The Celestial Instructi0n (17 page)

The Assistant Director of the FBI looked unhappy. “We have
assigned some of our best agents to the job of unwrapping the informant’s
technical background and reviewing everything relevant in his past to assess
both he truth and the possible implications of his allegations. His name is
Joex Baroco, formally Principal scientist at Mooneye in the Silicon Valley.”

“I’ve heard of Mooneye, Director,” the President said. “One of the
innovators that makes us great.” She asked Hawkins, “have you interviewed this
source yet, Admiral?”

“Kiley Fletch interjected: “he can’t yet, Madame President.”

“Well, have it done immediately. This could be a time bomb,” the
President voiced arched up half an octave,” to defend the United States I need
not only power, but all effective facts. We need to rule out a threat now. As
in right now.”

“The informant walked away.”

The President widened her eyes and stared through the Assistant
Director. Her head showed a fine tremor silhouetted by the harsh light through
the crown of the French doors.

“We were considering holding him as a material witness in the Riu
Bao case but he walked out of the office,” said Kiley Fletch. He felt the
corners of his eyes water. “Re-acquiring him is task number one at the agency.
We are also following the leads that he gave, but it will take some time.” He
clamped together his teeth and grinned while speaking through the grill of the
simulated smile. “We have had reports that he attacked his sister in Boston and
that days ago he attacked a woman in a Church in Portland. We are flying out
from New York one of the Church’s counterterrorism experts to assist with our
task force. A woman named Cassandra Jones. She is what they call their Security
Throne at the Church of the Crux.

“Why am I not surprised that the Crux has their hands in this thing?
But for all their craziness, they are effective in seeking out and correlating
information. As long as it moves from them to us and not the reverse.” The President’s
tremor seemed to flow into her arms, her voice deepening. “It is accurate to
say that we do not know how much time we have, if his allegations are true? And
that, if true, that we do not have any idea on how far this technical rot,
shadow code and Trojan horses extend into our entire technical infrastructure?”
said the President, now making her hands into fists and pushing the knuckles
into the marble edging of the meeting table.

Once again the silence extended for ten, twenty seconds.

“How do we know that this Baroco isn’t himself a perpetrator?”

Again, no one offered an opinion.

“You will both report to me by Wednesday on an extended interview
with Mr. Baroco, independent analysis of every particle of code that he worked
on, a concurrent analysis of code now in use, and what can we do to thwart a
technical attack on the United States. Finally your progress in executing your
plan for preventing this kind of attack now and in the future. If this were a
bio threat…”

Assistant Director Fletch quietly said “one other fact you need to
know, we verified that Riu Bao worked with Joex Baroco at Mooneye designing
firmware for the original internet switches.”

“Does ‘Internet switch’ have the import that I imagine it to have,
Director?” said the President, equally coolly.

“Yes, sir, Madame President.”

The President held the leather-wrapped arms of the chair and
pushed herself standing. “That is all, gentlemen.” She walked out through the
partially open doors and under the arched glass over them, back toward the Oval
office.

Sam was wandering the streets of Freetown, evading the go-boys who
now were looting the DataTel café. It was a stroke of luck that Sam was not
sleeping in his cardboard pallet among the cables and orange flickers, but his
exchanges with “Jim Rogers” had kept him awake. On both sides of every downtown
road in Freetown there was a steady stream of barefoot men and women, boy and
girls with baskets of goods overhead. Sometimes there was a candle carried by
one or another; mostly there was darkness, the shuffling and whispers
interrupted by the stray tan dogs that demanded others’ give way. Occasionally
an expensive SUV purchased by foreign donation for the use by some
Non-Governmental Organization sponsored by this or that Church or this or that
UN commission sped by in the darkness. A dog or person clipped by these cars
lay on the ground, stepped over by the steady stream of commerce. Sam stepped
on one mat on the ground, flat as his cardboard duvet, that had once been a
person—an old man who had survived the sleeping sickness, malaria, civil war,
tribal jealousies, and more simply stomach sickness for sixty or seventy years,
but had succumbed to old age or a glancing strike by a new swerving Range Rover
with black GPS stalk, or perhaps a beaten minibus with ‘God’s Promise’ as its
figurehead. Now he was rug of withered leather and bones that had finally
crumbled under thousands of feasting insects and human steps. His suffering was
over.

But Sam’s was not. His wandering was leading him downtown toward
the shell-marked towers that had what little financial and communications
infrastructure that had survived ten years of civil war or was chosen by Care
and HOPE and USAID and the Red Cross and various other gongos and quangos to
house their missions, accept funding, and to point their satellite arrays at
the heavens. Returning to the café was out. Even if he could skirt Cousin
Robert, the Lebanese owner would warn the other Datatels about him and the
destruction which followed him. But despite the fear of the go-boys which was
receding into the streams of midnight people incessantly tracking the warm edges
of the city, and his growing need for food and shelter from the festering
monsoon, Sam thought about the code he had retrieved and sent to “Jim.” So
primitive, the Internetwork operating system. Even though it could be executed
thousands of times faster now, back then they sought, as now, to optimize, to
hack, to bless the center of the code, to sacrifice clarity upon the alter of
marketability and competition. He had heard the computer scientist Donald Knuth
say in a grainy avi that the computer doesn’t care how many goto’s are used.
But Professor Don, its coder does: twisty little passages, all alike.

Sam really had no idea of the mind he had been given. It never
occurred to him that most others could not review what they had seen as if on a
scrolling chart within their head. He looked and thought about the code’s then
nascent and primitive function, and what it had evolved into. His mind’s eye
decoded instructions, saw errors, and corrected them. He ran simulations of the
code in his mind, saw how simply it functioned. He then played games, beginning
again with input collisions in the interfaces and random power failures. As he
walked toward the center, his eyes sparkled from the searching candles and the
globes of sweat on his black skin reflecting the smoky faces of the men and
women moving silently around him, as if a mass for the dead.

Sam had reached the Grand Plaza in Freetown. It was surrounded by
pock-marked high-rises that before the war held multinational corporations,
French, English, Dutch. Now there was a single bank and the French telecom
company. Sam squatted at the center fountain, which to his knowledge had never
worked. It was filled with picked-over open toilet of dog corpses, rotten
mangoes and random scraps of shiny brown paper mixed with pulpy newsprint. Sam
took inventory of what he had. A ripped and sun-faded T-shirt of a west African
pop star who had never caught on in the west despite his outrageous use of palm
wine and local wild ganja, and a pair of olive-drab boxer shorts. It had no
pockets. His flip-flops were long lost. He might as well forget his Datatel treasure
bundle. For now, a meal would be welcome, or even more so, some tobacco. But he
had nothing, with no prospects. And Freetown was not a good place to have
nothing. The hollowness of his stomach made Sam feel smaller.

Meanwhile, he had his thoughts. The ancient ios code welled up
without effort and Sam’s mind could scroll it backwards and forwards. If he had
been asked, Sam could not explain what he was doing—he simply did not have the
right language to describe the landscape of traps, semaphores, flags,
sentinels, stacks and queues. But he knew it; tight loops of execution would
feel hot to Sam and appear in his mind’s eye in a bright warm color. Branches
of code that were rarely taken were cool and blue. Dead code was black. Sam
could substitute his own instructions and then watch the new fork execute, change
registers, have side-effects. So, what was the issue here with this code?

There was nothing obviously wrong here, in Sam’s mind. The code
implemented a simple switch that would re-route a data stream based upon the
condition of several registers that would change based upon rules that were not
immediately obvious. There was some implied parallelism with two main threads
but as this old code was written back in the day, it’s main function was as
much speed as possible, which meant as little operation on the data stream as
possible.

Ancient code, some significance now. Must be code that is still
somehow relevant, unlike the billions of lines of code written for hardware
that no longer existed for functions no longer needed. And, whatever that was
different about this code much be subtle, but fiendishly hidden, for this would
be the innermost loop code that had to have been reviewed dozens of times for
efficiency not to mention plain error. Maybe he could look at it as if it were
a Chess puzzle, mate in seven. Like a Chess puzzle, the position had to be a
legal one or code in this case had to work both at what it was supposed to do
and whatever it was not supposed to do (or not do); but while the position had
to be a legal Chess on (can’t for example have a puzzle with nine white pawns
on the board), it didn’t necessarily have to come about from a legal game or
nor was it required that it was even possible to come about in any reasonable
real-world scenario; for example, he remembered one puzzle featuring four white
knights; while possible, it was unlikely that white would promote two pawns to
knights rather than, say, a queen, or rook, or even bishop.

So, what is the analogy with code here? Assume someone had hidden
a secret function or mate-in-seven with an innocuous-looking code segment or
“position.” How could someone recognize it or even where to look for it among
thousands of lines of code?

Well, it stands to reason that anomalous code, while working as
documented would not have been written in a standard manner. There would be
something wrong about it, something that would stand out such as choosing to
increment a negative number rather than decrement a positive one to reach zero.
Equally efficient, equally correct, but conceptually in disarray. Sam reviewed
the code again in his mind, scrolling backwards and forwards. This relatively
simple code implemented a simple function. Two small pieces stood out. Both of
them were in the core double-buffering area. Here the idea that despite
external unexpected demands on the computer processor function (an “interrupt”)
that none of the raw data stream that the processor was conveying from one
external device to another would have any potential for corruption or loss. The
buffer was a little reservoir of data that could be filled and emptied out smoothly
as needed even if there was a period where it could not get more. The anomalies
were a section shared by both double-buffering code that used two bytes, or
sixteen bits, rather than the one byte that was needed to address a 256 byte
buffer. Oddly enough, only a single byte was allocated for the sixteen-bit
address. How could this have ever worked? But this would never break, right,
since the upper byte was always masked off with an AND instruction.

Sam played with the code in his mind.

Then he got it. An error depended upon the coordinated fault of
two separate pieces of code. Neither faulting given out-of-bounds inputs would
fail; this had been verified and tested multiple times. But when this piece has
this bad input followed by a separate bad input to the second piece of code
within the time-frame of a few instructions, then the high byte of this
instruction would be written over. Now this wouldn’t matter if the code were an
embedded code kept in a read-only memory, instructions could not be overwritten
even if attempted. But lately fully writeable memory had such low power
requirements, low cost, reliability and of course flexibility to stay one step
ahead of competitors by upgrading software on the fly, that read-only memories,
even reprogrammable ones were virtually obsolete. So like an ancient Mastodon
virus, the thawed bug could once again surface in the world, and could be
exploited by those who might know of it.

What Sam did not know it that this was a species of buffer-overrun
error that would result in the data contents of the buffer being interpreted as
instructions. Instructions that could do anything only constrained by the switching
hardware itself, which was at the core of the Internet.

Sam did realize that he needed to send “Jim Rogers” the last
section of code and convey the anomaly he had noticed. Perhaps “Jim” would
reward him with a larger money order? He could hope. What else could he do?

The one thing Sam hadn’t mastered was reconciling the speed of
thought with speed of ordinary events. He had to get to an Internet terminal. But
he had nothing. But that was not unique in Freetown. One difference is that
many others who had nothing still managed to hold some kind of job, such as the
myriad guards on the twenty-story buildings around him. They certainly had
Internet as their satellite dishes testified. But they were taught to hunt and
to catch people exactly like him.