The Terminal Experiment

CHAPTER 40

It had taken some work, but on December 4 Sandra Philo had gotten the monitoring warrant she’d requested, allowing her to place a transponder inside the rear bumper of Peter Hobson’s car. She’d been given a ten-day permit by the judge. The transponder had a timing chip in it: it had operated for precisely the period authorized, and not a second longer. The ten days were now up, and Sandra was analyzing the collected data.

Peter drove to his office a lot, and also went frequently to several restaurants, including Sonny Gotlieb’s, a place Sandra quite liked herself; to North York General Hospital (he was on their board of directors); and elsewhere. But there was one address that kept appearing over and over in the logs: 88 Connie Crescent in Concord. That was an industrial unit that housed four different businesses. She cross-referenced the address with Peter’s telephone records, obtained under the same warrant. He’d repeatedly called a number registered to Mirror Image, 88 Connie Crescent.

Sandra called up InfoGlobe and got screens full of data about that company: Mirror Image Ltd., founded in 2001 by wunderkind Sarkar Muhammed, a firm specializing in expert systems and artificial-intelligence applications. Big contracts with the Ontario government and several Financial Post 100 corporations.

Sandra thought back to the lie-detector test Peter Hobson had taken. “I don’t know any person who might have killed them,” he’d said — and his vital signs had been agitated when he said the word “person.”

And now he was spending time at an artificial-intelligence lab.

It was almost too wild, too crazy.

And yet Hobson himself hadn’t committed the murders. The lie detector had shown that.

It was the kind of thing the law-enforcement journals had been warning was coming down the pike.

Perhaps, now, at last, it was here.

Here.

Sandra leaned back in her chair, trying to absorb it all.

It certainly wasn’t enough to get an arrest warrant.

Not an arrest warrant, no. But maybe a search warrant…

She saved her research files, logged off, and headed out the door.

It took five vehicles to get them all there: two patrol cars with a pair of uniformed officers apiece; a York Region squad car with the liaison officer from that police force — the raid would be conducted on York’s turf; Sandra Philo’s unmarked car, carrying her and Jorgenson, head of the computer-crimes division; and the blue CCD van, carrying five analysts and their equipment.

The convoy pulled up outside 88 Connie Crescent at 10:17 a.m. Sandra and the four uniformed officers went directly inside; Jorgenson went over to the CCD van to confer with his team.

The receptionist at Mirror Image — an elderly Asian man — looked up in shock as Sandra and the uniforms entered. “Can I help you?” he said.

“Please move away from your computer terminal,” said Sandra. “We have a warrant to search these premises.” She held up the document.

“I think I better call Dr. Muhammed,” said the man.

“You do that,” said Sandra. She snapped her fingers, indicating that one of the uniforms should stay here, preventing the receptionist from using his terminal. Sandra and the other three headed inside.

A thin dark-skinned man appeared at the far end of the corridor.

“May I help you?” he said, his voice full of concern.

“Are you Sarkar Muhammed?” asked Sandra, closing the distance between them.

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Inspector Philo, Metropolitan Toronto Police.” She handed him the warrant. “We have reason to believe that computer-related crimes have been committed from this establishment. This warrant gives us authority to search not just your offices, but your computer systems as well.”

At that moment, the door to the reception area burst open and Jorgenson and the five analysts came in. “Make sure none of the employees touch any computer equipment,” Jorgenson said to the senior uniformed officer. The cops started fanning out into the building. One of the corridor walls was largely glass, overlooking a big data-processing facility. Jorgenson pointed to two of the analysts. “Davis, Kato — you’re in there.” The two analysts went to the door, but it had a separate FILE lock.

“Dr. Muhammed,” said Sandra, “our warrant gives us the right to break any locks we deem necessary. If you prefer we not do that, please unlock that door.”

“Look,” said Sarkar, “we’ve done nothing wrong here.”

“Open the door, please,” Sandra said firmly.

“I want to review this warrant with my attorney.”

“Fine,” said Sandra. “Jones, kick it.”

“No!” said Sarkar. “All right, all right.” He moved to the side of the door and pressed his thumb against the blue scanner. The dead bolt popped aside and the door slid open. Davis and Kato went in, the former going straight for the master console, the latter starting an inventory of the DASD tape and optical-drive units.

Jorgenson turned to Sarkar. “You have an AI lab here. Where is it?”

“We’ve done nothing wrong,” said Sarkar again.

One of the uniforms reappeared at the far end of the corridor. “It’s down here, Karl!”

Jorgenson jogged down the hall, the three remaining members of his team following. Sandra walked in that direction, too, checking the signs on each door as she went.

The Asian receptionist had appeared at the other end of the corridor, looking worried. Sarkar shouted, “Call Kejavee, my attorney — tell him what’s happening. ” He then hurried off to follow Jorgenson.

Sarkar had been working in the AI lab when the receptionist had called him. He’d left the door open. By the time he got back there, Jorgenson was looming over the main console, unplugging the keyboard. He motioned to one of his associates who handed him another keyboard with a glossy black housing and silver keys. A diagnostic unit: every keystroke typed, every response from the computer, every disk-access delay would be recorded.

“Hey!” shouted Sarkar. “These are delicate systems. Be careful.”

Jorgenson ignored him. He sat on the barstool and pulled a vinyl folder out of his briefcase. It contained an assortment of diskettes, CDs, and PCMCIA cards. He selected a card that would fit the drive on the console, inserted it, then hit some keys on his keyboard.

The computer’s monitor cleared, then filled with diagnostic information about the system.

“Top of the line,” said Jorgenson, impressed. “Fully populated with 512 gigabytes of RAM, five parallel math coprocessors, self-referential bus architecture.” He tapped the space bar; another screen came up. “Latest firmware revision, too. Nice.”

He exited his program and began listing directories at the system prompt.

“What are you looking for?” asked Sarkar.

“Anything,” said Sandra, entering the room. “Everything.” Then, to Jorgenson: “Any problems?”

“Not so far. He was already logged in, so we didn’t need to crack the password file.”

Sarkar was edging away from the group toward a console on the other side of the room — a console with a microphone stalk sticking up from it.

“Login,” said Sarkar in a low voice, then, without waiting for the prompt, “Login name Sarkar.”

“Hello, Sarkar,” said the computer. “Shall I terminate your other session?”

Sandra Philo had come up behind him, the rounded front of her stunner pressing into the small of his back. “Don’t do that,” she said simply. She reached over to the console and flicked off the switch marked “Voice Input.”

At that point, Kawalski, the liaison officer from York, appeared at the entrance to the room. “They’ve got a barber’s chair upstairs,” he said generally to the group, then, looking at Sarkar, “You give haircuts here?”

Sarkar shook his head. “It’s actually a dentist’s chair.”

Jorgenson spoke without looking up. “Scanning room, no doubt,” he said. Then, to Sarkar: “I enjoyed your paper in last month’s Journal of AI Studies. I’ll want to search that room next.” He went back to typing commands on his black-and-silver keyboard.

Sarkar sounded exasperated. “If you would just tell me what you’re looking for…”

“Damn,” said Jorgenson. “There are several encrypted banks here.”

Sandra looked at Sarkar. “What’s the decryption key?”

Sarkar, feeling perhaps that he had some measure of control at last, said, “I do not believe I’m obligated to tell you.”

Jorgenson got up from the stool. Without a word, a second analyst sat down on it and began typing commands.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Jorgenson with a shrug. “Valentina was with the KGB, back when there was such a thing. There’s not much she can’t crack.”

Valentina popped a new datacard into the card slot, and typed furiously with two fingers. After several minutes, she looked at Sarkar, her face full of disappointment. Sarkar brightened visibly — perhaps she wasn’t as good as Jorgenson had said. But then Sarkar’s heart fell. The disappointment on her face was simply that of someone who’d been hoping for a good challenge, and had failed to find it. “The Hunsacker algorithm?” she said in a heavily accented voice, shaking her head. “You could have done better than that.” Valentina pressed a few more keys and the screen, which to this point had been filled with gibberish, was replaced with English source-code listings.

She got up. and Jorgenson went back to work. He cleared the screen, then replaced Valentina’s datacard with another of his own. “Initiating search,” he said. The screen filled with a multicolumn list of two hundred or so terms in alphabetical order.

“There’s massive storage online here,” said Jorgenson, “under a variety of compression schemes. It’ll take a while to hunt through it all.” He got up. “I’m going up to look at that scanning room.”

Peter had an evening board meeting at North York General today, and rather than waste the morning fighting the telephones at the office he decided to do some work from home. But he was having trouble concentrating. Sarkar had said he’d have the virus finished today, but Peter still felt he should be doing something himself. Around ten-thirty, he logged into Mirror Image, hoping to see if he could fathom how the sims had gotten outside.

After dialing in, he issued the WHO command to see whether Sarkar was also online — Peter wanted to send him an E-mail hello. He was indeed. Peter then issued WHAT to see what sort of activity Sarkar was doing; if it was a background task, he probably wasn’t actually sitting at the terminal, and so the E-mail would be a waste of time.

WHAT reported the following:

Node | User | Logged in at | Task

002 | Sarkar | 08:14:22 | text search

Well, a text search could be either background or foreground. Peter had high-level supervisory privileges on Sarkar’s systems. He called for an echoing of the task at node 002 on his own monitor. The screen filled with a list of search terms, and a constantly updated tally of hits. Some, such as Toronto, had hundreds of hits so far, but others…

Christ, thought Peter. Look at that…

Sarkar was searching for “Hobson” and “Pete*” and “Cath*” and…

Peter tapped out an E-mail message: “Nosy, aren’t we?” He was about to send it when he noticed the full search parameters in the status line: “Search all systems; within each system, search all online and offline storage and all working memory.”

A search like that could take hours. Sarkar would never order something like that — he was too well organized not to have at least some idea how to narrow the search.

Peter glanced at the other search terms.

Oh, shit.

“Larsen,” “Hans,” “adultery,” “affair.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. No way Sarkar would be doing a search like that. Someone else was inside the system.

Node 002 was the AI lab at Mirror Image. Peter swung his chair to face his phone and hit the speed-dialer key for there.

The phone rang in the AI lab. “May I get that?” asked Sarkar.

Sandra nodded. She was watching the screen intently. Lots of hits on the common words — “affair” had over four hundred so far — but none on Hobson or Larsen.

Sarkar moved across the room to the videophone and hit the ANSWER key.

The Bell Canada logo backflipped away. Peter saw Sarkar’s face, looking worried.

“What’s — ” said Peter, but that’s all he said. In the background, over Sarkar’s shoulder, he saw a profile of Sandra Philo. Peter broke the connection at once.

Philo there, at Mirror Image.

A raid. A goddamned raid.

Peter looked at his screen, slaved to node 002. Still no hits on “Hobson.”

He thought for a second, then began tapping keys. Peter spun off a second session under Sarkar’s login name, using the password he’d heard Sarkar use before. He then accessed the diagnostic-tools subdirectory and called up a file listing. There were hundreds of programs, including one called TEXTREP. That sounded promising. He called up help on it.

Good. Exactly what he needed. Syntax: search-term, replacement-term, search parameters.

Peter typed “TEXTREP / Hobson / Roddenberry / AI7-AI10” — meaning change all occurrences of “Hobson” to “Roddenberry” on artificial-intelligence systems seven through ten.

The program set to work. It was a much smaller search — only one term — and a much narrower area to search — only four computers instead of the hundred or more that Philo was currently examining. With luck, it would make all the substitutions before it was too late…

The console beeped, signaling its task was complete. Jorgenson was back, having found nothing of interest in the scanning room. He looked at the screen, then at Sandra. Thirteen hits for Hobson. Sandra pointed at the tally. “Display them in context,” she said.

Two appearances of the word in an online dictionary entry for “Hobson’s choice.”

A user-ID file, equating “fobson” with Peter G. Hobson.

A computerized Rolodex with home and business addresses for Peter Hobson.

And nine more references, mostly within copyright notices, to Hobson Monitoring Ltd. as parts of various pieces of scanning software.

“Nada,” said Jorgenson.

“He’s got an account here,” said Sandra, turning to Sarkar.

“Who does?” he said.

“Peter Hobson.”

“Oh, yes. We use some programs made by his company.”

“Nothing more?”

“Well, he’s a friend of mine, too. That’s why I have his home address in my Rolodex.” Sarkar looked innocent. “What were you expecting to find?”