Page 53 of Insidious Threats
“Or both.” Ellie fell silent for a moment before saying in a soft voice, “This trip was probably a waste of time.”
“Why? Because some random guy we met on the river bank said your dad went to Canada? Let’s not declare defeat prematurely. The first rule of working with me is: it’s not over until I say it’s over.”
Ellie arched an eyebrow, but a faint smile bloomed on her lips. “Fair enough. So, are we going to take a run at Poppy?”
“I don’t know that I have the energy for prickly right now. Let’s check-in and get settled at the inn, hit Cole’s for dinner, and then go to the art colony while Pete’s on duty.”
The hint of a smile faded. “We’re just putting off the inevitable. If my dad’s gone, he’s gone. Whether the receptionist is cranky or not won’t change that.”
“No, it won’t. But a cranky receptionist isn’t going to bend the rules to let us into his room. Besides, we might pick up some scuttlebutt at the tavern. And, importantly, the second rule of working with me is: Eat when you have the opportunity; sleep when you can. A nourished, rested brain and body are sharp weapons.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ellie’s shoulders straightened, and she gripped the steering wheel. “Just tell me where to go.”
“Head east on this road.”
As she eased the car off the shoulder and onto the road, she said, “Out of curiosity, how many of these rules are there?”
“So many,” Sasha told her. “So, so many.”
27
Leo leaned against the back wall of August’s dimly lit office and watched the fingers of the computer guy’s left hand fly over the keyboard while his right hand manipulated a complicated-looking mouse so quickly that the movements blurred.
“Is this legal?”
He didn’t necessarily care—or, at least, he wouldn’t have cared if they weren’t using his wife’s law firm resources. But Sasha would have his head if McCandless, Volmer & Andrews was charged with cyber-espionage.
August’s hands paused. “Define legal,” he said without looking away from his screen.
“Spoken like a man who works with a bunch of lawyers.”
The IT expert laughed. Then he turned to meet Leo’s eyes, “Seriously, though. It’s a gray area, at best. I’m using a VPN to mask my location, but it’s a risk. Are you sure you want to go forward?”
“You said the thing on the drive is a worm, right?”
He nodded and cracked his chewing gum. “That’s right.”
“And the only way to deploy it is to stick this thing into a USB drive connected to the system where Cesare is running?”
August drew his eyebrows together. “What’s Cesare? This program is the Mjölnir Killer, remember?”
He remembered. “Cesare is the original Mjölnir. It’s the AI Landon Lewis was using with the Milltown Police to predict criminality.”
“You mean, to racially profile law-abiding Black men?”
“That, too.”
Landon had helpfully included a short text file on the drive with the more explicit marching orders that Leo had been wishing for. Unlike the flowery handwritten note, the note on the drive was brief and pointed:
Landon had sold his reviled artificial intelligence program. An outfit named Pinpoint Partners was working to turn it into Mjölnir, an algorithm that would be sold to online retailers, social media sites, and other commercial enterprises with a virtual presence. Each copy of Mjölnir would communicate with every other copy, building a composite picture of every person who wandered into its path online. Landon’s terse note described the program as “an insidious threat, lying in wait to destroy longstanding concepts of privacy, free will, and agency.” Per Landon, “Mjölnir must be stopped, or the unintended consequences will wreak unimaginable damage.”
According to August, the Killer program was a worm virus. Once loaded onto a computer that was connected to a network where Mjölnir resided, the worm would infect Mjölnir. Because Cesare—and, thus, Mjölnir—was designed to replicate itself and share input with each copy of itself, as soon as Leo infected a single copy of Mjölnir, the program would do the rest. It would infect and reinfect itself until it self-destructed.
“And all I have to do is insert the USB stick into a port on a computer running a copy of Mjölnir?” The task sounded almost too easy.
“Yes, but don’t get excited, yet. If I were running the show, I’d be very careful to keep Mjölnir un-networked until I was ready to deploy it. And unless Pinpoint Partners is entirely incompetent, they’ll have sandbox detection set up.”
Leo cocked his head. “It’s weird, August. You’ll go for extended periods of time speaking English and then, bam, it all falls apart. What in the world is sandbox detection?”
