Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (11 page)

“
I’m sorry General. You
know how I hate to disappoint you,” said Samantha, seductively.
“But first off, you’re not telling me anything about the project.
Secondly, Saul is
also
the key to doing anything in REALSPACE. He knows
G-Bridge
backwards
and forwards. Ali is very sharp, but he takes his
lead from Saul.”

“
Ok,” said the General,
with a
tone
of resignation
in his voice.
“But, I need you to keep everything very compartmentalized. There
can be no leaks of this classified information. Only those read
into FOGGY, can know about FOGGY.

“
Even details about
information
that’s not classified; like the integration you’re doing with
Prosthetic Thought, you need to keep on a
need-to-know
basis. And, I want you
to keep Becca Roberts in the dark about these classified projects.
She can’t work any of them.”

Samantha was irritated by
the directive to cut Becca out of the loop. “Let me get this
straight. You want GAMESPACE to incorporate a
first-person
shooter
that
gamifies
something secret in REALSPACE, using brain waves for virtual
reality control? And, you’re limiting the resources I can employ?
You don’t want my second best software engineer to work on it? Is
that all you want?”

“
That’s all you need to
know for now. But that’s not all I want,” said the General. He
poured them both another scotch. “I want you—now.”

Shields’ words didn’t register with
Samantha. “Why don’t you like Becca?”

“
I like Becca a lot. I
agree. She’s one of your best. I know Saul is a better
coder, but
Becca
is both a great software
engineer
and an outstanding
communicator. She’s probably more valuable to Gamification Systems
than Saul. You can put her in front of a client. It’s great that
you have her working with Josh. But I’ve read her
SF-86.”

SF-86’s were the form
that
individuals
seeking to work with classified information
submitted
to the government. It
was the document used to formally request a
clearance
. The Office of Personnel and
Management—OPM—was the government agency ultimately in charge of
SF-86’s.

SF-86’s not only contained
extremely personal information, like financial records and health
data, but also included data on known associates of the person
seeking the clearance.
This
included
neighbors, co-workers, parents,
spouse, ex-spouses, and children. In 2015, the OPM database was
hacked, yielding
a massive
amount of personal information—including
fingerprint
data.

The General continued,
“Her dad is a fundamentalist pastor. She strikes me as a bit naïve.
Becca is a
straight
arrow
. Straight arrows get bent when you
have to fight radical Islamic terrorists, like the
Caliphate.”

A flash of hot anger shot
through Samantha.
Who the hell was he, to
tell me, how to run Gamification Systems?
She quickly suppressed the emotion.

Then, the General’s words
of boardroom foreplay finally hit her. She was appreciative of him
for
the Gecko
opportunity and funding offer. She
didn’t want to ruin the moment. “Ok. I
understand.” She’d employ the art of persuasion in upcoming
days.

Samantha rose from her chair and
straddled the General with her taut thighs.

As the two began to kiss, the General
fondled Samantha’s voluptuousness.

“
General,” she said,
oozing lust, “I don’t know anything about a straight arrow; but,
there’s something else that’s very straight in this
room.”

Samantha grabbed the
General’s hand. She led him over to his English oak desk. In one
fell swoop, Samantha dumped the entire contents of the desk to the
floor. Papers and file folders scattered everywhere. Then, she
sprawled on the
desk
and beckoned the General to join her.

The two pleasured each other with
passionate sex for hours.

9:05 a.m. (EDT), Tuesday, July 28,
2020 – Columbia, MD

Suite 201, Gamification
Systems’ Offices,
Defense Innovations
Accelerator

Josh exited the elevator and set foot
into the offices of Gamification Systems, for the first time. He
smiled at the receptionist, asking if Becca Roberts was available.
“My name is—”

“
Josh Adler,” interrupted
the receptionist, reciprocating Josh’s smile. “Let me see if Becca
is
available.
”

Becca
said she
’d be right out. She
reached into her purse, grabbed a mirror, and fixed her
shoulder-length hair. There was no ponytail today. Eye makeup
replaced her glasses.
Like
the receptionist, Becca knew of Josh
Adler.

Over the past nine
months,
they had
on occasion, seen one another in the Accelerator’s cafeteria. They
exchanged niceties—but nothing more than that. They were
competitors.

Becca entered the reception area. “Hi,
Josh!”

“
Hey, Becca. Thanks for
meeting me on such short notice.”

“
Sure, what the General
wants; the General gets. Let’s go back to my office to talk about
integration
options.
Do you need anything to drink?”

“
I’ll have a shot
of
tequila,
” he answered, sarcastically.

Becca laughed. “So early
in the morning? Yesterday’s demo went that well, huh? How
about
coffee?
Then, let’s see if we’re still talking by happy
hour.”

“
Deal.”

After stopping by Gamification’s
kitchen, Becca walked Josh back to her glass office. All the
see-through offices overlooked a room that contained a conference
table and wall-to-wall whiteboards.

“
Cool offices,” said Josh.
“Wouldn’t I love to see what my employees were up to, every minute
of the day?” Next door, Samantha was on the phone with her door
shut. She waved at Josh. Becca’s
workspace
was
manageably
messy, with
lots of
technology books and magazines
strewn about
. She must have owned every
edition of
2600
Magazine
.

Josh examined Becca’s degree in
computer science. “How’d you like Carnegie Mellon?”

“
It was
an excellent
education, but I hated the Pittsburgh weather and stinkbugs.
I wish Andrew Carnegie had started the steel industry
by
a
beach.”

“
Ha!” bellowed Josh. Next,
he focused on a picture of a much younger Becca. She stood,
arm-in-arm, with a man that looked to be her father. They
were dressed
in
fall
season
, camouflaged hunting gear. A
black
boar lay dead at the tip of
their hunting boots.
He’s
kind of
nosy
,
thought
Becca.

“
You’re a hunter?” asked
Josh, with a surprised inflection.

“
Yeah. My dad taught me
to
hunt,
while growing up in Texas. That picture
was taken
at a family
friend’s ranch. We’d go there to kill wild pigs. Farrell hogs are
nasty. They’re all over Texas ranches. If you don’t kill
them,
they’ll
eat all the crops and make huge mud pits in the fields. They love
corn.”

“
I’m impressed. You’ve got
to be
brilliant to get into
Carnegie’s computer science program. And
you can handle a gun.”

Becca giggled. She hoped she wasn’t
blushing.

Josh grabbed the chair in
front of Becca’s desk and got down to business. “During my demo,
General Shields suggested that I meet
you,
to see if we could help each
other with AI. AI is the heart of my company. I’ve hit a roadblock
in my machine learning and NLP algorithms. Right now, our AI is
narrowly applied to recognizing
cybersecurity
events—scans, botnet
attacks, deployment of malware—things like that.

“
CyberAI also matches
these
cyber
-events against threats we gather from crawling the web and
social media. So for example, if a hacker starts maligning your
company in a Tweet, we’ll be on elevated alert. The General thought
we might be able to help you recognize these cyber-events. He also
suggested that you had a more general purpose need for AI. I’m not
sure what he meant by that.”

Becca gazed into Josh’s
face—and dimples—intently. Luckily, her multi-tasking mind could
listen at the same time. “I think
there are
a couple of possibilities for
integration.”

She picked up a coffee mug
full of whiteboard
markers
and spied an empty section
of
her office wall. On the
glass, she drew the same architectural diagram she
sketched
for the
General—REALSPACE, G-Bridge, and GAMESPACE.

“
We turn
cybersecurity
into a game. But that’s just one use case. We want to be able
to gamify a lot of things. So, I see some synergies here.
Quite frankly,
we’ve spent a lot of time programming our system to
recognize
cyber-attacks
and events. If you could do that for us, it would
allow us to focus on G-Bridge. G-Bridge has a robust API. So we
might be able to rip out our AI, and replace it with yours. What
language did you use?”

“
The architecture of the
CyberAI engine is pretty
sophisticated
. It’s got packages
written in C++, Java, CUDA, Python, and even some Assembly
Language. Some modules have to run like lightning. But the CyberAI
engine exposes
a number of
APIs, so to you, it’s like a black box. We have
APIs for C++, Java, Python, and REST.”

C++, Java, CUDA, Python,
and Assembly Language were all computer programming languages. Each
language had strengths and weaknesses. CUDA was
a language
that you’d use to
interact with
NVIDIA
Graphics Processing Units—GPUs. GPUs were special
purpose chips that offloaded certain types of tasks from a
computer's
CPU.
The first market for GPUs was gaming
machines
. Recently, car and
truck
manufacturers
were rapidly integrating GPUs
into their autonomous vehicles for their AI
incorporating
deep
learning
algorithms. GPUs were also
critical
components within VR and AR gear.

Assembly Language was
a
low-level
language that talked directly to CPUs. It was
complicated
to
write,
but ran very quickly. C++, Java, and Python were
all higher level languages. They were easier to write than
Assembly,
but
executed
more slowly. The REST API spoke the same language
as an Internet browser. Companies, like Facebook and Twitter,
exposed REST APIs to enable computer programs to interact with
their websites—without the use of a browser.

Josh continued, “I’d recommend either
the C++ API or the Java API. Those will work best for
you.”

Becca was encouraged. “That’s awesome!
Are you guys able to handle spear phishing?”

“
Yes, sometimes we throw a
false positive. B
ut at
least
you’re made aware of the danger. The
spear phishing engine detects spoofing and
homographs. It also incorporates
DNS heuristics and can see if emails comply with an
enterprise’s content compliance policies.”

“
Great,
” replied Becca. “If you’re
better than us at recognizing
cyber
-events in REALSPACE, especially
things like spear phishing, then we’ll just use your AI engine. I
think the second place will be more of a stretch for you. It’s
beyond the weak AI of
merely
recognizing
cyber
-events. It’s related
to GAMESPACE.

“
I’d
like to
investigate how your
AI could replace
or, at
least
lessen the need for our G-Master.
This requirement should help you move your engine towards
stronger
AI,
because you’d be replacing a human being.