2022 (2 page)

“Spencer, I’d like you to meet your new
partner, Sue.”

“Hi,” he said. He stood at the entryway
unsure of what to do next.

She looked at him then glanced at the
director to make sure she had his attention. With a mischievous
smile, she turned her gaze to the wastepaper basket by his desk and
back to Spencer. She then walked over to his desk and the director
felt relieved to see her pick up a pen and a piece of paper,
scribble a few words and hand it to Spencer.

“Ask the receptionist for a print-out of this
form. We need it to finish your processing.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, glancing at the note
on his way out of the office.

“What additional form?” the director
asked.

“The IDT-ENT form. Let’s see how he does. If
he handles this properly, I guess I’ll keep him.”

The director looked puzzled for a few seconds
and laughed. “You are cruel. Maybe I have this wrong, and it’s
actually Spencer that doesn’t deserve
you
. But he’s not a
puppy you can just decide to keep. You don’t get a choice in the
matter. He’s well connected, and I’ve already received two email
requests from higher levels to find a position for him here. He’ll
be your new partner. End of discussion. So tell me, what crisis of
the day are you working on now?”

“No crisis today. I’m working on a summary of
Asia’s factory utilization. Pretty routine stuff. I’m compiling all
the data received from our agents in the field.”

“Maybe that’s something you can get Spencer
started with. I have an urgent request that came across my desk
this morning and I want you to start working on it.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s from the intelligence agency. They want
to find out about The Pleasant Belief Foundation—all its activities
and whether there’s any tie between them and the eco-terrorist
group CURE.”

“That should be simple. Are you sure you want
me to handle it? We could give this to Spencer or another junior
person.”

“I chatted with a guy at the agency this
morning, and he’s heard of at least a half-dozen areas that the
foundation is involved in. It’s his feeling that they’re hiding
something. I told him I’d put my best person on it, and that would
be you.”

Spencer knocked and entered looking flushed.
He kept one hand behind his back.

Sue looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Well?”

He grimaced. “The receptionist and several
others were all too happy to get me an IDT-ENT form.” He pulled out
a crudely made paper dunce’s cap and put it on his head. “ID10T”
was clearly printed at the base. “I’m kind of mad at myself—I
should’ve figured out this one much quicker.”

She chuckled. “Always be on your toes. It’ll
save your life someday. Now take that damn thing off of your head
and let’s get going and get you settled into a cube.” On her way
out, she spoke to the director over her shoulder. I’ll give you an
update once I find out more.”

“Please do, and treat this with
importance.”

They headed down a hallway of office cubes
and noticed several people standing and watching a special news
report on overhead television screens scattered throughout the
office. Sue stopped and questioned a staff member.

“CURE just released a new video and every
news station is playing it,” he replied.

“…Your continual abuse of the planet must
stop. We will take action in the top ten abusive countries. Over
the next few months, we will monitor major consumption and
environment statistics in all industrialized countries. Those that
show the least improvement per capita will feel our wrath, and it
will be swift. Details of what we are monitoring will be given to
all major newspapers.”

Shaking her head in silent disbelief, Sue
continued towards her cube. When she reached it, she noticed that
someone had put Spencer’s name plate on the cube opposite her own.
I guess I didn’t have a choice after all.

Spencer went to his desk and dropped his
backpack beside the chair. “That CURE group has really picked up
the hype over the last year,” he said. “What do you think they’re
going to do now?”

“Who knows? Last time they disrupted every
major oil refinery in the country with strategically placed
explosives. The resulting fuel shortage undermined the nation for
nearly a year.”

“Yeah, there was a lot of pain when that
happened.”

“Let me ask you—why do you want to work
here?”

“In all honesty, I wanted to start here after
graduating because it’s an excellent stepping stone to getting into
politics. Ideally, I’d like to work here for five to seven years
and then try a run for public office.”

“Fair enough. With your looks, I’m guessing
you’ll do well, too. What do you know about this department and
CURE?”

“The Department of Information Retrieval, or
DIR, was formed right after the 2018 crisis that many people blamed
on all the conflicting information published by various government
departments, agencies, and commissions. It was set up so there
would be only a single organization, with no vested interest
anywhere, responsible for providing data on any topic to other
government divisions.

“As for CURE or Curtail Unnecessary Resource
Exploitation, I just know what I’ve seen in the news. They’re an
eco-terrorist group that started to make headlines a few years ago.
They’re against anything that harms the environment and commit
terrorist acts to punish the countries that are the worst
offenders. They’re loosely organized, so it’s been very hard to
track and stop them.”

She listened intently to everything he had
said. “Your general definition of DIR is good, but it’s missing a
few things. First of all, we don’t publish data; we gather it, and
then we publish information. There’s a difference—information is
processed data. We use several sources including plenty of field
work to see what’s actually happening.”

“Field work?”

“That and some clever tools I’ll show you
shortly. But all of this is only part of our jobs here. We’re also
responsible for enforcing the Internet Information Protection Act
or IIPA that was put in place about three years ago.”

“Must be a nightmare to enforce.”

“It is, but it needs to be done, and there’s
no better group than ours to do it. As political tensions have
grown over the last several years, and terrorist groups like CURE
become more organized, the flow of information needs to be
controlled. The IIPA was put in place to prevent access to any data
movement from Internet sites without proper authorization while
still allowing for e-commerce and some types of social media. It
also ensures that copyright laws are enforced, bandwidth is
properly paid for, and it filters things like child pornography.
Since our business is processing data, it was a natural fit.”

“Yeah, but it messed things up too when it
was implemented. Now you need a government-issued passport to use
the Internet for practically anything.” He pointed to the bracelet
on his wrist. “And good luck trying to send or receive anything on
a server that’s outside the country.”

Sue nodded. She remembered the countless
meetings to develop protocols and going through endless technical
details. She hadn’t been happy with the final result but believed
it was effective. Every individual in the world could request a
small RFID chip with the choice of having it implanted, put on a
plastic card, or even on a piece of jewelry. All Internet devices
having data display and entry capabilities were given two years to
comply with the mandatory regulation requiring the ability to read
the RFID code and transmit it with any data sent from the device.
Randomly, the DIR servers from each country challenged users, and
they were required to submit a fingerprint or enter a six-digit
code into the device. If the user was unable to respond correctly,
the Internet connection was cut off, and if this happened too many
times, a signal was sent to law enforcement centers showing the
user’s location and RFID information.

To address individual privacy concerns, and
for travelers to different countries, a temporary RFID card,
similar to a burn phone, was developed to allow limited Internet
access.

She had spent the most time on the data
customs piece of the IIPA Act. All data transmitted over the web
needed to be tagged with the country of origin and a category
describing the nature of the data. If the data did not have this
information, or if it were incorrect, the Internet service provider
was compelled by law to block the data. Failure to do so would
result in a signal being sent to the server to shut down the
hardware.

The IIPA was broadly accepted by governments
and corporations; governments, because of the tight data that
control allowed, and many corporations because of the boom in
hardware and software sales that would occur to implement it.

“Wait until you’ve worked here a while to see
how deep this rabbit hole goes,” she said. “The IIPA not only
controls the data flow but is also used for monitoring who’s doing
what on the Internet.”

“I can only imagine.”

“Hey, did you get notified that your RFID
code has been updated for your new clearance?”

“Yes, though I haven’t noticed any big
difference in access.”

Sue smiled and walked over to his
workstation. “Click on this,” she said, pointing to an icon on his
monitor that resembled a poorly drawn vampire.

A simple screen appeared that looked like any
other Internet search engine screen with the exception of the
vampire logo at the top.

“Now type in something to search
for—something interesting, like black-market music downloads.”

He entered the words, pressed Return, and was
surprised when the screen instantly displayed links and summaries,
most of which had a small vampire icon beside them. The bottom of
the page showed an indication of several billion matching hits.

“What kind of a search engine is this?”

“This will be your best new toy. As you may
have guessed, this isn’t a normal search engine. The links without
the vampire are normal search returns. But the links with the icon
are from the dark web, the part of the Internet that’s not returned
by standard search engines and thousands of times bigger than the
regular web. If there’s a web page out there, even password
protected, unlinked, on a corporate intranet, or with some kind of
hardware protection on it, our dark-web engine probably has it
indexed.”

“Holy Crap!”

“Now for the bad news. With your new RFID
chip clearance and tools like this, you’ll be able to access a lot
more than before, but not everything. That will come with time and
as your level rises. But because you have this increased access,
they’ll be watching you more closely now.”

“They?”

“The security team here at the DIR. They’re
going to be watching you all of the time. Your home, vehicles, and
cell phones will be bugged, they’ll monitor your behavior, watch
who you’re friends with, and will keep close track of your
financial transactions.”

“They can’t do that! Nobody said anything
about this.”

“You won’t find it written anywhere, but
that’s the way it is. We’re in charge of information. We need a
great deal of access to data and, hence, the super-search
capabilities. But these could be easily misused, which is why
everyone of us is under surveillance all the time. Do you still
want this job? It’s not too late to leave.”

He paused before answering. “I’ve worked too
hard to get here, and I’d be a fool to turn it down.”

“It
is
a pretty cool job. You’ll see
things here that you’d never see anywhere else and find out about
things you’ll wish you never knew. And over time you’ll learn that
the phrase “ignorance is bliss” can sometimes be true. But I think
that’s enough doom and gloom. Let’s get you working on something
easy—something that will introduce you to how things work around
here, and then I’ll get you involved in some of the work I’m
doing.”

“What do you want me to start on?”

“I’ve been working on a routine report that
we compile every few months on Asia’s factory capacity. You can
start on that, and I want you to read through the first report we
published on the 2018 crisis itself.”

“That factory capacity stuff doesn’t sound
too difficult. Isn’t that information on the Internet?”

“Governments in Asia want people to believe
the information seen on the Internet, but our job is to post what’s
really happening. We have hundreds of people across Asia monitoring
things like trucks entering and leaving factories and warehouses,
counts of critical raw parts, and factory start-ups and closures.
They all report back to us, and then my job, or actually
yours,
is to put together all the pieces to show an accurate
figure. I’ll send you the data and tell you where I’m at with
it.”

“So you’re using spies to get your data?
Can’t this vampire tool find it?”

“We can use the Dark Web search engine to
verify data, but there’s nothing like having it come directly from
the field. We do have information gatherers everywhere, or spies,
as you so crudely put it. We’ve been suspecting for quite a while
that Asian governments are onto our little vampire friend and are
posting invalid data on their own internal networks. Part of this
exercise is to see whether that’s true or not.”

“Okay, I’ll start on the factory stuff first
and then read through that publication,” he said. “What are you
working on?”

“I’m looking up information on The Pleasant
Belief Foundation and checking to see if they have any ties to
CURE.”

“Oh, I’ve seen some of the foundation’s ads!
They’re really funny but make you think. I read somewhere that
they’re involved in the colony experiment and in funding part of
the Mars mission too. How long have they been around?”