobedient human who thinks himself better than his chain of command and beyond the rules of the military. This describes many in your career field and does not normally trouble me, but you seem to make an art form out of irritating your supervisors. This I cannot abide right now.”
“I…” Garcia said, trying to speak.
Pallas just tightened his grip and kept going. Shit, those fingers were strong. Weren’t kugus limited to human parameters? “You tell nobody about what we have found. There is more at stake here than whatever argument our state has with Washington, D.C.”
Garcia stared back at him. “What, like Unity being a fraud?” he wheezed.
Pallas’s eye-lenses whirred. “Where did you hear that?”
Eleutheria, he tried to say, but the lie wouldn’t come out. His vision was starting to blur, gray out. The pressure on his arteries was intense; he could feel his pulse fighting against those metal fingers. “Daelia Hall,” he said instead.
Immediately, the death grip on his throat released. He almost fell.
“Be very careful what you say about the daughter of the First One,” Pallas warned. “And be even more careful who you say it to.”
“Why?” Garcia asked, coughing.
But Pallas said nothing else. Just turned and left, slamming the door behind him.
Garcia let his head fall back against the wall, trying to get the burning sensation out of his lungs.
What the hell was going on?
23
Chimneys and storage tanks rose up against the afternoon sky for as far as Argo could see as he approached the warehouse. The refinery complex here in Houston was vast; he’d driven by it on the freeway but hadn’t gotten a true appreciation for the scale of it. Fusion may have replaced most all coal- and gas-fired power plants in the country, but liquid fuel, plastics, and natural gas were all still in demand. This strip of industry, here in Houston, supplied the vast majority of the nation’s petroleum needs.
The warehouse was a mere speck in all of that. One little hill in a veritable mountain range of metal and oil. A good place for hiding.
Daelia had said to drive right on in. On the far side of the warehouse, on the edge of a huge berm, there was a roll-up door, large enough to get a semi through. It opened for him as he approached.
The rest of the small team was already here. Chalk’s kugus were silent, on standby near her rudiment core. Over on one of the worktables, a little dragon projection was frolicking around a stationary kugu, a basic sensory setup wired to a hardline connection. June and Daelia were working on that kugu he’d helped Daelia pick up the other morning. Only Lee was nowhere to be seen, but Argo knew he was here. From what Daelia had told him, the old contractor was sleeping here.
It was good, seeing Daelia. He’d been busy the last few days, working his shifts, out flying. Part of him wanted more time with her. It could wait—it would have to wait. It was still good, though.
Daelia had a visor on instead of her usual monocle. It looked specialized, with optical magnification lenses slotted into the frames like bifocals. The edges were lit up. Probably in some kind of AR-enhanced maintenance overlay, Argo figured.
Daelia had the kugu from yesterday spread out in front of her. She’d stripped the thing apart, down to its frame. Argo wondered what the point of buying it had been; it looked like something she could have built from the ground up with a kit, or spare parts from Lee’s storeroom.
“So what is this for exactly?”
“Well, Emily volunteered to come along, so we need something for her to puppet,” Daelia told him. Her hair was sweaty. Her right hand shook a little as she tightened down a screw with a long, slender Phillips-head. Argo wondered if she’d slept at all last night.
“Won’t they see her?” Argo asked, looking over at the small projection of Emily. “Figure out what she is pretty quick?”
“You mean through her metadata?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“You know where the metadata thing comes from, right?” June asked. When Argo didn’t answer, she continued. "Early on, back when we were still figuring abiota out, it became apparent that they were only as good as the data they were given.”
“June!” Daelia protested.
“This is true for humans too,” her aunt replied with a long-suffering sigh, as if this was a conversation they’d had many times before. “So one of the concessions most tech companies made, and that was then later codified with agreements with the Domain Array, is that metadata must be present and verifiable for anything that’s pushed over a network. The Internet, the AR overlays, internal corporate structures and the like.”
“Right,” Argo said. “That’s when digital ID was introduced for the Internet, right?”
“Exactly. In order for abiota to function, they have to be able to verify that what they’re seeing is real.”
“Humans too,” Daelia said again.
“Yes, but meatspace”—and June rapped the table with her knuckles—“cannot be so easily manipulated as a cyber environment.”
Argo leaned on his elbow. “And this?”
Daelia finally looked up. She tapped a button on the side of her visor and then pushed the thing up onto her head, honey-blonde hair scrunching up behind it like a wave. “This”—and she gestured at the mess in front of her—“needs to look like I’ve been messing with Ginger’s kugu for fun or whatever.”
“It’s impossible to completely fake metadata,” June said. “Are you familiar with the OSI stack?”
“Um…”
“Any computer system, including simple things like kugus, has multiple layers of operation,” June said. “An abiota can’t just send a command into TGLP and have the hardware adjust a solenoid. It takes multiple protocol layers, different programming languages, to translate any command into action. Multiple layers of metadata, layers that abiota are very tuned into.”
“It’s like a dog’s sense of smell,” Daelia said. “They have a greater degree of sensitivity, and a greater range of senses within a cyber environment, than us.”
“That’s what makes an abiota’s metadata so difficult to forge. We can spoof the upper layer that is reviewed first, but the lower levels become increasingly harder to fake. Plus, the way a canid-class and orcinus-class interface with kugus is totally different. Much like you can tell the difference between a NASCAR driver and some teenager with their learner’s permit.” June squinted at her laptop screen and typed something in. She sat back again. “I think this phenomenon is why our insane little friend was inserting emergents into his kugus to use as henchmen. Secondary device operation is one of the ways we, and the Domain Array, verify class identity.”
Now Argo was catching on. “Different emergents operate kugus differently?”
“Precisely,” June said. “We can’t fake Emily’s metadata. It’s not just what she consciously broadcasts. So what we have to do is have her puppet through a secondary interface. One that will mimic Ginger.”
“So you’re building a secondary control system she can send commands to, that will then control the kugu?”
“Yes,” June said, and frowned at her laptop again. “But that’s a ruse that the Domain Array, and most security predictives worth their core space, is aware of and knows to look for.”
“So why are we doing it?”
“There’s no other way,” Daelia said. She tapped her screwdriver on the chassis. “We don’t really have a choice. I can’t use Ginger’s existing kugu. Everybody knows it. Paphus knows it. But if it’s a new kugu, that I’ve been messing with and has a few little bugs that aren’t worked out, then discrepancies are most easily dismissed as flaws in the machinery. And hopefully, they won’t start pinging her for lower-level metadata identifiers.”
Argo digested this for a moment. “So you’re sabotaging the car to disguise the driver’s style?”
“Something like that,” Daelia said.
Argo looked at the number of pieces spread out on the table in front of Daelia. “Aren’t we heading out to New UT in the morning?”
“Yeah,” Daelia said.
“I know there’s other stuff we need to get done.”
“If Emily gets caught, they’ll brick her for sure,” Daelia said.
If we get caught, we’re getting bricked, Argo thought, but didn’t say it. “What about—”
“It’ll get done,” Daelia said, short, terse. “You might have to drive tomorrow, though.”
“Good, Argo, you’re here,” Lee said, coming out of the back office, wiping his hands. He kicked the door shut. “Now we can get started.”
“This is really a straightforward kind of thing,” Daelia said, almost apologetically, and looked at her dad. “Do we really need to do this?”
“Yes,” Lee said.
She sighed and pulled up the simulation.
The Halls had a mobile virch bottle running, one Argo didn’t recognize. It wasn’t the one from the Scrap House, anyway. And the simulation around them, contrary to most of what he’d experienced over the past few weeks, wasn’t Emily’s. No windswept mountains, no glistening waterfalls. Not today.
Today, they were standing on what looked like a well-manicured lawn, looking at a very modern building. Steel and concrete and glass, with all those unnecessary angles that seemed to plague abiota-designed construction.
“This is the Ware College of Graduate Engineering,” Daelia said with a sigh, pointing at the building. “This is what we’re going to hack this weekend.”
“No,” Chalk said, her voice sibilant inside the simulation. It was still almost impossible to pin down her AR form. One moment it looked like a human woman, another, a giant coiled snake. “This is what we’re going to hack.”
Instantly, the scene changed. Glistening wet limestone, the flow of stalactites, the sound of water dripping in the distance.
“We’re just going to look at the logic diagrams right now,” Daelia said, and changed the view again. Back to the view of the college. Lighter this time, with a vast diagram of spidery blue lines placed over it, a vertical 2D map. “Okay, Chalk? This is my briefing.”
“Suit self.”
“Okay, so this is the network,” Daelia said, and waved a hand at it. Several spaces within it lit up. “My information was stored here, in the student research database. If we want to look at the architecture for how this was constructed—”
“Daelia,” Argo interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Can we keep it high-level? How do we get her in?” Argo asked.
“We’re already kind of in. Chalk’s got a bot trawling the outward-facing side of the network. But the main student research database is heavily monitored and protected. If Chalk tried to go in now, from an off-site location, the penetration would be IDed and stopped in a few seconds.” Daelia shook her head. “Only reason why the network’s accessible at all outside of the building is so students can work on stuff outside the lab."
“Seems like overkill.”
“Ware does a lot of research for our big industry partners like Omphalos and Tamm Good Industries, and they want this level of protection for what they put into the college.”
“Omphalos donated most of the original equipment,” Lee added. “And the network admin.”
“Paphus, yeah,” Daelia said. “It’s a Galatea clone. Anyway, yes, we have to provide Chalk a way in through one of the building’s own physical ports. That’s the wireless device that Dad’s been working on.”
“Bandwidth?” Emily asked. She had sized her dragon-form down to something the size of a small dog, positioned between Daelia and Chalk.
“Bandwidth sufficient for infiltration phase,” Chalk said. “Will go in deeper for extraction. May take time to upload.”
“How much data are you grabbing?” Argo asked.
“The way hacker abiota typically work,” June said, “is through an armor program, combined with some additional penetration and stealth enhancements, with what she sees run through a metaphor server. None of them can swim in raw code. It’s just not how they function. For her to be effective, she has to experience this as an environment.”
“Are all abiota like that?” he asked.
Chalk smiled through the haze that surrounded her. “All abiota that can interact with meatspace.”
“Is price of being in human world,” Emily added.
There was more to this, Argo sensed, a hell of a lot more, but none of the other humans in the room seemed fazed by it, so he didn’t press. Maybe he could get Daelia to explain it later.
“The metaphor server view provides a level of detail on a network that surpasses anything a human can do through a screen,” Daelia said. “But additional defenses get layered in now, just as a best practice, so a human is usually necessary to check the code and decipher those kinds of traps.”
“Okay,” Argo said. “Where do we need to put Chalk’s entry device?”
“Best place is AR server hook-ins,” Chalk said. “Difficult to monitor, many abiota moving in and out. Don’t leave footprints.”
“As readily,” June added.
“Always trail. Hide well.”
“We want to get her in through the hotel room,” Daelia said.
“Hotel room,” Argo repeated. “Right.”
“And from there, you two can enjoy your weekend,” Lee said, giving Argo a meaningful look. “Responsibly. With nobody getting hurt.”
“And the actual hack?”
“Build model of system to practice. I use, last days,” Chalk said, and a three-dimensional map of what looked like a cave system appeared around them. “Day of, I survey, make changes, find weakness, go in.”
“We don’t want you to go in sooner than the judging contest,” Daelia said. “Paphus is in charge of security, but it also runs all the kugus during both the judging and the actual haunted house on Saturday. As I understand it, it employs task switching to do this. Looks near instantaneous but for an abiota it’s tricky. Paphus’s attention will be divided.”
