Random Origins: Four Our Cyber World Stories by Eduardo Suastegui

Author:Eduardo Suastegui [Suastegui, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2015-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

04 » Forensics

The president marches out of the White House’s situation room. He said it sounds like we got the right experts in the room. Keep him posted. Keep up the good work. Rah-rah-rah.

That pretty much throws the meeting into chaos. Once the big cat is out of play, the mice all want to angle for the biggest piece of cheese. Questions start flying at me. What other great ideas do I have?

Well, for one, I tell them, those drones fly in formation. Good luck getting sixteen hackers to keep their flying patterns that clean. Which means, they’re somehow coordinated among themselves, with one drone leading the others—maybe two for redundancy, how I would do it. Call them mothership one and two, I suggest.

Everyone acts impressed with that line of thinking. My creative imagination, one dude calls it, so nice of him to spew his skepticism with such a nice side-swipe compliment. All the same, they’re buying my theory, for the most part. Now they want me to cook up a solution. That should be easy, I tell them, because if you look closer at the way they fly, it’s pretty boring.

“Meaning?” big kahuna dude at the front of the room says.

“Straight lines, follow the leader sort of thing,” I reply. “Simple flying patterns.”

To double-check my claim, they replay two flying sequences. Yup, turn this way, turn that way, but pretty much straight down the middle. Formulaic. Turn the crank. Predictable.

“Throw some random at it, and down they go,” I add.

“Meaning?”

I glance over at Martin. Can he jump in here, give me a hand? He gets it.

“Hit them with something unexpected,” Martin says. “Outside their playbook.”

“Can we get more specific?”

“Bring down the mothership,” says a younger engineer, not seated at the table, of course.

I smile at him and aim a gun-like index finger at his direction. “Close, but that’s what they expect. Predictable.”

“So then—” he starts to ask, but without knowing the question, he can’t finish his sentence.

“You go after one of the other nodes,” I say. I turn to the screen and point at one of the trailing drones. “You take it over and hack it into a version of the mothership. Make it start telling the others what to do.”

“You would need their code—their programming to do that.”

“Nah, man. That’s the last thing you want. You want your own. You want to come in with something out of left field that at a minimum will cause the rest of the squadron to freeze.”

“This all sounds very interesting, but how do we know it will work?” a senior guy says.

“We prototype it,” I reply. “Rapid development style.”

That’s when it happens. One by one, the three picture-in-picture mini-screens drop off. They’ve grown tired of the geek-speak. They have more important things to do than watch the blow-by-blow engineering sausage-making.

I add, “It sure would be nice to look at some hardware. At least some specs, if we know what kind of drones those are.”

Everyone except for Martin and me trade looks.

“You have some of the drone debris?” Martin says.

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