Cybernation (2001) Read online

  “Okay, I can follow that much.”

  “So, what this meant was, if the Soviet Union, who was our worst enemy in the bad old days, dropped a nuke on a city, it didn’t much matter in the grand cosmic scheme of things.”

  “Except to the people vaporized in the aforementioned city,” Fernandez said.

  “We’re talking bigger picture here, Julio. What I meant was, it wouldn’t significantly disrupt the net elsewhere. Like those giant fungus-thingees that are spread out over a thousand acres, but are still only one plant—cut a chunk out here or there, it doesn’t matter. The beat goes on.”

  “I got you, babe.”

  “Funny. Thing is, as the world wide web came into being and expanded, with everybody and his kid sister logging on, a lot more information started going back and forth, a whole lot more than the original guys ever figured on. This was set up pre-WWW, remember. Anyhow, along the way, things wound up getting more clumped together than the net founders intended. Everything started getting run by computers. In the beginning, when most everything in the phone company—and there was only one big phone company back then—was mechanical, you couldn’t really hack into much because there wasn’t anything much to hack into.

  “Now, the phone companies are like everybody else, slaves to the computer, and what one programmer can make, another one can screw up. Shut down any substantial amount of phone service to a big city, and that city is whacko. Sure, some of the big companies have landlines to other cities that don’t run through MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and so on, but the little guys who use dial-up or T1 or DSLs and such—and there are an awful lot of little guys—they’re screwed, because no matter how good their ISP’s securityware might be, bottom line is, you can’t spike paper without a paper spike.”

  “No shirt, no shoes, no service?”

  “Exactly. Even if the phones work, there are ways to bollix things. The web itself these days, there are a dozen main DNS servers, or name servers—these are the ones that map from domain names, like www-dot-whoever-dot-com, or dot-org, or dot-biz, or dot-whatever. Then the raw Internet Protocol addresses, those are the IP numbers, one-eight-four-dot-two-dot-three-dot-blah-blah-blah. They all have backups, of course, but there are ways to get into them electronically and rascal ’em. So that can mess things up real good by itself.”

  “Sounds just swell, Jay.”

  “Hey, we aren’t even talking social engineering yet. Bribing a guy who’s got the password is a real easy way to save yourself a lot of trouble.

  “The big multinational corps all have their own servers, of course, and even if you manage to throw a monkey wrench into the big DNS guys, the pool of corp info and connections won’t be affected right away—this gets kinda technical here, but let’s just say it’s kind of like shutting off a big power grid. Some houses will go dark, but a lot of folks have personal generators at home they can crank up, and they’ll work fine until they run out of gas.”

  “I’m still with you.”

  “But if you know what you are doing, you can maybe time things so that the big blackout hits long enough to make folks kick on their little generators, then it seems to ease a little. About the time the little generators are running out of gas, another big blackout hits. It’s tricky, but not impossible.”

  “Okay. Blackout.”

  “All right. But to complicate things further, there are some new, big, centralized broadband backbone switchers that serve a lot of traffic. And while a bunch of the traffic is encrypted or stegawared, especially in the military and banking areas, there are servers that have those encryption sequences or picture decoders who serve a whole lot of folks. Rascal those, and you get another kind of shutdown. Think of it like somebody not only shut off the power, they stopped the natural gas flow, or maybe flattened the tires of the heating oil trucks so they can’t deliver, and turned off the water while they were at it.”

  “This all sounds complicated,” Fernandez said.

  “Boy, howdy, is it complicated. There are so many triple fail-safes built into the system that making a major dent in the web, much less the entire net, is almost impossible without a multipronged attack perfectly timed. I wouldn’t want to try it without a herd of expert hackers and programmers, and even then, it’d be iffy at best. Before this happened, I’d have said it couldn’t be done.”

  “Except that somebody did it.”

  “No way around that, somebody did—unless it’s the biggest coincidence of all time, and I don’t believe that for a second. I’d sure like to know who ran the teams. He’s good. Real good.”

  Better than I am, Jay thought, but he kept that to himself.

  “Sounds like it would be easier just to go to the servers and cut the wires.”

  “If you knew where they were. These places are kept out of public view, and even if you knew where to find ’em, you’d still have to get past rabid armed guards who’d just as soon shoot you as look at you.”

  “Now we’re talking my language.”

  “There are a couple of major switchers that carry a substantial portion of net traffic now, more than they should, some fiber-optic, some wireless, and if you blew ’em up, it would be like stopping up all the toilets at a championship football game at once—civilization wouldn’t exactly grind to a halt, but you’d be knee-deep in feces in a hurry. We’re talking billions of dollars in downtime, so you can’t just waltz in and snip a few light cables with your handy-dandy wire cutters; it would be more like breaking into Fort Knox.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “Sure. And you could do it other ways, too, and never have to get in the building. FCGs, MHGs, or HPMs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse bombs.”

  “Ah, yeah, EMP I’ve heard of. Nukes.”

  “Oh, that’s last century’s news, Lieutenant. EMPs come in a rainbow of flavors these days, non-nuclear, no messy radiation to deal with. Got your Flux Compression Generators, MagnetoHydrodynamic Generators, and the dreaded Virtual Cathode Oscillators, aka Vircators. These babies are packed into conventional bombs, use easy-to-find high-speed explosives and off-the-shelf electronics, and can be shoved out the back door of your basic twin-engine FedEx delivery plane for an air burst high enough so the ka-blooey doesn’t even scorch the building’s paint. But even hardened electronic components will shimmy if a big one of those suckers goes off directly overhead, and all the nonhardened stuff gets turned into chicken soup.”

  “My God, you computer geeks are a dangerous lot.”

  “Nah, computer geeks don’t do things like that, Julio. We sit in our offices and push buttons and talk about it. You ain’t gonna see a bunch of guys with pocket-protectors storming a backbone server, shooting it out with guards, and throwing hand grenades, dropping bombs, that’s . . . not cool. Not to mention most geeks I know outside the intelligence community would collapse under the weight of a flak vest, and probably pull half the muscles in their body trying to toss a baseball, much less a grenade.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Jeez, don’t be so quick to say that when you’re looking right at me, dude.”

  “I’ve heard about your field exploits, Jay.”

  “And this is why I get paid the big bucks to sit in my office and do what I do. Let guys like you do my heavy lifting, thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome. I’d rather be throwing grenades than pushing buttons any day.”

  “Yeah. So anyway, how they did it was as computer geeks and not commandos. They electronically attacked the phone companies, the big servers, the backbone routers, the comsats, they bought some passwords and strolled right on in, and probably stuff I haven’t even thought about, the whole enchilada, they did it in very precise stages, and they were good enough to cause the snafu they caused. Numbers aren’t in, but if they managed no more than a fifteen-percent disruption, even twelve-percent, they burned up billions and billions of dollars, reals, pesos, or whatever in downtime.

 
“The real question is, why did they do it? What did they hope to gain?”

  Fernandez shrugged. “That’s for you and the other Net Force computer ops to figure out. Me, I just go and shoot who they tell me to shoot.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Yes. It is, actually. Much easier.”

  The two smiled at each other. Everybody had to be somewhere, Jay figured, and if he ever wound up in a dark alley in RT, he’d want Julio Fernandez watching his back. And his front, too . . .

  4

  Alex Michaels leaned back in his chair and stared at his monitor’s splash screen.

  “Okay, what else is on our agenda today?”

  The computer’s voxax circuit came to life and told him. Among the other items on his list was a meeting with the director to discuss his testimony before the Senate Committee on Electronic Communication. Apparently the political pressure from CyberNation was on the rise again, and some of their promises were being examined. A totally secure net/web connection was one of those promises, and the committee wanted to know if that was possible.

  CyberNation. Michaels wasn’t sure how he felt about them. More a political movement than a web site, CyberNation was trying to get the world powers to recognize them as an actual country, a nation without cities, a nation without borders, a nation that existed only in the virtual world of the net. But a nation with real power nonetheless.

  And that was the scary part. It seemed that a lot people didn’t know whether to laugh at them or join them. Could such a thing really work? Could a country exist without roads, without buildings, without farms and rivers and lakes? Could a country exist without really existing? If it could, what did that say about the nature of countries . . . or of citizenship . . . or of life itself?

  To an extent, Michaels could appreciate their vision. These days in particular, in the age of the Internet, an era of ever-increasing globalization and the constant movement of people, information, and ideas, the dream of a truly borderless country held a certain kind of appeal. Not that it would fly, of course. Not yet. Not today.

  The chances of any major country granting CyberNation’s patrons the status of nationals and exempting them from taxes was about as good as flying to the moon by jumping off a tall building and flapping your arms. It made no logical sense that if you lived in, say, Dubuque, Iowa, you could use the roads and infrastructure of the city, state, and country, but be exempt from paying anything for the privileges. Of course, you’d have to give up social security and welfare, but if you could afford to join CyberNation and pay their fees, you were better off than most anyhow. And their claim that megacorps and even nation-states were going to pay that freight for the rights to reach billions with their advertising was such a vaporous castle in the air that even psychotics wouldn’t try to live there.

  CyberNation said it would offer all information to all its “residents,” for free. Music, vids, books, medical formulas, whatever. It was a chaos engine looking for a place to have a train wreck, and anybody who believed it would work was a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

  Still, they had money, and they were willing to spend it. And enough money could, if used correctly, translate into power. Otherwise, would a senate committee be calling the head of Net Force to the hill for a little chat? Not likely.

  Michaels hated this part of his job. The glad-handing he had to do, the whole political game. It was necessary, he knew that, and the director could deal with a lot of it and more power to her, but now and then it fell to him. Politicians did things for reasons not connected to logic or science, but because they were trying to please voters back home; being re-elected was always in the rearview mirror for professional politicos, and some of them wouldn’t go to the bathroom without taking a poll to find out if it was okay to unzip.

  He sighed. It was always something. He wished he could just take the day off, go home, and be with his wife and baby son. Sitting in a rocking chair with a sleeping baby on your lap was a lot closer to paradise than listening to the director caution him on anger management against the likely possibility some fat cat senator from Bug Dick, Arkansas, asked you a question that would insult the intelligence of a retarded moron . . .

  Aboard the Gambling Ship Bon Chance Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea

  A long-legged, blue-eyed blonde in her early twenties, hair down to the middle of her back, and wearing just enough to be legal for network television smiled, showing perfect teeth. She inhaled, and breasts too perfect to be real nearly broke free of their translucent gauze microbikini top.

  “I’m in CyberNation. Why don’t you join me?”

  She moistened her ruby lips with her tongue, then drew one finger down her cleavage, down her belly, and to the hem of her bikini panties.

  A phone number and e-mail address appeared in the air next to her as she inhaled again.

  Jasmine Chance touched a button on the remote, and the hologram froze. She looked at Roberto. “What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”

  Chance laughed. “You wouldn’t kick a crippled blind pig out of bed if it was dark enough so you didn’t have to look at it. I meant as an ad. We’re running it on the TV nets, movie house commercials, and the big servers and comware.”

  He shrugged.

  She said, “Yes, it goes straight for the groin, nothing subtle. If we could get away with it, we’d have her say, ‘Join CyberNation, you can date me, and I do housecalls.’ ”

  “Yeah? You have her number?”

  “No, but I’ve got your number. She isn’t even real, Roberto, she’s a computer construct.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It’s end-justifying-the-means,” she said. “They join, they’ll get more than their money’s worth, in the long run. But we need bodies. If we have enough members, we can start to get things done.”

  “I thought the exercise with the computers was getting things done.”

  “Yes, but our fork has four prongs. We do ads, we do politics, we rascal computers, and if push comes to shove, we hit hardware with hardware. We have to come at this from every angle we can think of.”

  He shrugged again. “You the boss.”

  “No, I represent the bosses. I’m just the hand.”

  “What does that make me?”

  “A finger.”

  “Ah. Which one?”

  She showed him.

  He laughed. “Want me to show you what I can reach with that finger?”

  “Go for it.”

  Washington, D.C.

  When he finally got home, Michaels was tired, but looking forward to seeing Toni and the baby.

  She met him at the door. Before he could ask, she said, “He’s asleep. I just got him down. Wake him up, and you die.”

  He chuckled.

  “Let me go turn the baby monitor on and I’ll be right back.”

  When she left, he opened his briefcase and removed the gift-wrapped present he’d hidden there. He had spent some time looking for it. It wasn’t their wedding anniversary, but the anniversary of the day they had first kissed, sitting in that old Mazda MX-5 he had bought to restore, somewhere in Virginia. It had taken a while to find what he wanted, and it had cost five times what it had sold for new, only a decade back. He’d stashed it at the office for a couple of months after he’d gotten it. He hadn’t wanted to wait, he’d wanted to give it to Toni the first day it arrived, but he’d held off. She was gonna be surprised, he was sure of it.

  When she came back from Little Alex’s room, he had set the blue foil-wrapped box casually on the end table.

  “Chinese food’ll be here in about ten minutes. Hot and spicy chicken, purse shrimp, chow mein, dried, sauteed string beans.”

  “Sounds good. How’s the boy been today?”

  “An angel.”

  “But of course.”

  “Better enjoy it while we can. We—what’s this?”

  “That. Oh, you mean that package there? Got me.”

  “Wha
t did you do, Alex?”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything. I never saw that before.”

  She grinned and picked up the package. Shook it.

  “What’s it for?”

  “You’ve forgotten what today’s date is?”

  “January 15th, isn’t it?”

  “Toni.”

  She grinned wider. “And they say women are romantic. No, I haven’t forgotten. It’s the day you bought the Miata.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Isn’t that all?”

  “You’re scum.”

  She laughed. “Our first date, first kiss, and the first time you were able to admit what I had known for a long time before that. You didn’t need to buy me anything.”

  “No, I didn’t need to, I wanted to. Go on, open it.”

  She did, ripping the paper off with abandon.

  “Wow. Where did you find this?”

  “You like it?”

  “You’re an idiot. Of course I like it.”

  “It’s a first generation,” he said. “A collector’s item.”

  She turned the old VHS videotape box in her hands, and he smiled at her happiness.

  The tape was an introduction to Pukulan Pentjak Silat Serak, techniques from djuru one, as taught by Maha Guru Stevan Plinck. There was a web address and a picture.

  According to what Michaels had learned, the vid had been shot in a borrowed kung fu school in Longview, Washington, ten or eleven years ago, the first one of a series, about the time Americans started realizing there were such things as Indonesian martial arts. Toni had another tape by Plinck, an intro to Bukti Negara shot a couple of years earlier, also in the old VHS format. The serak tapes were harder to find, since they were self-marketed by Plinck in the backs of martial arts magazines, and from a single web page on the net. Most of the commercial producers had gone to DVD or super SQD formats years ago, and the old magnetic tapes were harder and harder to come by. The instructional video consisted of Plinck, who looked to be in his early forties, lecturing on laws and principles of serak, then demonstrating them on various students, along with the students punching, kicking and bouncing each other off the floor and walls. The players all wore T-shirts, sweatpants, and sarongs, most of them men, a couple of women. One of the women was even smaller than Toni.