Code of Honor

64

Commander Akana welcomed Ding and Adara aboard the USS Fort Worth without asking their names. The corpsman checked out Ding’s pupils, deemed him mildly concussed but ambulatory, since he’d just run off a mountain. She splinted his wrist and made him promise to get a CAT scan at his earliest possible convenience when he returned to shore. The cook hustled up some ham and eggs — reminding Chavez how good the Navy ate.

The skipper invited them into the officers’ wardroom and gave each an ice-cold bottle of Gatorade.

“I’d offer you coffee,” he said, “but it’s a diuretic and the doc says you both need to keep some liquids in you right now.”

As bad as his head hurt, Chavez was ravenous, and he dug into the ham and eggs like he hadn’t eaten for days.

“I don’t suppose you have a computer genius on board, do you, Skipper?” he asked after a long pull of electrolytes.

“Like a tech?”

“I mean like a hacker.”

“Half the kids on this boat are hackers,” Akana said. “I think that’s this generation.” He glanced up at a senior enlisted man who had a pencil-thin mustache and the look of a man who had just bitten the head off a baby duck.

“Command Master Chief, would you be so kind as to locate IT2 Richwine?”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” the CMC said, wheeling at once to leave the wardroom.

Information Systems Technician, Petty Officer Second Class Carl Richwine poked his head inside the wardroom a few minutes later. He was farm-boy big, with broad shoulders and a broad face that was covered with freckles.

“You wanted to see me, Captain?”

“Come in, IT2,” Akana said, addressing the sailor by a combination of his rating and rate.

Chavez leaned back, blinking to clear his thoughts after the meal. “Your skipper says you’re a whiz with computers.”

IT2 Richwine gave a humble grin. “I do all right, sir.”

“You know what a Raspberry Pi is?”

The sailor laughed and looked around the wardroom like he was surely being punked. “Of course, sir. Doesn’t everyone?”

“Well,” Chavez said, “I don’t. Not really, anyway. That’s why we need you. I wonder if you might have a stand-alone laptop on board that would allow you to take a look at something for us, tell us what you see.”

IT2 Richwine looked at Akana for guidance.

“Go ahead,” the skipper said. “But this is sensitive. It isn’t something you can talk about to the rest of the crew.”

“I figured, sir,” Richwine said, before turning back to Chavez. “I have a laptop that runs Linux. I do some game programing. You want me to go get it?”

Adara removed the Faraday bag from the pocket of her blues.

Commander Akana eyed it suspiciously. “Are my systems in jeopardy here?”

Richwine picked up the bag but didn’t open it. “Is there any kind of phone or Wi-Fi-capable device in this?”

“Just a thumb drive,” Adara said.

“Then we should be fine, sir,” Richwine said. “My Linux machine doesn’t have a modem, wireless or otherwise. Anything I design on it, I have to download via cable.”

“Very well,” Akana said. “Go get your computer.”

Holy shit!” Richwine said, when he booted up the machine and inserted the Calliope drive. He grimaced at the captain and looked toward the hatch to see if the command master chief was within earshot. “Sorry, sir, but this is weird. I’ve seen this sort of code before in computer games.”

Chavez and Adara leaned in to get a better view. Numbers and symbols scrolled up the screen.

“What is it?” Adara asked.

“It’s a fairly small program,” Richwine said. “At first glance it looks like basic AI, which is pretty common in gaming.”

“What kind of game have you seen this in?” Adara asked.

“I haven’t seen this exact thing,” Richwine said. “But something like it.” He pointed to several lines of repeating code as they scrolled by on the screen. “See this? If you were to view this on a screen, it would look like one of those Snake games my dad used to let me play on his phone when I was a kid.”

“Snake?” Chavez said.

“Yeah,” Richwine said. “You know, a long line of dots that keeps growing as long as you don’t let it run into itself.”

Chavez looked at Adara. “So we just smuggled out a cell phone game?”

“This isn’t that,” Richwine said. “It’s just acting like that.” The sailor’s jaw fell open as he continued to watch. “Would you look at that.” He gasped. “This is beyond my skill set…”

Adara shook her head. “What?”

“This thing is amazing… It’s picking up bits of information from my computer, growing, exploring. My friends and I talk about this kind of AI all the time. It’s like the Holy Grail, or the Chimera. The Bigfoot of gaming tech and artificial intelligence.”

“What can it do?” Adara asked.

“If it’s what I think it is,” Richwine said. “Pretty much anything it wants to.”

“‘Wants to’?” Commander Akana said. “You talk like it has goals.”

Richwine half turned his screen so the rest of them had a clear view. “See what I mean?”

They did not.

The IT2 rubbed his face in disbelief. “It’s attempting to tell my computer to make a call… looking through my files for a Wi-Fi… or a dial-up modem, a cable connection…”

“What do you mean, ‘looking’?” Chavez asked.

“This thing is like a caged animal,” Richwine said. “It’s trying everything to find a way out.”

“‘Out’?” Adara said.

“Of my computer… Holy crap…” Richwine pointed at the screen. “It just went dormant. It’s… it’s disguised itself as a JPEG among a bunch of other files.”

“A JPEG?”

“A file like you use for photos.”

“So,” Chavez said, “theoretically, what would something like this do to the systems on a ship or a city’s power grid?”

“Whatever it pleases,” Richwine said. “I mean, I’m not trying to be flippant, sir. This is basic-bones stuff, a soldier running around without a mission. Someone who knew what he or she was doing… they could make this code do whatever they asked it to do — take over a ship, have that ship fire its weapons, sink that ship…”

Commander Akana reached across the table and slammed the laptop shut.

“Let’s stow that thing back in the Faraday bag.”

Richwine handed the thumb drive back to Adara. “Is there another one of these out there?”

She shrugged.

“Because if there is…” The IT2’s voice trailed off.

“So,” Adara said. “You’re the computer expert in this wardroom. How would you stop this?”

Richwine blew out a hard breath, then rubbed a hand over his face. “Like I said, this is beyond anything I’ve ever seen, ma’am. First you’d have to find it.”

“Okay,” Adara said, coaxing.

“All I can really do is identify it,” Richwine said. “Help people know what they’re looking for. If it was me, I’d talk to those who were in the know, and find out about the most important things going on in the world right now — the big events, the possible targets. And then I’d look at those events for the biggest dumpster fire I could find.” He tapped the Faraday bag. “Because wherever that catastrophe is, this thing will be the cause of it.”