Freedom Incorporated (11 page)

Taking another
sip, Jen daydreamed about what they could do if
the hack worked
. It was bigger than
anything they would have dreamed of tackling a year ago, even a
month ago. Accessing the UniForce network was the ultimate prize
for everyone struggling to restore some measure of
freedom
to the unwittingly
oppressed
. She closed her eyes and let the
caffeine numb the dull throb in her head.
How did we ever let it get to this?
She demanded the question of nobody in particular, and she
received no reply.
How did we fuck up so
badly?
She remembered the stories her
grandfather had told.
He was right when he
said the ‘good old days’. Anything would be better than
this.
She wished she could burn the whole
system to the ground and watch something better raise like a
phoenix from the ashes.
If only we
could.
She tensed, not yet ready to trust
Cookie’s judgement wholeheartedly.
But
i
f anybody finds out…
She swallowed hard.
Then we’ll be
totally fucked.

“
You tired?”
Samantha crawled onto the couch and sat looking at her friend,
leaving Cookie to work in peace for a change.

Jen nodded. “Yeah. I’ve
been tired for… God I don’t know, years I think.”

“
That’s not
what I meant.”

Jen smiled. “Yes it
was.”

Samantha
gathered her long black hair, secured it with a plasmaband at the
back of her head, and then smoothed a few wispy strays behind her
ears. Her grandparents were Korean and they’d given her a legacy of
health and probable longevity
,
though she nearly puked whenever she
visited them. She’d never acquired a taste for their prized gimchi.
Fermented cabbage had about the same appeal as a bowl full of shit
as far as Samantha was concerned.

Jen watched
her. She knew everything about Samantha; she was in her earliest
memories
.
She knew
her well enough to complete her sentences.
T
hey’d grown up together, gone to
school and university together, and now they lived in the same
apartment together. And they certainly shared the dedication to
change the world.

“
Do you think
we can win?” Samantha asked. For once, her eternal spring of energy
had run dry. It’d been a busy few days.

Jen frowned. “Win? It’s
not a game.”

“
You know what
I mean. Do you think we can pull this off?”

“
I think we
have a good shot at getting
inside
their network.” Jen stifled a sigh that badly
needed to come out. “And if the world owes us a miracle we
might
even disrupt
Echelon, even if it’s only for a minute.
Hell
…
seconds would
make me happy.” The sigh escaped. “But it’s going to take more than
that to effect any real change.”

Samantha sensed a little
of what Jen was feeling and said, “Stranger things have happened.
It’s not impossible.”

Jen nodded. “I know,
that’s what scares me. What if we bring Echelon down? What
then?”

“
Then we’ve
won.”

“
Is that
winning?”

Samantha paused briefly
before answering. “Yes, I suppose it is. You’re thinking too large.
You shouldn’t think of everything you need to win the war, just
what you need to win the battle.”

“
Yeah but
if
we’re
not
prepared you can bet
they
will be.” Jen had never felt more
motivated in her life. She could almost smell the sweet dew of a
significant win – something to prove to the world that the
resistance wasn’t dead.
Not yet
anyway.
And she silently vowed that while
she was alive the resistance would never die.

She
remembered reading a textbook account of how
Echelon had evolved. It had started innocent
ly
enough; most people had barely known
of its existence. It began with the birth of the original Internet
– back when it was slow and people still connected
with
modems. She smiled at
the thought.
Imagine that,
modems!
She’d seen one on a trip to a
science museum with her grandfather when she
was
a little girl
.
There was
an
exhibit on display with real, functioning modems
connecting
two computers.
It was mind boggling to think how patient everybody
must
’ve
been,
waiting for downloads from constipated servers through technology
that made her toaster look sophisticated. She’d read accounts of
what they’d used back then: twisted pair wires, coaxial cable,
fibre optic glass tubes and microwave dishes. All primitive.
Nothing that came close to the nano-technology she’d grown up
with.

It pained her
to think about
Echelon.
How easy it would’ve been to stop back then! But that’s the
way things work, isn’t it
?
P
eople are
too busy running their lives to worry about
things like that
.
The society that
had
crawled out of the twentieth century was woefully unprepared
for the technology it could invent.
Ha!
Her mind sneered.
We’re no more prepared for it
today.
When she thought about it, Homo
sapiens were a slow-witted species, especially in groups – the more
there were, the stupider they got. In the year 2000, Echelon merely
scanned e-mail transmission
s
and international
communications
for
a
preset list of words and phrases that flagged potentially
suspicious activity. But the fledgling technology gathered more
data than it could thoroughly scan. The
system was more useful for
statistical
analysis
of
communication channels than anything else.

It sent a
shiver down Jen’s spine.
But it evolved
quickly and turned sinister.
Project Echelon
doubled in power and sophistication every six months, keeping
abreast of the technological horsepower of the times.
Primitive but deadly.
She
furrowed her brow and thought,
Couldn’t
people see it was a weapon
?
D
eadlier
than
bullets
in
the wrong hands?
It infuriated
her.
I guess what they say is
true – evil will flourish if good people do
nothing.

And so
Echelon, a Frankenstein’s monster,
had
been
born.

Jen gritted
her teeth.
Well I’m not going to stand by.
Not anymore
. She was determined to rebel
against the regime tha
t
had
risen during the chaotic corporate dive
for power during the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Echelon had
quickly set freedom of speech in its sights. The arguments were all
the same. We’ll only use it against terrorists, so what did you
have to fear? Why are you so opposed to it? Do you have something
to hide? But then they broadened the definition of terrorism,
adding more crimes to the list. Soon carjacking and assault were
also crimes of terror. The system didn’t care; it happily chewed on
and spat out carjackers with as much zeal as it went after
potential suicide bombers. Then the ‘50s saw the rise of Internet
Mark 4, the nano-net, which used the first generation of stable
quantum
products
.
But project Echelon had infiltrated the
nano-net
before they’d even switched
it on, strangling the communication channels with its ever-present
ear.

And
Echelon
’s sphere of influence
expanded. After targeting the major felonies, the
authorities used it to clamp down on minor crime. They used video
surveillance systems and visual recognition algorithms to track
paedophiles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
But the paedophiles weren’t enough, were
they?
They were just a pilot group;
Echelon’s creators had always had much grander things in mind.
Within two months they’d ascertained the new Echelon could cope
with the increased influx of data and they expanded the project to
include paroled prisoners, then to suspects, then to every member
of society. Echelon catalogued and kept track of everyone that had
ever shown his or her face in public. Everyone who had said
something within range of Echelon
’s
microphones, picked up a telephone
handset, or spoken to their loved ones on a videophone had had
their 5,326 characteristic voice-points permanently logged in the
belly of the beast. But the microchips were the icing on the cake.
They branded people like cattle and kept them under control with an
electronic web of needles. Purse-snatchers, jaywalkers and
teenagers who spat chewing gum on the pavement – Echelon flagged
them all, raised an alarm, and stamped the crimes on their
permanently record. Society no longer tolerated… anything. Society
demanded perfection, pure harmony.

Jen shivered despite the
mid-September heat.

It was
only a
matter of
time
before
Echelon
made the transition to the
private
sector. The governments couldn’t keep something
that valuable
away
from the greedy corporate giants forever. There wasn’t a
giga-corporation on the planet that didn’t drool and rub its hands
together in glee at the thought of controlling it. They were like
vultures circling a dying beast, their nervous eyes darting from
each other to the carcass-to-be. A co-operative of governments had
jointly owned and operated the project, but they were all weakening
at the knees. Unified Enforcement had simply petitioned the
hardest. Already being in the law enforcement business, UniForce
could claim they had a legitimate use for the system. The fact that
they
’
d always
intended to sublet time to other corporations for marketing
purposes was irrelevant. Echelon was a law enforcement organism so
the governments responsible for it sold it to a law-enforcement
multinational.

They’d lapsed
into an uncomfortable silence, unusual for the pair of
chatterboxes. Samantha
was
tugg
ing
at the fraying sleeve of her pyjamas and Jen was nursing her
empty mug.

Cookie gasped.

“
What?”
Samantha was glad for the distraction.

His jaw hung slack and,
for once, he was incapable of speech; the present task totally
engaged his brain. His fingers were a blur of activity. No matter
how archaic it felt to stick stubbornly to a keyboard, Cookie
refused to get implants; they just felt too unnatural. Samantha
approved.

“
What is it?”
Jen echoed Samantha’s question.

“
I’m
in.”

“
What?” Jen
and Samantha leapt to his side, fixing their gaze on his
screen.

“
No, wait…” He
held his breath, inwardly swearing at the false alarm. “Sorry, I
just got jittery. I’m through another layer. This thing’s like an
onion, they sure as hell don’t want anybody in there.”

Jen visibly sagged. “Want
a cookie, Cookie?”

“
Yeah, baby.”
He stopped what he was doing, blinked, and removed his glasses to
rub feeling back into his eyelids. A thin crust had formed over his
corneas
and
it hurt
to moisten them again. “Hey, Samantha, you think you could get me
some eye
drops?”

“
Sure.”
Samantha knew better than to argue with him. She’d tried dozens of
times to stop him from abusing his body, but he pigheadedly refused
to change his habits. Eventually she’d given up trying.

Jen brought the tray of
chocolate biscuits and offered them around while Samantha
administered the saline drops to David’s swollen eyes. “Oh, and
your coffee’s gone cold.”

“
Oh yeah, I
forgot about that.” He pushed back from the computer. “Man, I gotta
take a break, this stint’s killing me.” He munched on a biscuit and
skulled his coffee.

“
Can you leave
it where it is?” Samantha was hoping he’d take a break, at least
until morning. She planned to deactivate his alarm after he fell
asleep so he could get some decent sleep for a change.

Cookie creased
his forehead and brushed the crumbs from his lap onto the carpet.
“I think so; just let me activate a prop.” He’d already explained
to them the necessity of such measures. Without a prop program the
UG7-rated network would self-heal and all the holes Cookie had
laboured to bore into the electronic defences
would
be gone
by
morning. Worse, a setback like that would break Cookie’s spirit.
He’d already invested more than fifty hours in the hack. The team
that had devised the UG7 protocols certainly hadn’t intend for
anybody to compromise their network alone. All the previous
successful UG7 hacks had required a whole team
of hackers –
all with implants – and a
disgruntled system administrator leading the charge.