“Industrial facilities,” Oistad said. “It’s relatively subtle. Refineries lose efficiency; component failure in manufacturing facilities increases due to glitched management routines, decreasing productivity. The rate of these attacks has been gradually increasing. We’re upgrading our electronic countermeasures, but we’re behind on security development. Even our G8Turings have trouble defending themselves against the more sophisticated intrusion attempts.”
“Your G8Turings are vulnerable?” Kandara asked in surprise. G8Turings had only been coming online in the last six months, almost in accordance with the Robson law of progression, which said the rate of development would double between each generation. Though they’d taken slightly longer than expected to develop, the G8Turings should have been utterly secure.
“They can’t be cracked, obviously, but defense absorbs more of their processing capacity than I’d like. The G8Turings produced by commercial companies are more evolved in that regard.”
“And this is why you brought me in?” Kandara asked skeptically. “A few items in short supply?”
“No,” Jessika said firmly. “There’s been a tipping point. Three weeks ago, the public biolife center here in Naima was subject to an intense digital assault. The entire production facility was taken offline. Black routing opened a clean channel into the network. They penetrated the management routines so deeply, they even overrode safety limiters; the machines suffered actual physical damage from overloads. That all had to be repaired. And sleeper bugs were left behind. The entire network architecture has to be wiped and rebooted. And even that doesn’t guarantee the bugs are eliminated; they’re highly adaptive.”
“What does the biolife center produce?” Kandara was very aware of the glances the team exchanged as soon as she came out with the question. For a moment she wondered if it was some kind of weapons research, a nice dirty little secret at the heart of Utopial society.
“Naima produces ninety percent of the planet’s telomere treatment vectors,” Oistad said gloomily.
“We’ve had to implement rationing,” Kruse said. “Treatment therapies have been delayed. We’re now buying in vectors from Universal companies, but even they don’t have enough. They use demand-match supply systems; nobody stockpiles anything these days, it’s not
“The big nine pharmas were delighted, of course,” Jessika said. “But they’re frustrated, too. By the time they expand their production facilities to meet our requirements, we’ll have the Naima biolife facilities back up.”
“So all that’s happened is the price of the Universal vectors has risen, making the treatments more limited for everyone. Supply and demand.” Kruse said it as if she was uttering a profane curse.
Kandara suspected that, in a way, sie was. “That’s not good,” she admitted.
“Thank you for your empathy,” Kruse snapped.
“If you wanted a therapist, you came to the wrong person.”
“They knew what they were doing,” Jessika said. “They knew the effect damaging the telomere therapies would have. It’s an attack on the fundamental principles of our society. In any decent civilization, healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Even their own, the Universals, suffered from this action.”
“I see why you called me in,” Kandara said. “Life expectancy is precious. Take a day away from everyone on a planet, and you’ve killed centuries of human life. It’s subtle, but very real.”
“I hoped you’d understand,” Kruse said.
Jessika gave Kandara a sly conspiratorial smile, which quickly vanished. She drained her wineglass. “So. We’ve been trying to track down where the black routing originated from.”
“And?” Kandara asked.
“We have absolutely no idea. Their routines are better than ours. They left nothing behind.”
Kandara looked around the table, taking in for the first time just how glum some of them appeared. “So you’re not going to find the source, are you? Not now?”
“If you can’t backtrack the load point within a day, then no,” Tyle said.
“What do you need to find it?” she asked. “Better routines? I know some experts we can bring in. Good ones.”
“I’m not that bad. And I have been given the Bureau’s G8Turing to work with.”
“Then how do we catch them? Give me a best-case scenario.”
“The dark routines are easiest to detect when they are being infiltrated into the target network. If we could just be monitoring that when it happened, we can backtrack effectively.”
“So you have to upgrade security monitor routines.”
“We are doing that, but there are hundreds of thousands of individual networks on Akitha. I told you, it will take time.”
“All right,” Kandara said. “Then we need to narrow it down. Jessika, you’re supposed to be analyzing the strategic pattern. Is this one team or several?”