Page 74 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
What better place to hide such a monumental project than a completely anonymous cargo ship?
Linlin gleamed with satisfaction.
Thanks to Murphy’s series of ham-handed mistakes, her mission to find an operational organoid computer seemed tantalizingly close.
And Cabrillo was clearly no ordinary ship’s captain. Linlin had trained with some of China’s finest special warfare operators and she knew the type well. Despite his roguish charm, the “Chairman” carried himself with the self-possessed confidence of a sheathed blade, just like the one hidden beneath his tropical shirt. His navigator, Seng, was cut from the same cloth.
What more proof did she need?
She’d laid low long enough, and had taken the proper security precautions. It was finally time to take the next step.
?
Linlin had placed her empty breakfast tray and dishes out in the corridor to be retrieved by a member of the ship’s crew. Now she sat ather desk with her e-reader on the table and her backpack at her feet. She appeared to be scrolling through a booklist on her reader. But she wasn’t.
Linlin had already performed several clandestine visual inspections of her small cabin and was utterly confident she was not under optical or electronic surveillance, though anOregoncrew member was lurking in the passageway outside of her room even now.
She carefully opened up her backpack and pulled out her espionage gear. She’d packed her bag as if she had just thrown in whatever she could at the last moment under duress. Anyone inspecting the bag wouldn’t be the least bit suspicious of its contents.
The essentials were all there, starting with her passport and a small coin purse. There was also a toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, extra pairs of panties and socks, a couple of mashed candy bars, and other sundries.
She’d also tossed in the e-reader tablet, earbuds and charger, pencil case and sharpener, and a spiral planning calendar filled with appointments, names, and phone numbers.
It was these latter items Linlin removed first, beginning with the spiral calendar. The German A4-size calendar was close to the American eight-and-a-half-by-eleven format. The daily/monthly calendar had plastic covers and sheets on the front and back.
She then pulled out the other items and began assembling her device.
Detaching the blade from the pencil sharpener, she carefully cut away the rear plastic “Holidays” page in her calendar. The half-millimeter page was actually a flexible polymer computer motherboard laminated between sheets of Gorilla Glass. That motherboard was a system-on-chip with a multicore CPU and an integrated graphics processor. Eight gigabytes of processing memory was built into it along with basic firmware and a minimal operating system.
The next thing Linlin did was to snap open the pencil sharpener’s bottom revealing a high-density lithium-polymer battery providing four hours of stable power.
She then pulled out a ballpoint pen from the pencil case. She removed the pen’s clip, which was actually an antenna gain filament. She attached it to the motherboard. The antenna gain boosted her wireless range significantly, and would easily receive and transmit through the ship’s bulkheads.
Next, Linlin selected four different pens and laid them out in a line. Despite their different shapes, they all connected together to form a single eight-inch-long module.
The first pen was a large permanent marker. This unit was an additional system-on-chip board that doubled her CPU capacity, accelerating her encryption cracking and intrusion scripts.
The second unit, a stainless steel mechanical pencil, was a one-terabyte solid-state storage device. This could be used to store large data dumps of files and caches of live closed-circuit video feeds.
The purple gel pen she pulled out next was another lithium-polymer battery extending her operational time another two hours.
The fourth, a fountain pen, was a retractable high-grade fiber-optic probe tip. This could be used for interfacing with maintenance ports or direct network links, though neither existed in her cabin.
Linlin next fetched her two earbuds from their charging case and gently snapped them onto magnetic connectors located on the barrel of the stainless steel mechanical pencil. Each earbud contained a microprocessor cluster, two gigabytes of additional memory, and a micro battery.
She then opened up the small coin purse and removed three specialized hardware accelerators disguised as subway tokens. She attached them to an edge-embedded ribbon connector on the motherboard. The first token was dedicated to encryption and decryption, the second was a memory cache expander, and the third provided additional interface logic to reduce redundancy and stabilize network connections.
Finally, she Bluetoothed her touchscreen e-reader to the motherboard, providing her with a discreet, low-power control terminal and visual monitor.
Linlin checked her watch. She had assembled the entire cyberdeck in just under six minutes, a full thirty seconds faster than she had ever achieved during her training session. She was pleased. If necessary, she could disassemble it in half the time.
Now the fun could begin.
40
Linlin tapped the e-reader screen to scan for the ship’s Wi-Fi. Her newly assembled covert cyberdeck cracked the system’s encryption in just two minutes. Once inside the system, she proceeded to the mainframe and ran into her first firewall.
She instantly recognized Murphy’s idiosyncratic coding signature—a brilliant, organized chaos deploying unorthodox yet ingenious solutions. One of their profs at MIT described Murphy’s coding style as “Jackson Pollock writing haiku.” Hacking Murphy’s code would be as easy as hacking his heart. Within moments, his firewall was breached and she was navigating the ship’s mainframe.
