The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella (27 page)

"I'm talking about an electricity shortage,"
he shouted back to her over the sound of running water. "They are
re-routing from James Bay, but people are without electricity."

Kadie could not believe the news she was
hearing. "But why are they contacting you?" she shouted back.
Several minutes passed before he reappeared, wrapped in a towel,
water droplets dripping off his skin. "Why are they contacting
you?" she repeated.

"Security issues, baby," he replied,
slightly exasperated as he began to dress.

Kadie rolled her eyes at him. She had a
higher security clearance level than he did. "I know it's
security," she retorted. "But what?"

"I don't know, but I've got to go." Roman
had swiftly shaved, groomed, dressed, and holstered his gun. She
always marveled at how rapidly he could prepare for the day.
Catching her anxiously watching him, his demeanor shifted. Walking
towards her, he leaned down to kiss her lips, before politely
adding, "I'm unbelievably sorry, but I have to leave you to go and
deal with an international emergency." He stared into her softening
eyes. "I love you, and I'll let you know the moment I know what is
going on."

"Security permitting," she warned as she
kissed him back.

"Yes of course, security permitting."

"I love you too. Be safe."

He smiled, kissed her again and turned to
leave. As the door closed behind him, Kadie picked up her com and
began looking at overnight messages. Neither Kadie nor Roman were
officially in Aspen, and they certainly were not known to be
sleeping together. Kadie had no reason to know there was an
emergency on the North American electricity grid. But she looked
for a search route to the details of Roman's alert notification
message that would not be uncovered by The Network.

As government monitoring of free public
Internet activity had grown increasingly intrusive, technologists
from around the world, highly skilled engineers and computer
programmers declaring no affiliation to a government or business or
non-governmental organization, had built a separate internet.
Initially they had only known how to hide their server farm
physical infrastructure, but not digital signal transmission
equipment permitting instant global access. The situation
dramatically changed when the acceleration of personal travel to
outer space, expanded into personal cargo shipping, and people with
resources launched their own satellites faster than any government
could legislate against the practice. Since shooting down
satellites could lead to war, the private civilian launches created
a crisis. Almost all commercial satellites had been controlled by
public companies, not wealthy individuals operating behind shell
corporations. Governments tried to outlaw private, individual
satellites, but lost all of the court battles. The technology was
too advanced to claim interference with national security, and the
territory of the earth's orbit was too substantial to demand more
than limited control over its expanse. If individuals adhered to
the operational treaty agreements of their home governments, the
satellites were legal.

Although governments could use their own
satellites to monitor all others in the sky, on the ground the
rogue techs, as the independent technologists came to be known, had
sliced the electromagnetic spectrum to carve out private lanes in
the virtual cloud to untraceably carry their data. They called
these electronic roads off the public information superhighway,
off-ramps. The governments knew the off-ramps existed, but whenever
their official technologists reached an identified entry point,
they could not find a way in. Rogue techs had built impenetrable
firewalls, coded multi-level encryption keys, created redundancies
around the world, and most importantly, attracted the support of
billionaires who had wanted a secret, but accessible internet for
their personal use. The work was a volatile risk that changed every
day. Rogues, with deep-pocketed friends, managed to build and
re-build their off-ramps and private networks, faster than
governments and law enforcement could find and infiltrate them. The
rogues considered the challenge of creating virtual construction
projects the greatest videogame ever played, and a battle they had
to win. When they had uncovered the most efficient means for
traveling back and forth between their servers and the worldwide
Internet, while virtually masking the access to their off-ramps,
the separate, secret networks proliferated. Although conspiracy
theorists warned that people were delusional if they thought
governments did not have control over every bit of data, those who
could afford rogue tech assistance bought access to an off-ramp,
and the software to use their coms while masking the activity from
The Network. The switching was seamless from a Networked com,
Global Intelligence rarely knew who was on private off-ramps around
the world. And although technically, government officials were not
permitted to access the unofficial entry points using their high
security level coms, unlike most people who were monitored for the
activity by The Network, presiding officials like Kadie, were
not.

She projected a screen in front of her eyes,
and using an off-ramp, accessed a private global news forum for
government and industry officials who cared about sharing
non-public information. The site had been built and populated,
through virtual word of mouth, as a portal for invited members to
anonymously post information they could use in negotiations and
international discussions. The contributors saw the confidential
bulletins as efficient diplomacy, their governments would likely
have another word for the practice, disloyalty. But claiming
disloyalty was an overreaction, a threat to limit the actions of
thinking people. True disloyalty put millions of lives in danger,
their knowledge sharing, saved millions.

Kadie navigated to a forum site. Users
entered information in their own languages and had developed their
own coded terms. If a user were serious about staying up-to-date,
she would have to master the ability to read other people's coded
comments. Quickly Kadie wrote, 'Driving into dark near Kansas
today, looking for divergences on the road?' Expecting the wait for
a reply would not be long, she hit 'post.'

*

Louis Santino and the box drone were at a
standstill. The whirring sound had been brief. From the moment
Santino had expressed alarm and stopped moving, the noise had
halted. Staring at the drone, the human literally felt the drone
staring back. The air around him had ceased to be cold, instead
Santino felt the heat permeating from his body as he sweated from
head to toe. His fingers were gripped to the tower frame, not
attached by frostbite, but by his own terror of not knowing if
movement would trigger a drone action he was not prepared to
manage. As he considered the position of his hand, the simulated
sunlight he had nonchalantly requested minutes before, began to
fade.

"No, no, don't!" Santino proclaimed aloud as
the sky encircling him transformed from the comforting soft white
glow to the background of a seamless black night. If a human had
sensitive eyes, The Network would have the drone slowly adjust the
light. But Santino did not have sensitive eyes, this drone should
have instantly switched the light off only on his command. With
growing awareness, Santino determined he would not be providing any
more instructions to a box acting on its own. He desperately wanted
to look at his com, to see if updated information had appeared, but
the slowly setting simulated sun told him an action would probably
come too late for official or unofficial word to reach him. As the
light faded completely out, a red laser beam flashed on and aimed
its pointer directly at the spot where Santino's hand grasped the
frame at marker 56.

"No, no,
Santa Maria
, no!" Santino
shouted. He had seen the work of red laser beams on news programs.
"No, no, no, off, off!" he cried as the drone once more increased
the volume of its whirring sound. "No, please no!" Santino begged
the box. With his screams reverberating in the empty dark forest
where bears, wolves and deer had long ago been frightened away, and
chased deep into the trees by the construction of the
hydroelectricity complex, Santino expected no response. Launching
reflexive actions to prevent capitulation to the waiting darkness,
he moved to lift his hand off the frame, and direct his feet down
the ladder. But the drone stopped prepping. Before the human could
make his retreat, the machine revved up the force and intensity of
the beam, and the whirring sound mimicked the extraction of a
firing mechanism. The red laser reconfigured as a singular heat
source directing its trajectory towards Santino's hand, through to
a green-lit sensor on the tower, and at impact, set off an
explosion bringing down the transmission tower in Sector 2G.

Alert signals lit up monitoring stations all
over the world.

*

When Roman arrived onsite in response to the
earlier text alert, more than one person in the meeting room was
completely startled to see him. He was equally disconcerted. For
the past several weeks, he had been working inside a military
complex in the mountains between Aspen and Denver, Colorado, with
an officially non-existent Western Hemisphere Defense Command
strategy team. A digital security mask overrode the global position
indicator on his com, and broadcast his location as Dallas, Texas,
his status read 'On Business.' The gathered attendees he now
viewed, representatives of eleven countries and organizations, were
not the same people he had been seeing every day at WestCom to
negotiate a revised security agreement for Central American
countries. Instead, this group was military and industrial
officials, contacted by various organizations to assemble and hear
specific information.

In a room containing a long oblong table,
short at one end, wider at the other, and built on a slight rise,
every person could clearly view the rest of the seated attendees.
At each chair, translation sensors were embedded into the armrests.
An individual's com would detect the spoken language and, if
necessary, feed a simultaneous translation into an earpiece. On one
wall 90-inch video conferencing screens were positioned to project
as if the displayed individuals, who were in other locations, were
sitting in the room. Another wall broadcast news and satellite
images. The last supported a refreshments table with the preferred
beverages and snacks of every participant ordered and available
based on a Network predicted calculation of the amount each person
would consume, within the scheduled time they would be meeting.
Roman was hungry, but he would not have time to reach the food
table.

"What's going on?" were the first words
Roman heard upon entering.

"I'm sorry General, I received the same
message you did," he politely replied to U.S. Army General Patrick
Wheeler. "I have no other intel." Wheeler inattentively looked at
him, and Roman quickly moved to take his place among the
representatives.

On a video screen, Slater James, an agent at
British Intelligence in London began speaking, "We have been
monitoring a situation at the Grand Rapids hydro dam in
Canada."

"What kind of situation?" Roman asked.

"The incident was a glitch," began the hydro
company’s representative Corey Miller, a senior executive with
military clearance for the meeting. "A fried or split line led to
an outage. But we cannot get a complete report."

"You do not know the problem?" interrupted
Eduardo Juarez, the senior Mexican military officer based at
WestCom.

"It's a big facility, could be any issue.
But the real problem is, we have no credible Network report,"
Miller glumly stated. The complete hydroelectric complex provided
zero carbon emission, always on electricity, to the populated areas
of central North America, north to the mining and military towns in
the Arctic, and south down the Pan American highway from Winnipeg
to Minneapolis to Kansas City to Dallas to Monterrey and to Mexico
City on through Tegucigalpa to San Jose and ending a few miles
south of Panama City. Each of those centers transmitted electricity
in a hundred directions to the skyscrapers of the big cities,
factories in commercial zones, acres of agricultural production
sites, and small forgotten towns along the routes. The towering
transmission lines rolled out from sites like Grand Rapids at high
voltage across empty plains, and upon reaching populated areas, the
lines went underground, or where necessary, disappeared to continue
transmitting virtually, through the air. Most humans had never seen
a power line. As a stable, reliable energy source managed through a
treaty, almost all military installations within range also
connected to the complex. Despite its limited use of human
employees on the ground, Grand Rapids was a vital location
affecting millions who obtained at least part of their living from
its existence. The center of North America was the crucial
infrastructure reinforcement for the mega-populations and ports on
the coasts. The strategic inhabited centers in the Pacific
Northwest, around the Great Lakes, New York City, in Northern and
Southern California, Texas, South Florida and Mexico City contained
nearly three-quarters of the continent's people. Those regions had
self-contained networks, energy, and water supplies, but almost all
back-ups were in the center, on the Hudson Bay grid.

Miller continued, "We have a lot of data
being analyzed, cross-ref—" He halted as an alert signal sounded,
and the room fell completely silent.

"Please look at the monitors everyone,"
Slater directed. "We have now been advised the incident was
extended."

The video screens switched to scenes of the
disaster at Grand Rapids, smoke drifted over a crumpled heap of
steel where the transmission tower in Sector 2G had once stood. The
entire room gasped. At the destroyed site, a dozen
wheelbarrow-sized drones acted as water cannons, and dosed the
embers from the explosion fire, while a camera drone, programmed to
detect body parts, scanned for Santino. Human investigators had
been dispatched to the scene, but all of the initial information to
be analyzed was already captured in The Network. The meeting room
participants rapidly activated personal screens from their coms and
simultaneously read The Network's report.