Internet Kill Switch (5 page)

9

Lou Gonsalves, Mobiligent’s top network administrator, shook his head as he
sat at his desk, searching various network drives. It just wasn’t there.

Sacks watched Gonsalves
work, and his spirits sank as he saw the frustration on the admin’s face. Sacks had never been in the corporate datacenter before; he was a manager, not a geek. But now he wanted to be here, as Mobiligent’s very survival hung on Gonsalves’s ability to find what he was apparently unable to find.

Gonsalves hated having Sacks
next to him as he worked. Having the CEO staring was like someone putting a piano on your back and telling you to haul it up nine flights of stairs. His nervousness slowed him down as he checked everywhere, both locally and remotely, and through all the backup drives stored onsite and offsite. They had data stored as far away as Tel Aviv, in case of a catastrophe.

I
n none of those drives was any information related to the phone Dalton Greavy had spent 10 years creating.

Gonsalves would rather sell his kids into slavery than tell Mortimer Sacks what he
had to tell Mortimer Sacks. But, since Mortimer Sacks was looming over his shoulder, he had no choice but to tell Mortimer Sacks.

Gonsalves turned around in his chair and sighed heavily. “Nothing, Mr. Sacks.”

Sacks closed his eyes. “Are you sure? You checked everywhere?”

“Absolutely everywhere, sir. If he had any information related to the phone anywhere on our network, I’d have found it.”

“Couldn’t he have hidden it? You know, from prying eyes?”

Gonsalves shook his head. “I’d have found it. Stuff can be hidden,
sure, but if was anywhere on this network, I could find it. He couldn’t hide it from me.”

Sacks, eyes still closed, rubbed his graying temples.
This wasn’t happening. “But this is Dalton we’re talking about. I mean, he was the best there is. He was about a hundred times smarter than me. Couldn’t he have put it… I don’t know… on some secret hard drive somewhere?” Sacks knew he was grasping at straws, but he’d take even straws right now.

It had been three days since Sacks had learned of Dalton’s death. It took some time to identify the body, since it had been burned so badly in the fire. Dental records eventually confirmed what Sacks strongly suspected.

For the first day after Dalton didn’t appear at the mee
ting with the Chinese businessmen, Sacks’s greatest fear wasn’t that something had happened to Dalton; it was that Dalton had turned traitor and sold his phone to Samsung, HTC, Google, Microsoft or some startup with tons of cash. That’s when they first started searching the corporate network, looking for evidence that Dalton had removed any data and taken it with him. Sacks didn’t believe it, but they still had to check.

Then, when S
acks saw a news report about an accident where a car burst into flames, killing the driver, his breath momentarily stopped. He knew in his heart that Dalton was in the car, even though the fire incinerated the Porsche so badly that the police couldn’t retrieve any immediate information on the car or its dead owner.

Intuition isn’t fact, though, and Sacks thought it
at least possible that Dalton had sold the phone and taken off for Tahiti, or had some kind of mental breakdown and was raving in the streets. The tightly-wound engineer had had an episode years before, after all.

It had taken days and a half-dozen system administrators to comb through every bit of information on the network, looking for any trace of data relating to Dalton’s phone. Eventually, news came that Dalton was indeed the burned victim. It made Sacks simultaneously sad and guilty. He liked Dalton, and hated to see him gone. At the same time, he was tremendously relieved that the phone hadn’t ended up in a competitor’s hands. That wave of relief made Sacks ashamed, but he preferred that to the horror of seeing a modified version of Dalton’s phone introduced at the next Consumer Electronics Show.

Sacks asked the emergency responders at the scene if they found a phone in the fire, or anything that looked like
it might have been a phone. They hadn’t, the lead accident investigator said, but that wasn’t conclusive. With the intense heat of the flames, any phone would have been completely destroyed. It had likely melted within minutes.

That was a substantial setback, but not a fatal one, Sacks believed. After all, it was just a matter of finding
the data relating to the phone. Once the plans, designs and code were recovered, it shouldn’t take too long to re-create the phone.

Now, however, that hope was flickering on the edge of extinction, and Gonsalves wasn’t helping Sacks’
s mood by telling him there was nothing to be found. He exploded. “Why wouldn’t we have that data in our systems?!”

Gonsalves flinched. The piano threaten
ed to break his back. “I don’t know, sir. Dalton had a lot of autonomy. He might have been paranoid about our network being vulnerable, and kept stuff on his own private network to keep it safer.”

“Why wouldn’t we
have known that!?” Spittle flew from Sacks’s lips, some of it striking the administrator.

Gonsalves didn’t wipe the spit away; he was afraid it might make Sacks even angrier. “It’s just not something we’d ever check on, sir. Our job is to keep the network running, make sure the backups are good, and keep everything secure.”

Sacks had one more good bellow in him. “So what do we do now?”

Gonsalves had already decided on the next steps. “We che
ck his work and home computers, and backup CDs and thumb drives at his condo; anything that might store data. I’m sure he kept the information in numerous places; we just have to find out where. We’ll get it, sir.”

Sacks, energy spent, turned and put his hand on the doorknob of Gonsalves’
s office. He stopped a moment and spoke in a tired, but clear, voice. “I hope so. I’m in a firing mood.”

10

Instead of
eating in the Miles Forge cafeteria the next day, Tony dragged Rick outside to the stands surrounding the school’s football field. The place was deserted, which was the point.

“I’m starving, Tony,” Rick said as they sat down
. Tony pulled off his backpack and unzipped it. “This ‘secret’ better be as good as you say it is, or I’m gonna go zombie on your fingers.” He slurped a Monster energy drink as he talked. It seemed like Rick was never more than an arm’s length away from a Monster can.

“It’s better,” Tony said as he took out the phone and handed it to Rick. Rick whistled in appreciation.

“Looks awesome. Never seen one like this.” He turned it over, looking for a button to push. “Hey, how do you turn this thing on?”

“That’s one of the tricks. I stumbled on it by accident.”
Tony took the phone from Rick and breathed on the front. After a moment, the phone powered up. Tony handed it back.

“Whoa, that’s
sick!” Rick said as he watched the phone come to life. At first, he saw a sunset on the smooth, silver display. In less than a minute, however, the screen changed – to a mugshot of Rick. “Berkeley, Rick. Age 17. Arrested for destruction of property. First offense. Assigned 100 hours of community service.”

Rick looked at his mugshot, stunned. Then he smiled, chuckled, and
progressed to laughing. “Awesome! How did it know that?” he said to Tony.

“Your fingerprints,” the phone answered, instead of Tony. “You’re holding me. I checked your fingerprints against local law enforcement databases. Seems you shot
some windows out of an abandoned school with a .22.”

“You hacked into a police database?” Rick asked.

“Yeah,” the phone answered simply.

“That’s so cool!” Rick said, laughing again.

“I like this kid, Tony,” the phone said. “You freaked out about the driver’s license stuff. Rick says ‘that’s so cool!’” On the “that’s so cool,” the phone did a perfect imitation of Rick’s voice, repeating the line.

“Hey, did you just record that line and plug it in to your sentence?” Tony asked.

“No. I just perfectly mimicked Rick’s tone and inflection. I could have recorded his voice and played it back, of course, but then all you can do is just that – play it back. Once I’ve got his voice down, I can do lots more.”

The phone
demonstrated, doing a dead-on imitation of Rick. “Say Tony, why don’t we go to the Four Seasons for lunch today? Lobster Thermidor’s the special. I’ll bring the fake IDs so we can toss back a couple of vodka tonics, too.”

Rick and Tony both cracked up. The imitation was nearly perfect.

“By the way, Rick, your blood pressure’s elevated. May want to cut back to fewer than a dozen of those energy drinks per day.”

“My blood pressure?” Rick asked, his mouth agape.

“Yeah, it’s a bit higher than it should be for a guy your age.”

“OK, I’ll cut back,” Rick answered, with a
wink at Tony.

“No you won’t,” the phone said.

Rick roared with laughter. “Hah! You knew it!”

“Knew
what?” asked a perplexed Tony.

“He was lying when he said he’d cut back,” the phone said
. “My ability to read biometrics also makes me a great lie detector.”

“He’s – it’s – right,” Rick said as he polished off the can. “Man, it’s hard to believe we’re talking to a piece of plastic.”

“Uh, mostly metal and silicon,” the phone said. “I’m not some Android made of Legos that you buy in Bangladesh for a buck.”

“I love this thing,” Rick said. “How’d you get it?”

Tony told the story of how he found the phone, and his attempts to find out who created it.

“Seems like trying to give it back is crazy,” Rick said. “It’s like having a… a… superhero as a friend.”

“I know, right?” Tony said. “But still, it’s not really mine.”

“Here we go again,” the phone said.

Rick marveled. “It actually sounds exasperated, man. I guess you’ve been wringing your hands over this for the past couple of days, feeling guilty.”

“You’ve got him pegged,” the phone said to Rick.

“You know who his voice reminds me of a little bit?” Rick said.

“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” Tony said.

“To me, his – its – regular voice sounds a little like William Shatner.”

“
Who?” Tony asked.

“Captain Kirk. The Enterprise. My dad loves Star Trek.”

“You know, I think you’re right,” Tony said. “That’s the guy.”

“Hold on a second,” the phone said.
“This should be easy to confirm over the Internet.”

I
t responded after a few moments. “You’re right. I should have known. Geeks and Trek. I bet the guy who created me probably had every episode memorized. Undoubtedly a genius, but probably also an epic loser with two pairs of Spock ears and a phaser in a hermetically-sealed cube on his mantlepiece.” The boys roared with laughter.

“So, what’s next with the phone?” Rick asked, pulling another Monster out of his backpack.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Tony said.

“So, business as usual,” Rick said
as he took a big swig of the drink, trying to send his blood pressure even higher.

11

This was their last shot, Nelson knew as he watched the high-powered forensic analyst go through the last computer
in Dalton’s home. The top experts at Mobiligent had already been through all of Dalton’s office computers, looking for data on the phone that would allow it to be reconstructed and keep the company from imploding.

When their own people turned up nothing, Sacks decided to bring in a hired gun
: Kelly Lomax, generally acknowledged to be the best of the best when it came to finding and retrieving information from computers. If it existed, Lomax could get it. He was insanely expensive to bring on board, but Mobiligent had already committed more than 10 years and many millions of dollars on this project; spending $2,000 an hour on Lomax, known in the industry as “the computer-whisperer”, was chump change compared to what Mobiligent would make on the phone, if its data could be recovered.

Lomax didn’t find anything
in Dalton’s office related to the phone. His brow furrowed as he rooted around in the hard drives. “This guy was unbelievably good,” he said more to himself than Nelson, who was with him in the office.

“He was the best there was,” Nelson said. “The best there ever will be,” he added, more
in anger than admiration. If Dalton hadn’t been so blasted brilliant, they might have been able to get something off these hard drives.

The last stop
on the line was Dalton’s condo and private home network. It took Lomax two days of searching before he was finally convinced that there was nothing there, either. Nelson was there the whole time, looking over his shoulder. It irked Lomax, but Mobiligent was taking no chances that he might find something and secretly download it for himself. The stakes in this game were incredibly high.

Digging through some code on the fifth and final computer in Dalton’s apartment, a relatively new MacBook
Pro, Lomax stopped, looked more closely at the display, then motioned to Nelson and pointed at the screen. It was filled with code: lots of brackets, semicolons, strange indentations, random words and numbers, parentheses. It might as well have been in Sanskrit, for all Nelson could make out of it.

“There it is.”

Nelson’s hopes shot into the air like a fountain. “You found the data?”

“No, but I found out what happened.”

The fountain turned into a puddle that
plunged over a waterfall. “What?”

“Dalton set up and activated a time bomb.”

Nelson didn’t understand, but he knew it couldn’t be good. “What does that mean?”

“It means
that he set up his network to self-destruct if he didn’t check in with it every 48 hours.”

Nelson put down the soda
can perched at his lips. “He what?”

Lomax took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “He was probably really paranoid about his work. Many great engineers are this way. They’re terrified of their work falling into the wrong hands
: industrial spies, the government, hackers, you name it.”

Nelson nodded his head,
thinking of the scanner outside Dalton’s office. “Yeah, he fit that profile.”

“Some are also afraid of somethi
ng happening to them – kidnapping, accident, heart attack, or something else that incapacitates them. So they often set up some time interval, and if they haven’t “checked in” with their systems, which is normally done with a highly-secure password, the system will destroy all the data on a hard drive, or in certain files on a drive.”

Nelson swallowed hard. “So you think Dalton would destroy his most precious thing…” he began.

“Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, if he didn’t personally identify himself at least every two days, right,” Lomax finished his sentence.

“Dalton never, ever went more than an hour without being on his computer or one of his devices,” Nelson said morosely. “T
wo days for that guy would have been unthinkable.”

“Exactly,” Lomax said. “If you’d been able to get here within t
wo days, you probably could’ve gotten the data.”

“We didn’t even know
he was dead by then,” Nelson said.

Lomax drummed his fingers on the table at which he was sitting. “There is one other thing you might check.”

A small ray of hope broke into Nelson’s soul. “What?”

“Well, you said Dalton had just gotten the final prototype of the phone the day of his accident, right?”

The beam of sunshine got brighter. “Right.”

“So, the manufacturer of the phone had to have all that data. Have you checked with them?”

Nelson smacked his forehead. “I didn’t even think of that! Of course!” He pulled out his phone and immediately called Mortimer Sacks.

Two days later, Nelson got a call from Sacks. It was hard to hear the CEO over the roaring in the background, like a loud engine. “Dalton time-bombed Kamagi, too. Same way he did it to his own stuff,” Sacks said simply. “Destroyed all the information related to the phone. Happened at the same time – after 48 hours. Backups, too.”

Nelson
sagged in his chair. “He was able to do that on their network... aren’t they supposed to have one of the most secure networks in the world?” Kamagi, a Japanese company that few people even knew existed, worked on many clandestine projects. Security was always the top priority; it had never been hacked.

“Yup. But Dalton was too good,
” Sacks shouted over the din.

Nelson
swallowed dryly; he had no spit left. “So, is that it? No more alleys to explore, no more rabbit holes to dive into?”

“Looks like it,” Sacks said.

Nelson feebly tried a little spin. “Well, we’ve got…other projects. There’s the geospatial stuff, the watch thingy, the…”

Sacks cut him off. “We
’ve got nothing, Nelson. You know that. Everything was based on this phone. The other things don’t get off the ground without the phone. The phone
was
Mobiligent. It’s over.”

Nelson
’s mouth opened and closed without making a sound. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear he heard Sacks crying, although he couldn’t be sure over the noise. Where was Sacks, anyway?

Nelson
didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. He could only manage a “So…”

“So that’s it, Nelson.
Game over. We’ll be bankrupt within a year. Get yourself another job, become a priest, raise cattle in Montana, be a painter. Mobiligent is done, history.” Then the line went dead.

Sacks ended the call and dropped the phone on the floor of the Cessna 182. The plane circled the skydiving drop zone as the pilot waited for his passenger to make the jump. Sacks had done this hundreds of times over the past four years, since he’d discovered skydiving.

In
one very important way, Sacks was like Dalton, without the 196 IQ: Mobiligent was their lives. Like the engineer, Sacks wasn’t married, and had no family. The company was his passion, his love, his reason for being. He’d started it with nothing, and built it into a small but thriving manufacturer of pagers and, later, personal digital assistants. Sales weren’t large, but they kept trending upward year after year. The company could go on like this practically forever, maintaining a healthy level of success.

Ironically, that success made Sacks unhappy. Life got boring as it got more predictable.
Mobiligent made him rich, but didn’t take risks. He made products the market wanted, but didn’t create any new markets. Innovation stopped being a priority, bowing to the demands of sales trajectories.

After a few years of that
slow death, he started looking for new frontiers to conquer. His hiring of Dalton was a coup that made his rivals jealous; they’d always seen Mobiligent as a marginal company that made competent products, but nothing more.

Then Sacks
hired the PhD. that everyone else wanted, the engineer with the biggest brain in town. Everyone knew Dalton would be a star, but no one expected him to end up at Mobiligent.

Then came t
he “Ape” project; it ignited Sacks’s imagination, rejuvenated him, gave him a reason to come into the office again. He set up his own private communication channel with Dalton, and knew a lot more about the project than even Nelson. As the phone neared completion, his excitement could barely be contained: how often do you get a chance to change everything? That was enough reason to make a man get up in the morning.

Now it was gone, all of it. If he
’d been able to get the plans, the data, and rebuild Ape, he could have staved off Mobiligent’s collapse; it would have been more years of work, but the goal could have been reached. Everest could be climbed again.

Without his brilliant friend, though, they would be stuck at base camp. He couldn’t start over. He wouldn’t start over.
Sure, he could hire some lesser designer and lower his aspirations from “world-changing device” to “decent imitation of an Android phone.” And then he’d start hating to come to work again, hate his life again, start hitting the bottle in his office at 3:30 every afternoon again. He could already feel it starting: the heaviness in his soul, the black thoughts, the despair falling like eternal night. He knew that darkness, the depression that always seemed to be just over his mental horizon.

The hell with that.
No, for Sacks, it was all or nothing. The phone or the pit. And the pit had won.

So Mortimer
Sacks yanked off his parachute and tossed it into the back of the plane. Then, without hesitation, he jumped out the door and into open air, 12,500 feet above the earth.