Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (60 page)

6:30 p.m. (EDT), Friday, July 16, 2021
– Columbia, MD

Suite 602, Conference
Room, Defense Innovations Accelerator

Samantha
Powers
shuffled
through her financial reports one more time. She was preparing for
Gamification Systems’ Board of Directors meeting. Lin Liu shared
the conference room with her.

General Shields entered. “What are we
doing in here? I thought we’d be meeting in my office, like
always.” Then, Shields noticed Lin.

“
General,” replied
Samantha, “I thought I’d have Lin attend this meeting so she could
take the meeting minutes. It’s been a while since our last
board
meeting. We have
a lot to discuss.”

Shields closed the
door. He
sat
down at the head of the table.

“
Are you alright,
General?” asked Lin. “You look…
well,
you don’t
look
too good.”

Shields
leaned back in his chair. He raised his arms to
his head, and firmly grasped his hands behind his skull. Then he
exhaled deeply. “6/1 rocked the very foundations of our government.
President
Goodman is doing a good job in
public of downplaying everything that transpired. But behind
the
scenes,
we’re scrambling to architect a game plan to use against
Rahmati.”

POTUS ordered a
120-day
gold
review panel to ascertain root causes of the power outage. He
selected people he could control. The utility and energy companies
were told to keep quiet for national security reasons. The
President gave all the CEO’s secret, written assurances that he’d
suspend Sarbanes-Oxley compliance for them and their
firms.

The New York Times was set
to run a story detailing the extensive damage done to the
fracking
rigs,
and tie it to reports of degraded military comms and
the
power outage.
Both POTUS and VPOTUS called the Times’
Editor
and
persuaded him to
kill
the story.

“
I have to hand it to the
President, behind the
scenes,
he’s using 6/1 as a rallying
cry for his Administration.” Shields impersonated Goodman with a
Texas accent he’d developed while working as Commander of AFCBYER
in San Antonio. “Ladies and gentlemen, we just got our ass handed
to us, like a rodeo clown in an outhouse.”

“
Eww,” said Lin. “I can’t
even imagine what that
means
…but it sounds
bad
.”

Shields continued, “It’s
up to us to make
damn sure
that the
twenty-first
century is the
Merican
century. We’ve
all been worried about China overtaking the US. We should’ve
been thinking
about the Middle East.”

POTUS got congressional
funding for a multi-billion dollar TOP SECRET project named,
LEVIATHAN. He likened LEVIATHAN to the Manhattan Project that
created the n
uclear
bomb to end World War II in Asia.

Project LEVIATHAN’s goal
was
to rapidly build a fully
functional, quantum computer
. Two teams
were selected
to compete
independently
in a race to create the
winning design and implementation. Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in Berkeley, California housed one
team. The other
competitor
was
stationed
at the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia,
Illinois.

An umbrella TS/SCI
operation, code named MOLESKIN, was established to contain the many
projects and
operations
dealing with Iraq, Persia, and
Rahmati.

GWENIVER was the code name
assigned to
a particularly
important project
under the MOLESKIN
umbrella. GWENIVER’s purpose was to determine the nature and
whereabouts of Rahmati’s quantum computer. It was given the
additional caveat of VRK, for Very Restricted Knowledge.

This meant,
between the NSA and CIA, less than 20
people
were read
into GWENIVER; including, Becca, Josh, Lin, and
Shields. Any communication related to GWENIVER had to be
handwritten and delivered in person. Samantha
was not read
into MOLESKIN
or GWENIVER.

“
POTUS was taken aback by
the failure of the Intelligence Community to
anticipate
Rahmati’s attack.
Even today, we’re still aren’t dealing
with
absolutes, only
probabilities. Rahmati’s
actual
capabilities are still a
mystery. President Goodson considered this failure to be on par
with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. He’s furious with DARPA. They were
supposed to make sure we didn’t get blindsided any technological
advance. He’s fired both DARPA’s Director and Deputy
Director.”

General Shields’ greatest source of
work stress was the quest to develop quantum-proof, encryption
algorithms. The Fort had minimally deployed encryption algorithms
they thought were quantum-secure, mostly on JWICS. But, it looked
like Rahmati had been able to crack those new codes.

Quantum-secure algorithms
did not rely on the
factorization
of prime numbers
or
integer
substitution. They employed
lattice
and multivariate cryptography.
However, it was impossible
to test
the quantum-resistant algorithms fully
,
until LEVIATHAN was a success.

“
The President’s greatest
immediate worry is the economy,” said Shields. “Jobless claims keep
ratcheting up, week after week. The July employment report
showed
a marked
rise in the unemployment rate, and that’s only a month after 6/1.
All the post 6/1 stock market gains have
evaporated.”

Many of the lost jobs were
in the energy sector. The number sent the market into a
tailspin
.
Already at zero, the Fed responded with negative interest rates in
an attempt to stabilize stocks. However, the dollar debasement
furthered the vicious rise of commodities. Oil hit
$275 a barrel, gasoline
spiked to over $9 a gallon, and gold neared $4000
an ounce.

“
People are losing their
retirement savings and can’t afford to drive their gas cars. To
make it worse, Rahmati continues to release embarrassing
revelations regarding the US and the Saudi government.
Files
going back
to the
90s,
show the depths of Saudi complicity with Jihadists; and the
complicity of the US with the Kingdom.”

“
Here we’ve been fighting
with these guys since 9/11, and Saudi Arabia has been funding the
ideology shared by Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, the Muslim Brotherhood,
ISIS, and the Caliphate. We’ve always known that the Kingdom used
charities to funnel money to these organizations. But the depth of
the collusion has remained hidden from the public. Until
now.”

“
At
least,” said Lin, “
the
disclosures
have
allowed the President to save face.
Without
them,
it would’ve been a major embarrassment to stop the troop
deployments to Saudi Arabia.”

“
That may be so,” replied
the General, “but the Kingdom is in a complete
meltdown
. The protests are
officially out of control. The handwriting is on the wall. The
Saudi government can’t
crack
down
on all the
protestors. The
police and
military will no longer carry out their orders. The House of Saud
is going to fall.” The House of Saud was the ruling family of Saudi
Arabia, established in 1744.

“
I can’t understate the
danger to the United States. Since the 1930s, the giant oil fields
of Saudi Arabia, including Ghawar Field, have been deemed critical
to our national interests. Protection of Saudi oil was a top
priority of every Administration since the 1930s, on par with the
Monroe Doctrine. Ghawar looks like it will come under Rahmati’s
control, any day now. We’re trying to get UN forces deployed to
protect the fields, but
Russia and
China keep overruling our efforts
.”

“
Not only will Rahmati
seize Saudi oil, but if the putsch goes his way, he’ll get his
hands on one of the most advanced militaries in the Middle East.
For
decades,
the quid pro quo with Saudi has been that we buy their
oil,
and they
buy our weapons. That’s the very definition of a
petrodollar.”

While the US was
moving towards energy independence, and alternative technologies
were chipping away Saudi importance—in 2021, Saudi oil was still
crucial to the world crude oil market.
This was
especially the case while
US fracking rigs were still inoperable.

The General’s gaze fell on
Samantha’s angry eyes.
As stressed
out as Shields was professionally; his personal life was far
worse.
Lisa confronted the General about
Samantha. Lisa was devastated. General Shields was ashamed. He
hadn’t told Samantha about Lisa’s discovery of the affair
yet.

“
General Shields,” said a
furious Samantha, “I’m very concerned about the economy. Enterprise
software does not fly off the shelves in a recession. And,
I’m
concerned
about the state of the world. But most of all, I’m
concerned
about
the company I run. Can we start the board meeting, or would you
like to reschedule?”

The General’s face went flush red.
“Lin, let’s reschedule this board meeting. Would you please excuse
us?” Lin left brusquely.

“
What’s your problem?”
said the General, scowling. “You’ve been at my throat for weeks.
Check that, months. And what’s with inviting Lin without my
approval?”

“
Bernie, my problem is
that I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve allowed my feelings for you
to hinder me from soundly managing
Gamification Sytems. Now,
I feel
trapped in a relationship with you.”

“
Samantha, our
relationship has been strictly business for weeks. I’m not going to
pressure you. We’re both adults.”

“
I know. The problem is,
you’re a married adult. It’s a mistake I profoundly regret. It was
selfishness on my part. You were an escape. I’m mad at myself for
falling in love with you. I mad at myself for letting our
relationship influence my leadership of Gamification. I
should
never
have let you dictate my
personnel
choices.”

“
Investors dictate
personnel
decisions
all the time. And not just in
start-ups.”

“
Maybe so,” Samantha
replied. “But carrying on an affair with my lead
investor
…has got
to be the
stupidest
business decision I’ve ever made. I’ve
disappointed
myself,
and I’ve failed people I
care about
.

“
General, I loved you.
But, we’re over.”

*

Shields walked back to his office.
Alone. He poured a scotch. Clutching the drink, he turned around
and looked at Charlie.

The General tossed the
scotch in the sink.
He went back home to
his wife.

1:30 p.m. (EDT), Friday, July 31, 2021
– Columbia, MD

Suite 502, ElectricMind’s
Offices,
Defense Innovations
Accelerator

The offices of
ElectricMind were spartan,
consisting of cubicles Josh bought from a second-hand furniture
store.

Not counting Becca, Josh
had hired five other employees. He possessed the capital to employ
more. But Josh wanted his team to be fast and agile, as they worked
to extend eM’s neural network
to
understand text better.
His biggest
takeaway
from
CyberAI was the fact that cash was precious.

In addition to continually refining
the NLP-based neural network, the next highest priority was
constructing a separate neural network that made sense of
images—like recognizing faces, objects, and the like. This ability
would also help the neural network with navigation of autonomous
robots.

While the process to
create deep learning algorithms for understanding words and
pictures
was the
same; the architecture of the neural networks
were
decidedly different.
Creation of
varied
neural networks was a key element of
ElectricMind’s business strategy, as it moved
into stronger AI and discovery
. General Shields was more than happy to push Josh in this
direction.