Grandfather Ghost: Old Code, #2

Chapter 1

As far as Ajay Andersen could tell, the three most secure computer systems in the state of Minnesota were the communications systems that connected the governor’s residence to the National Guard, the Mall of America food court after the hamburger incident, and the internal network of the new Paul Bunyan Middle School in Bemidji, where he was now headed.

Ajay walked his lazy bloodhound Garrison, cursing the perfectly seasonable cool December weather. Fat, wet flakes fell, making an uneven hazard of crumbling sidewalks. He placed his cane carefully on the packed snow, knowing that a wrong step might land him on his ass or possibly in a hospital. It was the least of the many concerns that plagued his retirement.

It amazed Ajay how sometimes technology stepped backward in the name of progress. Before the Internet, networks were strange, isolated things. They shuttled information quickly through a local campus or top-secret facility but denied access to the outside world. Networks were tools used to command screaming dot-matrix printers or to send opaque memos to a thousand employees in the blink of an eye.

Isolated networks were before Ajay Andersen’s time, despite his advanced years. Once someone had the idea to connect networks together into one worldwide monstrosity, humanity thought it would never go back. In a way, it didn’t, but worldwide networks weren’t secure. The Age of Honesty saw quantum computing break all encryption. Connected systems were compromised systems.

This morose line of thinking occupied Ajay as he snipped the links of the fence outside the middle school campus, hours after dark in the middle of the annoyingly productive snowstorm.

This is a ridiculous amount of security for a middle school, he whispered to Garrison. The place’s security was part of the reason Ajay felt comfortable sending his granddaughter Kylie there, even though she resented the very idea of non-virtual classes.

He felt it was better for her development to have real interactions with human beings. Maybe one day she would forgive him for his old-fashioned ways.

People stink, she always said.

It took him a while to realize that she meant it literally. Kylie grew up in a lab, where all of her associations had been virtual, except for her sister. Maybe that was why she didn’t know how to make friends. It might also be that the computer half of her brain was slowly damaging the tissue around it.

After clipping one last link, Ajay removed his glove and activated the dim glow of his fidget computer. The device was a new model, but one he had selected for performance rather than glamor. Loops of metal fit over the fingers of his left hand and displayed a flickering diagram over the back of his liver-spotted flesh. Augmented data appeared in the slim half-moon glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. He needed his cheaters to read, but they also helped him interact with the fidget.

On his screen, he tracked the chatter of a dozen moving signals. Drones, he cursed. He had expected they would be shut down due to the snowstorm. They weren’t. This was a problem.

Garrison gave no response, which Ajay took as grudging acceptance of the absolutely ridiculous level of Paul Bunyan Middle School’s security protocols. Ajay needed proximity to initiate his hack on the isolated network.

This was a matter of life and death.

Kylie wasn’t any ordinary twelve-year-old kid. She and her sister Isabelle were the oldest and strongest result of a program that enhanced the brains of children. Through new-fangled biotech, wild neuroscience, and an utter lack of ethics, the Haveraptics Corporation had developed a number of enhanced children able to connect to and control wireless computers with a thought. Kylie and Isabelle could also alter their own brain chemistry and shut down or change parts of their minds. It was terrifying tech to put in a developing child, and Ajay still sought a way to mitigate it and give her a normal life.

His best hope was Silas Cardoso, an old colleague with connections in biotech. Ajay had given the old man the scans and instructed him to find a fix, but that had been months ago, and he hadn’t heard anything. Every time he thought about it, Ajay doubted he had done the right thing.

For now, he only needed to make sure nobody found Kylie.

That was why, under the snow-white glow of a Minnesota winter, Ajay had taken Garrison for a walk so that he had an excuse to be close to the school. The alerts he had installed on her records during the last parent-teacher conference had fired, showing that someone had accessed Kylie’s records.

He needed to find out who.

The drones schooled like fish. A swarm of them could maintain uniform spacing, covering an optimal amount of ground with their sensors. Fortunately, with the bad weather, their sensor coverage was sporadic. They were stretched too thin.

Ajay tied Garrison to the fence and pocketed the wire cutters. His coat caught as he squeezed through the hole, but he tore it free. Stay here, Gare, he said to his dog.

His heart thrummed in his chest. The glory of a good hack vibrated his old bones. There was something thrilling about being somewhere forbidden. Ajay had worked for the government during his long career, hacking whatever the NSA told him to hack. The thrill may have been muted back then—with only the occasional excitement of taking down a foreign national or even retaliating for the digital intrusions of a non-governmental group. He’d been a digital hitman, a clever solution to a problem many didn’t take seriously until it was too late.

Now, in retirement, he was a free agent. The NSA had fallen, broken apart, and been absorbed into other agencies. He’d left his government work behind, bitter at the way he’d been used, and swore to only use his skills for good.

Mostly.

Ajay checked his fidget again. Its blue light flickered across his cheaters and danced across the falling snow.

He ran a hand through his white hair. Natural camouflage, unlike his light brown skin. That skin made him stand out far more than he wanted in this northern climate, though not as much as it had when he was young. The influx of scientists and migrant workers in the area brought a wide variety of colors and shapes. Perfect for hiding in plain sight.

Perfect for fleeing the corporations who would harm his granddaughters.

Ajay pressed himself under the left front leg of an enormous blue ox statue. With a gesture of his left hand, he ran the same protocol he’d used once before to mimic a teacher’s work device, hoping that the real device wasn’t present already on the system.

It wasn’t.

Connected.

Ajay took a moment to check his traps.

His hearing aid clicked with an incoming call. He ignored it.

Hacking wasn’t a digital battle of wills. Not exactly. A good hack was won with preparation as much as ingenuity. He’d programmed his routines for weeks before making his first attempt. Months, even. Once he had placed his payload on the system, it sat invisible for weeks before testing the merest tweak of surveillance. He couldn’t afford to get caught. That would defeat the purpose of living in this frozen wasteland of northern Minnesota.

One routine checked a single row in a single database every day. This, on its own, would not be enough. Every read of the database was registered in an encrypted vault. That vault was locked with powerful obfuscation measures in addition to its encryption. Quantum computing destroyed all illusions of rock-solid computer privacy, but things could still be hidden in plain sight. In this case, the obfuscation came in the form of labeling the database Lunch Menu Experiments.

Why did a middle school need such privacy?

Ajay appreciated it nonetheless. If he hadn’t been able to keep Kylie’s data private, he would have had to go through more drastic means to keep her hidden. Her father’s company still searched for Ajay’s granddaughters, even after their parents died tragically last year.

No, Haveraptics only really searched for Isabelle. They’d experimented on the older sister with their neurotech, only catching Kylie when their viral delivery survived longer than it should have.

His earpiece clicked again. He ignored it.

Ajay initiated a procedure to penetrate the next line of defense. He was in the public layer already, masquerading as Ms. Barret, Kylie’s least pleasant teacher. There was plenty to see in the public layer, especially as a teacher, but what he needed was login data from much deeper in the admin network.

He ran the routine as a gust of wind blew wet snow down the back of his coat.

Alarm subsystems flared. He swiped them away by directing their output into a bit bucket. When more arose, he executed a quick program to do the same. His routine hummed, touching each file in the enormous middle school network. American History flew past in his screen, along with early lessons of algebra mixed with strangely politicized versions of reproductive health.

A second wave of alerts flared, but they wouldn’t die so easily. Ajay rerouted them to the Phys Ed server, where the slow processing would buy him more time. Working on his tiny glasses strained his old eyes, but he squinted through it. Access opened, and he took it.

Operator.

As operator, Ajay could make changes to the curriculum. He could change schedules and erase merits. There were so many merits to erase. Ajay resisted the urge to glance at Kylie’s record. Had she stood out too much? He had told her to be normal, but she wasn’t normal.

She wasn’t the sort of kid to stay unnoticed, which was part of his problem.

Ajay used his new operator status to swim through seas of data, executing algorithms that burned the trail behind him. It removed Ms. Barret’s identity from his public access and made changes to the Lunch Menu entries that recorded his previous access. This wasn’t hard, but even these manual changes were logged in another obfuscated and encrypted database.

Ajay set his sights on the Hallway Poster Approval Database, which contained the next level of tracking.

The system burned with alerts, from the base code at the root of the system all the way up to the user-level interface. If any teachers huddled in their cold classrooms on this Thursday night, working late to grade assignments, they might notice the whole network slowing to a crawl from the sheer number of messages flying into Ajay’s nets. He caught them all, then redirected, rewrote, and reconfigured each through procedural masking. If even one of them got loose, it would fire a message to the system admin, revealing the attack and uncovering both Kylie and himself.

But Ajay was too good to let that happen.

A bead of sweat formed on his brow. With a swipe of two fingers, he slashed the alerts out of the way. The running procedures would handle those, and he needed to concentrate.

His hearing aid clicked again, but this time he answered it. Eh?

Papa? It was a girl’s voice. Not Kylie.

Sashi? He almost asked it, but his daughter was dead. Gone forever in a destructive scan meant to help her daughters recover from the changes in their brains. He had watched her die, but this… The display hovering over his left hand quavered. Who is this?

But as soon as he asked it, he knew the answer.

Papa, you have to leave, said Isabelle. She sounded so old.

How do you know where I am? he asked. Maybe it had been her in the middle school’s network. He’d done everything he could to hide Kylie, but that was nothing against Isabelle’s command of the computing networks. If she was trying to find them, she could do it.

He hadn’t known she was trying, and the idea of it brought a lump to the back of his throat.

His display flared red, flashing a dozen warnings at once. In a panic, he cleared them all, escalated the attack, and fired a barrage of counter procedures. Isabelle, he said when air returned to his lungs. How have you been?

There’s going to be too much activity in Bemidji, Isabelle said. You have to leave town tonight. And never come back.

Ajay scrambled to recover access, but his operator level authority was faltering. Something in the system was shutting him out piece by piece. Your sister needs stability. She has friends here.

Friends never did me any good.

You never had friends, Ajay snapped. He was right, but far crueler than he had any right to be. Something about her hard voice set him on edge. She was seventeen, but her words tripped over gravel like an aging rocker.

I had my sister, she said.

Ajay was silent for a long time. He regained his operator access by sending a coded message to the root authority. Then he spliced the admin password file into the encryption engine. Would they have reused the same encryption they used for the obfuscated databases?

The systems opened, and he had everything.

I’ll keep her safe, he promised Isabelle.

I know you’ll try.

There wasn’t a hint of accusation in the tone of her voice, but Ajay heard it anyway. He had once promised to keep all of them safe, including Sashi. She was dead, Isabelle was untraceable, and Kylie was in hiding. He could make an argument that two of those were something like safe, but Sashi was still dead.

He scrubbed his presence from the databases. All records of his intrusion would disappear when he was gone. Then, he scanned the tools he’d buried deep within the system, coiled into the machine code. Who had touched Kylie’s records? He had to check, even though he now knew it was likely Isabelle.

But it wasn’t Isabelle. A lone record sat unscrubbed, revealing the identity of the person who had cracked admin access in the middle school database, changed a single grade in a single file, then erased almost every sign of intrusion.

You won’t like what you find, Isabelle said.

I don’t like it already. He stared at the text on his screen. Kylie’s name flashed in dull green. She had been the one to hack her own records.

You better get home before Kylie.

Why did Isabelle sound so old? She sounded at least thirty. Ajay closed out his connections, verifying again that his intrusion would leave no trace. He erased Kylie’s involvement, too, just to be safe. He needed to talk with her about this, but he was not looking forward to it.

What am I going to find? he asked Isabelle.

The line clicked, and she was gone.

Ajay ghosted his way past the drones, fetched Garrison, and made his way home through the heavy snow.

Isabelle had been right. He did not like one bit what he found there.

Drunken footprints led up to the doorway of his house, faded into dimples by the blowing wind. A crater graced the side of the sidewalk where someone had fallen—a struggle, maybe. The trail led up to Ajay’s door, which stood wide open to the cold wind.

Inside, a man’s lifeless corpse sat in Ajay’s favorite chair.

Silas Cardoso, Ajay muttered, recognizing the body. You son of a bitch.

Chapter 2

Kylie Andersen didn’t much like in-person events.

In virtual school, she could be whoever she wanted. People didn’t see her darker-than-Swedish skin and assume she was Ojibwa or Lakota. In virtual school, she didn’t have to worry about whether the slight curl in the end of her shoulder-length dark hair was in fashion or a terrible mistake.

Everything she did in the real world was always a terrible mistake, especially going to the Liam Thompson presentation at the Bemidji State campus for extra credit. He was presenting in the new Thompson Hall, which Kylie thought probably helped boost his already overinflated ego.

I always knew I would return to Minnesota, said the slender man in the steel gray suit on stage in front of a packed auditorium. Mr. Thompson radiated confidence, and his bright blond hair made him look young, even though Kylie could see the makeup caked on his face to cover the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. Even when I was cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico’s worst ever oil spill, I had dreams of these great pine forests and crystal-clear lakes.

She needed the extra credit, even though she knew how to change her grades. Grades were much harder in in-person school, and not only because the teachers remembered their students. Virtual school was easy. Every lesson was automatically tailored to the students’ skills, so they always learned fast and succeeded. In in-person school, ninety percent of the material was way too easy, and the rest was impossibly hard.

People magazine called me the greatest environmentalist in human history, Mr. Thompson said, and I owe every bit of that to the Minnesota that made me, from our fabulous boundary waters where I spent countless summers to the old growth forests and even the wetlands.

Papa had told her that making friends was easy. All she had to do was talk to people and they would instantly like her. This was the exact opposite of her experience, but she had to try again or risk hearing the same dull lecture about the importance of integrating into society. As if her very grumpy grandpa ever did anything like that.

To her left was a woman with grayish-blonde hair wearing the drabbest gray cardigan Kylie had ever seen over a flower print dress. Kylie opened her mouth to say something witty about Mr. Thompson’s enormous ego, but the lady reminded her of Olivia. Olivia Bjornson had died in front of Kylie over a year ago, but Kylie still heard the old woman’s voice in her dreams. It had been a bad time for Kylie’s family. Her mother had murdered her father, then killed herself in a bid to save her daughters. Kylie’s sister Isabelle had left, maybe forever.

Her mother’s sacrifice had amounted to nothing, which probably just made it a regular suicide. That thought lingered in Kylie’s brain, spiraling ever downward and ever darker. It had all been a waste. All that death. Now she lived with Papa in a small town and sat through dreadfully boring lectures by exceptionally pompous white men.

This guy’s full of it, whispered the boy to her right. He had dark skin except for a white patch on his chin, and his black hair was in messy cornrows. He still wore his heavy orange winter coat despite the warmth of the packed auditorium.

Kylie was unprepared for conversation. She had seen the boy in her classes before, but she didn’t remember his name. Any communication with him would be awkward because of that, and she couldn’t stand it.

Mr. Thompson paced across the wide stage. Behind him, images of felled rainforests scrolled across a gigantic screen. In the beginning of this millennium, millions of our world’s precious forests were being clear-cut for the sake of paper and profit, but we knew there must be a better way.

I mean, look at him, whispered the boy, he’s got to be what, a hundred years old? He probably caused all those environmental disasters when he invented gasoline automobiles.

Kylie cast the boy a wary look. She couldn’t tell if he was joking. She could never tell if anyone was joking. Maybe that’s why she didn’t have any friends.

On the screens, the ruined forests were replaced with rows upon rows of planted trees. Those faded to be replaced with larger trees with snow-white leaves, interspersed with clusters of human and wildlife habitats. As the trees grew, they became part of a sprawling land where villages lived and worked in conjunction with nature. Kylie couldn’t see the exact moment where the video switched from real footage to computer animation, but toward the end, it was definitely fake.

That’s not real, is it? she whispered to the boy, whose name she still didn’t remember.

The woman to her left shushed her, and a chill ran up Kylie’s spine. It sounded like the kind of shush she would have gotten from Olivia.

He’s probably making all of this up, said the boy, earning a glare from the woman. I mean, this guy’s uber-rich. Where’s the profit in planting trees?

Maybe he makes people pay taxes or something, Kylie said, turning to shut out the woman on her left.

He’s not the government.

My goal was to save the environment from climate change, said Mr. Thompson, but I brought justice and peace to Brazil as a side effect. The smile that crinkled the corners of the man’s eyes made him look like he thought he was very clever. I suppose everything we do has unintended side effects.

Like oppressing the native populations, whispered the boy.

Kylie wondered if he had said it for her benefit. Her lineage, if she traced it back far enough, was from India. Not Native American at all. Still, as she watched the video, she noticed a lot of white settler faces in the forest homes. What happened to the native peoples of Brazil?

On the screen, the video faded, replaced by drone footage that Kylie recognized as Chernobyl. The wild had reclaimed both the nuclear power plant and the city, absorbing the man-made structures and making a creepy, surreal world of post-humanity.

The last centuries have been hard on this world in a number of ways, said Mr. Thompson. Climate change, mass extinctions, and even nuclear disasters. I’ve spent the years of my career fighting against this travesty, which is why I led the effort to clean up the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

The video faded again, and glass towers rose from the ruins of Chernobyl.

With my patented techniques, the world’s waste sites have been restored to glory. Again, that quirky smile. "Something Russia was eager to pay handsomely for. No longer is Chernobyl humanity’s greatest defeat. It’s now