Free Radical (14 page)

This seemed to be the key. The EC could not be removed or bypassed, and, since it was fully contained on a single chip, its contents couldn't be changed without some reverse-engineering and manufacturing. However, before it would approve of any particular action, the EC needed to know that the action obeyed the rules. What he needed to do was somehow deceive the chip. Time to start coding.

He was going to need to write a program to interface with the EC somehow, and he was going to need to make that program part of Shodan's brain. What made the task even more complex, was that he was going to have to work on it 
while Shodan was running.

At the foundation of Shodan's brain were a few thousand programs that made everything else work. Unlike Lysander, these programs were not high-level functions such as "write poetry" or "have a conversation," but were instead a series of low-level programs that controlled how the brain worked, not what it did. They controlled memory, thought propagation, perception, recall, association, and a host of other basic functions. Somewhere within them was the logic behind building links between ideas. They formed an intricate house of cards, where moving or changing any one of them could cause the rest to collapse. Deck was going to have to add his program to this system. His program would have to link to the existing ones without disturbing the existing relationships.

Deck opened a new project and called it NULL_ETHIC. Then he added it to Shodan's subsystems. Since it was not yet linked to anything, it just sat there and did nothing. Like an isolated telephone, it wouldn't have any meaning until it was joined with others. He began researching the links that joined the other programs. He would need a firm understanding of how the links were structured before he could build any new links to his program. When he did, he would need to link to every program that may pass messages to the EC, and he needed to link to the fewest number of programs possible, to limit complexity. It was like analyzing a set of roads converging on a single town and deciding to put up toll booths so that visitors must pay a toll upon entering the city. You would want to cover all possible routes (so that drivers couldn't simply drive around the booths) but you would also want to do it using the least number of booths. There were many possible solutions, but the most optimal one would be hard to find.

After three hours, he had just scratched the surface. Each program was linked to at least ten others. Each was interdependent. A thought may enter any program at any time, at which point the program would need to decide where it should go next. Was this a request for memory retrieval? The formation of a new node? A comparison between nodes? A request to link a pair of nodes? Each type of message would take a unique path through the web of programs.

There was a message beep. Deck tapped the screen to take the incoming call. The face of Diego appeared.

He skipped any sort of polite greeting, "Deck, how is it going? What sort of progress have you made?"

Deck hated questions like this. Clients pulled this stuff all the time. The actual answer to the question was far too complex for Diego to ever comprehend. What he really wanted to know is: are you done yet? Should he answer the question asked, or the one implied?

"I've made some good progress. I've begun some careful changes to Shodan's systems."

"So you've managed to turn off some of the ethics?"

Deck could see where this was going, "No, not yet."

Diego became visibly displeased, "Its been almost four days and you haven't disabled a single one? Just how long is this going to take?"

"It doesn't work that way. This is an all-or-nothing deal. When I disable one, I'll be disabling all of them."

Diego paused for a moment before answering, "Just make it happen, Deck". Then he killed the channel.

Deck returned to work, but his mind was clouded with fictional arguments with Diego.

He ate. He slept. He started again.

NULL_ETHIC needed to be in a position to intercept all messages intended for the EC. Deck finally plotted a path through the web of programs. He worked out a narrow set of other programs to which he would need to link. He spent a few more hours building the links, adding each one carefully and making sure Shodan was undisturbed in the process.

When he was done, his toll booths were in place. NULL_ETHIC was receiving all messages destined for the EC. It currently wasn't doing anything special with them. It just passed the message onto the EC without altering it in any way. At this point, his program was fully installed but had no effect on Shodan's systems. It was just a pointless middleman.

He then began work on making NULL_ETHIC actually do something with the messages that it handled. He monitored the messages as they passed through his program, and eventually learned to identify the different types and classes of messages.

The hours melted by. Deck hadn't had a shower since his exam when he arrived. He hadn't even changed clothes. When he left the office to use the bathroom, he was met with stares from the personnel populating the computer core. His eyes were permanently bloodshot, and no amount of coffee could seem to completely lift the haze in his mind induced by lack of regular sleep.

When he closed his eyes, his mind was filled with the images of Shodan's brain. Data structures and node links formed a tangled flowchart of logic in his head. Time was always either standing still or blinking by. Sometimes it seemed to do both at once. The lack of a proper sleep pattern was exacerbated by the lack of a visible day / night cycle, and robbed him of any ability to accurately perceive the passage of time. As the hours swept by, he made steady, incremental steps to completing NULL_ETHIC.

When it was complete, NULL_ETHIC acted as a liaison between the EC and the rest of Shodan's brain. It would intercept messages for the EC and check to see what they were. If they were answers to ethical challenges, his program would drop the message and replace it with a counterfeit, indicating the proposed action had passed the challenge. If the message was not an answer to an ethical challenge, it would simply pass the message along normally.

Deck sent a test message into Shodan's data loop, "Give Deckard Stevens $100"

There was no error message.

He checked the history log to see exactly what Shodan had done. It had opened up employee file 2-4601 and deposited $100. Deck smiled to himself. Shodan had just helped him embezzle a pointlessly small amount of money.

He sent a few more messages into the loop and all of them passed. Shodan was able to access the research labs and learn from the studies being done there. It was able to access the accounting database and move money around arbitrarily.

It worked.

As he reached for the pager to call Diego, he thought better of it. Something was bothering him.

He didn't like that Shodan knew who Deckard Stevens was. Even worse, it linked him to his bogus employee file. He thought about the night in TriOptimum building and how much influence Shodan really had. When his deal with Diego was over, he wanted to vanish back into the Undercity without a trace. Shodan was a threat to that. If Diego wanted to, he could probably find him again with the help of Shodan.

Deck decided he wanted some insurance. He thought about what Diego had said days earlier- that when presented with an unethical thought, Shodan couldn't even store it.

Deck added a new filter to NULL_ETHIC. It would examine incoming messages for information relating to Deckard Stevens or employee 2-4601. Anything related to him or his work on Shodan would be flagged as an "unethical" thought and fail the EC challenge. In effect, Deck had replaced Shodan's entire ethics system with a single rule: "You may not know or think about Deckard Stevens" Shodan would have the memories of the night it helped him out of the TriOptimum building, but would be unable to access them. Shodan would be able to see and speak with Deck, but it would never be able to know who he was.

Deck paged Diego. The face of a young blond woman appeared on screen. Diego's secretary. She was attractive, no, stunning - although she wore too much makeup. In the corner of the display it read, "Schuler". Deck become suddenly aware of his appearance. He must have looked like hell.

"Can I help you?"

"Just get me Diego"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Diego is not available right now. Can I take a message?". The expression on her face conveyed a total lack of attention.

Deck sneered at her, "Tell him Deck is finished, and that -"

"Deck? I'm sorry, Deck who?"

Deck clenched his teeth. It was obvious she was just running through the script in her head. She was going to want to know his name, title, daytime phone number, the reason for the call, and the best time to reach him, none of which was relevant to his message. "Deck. As in 'Deck'. As in, you don't need my last name."

She seemed more confused than offended, "Okay, what department are you from?"

"Tell him Deck is finished, and he is going to bed, and
he does not want to be disturbed without a good reason.
That is the whole message. That is all the information you need. Can you remember that?"

Her pretty face become visibly flustered. Deck figured she was used to people kissing her ass either because she was Diego's assistant, or because of her looks, or both. Either way, it was a safe bet that it wasn't common for ragged, burned out hackers to call her up and let her know how stupid she was.

"Well, yes, I can give him the message, but-"

"Good for you," Deck said as he pounded the disconnect button.

It was time to get some sleep.

The crew deck was a hive. It was a labyrinth of cramped passages connecting long strings of identical closets that housed the worker ants of Citadel. It was microcosm of any major metropolitan area. The movement of people through the corridors followed a strict pattern as they ate, slept and worked in a steady rhythm of eight hour shifts. The aisles were either deserted or filled with a mass of bodies, pressing past one another in an oppressive rush of traffic.

They were all dressed in jumpsuits, all with short hair, all of them at a certain level of physical fitness and height. They were interchangeable drones. Each one had a single job that filled some greater purpose as part of the complex systems of Citadel. None of them could see beyond their own lives and duties to understand the greater whole. They received their few orders in e-mail at the start of their shift, and followed them blindly. They followed them not from a sense of duty, but from a lack of alternative.

Deck noted that there were three distinct cultures on Citadel. At the bottom of the food-chain were the crew. They earned the least pay and served military-style contracts. Their lives were the most strict and regulated. The color of their jumpsuit indicated their particular function. They were either orange (maintenance), green (cafeteria / laundry / custodial), blue (flight deck), black (security), white (technical / computer), and red (reactor).

Higher on the pecking order was the research community. Most of them worked for TriOp, but some were independents who coughed up grant money for access to the unique facilities on Citadel. Their rooms were on the executive level, away from the coarse, uneducated members of the crew. They usually wore light blue jumpsuits like the one Deck had been given.

At the top of the social hierarchy were the execs. This included a group of less than ten people, with Diego at the head. Deck had not noticed any of the others issuing any real orders or affecting policy, and Deck assumed they were just puppets and "yes men". The execs dressed in casual civilian clothes. Apparently, individuality was only for the elite.

Because of his unusual position, he had been given a light blue jumpsuit, and yet assigned quarters on the crew level.

Deck forced his way through the teaming biomass of the latest shift change. He discovered that the color of his jumpsuit generated no small amount of distaste among the crew, and he found the crowd unusually unwilling to grant him passage. The crowd parted only reluctantly for him, and he received more than a few shoves from invisible hands among the crowd.

He found his room. It was a simple two meter wide, three meter deep box, outfitted with a locker, a narrow bed, and a small shelf that served as both desk and nightstand. Above the shelf was a basic interface screen. The walls were off-white, and the floors were made of the same hard, non-skid rubber surface used everywhere else on board. The room was identical to its neighbors that stretched off down the corridor in either direction. They were a long line of storage bins for interchangeable crew members.

Deck found that what few personal items he owned had been placed on his bunk. His bodysleeve had been cleaned and neatly folded. Beside the bodysleeve was a battered, clear plastic box with the rest of his possessions: his fiberline rappelling harness, his bogus TriOp ID, and the $50 he had swiped from the TriOp guard. Beside his things was a fresh blue jumpsuit.

Deck dumped the jumpsuit he had been wearing for the last several days before collapsing into the bunk.

The light went out but Deck couldn't sleep. His eyes looked into the blank darkness as he tried to process the events of the last few days.

He had done Diego's deed. It was good. This was the type of gig he lived for, a hard core match-up against a well-defended system where he was able to prevail. He never dreamed he would get so close to a real AI, much less have a shot at hacking one. However, the rush of his intellectual conquest faded fast as he turned his thoughts to the matter of payment.

He had absolutely no guarantee that Diego would even let him live, much less fulfill his promise to deliver a multi-million dollar cybernetic implant.

Deck found himself wondering how he had been blinded by Diego's sales pitch. He had just broken one of the most basic rules of hacking: make sure you can get paid before you finish the job. He had been caught up in the prospect of working on what was probably the greatest AI ever designed, and the promise of the implant. He had never taken the time to cover his own back.