Crow - The Awakening (19 page)
Laurence smiled broadly as he held out his hand to the chief of operations of the chip fabrication plant. The COO clasped it and shook it enthusiastically. "Brad Finley. It is so good to finally meet you, Mr. Crow," the COO gushed exuberantly. "You have really pushed the boundaries of our plant."
Laurence nodded, smiling. "I just had to come tour the plant and see it for myself."
"I trust that you're happy with the batch of prototypes we sent you?" He ushered Laurence down the observation hall that was set up for just such tours. Laurence had visited many such factories before finally settling on this one and he could hardly believe his luck at matching the stolen DARPA technology to an actual order.
"Extremely. They are being tested as we speak," Laurence lied. He gave his best disarming smile, mimicking the energetic enthusiasm of the COO. This particular mission was for his real boss and he was indeed extremely happy at the progress of his investigation, so it wasn't a hard act to perform.
Large glass panes on either side of the hall presented an exhaustive view into the actual fabrication process of the chips as well as product manufacturing. "This is the prototype manufacturing wing of the factory. The mass production wing is the next building over but it isn't set up for tours as of yet," Brad stated. "We have just finished a complete upgrade of all our facilities to take advantage of 12 nanometer fabrication and we are already set up for 10 nanometer fabs," Brad smiled, obviously proud of their capabilities.
"That's just amazing. Every time you think there's a limit, you guys break through it and go even smaller." Laurence grinned. It really was impressive and Laurence had to admit to being jealous of their capabilities.
"Research never stops. And the benefit is all yours," Brad said excitedly.
"Where are the lithos for my project?" Laurence asked innocently as they walked down the long hall. To the left and right were a dizzying variety of shiny new production lines, most being operated by robotics. He noticed one or two technicians in full clean room garb monitoring various steps in the fabrication process but other than that everything appeared to be completely automated. The production lines appeared to be going full speed with movement everywhere from assembly lines, robotics, and conveyor belts busy transporting a variety of components to different manufacturing stations. Laurence wondered how much of it was for the sake of the tour and how much was actual production work.
"Most of it is digital projection printing but we do have some masks for parts of your project in our clean room files right over here." Brad pointed the way to their filing and server room at the end of the hall. The room itself wasn't part of the clean room environment but the filing cabinets held sealed boxes that stored the various masks they used in their circuit printing processes. Laurence followed, hands clasped behind him as he amicably played the part of the interested buyer.
"Venture capital is starting to roll in, so I just wanted to take a look at the production materials personally, if you don't mind," he said innocently as Brad opened the file cabinet and pulled out a sealed box containing the lithographic masks. They had a glass cover that allowed for visual inspection without having to open the box.
"That is something we encourage here. It is always good to walk a client through the process of constructing their product. This box contains the physical masks for your project. We can't open it, of course. Just remember, most of the masks are digital." Brad showed the box to Laurence.
"Of course. And this is the server where the project files are stored?" Laurence pointed to a row of server racks and the terminal that accessed them. They appeared state of the art and brand new.
"Yep," Brad beamed proudly. "This is the heart of our operation. If you notice, we have a complete halon fire control system and the building itself is fully constructed of completely fireproof materials. You're not going to find a safer center of operations anywhere.
"Offsite backups?" Laurence fingered a flashdrive in his pocket.
"Yes, certainly. Your project has some new changes that will be in the next backup which will be made this afternoon. But all revisions of your project are fully backed up." Brad went to the terminal and pulled up Steven's project files. "Nothing really changed in the actual function of the project, just some adjustments to make the next fab a bit more streamlined when we migrate from prototyping stage to full production." He pointed to the changes displayed on the screen.
"That's just wonderful." Laurence walked up behind him, looking over his shoulder at the screen. "I think this is going to be perfect." He smiled broadly as he patted Brad on the back. Brad grinned at him, obviously proud of their operation, then suddenly he felt woozy and his eyes rolled back as he sank to the floor. Laurence capped and pocketed his tiny toxin delivery device and stepped over Brad as the COO went into full cardiac arrest.
He deftly placed his flashdrive into the server port and retrieved the project file that was set up for Steven. With a few rapid keystrokes, Laurence sent a delete command to the backup server, then activated a destructive malware program that set up a virtual operating system in memory and repartitioned and deep-formatted all of the server and backup disks and media. It began writing to all their sectors over and over again perpetually while also wiping any volatile memory of all processes but that which the malware occupied. Once the destructive process was completed the malware was set to disable safeguards and continuously cycle the disk read-write heads until physical failure then delete itself from memory, leaving completely bricked systems. Satisfied with his success, Laurence tucked the box of lithographs in his briefcase and calmly walked out, making sure not to trip over Brad's body.
Steven sat back after an hour of solid coding, looking out the window at the meadow below. It was spring and flowers were starting to bloom, but it wasn't the same as he remembered before. His heart ached a little for days long gone and he heard hints of whispers of Asherah and the occasional giggle. Her presence was even stronger with him today. It never went away, even with the tea. But the tea did take the edge off. He fervently missed his tea and reminded himself not to forget to hit up James for more. The pain was distracting.
Sighing, Steven got back to work, hoping to get engrossed in the project enough to not think of his imaginary romance. Even with the tea, and knowing it was all a fantasy, he still missed her and the meadow terribly. He suspected his godparents even tried to set him up with dates, but it never quite worked out. None of the girls even remotely matched up to Asherah and Steven felt ruined by his fantastical love. How badly had the fantasy set him back when he couldn't even date? Two years of therapy still hadn't made a dent in that problem. So he focused on his school work and his search, and kicked that can farther down the road, hoping that time would be the main factor to his healing. He was furious with himself to have fallen this deeply for something so imaginary when every other aspect of his life was solidly rooted in science and fact.
Shaking his head, Steven leaned back into his work. Once he mapped out the junctures to the technology underneath the circuitry and the abstraction layers, writing drivers for it was trivial for him. Regardless, it was still some of the most advanced coding he had written. He was basically writing software that will run not just off the hardware, but under the hardware on layers of hardware that wasn't fully defined, all based on how the two meshed together. He had done something similar with some old Department of Defense chips that turned out to have Chinese backdoors hardcoded into them so this wasn't entirely new, even though what he was currently writing was way beyond anything he had seen before.
He tweaked his driver and application many times, recompiling and retesting, trying to get into the hardware underneath. It was a typical process of reverse engineering that he was so familiar with since his ten year old self had to modify drivers to overcome hardware flaws and allow him to connect to the internet. He was seeing hints of that same sort of process now. It required a high level of patience and brute tenacity that seemed to come natural to him.
After yet another recompile, the driver suddenly opened up an entirely different sort of wireless network with a bandwidth higher than his equipment could measure and seemingly with no limit. Steven sat back and held up his hands, surprised at the breadth of the results. "Wow." That was about all he could utter as he stared at the logs that documented the access to the hardware under the chips.
Steven pondered on the ramifications as he rewrote part of his code to exploit that network. The flood of data coming in was extreme and he had to slow it down and filter it to keep his computer from completely choking on it. At his fingertips was a network that surpassed any nonphysical network he'd ever experienced before. He worked the driver to explore the processing capabilities, and suddenly his powerful server configuration was completely eclipsed by the tremendous computing power he had unleashed by accessing the mysterious technology. He went with it and reduced the filters to find the balance between what his hardware could physically handle and more importantly what he himself could handle.
The new network was a complete mystery to him. It didn't use any of the wireless technology he had become so familiar with. In fact, it didn't even use radio waves at all. He was at a loss as to just what it was. The only thing he knew was that it worked and it was phenomenal. There seemed to be no upper limit to it. At one time, Steven had found advanced research on quantum entanglement during his online explorations and even wrote a report on quantum entanglement based on the limited published articles for one of his classes, and he wondered if what he was seeing was something like that. In short, it was the entanglement of two atomic particles across vast distances where what happens to one particle is mirrored by its entangled partner.
As the changes to his software compiled, Steven started mapping what he could access currently. The map grew and grew, touching nearly every computer and computing device worldwide, regardless of whether it was on or off. His mouth went dry. His own networking had already slipped underneath much of the common infrastructure out there. But it did so by taking advantage of parts of the circuitry that he was now finding out were secondary to their primary purpose. He had been exploiting properties of this secret circuitry all this time and didn't even know it. He was rewriting his driver even as it was compiling on previous revisions to explore even more of the network.
Using the entanglement network as a sort of bridge, Steven pulled up several devices that were connected, including smartphones. He listened in on ambient sounds as he accessed phones that were just sitting in purses, and followed conversations of phones actively in use. A few of those conversations made him blush and he moved on quickly. He was even able to explore countless texts, not just in the phones, but in the texting servers themselves. It seemed nothing was denied to him now, and the power of complete and unfettered access scared him. He already had extensive access and thought he was the king of the pile. But this new power of access humbled him.
The addressing was completely different from what Steven was used to and as he worked to reverse engineer it, it dawned on him that the deeper parts of the hidden circuitry didn't run binary code, but a form of ternary code. Binary was bits of information that were simple ones and zeros. Ternary code added a third bit to that and with a variable value as well. But this seemed to go beyond even that. The first and second bit were variable as well. Not just ones and zeros but the entire spectrum of numbers. He rewrote part of his driver to reside within the abstraction layer of the chip to translate the ternary code into binary code as best as it could and suddenly the technology opened up to him even more. With refining, accounting for just a fraction of the infinite levels of variations these bits could adopt, Steven was able to see and map vast data streams from on and off Earth. He had to customize his software to interpret those data streams and spent much of the afternoon programming just on that.
A section of the data streams seemed to come from much farther away. He focused on those and was able to pull a video out of the millions of streams that were flooding in. His jaw dropped as he watched the video. It was like watching through the eyes of a person. This person appeared to be walking down a very modern looking hallway and entered into a vast room that was so big he couldn't see the opposite side. Within the room were hundreds of large vehicles that looked like naval troop carriers, except they didn't look like anything he had seen before. As he leaned closer to see better, the stream suddenly ended. He examined the stream and it appeared to have shifted and he lost it in the jumble. He pulled up another stream and saw what appeared to be a detention cell. In it were a couple who were sitting at a table eating dinner. They looked very much like his parents in the security video, but the details were much clearer. A hand reached out and put a pitcher of liquid on the table, then the view turned and left the room before that stream also blinked out.
Steven sat there for some time, replaying the video he captured from that stream over and over. He was dumbfounded by what he saw. The first part looked like something the military would put together, but was obviously beyond anything that has been published or even hidden away on the servers he had previously visited. But the second part looked so much like his parents that he was sure he had found them. He tried for a long time to recapture that stream to get more but was unable to get it back. His parents, alive, today. It looked like they were incarcerated somewhere, but otherwise healthy.
Steven felt a tingle on the back of his neck, knowing that he had made a significant discovery. He started to get up but a wave of vertigo forced him back down. Another astonishing breakthrough with regards to his parents and totally by accident. It was starting to sink in, and he sat there for a long time, trembling, looping the video over and over again. He remembered the other videos he had stumbled upon and how he felt then. With a shock he remembered Asherah there as well, and he tried to suppress that recollection as his heart ached again. He refused to let that overshadow his thrill at finding his parents. This time it wasn't some old security tape, but a mysterious video that had all the earmarks of being live. He felt it in his gut. His parents were alive and his resolve to find them and rescue them exploded and consumed him. Someone had taken them and were holding them and he didn't care who they were. He was going to make them suffer for what they had done.
