Containment (23 page)

"I don't quite know where to start. I know you must have a lot of questions, and I'll answer them all as soon as I can, but there are a few things I want you to know right away.

"First of all, I need you to understand that V1 was the best life your mother and I could give you. It may not seem like it right now, but you have no idea how lucky we are to live here. We have air, food, water, shelter, protection. You've seen what it's like out there for people who don't have the things that we have, and believe me when I tell you that you haven't seen the worst of it.

"Arik, the human race has failed spectacularly. I don't know how else to say it. There are no governments left, no laws, no economies. There's so much waste and poison and destruction out there that it's easier to contain ourselves than to contain it. Humanity's greatest achievement has turned out to be finally overcoming the forces which, for hundreds of thousands of years, prevented us from destroying ourselves.

"I don't know that anyone fully understands how it happened — how mankind was intelligent enough to defeat the natural system of checks and balances, but somehow not intelligent enough ensure its own survival. The easy answer is that there were simply too many variables. While one part of the world was perfecting cost effective solar technology, another part of the world was pumping so many pollutants and particles into the air that sunlight couldn't penetrate the atmosphere anymore. Just when wind turbine technology reached its peak, weather patterns became too unpredictable to know where to build them. Nuclear technology was supposed to be the big savior, but it ended up being the most destructive form of energy in history since the proliferation of reactors also meant the proliferation of weapons-grade enriched uranium and plutonium. The equations were just too complex, and there were just too many competing and chaotic and neutralizing forces for anyone to fully comprehend.

"But the biggest problem was that people had completely lost control of their lives, and when people lose control, they lose hope. And when that happens on a massive scale, Arik, the hopelessness becomes a ravaging and consuming and dehumanizing pestilence far more destructive than any nuclear detonation.

"V1 isn't a lie, son. It's hope. It's a reason to live. It gives us a purpose. It's our mission. It's the only pod system on the planet that's been successful and that's actually growing. It's the only place left where there are families, culture, medicine, celebrations, scientific advancements. For better or for worse, Arik, it really is the pinnacle of human achievement."

"I want you to know that your mother and I have no regrets. I don't expect you to understand this until you have children of your own, but there's nothing a parent wouldn't do for his or her own child, including lying when necessary. Whatever you're feeling right now, I want you to understand that all of this is for you. Everything your mother and I have done has been to give you and Cadie and Gen V and your children and your children's children a chance at not just survival, but
happiness
. Arik, if humanity has a future at all, V1 is it."

Darien paused, closed his eyes, took a breath. He shifted in his chair before continuing.

"There's something else I have to tell you. An employee of mine, your former teacher, Rosemary Grace, attempted suicide last night by overdosing on serotonin inhibitors. She's in a coma right now with very little brain activity, and we have no idea if she's going to recover. I'm so sorry to have to tell you this — I know how fond of her you were — but I want you to understand how difficult the truth about V1 can be to live with. She was a very strong woman, but even for her, the enormity of what V1 represents was too much.

"This is exactly what your mother and I have been trying to protect you from. As much as we hated having to lie to you, we hate even more that you know the truth. Of course we would have told you eventually, but not yet. You're in your prime right now. You're on the verge of technology that will provide humanity with limitless air. You just got married, and you and Cadie will be starting a family of your own soon. The last thing we want is for you to be distracted and derailed by all this.

"I want you know that if you decide you want things to go back to the way they were, we can do that for you. I know you're not the kind of person to walk away from a challenge, but don't think of this as giving up. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. Forgetting would mean that you could focus on more important challenges, things that you really do have the power to change. It would let you get back to the life that all of humanity needs you to live right now. I want you to think about that."

Darien looked beside him, then back at Arik. "I have to go now, son. I'll be there as soon as I can. Let Dr. Nguyen know if there's anything you need. I'll see you soon. And remember that your mother and I love you very much."

Darien reached up and touched the polymeth. The recording froze, flickered, faded. Arik stood up and touched the wall to start the message over again, but it had already been erased.

A
rik was surprised by how much of his workspace was functional. He assumed that Fai would have revoked everything but his ability to receive incoming messages from his father and maybe read-only access to his own personal files. As he explored, however, he found that his account was almost entirely intact. He could even see that Cadie's workspace was currently active, though every attempt to communicate with her failed.

The interface allowed him to request various types of communication connections, but each attempt resulted in an unexpected protocol error. Rather than restricting Arik's access to the messaging program (which he could have easily found a way around), Fai had taken the much more thorough and low-level approach of blocking Arik's access at the network level to the underlying communication protocols. The result was that even if Arik were to write his own messaging software, the network would reject any and all packets originating from him (and probably to him, as well, unless originating from his father). Of course, he could always write his own protocol that the network knew nothing about, but Cadie's communication client would have no idea how to interpret it.

Arik was behind an incredibly simple but incredibly effective firewall.

The fear was obviously that he would communicate the truth about V1 to Cadie or Cam, and put the entire pod system at risk. He knew his quarantine had nothing to do with the possibility of latent radiation sickness or an undetected injury. It was a psychological quarantine, a containment of information. But he understood the Founders' concerns. They were right to take precautions; even if the truth didn't destroy V1, it would profoundly alter its path and almost certainly prevent it from reaching its full potential. Eventually it would have to come out, but not until V1 was ready. Once certain milestones had been reached, the Founders would complete Gen V's initiation, and a new generation would be born and raised under whatever pretenses were necessary to ensure its survival.

But he still needed to send Cadie a message. By now, she would have been told something to explain his disappearance. Whatever it was, it would have to account for why she wasn't able to see him, or even talk to him, or send him a message. Arik had no intention of transferring the burden of what he knew to anyone else — least of all his wife — but he needed for Cadie to know that he was ok.

Arik had never tried to hack into anyone's workspace before, but as an exercise, he had considered various attack vectors. Compromising an arbitrary workspace was a nontrivial task, but there were two workspaces that he suspected were particularly vulnerable to an attack originating specifically from him: L'Ree's and Darien's.

Everyone in V1 knew that the V1 Computing Cloud used biometrics to authenticate user accounts, and since workspaces were typically invoked by placing your hand on a piece of interactive polymeth, most people assumed V1CC was doing a palm and fingerprint analysis. But Arik knew you could just as easily press an elbow or your knee or even your tongue against an interactive polymeth surface to bring up your workspace since user accounts were actually associated with genetic profiles. Even though humans share 99.9% of our genetic encoding, guessing the remaining 0.1% was impractical. But since half of Arik's DNA came from his mother and the other half came from his father, half the genetic puzzle was already in place. To get into one of their workspaces, all he needed to do was figure out the other half. With a 50% head start, enough CPU cycles, and with the experience he gained working with digital DNA while building ODSTAR, Arik hypothesized that in six to twelve hours, he would be sending Cadie a message through either his mother's or his father's workspace.

Since Arik didn't have his BCI, he needed to figure out an efficient way of interacting with his workspace. For relatively simple tasks, on-screen controls and voice commands were sufficient, but Arik knew he was going to need to review a great deal of source code and write hundreds if not thousands of lines of code himself. Without a more efficient input method, it would probably take him longer to assemble the program than the program itself would need to run.

Arik moved everything on the small bedside table over to the bed, and pulled the chair out from the wall. The table slid easily into the corner, and the three pieces of polymeth engaged. He moved his workspace over, and divided it among the three surfaces. Arik usually preferred to stand and move around while he worked, but since he would need to use his hands on the table, he pulled up the chair and sat down. It took him about thirty minutes to get the eye tracking and gesture systems properly calibrated, and to create a suitable command pallet on the table for his fingers to work with. The configuration wouldn't even come close to matching the efficiency of his BCI, but with a little practice, he would still probably be able to work far faster than anyone else in V1.

There was obviously no way for Arik to spoof the genetic medium itself — to fake an actual cell with actual genetic material inside of it. Therefore, he would need to focus on the layer of software that sat between the physical interpreter and the account authentication layer. His program would need to make the authentication code think that billions of slightly different hands were being pressed against the polymeth in impossibly rapid succession.

It occurred to Arik as he worked that given any form of DNA sample — a toenail clipping, a hair from a brush, a flake of skin — he and Cadie together could probably compromise anyone's account. Cadie would extract and digitize the genetic fingerprint, and Arik would insert it into the right place in the security software stack. In fact, he could probably even do it himself with enough time to write some custom software around the shell program's physical interpretation modules. At its heart, V1's entire security model was effectively obsolete. It relied on areas of expertise being disparate and disconnected, and computers being too slow to make "brute force" attacks practical. From the perspective of its original designers, it must have seemed impossibly complex, but to a generation that was completely comfortable crossing scientific boundaries, and to people who interacted with machines and technology as naturally as with each other, it was nothing if not full of possibilities.

It was becoming increasingly clear to Arik how much V1 depended on the ignorance and predictability of its inhabitance. He thought about the ease with which he was able to get outside, and even discover and unlock the doors that kept V1 isolated from the rest of the world. If he had really thought about it, he could have probably figured out their true location in the solar system just from the pinch of dirt perched on the grate floor of the dock. How many other clues were there all around them just waiting for the right combination of critical thinking, inspiration, and serendipity? How long would it take for someone else to figure out the secret of V1? Arik's generation, he realized, would become increasingly difficult to control. The foundation of ignorance on top of which V1 was built was already beginning to crumble. It was suddenly clear that eventually it would all need to be torn down and rebuilt if it was going to survive at all. The time remaining before Ishtar Terra Station One would need to be reinvented, reengineered, and entirely re-conceptualized — as all complex systems must eventually be — was exponentially dwindling. The only question was whether those in control would figure it out and admit it to themselves in time to dismantle and reconstruct the colony in a controlled and orderly way, or whether it would be allowed to collapse into chaos and barbarism like the world that gave rise to it.

When the program was finished, Arik wrote a series of software tests to verify its functionality. The tests uncovered a couple of potential bugs which he fixed, then he ran the tests again. They all passed the second time, so he kicked off the final process and obscured the active console in case someone came in.

Arik slept while the program ran. It was designed to wake him up in one of two circumstances: either when it encountered a successful authentication, or when it exited after trying every possible genetic combination without finding a match.

The alarm sounded after only two hours. Arik had been in a deep sleep, and it took him several minutes to figure out that it was a false positive. The program had guessed his genetic fingerprint, and successfully logged back into his own workspace. Arik had intentionally omitted the step of comparing newly generated genetic sequences against his own since, over the course of billions of iterations, it would have slowed down the entire process. It also served as what software engineers liked to call a "sanity check" — if the program finished without having guessed at least one known genetic sequence (his), he would know that there was a fatal flaw in its logic.

He didn't feel like he was tired anymore, but when the alarm sounded a second time a little over six hours later, he was again in a deep sleep. This time it wasn't a false alarm. When Arik sat down in front of his workspace, he found that the program had exited after exhausting every possible genetic combination. Arik wondered if someone from the Code Pod had been alerted to the attack during the night and hardened the system against it, or whether the authentication mechanism itself might have even detected the billions of unsuccessful attempts and locked itself down, but when he tested his program using his own genetic profile again, it worked as expected.