The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella (11 page)

"You again?" Dallas disdainfully replied.
"What do you want?"

"I've been trying to reach you live," Apex
politely stated. "I would like to speak with you in person."

Dallas gripped her phone. "Who are you?"

"I'm a person with a battle to fight and I
thought you, as a journalist, may be interested in knowing the
details."

"What kind of battle?"

"One involving all of our rights and
freedoms."

"Oh, sounds simple."

"It's not."

Dallas paused. "Okay where do you want to
meet?"

"There's a coffee shop called the
Conservatory."

"I know the place."

"Can you come there today at 2 pm?"

"Yes."

"Good, thank you."

"Wait. How will I know you?"

"I know you. See you this afternoon, Ms.
Winter." The caller disconnected before Dallas could ask another
question.

A few minutes before 2 pm, Dallas walked
into the Conservatory ordered a macchiato and sat down at a table.
A minute later a woman approached, placed a clear glass mug of
green tea on the table and sat down across from her.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Winter," the woman
said.

Instantly recognizing the voice from the
phone calls, Dallas stared at an image matching none of her
pre-conceived conceptions of the face behind the mysterious
threats. The beautiful stranger was elegantly dressed in an
expensive tailored suit. Briefly touching her immaculately combed
back hair, she carefully placed a designer handbag on the chair
next to her. "Good afternoon," she finally sputtered after soaking
in the woman's exterior presentation from head-to-toe.

Ignoring the curious admiration Apex asked,
"May I call you Dallas?"

"Yes, sure."

"First I'm going to come clean and apologize
for my earlier phone call. I did not mean to come off as the
annoying antagonist in a suspenseful thriller."

"Oh I've forgotten about that already,"
Dallas lied, as she tried to reclaim her composure.

"You see this is a very fluid situation, and
I did not want any incidents to occur that could move the needle
one way or another."

"What situation?"

"The situation we are going to talk about.
But first we need a common understanding. I am not speaking to you
as a source for a journalist, you understand?"

"Yes."

"Do you have any recording devices turned
on?"

"No," Dallas immediately answered.

"Were you planning to try and use one?"

"No, actually no."

"Okay, we're off to a good start. My
interest in speaking to you is strictly to tap into your expertise
about the media. The situation I'm going to tell you about is
dangerous for the world, very dangerous. I would like to try and
stop it, but I would need to understand how I could innovatively
use media resources. I asked to meet with you to tap into your
brainpower Dallas, not to enable you to write a story, you
understand?"

"Okay."

"And you are okay with the ground
rules?"

Dallas hesitated. "Depends on who you are
and whether this situation you're referring to is real. If you're a
credible person who is not wasting my time, yes I'm okay with the
rules."

"I'm still going to tell you my name is
Apex."

"Seriously?"

"I have good reason."

"Honestly you do not look like someone who
operates under a spy name."

"Thanks I suppose. But I am a private
person, extremely private and that is the crux of the developing
situation we are facing."

"Okay what's the situation?"

"You remember the files you read on the
flash drive you found at Infrared?"

"Yes of course. But how do you know I have
that drive?"

"We have resources."

"Resources uncovering the late night
discovery of a flash drive? That's a pretty specific resource task.
Is someone looking for a missing drive or is it moving from hand to
hand as you would have wanted?"

"I had nothing to do with how you obtained
the drive."

"Okay, you didn't. But what about someone
you know?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"You have no idea where those files
originated?"

"Correct, I have no idea."

"Did you or someone you know follow Frez
Tyler to my place the night the drive was found?"

Apex defiantly stared at Dallas. "Dallas,
the content of those files, and more importantly, the broader story
behind the creation of those documents is much more significant
than the reason the drive was in the restaurant and ended up with
you. I'm going to explain this to you and set a certain level of
context, okay?"

Dallas narrowed her eyes, but gave up the
fight for more details. "Okay."

"But you need to understand this information
is beyond top secret. Think about a situation where information is
not top secret, at the highest levels of the government but...from
them. The people who control the content on the drive are working
outside government circles—"

"Okay Apex, hold up right there. Do you know
how many people in Washington are telling fantastical tales of
government conspiracies every day?"

"Hundreds."

"Yes hundreds. So whatever you are about to
say—"

"Marco Manuel took you blind-folded to an
office complex in the northwest quadrant, correct?"

Fighting an urge to shudder, Dallas
answered, "Yes."

"You could see the Potomac River from the
office you were in?"

"Yes."

"People used biometric ID scanners to enter
and exit?"

"Do you work in that building?"

"No."

"What do you do for a living?"

"I own privately-held Internet companies
through a silent investors fund."

"Where do you live?"

"Both coasts, depending on my work."

"Would I have heard of you?"

"I hope not. I'm serious when I say I'm
intensely private. I think we should all have the option to protect
ourselves from prying eyes. I find our current online world
absolutely incredible. Our default personal information, the only
unique identifiers we have are data we cannot replace, and its
being tossed around as bits on the Internet as if the facts were
worthless."

"You work in online privacy?"

"Not really, but let me ask you, when you
were in Manuel's building did you notice the ID scanners?"

"Yes."

"Had you ever seen similar office ID
anywhere else in D.C.?"

Dallas considered the question. "No. No, I
don't think so."

"What else did you notice?"

"Just a lot of serious people walking in and
out."

"In and out of which building?"

"The one I was in."

"And the other buildings?" Dallas thought
back to her brief glance out the window of Marco's office, and
suddenly recalled there were no people entering or exiting the
other buildings. "Dallas, did you see any people at the other
buildings?"

"No, no I don't think so."

"No, you wouldn't have because the other
buildings are a server farm."

"Sorry?"

"Buildings designed strictly for housing
servers for data processing."

"Office buildings for data processing
servers?"

"Yes, the concept is actually a good idea.
The buildings are skeletons, there are no services, just reinforced
floors for the servers. Building vertically allows for much more
space and the maintenance costs are low. You only need to keep the
place cool and dry. Options by the way that are severely lacking in
a D.C. summer."

"Yeah, no kidding."

"But that's not the point. The people who
built the complex needed temporary space. In early 2009, the
buildings were scheduled to be occupied by people, but the original
tenants crashed along with the rest of the economy so the
purchasers paid almost nothing for a shell. They bought the
incomplete structure for housing the servers."

"Who were the purchasers?"

"Private investors."

"What are the servers doing?"

"Churning through data. Your data and the
private information of millions of others. They are developing the
most intrusive technology tool we will ever know."

"What?"

"A complete surveillance and data
integration program code-named COSA." Dallas looked skeptical. "I
know I am sounding like the conspiracy theorist again, but you have
to understand Dallas, some conspiracies are real."

"Okay, tell me about COSA?"

"Imagine total surveillance of everyone's
actions, physical and digital, all the time. As I mentioned, a
beyond secret process has been set-up to lay the foundation for
implementing COSA across the country, and around the world. And I
mean actually laying a physical foundation. They are going to build
more server farms capable of using facial and body recognition to
search through surveillance footage to find anyone on earth."

"Body recognition?"

"Yes, how you move, walk, stand, swing your
arms. They are looking to be able to use those features to confirm
identity."

"Why?"

"To catch bad guys, national security, take
your pick."

"You mean if they have a suspect, this
system would look at all surveillance everywhere in the world to
try and find him?"

"Yes that's about right."

"But that sounds okay. I mean law
enforcement is probably already using similar technology, this city
has cameras everywhere."

"No, no one is doing this level of
surveillance now. Cameras here and everywhere are recording the
activity wandering by. But if law enforcement wants to see the
video they have to know which cameras to search for and who to ask
for permission to obtain the recording after an incident has
occurred. In the future, the process will be reversed. They will
have a suspect first, put the name in the system, and using face
and body movement records, receive a data feed displaying the
current and past locations of the suspect."

"But that sounds okay too. What am I
missing? They will be working from information about suspects they
have already identified to catch bad guys."

"Yes but searching for criminals is only
part of the plan. To confirm identity, surveillance will be
directly tied to all of your online activity, which in the future
will be everything you do. I'm not talking about surfing social
media and buying from an online retailer. In the future, you'll
have your entire home and work life on an integrated system
designed to track you throughout the day. Your workplace will be
tied into the system, capturing when you are working and the tasks
you are completing. Online activities can be cross-referenced to
your physical presence in the world as identified by the cameras
and sensors. There should be no more false arrests, because the
cross referencing of information should pinpoint the exact
suspect."

"Okay I can see how the intrusion is
increasing but still I'm thinking the idea of catching criminals
bef—"

"The system would know you, all about you,"
Apex angrily continued. "If you always do online ordering at one
store, but physically like to shop at another, the system captures
both data points. Everything you buy, read, see, everyone you talk
to, where you go. The data would be aggregated to create a profile
for every American, and eventually everyone on earth."

"A data profile for everyone on earth?"

"Yes the initial set-up will work through
the school system, or I should say online access to mandatory
primary and secondary education coursework." Apex leveled her
voice. "Besides the issues of failing schools, bullying, teacher
bias, and rising costs, there is a basic threat to economic growth
from the inability of the public education system to adapt to labor
market demand. Thinking people realize the shortage of
technologists will destroy America's ability to compete. One way to
address all of those issues is to provide an interactive online
education from pre-K to 12th grade. The idea would be to make the
entire curriculum plus advanced placement courses available as a
totally immersive interactive program of lectures, books, tests,
exercises and a suggested study schedule. Children could begin at
any time they are ready to start learning. There would be no set
school year, no defined beginning or end time. Parents could
schedule the learning day exactly against the hours of their own
working and commuting time, and continue through the summer or
other holidays based on the family’s vacation plans. All the work a
child does would be recorded. Instead of sitting in a classroom
forced to work at the pace of the weakest student in the room, each
child would be operating at her own level. You could have a girl
who is at an eighth grade math level, and a third grade reading
level and that would be fine. Plus society would know,
statistically at least, exactly how everyone is performing.

A lot of people will love the idea because
more children could be tactically educated. Think of the desperate
need for technologists, millions of unfilled jobs. But if the kind
of kid who would be interested in a tech profession, the kid who
can be on a computer all day, can succeed with an online education
offering, those students can go through school quickly, qualify for
higher learning and move into the working world much faster.
Silicon Valley may be the elite place to work, but America could
use a dozen more high tech cities creating products tied to
government or healthcare, policing and national security. We need
ten times...if not 100 times more technologists than we have now.
But there's no way we'll have the teachers available to make the
push happen. And why should society wait for them when we have the
technology to move forward without them?

Education is a process used to provide a
human with basic skills, such as reading and writing, required for
operating in a modern civilization, and generating a common basis
of information to be used as a foundation for future knowledge.
Whether the objective is spread out over 2,000 leisurely days, or
crammed into half that time, hardly makes any difference to the
child’s eventual standing as an adult who has retained the
information. Think about a process without the organizational,
social and logistical headaches of forcing every child through a
common school system dealing with teacher foibles and rising
administrative costs. Online education may end up improving focus,
accelerating learning, instantly updating to changing labor
demands, and saving billions in one sweep of a keyboard. Even if a
fraction of kids could complete the online-only curriculum, the
savings would be enormous, and the benefit to those kids would be
incalculable. The idea has solid appeal."