Zero days, p.20
Zero Days, page 20
Raymond handed Drayton the letter. ‘There you go, Andreas. Enjoy.’
Raymond then set about hacking the house itself. The defences were good.
Vika sent Bret details of the surveillance cameras, and although Bret had easily identified them and found the video feed, the pictures were encrypted and with a password that was tough to crack. He said it might take time.
Raymond probed the mansion’s Wi-Fi, thinking that hacking connected gadgets would be the best way in. It usually was. Breach one and you could potentially control the lot. It meant a couple of trips up to the Peak, but by the end of the afternoon he was inside.
‘Wu’s a lazy cleaner,’ Raymond said. ‘He has a pair of smart vacuum cleaners. Little robot housekeepers. They map the house as they work, in that way they can navigate around without knocking over lamps and stuff, clean the place and then return to their charging station. They’ve even got little video cameras. But no password protection.’
He opened his laptop and showed Drayton the layout of the house, which he’d extracted from the cleaner. Then he remotely powered up the cleaner, a video image from its camera showing a wide shot of a large but sparsely furnished room.
‘Nice,’ Drayton said.
‘Yeah,’ said Raymond, enjoying himself now. ‘I think we’re gonna have fun.’
‘I should go,’ Drayton said.
‘Sure. Yeah. We’ll be watching your back.’
They joined Vika on deck.
She’d personally supervised Drayton’s purchase of a new pair of black jeans, turtle-neck and light grey jacket. So that he would look the part.
‘You’re the real geek,’ she said.
‘You know where that came from? The word geek,’ said Raymond, who was a mine of the sort of technical information almost guaranteed to send mere mortals into a coma.
Drayton said he had no idea.
‘It dates back to the early 1900s and came from travelling circuses. Geeks were performers who bit the heads off chickens or performed other weird or disgusting acts. Only recently has it become more techie.’
‘I prefer the circus version. Though they’ve got a lot in common,’ Drayton said, thinking that he’d tell that one to Anna if he ever got to talk to her again. A new email from her was mildly encouraging. After asking whether he’d seen her earlier message, she said she really would like to clear the air, that things were really cool in Berlin, going soooooo well, followed by a bunch of smiley faces. Drayton smiled too, until she started on about Efren Bell, what a wonderful person he is, amazing project work, the chance to travel …
He started to compose a reply, then stopped, partly because he wasn’t sure what to say, but mostly because he saw Vika, an intense look on her face, as she turned up the volume on a television in the corner, tuned to CNN, a report from Ukraine. A series of fast moving, disjointed images. Burning, smoke, a tattered Ukrainian flag above an entrance to a school, beyond it screaming and shouting, a wailing woman on her knees, another shaking, her face in her hands. A crater where the school yard used to be, a reporter holding a fragment of a rocket case, the writing in Cyrillic, the reporter saying that twenty children were dead, maybe more since they were still sifting through the body parts. Not us, says Russia, the Ukrainians must have done it themselves. A spokesman in Moscow, denying it with a straight face, the same straight face that denied invading Crimea, not our little green men without insignias. And denied shooting down a Malaysian passenger jet high above the battlefield, killing all 283 people onboard. The more overwhelming the evidence, the straighter the face.
Drayton tried to read Vika’s face. Was it disgust? Shock perhaps? She certainly seemed to grow uneasy as the report described a flare-up of fighting along the front line between Ukraine and the Russian separatists in the east of the country, concentrating hard, and then turning to Raymond saying, ‘I need to use a phone. A secure phone.’
Raymond gave her an old Nokia that had been lying amid the empty Coke cans, and she went outside to make a call. She returned ten minutes later, throwing the phone back on the table and saying to Drayton, ‘You need to go.’
Raymond said he’d arranged a van, and they’d travel up together. He said he’d be working from the van.
Drayton looked at Vika. She seemed pre-occupied. Her mind elsewhere.
They left the boat, Vika and Raymond leading the way. As they stepped up onto the wooden walkway against which the boat was moored, Drayton said he’d forgotten something, and ducked back into the boat. He picked up the phone that Vika had just used, scrolling through to the log of the most recent calls. There were two listed. Both international. One was to Ukraine. The other to Germany.
*****
Delta View sat at the top of a steep narrow road, beyond a heavy sliding security gate. It was a forbidding-looking gate, but it had been opened for the occasion and strung with fairy lights. Police directed the flow of expensive-looking limousines up and down and in and out of the compound beyond.
It was dusk when Raymond and Vika dropped Drayton at the bottom of the road and he walked the last stretch. He was greeted by a young woman wearing a body-hugging traditional Chinese dress, a cheongsam, and wielding a hand-held computer. She checked Drayton’s letter of invitation and his passport against the guest list and then printed a tag with his photograph above the words, ‘Andreas Fischer, Technical Director, AF Global Digital Solutions’.
She smiled and tapped the sticky tag into place on his lapel.
‘What sort of solutions are they?’ she asked.
‘Global digital ones,’ he said.
‘That’s so cool. Have a nice day.’
She also gave him a plan of the compound, which was big, and a schedule, which involved several presentations and a welcome from Wu Hongwei, whom it described as the creative genius behind Pearl Digital.
The next person Drayton met was an earnest young man who described himself as the Hong Kong Government Engagement Lead. He said that Hong Kong was committed to a tech policy that was agile, inclusive, focussed and sustainable. Transformative too. And was Andreas aware that technologies were challenging existing regulatory and mitigative systems? Drayton said he wasn’t aware, and good luck with that, handing him a business card.
Drayton hated receptions like this. The posturing, the posing. Where Bret and Raymond saw dark political forces and Big Tech conspiracies, he just saw bullshit by the bucketful. Self-important geeks spouting incomprehensible jargon. Artificial Intelligence with everything. AI-driven. AI-powered. The way Drayton saw it, most were heavy on the artificial and light on the intelligence.
When a robot server sidled past with a tray of champagne, he just wanted to kick it, but then had second thoughts because that would have been a waste of good champagne. He took a glass instead.
‘Enjoy,’ said the robot, programmed with a horrible French accent. It was around three feet tall, with a head that looked like a motorbike helmet, lights flashing beneath the visor when it spoke.
Drayton looked at the harbour below. As the last of the natural light drained from the sky, it was replaced by a wall of bright lights and neon signs from the tightly packed skyscrapers lining the waterfront on both sides.
Lights came on in the garden, where several tent-like shelters were hosting presentations. The main house, at the back of the garden was a sprawling three-storey building with large windows and wide balconies, fat turret-like structures at each corner. There were rows of small lights marking the contours of the house. Video screens showed simulations of the brave new world of robots, autonomous vehicles and space travel. Even the bathroom didn’t provide a sanctuary from the brave new future. After he relieved himself, Drayton was confronted by an interactive mirror with a display on the glass offering him urine-test results derived from a sensor in the connected toilet.
It was the sort of place that gave him bad dreams.
In one tent, social media executives were talking about fake news, making the flood of digital excrement swamping their platforms sound like a minor irritation. Insisting on the purity of their mission to connect the world for the common good. There was only one thing that could solve the challenges facing social media, and that was more social media. Drayton left the tent.
The next contained a mock-up of an autonomous car. Drayton peered inside. Sat inside. A round-faced man wearing small rectangular glasses and regulation stubble, leaned in the car window. ‘The problem is still consumer acceptability,’ he said. He described himself as a developer. ‘It’s still a challenge to get people to accept the idea of being driven around by a computer. It’s like elevators in the old days. The first elevators all had attendants pushing the buttons. When technology advanced and the attendants were removed, people at first were too afraid to take the elevator, because it no longer had a driver. You get me? But they learned to get used to it. The same thing will happen with autonomous cars.’
‘People still get trapped in lifts,’ Drayton said. ‘And anyway, suppose I like driving?’
The developer didn’t immediately answer, the idea of personal choice wasn’t something he could immediately compute.
‘Still, it’s a nice car,’ Drayton said, leaving the tent and stumbling into a group wearing giant ski-type goggles, bending and thrusting their arms, ducking and weaving.
‘Augmented reality glasses,’ said a woman standing nearby. ‘Turbocharging creativity and innovation. Enhancing the real.’
‘I quite like the real,’ Drayton said. ‘And anyway, they used to say that about acid. You know, mind-bending drugs?’
But the woman was no longer listening. She was putting on her own pair of ski-goggles, popping her own technical pill, and was soon swinging her arms, which made Drayton think of the mosquitoes in Myanmar. Maybe that’s what gave her a thrill. Battling augmented mosquitoes.
In another tent, five middle-aged white men were sitting on a small stage discussing diversity in the tech industry. Nearby, a man in a red T-shirt with the words ‘Embracing the Future’ on the front invited Drayton to a session on what he called intelligent enterprises preparing for the digital transformation. Drayton said he wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, and the man said it was pretty straightforward.
‘We need to move on from the paradigms of conventional space and embrace the different paradigms of cyberspace.’
Another man in a grey turtle-neck and more stubble said that wasn’t just right, it was so right. He described himself as a venture capitalist looking for the next big breakthrough. Billion dollar start-ups, which he called unicorns.
‘And what makes a unicorn?’ asked Drayton, struggling to sound interested. ‘Apart from a big horn in the middle of its forehead.’
‘They’re disrupters, Andreas,’ the turtle-neck said, looking at Drayton’s name tag, and not really understanding the bit about the horn. ‘They shoot for the moon. Boil the ocean. Embrace the future. You get what I’m saying?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Drayton, embracing another glass of champagne from a passing server robot. The robot said, ‘Ciao,’ sounding Italian this time.
‘We need to enrich the conversation and move it forward,’ said a man in a black collarless shirt.
The way Drayton saw it, the main thing Big Tech was enriching was itself, at their most innovative avoiding taxes, but he kept that to himself. The black collarless shirt began to yell into his cell phone, ‘We need to get more energy into that.’ Maybe he was talking to his accountant.
In another tent, more stubbled chins, talking this time about data breaches, making them sound like something trivial. ‘We have to keep moving forward.’ Drayton moved forward and out of the tent, thinking, ‘Who would choose to come to a conference like this? It felt to him like some kind of cult. A bunch of New Age wackos.
Drayton headed for the main house, where Wu Hongwei was due to begin his presentation on the stage in the large sparsely furnished room Drayton had seen in the video from the hacked robot vacuum cleaner.
But it wasn’t Wu on the stage, but Efren Bell, in the same geeky uniform of black suit over a grey turtle-neck that he’d been wearing in Berlin. Greying hair slicked back into a ponytail. He was talking about data, calling it the new oil of the global economy. The fuel of the future. The thing that powers artificial intelligence. He was talking about rethinking privacy. About the need to see personal data as an investment for better, more personalised services that could anticipate your needs.
‘To serve customers we need to get inside their heads,’ he said to loud applause.
For a moment, Drayton was back in Bangkok. In the seedy go-go bar with Dobberman obsessing about perfect algorithms while naked women climbed poles in front of him. Dead Dobberman. Dobberman whose phone had led them to Hong Kong.
A map of the world behind Bell showed what he called the pipelines of the future, a network of fibre optic cables he was building for transferring hitherto unimaginable amounts of data around the world. Feeding the hungry algorithms of AI. Knowing what the customer wants before they know it themselves. A large caption above the map read, ‘Building a shared future in a fractured world’.
‘Look at China,’ he said. ‘There are so many exciting things happening. Such a positive attitude towards AI.’
Then Wu bounded up on stage wearing a similar uniform to Bell and they announced a new partnership. He talked about voice and face recognition. Picking one individual out of a crowd of thousands, and matching that image with countless other data sets in seconds. Not just recognising faces, but reading emotions. And by reading emotions, reading intent. The end of crime, since there’d truly be nowhere to hide. Monitoring not just identities, but bad intentions.
Efren Bell led the applause, and then said, ‘That’s what the Digital Pagoda Fund is for, backing the technologies of the future. Secure technologies. To make the world a safer place.’
The logo of his fund, the image of a golden bell-shaped Buddhist stupa, superimposed on the padlock that represented security, appeared on the screen behind him, and on several others around the edge of the room.
Then Wu said, ‘It’s a pleasure to be part of your initiative, Efren. Here’s to the tech superstars of the future.’
The room was packed, and Wu welcomed his audience to his connected house – ‘Possibly the most connected house in Hong Kong,’ he bragged. ‘Meet Mimi, my indispensable assistant.’ He gestured towards a black, flask-shaped object sitting on a table beside him. ‘She’s a prototype. She controls everything in the house at my command. And I’m training her to anticipate my needs.’ Mimi flashed her lights at mention of her name. ‘Let’s organise the toast, shall we Mimi.’
Mimi flashed some more lights and then several robot servers entered the room, each with a tray brimming with glasses full of champagne. But instead of stopping at outstretched hands, they picked up speed, manically weaving around and under the tables. Then two of them collided, trays of champagne crashing to the floor. Another ran straight into the wall. While two more dropped their trays and sped out of the room, onto the lawn, heading for the swimming pool.
There was nervous laughter, some thinking that it might just be a joke. Wu looked flustered, the look of an actor struggling with his lines and not a prompter in sight. He eventually decided it was better to say nothing, and just gestured to a server to bring more champagne and the food, but to forget about the robots. But the server seemed anxious, and Drayton overheard her telling one of Wu’s assistants that something weird had happened. The fridge had become a freezer and most of the champagne and the sandwiches were now like slabs of ice.
Wu was perspiring heavily. Everybody was looking hot. And everybody was looking at him. So he turned to Mimi and asked the voice-controlled organiser to turn up the air con.
‘Certainly Mr Wu. What temperature do you have in mind?’
Wu leaned towards Mimi and hissed, ‘I don’t give a fuck, just cool this place down.’ Mimi told him there was no need to swear, and with an audible whoosh the air con that was embedded in the ceiling of the room, stepped up a few notches in speed.
Except the air it was pumping out became even hotter.
Wu stood and said it was time to relax. For music.
But he was interrupted by a robot server coming back to life, spinning round and round, and yelling. ‘Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Enjoy. Enjoy.’
Wu ignored the robot and turned again to Mimi.
‘Some classical music Mimi. Mozart. A string quartet. Medium volume.’
But Mimi wasn’t in the mood for classical, and powerful speakers around the room began to thump out gangster rap. Full volume. The room shaking. Tha Dogg Pound rapping, ‘That’s right. Some of that shit you just can’t fuck wit. Tha Dogg Pound flava. For the nine-fever. Know what I’m saying?’
Wu told Mimi to turn it off, but she ignored him.
There were gasps around the room. Some uncomfortable laughter, and a lot of confusion. Hands went to ears to shield against the noise; others made for the exits.
Wu grabbed Mimi, holding her close, shouting instructions. Yelling at his indispensable assistant to shut the fuck up. But Mimi had a mind of her own, and his words were drowned out by the ear-piercing rap. ‘Give a fuck, what’s your name, what you claim. Or why you came, motherfucker don’t explain. Simply, don’t tempt me, cause I’m simply layin’ hoes life’s empty, the invincible me.’
Wu flung Mimi at two security men, who grabbed her, wrapped her in a tablecloth and took her outside. From under the cloth, Drayton could hear Mimi squeaking, ‘Leave me alone, you fuckers. Leave me alone.’
It sounded a lot like Raymond.
Drayton left the room towards an alcove to one side, but he was blocked by a robot vacuum cleaner. The cleaner was a chunky cylindrical thing. Reaching to just below Drayton’s knees, and with the words ‘Dust Dog’ on top beside flashing lights. Drayton went to step around it, but the cleaner moved again, so that it still blocked his way. Then he remembered that Raymond was controlling the cleaner, which meant Dim sum was sending a message – ‘Don’t enter the room!’
