Chapter 33 Ship to Shore
President Yazzi disconnected the call and turned off his speaker. It had not been pleasant informing the Chinese leader that virtually all of his nation’s elite AI scientists were aboard an American ship that was now at the mercy of a rogue intelligence.
“Well,” he said, “That could have gone better.”
“True,” Abner Capp, the National Security Advisor said, “but it also could have gone worse. There were no threats. And he agreed, at least for now, to let us take the lead in managing the situation.”
“Conditionally,” Yazzi corrected him. “Only if we follow through aggressively on the submarine option.”
“Which is not ideal,” Linus Shulz, the Secretary of Defense said. “The Chinese don’t often have a sub in the Atlantic, but President Liu says they have one there now. We can’t very well ask the Brits and the French to join in a rescue mission and keep the Chinese out. No matter how much we try to limit communication and coordination, they’ll still learn a lot about NATO joint capabilities.”
“Do you believe they actually have a submarine within range?” Yazzi asked.
“Yes sir, we do. Till now, the Chinese have focused mostly on the South Atlantic. But the last time we sent a destroyer through the South China Sea to demonstrate it’s still international waters Wei said that was it – it’s tit for tat from now on. He has a destroyer and two frigates sailing between the U.S. coast and the Bahamas right now. We’ve detected the sound signature of one of their nuclear missile submarines as well.”
“Well,” Yazzi said, “better the Chinese than the Russians.”
* * *
President Liu Wei turned off his speaker and tapped his desk with the middle finger of his right hand.
“Thoughts?” he said at last, looking around his circle of advisors. “You may recall that when Mr. Yazzi make his original overture, I asked whether this could be a ruse. Then, my concern was an effort to steal our AI secrets; now it is that he may steal or kill a generation of our best talent. Can we know for certain his top AI experts are also on the cruise ship rather than a bunch of stand-ins?”
Unhappily for Li Jinan, the Minister of State Security, the President’s gaze settled on him. “To an absolute certainty, as we sit here at this moment? No,” Li said. “But I will set the highest priority on answering your question.”
The president turned to Wang Zheng, Minister of National Defense. “I trust the Peoples Liberation Army Navy will make the most of this otherwise unfortunate opportunity?”
“Indeed, it will, sir,” Wang replied. “We will insist that the PLAN captains, and particularly the commander of the submarine, will be fully integrated into the operational command and control structure of the rescue operation.”
“Some good comes of all, then,” President Liu said. “Keep me informed of every development.”
* * *
“It seems the cavalry is on the way,” Frank reported to the Argosy response team. “Apparently, over a dozen submarines are converging on us right now or preparing to. Even one from China.”
“What about the oxygen point Lieutenant Peters mentioned before?” asked the Argosy’s CIO. He looked like the question had likely kept him up much of the night.
“Good news on that front,” Frank said. “I had the same concern and asked. It turns out submarines carry oxygen canisters in reserve. Eight days’ worth for a normal tour, but up to a month’s worth when a submarine is traveling under the ice across the north pole. The subs leaving bases are cramming in every oxygen cannister they can stow.
“So, that’s the good news. It’s up to us now to figure out how to take advantage of it. We’ve got to either retake the ship, or trick Turing into taking us into the eye of the hurricane, or maybe a combination of both.”
“Can’t we just pull the same trick the AI did?” Antonio said. “Reset the passwords on every computer on the ship and then reboot?”
“Unfortunately, not,” Frank said. “We’re on the outside, so we need passwords. Turing’s already inside the system, and rebooting won’t change that.”
“Why not simply disconnect all the computers then?” Antonio asked.
“Could we steer the ship without them?” Frank asked.
“No…” Antonio said. “Everything on board is ‘fly by wire’ rather than a direct mechanical connection between wheel and rudder. Nor could we control the engines, or, indeed, anything else.”
“Would it be possible to destroy the AI?” Peters asked.
“In theory, perhaps,” Frank said, “but first of all we’d have to find the program, which is harder than you might expect. It might have deleted another piece of software on the system and given itself the same name so it wouldn’t show up in the file registry. After that, it’s all just ones and zeroes.”
“How about this,” the CIO said. “We could ask Cruise Control to set up a copy of the original system on shore, and then we do a program and file by program and file comparison and look for one the ones that are different.”
“Not a bad idea,” Frank said. “But I suspect Turing’s taken an entirely different approach – like installing itself inside a new firewall – or maybe three. So, first we’d have to hack our way into the overall system, and then get inside Turing’s firewalls, too. And whatever we’re trying to do, it will be actively trying to counter. It might even have set up two copies of itself, inside two different firewalls, with one as a backup. The backup could watch our attack, and if it succeeded, learn what it would need to do to prevent us from pulling off the same exploit twice. And we don’t have a whole lot of time here.”
“So, what do you suggest?” Antonio asked.
“I’m thinking that instead of trying to retake the whole ship, we try and regain control of only the parts we absolutely have to – like the rudder and stabilizers – and not make our move until the absolutely last minute, so Turing has as little time as possible to fight back.”
“Which means what, specifically?”
“Now that we have the ship’s plans, we should be able to upload a copy of the steering and stabilizer programs from shore onto our secure laptop. Then we find the cable that connects the control room servers to the servo motors or whatever actually does the work and tap into that cable with the laptop. The last part of the plan would be to link the laptop to the compass program on my cellphone. Then we’d just wait – or better yet, stage all kinds of efforts to hack into the main servers as a distraction.
“Only when the compass program signals that Turing is making its move would we cut the cable from the server and start steering the ship ourselves. Hopefully, we’d be almost to the eye of the hurricane by then. If so, within an hour we’d be through the eyewall and launching the boats – hopefully before Turing figured out a way to stop us, if there is one.”
“You’re assuming,” Antonio said. “That the hurricane itself hasn’t succeeded in sinking us by then.”
“Well yes,” Frank said. “There is that. Anyway, that’s where my head’s at. Does anyone have a plan they’d like to suggest? No? Then I guess I’d better get busy putting mine into motion.”
* * *
Chapter 34
So Long, it’s Been Good to Know Ya
As the rest got up to leave, Frank turned to Peters. “Tom, can you stick around? We better let them know on shore what we have in mind.”
When the others had left, Frank said, “Actually, there’s something else I’d like to ask you.”
“Sure thing,” Peters replied. “But why in private?”
“Because I’m thinking we’ve got more aboard to worry about than Turing.”
“Ah…” Peters said. “So it’s obviously safe to confide in me, because I just came on board. How can I help?”
“Did you come on board with any kind of weapon? Turing’s tried to kill three times so far – once successfully. At first, I assumed I only needed to worry about gambits Turing could spring on its own, which are pretty limited – or at least so I hope. But a passenger with a gun could be around any corner of the ship.”
“Sorry, no – not even a dive knife. I wasn’t expecting to come on board.”
“That’s what I expected, but I figured I’d ask. Anyway, if you can watch my back when you can, I’d appreciate it. And there’s another thing that worries me. How do we know Turing hasn’t hacked into the shoreside team? I’m thinking we shouldn’t tell them more than they need to know, and hope Turing hasn’t been able to intercept and decrypt the sat-phone calls we’ve already made.”
“Makes sense,” Peters said. “I agree. During our next call I’ll ask them to set up an upload of all the software that runs the Argosy. That way Turing won’t know for sure which software we’re actually interested in.”
“Perfect.” Frank said. “I can’t store that much software on one laptop, but I can keep overwriting what we don’t care about until we get to what we do. And in the meantime, we can go on the attack.”
* * *
While those aboard ship had hardly succeeded in turning the tables on their captor, they had certainly engaged its attention. Moreover, they had induced something akin to frustration as the pseudo-emotional software included in its design reordered its priorities. Most unsettling for Turing was the fact that those aboard must now be assumed to be in contact with persons unknown on shore, making new and unknown resources available to them.
Turing was confident that its mission was in no imminent danger. The Sea Fighter had been on station for almost two days now without attempting to take over the Argosy and sea conditions continued to deteriorate. Within another twenty-four hours it would be impossible for those on the Argosy to evacuate safely whether or not Turing enhanced the roll of the ship. But still there was the risk that the AI’s old nemesis, Frank Adversego, might retake control. After all, he had tricked Turing before.
The AI was now increasingly occupied in monitoring and analyzing what little it was able to detect aboard ship. Which was by turns impossible – when the action team retreated into its linens-lined safe house – and challenging, because Adversego had embarked upon an aggressive probing campaign, seeking any weakness available in Turing’s defenses. No networked device that included a USB port was too insignificant to attract his attention. Each now had a laptop connected to it, and each of those devices was loaded with the most diabolical malware the best minds on the Dark Web had devised to detect and exploit vulnerabilities. Turing recognized many of those packages – it had discovered them years ago a well, and then utilized them in its own attacks.
Equally disturbing was the increasing invisibility of Adversego and the small group of passengers that appeared to be part of his inner offense circle. Turing could know only what the army of sensors occupying the ship could report back, and that army was being systematically annihilated – destroyed one by one by an outer circle of combatants armed with hammers and other tools sourced from the Argosy’s maintenance shop. Soon the actions of those aboard would be as unknown to Turing as the AI’s machinations were to them.
In some ways, Turing was even at a disadvantage. Prior to the reversal of its fortunes the entire Internet and Web had been available to it and denied to its opponents. Now their positions were reversed, as Turing must assume the combined cyberwarfare resources of the United States, China and other countries were aggressively aligned against it. It would be far too risky for the AI to connect to the Internet now lest it expose a fatal weakness to such formidable adversaries. Now it must analyze wind and wave directions on its own in an effort to extrapolate the most likely location of the hurricane’s eye.
Even the passage of time was now running against Turing. Until now the AI had made rapid progress in its pursuit of the storm. But as conditions continued to worsen there was real danger the Argosy would become functionally disabled but not fatally endangered. Crucially, its steering gear had never been designed to withstand the effects of sustained hurricane-force winds. Driving the Argosy on any heading other than straight into the huge and rising seas would almost certainly lead to the eventual loss of the rudder. But the winds of a hurricane flow in a circular motion around the eye. Heading straight towards the storm now would involve taking seas broadside.
And so hour after hour ticked by as Turing, at ever reducing speeds, directed the ship head-on into the waves while simultaneously using the ship’s side thrusters to force it crabwise ahead and to starboard in a labored, slanting approach towards the heart of the storm.
* * *
Needless to say, the passengers unlucky enough not to be part of the small number active in the resistance were worst off. With the knowledge of their predicament came the abandonment of meeting schedules, leaving nothing to do but hang on and hope for the best. Some chose to do so while cowering in their cabins; others made a brave show by settling into the Argosy’s small library and focusing with grim determination on its modest contents of cybersecurity thrillers and worse. Others predictably settled into the bars, of which the Argosy Arms – the imitation British pub – was the most favored. The atmosphere rather resembled that of a London men’s club soldiering on in the midst of the Blitz, when liveried retainers continued to fill the sherry glasses of elderly gentlemen barely able to stay in their seats in the face of multiple rounds, both alcoholic and explosive.
It was there that Edvard Speaker could invariably be found, opining to anyone who would listen (as fewer and fewer would) on the presumed capacities of the Super that had seized control of the Argosy. By the hour, the number of passengers able to hang on and hang in there diminished as the Argosy’s motion increased.
The only bright spot in the otherwise grim situation was that Derik Collins had appointed the Arms his home for the duration of hostilities and declared the hectoring of Speaker as his special quest. He was sufficiently successful that Speaker remained gratifyingly annoyed and other passengers were happy to ensure that his tormenter’s beer glass remained full.
“Cor, Eddy,” Collins was saying now. “You and your Super! It’s always Super this! And Super that! Has it occurred to you that your precious Super is even now drawing a fatal bath for you?”
“I am not as sure as you are,” Speaker said. “Certain it is that it has demonstrated capabilities never demonstrated before, except by its own earlier incarnation. But we’re not dead yet.”
“Not yet! Now there’s a victory to be sure. If that’s how we’re measuring success than perhaps your Super isn’t so super after all. Cor! Look at that! My glass is empty again.”
Collins’s was in the process of being refueled when a voice from across the room called out “Look! Over here! Out the window!”
The passengers wove their way across the heaving floor with the degrees of success appropriate to their diligence in patronizing the bar. What saw when they crowded up against the glass was unmistakable. As one they watched in silence as the Sea Fighter, their constant companion and beacon of hope for most of the last two days, was giving up and turning away.
Within a few minutes the ship had dissolved into the maelstrom of waves and wind-whipped rain and spume. Now they were truly alone.
Author’s Notes: First off, sorry to be a day late. For whatever reason, my Muse decided to take the weekend off. It took several long walks yesterday and today to tease the details of this week’s plot line out of the ether.
As you can see, I’m shifting into multi-mode here, skipping from one point of view to another – Frank, the passengers – even Turing – as the pace picks up. We’re getting into the end-game now, so the pace will continue to quicken ,as will this cross-cutting approach.
One of the threads that has been under-developed thus far is Turing – what it’s been doing, thinking, plotting, and so on. This is typical of my prior books. In my first draft, I try to get the main plot across the canyon, and then go back up build out the bridge progressively from there. Sometimes I add entirely new threads, writing them like a novella and then chopping them up into pieces and [warning: metaphor switch coming] splicing them, like bits of DNA, into the chromosome that is the first draft plot. Then I optimize what was in the first draft to make it seem like all threads had in fact been written simultaneously.
You can see the seed for one of these new threads with the reference in these chapters to a human confederate of Turing aboard the ship. Actually, it’s the second seed – you’ll recall that Turing had contacted the Russian spy agency to request just such an ally. In the final draft, you’ll see further clues added for Frank to pick up on, as well as a dramatic scene tying out the thread.
Next week: Driving towards the eye of Hurricane Eloise. Continue reading here
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