Month: July 2020

Categories
Narrative

A Matter of Digital Security

It had taken Jack all day to get Steffi’s phone set back up. Given how important one’s phone was in a lunar settlement — it was your wallet, your dining commons pass, your gym card, your keychain — being without it was a real pain in the keister. But with evidence that it had been hacked and someone had access to her contacts file, there wasn’t much else to do but reset it to factory settings. Then there was the problem of determining when the intrusion had occurred and finding a backup that predated it.

At least she’d been able to use her desktop computer in her office to call in lunch. The deliverybot had dropped it just outside her door, so having her phone down for the count didn’t mean having to go hungry. But it still left her more than a little shaken. If she, the head of IT, could have something as vital as her phone hacked, what did it say about security on everyone else’s devices?

Maybe she ought to look into the situation. Make some time to talk to Betty Margrave about a settlement-wide security assessment.

Now that Jack finally had her phone up and running, Steffi had to make final tweaks on all those things that never quite restored from a cloud backup.

As they were talking, she noticed a computer sitting on the counter. Not one of the big tower workstations the scientists used for number crunching when they didn’t need the real heavy iron down here. Just a little desktop box you might find in an administrative office.

“Where did that one come from?”

Jack looked it over. “Lou Corlin brought it down from the radio station offices. Said it picked up some particularly nasty malware from an e-mail, and he didn’t think he was up to cleaning it out.”

It took Steffi a moment to place the name, but as soon as she did, she remembered the dark-haired young man at the counter when she had brought the phone for Jack to look at. The kid was getting old enough that the distinctive thick eyebrows of a Chaffee were really getting noticeable.

The Admiral had already gone completely gray by the time Steffi met him, but she’d seen plenty of pictures of his younger days. And she’d hung out with Toni enough to be acquainted with Cather, even if he spent a lot more of his time with his buddies in EMS than with the JPL people.

Come to think of it, Lou’s expression had brightened noticeably when she’d mentioned Toni. Like he’d suddenly realized something important.

Maybe she’d better check in with Toni. Not necessarily mention Lou or anything, but just see what might be going on.

Categories
Narrative

A Dangerous Mystery

Chandler Armitage was really wondering whether he’d made a mistake in not telling Spruance Del Curtin to find someone back at home to get his ass out of whatever bear trap it had gotten caught in. But Sprue was his clone-brother, which made it harder to refuse.

A little texting back and forth had enabled Chandler to determine that Sprue was dealing with some statistical material that had really upset him. However, it was also becoming obvious that Sprue was acting almost entirely on intuition. He had no idea what the numbers in front of him were actually representing — and reading between the lines, it sounded very much like he wasn’t supposed to know.

Are you sure you really ought to be discussing this with me?

Probably not, but I know Dr. D won’t answer any questions. And you’re the only other person I know with a strong background in data processing and statistical analysis.

True. Are you where I could call you? I think this is something we may need to discuss in realtime.

Right now I’m in Dr. D’s office. I can hear her talking with someone in the department office, but she could come back here any time.

Now that definitely complicated matters. How long does she usually stay in the departmental offices?

Totally depends. Earlier today she was down at FSOT, dealing with some problem with their imaging systems. Apparently she had to spend the whole trip suited up so she wouldn’t have any contact with the commander and pilot of the suborbital hopper.

That’s getting pretty much standard. OTOH, if this isn’t super-urgent, it might be better to wait until I get back to SP tomorrow. Even if we have to talk through a moonglass window, it may be better to discuss this face to face.

I’ll see what I can manage.

Categories
Narrative

The Farm Report

Bill Hearne got home to find his wife hunched over a tablet, face pale and drawn. He sat down beside her. “What’s wrong, Alice?”

“The new USDA Farm Report just came in, and I don’t know which is worse, the statistical data or the verbal reports.” Alice tilted the tablet to let him see the columns of numbers, although he didn’t have enough context to really appreciate them.

Still, he made a show of skimming over them before admitting his own ignorance. “I’m not really all that current on agricultural matters, sweetheart. As busy as my own work keeps me these days…” He shook his head. “Although I thought this plague only affects humans.”

“Bill, you and I were both raised on farms. We know just what it takes to bring a crop in, to keep livestock.”

Now there was a truth. He’d been raised on a dairy farm north of Madison, while Alice had grown up on a wheat farm not far from Duluth. But while both of them had loved the wide-open country of their childhood, neither had been over-fond of the back-breaking work of farming, the white-knuckle vagaries of weather, and had sought careers that took them elsewhere: himself into the Air Force and then NASA, Alice into the life sciences and agronomy.

“Now consider what happens when a lot of the labor force starts falling sick. Crops don’t get planted or harvested, and worse, livestock isn’t getting taken care of. Sure, it’s a lot more automated than it was when we were kids growing up, going out every morning before breakfast to do our chores and still getting to school on time. But it still takes someone with a loader to fill up those automatic feeders, and if everyone on the farm is laid out flat with illness, what happens when those feeders run empty?”

Alice wasn’t a total stranger to livestock, even before she became Shepardsport’s Chief of Agriculture and unofficial county agent to all the outlying settlements with Zubrin hobby farms. Although her dad and uncle had raised wheat for sale, they’d always had a pig or two and a coop of chickens for the table. But it was a far cry from five hundred head of Holsteins waiting for their twice-daily milkings and concentrates feedings.

“That’s not good. I remember some winters we’d get snowed in so bad the milk truck couldn’t get out to us .We’d have to dump milk so we could keep milking. Otherwise the cows’d go dry on us.”

“Which means there are going to be whole herds of cattle all going dry at once. And that’s assuming they have access to pasture, like on your dad’s farm. A lot of the big dairy farms these days keep their cows inside and provide them with hay all the time. Even if they’re running robotic loaders, it’s only a matter of time before those things get wedged from one thing or another. If nobody’s around to reboot them, what happens then?”

She paused to let it sink in. “And then there’s the hog farms. I’ve got a report here from one of the big ones in Iowa. Ten thousand head of hogs, all in confinement buildings. Or there were when this started. By the time someone got out there, more than half the herd was dead of starvation. They’re not even sure how many died, because the stronger ones ate the weaker ones.”

Bill could believe it. He’d heard some horror stories when he was growing up, of neighbors savaged by an aggressive or hungry hog. And he’d hunted razorbacks with Braden Maitland, back in Texas before the Expulsions. “They’ll probably have to wipe that whole herd out. There’s no way it’ll be safe to try to fatten the survivors back up and try to take them to a slaughterhouse.”

“They might not have any choice. They may not have anything to feed them. Heck, from some of the things I’m reading, we may be looking at serious food shortages in the grocery stores.” She looked straight at him. “Not just like back in the Energy Wars, when you couldn’t always get fresh fruits from Chile in the winter. I’m talking the shelves being barren, without even the basics. And there’s not going to be a damned thing we can do about it up here. Sure, we’ve solved the problems we had right after the Expulsions, when our population doubled, and doubled again. But even with a surplus, it’s not going to be nearly enough to make up for all the food that’s been lost dirtside.”

Categories
Narrative

To Correlate the Contents of Our Consciousness

Spruance Del Curtin checked the life-support monitor, reassuring himself that the temperature in the room had not dropped, that oxygen and carbon dioxide levels remained nominal. Intellectually he knew that it was just nerves, yet he couldn’t shake the sense that the temperature in the room had dropped suddenly.

For the first time since he’d begun this project, he was genuinely frightened by what he was seeing. And while he knew he really ought to tell Dr. Doorne, he was hesitant to do so. Not so much because she would be angry with him as that she would be disappointed in him.

So he’d decided to text Chandler Armitage for advice. Although Chandler was a pilot-astronaut, and normally off-limits for non-pilots to initiate interaction with, Sprue had two good reasons to call upon him. Not only were they both clones of Alan Shepard, but there was also the matter of Chandler’s secondary astronaut specialty being data processing. And familiarity with handling the enormous amount of data involved in astronautics would help with just about any kind of data analysis.

Like the data sets he’d been sanitizing and preparing for analysis every day for the last how many days? Sometimes it felt like it was just yesterday Dr. Doorne had called him into her office for that special meeting, and at other times it seemed like he’d been at this chore forever and a day.

One thing was for certain — it had been long enough for his subconscious mind to start picking up patterns in the data. Correlations that were leaving him profoundly uncomfortable.

Although he wasn’t supposed to look back at old data, or to look ahead, he’d decided to take a quick peek and see if it confirmed the sense he was developing. If anything, what he saw was even worse.

There were three basic types of data coming through. Although he had no idea what exactly it represented — that was important in his ability to do this work, so he would not introduce unconscious bias into the data by paying more attention to material that fit his expectations — he noticed that all of a certain type tended to change together. Not necessarily in lockstep, but certainly the trends would graph as pretty much the same kinds of curves.

Until recently, those curves had been showing pretty steady slopes. But now every last one of them was showing rapid sharp changes. One kind of data was suddenly shooting upward, while another was plummeting like it were falling down a black hole, and the third was fluctuating wildly.

Whatever that data represented, it looked very much as if the system was destabilizing rapidly. And he would never have noticed it if he had been looking at datasets in isolation. It made him think about that quote from HP Lovecraft on that plaque at the entrance to the IT department, about the inability to correlate the contents of one’s mind. Sprue had always thought it was there because Reggie Waite was such a huge fan of Lovecraft and liked to put HPL mementos everywhere. But now Sprue was wondering if it was meant as a warning about the peril of how Big Data could bring together disparate facts to reveal dangerous truths about a system.

Categories
Narrative

No Night on the Town Today

There were some definite advantages to being a pilot-astronaut, Chandler Armitage decided. He liked being able to get around, in more ways than one.

However, right now a big chunk of that was pretty well negated by the current quarantine rules. In normal times he always looked forward to getting assigned a flight to Grissom City. Although pilot-astronauts were supposed to stay in the Roosa Barracks, the external habitat on Slayton Field, he could usually finagle a pass to the main settlement, enjoy at least a little of the night life.

Not all of it, because he sure as heck couldn’t pay tourist prices on a Navy officer’s budget. And while he was a silent partner in several business ventures, none of them were overwhelmingly lucrative, and being seen as too free a spender could result in awkward questions. But in general he could count on being able to pick up a pretty girl and show her a good time.

Not now, that was for certain. Heck, he couldn’t even go meet some of his old friends here in the Roosa Barracks. Nope, the rule now was if you weren’t in your lander, you were to stay in your assigned transit quarters. Meals would be brought by robot, and unless physical interaction was essential, all meetings were via teleconference.

Another guy might’ve taken a look around the Internet to see just how far Rule 34 would stretch. Chandler had discovered sometime in his teens that, once the allure of the forbidden wore off, smut got boring. For him, the thrill lay in the chase, in the winning rather than the having.

Pretty faces were a dime a dozen up here, especially in Tourist-Town, and there were a lot of women who seemed to think it was some kind of attainment to get laid by a pilot-astronaut. Sometimes he wondered how many of them would have guessed that they would’ve stood a far better chance of actually interesting him if they’d been a little stand-offish instead of throwing themselves at him like he were a water fountain in the middle of the Mojave.

But right now every last one of them was out of reach. The tourist trade was shut down — no tour operator was going to take the risk of launching, no matter how good their pre-flight quarantine procedures might be. The Indian Space Agency mess showed just how easy it was for a single commuting worker to transmit this virus, whether directly to one of the astronauts or via an intermediary contact with a support staff member who was staying on-site. And while some of the tourists who’d made it up here were stuck until return flights could be arranged for them, all those people were being confined to their transit quarters for the duration.

Which left him with damned little to do. There was only so long you could stare at stuff on a screen before you got sick and tired of it. And what exercise was possible in the confines of this tiny room got tedious too.

The ding of his phone’s text chime pulled him out of his thoughts. He retrieved his phone, read the lock screen. What was Spruance Del Curtin doing sending him a text right now? Not that the kid didn’t have lineage right, but what was so important that he should be the first person Sprue would contact?

Categories
Document

Back of the Beyond

One of the advantages of being on Farside is its isolation. Particularly in the early days of the settlement of the Solar System, Farside was almost completely shielded from human electromagnetic activity, making it a perfect location for telescopes intended to peer into deep space, and thus deep time. Although both the Far Side Optical Telescope (FSOT) and Far Side Radio Array (FSRA) have since been surpassed by telescopes that use the gravitic lensing effect of various celestial bodies, including the Sun itself, in their heyday they were the source of many career-making discoveries.

But Farside was distant in other ways. For those who were born on Earth, the fact that it was forever cut off from sight of the Mother World made it psychologically distant in a way that even Mars could not be, for all that Mars was much further away. This feature made it a place of exile, originally for those who’d displeased senior officials, but later for the astronaut clones who were no longer welcome in a society that was coming to reject its Cold War experiments.

And during the Great Outbreak, this isolation would play out in a multitude of ways, great and small. It was a form of safety, to be so far away from what was now sources of contagion. But it was also danger, to be so far away from help if something were to go wrong.

—- V. N. Petrov, The Psychology of Isolation, Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2088.

Categories
Narrative

We’ve Got Trouble

It didn’t take Lou Corlin long to decide that he’d made a mistake carrying Autumn Belfontaine’s computer down to Jack Lang’s work area. If Jack took one look at it and told Lou it was within his skills and fix it himself, Lou was not going to enjoy carrying it back.

However, he found Jack in a chatty mood for a change. He was a little unhappy about getting information fourth hand, and was seriously considering calling up to the newsroom to get Autumn’s first-hand description of events. On consideration, he decided that she was probably busy enough already, and it would be better if he only contact her if he couldn’t figure it out on his own.

Lou was about to go back to his own work when Steffi Roderick walked in. “Got a good one for you this time, Jack.”

She described the cryptic text she’d just gotten from an old friend over at Grissom City. “It’s not like Toni to send weird stuff like that. She’s a straightforward sort.”

She’s talking about Toni Hargreaves. Lou had to suppress an urge to smack his forehead. Why hadn’t he thought of her? Especially since she was considered one of the greatest white-hat hackers of all time, and was married to one of his clone-brothers.

Sure, she didn’t live steeped in the creche traditions of lineage-right the way everyone over here in Shepardsport did. But she was aware of it, and wouldn’t look askance at his approaching her.

On the other hand, any method he used to contact her would leave a record. Which meant he would need to be very careful how he phrased anything.

Categories
Narrative

The Digital Dungeon

A single computer’s cooling fan wasn’t that loud, but the big fans that cooled the rack servers produced a curtain of white noise. Here in the main Shepardsport server farm, surrounded by rank after rank of rack servers, someone could be talking a few feet away and Steffi might not even hear them.

Even the click of the KVM switch was muffled as she worked her way down the rack of blade servers. Normally this sort of thing would be handled by someone much lower than the head of IT. However, after the trouble they’d been having, the possibility that malware had gotten through their security systems again was alarming enough that she wanted to check things herself.

She was almost done with the rack when the text chime sounded on her phone. She started to reach for it, then checked herself. SMS was asynchronous and could wait until she got this rack of servers checked.

Finished with the task, she took a look at her messaging app. What was with this cryptic message from Toni Hargreaves? It wasn’t like her to write such an evasive message

Or was it from Toni? They’d been having some problems with spoofed texts of late. It wouldn’t be impossible to get someone’s contacts list and make it look like a message came from a trusted friend.

Steffi decided she’d better ask Jack. He was one of her best security guys, and would be able to tell if her phone had been compromised, or if the settlement’s SMS servers had been hacked.

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Categories
Narrative

The Information Race

Lou Corlin usually did an afternoon bench tech shift, after his air shift at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. Today, he’d switched with someone on the early morning shift who needed some extra time to study for an important exam. It meant he had to have his breakfast sent down here, but it would give him a head start on sounding out some people about the problem of locating Brenda’s friend without breaking any data security rules.

Except he’d no more than clocked in when he heard a familiar voice calling his name. There was Juss Forsythe, tool satchel over one shoulder and a computer under the other arm, walking along like he wasn’t even burdened. Maybe it wasn’t one of the big tower workstations, but Juss was carrying a desktop box like it was a cheap laptop.

“So what’ve you got today, Juss?” Lou hoped he didn’t sound too irritated.

“Apparently the news department’s getting a lot of hate mail, and someone’s getting pretty serious about it.” Juss set the computer on Lou’s workbench. “Autumn was cleaning out her inbox, and she accidentally opened an e-mail she shouldn’t have. It had an attachment that was apparently some kind of auto-running malware.”

Lou sucked in his breath, not caring that it made a whistle loud enough that the other guys would be able to hear it. “That’s bad. Especially considering that a modern e-mail client is supposed to block that sort of stuff.”

“We got it powered down before whatever it was running could infect the whole network. But I’d suggest you pull its WiFi antenna before you try to do any diagnostics.”

Lou looked down at the computer, then back to Juss. “Which assumes that I’m even going to try to do it myself. From what you’re talking about, I’m thinking I could get in over my head real fast.”

And kicking this problem upstairs would also give me an opportunity to talk to some of the senior techs about just what latitude I’d have in locating Brenda’s friend before I’d have to take the matter to Betty Margrave.