The Turing Test Page 17

  “Well, yes.”

  “Is it on?”

  “No.”

  “I bet what you really mean is it’s asleep. And I bet it’s not in airplane mode, either.”

  “Well, that’s right.”

  “I’d suggest you power it off. We should both do that whenever we’re talking shop.”

  “Isn’t that going overboard?”

  “If the management guys at that car manufacturer were alive today, I expect they’d disagree.”

  “Point taken,” Shannon said, powering off her phone. “Head back home?”

  “Why not?”

  They ran in silence for the rest of the way, Shannon deciding she’d gotten as much, or more, information than she really wanted.

  * * *

  “Where were you thinking we should go?” Shannon asked after they showered.

  “Have you ever been to the southwest?”

  “Once. A vacation with my folks when I was in grade school. We did the usual National Park swing – Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Zion, and Bryce. And I’ve been to Las Vegas for conferences, if that counts. Why?”

  “Because I’m thinking that might be a good spot to work from. My father lives in a tiny place in Nevada called Rachel. It’s about as disconnected a speck of a town as you could find. Not only won’t Turing be able to keep track of what we’re up to, but there’s nothing in Rachel Turing could take control of to spy on us, or worse. And you do like the out of doors.”

  Shannon frowned. “Have you been quizzing Mr. Google again?”

  “Well, he does know everything. He told me you were a member of the Outing Club in college.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you and Turing have a lot in common?”

  “Maybe. But I bet he lacks my boyish good looks.”

  “Safe bet – no looks at all. Anyway, are you sure he’d want us for an extended stay?”

  “Turing?”

  “Don’t you dare start going Jerry on me. Your father.”

  “It wouldn’t be much of an imposition. I’ve got a camper we can use to drive there, and we can keep living in it after we arrive. I’d want to drive instead of fly, anyway, so Turing won’t know where we are.”

  “Well, sure. I’m game.”

  “Great. I’ll get in touch with my dad and see if it’s okay with him. Want to join me for a cup of coffee up the street?”

  “Why not just make a fresh pot here?”

  “If we’re about to drive most of the way across the country so we can disappear, I don’t want to give our destination away. The good thing about having a software program as an adversary is it can’t install physical objects – just exploit ones already there. I’m sure I don’t have any devices in this apartment that have microphones that aren’t powered off, so talking here is fine. But if I use my phone from anywhere, it leaves a record at the carrier. And the same holds true when I connect through my Wi-Fi router.”

  “Okay. But what do you solve by emailing from the kind of place you always tell me has lousy security for its Wi-Fi router?”

  “Right. I keep a couple of cheap, factory-fresh laptops on hand just for such occasions. Once I have access to a different router, I’ll use one of those laptops to post something to an old message board from pre-Web days, using the TOR network and a new email alias. Put all that together, and I’m not worried. Feel like a walk?”

  “Why not?”

  Shannon said that a lot, Frank thought as he rummaged through a closet for the laptop. He liked that in a companion.

  19

  May the Force be With You

  Shannon and Frank returned to the coffee shop the next morning to check for a reply from his father. She wondered why Frank didn’t start typing after booting up his laptop there; the screen looked blank. Then she noticed a single line of ancient, phosphorescent-white, DOS-era text along the top of the dark screen. That must be Frank’s message from the day before.

  He tilted the laptop her way, so it was easier for her to see. The message read:

  >Y: How about a visit from me and a friend in a few days? Would that work for you? Online here tomorrow at 10:00 EST.

  As she watched, another line of text began to spread across the screen. It read:

  >F: Happy would I be if a “friend” and you visited.

  Frank groaned. “I forgot to warn you about that. I’ll explain later.” He typed in a response:

  >That’s great, but no need to go Yoda on me just for old time’s sake.

  Another string of letters immediately appeared.

  >Die hard, old habits do.

  Frank rolled his eyes at Shannon.

  >Oh, all right. We’ll get in touch by phone the old way when we’re a day away. We’ll be driving. See you soon.

  A last line from his father followed.

  >May the, well, you know.

  When they were outside, Shannon asked. “What’s with the Yoda bit?”

  “Well, that’s my Dad for you. He’s got kind of an eccentric sense of humor. Marla has this crazy notion I do, too.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Yeah. I think it’s crazy, too.”

  “Don’t confuse tact with agreement. But that still doesn’t explain why he replied as Yoda?”

  “Now you’re getting into a long story. The short version is that long before the World Wide Web came about, what you had was a bulletin board–like public message system. It was called the ‘Usenet’ – as in ‘users network’ – and people could set up a virtual space, called a newsgroup, around a single topic or area of interest. Anyone could meet there to have discussions. But all you saw was a black screen with white text on it, like you just saw.

  “Once the Web and graphical user interfaces became popular, Usenet sites mostly died off as more attractive chat rooms, and then wikis, came along. And now, of course, you’ve got Facebook and everything else. But a few of the old addresses still work. Anyway, network security was the topic for this newsgroup, and I used to hang out there a lot when I was younger.

  “One day, I posted a tough security problem I hadn’t been able to solve. There was discussion back and forth about it between me and some of the other folks in the group, but nobody came up with anything helpful. Then, just when the thread was dying out, somebody new chimed in. He made this cryptic comment, using the same Yoda-speak phrasing you just saw. At first it made no sense to me. But then it got me thinking about the problem in a different way. The next day, a light bulb went off, and I figured out a solution.

  “For years after that, every time I was stumped, I’d go back to that message board, and every time the same thing would happen. Whoever it was never gave me a solution. And I don’t know if he always had one. But the weird things he’d say somehow always put me on the right track.”

  “How long did it take you to figure out it was your father?”

  “I never did. He finally told me.”

  “Were you close to him back then?”

  “Anything but. He disappeared when I was just starting high school. My mother told me he’d abandoned us. I spent the next twenty-five years hating his guts.”

  “You’re kidding!” Shannon said, putting her hand to her mouth. “That’s terrible!”

  “I know. The real backstory turned out to be that one day my father helped out an old Army buddy, now working for the FBI, when he needed a bit player to take part in a sting operation. That sounded interesting to my father, so he said yes. But things didn’t go as planned, and the Agency ended up needing my dad to testify in court. They promised to put him in a witness protection program if he did, and he was ready for a change anyway. When the day came to leave, my mother told him she was staying. They’d been in a terrible marriage for a long time, so she took advantage of the situation
to make a clean break.”

  “That must have been rough on you.”

  “It was terrible for me. And very unfair to him. I didn’t see my father again until I ran into him in a little bar-restaurant in the same place we’re about to head for.”

  “Wow – you didn’t include all that background in your book. Why not? It’s pretty amazing.”

  “And pretty personal.”

  “Well, of course. Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

  “Leaving a three- or four-day drive aside, you won’t have long to wait. How long will it take you to get ready?”

  “I can drop you off after we meet with Jim this afternoon and then go to my apartment to pack. We could leave early tomorrow morning before the traffic gets bad. Oh – and we can’t forget to ask Marla to take care of Thor.”

  “Why not?”

  Shannon smiled. Frank had started to say that a lot lately. She decided it was a very endearing habit to find in a companion.

  * * *

  “So, to summarize, you’re saying I may hear nothing from you for the indefinite future, I won’t have a way to reach you on short notice, and it may turn out you’re all wrong. But keep those paychecks coming. Do I have that right?”

  Shannon cringed, but Frank didn’t shrink from Barker’s question. “That’s a fair summary, yes.”

  Barker kicked through the dry leaves drifting across the sidewalk before replying. The NSA had a dozen other teams chasing down leads, any of which might eventually uncover who was behind the attacks. Some of their theories were even as crazy as this one. “So, tell me one more time what your endgame is?”

  “Okay, but I’ll set the stage a little differently this time. Everyone has been trying to figure out how to find who’s behind the attacks, and then catch him. Shannon and I have been doing the same thing. The only difference between us and everyone else is that we think we’re after an ‘it’ rather than a ‘him.’ But a couple days ago I realized we were going about it all wrong.

  “What occurred to me is that if we’re dealing with an AI that’s outside the NSA, it will be a waste of time to go looking for it. It could be anywhere – or even everywhere, if it’s cloned itself or broken itself up into pieces. And it could be somewhere else tomorrow than where it is today. That means there may be no practical way for us to find it. So, we need to figure a way to make it want to find us.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “If we can get the program to connect to a computer at a particular time, we can trace it back to the server, or servers, it’s running on and destroy it. And then we’re done – no more attacks.”

  “Well, sure. And if we set up a great big box and figure out a way to make the Russians want to put all their nukes in it, we could close that box and lock it, and never worry about Armageddon again. Do you have a bright idea how to make that happen, too?”

  “Sorry. You’re on your own with that one. But I think I can come up with a way to trap an AI if one is behind the attacks. Maybe by making it feel threatened and then set up a safe harbor it would find attractive. Or something like that. I don’t yet have a definite plan, but I’m betting I will.”

  Barker kicked some more leaves. What did he have to lose? Frank and Shannon were working off-site most of the time anyway.

  “Okay. You’ve got my sign-off. When do you plan on leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning, now that we’ve got the green light.”

  They turned a corner and headed towards the NSA’s main entrance. An ambulance was parked outside. When they reached the front door, they saw several EMTs wheeling a gurney toward them.

  “Hey,” Shannon said. “Isn’t the guy behind them on Jerry’s team?” The question answered itself when the gurney rolled past them: the ashen face of the person lying on it belonged to Jerry. And it wasn’t grinning.

  Frank grabbed the developer by the arm. “What happened?”

  “I walked into Jerry’s office to ask him a question and found him collapsed across his desk, having these terrible seizures. I called a couple of guys to help, and we laid him out on the floor. But it wasn’t until the NSA EMTs got there and wheeled him out into the hall that he settled down. They said they’d never seen anything like it.”

  “Thanks – thanks a lot. I hope he’s okay.”

  “So do I. It was horrible.”

  Frank turned to Barker. “Got another minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Frank led him back away from the entrance.

  “Can you get access to Jerry’s medical records?”

  “I doubt it. They’re subject to all the usual privacy restrictions. Why?”

  “I bet Jerry’s got a programmable pacemaker and Turing tried to do him in.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Isn’t that going kind of Hollywood?”

  “Is it? I don’t know. Everybody knows medical device security is terrible. And yesterday Jerry told his team he would turn Turing Nine, and all his notes, over to them next week. Until that happens, he’s the only person who knows anything about Turing Nine, and any vulnerabilities it might have. That sounds like too much of a coincidence.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I don’t think I can get into Jerry’s medical records.”

  “Okay, I’ll come back to that. Now on to a different topic. You mentioned before that you had access to the server logs for Jerry’s personal development platform?”

  “That’s right. We’ve got the passwords to every system on-site. Why?”

  “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that zapping Jerry was the last thing Turing did before erasing itself, and all those notes and diagrams, from Jerry’s office system. And I’ll bet you another hundred it wiped the testbed system, too. Can you find out whether I’m right?”

  “That I can find out. When do you need the answer?”

  “Let me put it this way. Assume I’m right that a rogue copy of Turing tried to knock off Jerry in the bowels of the NSA. Do you want him to spend the next week in a hospital, hooked up to lots of wireless equipment and getting medications every few hours, all per the instructions the staff are reading on an electronic medical record system?”

  Barker stared at Frank. It sounded too insane to be possible. But then again, a few months ago, he would have said the real-world attacks they were trying to crack were crazy, too.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll find out as soon as I can. I’ll text you the answer.”

  “Good. Be sure to make it cryptic but clear to me. And thanks.”

  An hour later, Frank got the text. All it read was “Gone and Gone. Be safe.”

  20

  A Little Adventure Along the Way

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Shannon whispered.

  “You mean what we’re doing?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Isn’t this kidnapping?”

  “I think it’s not technically kidnapping when the CIA helps.”

  “By CIA, do you mean that twelve-year-old paramedic we met at the door?”

  “He’s not twelve years old. He just looks like he is. Anyway, his name is Zack Taylor, and George said he’s very well trained. And besides, we can’t be picky on such short notice.”

  They were through the reception area now, and Frank started looking for restrooms. Good – there were two. “I’ll wait for you out here.”

  A few minutes later, they were back in the hall, this time wearing the scrubs Taylor had handed them in bags at the front door.

  “So, how is this going to work?” Shannon asked.

  “They moved Jerry out of the intensive care unit a few hours ago. He’s stable, but they didn’t say how long they want to keep him.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “Barker had somebody high u
p call to check how a valued NSA employee was doing.”

  “Okay. But again – how is this going to work.”

  “There’s not much we have to do. You just stand there keeping an eye out while Taylor checks Jerry’s chart and vital signs to be sure nothing’s changed.”

  “I just stand there? Where will you be?”

  “I’ll be nonchalantly borrowing a wheelchair from somewhere.”

  “Where’s somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a hospital. How hard can it be to find a wheelchair?”

  Shannon made a small, muffled noise. Frank guessed it was something like the sound a hamster might make if you squeezed it too hard.

  They were on the right floor now, counting down the numbers on the wall to Jerry’s room. “Bingo!” Frank said, pulling a folding wheelchair out of an alcove. “See? This will be a piece of cake.”

  They were at Jerry’s door now. Frank rolled past the curtains dividing up the six-bed room until he saw their paramedic at the foot of a bed. Jerry’s eyes were closed, and he still looked like death warmed over.

  “How’s our transport?” Frank asked, trying to sound professional.

  “Stable and sedated,” the paramedic said, looking up. Then he frowned and moved two fingers across his face. What did that mean? Then Frank got it. Darn! He’d forgotten the most important part of their disguises – the part that would make it difficult for anyone – or anything – viewing a security camera video to identify them. He dug to the bottom of the bag that was now holding their street clothes and found the masks. He handed one to Shannon. “Here; the transport orders say his immune system is compromised.”

  Taylor nodded slightly and lowered the bars on his side of Jerry’s bed. “Help me get him into the chair,” he said. An electric motor whirred softly, and the bed slowly tilted Jerry up towards a sitting position. His eyes opened halfway and then closed again.