The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella (8 page)

"It's possible," Marco replied leaning back
into a sofa and putting his feet up on the table in front of him.
They had retreated to the basement of FedSec's main office building
where secure rooms with recording devices and video cameras were
available for discussion of classified topics. A clock on the wall
displayed the time as 1:10 am. Marco had entered the facility
minutes earlier to personally access the room's operations and shut
down the listening and viewing recorders for their conversation.
"We need a new place to work."

"Impossible to move at this point. Besides
the issue is not the building, the attack was against our servers
and software. We'll have to fix Horizon."

"Fix Horizon? Some hacker could have lined
the server rooms with damaging code aimed at not only listening to
us but also stealing every file we have. He probably already has
every file we have."

"You think we are too far along with the
build-out at Horizon to take another course of action?"

"With our plans?"

"Yes."

"Well we would have to stick with the main
concepts, the core structure we had decided on is definitely far
enough along. But the details, no."

"Hmm, don't you think a hacker only wants
the details? Wouldn't they already be suspicious we were working on
global surveillance tracking? Conspiracy theories often have a way
of actually being true."

"He may have been suspicious, but now the
rumors have been confirmed."

"That's okay, as long as they don't have the
details. We can change the specifics now and throw off the
advantage they thought they had obtained by stealing from us."

"I don't know. How differently can you code
a program to do the surveillance work we expect?"

"Coding is not my area of expertise. But we
can have our Silicon Valley friend take a look for us, and let us
know if we are okay to move forward or if we have to start again.
He could also check the physical Horizon infrastructure and confirm
if we really have to worry about moving."

"If you are speaking about the friend I
think you are speaking about, contacting him would be extremely
risky. He said we should only reach out in a genuine emergency.
People cannot know his connection to us and to this program."

"We have an emergency. A hacker has
infiltrated Horizon and possibly all of the Horizon files. Our
plans are in jeopardy. You have quality people working on a
possible breach but you do not have the depth of technological
prowess our friend can access. He has a team capable of conducting
a much more thorough search than your analysts to uncover if we are
truly at risk."

"Maybe we are better off not playing that
card right now. We can fix a potential breach ourselves. We are
going to need our friend in the future if this situation becomes
volatile. I do not want to cry wolf."

"We are not crying wolf. We already know the
system has been attacked. What are you really afraid of?"

"Being hasty."

"Or being exposed for having made a
mistake?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You took a flash drive from a reporter and
put an access file directly into Horizon's system."

"Be careful with the words you are using,
Julia."

"I'm only wondering if the real reason you
are reluctant to contact our friend is because you have more to
hide than an innocent mistake."

Marco slowly lifted his feet off the table
and deliberately placed them on the floor as he moved to sit up
straight. "Are you accusing me of irresponsible behavior?"

"No."

"What are you attempting to say with your
statements?"

"Marco, I'm not your enemy and I'm not
accusing you of any wrongdoing. But we are in a dangerous place.
Our activity is not public information for a reason. We are not
interested in having the public learn about our plans because the
public may not appreciate our intentions. We are also being forced
to establish a plan no future administration could disrupt. You and
I will not be around to see COSA through to fruition. We will be
replaced and we will die, but the system will carry on. We have to
make sure we do not disrupt the ability of this project to live on
after we are gone, and the only way to do that is to ensure the
foundation is established today. Dallas Winter is a friend of
yours, but you and I no longer have friends on the outside. We gave
up our 'regular world' connections to ensure our nation's long-term
security. The damage has already been done, very few names are
connected to COSA, but two of them are ours. Under no circumstances
can our positions be revealed, nor anyone learn the details of the
operation. COSA will function autonomously. Future administrations
will not be able to dismantle the legacy we have built, and more
importantly, they will not want to. We are constructing a
functioning, automatic process designed to stand-alone forever. We
cannot make mistakes."

"I'm well aware of the stakes. I know the
future we are building. I have been a champion of this plan from
the beginning."

"We are hardly the beginning, Marco. Many
minds before us set out on this path."

"Yes I know. But we have carried their ideas
further than anyone. Like you said, COSA has to operate
autonomously. We are the first administrators to solidify the reach
of our intentions because we have identified the money. Once this
project is financed as we have proposed, the rollout can continue
without interference from levels of government. The real beginning
is now."

Julia sighed. "If you believe that then
there's even more reason to be vigilant. We are moving forward now,
there is no room to turn back." She stood and walked towards him.
Sitting, she took his hand. "I did not mean to sound like I was
accusing you of being negligent. But I think we, all of us, have to
discuss how we are going to protect the operation we have built. We
have to go forward with this program, total surveillance is the
best option for our country, for the world. Imagine an online file
for every human on earth, immediately accessible to match suspects
before there is an incident. We can bring terrorism to its knees.
That's the goal here Marco, the end of living in fear."

"I agree and I swear to you I know my
responsibilities to our project."

"I know you do. But we have to call our
friend. We should be totally transparent and prepared to establish
our own internal security protocol for moving forward together. We
need to talk to him."

Marco dropped his head and stared at the
floor. "I agree. But I want to be clear." He looked up at Julia,
his eyes rimmed with defiance. "Dallas does not know anything. She
saw a bunch of unidentified policy papers, nothing more. She does
not know about COSA or programs connected to the broader project
implementation."

"I'm sure you're correct, but Dallas Winter
is not the disrupter I'm worried about."

"You want to find out who the hacker
is?"

"Of course. But not only who. We need to
uncover the information this hacker took from Horizon, and the
plans he has for the evidence he found."

*

On a white, laminated dry-erase wall, a
schematic separated various scenarios with dense red lines. Each
predicted alternate versions of the initial rollout of COSA over
the next ten years. Under one column, the rollout would connect
every single surveillance camera in the country. The camera's feed
would upload directly to the COSA database, 24 hours a day. The
government was preparing to encourage every jurisdiction, business,
school, and public place to voluntarily insert a wireless
transmitter into every camera to send images to a local server farm
connected to COSA. Or alternatively, legislation could be
introduced to ensure every surveillance camera sold or used in the
U.S. was pre-equipped with technology designed to automatically
turn on the transmitter when the camera was connected. 'That
approach would capture consumer surveillance cameras at people's
homes,' Apex thought. 'I wonder what the public would think of
that.' As she considered another column, she heard a faint knock on
the door.

Her apartment was located in a non-descript
low-rise a few blocks from the columned 18th century buildings on
the postcard-perfect campus of the University of Maryland in
College Park. Living within a catchment area for 38,000 students,
Apex accessed project supplies, computer hardware, coffee and
pizza, with little notice. Diverse college towns were favored
residential locations for independent technologists. The bustling
attraction of a multi-hued populace wearing all manner of clothing
from business suits to shorts and flip-flops; with hair styles
capable of catching tight spikes in tree branches or qualifying for
military service; and food ranging from extracted anti-allergy air
to stuffed rolled animal-style animals, provided a background upon
which any free human could throw a tapestry of pursuits and engage
with many or remain alone. Less than nine miles from downtown D.C.,
the town provided Apex with her safe haven away from a location
where everyone was considered suspicious.

Opening the door she smiled in surprise.
"You are here," Apex greeted her visitor as she moved aside to let
him in.

Carter Harden stepped into the apartment
with the straight-backed intention reflecting his multi-billion
dollar net worth. "Well, sounded like you were nervous," Carter
responded with a smile. "And I don't like when my favorite people
get scared."

Apex stepped towards him, took his face in
her hands and kissed him full on the lips. "Or your wife," she
commented, returning his smile.

He kissed her back. "Or my wife," he agreed.
"What's going on?" Carter demanded as he moved further into the
room and walked towards the couch as if he had just come home from
his workday. Apex glanced at him with uncontrolled admiration.

Carter had been born to a single mother who
never left her father's wheat farm near Minot, North Dakota. The
family's daily meals were derived mostly from their own production
and any extra purchased with money earned from sporadic outside
work. Attending all of his local schools, working at service
industry jobs, and tinkering with computer code were the only
activities permitted to Carter. But the constraint of low
expectations was not accessible to his DNA. Six months after
graduating from high school, he decided the thoughts in his brain
trying to determine how to attend college, start his own business
and operate with thinking people, were not useless dreams as
everyone around him preferred to proclaim. Knowing if he did not
leave his insular prairie town, he was in danger of succumbing to
its beer drinking, beaten down shooting Sundays, he packed a
backpack, walked through the winter snow to the Greyhound bus
station, and boarded the first connection heading west towards
California.

Settling in Palo Alto near Stanford
University, he found a bed to rent in a house full of computer
science students, and took two jobs serving burgers and fries
during the day and mopping floors at night. In his spare time,
Carter challenged his roommates over their homework until one of
the students dragged him to see a professor who tested him,
marveled at his scores, and worked with admissions to allow him to
enroll in classes on a work-study scholarship. From inside a
classroom, surrounded for the first time in his life with
like-minded equals who thrived on a life of intellectual
achievement, Carter vowed to finish his education before embarking
on a business career. But when he woke up in the middle of the
night thinking of program code for a computer game that doubled as
a type of synthesizer to aid with college-reading assignments, he
rearranged his plans.

Within two years of arriving in the west, he
was a millionaire. Still vowing to finish college, over the next
ten years he created four more companies, and a day after his most
recent public offering, he graduated. The next day, he created his
own venture capital firm and declared his intention to invest the
money in determined individuals with insuppressible ideas.

On day during his business building years,
Carter had gone to visit the professor who had helped him enroll at
Stanford, and discovered another student already in his office. The
woman, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, looked to Carter's eyes as
if she too had come off a farm, although as he was later to
discover, disguise was one of her qualities. Her name, she claimed,
was Apex. A day later, in bed, they talked about the companies they
intended to build and their shared interest in cultivating
technology developments for advancing the world and pushing
humanity forward. "The dream of my life has always included finding
people who are on my wavelength, ready to work and contribute as I
am," Apex had told him. "I'm so glad you are real, so happy my
vision is possible."

Carter's contented grin matched her
satisfied realization. "More than possible," he said. "Your vision
is happening right now." After her graduation, they privately
married, bought a house in San Francisco's desirable Pacific
Heights neighborhood, and focused on their businesses. But as
Internet companies began to rise in economic, social and cultural
dominance, Apex became increasingly concerned about the co-opting
of technology companies' consumer data by the government's national
security agenda. With controversial legislation to support their
demands, law enforcement had determined the data contained in
private companies' servers was fair game in a criminal
investigation, even though the companies had promised consumers to
keep their data private. The battle was one-sided, so far, with the
tech companies forced to cooperate or be branded traitors bent on
aiding terrorists. In the government's actions, Apex saw two
equally disconcerting developments. A law enforcement process
avoiding development of its skill and intellect by becoming
complacent and reliant on technology; and an uncharted entitlement,
by both business and the law, to consumer personal information by
virtue of providing a service, consumers literally, or figuratively
through advertising, had paid for. In response, Apex slowly turned
her focus away from her technology and investment businesses, and
towards searching for furtive solutions to the growing conflict.
Her decision put her relationship with Carter on a ledge, one they
both desperately fought to keep from falling off.