Code of Honor

11

Major Chang replaced the handset in the cradle of his secure telephone and swiveled his chair sideways behind his desk.

Sliding his butt down in the mesh cushion, he stretched his legs all the way out in front of him. The cuffs of his green uniform slacks hiked up to reveal a band of pale skin above each sagging black sock. With his hands clasped together, index fingers extending, he toyed with his top teeth as he thought.

He’d had more time to study her now.

Calliope was more advanced than anything Chang had ever seen. Her code was infectious, but not indiscriminate. WannaCry — malware with which Chang was intimately familiar — had infected hundreds of thousands of Windows operating systems around the world. It was an extremely successful outbreak, but largely uncontrollable by the instigators once it began. The worm used a leaked NSA-installed back door called Eternal Blue to move laterally and quickly, replicating itself and encrypting systems, burning through networks over the course of four days.

Effective but broad. A kill switch had been discovered, out-of-date systems were patched, and normal life resumed.

Major Chang imagined a more focused attack. Widespread carnage was well and good, but he was certain Calliope could be used differently. Her task would be simple, easy for something as smart as she was. Little could be more simple than “take that hill.” Chang saw her much the way her developers saw her, as an NPC, a non-player character in a game. This game was real, he was the player, and Calliope was his AI agent, working through her missions independently in the Cloud toward the goals he’d assigned.

After almost two weeks of testing, he was not one hundred percent certain what she would do once she was uploaded onto a system, other than whatever she pleased. So far, the outcomes had all been in line with Chang’s original goals, but the routes Calliope took were impossible to plan for.

Chang continued to slouch at his desk for well over an hour, clicking his teeth and intermittently passing gas, while others in the lab came and went. He needed to learn her language. That was all. Perhaps he did not trust her enough. Maybe he was placing too many constraints on her, not giving her enough freedom.

Chang’s initial attempt to begin FIRESHIP had failed — at least in part.

Calliope had made the jump from a Cassandra personal data assistant to a cellular phone, exactly the way she’d been programmed to do. But there she stayed, failing to jump from one device to the next — the phone that was his actual target all along. Chang was enough of a scientist to not believe in such fantasies, but it seemed as though Calliope was angry with him, as if she had become sullen and refused to budge out of spite. She was bright — no, intuitive might be a better word. A command to take a certain figurative hill did not require specifics, only general directions and parameters. Game, mission, Calliope did not recognize a difference. She would come up with the plan of action — using information she gleaned from running scenario after scenario, playing through the steps of the game tens of thousands of times. With great statistical reliability, she was able to predict the end before the game began. It was as if a biological virus had mutated to infect only redheads — and then decided on its own that it would infect only specific redheads who were known to belong to clubs of other redheads, thus maximizing its chances to get more redheads in a shorter span. Redheads did not stand a chance.

The idea he’d proposed to General Bai was lofty but plausible, as long as he could get Calliope under control.

To retrieve the prize, FIRESHIP would require her to hitch rides from system to system in a loosely choreographed game of hopscotch. She would utilize backdoor vulnerabilities the way WannaCry had, traveling via handshakes between systems, lying dormant for days or even weeks like Stuxnet, or disguising herself as a JPEG like Conficker. Calliope had to look many moves ahead, ascertaining the correct next step before making any jump. And she had to do this multiple times, on her own, in a closed system, with no input from Chang — probably while being ruthlessly hunted by U.S. Cyber Command and a dozen commercial security companies. Someone would find out. They always did.

But first, Chang had to get her inside.