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Ashton Dunleavey sighed and forced himself to a standing position, albeit a little stiffly. He surveyed his bedroom without looking too hard at any one bit of it. It occurred to him that perhaps a modicum of straightening up might be in order. No, he thought a second later with some relief, no point. Satisfied at having at least considered the possibility of cleaning, he flopped back onto the indented mattress and tossed briefly, then lay motionless in a semblance of slumber. A fly on the wall above his bed relaxed when Ash finally settled, and was leapt upon by a small black spider that issued abruptly from behind a cheaply framed photograph of some castle in Wales. Ash was a typical heterosexual bachelor, in that he was not overly concerned with trivialities such as domestic or personal decorum. Although his downstairs study and the path leading to it from the front door were relatively tidy, as this was his office and he occasionally had to show it to clients who might not be inclined to pay him if he didn't make some effort at looking professional, the rest of his domicile was verging on the chaotic. The dominant furnishings were books and bookshelves, the former seldom contained within the latter. It was as though an invisible tide regularly swept through, carrying books along before it and leaving them beached randomly throughout the premises, despite the fact that Ash often went around and restocked the shelves which occupied most of the available wall space. The apparent tidal influence was further reinforced by the manifestation of books in highly unlikely and remote locations, such as behind the stereo speakers or on top of the fish tank. This was not a typical fish tank. It had a quality about it which made it seem deeper and more spacious than it actually was--probably a function somehow of its murky and indistinct interior. If one were to peer closely through the algae-matted glass for any length of time, one would catch glimpses of various strangely-shaped denizens of this twilight limnos weaving in and out of vision. Ash was vaguely mystified by the apparent zoological and botanical diversity of the tank's aquatic community; he could only recall having introduced two rather featureless fish and some plastic ferns several months ago. He almost never remembered to put any food in the tank, and when he did it was usually his own leftovers, because the actual fish food box had disappeared within a few hours of his getting it home from the pet store. It was hard to tell what lived in the strangely colored water now, but it certainly included a interesting variety of occasionally quite animated littoral life. Whatever did reside there had apparently sized up the situation and decided, wisely, to establish an ecosystem which did not require any attention from Ash to survive. He wasn't sure what to think about this, so he decided not to think about it at all, which of course brought the issue full circle. He had a cat he'd named Linnaeus. This was not an especially meaningful name to him; it was simply the first one that came to mind. It made no difference to Ash that the cat turned out to be female. He fed Linnaeus on a regular schedule because she seemed less inclined to adopt the independent evolutionary path taken by his aquatic roommates. That, and the fact that she shredded his furniture if he forgot. Sometimes she shredded his furniture even if he remembered, just because she was a cat and cats do that sort of thing. Ash was a tinkerer. He had been a computer systems administrator and long time practitioner of what used to be known as ‘hacking' before he drifted into information security consultancy, though these days the term ‘hacker' had been degraded to the point where it bore little resemblance to what it had meant when he started doing it. Hackers, at least as Ash thought of them, didn't break into other people's computer systems; it never even occurred to them. There was still so much to find out about their own. He was a tinkerer in a much wider sense, as well. He liked to build things or to take things apart and put them back together in ways that no one had ever thought of before, or admitted to, anyway. He had acquired over the years a rather respectable command of the practical aspects of fluid mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, higher mathematics, and cosmology. His latest kick was quantum theory, and it was at once exhilarating and mind-numbing to him. He didn't delve too deeply into the math, as it started to lose him after a while, but the potential practical applications of the theory drew him in like matter falling into a black hole. What Ash wanted to do more than anything at the moment was to build a usable quantum computer. Never mind that the mechanism for doing this hadn't even been worked out by the scientific community yet. He didn't concern himself with that; he just wanted to build one and hang the impossibility of the feat. Not worrying about whether or not a thing was possible left him more time and energy to devote to accomplishing it, he felt. Right now, though, Ash was trying very hard to get his badly misnamed "smart" card to work in the newly installed security lock on his home office door. Some of the government agencies for whom he did contracting work were a little concerned about his rather cavalier approach to physical security, and insisted that he control access to his secure computer terminals a bit more stringently. "Control access by whom?" he had asked at the time, "My cat?" They (being the proverbial ‘They,' as in ‘Them') were not amused, of course, and installed this monster of a lock that was now failing to grant Ash access to his own study. After ten minutes of increasingly aggravating struggle, Ash sat back in a chair he'd pulled up to the doorway and stared hard at the uncooperative lock. A thought took shape in his mind and evolved rapidly into a full-fledged idea. He tromped off to the garage for his cordless drill. About half an hour later he was sitting at the Sun Ultra 5 workstation he'd obtained from an online auction getting ready to do some port scanning for a client. The putty filling the two holes he had drilled in the wall next to the doorframe was just beginning to set. Near his left hand lay the clothes hanger wire and medical endoscope he had used to see and trip the emergency release on the inside of the door (this wasn't the first time that Ash's obsession with collecting odd techno gadgets has stood him in good stead). He made a mental note to install some hidden way to open the door when his stupid card failed in the future. What the spooks didn't know wouldn't hurt him. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is one cool place. More way out, wacky, cocky, insane, screwball and purely genius ideas have wafted through the halls of DARPA than just about any other location in explored space. People employed here have done really big and important things with wide press coverage, such as (actually) inventing the Internet, but they've done a lot more stuff that never made the news, either because it was classified or just too silly to relate outside the magical realm of DARPA. Many experiments have gone on here involving flying disks (the kind you throw in the park as well as the kind you pilot at Mach 3 on the edge of the stratosphere), vegetables, plastic wrap, lasers, masers, phasers, birds' feathers, polyvinyl chloride, sodium chloride, iridium, radium, ammonium, and plastic undergarments for amphibious troop operations. The list is quite long, but you get the idea. In the context of this nothing's-too-weird-to-try research atmosphere, it isn't surprising that occasionally something truly spectacular is stumbled across. For national security reasons, notification of the public of these achievements is often postponed indefinitely, but that does not make them any less spectacular. Ash had been contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense to conduct random security audits on certain crucial DARPA networks and systems. He had at his disposal virtually every hacker tool and penetration testing system known, both commercial and Open Source. He had, in addition, some critical information about network topologies and the IP addresses of all gateways, routers, firewalls, proxies, and remote access servers in the networks in question. This is not information J. Random Scriptkiddie would be able to get his grubby little paws on, but the DoD was much more interested in keeping the system secure from foreign intelligence operatives and their own employees than bored teenagers with inferiority complexes. This wasn't a publicly accessible network, anyway. Most of the IP addresses were in nonroutable space on a vast private network the DoD referred to as SIPRnet, reachable directly only by other nodes in the same encrypted subnet using the Network Address Translation protocol, or NAT, of which it is fair to say Ash was not a strong supporter. He was a graduate of the ‘old school' of Internet engineering, many of whom felt that NAT ‘broke' the Internet Protocol (IP) by making it impossible to deliver datagrams end to end. The addition of the translation step, where datagrams addressed to a computer that is in fact not the final destination, but a sort of ‘PBX' that routes them to the correct node based on its own internal table of addresses and host names, destroys the spirit, if not actually the mechanism, of IP as originally conceived, and was therefore, in Ash's opinion, a Bad Thing, at least when used on the public Internet. This was not the public Internet, of course, so the point wasn't as clear cut, although Ash privately felt that IPv6 (the latest incarnation of IP, which provided a much larger address space and would eliminate the need for kludges like NAT) was the logical way to go here. Chastising the Department of Defense for their choice of network addressing schemes was not within the scope of his current assignment, however, so Ash paid as little attention to the issue as possible. If it didn't put bread on the table or contribute to one more entry in his mortgage payment book, he wasn't going to get all hot and bothered over it Today he was going to use a tried and true intelligence gathering tool called "port mapping" to see what sorts of information he could dredge up about open ports on his target systems and the services they were advertising. These ports weren't actually individual physical connections into the computers–they were more like 65,536 (216) Post Office boxes in the same building. All mail comes in through the front door, but gets parceled out to different recipients depending on the box number to which it is addressed. In the same way, all traffic destined for a given machine enters through the same network interface, but is handled by different programs, or daemons, who sit and ‘listen' for datagrams addressed to their specific port. Since there are so many ports available, and since each port is capable at least on an architectural level of giving a remote user complete access to the machine, it becomes rather crucial to make sure that every daemon is well-behaved and not prone to handing over the operating system reins to any old connection that waltzes in and asks for it. Waltzing in was precisely what Ash intended to do, once he established which ports on the target machines were receptive. He would to try to take over one or more of those bad boys over fifteen hundred miles away from the comfort of his study. He'd done it many times before, for many different clients. The main difference this time would be that Ash was coming in over a dedicated connection set up specifically for him, since none of the target systems were accessible from the Internet (his usual pathway). He fired up the network sniffer and left it collecting data in a file for his later perusal. The process was totally automated; he felt no need to hang about and supervise. Besides, there was an online auction of exotic surplus equipment calling his name. The next morning, after a rather uninspired and hastily contrived breakfast consisting of little chocolate-covered donuts, half a kosher dill pickle, and some almost-but-not-quite-too-spoiled-to-drink milk, Ash ambled over to his study and let himself in. He fired up the four computer monitors that stared back at him from the semicircular desktop and pulled up a project scheduling program on one of them to see what the day held in store. Then he remembered the sniffer. Rolling a few feet to the right in his command chair, Ash logged into his Sun box and shut the data collector down. The packet capture log was enormous, but that was to be expected since the sniffer had been running all night. There was the usual high percentage of routine traffic, of course–gigabytes of it, to be more precise. He sifted through this for almost an hour, and while there were a few interesting packets, nothing reached out and demanded his attention. That is, until he came across the encrypted stream. If you've never seen an encrypted stream of data going across a network, here is a general description to get you up to speed: it looks like utter gibberish. Page after page of total nonsense, using every character the computer can possibly display and leaving blank spaces where it can't come up with anything at all. This is exactly what confronted Ash: about five megabytes of gibberish. Encrypted data was certainly nothing new on a Department of Defense network–in fact, it was standard operating procedure for anything classified. This particular data stream struck Ash as odd almost immediately, though. Although it isn't possible to make any sense of the contents of an encrypted stream just by looking at it, with enough experience you do start to recognize certain patterns. He ran a little highly illegal utility he had once managed to acquire from a momentarily unprotected NSA contractor's server to try to determine at least what flavor of encryption had been employed. To his shock, the stream appeared to be encrypted using a very low-grade algorithm that was relatively trivial to break. Ash shrugged and fed it into a cracking program. He had nothing but time. It took almost three days, in fact, but that's a veritable flash in the pan in cryptographic key-breaking terms. Ash had just started his second pot of coffee for the day when the key popped up on his screen. He raised his eyebrows at it, shrugged, and ran the encrypted file through the cracker with the key. What came out almost made him drop his coffee mug. The file was a technical summary of something called Project Bellatrix; it involved quantum computing and much, much more. Two hours later, Ash had digested most of what he had read in the thirty page report. He was already planning where he was going to get the components he'd need to build his own version. This was going to be fun. One evening two weeks later, as the air grew heavy with water vapor and the still, laden oppression of an impending storm, Ash worked alone in his basement. He hadn't seen Linnaeus for a while. Sometimes his cat's mysterious comings and goings in his not particularly expansive townhouse made him think that perhaps Heisenberg might have been a more appropriate name. All you could really work out was the probability that Linnaeus would appear at any given time. Actually knowing where she was seemed to violate some fundamental tenet of feline physics, so Ash stopped trying to keep track of her. As long as she kept eating and appeared every so often to reassure him of her continued residence, he was satisfied. Ash was soldering wires and checking heavily insulated tubes running to liquid nitrogen tanks. He had smuggled these into the building past the landlord by using the slightly silly story that they were tanks of cola and carbon dioxide needed to satisfy his unnatural craving for carbonated beverages. Actually, that wasn't too farfetched an idea; he did have rather a substantial appetite for them. These tanks, however, were really for supercooling his latest gadgetary obsession. It was a tangled conglomeration of lasers, prisms, metal chambers, breadboarded circuits, and a wad of cables leading to a much-dissected Sun workstation running a substantially hacked version of OpenBSD/sparc64, itself awash in wires connecting to racks holding circuit boards too big to fit in the slim desktop case. A tiny 15 inch monochrome monitor glowed somewhat unsteadily from a shelf mounted in the wall above the lab bench. A slight haze from the supercooled conduits hung about an inch from the floor for a radius of a meter or so around his feet. In the center of this electromechanical melange was a two meter metallic rod set vertically into the table surface. Attached to this rod at intervals of about half a meter were three toroids, each surrounded by supercooled tubing and with fiber optic cables coming out of them in opposite directions. The power supply for this assemblage was a largish, olive-green metal box over in one corner of the basement. A corrugated dryer hose led from an outlet near the bottom of the box to a window high on the wall, near the ceiling. The box was in fact a loud but very powerful generator Ash had picked up at an auction of military surplus items at a nearby Army base. Getting it down into the basement had required that he disassemble and transport it down the stairs one piece at a time. When he put it together, he couldn't help making a few ‘minor modifications' to improve the overall efficiency and functionality of the mechanism. To tweak, perchance to enhance... He squinted through one eye and nudged the path of a laser over a few tenths of a millimeter. He went over to the computer keyboard and tapped some keys, then dashed back over to the bench. There was a nebulous sparkling mist forming inside the donuts--a mist which suddenly began to spin clockwise and grow more opaque. Ash held his breath and started turning a small handle attached to a block on the bench. It looked like the window crank off an old car. As Ash cranked it, a small digital watch suspended from a fine metallic chain was lowered slowly into the uppermost donut. When Ash judged it was perfectly positioned in the center of the middle toroid, he stopped and ran back to the computer, hitting a single key. He returned to the lab bench just in time to see the nearly colorless mist begin to take on a grayish hue, which changed gradually to light blue, then azure, then very deep blue, and then...the watch and the mist vanished. For a few seconds nothing else happened. Ash stood stock still, fixated on the spot where the watch had been. He realized that he was holding his breath when he began to get dizzy from the self-inflicted anoxia. Just when Ash was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong, the watch reappeared, seemingly from out of thin air. It was just in the nick of time, too: he was beginning to turn purple around the edges. For a moment he was too shocked by the novelty of what he had just experienced to move. Sudden manifestation of the physically impossible can be hard to cope with. When he snapped out of it, he ran over to the crank and excitedly lifted the watch up out of the toroid. He snatched it from its mooring, very nearly dropping it in his nervous haste. He paused and took a couple of deep breaths, then set the watch down carefully next to a twin he had kept as a control. He compared them. He frowned, squinted, and compared them again. Only the control watch was running. He examined it minutely. There was no damage or any evidence of a shock. He got out his jeweler's screwdriver and pried off the back. The batteries were missing. They most certainly had been there a few minutes ago–he had calibrated the displayed times of the two instruments to within a few hundredths of a second. They weren't there anymore, however, and Ash realized that he was going to be forced to face that simple fact. Someone or something had brazenly stolen his batteries. What he would need to do to his brain to get to grips with this was still an unanswered question at this point. He would have to get some good brown ale and think about it. The next morning he hadn't made any progress on the missing battery mystery, but the quantity of ale (Wicked, Pete's) he had consumed as an aid to the thought process had the effect of significantly reducing the importance of solving it, at least for the present. Right now the only problems that seemed worth bothering with were:
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