Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (23 page)

“I don’t think she can hear you,” Aaron says, turning her and positioning himself on his knees, a supplicant to polished hips of the eternal goddess.

“Say it louder.”

“K-Katy?” Alicia tries again. She scarcely has time to notice Aaron lining up to slip it in from behind, when a massive and grotesque winged
lizard-form blocks all light in the doorway, bloody claws hold Katy’s naked dangling limbs.

“Looking for something?” The voice
booms from polished marble walls. “Maybe it was this?” A clawed hand the size of a mini-fridge throws something at them. It is bloody and lands in the water with a splash, trailing a mop of brown hair. It floats and rolls over, revealing Katy’s face, which regards them with maniacal gleam as it bobs in the tub.

“Oopsie,” the grinning face says in the voice of a mechanized doll.
The eyeballs roll in opposite directions as it begins to sink. Scarlet billows spread.

Alicia and Aaron scream in chorus, shoot to their feet holding one another. The winged monster throws the headless body forcefully and both go down shrieking. In two steps he is on them, gripping the breath from their lungs with
leathery hands.

“This won’t be fun, but it must be done.”

“Oh please no,” Alicia squeaks. Her eyes roll wildly. Her boobs ooze out between hard claw-tipped fingers.

“It was you,” the leather-skinned dragon bellows, his head inches from their terrified eyes
, “who pursued my mate for centuries, who slew her and caused her body to be rendered into fragments. It is you who wrongly accused her, and with your cohorts brought her great pain and fear. It was you who caused her to hide in the one place I am forbidden to be. But now I am here and you shall feel my wrath and die like the scum you are. Yes, you foolishly descended among humans, wingless for your ego-rush, now comes your moment of penance!”

The rest of the scene is neither quick nor pretty.
Fearful voices rise in pleading anguish, begging for mercy and invoking many deities as perfect bodies are shredded into offal. They are not allowed to die until the very last.

When all is silence and the hot tub resembles a festive party-size
paella
, the leathery beast throws three peeled skeletons onto the large circular bed, crashes through a panoramic ocean-view window, lifts its wings to the heavens, and blinks out of sight.

“Stand down, Reaper Six.” The terse command from two thousand miles distant is clear in Exley’s headset.

In an air-conditioned trailer at Creech Air Force Base
in Clark County, Nevada, RPV pilot Maj. William Exley surveys a bank of video screens splashed with aerial views of the Pentagon complex and the bright Potomac. To the left in his view are the measured ranks of crosses and headstones of Arlington National Cemetery, where Exley’s father and more than a few fellow pilots lie in eternal silence. Colorful as a computer game, Exley’s video console lays out the MQ-9 Reaper’s full avionics, dials, readouts, directional vectors, a winking, rippling, ever-changing information stream he needs to keep his ship on mission. And everything required to bring down hell fire on a target anywhere on Earth with a few computer inputs.

In a command chair
at Exley’s right hand, Sensor Operator Veronica duLac uses her joystick to orient the distant drone’s camera turret. The system allows her to position cameras so powerful that from the current mission altitude of 23,000 feet she can tell if someone on the ground needs a haircut. Exley and duLac frequently work shifts together, through the exchange of words and gestures bring quiet competence to every mission. A single word, a turn of the head, the flick of a finger will do. While Exley is more talkative, Veronica says little during her rotation that is not directly related to tasks at hand. Among other aspects of each mission, her jobs are to control the Synthetic Aperture Radar and nose camera, Inertial and GPS nav systems, the Omni Antenna, the Ku-Band Satcom system.

“Roger that, Reaper Six standing down.” Exley steps through the disarm checklist, brings the onboard missile back to Alert status. Although the warhead he’d carefully disarmed is a mere 13-pound anti-personnel bomb, Exley wills himself to relax. It doesn’t always come. Having flown RPV missions all over the world in the last eighteen months, he has never
experienced anything like this, holding in Veronica’s bombsights the most sacrosanct citadel in all the world’s military, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, the United States Pentagon.

To say that an RPV crew, able to be home with family after each rotation at the controls has it easy
, is to mistake human nature. These remote-control vehicle jockeys who launch deadly missile attacks from the safety of stateside locations suffer the same psychological stresses as their comrades in fighter cockpits or battlefield positions. Exley and duLac are on this patrol detail specifically because of their remarkable coordination, and their ability to shake off stress.

For Exley,
ridding himself of stress usually comes with the help of a ten-mile run after he leaves the base. DuLac loves the game of racquetball, will spend two hours on the courts playing cutthroat, her favorite game. Often invincible against men, many call her ‘Ronnie Rollout’ to her face. Less-charitable males use the term ‘Ronnie Rollover’ when her sleek back is turned.

In a way, remote piloting is tougher than
the life of a fighter pilot, who releases potent munitions and clears the area, doesn’t see the consequences of his drop. But when an RPV fires on a target, the remote pilot must watch the device all the way to detonation. Pilots and sensor operators agree the experience is vivid and uncommonly personal. The small human forms in the fast-expanding image remain in the mind for a long time, humans completely unaware of the fate that hurries down from on high. Humans who cease to exist when the view goes blackscreen. Some crew remark it’s akin to living inside a video game, where the blood is real.

I
t is no surprise that Exley, his bird’s monitors trained unblinking on the Pentagon, is first to call into his headset that the courtyard intruder is back. His curt description is repeated up and down the commlink.
The size of a truck, with wings.
Moments later he adds that another figure is present, a woman, small beside the dragon-like form. Exley and duLac allow the merest flicker of a glance between them.

Exley’s job is not to question orders, he trusts his chain of command for that. His job is to carry them out. Though Exley is trained and prepared for it, he feels an overhang of dread when contemplating what his duty could
now include: blowing an unarmed U.S. citizen to Kingdom come.

He is also prepared, if and when so ordered, to arm and fire another of the missiles Reaper Six
can carry. Although much more compact, Reaper’s B63G guided bomb in the most significant ways rivals the device detonated on the morning of August 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, Japan.

Beside him in the dimly-lit operations cockpit, Veronica returns her MTS ball to target autotrac. Their eyes meet briefly
, reach agreement. Exley sets the controls to maintain mission altitude, turns Reaper Six into a loiter orbit above the distant target, all systems nominal, awaiting orders.

FBI Special Agent Sonia Mhyro parks at a rest stop outside Ypsilanti, Michigan. Rain spatters her windshield, she turns the wipers off. Driving a Bureau vehicle to Ann Arbor to lead a training session on the latest rollouts of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification program, she’s in an emergency chat with field agents on priority assignment. Originally attached to the NGI system’s 2012 pilot program with the state of Michigan, Mhyro trains agents on proper use of the Universal Face Workstation, designed to enable law enforcement agencies to conduct automated photographic matches across mass databases.

The NGI pilot program had spread quickly to Hawaii, Maryland, South Carolina, Ohio and New Mexico, now involves the entire country. Operational-
grade results surfaced early in the trial, actionable tracking of persons of interest and key arrests are on record, included now as case studies in Mhyro’s instructional materials. The Facial Recognition component of the NGI pilot provided rapid searches of 13 million criminal mug shot photos. Now, databases accessible to NGI software include passport photos, state driver’s licenses, airport and population center security cameras, and social media sites numbering in the dozens.

Mhyro pulls the swivel-mounted laptop toward her. Images of a young woman in the company of a hulking
fugitive from a nightmare. The woman’s small body twists futilely in the creature’s grip, terror stamped on every move. Mhyro knows one of these agents socially, thinks for a moment that someone is messing with her. But careful, best to play it straight. If it’s a gag, she’ll have to put up with it. Duty and professionalism first, however macabre it seems.

ch867
: you should have the images

mhymhy
: I see them - is this a movie set?

ch867
: security camera, pentagon courtyard, see timestamp and camera id it’s on your list

mhymhy
: how old you think she is, 20?

69vw
: 16-23 start searching DMV records

mhymhy
: any particular state?

ch867
: all states - she came in through the bathroom window – then run passport office

69vw
: if no hits use school yearbooks, HS and university

mhymhy
: I’d start with california.

ch867
: ??

mhymhy
: cali girls have this look. what is this goddess culture thing on her shirt?

69wv
: k. start from calif

ch867
: check facebook twitter pinterest bridal registries, tweo, imvu, secondlife, farmville

69vw
: start checking public cameras in the northeast, airports up here

mhymhy
: on it will get back to you – 30 -

Mhyro minimizes the chat window. She opens her Universal Face Workstation, with image-editing software manipulates the six photos to create a flattened composite view of the woman’s face from ear to ear. The hair obscures ears and cheeks but there is enough information in the photos for the software to assemble the needed composite, looking like a face that was peeled off its skull and laid out flat. Too much like the real-life version that’s all over the
Internet. Mhyro had seen the Annetka photo, so macabre. She shudders. This giant winged thing. She’d heard that a man materialized out of nowhere at the Pentagon. So what’s with this monster lizard?

Agent Mhyro launches the match query. From
the highway rest stop her laptop commands the searches on a mainframe computer at a remote location. There are 768 million searchable photographs in the NGI system, and she’s programmed the search to prioritize for driver’s licenses, Facebook, school yearbooks. In under half a minute, three images appear on Mhyro’s screen. A high school photo, from San Jose, California. A student ID taken at San Jose State University. A California driver’s license, the address in San Jose.

A fourth image joins the list. Then more, a dozen photos from Facebook, one
taken on the porch of a home. Address numerals in this photo match the driver’s license. Mhyro studies the images. The metrics look strong, and to her eye all photos represent the same person. A lovely girl in these photos, blonde and smiling, joyful. So different from this terrified white-haired wretch.

Mhyro opens her chat.

mhymhy
: ID positive san jose california. Female age 19, address is solid. Dig into CA DMV to verify. complete workup posted to SPIRS server, team access. have fun

ch987
: nice going Sonia ty

69vw
: good one - any passport or airport

mhymhy
: still chugging will advise – what is the goddess culture thing?

ch987
: agents on that now will advise – break -

Comparing the source photos with those found by the system, Mhyro finds herself mesmerized by the
girl’s soft face.
But why did she do her hair so white?

By the time he’s read partway through Whalesong 5023 on Jerry’s laptop, Chris Strand finds himself in a dilemma. The article is a detailed explanation of DNA molecules that can store data in living tissue.

The text refers to specific terminology with which Strand is not familiar, but appears to describe a means of access to information in DNA molecules that can be built as a machine, implemented as an algorithm. Calculations in the article quantify the amounts of information that can be retained in a single DNA molecule. A number is given,
expressed a powers of ten, representing the amount of data that can be stored in all of Earth’s living organic material. It is vast. It represents a mass of data so large it has no name in scientific vocabulary.

Next History’s computers can store up to seven exabytes of data, or seven times a gigabyte squared, an exabyte being one of the nonsense syllables that represent orders of numeric magnitude: kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte. There is no conventional expression for what comes after yottabyte in Strand’s technical vocabulary. But the information capacity of living DNA on Earth expressed in the Whalesong article is
far beyond those designations. It reaches fifty-six powers of ten.