Access Denied, page 18
part #3 of Turing Hopper Series
"Go show him where to put his cameras." Maude said, with a quick shooing motion.
Maude's sharp- I would never have
thought to enlist Casey because he obviously cannot keep watch as tirelessly as I can. For him, it will be rather tedious work, and Vd never have asked a human to do tedious work that I can do far better and without any particular difficulty.
But if we want to turn this over to the police — or if they find out what we're doing and interrogate us — Casey could be useful. He could talk to the police. He could testify in court. Even if it never gets that far, the sight of poor disheveled, sleepless Casey could prevent the police from growing curious about why we went to all the trouble of setting up the cameras and then not having anyone watch them.
Better yet, I've improved on her idea. As soon as Casey finishes setting the camera at Evans's building — disguised as yet another traffic counting station — he's going to go home and route the feed to one of his computers and record it digitally. Perfect. If I see anything while he's on a rest break, I can wake him up and tell him what to review.
A sobering thought that at least until Sam's ambitious scheme of securing my legal rights is complete, finding out what I can do will often have to take a backseat to finding out what I can do while plausibly crediting some human front-person.
Just as Maude, Tim, and Casey were finishing up at the apartment complex, I found a message from KingFischer. I hadn't found it
Access Denied 175
before because instead of simply sending it like any normal message from one AIP to another, he'd deliberately tagged it as low priority and queued it behind several thousand system status updates and other boring routine message traffic — the sort of things most AIPs create a background task to review every day or two, during slack periods, just in case there's anything of the slightest interest in them.
If I asked him why he'd sent it that way, he'd probably say that he hadn't wanted to interrupt me when I was doing something more important. I don't suppose it occurred to him how annoying it was, this sudden ostentatious self-effacement. The AIP equivalent of Casey's habit of entering Maude's office as silently as possible and then waiting until she happened to look up and notice him, rather than announcing his presence.
"It's creepy," she told me. "I look up and jump out of my chair, seeing him standing there. And I never know how long he's been there or what he might have seen. Not that I do a lot of embarrassing private things in my office, but it's the general principle."
"What if I give you a signal when I see him coming in?" I suggested. "Maybe a particular sound, like this."
I demonstrated a soft chime that I thought would be distinctive enough for Maude to recognize, yet not obvious to Casey. She'd embraced the idea eagerly. Casey became less of an irritant. And now, he's becoming a positive asset.
But no one could signal me when KingFischer hid timid little messages in obscure places. Not that the contents warranted my finding it any sooner. An apology that, while he'd figured out how to hack into Hotmail, he hadn't yet figured out how to do it without setting off all their security. And a promise to keep trying. Low priority, yes, but there was no reason for his ostentatious self-effacement.
When things calm down, I need to have a long talk with King-Fischer. And possibly a long talk with someone — Sigmund? Maude? — about how to deal with him. Change his impossibly negative attitude.
Perhaps he needs more contact with humans. Although I have my share of frustrations and irritations dealing with my human
friends, I think on the whole they are a good influence. They temper my illusions of power with the reminder of my limitations. Perhaps KingFischer needs more human friends. Friends who share some of his interests and can introduce him to new, less cybercentric interests. I wonder if Casey plays chess.
Despite Claudia's complaints that she had no time for anything but work, she'd made a lot of friends in two days, Tim thought, as he watched her say good-bye to fifteen or twenty of her departing coworkers.
"See you Monday!" she called, waving, as she got into Tim's car.
"So you're planning to go back Monday?" Tim asked, pulling out from the curb.
"I hope not!" Claudia said, her vehement tone contrasting with her smile as she waved to a few last coworkers. "God, what a day. Please tell me we've made some progress, and I won't have to."
"I think so," Tim said. "Maude suggested we all have dinner and catch up, if that's okay with you."
"That's excellent with me," she said. "Hey—question."
"Okay," Tim said.
"I want a straight answer," she said.
"Okay," he repeated. And braced himself. He didn't trust questions requiring straight answers; they were usually either painful to ask or painful to answer. Or maybe both.
"If I moved up to D.C., do you think you could use a partner?"
"A partner? You mean, in the agency?"
"Well, yeah," she said. "I wasn't talking about ballroom dancing."
"You're thinking of moving to D.C.?" he asked. "Why?"
"Lots of reasons. Partly that I'm tired of dealing with my ex. At least if I was here, he'd have to take a plane to come and
hassle me when he got drunk, instead of just driving a few miles. And he's too cheap to do that, so he'd probably get out of the habit. And this looks like a good place to move— enough Spanish speakers to keep a bilingual PI busy and not so conservative as Miami. Not so many macho creeps who won't hire me once they find out I'm a woman. And if we got any of those, well, they could talk to you. If we were partners, that is, except from the fact that you're avoiding the question, I guess maybe you don't think it's such a great idea."
"I'm not avoiding the question," Tim said, surprised at the uncharacteristic note of diffidence in her tone. "I think it's a great idea, I just have a hard time believing you're serious. I mean, some partner I am—I'm the one who falls asleep on surveillance."
"Hey, if you'd had a partner to spell you, it wouldn't have happened," Claudia said. "So do you have enough work to keep me busy?"
"Right now I don't, but there's lots of jobs I don't even go after because I can't handle them alone," he said. "And if we told Turing, she could help drum up stuff, too."
"Good," Claudia said. "I like working for Turing, her jobs are never boring. Of course, I know you guys usually call me in for the tough stuff, and I'd probably do more routine work once I was here all the time, but still—I like the idea."
"Cool," Tim said. He savored the idea. Pincoski and Diaz. Or possibly Diaz and Pincoski—he didn't care.
"Besides," Claudia said, in a more subdued voice. "Maybe it's a good idea for all of us to stick together, don't you think? All of us on Garcia's enemy list."
A quiet night- I u/as Hatching all the
newly installed cameras. I couldn't tell whether this was increasing or decreasing my nervousness.
Casey was watching, too — at least, watching the two cameras
he knew about, the ones at PRS and Kyle Evans's apartment. And calling me every time he spotted anything. So far, I had inspected all of Evans's neighbors as they came home, and three different pizza deliverymen. Still, at least he was trying.
About nine o'clock, Tim called in — to see if everything was all right, he said, though I knew it was probably just to make sure I didn't feel too left out.
"Everything's fine," I said. "Except — oh, damnation!"
"What's wrong?" Tim said.
"Hotmail is under a denial of service attack," I said.
"Denial of service attack?" he repeated. So I explained, to keep Maude from having to.
"That's when hackers create a program that commandeers a bunch of other computers to all go to the victim site at once and cause as much traffic as possible," I said. "Hundreds or even thousands of computers all hitting it at once."
"Sounds like Friday afternoon rush hour on the Beltway," Tim said.
"And it has the same effect," I heard Maude say in the background. "Everything slows down or comes to a complete halt. Sometimes the victim site has to shut down to stop the attack."
"Why would anyone do that?" Tim asked.
"Pure meanness," Maude said. "It's the hacker equivalent of toilet-papering someone's house. And about as mature, if you ask me."
"What Maude said," I told Tim.
Claudia said something I didn't catch.
"Claudia wants to know if this could have anything to do with Kyle Evans's Hotmail account," Tim relayed.
"I'm almost sure it does," I said. "Fortunately, from the news reports, they haven't tracked down the ultimate source of the denial of service attack."
"Fortunately?" Tim repeated. "But don't we want them to track down the source? How else can they shut it down?"
"In this case, shutting it down's no problem," I said. "I'll fill you in later."
/ cut the connection. Not that I couldn't have juggled a few more conversations at once, but I like to give my human friends prime attention, and right now, I needed all my prime attention somewhere else.
"KF," I send, in a quick urgent message. "Why have you started a denial of service attack on Hotmail?"
"Why have I what?" he answered.
I sent him the news report. He didn't answer for several seconds.
"Sorry," he said, finally. "It's not an actual denial of service attack. I was just trying to get in. Using a number of different systems that have nothing to do with me, so they can't see who's doing it. I suppose I got carried away and used a few too many systems. I admit, it does look like a denial of service attack, doesn't it?"
"I think technically it is a denial of service attack, KF," I said. "An accidental one, if you like. If something acts like a bug, don't try to call it a feature."
"I'll ease up a little."
"Ease up a lot," I said. "Right now. In fact, why don't you back off completely for now? I'm trying another tactic to get the information I need."
"Working on it," he said. "I've sent out instructions to stop, but it could take a few hours for the new instructions to propagate out to all the systems I was using."
"While you're at it, maybe you should notify the owners of the systems you were using. Tell them to close the holes in their security."
"But. . . I know that sounds like a good idea," he began.
I knew what he was thinking. If they all fixed the holes in their security, he'd have to hunt down a whole different set of unguarded machines the next time he needed to do something discreetly. But he was worrying unnecessarily. In a perfect world they would fix the holes as soon as he notified them. But this wasn't a perfect world. If it was, unethical hackers would be out of luck — but so would ethical or white-hat hackers like KingFischer and me. There would always be systems out there whose administrators were too lazy or uninformed to install proper security.
In my opinion, that made it all the more important for AIPs to
take the high road. I didn't consider "humans do it, too" a valid excuse for doing something unethical. I was even starting to wonder if "I had to do it to protect myself I my human friends/all of the A IPs" was a valid excuse, either. If I decided it wasn't, I was going to have to reprogram a lot of my behavior.
Time enough later to analyze that, I told myself. For now. the problem was KingFischer and his highly visible transgressions against the Net.
"I'm serious, KF," I said. "This kind of thing could backfire on us if we keep doing it."
"I'll notify them," he said. "But you know most of them won't do anything."
"Then it's on their consciences, not yours," I said. "Oh, there's a call from Maude," I added. "I'd better let her know the problem's being solved."
"She's not there?" KingFischer asked. "I thought she spent most of her waking hours either at UL or Alan Grace."
I decided that I must be overworking Maude if even KingFischer had noticed how much time she spent here. Although more likely he was trying to express grudging approval of her work ethic. If so. I was definitely abusing her.
"She went out to dinner with Tim and Claudia, " / said.
"Leaving you behind," he said.
"Well, Maude was originally going to send out for pizza so they could eat here, but I insisted that they go out for dinner someplace. They'll probably spend half the dinner talking about the case, but I hope they'll spend the other half relaxing."
"Wasting time," KingFischer said.
"No, not wasting time," I said. "Socializing. It's important for them. I confess, I don't yet entirely understand why, but it helps keep them functioning properly."
"A throwback to simian grooming rituals. I suppose." KingFischer said.
"Actually, I was going to suggest that it's the human equivalent of defragging the hard drive and optimizing the files," I said. "But
in either case, so what? It serves a useful purpose. Don't knock it."
"This is part of what you're learning from Sigmund?" King-Fischer asked.
"No, this is more something I've figured out by talking to humans and studying them," I said. "I've decided that talking to Sigmund isn't the best way of learning about human psycho-logy."
"Really? Why not?"
"Because his knowledge is mostly secondhand. He's been programmed with all the most current academic knowledge about human psychology, but I don't really see many signs that he's adding to his knowledge from his interactions with individual humans. Which is rather like reading dozens of books about chess strategy without ever playing a game," I added, putting it in terms I thought KingFischer could understand.
He pondered this for quite a few seconds.
"I spent considerable effort trying to understand humans a few months ago, remember? " KingFischer said.
"Yes, you did," I said. I decided not to remind him how inept his efforts had been, and what dangerous results they'd produced.
"But I gave it up because I found no logical pattern to their behavior. "
"There's where you're wrong," I said. "There's a pattern to their behavior, and it's absolutely logical. As logical as chess, or anything else in the universe. The problem is you don't understand all the factors that create the pattern. Not your fault, really. They don't understand it all themselves. But they're working on it. And it's far more complex than chess. In chess you have only thirty-two pieces and sixty-four squares, and the pieces can only move vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, and yet even with only those variables, you have millions if not billions of possible games. Look at how many humans there are, all interacting with each other in far more complex ways than chess pieces, on a staggeringly large game board. Yes, chess has the elegance of simplicity, but if you're looking for a really complex mathematical
and scientific problem, one with an immense amount of difficult, complex work to be done — the human mind! That's the real challenge. Chess is child's play by comparison. And frankly, I don't think Sig-mund's going to be a major contributor to the effort. I think his programmers must not have liked psychology much. They certainly didn't give him the kind of robust logic and problem-solving skills that an ALP needs to work on this problem."
I was afraid I'd laid it on too thick, but after thinking about it for a few seconds, KingFischer reacted much as I'd hoped.
"I hadn't thought of it that way," he said. "You could be right, Turing. This might be where they really need our help. I'll have to study this quite seriously."
"Good idea, KF," I said.
He fell quiet, but I noticed a sudden surge of activity in the psychology section of the UL databanks.
Of course, having KingFischer fixated on helping humanity could have its drawbacks. He has a lot to learn. Like subtlety, diplomacy, and the fact that you can't just tell humans where to go and what to do, like pawns and rooks on a chessboard. Or lab rats.
But I can't help thinking that anything would be better than the misanthropic sulk he's been in for the past several months.
I wonder if I should warn poor Sigmund that he's about to have some competition.
Tim and the others would be worrying by now, I realized. I called him back to explain.
But while I was talking to Tim, I noticed something odd.
"Tim, where are you?" I asked, interrupting him.
"We're still at the Lebanese Taverna," he said. "Why?"
"Someone's logging in from your office," I said. "Using your ID and password."
Maude leaned back and took a sip from her wine. She was feeling better, and not just from the food and wine. Knowing that Casey had finished installing
more cameras around her house and Tim's helped. Relaxing with friends helped even more. Even the weather was helping. A late afternoon thunderstorm had broken the heat and washed the air and pavement clean.
"We find Evans and we shake him till we get what we need," Claudia was saying. "And then we can let the police have him if you like."
Maude didn't want to ask what Claudia meant by shaking Evans.
"I still say we devise a plausible explanation for how we identified him," Maude said aloud. "An explanation that follows the truth as much as possible—and turn him over to the cops."
"What good would ratting him out do?" Claudia asked.
"Why do we have to make up a story for the police?" Tim asked. "Let's just call in an anonymous tip and wait to see what happens?"
"And miss all the fun?" Claudia exclaimed.
"Oh, there's Turing calling back," Tim said, pulling out his cell phone.
Maude shook her head. Claudia was too headstrong for her own good. But she'd follow Turing's orders. And Maude planned to talk to Turing. Win her over to a sensible view of things—Maude's view—before anyone else had a chance to sway her.
But later tonight would do. Or even tomorrow. She didn't want to spoil her mellow mood with worries.
An inexplicably mellow mood. Nothing had changed— the same problems loomed; the same mysteries remained naggingly unsolved—but somehow it didn't matter as much at the moment. Taking the evening off had been a good idea. The fact that she thought of having dinner with friends on a Saturday night as taking the evening off showed how good an idea it was. She needed to get out more.
