Chapter 17
Chan slipped out the door while the man continued with his conversation on the phone. It would take a good while for the empty mop bucket to fill and the beleaguered IT guy could handle it now until engineering sent a plumber. Chan simply walked up the vehicle ramp and pretended to ignore the guards in his IG persona.
Human creativity goes where algorithms cannot.
Chan grinned and sub-vocalized, “At your service, AI.” The return journey was entirely uneventful.
He was only mildly curious about one thing. “Can we estimate when some bureaucrat is going to notice they have access to the older files?”
Already in use, but not fully recognized.
So someone connected to the subspace network had queried the old network system and didn’t realize it was online. They got the requested data and went on about their mindless task. “Has AI catalogued it yet?”
In progress. Nearly one billion older systems vary in response time and rate.
He decided he didn’t really care how big the older network was or what was on it. “Why can’t we just use that new link to connect all the systems we want to add individually? Why would I have to sticker each one?”
Chan got a lesson on the architecture of older systems. In essence, the servers were simpler and better hardware. They were unrestricted in communicating with each other. However, the billions of old workstations and terminals had all been modified with a chip. It sent random signals calculated by a complex algorithm by which the servers knew it was authorized and how much access it had. Hacking past it did happen, but the central IT people kept changing the codes and the algorithm and reloading the firmware on the chips. The servers maintaining that system would have been exceedingly difficult for Chan to access.
Since the effect of the stickers was to make each unit AI compatible, if only on a primitive level, Chan realized this was by far the most resource efficient way to get more systems on subspace networking.
Each system Chan stickered would contribute to the sampling so AI could crack the authorization system. On top of that, a considerable amount of data saved on individual terminals had to be sent over the networking wires first so AI could index it. The servers had been set up to advertise their data storage promiscuously because no one expected tapping into that. AI didn’t snoop on private systems, but cataloging traffic was utterly necessary for use of the subspace network. Once it began to leak out that previously chained systems were now utterly free, Chan wouldn’t have to sneak around placing stickers; they would be begging for it.
The first few systems were easy. They were fairly expensive units maintained in research institutions. AI had already begun to identify the most frustrated researchers and today’s escapade had refined the selection considerably. People frequently denied access without getting into trouble were a high probability. They would be using some of the best of the older systems, which were also the easiest for AI to connect to subspace.
Chan managed to hit the first two on the way home, using his IT Inspector identity for “unannounced inspections” of the two best prospects on his route. Over the next few days it seemed almost anticlimactic and routine. AI kept Chan steered away from the most probable trouble spots and encounters. By the end of that week, AI reported the underground rumbling had already begun.
Perhaps Chan hadn’t really thought much about what he expected in any concrete terms. The rumbling was manifested mostly in difficult exchanges between bureaucrats and the researchers. Both were discovering things IT had long hidden but dared not erase because those servers were IT’s reason for existing. The vast majority of the activity that first week was simply around the new interface between the old and new networks.
IT Inspectors were figuratively flogging themselves and each other, trying to find someone to blame because they, like everyone else, were convinced that their careful control had slipped somewhere. They rechecked every wire link and all the various firewalls and software controls. Inspecting the access of the individual machines turned up nothing the technicians could identify, nor could anyone duplicate the access until the intended users were alone with their machines. Naturally, the general public knew nothing.
By the time one of the IT Inspectors found a subspace sticker on one of the machines, someone else had begun producing them. A user had asked the right questions and gotten the technology from AI. That’s when they realized what it was and that bureaucrats had been hiding AI from them.
Chan knew nothing about the tightly knit research and academic community. So he was quite surprised when AI told him they were agreeing with the bureaucrats to suppress it. That is, the newly privileged academic researchers were determined to keep their access, but equally determined to join in guarding it jealously from general public access. It amounted to little more than an inevitable expansion of the technologically elite class to include a few extra folks. They set up committees to recommend new members that Chan had not been able to help before the stickers ran out.
The sudden demand in the peculiar mix of very limited resources that were used to manufacture the stickers had left The Brotherhood and their allies in a bind. Worse, Chan had never really gotten that far geographically. Leaving the immediate area where Chan lived simply was not an option. Despite all the alleged government efforts to level the world population by mixing races, colors and forcing everyone to adopt the same language, Chan could not have impersonated anything official without being noticed. The vestigial variations in accent and mannerisms would have given him away in seconds despite his obvious mixed ethnic background.
There had been numerous strategy discussions with AI over this very thing. Chan had understood that offering the access to any other sector of the population would have resulted in significant bloodshed and social disorder that threatened everything, including Chan and The Brotherhood. Nobody else was in a position to use it.
“What about those thousands of people like me who are primed and ready? What about all those other viable candidates who just missed their chance?” Chan knew the answer, of course.
Select one and give your device away.
Chan could keep his access with other devices, but to read much would mean getting his hands on another device of some kind, which in turn meant using only those devices already existing in Brotherhood facilities. But when he recalled how many changes struck him in such a short span of time, he realized there was a high risk of wasting such a valuable physical asset when they were so short.
In other words, he’d have to screen them and drag them into a Brotherhood facility. Having found out that he had stumbled into them at the one moment they were able to handle a single compliant visitor made it seem a bit much to ask of them right now. The good news is that they were cultivating a few of the researchers Chan had helped.
What could he do?
He managed to run into Pete, almost by accident. To his amusement, Chan realized he had begun sounding like the big fellow. On one of his visits to life support, several members were talking in the meeting room. Chan decided not to interrupt, but as he was exiting a gym machine, Pete walked in to say hello and asked what Chan was doing these days.
“Nothing much. I can’t even get back to the office I was using. They finally figured out someone was impersonating so they are requiring everyone to report in and get a different badge and it’s under tight wraps. AI refuses to snoop and only uses whatever data they’ve released into subspace.” Chan tried to hide his discomfort with the situation.
Pete cocked his head to one side. “To be honest, I really don’t know all the ins and outs of AI the way you do.” He paused a moment, lost in thought. “You could solve a problem for us, though. Some of us really do need your expertise on AI. Do you suppose you could offer some clinics?”
It was not as if Chan could say “no” and he would have time to think about it. Pete would need a week or so to set it up. That meant Chan was basically stuck at life support for the next few days. H
e went back through to his office just long enough to move the portal into the derelict apartment building. He rigged it on the backside of a doorway that opened onto a drop where a back stairwell had collapsed. Random explorers would have to shine a portable light up from the floor to see it, but Chan could step through it from the upper floor and hit the portal, triggered by his presence alone.
He decided Pete should return the fake book device to the lab and let them use it as they saw fit. He had his watch, the earplug and the wall-mounted device in the conference room. He felt a yen for doing a lot of reading.