NXM Episode 1: Operation N

The look being sent across the black marble meeting table was not an unfamiliar one, but there was something more honest about it this time. In past interrogations, the expression was more implied than present, the anger a shadow imminent in the skin. Today it cut through all inhibitions, a raptor’s claw tightening nose and brow into a furious glare. The wetware infused eyes nested within those features seemed to shine brighter today with the fire of fury. But when he spoke, his voice maintained the careful measure that one must when in the presence of lawyers.

“A coordinated hacking campaign targeting city infrastructure… A murdered research scientist… nearly 1.7 million in stolen bioware assets…” The record executive rested his forehead against his hand, perhaps tapping into self-regulation software to help moderate his clearly negative mood state. “This is the limit, Daemon, beyond the limit by far”. His eyes carefully roamed to Daemon’s lawyer. “If”, he began carefully, “this is demonstrated to have been your doing… Even if you played only the most minor role in this, you will be stripped of citizenship, exiled from this system, hell the whole label, would likely be exiled with you as an accessory to treason, murder, theft… We have done nothing but given you gifts, Daemon, lifted you from your near-damned status, enabled you to redeem your family’s name by the good graces of our institution…” 

Daemon did nothing but smile. He had long ago learned that words towards the powerful were rarely wise. He was a creature of action. And he had money now, so he could afford to have someone else do the talking before him. Daemon Darksyn had little respect for Fielgud. The man was a parasite, like everyone in his position had to be to stay there. You could not obtain a position of power like his by merit alone. No, his standing was for the “righteous” and “noble” only; those whose family’s had, for generations, no debt to their name. There were remarkably few families that fit this description amongst the billions living on the face of Valeria. And it was noted by many historians that the number was slowly shrinking. This was, of course, denied by those who pulled the planet’s strings, but everyone knew it to be true. That was the aim of the game; for one to rise above the rest as God, the world a teeming ant hill of subservients at their beck and call.

Daemon’s lawyer stepped in to fill the silence. “These are extremely serious accusations you are fielding against my client Mr. Fielgud. I’ll remind you that this meeting is on record and that your statements here can be used in a libel suit if that becomes a relevant consideration.”

Fielgud rolled his shining eyes and lazily flicked the representation of a folder glimmering against the black marble’s surface. “Our analysts have determined that the likelihood of the coded message in your latest song being a chance occurrence is around 18%. There is no ambiguity about this message having been the initiating cause of the sequence of events just described. Somebody put that message in there. And as I understand, you are taking full credit for writing the words so decoded are you not? There are no ghost writers to speak of? No NI assistance?”

Daemon decided he would chime in here. “You’re right. It’s wholly my work,” he said, putting his hands up as if to demonstrate innocence in his claim. 

“So you put that message in there” Fielgud said through tense, whitened lips.

With a gesture, the lawyer pulled up his own folder rep and flicked it across the marble. “And our analysts, Fielgud, have discerned that the lyrics of the song “Everything Ends”, could have been decoded into at least 14 other messages, some of which have an even higher probability of being intentional. Those have quite harmless messages, including “brush your teeth”. Of course, probability is not causation. It is a measure of likelihood. But it is not a measure of truth. I believe my client. What you are seeing, Mr. Fielgud, is the consequence of genius. And we know that Daemon is a genius. If not for his family’s unfortunate karma, requiring penance and proving by my client here, then he could easily be at the Righteous Academy for Scientific Excellence rather than on your payroll as an entertainer if he chose to be. Sometimes things show up in a work of art that seem, by all accounts, intentional and clear, but that the artist was blind to until someone else found them. Artists channel, creativity is improvisational. Certainly Daemon has played pranks through coded messages before, but these have all been good fun. Publicity stunts, which have benefited your corporation quite significantly I believe. It is entirely reasonable that given these stunts, some would continue to look for similar such happenings on an ongoing basis. And it was a slightly obsessed hyper fan who found it, was it not? One with a known tendency to believe that Daemon speaks to him personally through his music? This individual is currently in custody as the primary suspect, but it is also not impossible that someone is trying to set Daemon up. I would be careful about your accusations until these other plausible scenarios have been properly explored. Not to mention, Daemon does have an alibi as you know.

In that document there, you will see that your analysts failed to look for anything other than the message responsible for the unfortunate events of last week. When you crunch the numbers alongside other possible “hidden messages” that could be derived from the work of art in question, the probability of the offending message being a chance occurrence rises to 67%. There is no case here, Mr. Fielgud. There is only speculation and ungrounded accusations. A suspect is already in custody. A suspect who is on record criticizing our hallowed government and the murdered Doctor, by the way. There’s a clear motive and trail to this individual, and to my client there is nothing other than that his art was manipulated by an unwell mind for nefarious purposes. I’d advise you to cease and desist. It’s wiser for you - and your shareholders - to stand with my client.”

Fielgud emitted a long and laborious breath but said nothing. “I think this discussion is over then”, said the lawyer, standing up. He bowed and said his thanks to the higher status executive and turned to leave at the dismissive wave of the executive’s hand. Daemon followed suit, performing the curtsy-like bow proper to his even lower social standing. Before closing the door behind him, he turned to give Fielgud a subtle smile and wink. He relished the fury in those augmented eyes, the silent certainty lurking beneath furrowed brows that said what he legally couldn’t: “I know you did this”. 

And he was right. Daemon did do it. He coded a message in a song that rose as high as #3 in several Valerian music charts. That message urged people to send an email to an address that was thought to reward the recipient with a golden-ticket style secret performance experience. What it really did was recruit the sender’s system into a DDOS-like attack network. A follow up email, allegedly from a sponsor concerned with environmental decline, urged these “lucky” senders to reduce stress on the city’s network by shutting off all of their electronics within an interval of time. 

The attacks began when a threshold of power demand was reintroduced to the power grid with the reactivation of the unsuspecting electronic army’s home devices. The attacks had two targets. First, a series of adaptive power transformers controlling power distribution throughout Kapita, a megacity with a population of about 32 million people and home of Daemon and his record label. The city grid is modeled after organic circulatory systems, with power supply stations playing the role of a heart, and transformers throughout the city playing the role of baroreceptors. The role of a baroreceptor is to register the pressure (or in this case, power density) flowing through the network's channels. They initiate adjustments to power density and cable contractions. Just like blood vessels in an organic system, Kapita’s power lines are dynamic and can expand and contract to ensure that power density ratios are always within operable parameters for the network. The point of this power grid is not necessarily to provide consistent power to everyone, but to provide consistent power to priority neighborhoods while minimizing overall power consumption. It is optimized for efficiency rather than consistency. 

The poorest neighborhoods, inhabited by those referred to as “the damned” do not even own enough powered things to justify sending power to those regions at all times. Rather, power to those areas is supplied only during business hours, primarily to ensure that policing forces are able to access the tools needed for law enforcement. As a convenient side effect, some are able to operate small businesses during the day. At night, the power grid sleeps like an organism, with flow being reduced to the periphery but increased in the “brain” of Kapita, its central priority neighborhoods. Here are located the noble citizens, those free of debt, and even those who have some store of wealth to their name. Here there are respected schools and hospitals, laboratories, government buildings, and all of the best entertainment venues to be found in the city. Here, no one has to sleep if they don’t want to, so long as their credit rating enables them freedom of purchase for the various chemical and mechanical alterations that Kapita’s finest have to offer. The power grid serves its intended purpose. But it also has the same weaknesses that a circulatory system has. It can, in a way, be induced to have a reflex syncope (in simpler terms, to faint). Just as to faint is to have a blackout in consciousness, errors in the system’s self regulation mechanisms can yield power blackouts.

The distributed attacks on the power grid’s adaptive transformers targeted those that surrounded a neighborhood wherein Skele-Tech Industries’ primary lab is located. As the name implies, they specialize in in carbon nano-tube replacements for skeletal systems, but they have also developed a line of skin augmentations improving upon key performance indicators such as resilience, durability, and glow (opening them up to market share in the cosmetic industry in addition to their primary market in high-performance sports and military applications). The attacks sent constant streams of corrupted data packages to the transformers. Unfortunately, these transformers happened to be too smart for their own good, over-engineered (as everything here is) with NI-algorithms that enable their operations to be discussed as if they were living thinking things. The transformers interpreted the consistency of package delivery as an indication that they were doing something wrong. Nothing like this had ever happened, so they inferred that their operators must find it very important for them to read this mysterious package. Being adaptive, naturally intelligent agents, they learned to read the corrupted code the files contained. This, however, required them to make a temporary adjustment in their base coding, shifting their decimal reads in all numeric values one digit to the left for the several milliseconds required to read the data packages (which only contained a laughing devil emoji). This ephemeral change had the consequence of changing how the transformers read power densities flowing through them. For that brief moment, all volume in the system was read as significantly lower than its actual throughput. Before their NI-enabled reflective functions could activate, they were automatically contracting their connected channels. Combined with the sudden surge in power caused by thousands of nearby devices being turned back on simultaneously within a minute of this happening, the neighborhood grid was overloaded and blacked out. This caused a cascade of blackouts as the system tried but failed to compensate for this artificially induced error. 

The second cyber attack targets were the remote access portals for security systems commonly used in private research labs. By overwhelming the system’s servers, the service was inaccessible for the critical time window of 11:45 pm-midnight, preventing remote operatives from observing or acting on any system alerts (which a power outage would certainly produce). In this 15 minute window, the hacker known as Techro infiltrated the Skele-Tech Industries lab through upper floor windows whose locks were deemed less important than those below and so did not have the failsafe deadlock mechanisms that ensured security in the occasion of blackouts such as this. To be fair to the security team, it is quite difficult to climb 13 stories up a building with very little in the way of handholds. Not even a fire escape lined this building, where profit and proprietary secrets were the logical priority over the lives within it. Luck had it that Techro ran into a notorious researcher by the name of Tarrion Mangull, who, in different times and places, may have been considered criminally insane for the things he did to people’s bodies with or without their consent in the name of his science and the creation of shareholder value. But In Kapita, he was a hero of industry and a very rich man. 

Rounding a corner, Techro cut a V in the man from groin to shoulder, his curved soni-tech blades cutting cleanly through the doctor’s augmented skin. Under the sway of pulsing sonic sequences Daemon had programmed into the weapons, the carbon nano-tubes in that skin parted like the red sea before Moses. And with their movements, a red sea came pouring forth, along with all manner of tubular organs whose eviction from their casing was blurted out like a sudden and awkward departure at a party. For good measure, Techro decapitated Mangull before he hit the ground. He did not linger, nor did he feel any emotion in the act. It was simply the right thing to do; like helping a friend with the dishes after they have prepared a shared meal. Cleanup finished, he moved on to his primary objective of what they were calling Operation N; procuring skin and skeletal augments. Having studied maps of the building in preparation, this was accomplished in seven minutes, and he was out the entry point and in Daemon’s getaway van with three minutes to spare before the power grid began to return to function. 

Of course, someone had to take the fall. And Daemon had the perfect person at the ready; an increasingly invasive hyper fan who, it happens, very readily found the intended message in the song “Everything Ends” while missing the decoy messages. This is a sensible outcome because the code was tailored to that particular mind, schizotypal in its operations, and entertaining delusions of reference in Daemon’s music already. That this person had a record of “discovering secret messages to and about him” in Daemon’s music, meant that his finding another would not be likely to raise too much suspicion. And as this fan had been assuming a paparazzi-like obsession with Daemon and had begun to follow him to places he should not have been followed, it was a necessity to have him removed. This route of removal had at least some chance of being kinder than killing him, depending on the judge and the sentence imposed. But kindness in this circumstance was secondary to the greater kindness that could be brought to all by burning Vaerlia’s systems of power to the ground.

Upon return to his illegal underground laboratory at the outskirts of the habitations of The Damned, Daemon fired up his generators and got to work. He sterilized his materials and body as Techro inserted a soporific syringe into a vein in his left arm. As the hacker in green slept, Daemon cut him open and replaced a few critical bones in his chest, his arms, his feet. He attached to these replacements a couple of sonic augments he had designed, which would both mask the presence of Skele-Tech hardware in the presence of proprietary-marker scanners (it was illegal for those of the castes to which they both belonged to have such augments), and would also improve upon their operations when dedicated sound sequences were delivered to their receivers. Techro remained at the lab while he recovered, and Daemon returned to his life of interviews, performers, and meetings with his PR team. He played his role perfectly as if nothing happened. Until a week later, when Fielgud confronted him with the analysis his lawyer so readily shot down. But with that wink, he let his record exec know that this was not the end of a series of pranks pulled through the vehicle of his music. No… Operation N was just the beginning…

Of Ninja X Machina