Wallet (a novel)

Chapter 25

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“What… the… hell…?”, Wint muttered. His voice croaked. He sat up on and slid his legs onto the floor. His bare feet hit the cold linoleum surface, and his knees buckled as he tried to stand up.

Wint surveyed his surroundings. He sat on what looked like a dining table covered with black trash bags. The room was long and narrow, barely wider than the table itself. At the end of the table, three worried pairs of eyes studied him intently. The last thing he remembered was… the frilly sofa… getting undressed… But this place? What was this place?

“William! Take it easy. You’ve been out for almost a whole day”, Ada said.

Wint recognised Ada and Rob. The third person, a blonde man seemingly in his early thirties, he did not recognise.

“Where… am I?”

Wint spun his head around and saw his own reflection in a dark window. His white tank top was covered in blood. He adjusted the focus of his eyes and looked past his own reflection. They were somewhere high up. A lit concrete tower protruded in the near distance. The tower’s recognisable shape was impossible to miss.

“I know this place… this is the Barbican.”

“Yes”, Ada replied.

“How did we get here?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just try to relax. You’ve been through a lot.”

Wint touched his forehead. An adhesive bandage covered the wound of his head. “Relax!? Relax!? No, no more relax. I’ve been to Brighton and back again on this fucking goose chase, this is where it stops. What the hell is going on, Ada?”

Ada exhaled. “Ok, that’s fair. Look, just… just go and get cleaned up. Lukas, is there any coffee in the house?”


Awkwardly, the four of them sat around a low designer coffee table, hands on knees. There was no coffee in the house, so Lukas had made them herbal tea. Four cups sat steaming on the round glass surface in between them. If the tea’s intended effect had been to make Wint relax, it was not working.

“You found what in my head!?”

“A tracker. A bug… sort of a listening device.”

“Like a microphone?”

“That’s what I thought at first too”, Rob said.

“A mind reading device”, Ada said matter-of-factly.

Wint guffawed, incredulous. “You can’t be serious.” The silence that followed said: Yes. They were serious.

“So they… whoever they were… they… wait, I don’t understand?”

“The people who treated you after your accident. They weren’t doctors. They were field ops”, the fourth man said.

“Who — who are you again?”

“His name is Lukas”, Ada said. “He’s an old friend of mine. This is his house.”

“Actually, it’s an AirBnB”, Lukas said.

“Right. Anyway, Lukas helped us to get the bug out of your head. Lukas, do you still have it?”

Lukas dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it once, twice, and offered the creased paper to Wint, who looked at it.

“What… what is this? It’s empty.”

“No, look. This thing”, Ada pointed at the tiny piece of metal that rested in the folds of the paper. “It’s a microchip. Lukas removed it from the incision in your forehead.”

Wint reeled. None of this made any sense. He closed his eyes and leaned back in the uncomfortable designer chair, the rungs of the chair’s back digging into his spine.

“It’s a MemBrain X. It can intercept your brain activity and send them over a 3g network to an internet server. After it’s been uploaded, there are tools that can process the raw electrical activity in different parts of your brain and form a…”, Lukas searched for words, “a narrative of what you might have been thinking about at that moment.”

Wint rubbed his face, trying to compute the information he was given. It did not compute.

“So, you mean someone, whoever put it in… they have been able to hear all my thoughts… for days?”

“Technically, yes. But actually, only one person did”, Lukas said.

“Who?”

“Me.”

“…”

Wint’s brain threw a somersault. It took him a while to catch his mental balance.

“You?”

Lukas grimaced. “Yeah… but in my defence, I didn’t know it was you. I mean… I didn’t know who it was. It was just a job.”

Wint turned to Ada. “Did… did you do this?”

“No”, Lukas said. “If I had know Ada was the target, I wouldn’t have taken the job.”

“The target?”

“Yes. You were my primary subject. But the secondary target, the goal of the exercise was… the person you were thinking about. My job was to inspect your MemBrain and find out as much as possible about the secondary target. The key facet they were looking for was their location.”

“But how did they know he’d lead them to us?”, Rob interjected.

“Well… I’m not sure”, Ada said. “But I have a theory. William told me that as soon as he was treated, someone — an anon — had posted a comment to an article he wrote years ago. The article was about me. It mentioned me by name — this was way before I went silent, Rob — and also the fact that William mined quite a bit of bitcoin back in the day…”

“So they relied on his greed?”, Rob asked.

“I’m not sure that’s the way I would put it. But yes, it seems like the plan was that the article would remind William of me and perhaps he’d known my location —”

“Yes”, Lukas said. That’s the basic idea. It’s called passive interrogation. There are a few different ways you can use MemBrains. Active interrogation is when you strap someone in a chair, put a MemBrain on their head, and ask them questions. They may not want to tell you whatever you want to know, but there’s no way they can not think about it.”

“So why didn’t they just do that? Seems like they don’t hesitate to use force”, Rob asked.

“I only know what was in my case brief”, Lukas replied. “But the thinking seems to have been that there would be no point to interrogate the subject — William, right? — actively, because he did not know the location of the secondary. But by passively interrogating them, we could make him do the work of figuring out where the secondary was, how to get in touch with her, and to lead us to them.”

“Looks like they were right”, Rob said.

Lukas shook his head. “Fuck… guys, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. The stream was all fucked up because there’s no buffers on this model, so I didn’t get the full picture. It was a mess. If I had known…”

“It’s ok Lukas. It’s not your fault”, Ada said.

Wint leapt out of his seat and lunged at Lukas, sending cups of herbal tea flying off the table. Lukas covered his head, deflecting Wint’s imbalanced flailing punches. Rob grabbed Wint at the waist and pulled him back into the chair, holding him in a bear hug from behind.

Hot tears streamed down Wint’s face. He was… furious at the man. For days, this guy had been in his head, prying on his most private thoughts. Every single fleeting thought could have been exposed. What did he know?

“Shhhh….”, Rob whispered into his ear as his flailing weakened and stopped.

“You… you fucker!”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then, Wint: “So… it was not the bitcoins?”

“No. William”, Ada sighed. “You have to understand. These people, they aren’t motivated by money. Or maybe they are, but not that kinds of sums anyway.”

“But it’s worth hundreds of millions!”

“Yes, well, maybe, for the time being. The value is higher now than it’s ever been before, and it is a lot of money for someone like you and me. I did ask myself, could this be a completely new kind of hack? Maybe it’s a new vector, where they try to read passwords from people’s minds? But then Lukas explained how the bug works. They couldn’t have done that. Apparently words aren’t encoded in the MemBrain stream.”

“Besides”, Lukas said, “I know for a fact they weren’t after money. I was the one watching in.”

“Twelve thousand bitcoins is a lot for sure”, Ada said. “But these people probably have a lot more than than stored away already, and they also probably know the valuation is not going to last.”

Wint lowered his head. Rob released his bear hug and stood back to observe Wint in case he became reinvigorated and made another go at Lukas.

“You keep saying they”, Wint finally murmured. “You know who they are?” If not Lukas, someone out there had access to his deepest, darkest secrets.

Lukas shrugged. “I don’t. I have some guesses who it could be, but this client is anonymous. We connected on the dark web a few years ago, and all I know is that they pay very well. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t think they know who I am either, otherwise they would’ve just used me directly to get to Ada.” Lukas looked at her. “I’ve put you in huge danger.”

“Did they tell you why they wanted to find me?”, Ada asked.

Lukas shrugged.

“Is it the Struct?”, Wint asked.

“Probably”, Ada said.

“What the hell is it anyway?”

“It’s none of your business”, Rob said from behind his shoulder.

“The hell it’s not! I’ve been almost killed, twice. I’ve been… violated. I need to know.”

“I think it’s better if you don’t”, Ada said. “This thing is a tinderbox. You want to be as far from it as you can when it finally catches flame.”

“No.” Wint was resolute. “You need to tell me right now.”


“So… it’s a virus?” Wint asked.

Ada had explained the Struct to him, but he had understood only about half of the words, and the best understanding he had been able to piece together was this: Ada had written some kind of a computer virus. It had been meant to only infect a particular company’s network, but somehow, the virus had been able to escape its “sandbox”, and now it was roaming free on the internet, infecting computer after computer it came into contact with.

“Yes, you could say it’s a virus. But it’s not a traditional virus.”, Ada said. “There have been many widespread viruses before, stuxnet, w2k, you name it. These were very intricate and clever, but fundamentally unsophisticated programs that had two functions. Their first mechanism was to spread themselves, whether it was by exploiting a known vulnerability in operating systems — like Windows — or a vulnerability in the human operator, such as opening an attachment in an email that activated the virus.”

“Uh-huh”, Wint said. He didn’t still know all these terms, but the article that had let him to meet Ada all those years ago had been about a virus like this one, so he wasn’t completely out of the loop.

“Once the virus spreads”, Ada continued, “they could do different things, but usually it’s one of few predictable things. Either it will call home, so that the creator of the virus can access the computer, or it can lock the system down and demand a ransom for decrypting it. Sometimes they just open popups that show ads that make the creator of the virus money, or they mine bitcoin on the computer and send them to the hacker’s wallet. Whatever it is, it’s usually the same old blackhat motive. Profit and lulz”.

Wint understood, sort of. “And how is Struct different?”

“Well, to begin with, I didn’t really write Struct in the traditional sense of the word.”

“Instead…?”

“I guess you could say I created it. I gave birth to it. Struct is a completely new kind of virus. It doesn’t have a mechanism of operation, or a list of vulnerabilities to exploit. As far as I know,” Ada said. She sounded oddly proud for what followed: “it’s the world’s first self-learning virus.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, instead of telling the computer that if this then that, or call this function, I gave the virus a mission and told it to figure it out.”

“And I guess it did?”

Ada smirked. “Yeah… you could say that.”

“And what was the mission?”

“The mission was to level the playing field. We are in the middle of an arms race. I believe — and a lot of people in the Org agree — that the future of the world depends on who can first develop a true artificial intelligence. The problem is that these days the incentives are all wrong. The best minds of our generation are working not at universities and state research institutions. They are being paid million dollar salaries inside Silicon Valley and Shenzhen corporations, competing to be the first to solve each problem so that their masters can be the ones to reap the profit. This is the dark side of the startup culture. Self-driving cars… that’s one thing, and while it’s probably going to destroy millions of jobs and even more millions of lives in return for the rich getting even richer, that’s just the beginning. True, general artificial intelligence cannot be left to Silicon Valley companies. They will patent it, they will contain it, they will use it to destroy their competitors, and all of the social institutions we’ve built —”

Ada paused for a breath. She looked manic. This was clearly a speech that had been brewing inside her for a long time.

“So…”, Wint started, but was interrupted by Ada, who gained a second wind.

“Imagine that back in the 1940’s, instead of the United States, it had been a private corporation that invented the atom bomb. Well, all right, back in those days that would have been fine since we had strong governments who could have seized the weapon and nationalised it. But not any more, now the governments are in those corporations’ pockets. If a company invented the atom bomb, they would manufacture it and sell it to the highest bidder, and there’s not a damn thing anyone could do about it.”

“Besides”, Rob interjected it. “Nation states, corporations, the distinction is basically academic these days. It’s not like there are any countries we can trust left.”

“True”, Ada said. “We pretend like there are categories of nations. We have the good guys, the so-called democracies like the US or the UK. Then we have the good bad guys, totalitarian clusterfucks like China, who are so powerful that the good guys can’t just go ahead and call them bad guys. Besides, both of them have nukes, so neither can mess with either. So together they ride their high horses around, pointing at the bad guys, Iran, North Korea, you name it. And they get into big meetings and write nuclear disarmament treaties that seek do nothing more than to keep the scales of power tipped towards the currently powerful…”

“Right, ok, I get it”, Wint said. “But what does any of this have to do with the Struct?”

Ada paused. She had gone on a tangent, and needed to rewind her stack to get back to the point. Finally, she found where she had branched off.

“Right, so. I wrote… no, created the Struct with a simple mission in mind. It was supposed to breach the networks of corporations working on AI research, and do a few different things. It was supposed to feed the research to the Org so we could use it and beat them at their own game — there’s no way for us to compete with their resources, so the only viable play is a dirty play — and subtly corrupt the original research documents so that we could slow them down enough to make it there first. But there was no way for me to write a worm to do that. The research is in multitudes of formats and locations, on thousands of different environments. So instead of writing a traditional worm, I created the Struct.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s hard to explain in a way that you’d understand…”

Thanks.

“Well, ok, so. Imagine it’s a computer program that gets on a new computer. Its mission was to inspect everything on that computer, whether encrypted or not, break into it, figure out if it contained relevant data, send us the relevant bits and obfuscate the originals. Then, while waiting for someone to insert new data to the computer for it to pilfer, it would use its time figuring out how to break out of that computer to any connected computers within the same network, and randomly morphing its behaviour so that it could not be detected.”

“But someone must have detected it”, Rob said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here…”

“Hold up a minute”, Wint said. “When you mean computers, you mean like… peoples’ laptops?”

“Anything. Laptops, phones, servers, virtual machines, IoT devices… the only limitation I set for it was to stay in Chakra’s network.”

“Whaa — did you say Chakra’s?”

“Yeah, they are one of the biggest AI research players out there. Bigger than Google or Microsoft or Alibaba even.”

“Chakra? Zee Chakramurthy Chakra?”

“Yes, why? Why is that important?”

Wint blinked. “Well, to start with… Zee Chakramurthy is my boss?”

Now it was Ada’s turn to be incredulous. “Really!? How can that be?”

“His company bought The Intrepid… like, nine months ago.”

“Holy shit!”, Ada cursed. “I had no idea! Why would he buy a newspaper?”

“Don’t sound too impressed now”, Wint sulked.

“No but… oh, nevermind. Chakra’s not really the problem here anyway. The problem is that that edge condition I programmed into the Struct… failed.”

“So?”

“So… the worm managed to — I don’t really understand how, the edge case was supposed to be isolated, completely outside of the self-learning engine — anyway, the worm managed to escape.”

“Escape to where?”

“…”

The silence felt ominous to Wint.

Everywhere.

Wint studies Ada’s expression. It was a curious combination of shame and pride.

“Wait, what do you mean everywhere?” he asked.

“I mean that the Struct has a subtle phone-home module that notifies its parent, that notifies its parent, that notifies its parent… until it gets back to me, and as far as I can tell, at this very time, there aren’t many computers on the internet that aren’t running some generation of the Struct.”

“Holy shit”, Lukas said, his face a big moon of realisation.

Wint didn’t really fully understand the ramifications of what Ada had just told him, but it didn’t sound good.

“You haven’t told them the best bit yet”, Rob said.

“The… best bit?” Lukas’s expression implored him to go on.

“Basically”, Ada said. “I did program a self-destructing functionality into the virus. It keeps checking into the Bitcoin block chain for a kind of a canary transaction. It’s basically a call code that I need to keep regenerating and re-uploading once every twenty four hours in different locations, and if the virus doesn’t find an up-to-date canary, it shuts itself down.”

“If this thing has gotten out of hand, why haven’t you shut it down then?”, Wint asked.

“When the Struct receives the call code, it takes the entire machine down with itself.”

“Holy shit”, Lukas repeated.

It took Wint a few seconds to catch up.

“So, you’re saying that if one day you fail to give it this… call code… then…?”

“Then every single laptop, phone, server, water processing facility, air traffic control center, nuclear power plant in the world, and a few space stations technically speaking not even on this world, will self-destruct.

“Holy…”, Lukas repeated.

“Shit.”


Lukas has brought out a bottle of champagne. Wint took a sip. It felt wrong to drink bubbly at a time like this. Usually he reserved champagne for celebrations, and this felt more like a shot of bourbon kind of moment. It was getting late. Rob nodded in and out of consciousness in a brown leather lounging chair in the corner of the room. Lukas had disappeared back into this room, trying to detect the Struct on his computer despite Ada’s protestations that he would never find it.

“Do you think it’s Zee?”, Wint asked.

“Maybe”, Ada responded.

“You need to fix this.”

“I know…”, Ada said. “I’ve been trying. But I don’t know how to fix it. The Struct has taken on a life of its own.”

“What happens when they get access to it?”

“I don’t know, I guess it depends on who it is. Either they can destroy the entire fabric of modern life, they can protect it, or they can use it for leverage.”

“How do we find out?”

Lukas, who had been listening into their conversation in the doorway, entered the room and sat down at the coffee table with a black, shiny tablet computer in his hand.

“I think I have an idea…”, Lukas said.

“I’m not sure what I can do…”, Wint said, reaching out for Ada’s hand. She took his offer and squeezed his hand. Her hand felt warm. “But I’d like to help.”


Next: Part Two