(I wrote this, but never finished it, in China back around Christmastime. Randomly remembered it today, and thought this would be as good a place as any for it.)
The key was to be found across the city, in the
old commercial district. We had tried simulations, implanted demos, viewed stereoscopic
images through a haploscope we found in storage in the medical school. After
all of these, we had tried hallucinogens to modulate the imagined presence of
the key, but it was all to no avail. At least, we said to ourselves, when we
finally approach the key we will be familiar with it. The front end of the
process will not be a surprise.
The approach, however, to that front end, would
be horrendous. First, our camp was protected from the feed. This kept the peace
from finding us, but it also meant that our emergence into the feed would stand
out like a tree in the desert. We had monitored the security cycles for days.
Most would say that such monitoring was futile, since the cycle paths were
random, generated with new seeds every minute give or take another random
cycle. Any attempt, most would say, to predict gaps in the cycle would result
in no better chance of unnoticed entry than no attempt at all, with the added
hazard of false confidence to mask the creeping signs of detection.
It was possible, though, to closely estimate the
number of cycles. We could detect the passes themselves, which gave us data for
the estimation. The different cycles were unique, originating from different
security servers, each assigned its own identification during its current
generation. Given all these data, we had a method for estimating, at any given
moment, the likelihood of a pass. The optimal estimate could be made using the
previous twenty seconds of data. You could have pointed out that a likelihood
is the opposite of a certainty, at least along a certain conceptual dimension.
You could also have pointed out that the optimal estimate was lousy if those
twenty seconds contained a generation update. We would have ignored you.
Once inside, we would have to obtain city ids
from an admin, which was not trivial, but not a problem as long as we could
quickly make contact with Tsai, our woman on the inside. We knew she was still
online and that her admin was current, so as long as she wasn't in some
unshakable stupor, she would tie us on and we'd be set for the rest of the
trip. Anyways, persisting for a few minutes with unregistered cids wasn't as
dangerous as suddenly emerging out of the void. An impulse is like that tree in
the desert and the primary means of detecting aliens, while trouble finding a
cid registration is a basic function of the feed servers, which would be
checked in serial, assuming corruption or damage first and alien somewhere
further down the line. Tsai could just tie us onto the oldest and most remote
server, plot a false geographic history of intermittent reception and an
outstanding service request, and there would be nothing in the feed to mark us
out. The tree would dissolve into a puff of dust.
The next problem would be the actual emergence
into the city. Feed presence can be smoothed over, anyone can appear to be
anyone, fit into any group, assume any identity. The body, however, is much
less convenient to modify. Their hair is long, but ours is short. Their skin is
yellow, but ours is brown. We stand head and shoulders above them on the
street, and we have no choice but to travel on the street for the most part, by
foot, in the open, making stark and clear the comparison between foreigner and
local. But, there are other foreigners in Haisheng. They are few and far
between, but there are others, and though we draw attention it is natural,
because who can ignore a brown spot among yellow? The noticing is in itself not
a threat. But when others are looking for you, being easily noticed is a step
away from being easily found. We did not want to be found, but there was no
choice but to be noticed.
The final hazard was beyond any interaction with
the first two. At the time I could not imagine how, but I was still cognizant
that there was a possibility that the locked id had already been accessed by my
competitors before I had retrieved it. If so, they may even have already
decrypted it, outformed the important information inside, and restored the
encryption. This was beyond any vital worry on my part, since the main danger
was that knowing the key, and that I was looking to open the id, they might be
waiting for me at the site. This meant I would have to move slowly through the
streets, below them when possible, work quickly when it was time to get the key,
and maintain vigilance on all channels at all times. There was nothing else we
could do but be vigilant.
I can tell you more about the key without
compromising the truth of the mission. Someday down the line, you may be able
to put two and two together, but by that time whether or not you know such an
obscure truth won't matter much, and you'll be occupied with obscuring your own.
Anyways, it is an interesting detail, and may spark one or another interest in
you.
The id I had retrieved was that of a neural
engineer from a century or so earlier. We needed to query it regarding some
interactions it had had at one time with our main objective, whose id at the
time was missing and presumed destroyed. As it turns out this engineer had
dabbled in id encryption, which was a new field in those days, specifically in encryption
through perceptual experience. Though the field was active at the time, it was
- and remains - completely unknown to the science that this particular engineer
had worked on the problem. It was a private pastime, perhaps a paranoid fear
that a great advance might be stolen, or maybe it was just a fear of inadequacy
in an outsider bringing to the field such an idiosyncratic development. At any
rate, this engineer had come up with something exquisite, which was probably
unmatched by anything else produced by her generation. She may have meant it
entirely for herself. Today, it's a work of art, but the tech is fundamentally
outdated.
This is a digression, I'm sorry. Outdated or not,
it was a good lock, and on site we still needed the key to open it. The encryption
was applied to the id by taking the online state of some suite of perceptual
systems, definitely including visual, possibly other - and by the way, don't
take my ambiguity as indicating anything other than an intention to be
ambiguous - and using this neural state as the key for the encrypted id. The
entire state couldn't be recorded, of
course, since the subject would have to be standing out in the open at the
location, i.e. a true state scan would be impractical, especially in those
days. Instead, something was probably worn, perhaps obvious or perhaps hidden,
instantaneously recording a blocked brain state amounting to just a few
terabytes. It was a functional state, meaning that it could be reproduced in
other human brains, but our initial estimate that a good visual simulation
would suffice proved wrong. We needed to be there, unless someone could explain
exactly what composed the key, and the only person who could tell us that, it
appeared, was the one locked in that id.
Back to the problem. Being noticed, maybe being
scooped, these were mostly outside our control. But skipping as an alien into a
secure feed using random-cycle maintenance, that's something we can deal with.
Look at the figure field. We used standard methods to monitor the cycles and
establish their regeneration characteristics, how many there were, durations of
the cycles, amplitude of the duration modulation - everything here is something
you've seen before. You all have four minutes to generate the optimal estimate from these data, starting - now.
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