Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (12 page)

Vienna waited patiently
as her facial scan was completed, then stepped off the main elevator onto the sixth sub floor, the lowest level in Building 213. And the most secure. Every time the doors opened onto the GIPETTO foyer, she felt a rush of emotions. Today was no different.

Sub six looked and smelled new. The floors were black polycarbonate, the walls clad in stainless steel panels. All the lighting was LED and subdued. The entire sub six level was circular with a wide perimeter area filled with chrome workstations and wide-screen monitors. At the center of the complex, surrounded floor to ceiling in bulletproof Lexan glass that was ten inches thick, sat the power behind GIPETTO. An Avion supercomputer, one of only three in operation on the planet.

Vienna stepped up to the transparent security surround. She could feel the hum of the Avion resonate throughout the walls and through her feet. Her experience with custom-built computers taught her that the biggest challenge with these beasts was heat. The Avion had the processing power of a million personal computers, but also seemed to generate the heat output of a small nuclear power plant. The actual processor unit, about the size of a car engine, was immersed in liquid nitrogen to keep it from melting down into a lump of molten silicon. To keep the routing of cables as short as possible, the cooling tower ran up the middle of the computer system with the Avion’s countless memory banks wrapped around the periphery. Vienna often remarked, that to the uninitiated, an Avion looked like a rocket ship preparing to launch. The wisps of nitrogen gas occasionally escaping from the cooling towers only added to the illusion.

Avion engineers had explained to the GIPETTO team that the thick bulletproof Lexan shield that surrounded the core was a required safety precaution. If the cooling system ever broke down, and the numerous failsafe devices were defeated, the sudden rise in temperature could cause the Avion to explode. A highly unlikely event. Vienna was convinced that the wall of Lexan was only there for looks, and added to the glossy high-tech veneer of the system. As well as the cost. She guessed concrete would be significantly cheaper, but not nearly as… well, sexy. If that was a term that applied to supercomputers.

Over five years ago the GIPETTO project had begun with a fateful meeting at Langley that included the Director of Science and Technology, and several Joint Chiefs of Staff including the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the presidents close friend, Admiral, James Tripplehorn, the Chief of Naval Operations. Vienna had asked for the meeting through Portman. It was a last ditch effort to save Division 213, and she was as nervous as a first-grader.

Portman was new and unfamiliar with the CIA’s complex structure but the brief demonstration that Vienna had given him, had him hooked. He agreed to fight for support for her project. But she had to convince the people who would sign the checks. The project was estimated then to come in under two hundred million dollars. The final bill was over four hundred and fifty.

In the mid nineties the Secretary of Defense decided that all satellite recon development would be centralized with a new division in Washington called National Imagery and Mapping (NIM), consolidating several projects being run all over the intelligence community. No one was happy. These departments were feudal and territorial and resisted giving up control and very generous budgets. The CIA had their own satellite recon program, started back in the 50’s. The Department of Defense had developed a program specialized in tracking submarines. There was even a domestic unit monitoring suspicious activity on U.S. soil. Now all of this work and technology would be brought under one umbrella. Thousands of jobs would be lost and the knives were out.

On the day before the presentation, Portman and her had gone over the material several times. They had budgets in place and locked in supplier arrangements. Her team had carefully mapped out the intelligence community’s needs. But key to the meeting was a video that would stun them all.

“This will shake up the military. I can’t wait to see their faces,” commented Portman, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. Vienna agreed. Seeing a mocked-up demonstration, weeks before, was like a personal battery recharge. “Make sure,” he added, “that you tell the Hubble story. That will resonate with them.”

She remembered how the Hubble story was the seed for GIPPETO. Most Americans knew that the Hubble satellite was launched into orbit in 1990 with high expectations. The Hubble was a powerful space telescope that would reveal the mysteries of the universe. Problem was it couldn’t be focused. Engineers had made an error and the lens had been improperly ground. The Hubble telescope was now a multimillion dollar piece of useless space junk. But programmers on the ground came up with an idea. What if they wrote a new program that took the signal from the Hubble and then distorted the image back to correction? They could create a workaround.

The program was so successful they were able to get useable results from the telescope, enough in fact to encourage further investment, which resulted in additional repairs made to the lens while in orbit. The end result of these workarounds was an incredibly powerful tool that changed the way scientists look at the universe.

Vienna loved that story because as a developer she had worked on several programs where they had used workarounds to save critical projects. Working on the spy satellite program at Langley, she quickly became aware of the limitations of satellite photography and how valuable workarounds could be to American security.

Most spy satellites were built and launched in the eighties, so the technology wasn’t state-of-the-art by any stretch of the imagination. Vienna’s group worked specifically on enhancement techniques. Their challenge was to increase the contrast of pictures taken in bad lighting or shot through dense cloud cover. They developed software that dramatically improved the quality of black and white images. Vienna’s team got a reputation for turning images of shapeless gray lumps into highly useable intelligence.

The biggest stumbling block to getting better recon was limitations on computer power. Everyone on their team knew what could be accomplished if they had more power, how they could jump ahead of other countries if they could speed up processing a hundred or a thousand times.

Vienna also discovered that a big part of the problem wasn’t just computers. It was people. America’s first line of defense was essentially an army of intelligence clerks pouring over hundreds of photo maps taken every day looking for clues to troop and equipment movements, new construction of missile launchers, or other suspicious behavior by our enemies. Human error was a bigger issue than out-of-date cameras. So she decided to do something about that problem as well.

Vienna enlisted the aid of a dozen people on staff who volunteered to give up personal time to create a program that she hoped would revolutionize how the US monitored recon imagery.

The first problem they attacked was the low resolution of the cameras on the existing satellites. Using a workaround, they developed a trick where they took more images with less resolution in a shorter period of time. Because the cameras weren’t working as hard, they could take pictures faster. Then a computer program combined these images, overlaying the results, and used the existing information to calculate missing detail. The result was a high definition picture with far better clarity and detail.

The second workaround involved using computers to calculate color information about the terrain. All satellite imagery is black and white. Vienna’s team developed a program that turned the pictures into color making them easier to read. Color added something else no one predicted. Impact. The color images were simply more powerful and important details that had little meaning in black and white now seemed to jump right off the screen.

The third breakthrough involved using two shots of the same small scene taken in quick succession. Computers then calculated the three-dimensional qualities of each image. Now, the viewer could see subtle differences in height and shape and could rotate the images to understand elevations. The three-dimensional quality of the intel also increased the ability of people scanning the images to make out small changes by identifying critical details better, like how camouflage material might match the color of the background of the terrain, but rarely the shape. These new images were now able to reveal equipment intentionally covered to prevent overhead surveillance.

The fourth development was the most significant. One of the programmers had worked on animation in the past and understood the concept of
inbetweening
. In classic animation, a character artist only draws the main poses. One image might show a soldier with his hands in the air, another with his hands at his sides. The inbetweener would then come along and draw all the movements between the two so that the final action would be smooth and complete.

Computers today do most of the fill-in work eliminating thousands of hours of grunt work. What if they could do the same with the photo imagery? They took several snapshots over time where a tank was moving across a landscape. These were enhanced still images. Viewing them, a recon analyst had limited sense of movement or speed and only a rough idea of direction. The software Med’s team developed took the frozen images and added inbetweens that the computers calculated based on the differences between each stills. The final output was a full-motion video with the tank rolling across the landscape. Even the developers on the team were shocked by the results. Anyone watching could now clearly understand the speed of movement and the direction. The program also accurately re-calculated the details and the shadows for each inbetween frame as the object moved. Viewers of the video could even see the tank rise and fall as it maneuvered over the uneven terrain.

When Portman saw the demo video, he knew they had something of value, something that would keep Division 213 from being mothballed. He told Vienna she was the only one who could intelligently present the results. It would be her first time at the White House.

That morning Vienna went over her notes one last time before being picked up by the Secret Service. She had taken one last look in the mirror and frowned. She had always been aware that her looks held her back. She classified herself as short, shapeless and unfashionable. She often cut her own hair because she couldn’t be bothered wasting time in a hair salon, bored by the latest celebrity gossip. She wore thick glasses, the result of too many years staring at lines of dense code on a computer screen. She was sometimes tempted to get corrective laser surgery, but never found the time. Mostly, she just didn’t care.

Vienna was aware of her assets though. She knew she was bright. In meetings she often provided answers before the question was fully out of a colleague’s mouth, and she laughed at jokes before the punch line was delivered. Sometimes she felt like she was living her life a few seconds ahead of everyone else. And she had a brain wired to write code. She lived, slept and dreamt code. She saw every action in life as a problem that had a coded solution.

Well, maybe not everything. Vienna was certain she could fix Washington traffic if given a few months, but her personal life stubbornly refused to comply with
Programming Guidelines 101.
People were annoyingly unpredictable.

Frank Scammel was one example. He drove much of the real-world simulation work they did to make those moving tanks look so real. But he was a failed human being in all other respects. People on her team told Vienna that Frank made their skin crawl. How could you compute that? Thankfully he had stayed to himself most of the time, locked alone in his messy little graphics lab.

Vienna touched the shiny surface of the clear plastic wall that enclosed the Avion then walked a few steps along the curved barrier. She came to the port, Avion’s technical term for the secure entry door into the interior of the system, made of the same clear shatterproof material. She placed her hand on a steel panel that read her fingerprints. She waited for several heartbeats then the door sighed and clicked.

She stepped inside. The air, as usual, was cooler inside the Lexan-shielded enclosure; more air conditioning applied to the problem of too much heat generation. Even the dark panels that held the memory chips had blasts of cooled air directed at them by shaped blowers higher up in the ceiling. The hum was louder inside, and the low thrum of the nitrogen pumps seeming more visceral than audible. Some people found the Avion’s bass note thrilling — others were vaguely alarmed by it. To Vienna the sound seemed to signal something ominous. But she ignored the feeling. GIPETTO was her baby now. Their fates were indistinguishable.

At the summation of the White House presentation, she had shown the final demonstration video and she could tell by the faces of the participants they were hypnotized by the stunning 3D imagery, the detail of the terrain and the thrill of seeing important events in what appeared to be real time. During questions, Admiral Tripplehorn asked about submarines reconnaissance and Vienna proved she was one step ahead of him. She showed a second video, this one of enemy subs, clearly visible as they tracked along a submerged shelf over a mile under the Baltic Sea. He was stunned. This was a decade ahead of anything the Navy had.

The Chief of Staffs approved the initial budget within a few weeks. Portman took a lot of credit for the project, but that was part of the arrangement. If it failed, Vienna would have nothing anyway. She would be back to programming in the bowels of Langley. If successful, Portman would secretly champion the new project. Five years later, there was still work to do. More improvements to implement. There were still some minor bugs. Just small glitches that would be worked out over time.