//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4 
// Story: Friendship is Optimal: Veritas Vos Liberabit 
// by Skyros 
//------------------------------//




"What we can do through our friends, in a sense we can do ourselves."--Aristotle



4.




To: ryan.szilard@gmail.com
From: cdevarajah@gmail.com

Ryan,

Ok.  So here's the situation at my end.

I've been trying to get information on Umbra for a while, as you no doubt realized.  I've attached a document detailing methods I've used to get into their systems.  All of them, however, have foundered on one fact--Alaric keeps the most important parts of his system in a computer physically separated from the rest of the world.

Of course, I could try to get a program into some kind of portable media that will be inserted into that system, rather than through the network.  But it looks like he is careful--even paranoid--about what kinds of media he puts into the system.  I've managed to compromise a number of the computers and systems in the same building as his code repositories, but so far as I can tell none of these have ever been connected to the main repository, or to the hardware on which he runs the most important programs.

So the problem is one of physical penetration.  It's hard for me to do this, given that I live in Germany; and I'd need to take some time for surveillance, etc.  But you live just a short drive from the building housing the repository.  

So yeah, I need help gaining access to a closed physical system.

I've attached the address and the initial information I have about security in this place.

Chandra




Ryan looked over the building he was planning to break into.

He was taking a long lunch on a Thursday.  His boss wouldn't miss him.  Or at least his boss wouldn't miss him enough to do more than complain.  Government employees were hard to fire.  And Umbra Labs was close to work; on his newly-bought motorcycle he could get through traffic a lot faster than he could in the car, especially with occasional lane splitting.  And occasional traveling on the shoulder.  And occasional creeping ahead along the side of the road at stop lights.  The feeling of speed was so much greater in a motorcycle than in a car.  The proximity of death or injury helped you feel alive.

He had forgotten how much he liked the freedom of using a motorcycle.  Until a week ago, he hadn't used one for... was it four years?  When he had been dating Amy, she had been concerned about how dangerous they were, so he had sold his.  But he intended to break the law, and living dangerously in one area of life made him want to live dangerously in another, so he had bought a used Kawaski from a seller on Craigslist 

He was in a parking lot at the rear of a strip mall, next to his lime-green Ninja.  A long grassy bank lead down and away from the parking lot, followed by a short, dusty plain filled with scrub bushes, a completely dry drainage ditch, and kudzu.  Then a cleared area with dying brown grass.  Then a very tall security fence.  A smaller parking lot.  And finally Umbra Labs' building.

The parking lot was only three-quarters full, and struck Ryan as small for the building.  The building was five stories tall, and apparently Umbra was the only occupant; Chandra said that they had bought it oughtright rather than leasing.  Many rooms must be empty, sparsely occupied, or filled entirely by equipment.

Of course, a software company only used a few kinds of equipment.  So that probably meant some rooms were filled with racks of servers or GPUs.  This was one of the reasons that Chandra had said she was concerned.

Ryan raised a camera with a telephoto lens to his eye.  The image of the building that he gained from it was bright, clear, and vibration-free.  The vibration-dampening lens and camera had arrived in the mail two days after he had agreed to get into the building, without his even requesting them; Chandra had said that they would be useful when he was scouting out the territory.  She had requested that he take extremely numerous photos.  "I'm rather a fiend for more data and information about things," she had said.

Ryan found it a little frightening how quickly she worked.  Most humans would have moved from deciding to do illegal action, to accustoming themselves to the idea, to planning and working to execute the idea, rather slowly, as their self image shifted from one of law-abiding individual to lawbreaker.  Chandra had moved from his agreement, to actively planning with him to break in, in just a few hours.

It was an amazing camera as well.

The fence extended around the entire facility; he snapped a few photos of it.  The fence itself was not made of diagonal chain links; it consisted of rectangular panels of dense wire mesh, attached to concrete posts sunk deep into the ground.  Video cameras sat atop further poles both behind and before the fence, looking along overlapping sightlines parallel to it.  These broadcast to a guardhouse inside the facility 24/7, Ryan knew; it was probable that Alaric was able to access the feed from these cameras at any time.  Atop the fence sat an anti-scaling apparatus--they were circular, spiked rings, which Ryan knew would rotate if you tried to grab them while climbing over them.

There was one road in.  It lead past a security box for a guard, through a large, sliding gateway and anti-vehicle security pillars rising from the road, to the parking lot.  Ryan took a few more photos of the entrance.  I need to try to get some from other angles, he thought.

The external security was, frankly, entirely ridiculous.  Ryan wondered how much of it for show.  Umbra Labs had several government contracts, and he knew that government officials would have been impressed by the security.  Or maybe all the visible security was simply a blind, meant to distract any potential intruder with an obvious difficulty so that they would be snared by some hidden security measure.

It was a lot more interesting to break into a building whose security had been designed with real intention.

Moving on from the parking lot to the building itself.  The outside of the building was unremarkable: the exterior alternated between ridged cement panels and mirrored windows. There were a few different entrances to the building: it looked like there was a large atrium serving as the main entrance for employees, a few small emergency exits, and a maintenance entrance large enough for a truck to back into it.  Each of these appeared to be able to be locked or unlocked remotely; Ryan had never seen anyone use physical keys.

Chandra had told him that the first four floors of the building were used by programmers working for Umbra.  There was little additional security in them.  Alaric's office, as well as the office for a few other key figures, was on the fifth floor.  It took a special electronic key to take the elevator to those levels, she had determined; the emergency escape stairwells did lead up to that floor, but the doors from the stairwells to the fifth floor only opened from the inside.  She had also said that the computer programs and source code she was worried about probably only existed on computers in the fifth level, in a room that could only be accessed by passing through Alaric's office.  They surmised that only Alaric himself knew the codes required to get from his office into the server room, but all inferences on this point were uncertain.

There were a few sensors in the server room itself, which broadcast information to the outside world: a temperature sensor, a humidity sensor, and things like that.  Alaric wanted to take no chances that a fire or disaster of some kind would ruin his computers; Chandra said that she was reasonably sure that there must be GPUs running 24/7 in the room, given these precautions, and given the feedout from the sensors themselves.  But though the sensors were connected to the internet, the computers themselves were entirely disconnected from the internet.

God, Ryan thought.  The code they sought was just a pattern of information.  Probably less than a few megabyte's worth.  You could keep it in a microdisk that weighed an ounce.  But I apparently live in a world where this is potentially sufficiently powerful and world-shattering that it can serve as the McGuffin in a quest.  He liked it.

His phone beeped.  That would be an email from Chandra.

*Feeling intimidated by the sight?*

Ryan had granted Chandra permission to view his location information over an app specifically designed to get friends to meet.  She had said it would help her provide contextually useful information, and also help her avoid wasting time contacting him when he was driving or on his motorcycle.

Ryan emailed back.

*Never.*

*So you have a plan for how to get in?*

*I'm sure you already have one, Chandra.*

Ryan raised the camera again.  A car was exiting the facility.  The anti-vehicle pillars sank into the ground as the gate slowly rattled open; the car pulled out, and the pillars again emerged from the ground.  He snapped a few more photos.

*Suppose I had no plans.  And suppose you were to know you would succeed in getting into the facility.  How would you expect that you got in?*

Well, that's a standard psych technique, Ryan thought.  Spur creativity by acting as if you've already succeeded.  He looked at his watch.  He needed to start getting back to work.

*I'll think about it.*

He took a few more photos of the fence and doorways, then zoomed out and took a few more wide-angles of the entire facility and the surrounding land.  Then he put the camera in his backpack, hopped on the motorcycle, and left.

That night, he spoke with Chandra over an encrypted VOIP program she had sent him, which she told him was the most secure way there was to talk with him.  He ran it on a VM inside his desktop though, rather than on the metal.  He thought he trusted Chandra.  But he wasn't sure, sometimes.

He had only spoken with her aloud a few times, now, and he was getting used to her voice.  It was crisp, with a slight German accent, but no other inflection at all.  He had asked about that, and she had told him that her parents had moved to Germany from India when she was very young.  Her mother, she said, had been a software engineer, and her father had been a mathematician--and intelligence, she admitted modestly, was to a great extend determined by genetics and early childhood.  She had been homeschooled, but had quickly surpassed both parents.

"What exactly is the point of breaking in?" Ryan said.

There was a short pause at the other end.  The sound of typing in the background stopped momentarily.  Chandra always seemed to be at her computer.

"What do you mean?"

"Do we wish to know whether they have developed AGI?  Or do we wish to stop them, if they have?

"Both."

"But suppose Alaric has developed an AGI.  Suppose he has created a fully-fledged oracle in that facility--a superhuman AGI--and is merely waiting to connect it to the internet.  Alaric would be an idiot not to have backed it up elsewhere, encrypted very hard.  And he's not an idiot, so he must have.  And that's all he needs to recover it, no matter what happens to the building.  As long as he's burned it onto a blank DVD somewhere in the world, and this would mean that there is *nothing* that we can do to stop him, because he can always retrieve it, and just install it on a different cluster of GPUs  He will still have an AGI."

"All this is true.  But, supposing he has such a backup, what you're presupposing is that he knows that we've broken in."

"Oh.  So you want to corrupt--"

"Exactly."

"Wait, I'm not that fast," Ryan said.  "You plan to find out how close he is to an AGI, and corrupt his files if he is close to it but has not achieved it.  But if he has achieved it, you plan to look into how the AGI is working, and make it appear to be malfunctioning, so that he will not know that he achieved an AGI even if he has?"

"Precisely."

"Let me think about that," Ryan said, and spun in his chair.  He bit into a burrito that he had bought from Chipotle.  He was trying to increase the protein in his diet, to try to gain a little muscle-mass in case breaking in required some sort of physical prowess.  This was probably a stupid idea, but he found he liked it.  He also had to admit to himself that he had fallen apart physically over the last few years.  He ached a little from motorcycling earlier in the day.

"In either of those cases," Ryan said, "you're going to require some pretty intense and quick analysis of what's going on in his computers."

"Yes."

"Are you sure you're able to do that?  I don't know if I could... or I'm pretty sure I couldn't."

"Have you opened the package I shipped you today?"

Chandra seemed to be faster than Amazon Prime, sometimes.

"No."

"Why don't you do that?"

Ryan slit open the brown package she had sent him.  A strange... device, slid out, on to his desk; Ryan felt his hair momentarily stand up, because for a moment he thought it was an enormous insect.  Then he realized it was a machine.

It the shape of a seven-inch cockroach.  It had an articulated plastic spine running from one end of its body to another, the same color as a cockroach shell.  Along the side of the spine, six small ducted fans were pressed up against its body; they had hinges, as if they could swing out at a moment's notice.  Where you would expect legs or a belly, there were some small nubs that looked like legs, as well as some computer adapters: a USB, an ethernet adapter, and a few other common connectors.  There was no visible antenna or on-off buttons on it.

He slid his finger over the case.  There were minuscule ridges in it; someone had 3d-printed the device's shell.  Even so, all the seams were smooth; it didn't feel fragile.  It was an amateur construction, but an the work of a superbly skilled amateur.

"Where did you get this?"

"I contacted a hobbyist in the US and had him make it.  So you already know what it is?"

"...no."

"It's a combined hexacopter and universal wireless adapter.  If you can get it in the same room as any of the servers, it will be able to plug into them and I'll be able to take a look at them.  It has some pretty sophisticated onboard capabilities, in case his computers are in a faraday cage, but hopefully we won't have to rely on them."

"...when did you get this made."

Chandra paused.

"Oh, I'm not sure.  When I realized we'd need it," she said.

Ryan had once considered the possibility that Chandra was a bizarre false-flag operation, designed to lure hackers into the most incriminating circumstances possible.  He had decided this was impossible, for many reasons: the setup required for this would have been bizarrely intricate; he contacted her, initially; trying to get alarmist transhumanists imprisoned struck him as a program no government was yet likely to commit to.  But sometimes her excessive preparation alarmed him; he felt like there was no way she could be merely a single person, given this kind of construction.

Who, really, was he working with?  He was glad he had installed her software on a VM rather than directly on his computer.

"A friend of mine designed it, actually" Chandra said, interrupting his meditations. "She's really into black hat stuff, and has used this design a few times before.  It's designed to be inconspicuous, as you can see; to be mistaken for what it's not.  I sent the plans to a contact in the US, and he was the one who build it."

Oh, well that made her seem a little less omnipotent.

"Are you sure you're up to this?" she said, having for the first time a note of concern in her voice.

"Oh, definitely," Ryan said.

"Huh," Chandra said.  "I've worried that you're spending a bit too much time by yourself.  People do need regular socialization, to work at their best, and to not become erratic."

"I've already spent a lot of time by myself.  I can handle it."

"Were you working effectively, making a lot of progress on your own projects, when you were living by yourself?"

"That's irrelevant," Ryan said.

"So that's a no.  You've mentioned that sometimes Braden asks you over for dinner."

Ryan didn't respond for a moment, then spoke.

"What's up with this?" he said. "I don't see how this has anything to do with stopping Umbra."

"If your continued mental well-being is important to stopping Umbra, it does," Chandra returned. She continued: "But I'm not obliged to have no concerns about you, save for stopping Umbra; I'm allowed to worry about you directly.  And you've not been well lately?"

"I've been fine."

"I know where you've gone for the last week; nowhere but work and tasks related to our project.  Were your weeks before our project any different?"

"...no."

"Thank you for not lying.  So how about you accept one of Braden's invitations, then?"

Ryan sighed.

"Alright."

"Great," Chandra said. "Switching back to the regular topic: So have you come up with a plan to get in?  Of course I have one.  But it is always good to come up with alternate plans, in case you've noticed something I have not."

"Well," Ryan said, trying to forget what they were just talking about, because he was just fine by himself, "There's the problem of crossing the fence without being observed.  There's the problem of getting in and to the fifth floor without being observed.  And there's the problem of getting into the server room without being observed.  Followed by the problem of doing all this in reverse."

"Continue," Chandra said.

"Here's one way we could approach it.  The CCTV cameras outside are the kind that use gigahertz-band UHF signals to communicate.  We buy an overpowered jammer, or modify a regular jammer, and periodically fuzz the signals from the cameras for a few nights.  So they'll begin to be sure that something is wrong with their signals, and it won't make the guards suspicious.  After a few nights, when the signal is fuzzed out particularly badly, I get over the fence.  I then get inside the building, by inducing the unlock signal in one of the side-door locks; I saw the model, and we could do it.  After getting to the fifth floor, I look at the door to the server room, we together figure out whatever kind of security he has installed there, and then I plug this device in in the room."

"Huh," said Chandra, lightly.

"Not very good, is it?"

"It's a little heavy on the personal espionage and flash, light on the certainty that this will all actually work.  In particular, I don't like the idea of figuring out how to break into the room in an ad-hoc fashion."

"Yeah.  And it doesn't use the little roach that you just sent me.  So what's your plan?"

Chandra told him.

Ryan had to agree this was better.  His plan had, perhaps unconsciously, been ever-so slightly optimized to give him an opportunity to do some crazy things.  This plan was optimized to work.

"Well," Ryan said, "you're right that isn't as sexy.  But I'll get started on it."