Chapter 6
Hong Kong Exchange
Hong Kong, Special Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
January 12, 2121
1815 hours
At the Hong Kong Exchange on Kowloon Street, Nathaniel Lee watched with growing apprehension as a panic market selloff unfolded right before his eyes. The panic, and that was all you could really call it, had been underway for most of the last hour, rippling around the world in seconds, causing chaos from New York to London, Tokyo to Hong Kong, Frankfurt to Beirut.
Lee had heard of recent virus attacks and decided that had to be the explanation. He’d studied the Sandstorm attacks in great detail, attacks that had infected much of the Net in recent days and cringed when the American President Kenley had announced that he was putting a CyberSword response into operation. For days, the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese had traded viruses, worms, Trojans, backdoors and other malware insults and, as a result, the entire Net was roiled and reeling like ocean waves before a cyclone.
The ruckus now slamming his exchange and sending traders and brokers into paroxysms of frenzied yelling and waving had to be residual effect of that nonsense. That was all it could be. For the past hour, at nearly the speed of light, trillions in value had vaporized like dew on hot asphalt and his own IT people were saying the worst was yet to come. Trades were erased, cancelled, stalled, overwritten and otherwise gummed up on every network the Exchange maintained and Lee felt powerless to do anything about it.
If this keeps up much longer, he told himself, we’ll have to pull the plug and implement emergency cyber-fence measures, severing and air-gapping HKEx from the world, to try and save something. And the worst of it was that WorldNet and other media outlets had already gotten wind of the story and it was flashing around the world, lighting up tickers and alert boards from Toronto to Timbuktu.
Such was life in the stock and commodities trading business.
A full trading tsunami had erupted when news of the virus hit the airwaves. Panicked stockholders were screaming and messaging ‘sell at any price’ orders faster than the servers could process them, clogging HKEx’s comms and network with millions of requests and orders. Already some banks across Kowloon Street, and in Shanghai and Tokyo and London and New York were talking about shutting down, to squash the panic. A full-scale run on lending institutions around the world was underway. And in Geneva, UNFAD…the UN’s Financial Organizations Directorate…was already meeting in emergency session, pondering what to do next.
Nathaniel Lee sipped at lukewarm green tea and shook his head. He decided to head back to his third floor office. Momentarily an image came to his mind…the gun in the desk drawer, pulling the trigger, HK police discovering his blood-spattered body that afternoon. The headlines tomorrow in the South China Morning Post: “Exchange Director Kills Self; Wife and Two Children Distraught.”
No, it wouldn’t come to that. Nathaniel Lee shut his office door behind him and sat down heavily in the desk chair. It squeaked. He’d have to fix that someday. Outside the window, the bejeweled panoply of night time Hong Kong lay before him…Victoria Peak lit up like a Christmas tree, massive, half-hidden in harbor fog, lined with lights from the mansions and estates crowning the top and below, the ancient Star Ferry plying the harbor like some glittering sea serpent. In the reflection of his computer monitor on the window glass, he saw some kind of newsfeed crawling across…he tried reading it backwards, then with a start, he turned around.
Something about U.S. Cyber Corps again…? What the hell was this?
U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters
National Threat and Intelligence Fusion Center
January 12, 2121
Herndon, Virginia
1430 hours
CINCCYBER had called a briefing for all department heads and Captain Anson Leeds didn’t want to be late. There was no telling what General Pacer would get his fingers into if saner and cooler heads weren’t around to hold him back.
The White House wanted answers, fast. Was this another Sandstorm attack? POTUS wanted to initiate another CyberSword response. But Leeds felt in the pit of his stomach that the evidence suggested otherwise.
CINCCYBER held the briefing in his office, a semi-circle arranged around the end of his desk. Pacer had turned his hologram pedestal around so everybody could see. He ran down what was known at the moment.
“It’s banks and financial institutions this time. I’ve already drawn up a threatcon to go out, but I want everybody to have their say here. We’ve already done some damage to the Russians and the Chinese; we shut down Beijing Airport for a day late last week. The ruble’s pretty much trash, but that’s nothing new. We’re taking our licks too,” Pacer added. “Here’s a list of infrastructure hits we’ve taken—“he waved the display to start scrolling so the assembled department heads could see “—Morgantown Power and Light in West Virginia...down to a tenth capacity. The Solex plant in Arizona off grid for a day. Train collisions in New Jersey…a dozen fatalities. But I think we’re hurting them more…POTUS wants an upgraded CyberSword ready by 1600 hours today…we’ve got more zero-day stuff we can pull out of the drawer. Comments?” Pacer looked around the room.
Leeds spoke first. “Sir, it’s not Russia. It’s not China.”
Pacer was accustomed to contrarian views from Leeds. He decided to humor the captain. “Okay, Leeds, I’ll bite. What is it? Little green men from Neptune?”
“Sir,” Leeds ignored the jibe, “there’s growing evidence from our people down in CyberLab that this is a self-initiated anomaly. Whatever’s happening, it’s coming from within the Net. C2 can’t get a good IP trace on anything. All the seekers come back to us, like the packet routing’s been compromised. Plus they can’t find any evidence of worms, viruses, botnets, or anything especially ominous coming from outside the Net. There’s still the usual crap: probes and denial-of-service attacks, but that’s like dust in the air. It’s always there. The big stuff is not leaving any signatures we can trace. Whatever is happening seems to be emerging from the Net itself.”
Pacer was skeptical. He lit up a pipe and puffed. “You mean to say we’ve got nothing in the library that can match the footprint of any of this stuff? I can’t believe that. Malware always leaves a trace…a rogue packet here or there, some weird configuration or setting, executable files nobody’s seen before. Our sniffers and seekers should be smoking by now, getting hits left and right on this stuff.”
Leeds shook his head. “Sir, if I didn’t know better, I’d say whatever is happening isn’t some ‘bug’ inside the Net…not in the usual sense. General, it’s the Net itself, as if some kind of sentient entity has emerged, is waking up and flexing some muscles.”
Pacer looked like he had just swallowed an elephant. “Leeds, you’ve dropped this crap in my lap before and I’ve tried to humor you. This is beyond preposterous. Nobody thinks the Net’s alive and kicking, like some puppy just popped into the litter.”
“Where’s your evidence?” asked Threat Analysis, in the person of Major Ryne, sitting right next to Leeds. “What kind of footprints are showing up?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Leeds explained. “There are no exploit traces we can find. No vulnerability signals. No sniffers, keystroke loggers, vid pirates, none of any of that. Every runtime, every rootkit we examine…they’re all clean. ScanKing looks inside every packet we think is suspicious…mostly we see normal stuff: addressing protocol, packet make-up, hop length, payloads, error detection, error correction…normal plain vanilla, white bread stuff.”
“I heard you couldn’t crack some of the payloads,” said Network Defense. That was Captain Henning. “Prefixes, IDs, some of the headers…I heard there was some pretty weird encryption going on.”
Leeds admitted that. “Hashes we haven’t seen before, that’s true.” He looked at Pacer. “Sir, if I may, I’d like to conferenc
e in Dr. Tsu. CyberLab. He can explain this better than I can.”
Pacer looked pained again. Great. Nothing like another egghead to bollix up the works. He knew POTUS wanted answers, not crackpot theories. “Very well…but no long dissertations, Leeds. Keep this to first-grade schoolyard level.”
The hookup was made. James Tsu’s boyish face popped up on the holo pedestal mounted on Pacer’s desk. Tsu was thin to the point of starvation, pasty white, with a few unruly locks of black hair forever dropping into his eyes, which he perpetually brushed back. Pacer watched for a moment, willing his hands to keep from offering up a comb to the 3-d image.
“It’s from the ADAM Project, sir,” Tsu was saying. “We’ve uncovered some rather startling discoveries in our test cells.”
“ADAM Project?” Pacer tried out the words. “Sounds like a kindergarten, Tsu. What the hell kind of lab are you running down there?”
“You’re not far off, sir. You approved ADAM yourself last November, if you remember, sir.”
“I don’t, but go on.”
Tsu warmed to his topic. His eyes, once sleepy little slits, had now widened to bright dark brown orbs, intense and focused.
“Sir, this is just a working hypothesis. It comes out of artificial intelligence. It doesn't matter so much that we're all made out of neurons and bones and muscles. Obviously, if we lose neurons in a stroke or in a degenerative disease like Alzheimer's, we lose consciousness. But in principle, what matters for consciousness is the fact that we have these incredibly complicated little machines, these little switching devices called nerve cells and synapses, and they're wired together in pretty complicated ways. The Worldnet now already has trillions of nodes. Each node is a computer. Each one of these computers contains a couple of billion transistors, so it is in principle possible that the complexity of the Net is such that it feels like something to be conscious. I mean, that's what it would be if the Net as a whole had consciousness. Depending on the exact state of the transistors in the Net, it might feel sad one day and happy another day, or whatever the equivalent is in Net space.”
Pacer almost swallowed his pipe. “You’re serious about this, Tsu? The Net could feel sad? It could feel happy? It could get mad, like my mother-in-law, and start throwing things?”
Tsu’s face brightened with the possibilities. Pacer thought he looked like a child seeing his first birthday cake. “What I'm serious about is that the Net, in principle, could have conscious states. Now, do these conscious states express happiness? Do they express pain? Pleasure? Anger? Red? Blue? That really depends on the exact kind of relationship between the transistors, the nodes, the computers. It's more difficult to ascertain what exactly it feels. But there's no question that in principle it could feel something.”
Pacer just wasn’t buying it. “Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. Personally, I think you’re a loon, but just for argument’s sake. So the Net is alive and thinking. And it’s mad. What do we do about it? How do we quarantine it or take back control? Or can we just spank it and send it off to its room?”
It was plain that James Tsu had given this very point some thought. “Sir, I recommend we do what we would do with any newly discovered life form…study it. Examine it. Maybe we start disconnecting the Net from critical infrastructure to do this.”
“Oh, yeah…wouldn’t that be great?” said Henning, of Network Defense. “ANAD bots and the Net are more a part of life today than my own testicles…pardon my French, sir. To do what you’re suggesting is like giving myself a lobotomy…it can’t be done. Even if it could, I’m thinking the outcome wouldn’t be pretty.”
“Agreed,” Pacer said. “We need countermeasures, not lab studies. POTUS wants our recommendations. POTUS wants to implement CyberSword, round two. If we don’t think that’s a good idea, it’s our job to give the man some alternatives.”
“We simmed these very scenarios recently,” Tsu told them. His face disappeared for a moment, to be replaced and paired with some charts and graphs. “The last Com-Ex games, in fact. Look here—“ his avatar hand underlined something titled in bold All Caps: Adam and Eve: The Eden Response. Detailed paragraphs, equations and graphs filled the air around the display.
Pacer shook his head. “First-grade, Tsu. First grade. Give me the executive summary.”
“I’m sorry, sir…our best response comes from this scenario. We develop and insert some kind of entity into the Net, some kind of entity we can control and we confront this sentience. Maybe some version of an ANAD bot or swarm, a nanoscale entity that could physically engage this sentience and render it harmless, even capture it.”
The trouble was, as Pacer could plainly see, that nobody had the slightest idea how to do this.
The briefing went on for a minute, then Pacer’s newsfeed chimed in. It came from WorldNet…some kind of breaking news. The General waved the sound and video up full, haptic sensors converting his gestures into the right command. An announcer’s voice could be heard detailing the incident.
“…reporting from London…we have word just in the last several minutes, directly from TrackSat Control, that two airliners have collided mid-air over the North Atlantic, about seventy nautical miles southwest of Keflavik, Iceland. One was en-route to New York, the other to London Heathrow. Both went down. Rescue forces are flooding into the area as we speak, but at first look, satellite is showing few if any survivors. TrackSat has reported some glitches and anomalies this evening in its air traffic control systems…coincident with other problems the Net has been having lately…we have more reporters on the scene…airline operations people are looking into….
Anson Leeds looked up from the newsfeed. CINCCYBER’s face had gone deathly pale. And the image of James Tsu had frozen in place, while the newsfeed played out next to him on the same hologram stage, a strange juxtaposition of 3-d images, mixed and meshed together…CyberLab researcher, WorldNet news anchor and images of broken aircraft wings and smashed fuselage parts floating among drift ice in the North Atlantic….