Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (25 page)

Ali understood why Becca was upset. He
just couldn’t do anything about it. He tried to convince Samantha
to read Becca into SWARM, but to no avail.

Becca confronted Ali. “I
think you guys are using drones in REALSPACE
,
and you’re using a
different game in GAMESPACE. My guess is that these drones are
going to be used to kill people. Am I right?”

Ali looked at Becca with
compassion. “You know I can’t tell you what I’m doing. I like you
Becca, but I’m not going to wear an orange jumpsuit for
10
years.
Besides, I have no idea what’s going on in GAMESPACE.”

“
Well,” countered Becca,
“let’s just think out loud. You saw the two Co-Founders of Velocity
meet with Saul and Samantha. Saul’s got comments in his code about
Velocity. This morning, I watched Saul and a bunch of soldiers go
into the SCIF on this floor. You’ve got Swarmbot manuals all over
your office. So it’s pretty clear. Our company is moving from
gamification of
cybersecurity
to gamification of killer
robots. And Samantha doesn’t trust me enough to tell
me.”

“
Becca, I shouldn’t have
left the manuals out. I was trying to meet a deadline. Go to the
Swarmbot website. All they do is manufacture
surveillance drones.”

“
Ali,
i
f the drones
aren’t weaponized
yet, they will
be soon.”

Becca stormed back to her
workspace. She grabbed her phone, hoping to see a text from Josh.
‘Good morning,
LoveBug
. Can I
see
you
tday
?’

Becca texted back, ‘Sure. Lunch in the
cafeteria?’

Becca reviewed her inbox.
There were two emails from Gecko Insurance. Everything else was
unimportant. Becca didn’t want to read them. She opened Eclipse,
the program she used to author source code.
Becca
looked at some Python
code for the next hour. Then, she closed the Eclipse
application.
She
was
done
.

Samantha walked into her glass
enclosure. She didn’t look in Becca’s direction. Becca shut her
MacBook and followed her boss.

*

“
We need to talk,” said
Becca, austerely.

Samantha asked Becca to
sit down and close the door.
This
was
another one of those times that
Samantha wished that Gamification’s offices weren’t
see-through.

“
Samantha, I’d like to
give you my two weeks’ notice. I’m not happy here. Gamification
Systems is moving in directions that I’m not
comfortable with
. I started
working for
you
because I thought you’d mentor me. You’re
a successful
and
talented
woman.
I wanted to learn from you. But, you haven’t been
honest with me.
I wasn’t
imagining
things. You didn’t even talk to
me about our most important project. You told me this was an open,
transparent environment—remember your glass office
speech?

“
I’m
grateful
for this
opportunity, but I’m going to move on. Over the next two weeks,
I’ll help you transition the Gecko relationship to someone else. I
know I’m losing all my stock options. I don’t care.”

There wasn’t anything for
Samantha to say. She wasn’t shocked. She was sorry. She was upset
with the General. And Samantha was mad at herself. Rebecca Roberts
was her second best coder. She was her best employee in front of
customers, even better
than her VP
of Sales.
Samantha had tried in vain to
convince Shields to assign Becca, at least to FOGGY. What would it
hurt if she only worked in GAMESPACE?

The General believed that
Becca had the profile of someone who would disclose classified
information. She’d either go to the
press
or upload it
to
a website, like
WikiLeaks. Becca would call herself a
whistleblower
. General Shields
would call her a traitor.

*

At 12:55 p.m., Josh
arrived at the Accelerator’s
sixth-floor
conference room.
This was
CyberAI’s Demo Day for September.

Josh unpacked his laptop and set up
his PowerPoint. The General wouldn’t want to see a demo. There was
only one slide that mattered. He hoped that the results would
improve his relationship with the General. Since his fiery Sunday
meeting in August, it hadn’t been the same.

The General and Lin took a
seat. After
terse
mutual greetings, Josh began his very upbeat
presentation. He provided some technical background explaining his
deep learning approach. He briefed the General on his success in
using the NSA supercomputers. They helped
to rapidly develop genetic algorithms for each layer of the
neural network
.

As Josh approached his
most
significant
slide, CyberAI’s CTO—Vish Kumar—joined the
meeting. Josh
was
bewildered.
While Josh, Vish, and the
General always met for Board meetings; Josh conducted his monthly
demo
sessions
solo.

“
Thanks for coming, Vish,”
said the General. “Josh, I took the liberty of inviting Vish. I’d
like him to attend all the demos going forward.”

“
Ok,” said Josh
reservedly. He continued with the presentation. “General, I know
this is the slide you care about.” Josh clicked his prompter to
advance to the next slide.
“We now
recognize
92.7%
of the
cyber
-events. Two months ago that
number was 83%.”

“
Outstanding,” said the
General. Lin also looked impressed.

“
Vish, what’s your
reaction to that metric?” asked Shields.

“
Obviously, I think it’s
wonderful,” said Vish, with his deep voice and Indian accent. “But,
I’d like to take a look at the source code. Josh, I haven’t seen a
commit from you since you started the deep learning stuff, about
three months ago.”

“
Right, I forked the
repository. I didn’t want any namespace
collisions
or other problems that
might set us back. But, I’m going to merge the code soon.”
This was
a
technical excuse that meant that Josh hadn’t put the source code in
the CyberAI repository. The
code
was only available to
him.

Vish looked annoyed. “So,
the
code
that has improved cyber-event recognition is on a
forked source
code repository on your
laptop
?”

“
Yea Vish,” said Josh,
irritated. “Just like you, I do a lot of development from home. I
back it up on a server in my apartment.
Sometimes, it’s more convenient for me to do coding at
home, where I’m not disturbed by the day-to-day issues of being a
CEO.”

General Shields
jumped in
.
In
a stern
manner he asked, “Josh, you’ve been solely concentrating on
using your new algorithms for
cyber
-events, right?”

“
Uh
, yes.” Josh sensed that his answer
was not definitive enough, so he added, “Can’t you tell by looking
at the performance improvement?”

After working through the rest of the
presentation, General Shields adjourned the meeting.

Josh
was punctured. And on edge.

*

General Shields waited
until Josh and Vish
had cleared
the room.
He looked at Lin with a serious
expression.

“
Lin, I think we have an
issue with Josh. I’m going to need your help. The General shut the
conference room
door,
and picked up the secure telephone. He placed a
call to Phil Callahan at NSOC. General Shields told Phil he was
dealing with an urgent matter.

“
Phil, I think one of the
CEO’s at the Accelerator is going rogue. I want to know what Josh
Adler is doing now, and what he’s done over the past three months.
Assign only intel analysts that you completely trust to this
tasking.

“
First, I want to examine
the log files of the NSA supercomputers. Lin can give you the
details regarding the dates and times of Josh’s usage. I think
that’ll give us the clearest picture of what he’s
up to
. You
should get some good selectors by examining the logs.

“
Then, use Xkeyscore to
search retroactively. I want a report that tells me what web pages
Josh visited, what terms he’s searched on with Atom, who he’s
emailed or chatted with, and what he’s downloaded. Make sure you
also include the selectors you get from the supercomputer logs. I
want to know every
social
media
post: his likes, new friends,
comments—everything. Give me all his call records, text messages,
and credit card transactions.

“
And, I want you to have
TAO penetrate the network at his apartment and exfiltrate our
CyberAI source code. I need this report and the CyberAI software by
the close of your shift tomorrow morning. Call me tonight and give
me an update.” TAO stood for Tailored Access Operations. It was the
NSA’s name for its clandestine hacking operations.

Phil said, “Yes, sir.” He added
gingerly, “General, don’t we need a warrant?”

“
Dammit Phil,” barked
Shields, “I’ve got a potential traitor here. I’m not trying to
prosecute him; I’m
attempting
to protect the information.
At this very
moment,
he might be giving away
source
code to China, Russia, or
Israel.

“
Any one of those
countries might use the information to start World War III. I don’t
have time to get a warrant. Besides that, he’s got
a clearance.
I
believe he’s an insider threat. That fact alone is sufficient
justification for NSA counsel.
Just get
this done.”

“
Yes,
sir.”

General Shields terminated
the call. “Lin, I want
you
to
kick off our plan to staff the
SWARM
Op Center
24/7 with our most talented analysts.”

“
Got it.”

“
Also, I need you to call
Loreal & Hammer. Get them to draft
a notice
for
a Board of Directors meeting for CyberAI. The
bylaws allow for a board meeting to
be called
with a
24-hour
notice. I want the
documentation prepared. I want to be able to send the notice
out
tonight,
if
Phil’s update confirms my
suspicions. That way, we can conduct the board meeting on Friday.
And before I leave today, I need you to schedule
a face-to-face meeting with
Vish
. Don’t
invite
Josh.”

Lin inspected Shields. “General
Shields, you’re sure about all this? You’ve been going Mach 1 since
Dabiq-gate. You’re moving past the point of no return on
this.”

“
Lin, I’m not in the mood
for psychoanalysis. Just do what I’ve asked.”

*

It was early evening when Becca
arrived at Josh’s apartment.

“
I’m sorry I had to cancel
lunch,” said Josh. He looked discombobulated. “I don’t think you
want to
be seen
with me. You still haven’t told anyone at work
about us, right?”

Becca laughed. “None of that matters
anymore.”

Josh looked confused. “Are you
breaking up with me?”

“
No silly. I wanted to
tell you in person, and not by text. I gave my notice
today.”

“
What?” yelled
Josh.

Becca glanced at the
apartment.
Every time she came
over, the place was messier. The book stacks were taller, and there
were more empty pizza boxes. The books weren’t about programming or
AI. There were piles for
ancient Israel,
the Bible, and the Ark. Middle East travel books
were strewn
across the coffee table.

Since her last visit, Josh
had thumbtacked a map of the Middle East to the kitchen wall, along
with drawings of the Ark of the Covenant. Another stack sat tall on
the dining room table. It contained books on learning Hebrew and
Judaism.
Judaism
thought Becca,
is Josh becoming
Jewish?
Since Josh was Jewish, she filed
the thought
in her
illogical box.

“
Josh, you’re not going
all
Beautiful Mind
on me here, are you?” Becca and Josh had recently watched the
movie about the mathematician and cryptographer, John
Nash.