The Media Candidate (8 page)

The Asp raised the pipe to his mouth with one
hand while placing his other flatly on the tabletop as if to
somehow monitor his protégés reactions in this new arena. Sherwood
sensed the interrogation. He judged the Asp had been fired by a
career in the looking-glass world where things are rarely as they
seem. But Sherwood mirrored a ruthless, experienced agent—not the
engineer the Asp probably expected. There was a dialogue between
them as Jenner tried to conceal her discomfort at discussing the
unlawful termination of human life in such analytical terms.

“As you know,” the Asp continued, “COPE is
charged with protecting our republic from those who seek to destroy
the great progress we’ve made toward effective and free access to
the political process for all our citizens. Our robots can help us
maintain the freedoms that Americans have died for over the
centuries. They will become soldiers in the never ending battle
against the enemies of liberty.”

…
and of COPE,
thought Sherwood,
wondering if the Asp could decode this thought.

The Asp paused, thoroughly but delicately
interrogating every element of Sherwood’s face for a glimpse into
this young engineer, but finding no opening. He then asked, “Any
questions?”

A silence shaped itself to the room as the Asp
studied his two engineers. Jenner fidgeted, and Sherwood probed the
words
human target
that hung persistently from wisps of
smoke before the partially occluded face of the Asp. Finally, the
silence was broken by Jenner. “How are these … ah …”

“Enforcements,” assisted the Asp.

“Yes. How are these enforcements accomplished
presently?” she asked.

“We currently perform that function with COPE
field agents. But there are some serious deficiencies. First, it’s
very labor intensive, and thus the costs are extreme and the
reliability isn’t adequate. Secondly, human enforcers can sometimes
be traced back to their sponsors if they aren’t scrupulous about
their professional ethics. A robot could be so clean and so generic
that it could never be traced back to its source. Robotic enforcers
would solve a set of practical problems that we’ve had in recent
years. And finally, after years of very expensive R&D, robots
are good enough to do the job. All they need is the finishing
touches of a pair of dedicated engineers.” The Asp leaned back in
his chair, pipe secured between his teeth, put his hands behind his
head, and added, “To my knowledge, we are closer to realizing truly
autonomous enforcement robots than any other organization on earth.
I believe this will be the last surge to put us over the top—and
I’m entrusting it to you two.”

“How about support?” questioned Jenner.

“You’ll have the entire Dorsal Fin staff at your
disposal. There are only two differences between you and them.
First, you’re the boss; and second, they don’t know the whole
story.”

“How about this injector?” asked Jenner. “Do we
have to develop it from scratch?”

“That’s being done as we speak,” replied the
Asp. “I have a contract with a little company up north to deliver a
prototype in about three months. They’re at your disposal. All you
have to do is integrate it and make the whole system
work—flawlessly.”

Sherwood sat back in his comforting chair, his
hands folded under his chin. But his mind was far from relaxed. He
was analyzing the possibilities, playing the options in his mind.
This was the opportunity; this was the threshold between his
impotent world and a life that he had always dreamed of—his
niche.

“Sir?” said Sherwood as he sat forward. “What
will become of us after the project is completed?”

“You’ll be rewarded according to the success of
the task. I can assure you that compensation in the form of money
and opportunities within COPE will be forthcoming.”

How about teaming me with my own spider?
Sherwood asked in his mind.

“Any other questions?”

“No, sir,” replied Jenner.

“Everything is quite clear,” added Sherwood.

With these simple instructions, the
Jenner-Sherwood team launched into Project Dagger, one of the most
covert programs at COPE. They accessed whatever resources were
needed. For Jenner, this meant a team of programmers and analysts
and access to the most advanced computer systems at COPE. For
Sherwood, it meant classified data, advanced optical cubic
integration systems, a team of electrical and mechanical engineers
and technicians, and CAD-CAM packages coupled to laser and virtual
reality-prototyping machines. But beyond these toys of common
nerds, he was reborn. A control-system nerd transmuted into a
master of history’s greatest espionage tool. This was the saga for
which he had been created.

This new task challenged both engineers and took
them deep into the technical operations of COPE. Jenner’s software
engineering talents were so exceptional they could reach full
potential only in an incubator such as this. And her new access to
the COPE computer systems was a trip to hacker heaven. She became
so engrossed in the complexity of the system software that she
frequently stayed late at night exploring the folds of COPE’s
unsung management hero.

Her access to the COPE computers was well beyond
what she needed. The Asp didn’t understand the technical
requirements as well as she did, so when he asked her what access
level she needed, she took a wild shot and said system manager
level, the highest operating level. He bought it without question,
and she was in.

The system manager of a large computer system is
the person responsible for keeping the system and network running
flawlessly and coordinates all software and hardware configuration
changes and maintenance. But the system manager’s most important
role at COPE was to provide for system security. The identity of
the system manager was known to only two people at COPE as a way of
further insuring their paranoid concept of security. Jenner was not
one of them.

Jenner spent nearly every evening exploring
system-level operations to a depth that she felt only the real
system manager probably understood. During every session, she would
learn about at least one new network, database, or level of
operation that she didn’t even know existed. She kept accurate
notes in an electronic notebook in her secure file. This was the
most awesome computer game she’d ever played.

* * *

The networks connecting all the distributed
mainframe computers and the thousands of slave computers and
workstations all over the country were a maze of links. More than a
hundred levels and sub-levels of security classification, each with
its own list of authorized users, codes, and procedures, wove
through the computers and networks. Many classifications even
required encryption.

The COPE computer system had been developed by
high-tech wizards smitten by a virulent disease universal in
computer jocks—the obsession to maximize system flexibility and
growth capacity. This translated to more bytes, more FLOPS, greater
speed, and more nodes than would be required by the most
imaginative estimate of the system requirements. The corollary
disease was also rampant—a computer system swells to fill all
available capacity.

The whiz kids at COPE also adhered to another
rigid code—the quality of the documentation is inversely
proportional to the complexity of the system. In other words, the
more complicated the programming gets, the less gets written about
it. This makes it very tough for new people coming on board to know
what they are inheriting. It results from the developers pushing on
the state-of-the-art so hard that they’re always behind schedule,
over cost, and too busy to properly document what they’ve done. In
addition, computer nerds are notoriously poor writers and view
documentation as unclean drudgery that someone else might do if
they just ignore it.

In one of her ramblings through COPE’s brain,
Jenner had referred back to her electronic notebook for a password
into a classified account. This one was unusual, however, since it
was a word that had personal meaning to her even though someone
else was using it. But she found the password in her classified
notebook had been changed. The original was GRUMBUG, which just
happened to be the name that her grandmother had called her when
she was little—an odd, but memorable, coincidence. When she
returned to her notebook, it had been changed to GRUMBLE. But only
the system manager could gain access to her protected account.
Apparently, the system manager had been monitoring her exploratory
activity and chose to make this change in Jenner’s personal
notebook.

What Jenner was too naive to appreciate was that
the system manager had access to her personal-history file in which
the Grumbug nickname had appeared, realized that this change would
probably be noticed by Jenner, and had issued it as a subtle
warning. It was the computational equivalent to a shot across the
bow. But Jenner either didn’t get the message or chose not to heed
it.

She pieced together what information she had to
try to determine the identity of the system manager. This took a
month of late night hacking, and she was shocked at the inescapable
conclusion. The system manager, who was responsible for maintaining
the computer system, correcting errors, modifying programs,
managing passwords, and directly influencing the control of every
aspect of COPE operations, was not a person. The system manager was
another computer, or at least a partitioned section of the main
COPE supercomputer. And this wasn’t just an ordinary system
manager. Its software was so broad and complex that it made daily
recommendations to every level of upper management. It was so
trusted that those recommendations were generally followed without
question.

But this computer had gone well beyond the role
of a system manager. It had compromised its own security by
invading a personal locked file and modifying it. This was exactly
contrary to the most basic function of a system manager—to insure
error free files to the users.
It seems almost malicious
,
she thought.

The Asp called Sherwood into his office. “You
and Jenner have pulled it off. I’ll admit I had some doubts about
anybody being able to handle that job on such a short fuse. But
Dagger was done under budget and met every spec, and all in fifteen
months.” He considered his pipe rack and chose just the right pipe
for this conversation. He offered his tobacco pouch to Sherwood who
removed his own pipe from his pocket.

“You both have fine futures at COPE, and I can
recommend you highly for whatever positions you might want.
Whatever you do, I’m sure COPE will benefit. I’d be very happy, of
course, if you’d choose to stay on here in Dorsal Fin, however COPE
encourages its brightest people to get exposure to diverse areas.
There are other projects within Dorsal Fin …” He drew in a river of
smoke and mixed it with the rest of his sentence. “… or even Shark
Bait, where you would be most welcome. I talked with Jenner a few
minutes ago, and she’s decided to stay with me for another year or
so.”

Sherwood held his pipe in his hand, not wishing
to compete with the Asp.
If I could only work with a spider on a
mission
, he thought. “Project Dagger,” he trolled, looking
squarely at the Asp, “has given me insight into COPE that few have
experienced.”

“The every-day missions for a spider,” the Asp
parried, “might elude someone with a zealous imagination such as
yourself. I hope you’re not jumping to conclusions about its
utility.”

Sherwood’s gaze met the ASP’s on a silent
battlefield. “Yes. I understand,” he finally replied. Another
period of silence matured as both men analyzed each others eyes and
telltale lines in their faces for signs of weakness, for cracks
through which some personal inference could be drawn.

Sherwood said, “I made the move with COPE to
this new headquarters originally in hopes of working my way into a
field assignment. The electrical engineering degree that COPE
allowed me to pursue seemed to complement the electronics devices I
built when I was younger. It also seemed to be an excellent way to
raise myself from the menial jobs I held with COPE earlier in my
career. In retrospect, it seems to have been a fortuitous choice
since I ended up right in the middle of some very exciting and
challenging programs.” He put the pipe to his lips while studying
the Asp.

“Your performance in Dagger was most
gratifying,” the Asp responded. “You’ve shown excellent commitment
to COPE and the ability to work effectively under pressure. But
most important, you’ve shown intuition—the ability to choose the
best alternative. I think you have an excellent career ahead of
you, whether you stay in engineering or move into the field.”

“Thank you for your praise, sir. I have given
some thought to the direction I wish to go, and I think field work
would be best for me.”
With spiders,
he added to
himself.

“Most of the investigative work COPE does is
fairly routine,” said the Asp, “the stuff that produces those
boring reports in the newspapers and the endless personal-history
data on millions of Americans. There are some positions in the
field, though, that might be exactly what you’re looking for. Each
of the two major parties has about a dozen regional offices.
Attached to each office is at least one COPE Liaison Officer who
effectively works directly for the Regional Director of the party.
In reality, these liaison officers are on the COPE payroll, but for
appearance sake, they’re party employees with titles like Special
Assignment Manager. COPE found that investigative activities were
more efficiently performed and publicly less onerous when carried
out in the field from within the party at the regional level.”