Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (14 page)

“
Mark my words; this
century is not going to be the Asian century. The Middle East will
be the focal point of the next 100 years.
Our time
will revolve around the
fate of
Israel,
and the future of Jerusalem. Look how often the
Caliphate talks about Jerusalem.”

“
Ok, Dad,” said Becca,
treading carefully. She didn’t want to get into an argument. “I
don’t understand how that’s a sermon?”

“
I’m getting carried away.
I drank too much coffee,”
he
said, with a hearty chuckle. “The
meat of my sermon was to contrast Peter and Judas. Both men saw
Jesus. Both men were Jesus’ disciples. Both men
sinned
. Peter denied Jesus
three times. Judas betrayed Jesus. Both men knew they
sinned.
The
difference was their actions after the pain
set in
.

“
Peter repented. Peter
reached a personal singularity. After
that,
his life was never the same.
Judas didn’t repent. His pain led him to hang himself in a potter’s
field. So be like Peter. Give your pain to God. And live. That’s
the only way to get on the right side of history. Your personal
singularity will prepare you for the coming historical
singularity—the day that everyone, even unbelievers,
see
coming.”

“
How was it received?”
asked Becca.

“
Well,
that’s the best part. For the last year or so,
I’ve
really
felt this nation is undergoing a profound spiritual revival.
Other colleagues in the States and around the world have noticed
the same thing. I had eleven people give their lives to God. Then,
I asked if anybody wanted to come to the altar for an
extended
time
of prayer. Many did. I felt God’s Spirit impart a word of
wisdom to me. It pertained to a woman who was standing on crutches
around the altar. God impressed upon me to tell her to forgive her
mother, who hurt her so long ago. Unforgiveness
was blocking
her from
receiving her healing.

“
I approached the
traumatized woman. I told her what the Spirit related to
me
. It
was
clear
that this woman had experienced a lot of suffering.
The
deep
lines etched
on
her
face
told that story. I have no idea what her mom did.
But, I knew that she’d been carrying the pain for years, maybe
decades. She fell to her knees and began to weep. Then she stood
straight up, without her crutches, and hugged me.”

During the story,
Becca got angrier and angrier.
Everything
in her wanted to shake her father and say,
If God could lead you to heal a
perfect stranger, why didn’t He—why
didn’t you,
heal
mom? I refuse to believe your fables.

Elisha continued, “The
woman said, ‘I know this is from God. That’s
exactly
what God’s still
small voice whispered to me during your sermon. I’ve never gotten
past what she did to me. It’s like an open, festering wound I’ve
had for 35 years. I’ve tried to bandage the pain with men,
and
whiskey
, and cocaine.
I’ve hurt so
many people. I became my mom.
I
need
to
be forgiven
. But, I’ll start by
forgiving my mother.’

“
After she said that, her
face changed. She looked
10
years younger. I told her, ‘Sister, forgiveness
is a process. Make sure you continually bring this before God until
you feel released from the burden of
unforgiveness
.’”

Becca smiled crookedly.
“That’s great Dad. I’ve got to get back to work. It was good to see
you.”
I need to get out of here before he
drones on about Smith Wigglesworth or John G. Lake. If I hear those
names again, I’m going to lose it.

“
Becca, one last
thing…I’ve started writing a
book
. I’m calling it,
Quantum Faith
. I want to
examine
quantum mechanics and
string theory in light of Scripture. My book will discuss what the
quantum world tells us about God, Creation, and faith.”

“
That’s
interesting Dad. I’ve got to go.”

*

Becca was thankful
to
be done
with that. She could only take so much of her
father.

She
used the Uber app to request a ride back to the
Accelerator. Maryland was one of the first states to
allow fully autonomous,
driver-less
cars—automobiles that could
drive the road without any human driver.

Within five minutes, an
Uber-owned, robot car arrived. If the taxi cab companies hated Uber
and Lyft drivers, they
really
hated autonomous
cars
. There were
numerous reports of taxi cab drivers deliberately hitting
self-driving cars and falsifying accident reports. However, in
states that allowed autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing was much
cheaper than owning a car. For the average person, car ownership
was their second biggest expense, after housing.

Becca stepped into a
driver-less, Tesla Roadster 2. In the last few years, battery
prices for electric vehicles had declined significantly.
Electric cars were more affordable than
they’d ever been before.
Becca began
the
35-minute
drive back to Defense Innovations Accelerator. Along the way,
she dialed Josh. In the past five
days,
Josh and Becca had exchanged
texts and talked via phone
a
number of
times.

“
That was good news in
your text,” said Becca.

“
Yeah, it’s awesome. I’m
getting some insanely good results with this new deep learning
algorithm. I think I’ll be ready to leverage your API next
week.”

“
That’s great! I’m on my
way
to
the office
from
lunch;
I’ll be
there in about 30 minutes.”

“
Oh, alright…” said Josh,
sounding somewhat deflated.

Becca
perceived the difference in the pitch of his
voice.
Yes, s
he
thought.
He’s a little jealous
. “I had lunch
with my dad in Baltimore.”

“
How was that? I feel like
I owe him a royalty for the idea
of
using Bibles to train the deep
learning algorithm.”
Josh’s tone
was noticeably rosier.

“
You don’t owe him a
royalty, silly. He didn’t do anything. You owe me a
royalty;
it was
my idea to use them for your ground truth.” She giggled. “He’s
great. But a little of my dad goes a long way. Somebody always ends
up healed, except my mom...” Becca’s voice trailed off.

“
What?” asked
Josh.

“
Never mind.”

Becca and Josh continued
chatting for a good portion of Becca’s trip. She got back to the
office it was a little before
3:00
p.m. It was odd that Samantha,
Ali, and Saul were all gone. Nobody left early from Gamification
Systems. Especially, since everyone was preparing for next week’s
Gecko demo.

Becca sat in her chair,
opened up her Mac laptop, and began to work on a section of source
code that dealt with non-player characters.
Source
code was the actual
collection of instructions written in a
distinct
programming language.
Because Becca’s
code
interacted with the Unreal Engine, her source
code was written in C++. She wanted to make sure this section of
code was rock solid, just in
case
the need arose
for the G-Master
to spawn a
character in the Gecko demo.

To perform her
work,
Becca
needed to
inspect some of Saul’s
G-Bridge code. Her
code
sent messages to
Saul’s
code
. Becca browsed to Gamification’s GitHub repository.
She
located
the
right
module of Saul’s
code
. Unexpectedly, she saw
many
changes in
the various files that comprised the module. Saul updated the
files—just five minutes ago. Becca
carefully
examined the modified
files
. She ran
a
diff
command to
see the exact changes. The only thing different about the
code
was newly
added comments.

In
source
code, comments were
only meant to make the code more understandable to humans. The
computer completely overlooked the comments when it
compiled
or
executed the code. The
same
comment
was
attached
to
a number of
method
declarations—‘
Make
sure works with Velocity.’ An odd
feeling
enveloped
Becca.

Out of the corner of
her
eye,
she saw Ali. As Ali moved past her open office door, she
greeted him. Ali looked as if he’d just met the President. “Did you
see the guys from Velocity Games? They’re here to meet with
Samantha and Saul. I shook their hands in the reception
area,
when I was
running
to my
car
. John Vincent and Corey Lawson! Those
guys are the
gods
of gaming.”

Vincent and Lawson were
the two Co-Founders of Velocity Gaming Studios, located in
Bethesda, Maryland. Velocity was the first gaming company
to fully incorporate all aspects of
virtual reality gaming
. Other
companies
simply
ported over prior games to VR worlds.
Velocity
built
VR-optimized games—from the ground up.
Fog
of War
had broken all the video game sales
records and won numerous awards.

“
No,” replied Becca.
“Where are they meeting? Why aren’t they meeting in our conference
room?”

“
I don’t
know,
when I got
back, they were gone.
Obviously,
they’re meeting somewhere in this building.
I do know that I want to play me some
Fog of War
tonight.” Ali entered his
office. As he took his seat, he looked at Becca. Then, he pretended
to shoot at her, with the rat-a-tat-tat of an imagined machine
gun.

“
Great,” said Becca,
loudly. “A software engineer went postal today after he met the
Co-Founders of Velocity Studios. No one knows if the two incidents
are related. By the way, let’s run through the demo tomorrow
morning. I want to double-check that your code for spear phishing
is working.”

“
Ok.” A few minutes later,
Ali cursed loudly.

“
What’s the matter?”
yelled Becca.

“
None of my music works in
A-Tunes. Nucleus’ last update applied the music Blockchain to all
of my songs. It broke everything.”

Becca chortled and walked to Ali. “Is
it possible that you own pirated music?”

“
Whatever,” said Ali, in a
snit.

“
Music labels and movie
studios are using the Blockchain to stop piracy,” Becca said. “They
love the Blockchain because it allows them to control music
distribution and royalties with smart contracts.

“
You can’t play your music
unless A-Tunes locates a
record
of your purchase on the
Blockchain. You can still use streaming services, like A-Radio, but
now the hottest music is only available for purchase via the
Blockchain. After they’re old, the albums move to the streaming
services.”

“
Thanks
for the tech update, Professor
Buzzkill.”

Becca continued, “I just read an
article detailing how artists love the Blockchain too. Not only do
they thwart pirates, but they can also control who listens to their
intellectual property. And they can more easily pay creators and
producers. If the song changes by one note—with remixes for
example—it’s a new creation on the Blockchain. Everything starts
over for that song.”

Ali made a face. “You’re full of good
news. Becca, you’re a hacker. Hack A-Tunes and make my music
work.”

Becca laughed, “I’ve
already spent plenty of time with the FBI.” She
returned to her office. 90 minutes later, Becca saw Samantha
Powers and Saul Abrams.