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Slaves of the Cloud (a condensed technothriller)

by Bruce Sterling and Julian Bleecker

Bruce Sterling, blog.wired.com

Julian Bleecker, Near Future Laboratory

[[[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution ]]]

[[[ error below. “Field-programmable gate array” (not grid) ]]]

[[[ The first computers were people, parallel processors running numbers for the artillery guys. Mechanical parallel processing. Is this the same thing? Slaves, ganged together like a giant mech turk?

[[[ The gang’s data/trust centers are mobile, it’s a paradigm shift. They’re ahead of the curve. They’re networked computers crammed floor to ceiling in shipping containers that have these infinite loop shipping manifests. You scan the container’s bar code and it tells the shipping master to just put it on the next truck, rail, ship bound for wherever. They just keep moving. Maybe there are people in there. Legacy uplinks over GSM which makes it harder to track now that everything is 5G. If tracking even matters. It’s as if someone plugged in a Bell Model 500 POTS and tried to make a call.

[[[ Friend of mine at Google, cracker jack data vis guy. Went and met their #7 guy who’s somehow in charge of their networks or something. #7 brings in one of their Special Ops Data Security guys who has an impossible real-time dossier on my guy; like — he can tell him what web sites he’s worked on, he’s browsed — crap that doesn’t even have his name in it anywhere. Spooky stuff that even my brainiac guy can’t get his head around. Stuff pre-2.0, pre-millennium, etc. He’s tracing the knots back through old USENET and even BBS posts, which were barely on the Network, but somehow got uploaded when they got consumed by the take over rackets and then because it was all user-generated goodness, they just shoved the — whatever — 500 MB of text that represented 8 years of some local community BBS into a database table somewhere. Anyway, this is the good part. He told me that spammer gangs are using their own home made mechanical turks to create compelling human-made spam to bomb the network. This is the turk: Look at this (weird out of context human written spam poem) phrase. Write down what this makes you think of. Done, here’s your nickel. So, they’re creating an infinite loop of non sequitur human-authored spam poetry. They take the one “you” just wrote, use that along with 50 others to cobble together spam poems and embed a link or two to whatever; then they take those phrases and send them out to be ‘turked to create entirely new ones; keeps the white hat spam suppression operators from finding predictable patterns, etc. That explained a lot, frankly - at least in terms of the spam phrases I got. Is the network getting gummed up by human made spam? Is that the threat, or is it more quotidian — like, physical-digital threat? Is it 2nd Life damage that leaks into 1st Life? Hybrid bomb of some sort.

[ Working on an ID device that aggregates all of your physical-digital life into a stupid long data hash and checksum. All your sent emails. All your received emails. All your GPS coordinates, calls made/received, SMSs, Tweets, pages browsed. DNA data chain. Hash it all up and it’s you, maybe more than you are you. It becomes your avatar, your data.

CHAPTER I.  THE BOMB THREAT

  …  as gray needles of rain furred the Potomac.  “Eight years I spent on that case,” said Felix.  “Cellphone tracking, mostly.   DNA records from German intelligence… A gas-cap in Linz, a bullet casing in Copenhagen…”

        Ramanujan silently fiddled with his cloudpod.

       “They had The Bomb,” Felix told him.

        Web-colors from the tiny screen — fuschia and teal — washed Ramanujan’s rumpled shirt.  The Indian tech always wore white polyester.  “You said: they claimed they had the Bomb.”

        “Yeah.  Because they did.  And the Bomb is the infinite tech threat, it’s like dividing by zero.   So I had to give up the Vienna desk.   I’m tracking these low-lifes through Austria…  they’re in the  gypsy underground, they’re gay, they’re also junkies…   They’re living out of car trunks and they’ve got eight hundred thousand slaved PCs.  And the Bomb.”

        “Social software profiling,” said Ramanujan.

        “Yeah, we tried that trick. Right away.  They weren’t the usual kind of guys who have the Bomb.”

        “Social software. That’s how I found my girlfriend.”

         Felix had already met the girlfriend.  Ramanujan’s girlfriend was one in a billion.  Which was to say, she was an everyday, normal Indian girl.   Why  did a normal Indian girl take a shine to this weird spook geek?…  Maybe it was his fancy engineering degree?  Ten million Indian guys had engineering degrees.

        Ramanujan picked his ample teeth with the pod’s ivory-white plastic stylus.  “To track the Mooj in Kolkata, we sprayed the public access sites with nano-particles.”

         Felix nodded. “Good tactic.  And?”

         “Nanocarb goes straight to the lungs, so we got them with a breathalyzer.”  Ramanujan rooted through his bulging shoulderbag.  “I thought I brought my breathalyzer…  Oh wait.  Yes.  It’s built into my phone.”

          For eight years, Felix had been the go-to Company guy for the dogged pursuit of the “Gelatin Gang.”  Then a humble German meter maid had busted  the mobsters for hopping a trolley without tickets.

       In that one moment, the core of Felix’s life simply went away.  The world-transforming threat was over, done, vanished, and entirely forgotten.  Straight down the memory hole of global espionage.  Just another busted terror-bubble, and deader than the Apple IIe.

          ‘Global guerrillas.’  They came across like freakin’ Goldfinger, and the sons of bitches never bathed.

CHAPTER II.  THE BLOOD DETECTOR FLASHLIGHTS

       “Medical isotope bomb,” said Ramanujan.  “Yeah, in Kashmir.  I hated that.  Dirty,  so dirty…”

       Felix ducked under a cobwebbed, rust-spotted steel beam.  His breath clouded in the cold.  “Some ‘sweatshop’  this place is!”

         “Injectable RFID,” said Ramanujan.  “Grocery scanners in all the doors.  If they tried to escape, a smart vacuum cleaner rolled up and hit them with a taser.”

          “The guy had fifty illegals trapped in here, for six years!  Our baddie built a private no-go zone with his own freakin’ harem!  He really is the ‘Monster of Kreuzberg.’”

          “Karachi is much worse than Kreuzberg.”  Ramanujan still limped because of certain dark events in Karachi.  “In Karachi, your evil German smuggler was a prince.  He was like ‘Schindler’s List.’”

          The Monster had vanished hundreds of Moslem women.  He hid them in steel cargo containers, he fed them with takeout food.   They worked around the clock, sewing counterfeit fancy brassieres.  “He’s a total madman.”

         “Rendition,” shrugged Ramanujan.

         Felix scowled.  The rendition issue was something of a sore spot.  “Maybe we invented some little part of that, pal, but we never made it pay.”

         Ramanujan pulled his thick woolly skullcap over his thick inky hair.  He clearly lacked his usual gusto for this caper.  Normally a black-global crime scene like this one — there were ten female skeletons buried under the concrete courtyard — had the Indian geek all focussed, bright-eyed and perky.

        Something was visibly eating at the techie sidekick.

         Felix cleared his throat.  “Jet lag got you down?”

         “She stood me up today.”

        “Your fiancee, your homegirl, she turned down a  free trip to Berlin?  But the Company’s paying full expenses!  All she had to do was fill out a few dozen forms.”

        “She’s not coming here to Berlin.  She got a big offshore contract,” said Ramanujan.  “She works tech support for a gaming avatar now.  It’s not human, it’s not even smart, but it plays a lot of games.   It gambles.  It wins.  It’s rich.”

        Felix scuffed his Chuck Taylor high-tops on the oil-stained German cement.   He hated seeing Ramanujan put off his feed.  The technician was short, squat, slightly lopsided, and looked like his Mom picked his clothes — but no one else could boot those blood-detector flashlights.

        What did it say about the profession, that a career Indian spy would be out-charmed by some  goddamn computer-game character?  “How rich is this freakin’ avatar who stole your girlfriend?”

        “Rich enough to have his own neobank Trust Center.  And it runs off Iceland geothermal.”

          Felix felt his eyes widen.  “Well, yeah, that’s pretty rich.”

CHAPTER IV.  THE HAWALA MARKET THUMB DRIVE

    …“a piece of goddamn wood!  It doesn’t even have a battery!”

     “Wooden rosary  beads.   The Hindutva mob.  The Moslem Mooj.  But they’re Christians.  They felt victimized.  They had to take steps.”

      “But that doesn’t explain how this thing can work, Ramu.  It’s made of wood!  You can’t make electronics from wood! Wood won’t even show up on a security scan.”

         “That’s why they made their cloudbot from wood.  This unit is binary.  The priest is dead, the Mooj shot him.  So we’re missing a vital piece.    But look: you see the feet of Jesus?  Get some scrap metal  — wrap it around the foot of the Cross.  Then it becomes a plug.”

        “An electrical plug?”

         “USB plug.”

         “Nobody uses those any more.”

        “That’s why you can’t detect them.    They’re the Santeria Hawala…  they never call it technology, they always call it prayer…”

CHAPTER VII.  THE FREEWARE FIELD-PROGRAMMABLE GRID ARRAY

          …field-stripping his ancient Beretta.   “That might be it!   The ‘Monster of Kreuzberg,’  this global slumlord…  What if he is an avatar, too?”

        “There is no Artificial Intelligence,” said Ramanujan.  “Artificial Intelligence is not technically possible.  That idea went out with the 20th century.”

        “Okay, fine.”  Felix stared for stray dust down the pistol’s empty barrel, and fetched the cleaning rag.    “I’m making a subtler much point here.  There’s collective intelligence in the cloud.  The cloud runs whatever people need it to run — if there’s enough demand.  So: the more people inside the cloud, the closer the cloud gets to something that acts like Artificial Intelligence.   Because it’s networked human intelligence, only — with no soul.  No morals.  No laws.  No limits at all.  Totally stupid, yet totally powerful.   It’s like an Invisible Hand.”

        Ramanujan sipped his imported can of guava juice.  “An ‘invisible hand’ that strangles people.”

        “Right. Like that.

        “You won’t be having a lot of use for that handgun, then.”

        Felix knew that.  His handgun was stupid and archaic.  Still, they’d licensed it to him at Quantico, and the Bureau really insisted.  Felix always liked every Special Agent he met personally, but the cloud-bureaucracy of the FBI was a different matter.  If you ever once stepped across its impossible rules, it got all fussy about you.  For a Company guy, having the Bureau get all fussy was a worse fate than  a broken thighbone.

         Felix opened the Chinese suitcase.  “People used to collect online identities.  ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’”

          “I still collect online identities,” said Ramanujan, munching another papadam crisp.  “I have over two thousand.”

           Felix closed the suitcase.  “You’ve got two thousand sock-puppets, Ramu?”

          Ramanujan squeezed his tall plastic bottle of hot-sauce. “With two thousand online identities, nobody knows you’re a god.”

         Felix stared at the eco-friendly fluorescent bulb in the distant ceiling.  It’s spiderwebbed white coils had caught a host of flies.   “Ramu, listen.  Maybe online identities are collecting people now.  They’re luring people with phony email.  Abducting people.  Storing human beings inside cargo containers.  Shipping them around the planet.  Slaves of the cloud.”

        “You’re fantasizing.”

         “No, I’m theorizing.”

       “The ‘Monster of Kreuzberg’ is a  black-global businessman.   Okay, maybe he’s a kidnapper.  And he’s probably a cannibal, but…”

        “But  — maybe he’s totally automated.  He’s a market fiction, he’s an avatar.  We still can’t nail this son of a bitch, because he doesn’t physically exist.”

        Ramanujan blinked.

        Felix opened the case again, put the pistol inside  He never carried the pistol;  Berlin was crawling with magnetometers… but some Bureau guys were dropping by at 2 am for a pow-wow.  They’d be sure to check that he had the gun; they’d scan its RFID chip.

        “You’re a coder, Ramu.  You’re too literal-minded.  We need, like, the out-of-the-box  picture here.”

        Ramanujan rooted in the papadam bag, which was labelled in eighteen languages.  “Try me.”

        “We’re soldiers in a war with no front line: the war’s gone fractal, it’s Swiss global cheese.   Fifty Paki women vanish into steel boxes in the middle of Berlin.   Vietnamese pirates hide weaponized anthrax DNA in their car keys.  Five blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, there’s a crack-house full of armed Salvadorans.  They’ve all got broadband, and they’re all so far underground they don’t even need eyes any more.”

        “You have a right to your own politics,” said Ramanujan, munching doggedly, “but you don’t have a right to your own computer-science…”

CHAPTER IX.  THE BOTNET MARTYRS’ FRONT

…“not in deep cover, but I didn’t expect to sign any goddamn autographs here in Hong Kong!”

       “That girl was cute.  Not as cute as my new girlfriend.  But she’s Chinese.”

       “Do I need Chinese fangirls?   Girls in pink Chanel suits  with Maoist pigtails?  She had my full CV on that baseball card!   I’m freakin’ career CIA!  She shouldn’t even know that I exist!”

      “Felix, her search engines dug you out of your so-called cover in maybe ten seconds.”

       “No way, pal.”

        “It’s easy.  You look for any capable American who speaks three languages, works for a shell company and never speaks out in public forums.  Of course he’s in American intelligence — it’s the absence of signal that makes him so obvious.”

      Felix found himself with nothing to say.  Nobody had properly briefed him about that threat.  He wasn’t up to speed there at all.  He’d never seen that one coming.

       Felix caught the escalator up to the mall’s next floor.  The chip-market had been plenty loud, but it was wall-to-wall Canto-pop idol worship up here.  Loudspeakers.  Snow globes.  Bumper stickers.  Sweatshirts.  Candybars.

       Ramanujan tunneled through the dense crowd like a guy who lived among them, which he did.   “The Chinese don’t care about your national firewall.”

       “I don’t care about theirs.”

        “I use Chinese search engines myself.”

         Felix considered this assertion, as a swarm of leggy teens thundered past.  How could any Indian white-hat use a Chinese search engine?  Or  — reframe it this way — how could any red-blooded Indian hacker not exploit a vulnerable Chinese search engine?

        “We’re buddies,” he said.

        “That’s right.  We’re from secular democracies, Felix.  We vote.   We have civil rights.  And we have the same enemies.”

          “I meant us and the Chinese.  I meant all three of us.  This season.”

         “Since the Botnet Martyrs’ Front hit Xinjiang?  Oh yes.  The Chinese love us, this year.  The Chinese adore us right now.  They’d do anything to avenge the national honor.”

         “So… did you get her homepage, then?”

          “Yes.  She’s too young for you.”

          “She’s not that young.  There’s this handy technique we like to call ‘constructive engagement,’ and”

CHAPTER XI.  THE SHENZHENG PRE-COMPILER RACKET

“Networked connected sequencers are commodity items nowadays, so every coder who has even a stupid, crap day-job has one, because they just don’t trust the Trust Centers, even the one’s running off of the good geothermal in Iceland after the Swiss bought it to move their Private Data Banks; and ever since the Chinese Brown Cloud went viral…”

        “Just take it easy, Timmie,” said Felix, removing the coffee cup from the informant’s trembling fingers.  “You’re safe in here.”

        The informant rubbed his cheekbone.  He’d lost half his face to a sticky-bomb.  They put half the face back on again with stem-cells, but the new face didn’t move much like the old one.  Not at all, really.

   “All the laptop homeboys pulled their data out of Macao… They stored it on their homeboy LANs instead, so they could just yank their IPV6 cloudsafes out of the wall if the data exchanges tank.  Of course that leaves a cloud of your DNA spilled over your hardware, but it’s way too easy to hack your own genome data with user-managed sequencing, and, anyway, they’re using illegals’ spit to create falsies — I mean fake social software profiles — with alleyhacked 23-and-Me spittoons. With enough ‘spit friends’ you always look authenticated.  The blood flashlights can’t track anybody with all that genome junk mucking their profiles.…”

         Felix tipped the webcam forward  a fraction, and left the glare of the debriefing room.  The place was lined with Faraday cages.  It smelled like burned copper.

        Ramanujan glanced up from the latest cloudpod, which had flimsy Japanese keyboard wings folding out like origami.  “He’s still talking.”

        “Oh yeah.   Black-hat hackers always talk.  The  problem’s getting them to shut up.”

       “There’s some bad news about the raid.”

        Felix sat down.

        “Our Chinese team went in — very polite, very human-rightsie…  six Afghan vets in there.”

        “Oh Jesus, no.”

         “With mortars and shoulder-rockets.  They thought they’d be busting technicians.  They didn’t know the Mooj was in there ready to play it crude…”

CHAPTER XIV. CLOUDS CAN BE PEOPLE, TOO

    “Lasercode this into your thumbnail.   You can carry that through their body scanners and they’ll never even look.  Hospital body-scanning… it’s a joke.”

       “They’ve been good to me in here,” said Felix.  “Very supportive.”   His  pulse beat evenly on the bedside LED screen.  “Not much like the American health system.”

       Ramanujan set the reeking flowers at the bedside.   Indians always overdid with the flowers — huge reeking garlands of carnations, red, white, and blue.  “That’s not a ‘health system,’ Felix.  Every foreigner who goes to America is really afraid of it.  Because it’s a ‘system,’ but it’s not about your ‘health.’”

      “We’ve been fighting that system for years now.  For decades.  Every year it gets worse.  And kills more of us.”

       “That system is winning, Felix.  You’re not winning.”

        Felix knew that.  There wasn’t a lot to say about that verdict.  Domestic politics was a pain.  “You know what bugs me here?  I’m ‘collateral damage.’  The baddies finally got me — they blew me up — and it had nothing to do with my work.  I got hit in the guts with a random piece of flying rickshaw from five blocks away.”

      “Terror happens every day, pal.”

      “Not ‘Buddhist eco-terror.’  What the hell is that about?”

      “Eco-terror is the coming trend, Felix.  You’re ahead of the curve there.  There’s plenty of global eco-trouble.  Enough for all of us to get terrored about.”

      “Yeah, but Buddhists?  Buddhists are harmless little pacifists in yellow robes!”

       Ramanujan sighed.  “Felix, I’m a Tamil.  Tamils, in Sri Lanka… we invented suicide bombing.  Us.  Because of the Buddhists.  You know how many Tamil refugees there are around the globe?  We’re everywhere now.  They scattered us like wedding rice.”

      “All us Americans are refugees,” said Felix.  “Except for the Native Americans.  They’re our internally displaced.”  Beneath the sheets, his stomach rumbled audibly.  “I guess it gets hairy after this… I don’t know how you’re gonna manage without me.”

       “I can do that,” said Ramanujan.

       “Not without me, I’m the hero,” said Felix.  “You’re my colorful foreign geek sidekick.”  He turned his head onto the crisp white pillow.  After a moment, he began to snore.

       Ramanujan lifted his cloudpod and framed the sleeper’s face.   “I’ve got you outnumbered, pal.  Bollywood’s bigger than Hollywood.  And that means I am the hero.  You’re the Yankee comic-relief.”

        The comic relief said nothing.

       “I’m the hero — and I’ve got problems twelve hundred years old that you think you can solve in one Presidential Administration.  You’re not this planet’s hero.   You’re not as young as you think you are.  You’re not as cute as you think you are.  And you’re sure as hell not very innocent.   I’m the center of this story, because I’m the technically literate guy.   You used to bear that huge burden; now you’re the sideshow, a colorful Gunga Din fundie hick.  You carry the water and you jump in the way of a bullet.”

        The life-support machines bleeped cheerily.

         “There’s some good news.  Twenty years ago you would have been twenty kinds of dead from this incident.  You’re alive, Felix.   We’re gonna patch your ruptured guts together with pure medical manpower, so you can swan off and become some embassy’s Cultural Officer.”

         A wet shadow slapped at the iron-barred window.  Surprised, Ramanujan whipped his pod around and