The only available shot was going to have to be from across two busy streets. After some calculating, he decided to set up his shooting position hanging in a tree, a remotely fired charge would fake the sound and muzzle flash, and set up his real shooting site from the top of a tire store. It was going to be a cross shot, no straight on angles, but he knew he could pull it off.
He packed up his laptop and made sure his soldiering iron was unplugged. The scam he would use to get on the roof as a building contractor needed some things he didn't have with him. He had to draw out the shooting site including the relevant ranges, hang wind flags and other prep before he could take the shots. After this job was done, he hoped they'd leave him alone for a few months so he could get some work done.
Alpha Surplus was in a converted warehouse. It was a huge pole barn filled floor to ceiling with all sorts of junk ranging from military surplus backpacks to electronic equipment used during the Cold War. As Jackie wandered around, she wondered if there could be any order to the where stuff was placed — if there was, she couldn't see it. It was dusty, but brightly lit.
Old telephones, electronic test equipment and other unidentifiable computer equipment seemed to be stacked along the far wall. She made her way down there and saw a man crouching over a tub.
From a distance, it looked like Jared. When she got closer, she saw that it was — he was gangly, had thick glasses and moved in nervous twitches like the wiring to his muscles had something wrong with it.
He saw her coming and stood up, holding a black box with white painted writing on it.
“Found me,” he said.
“Yes.”
Handing her the box he said, “Guess what this is?”
Besides having flaking paint, the writing on it said 'NASA' along with a part number.
Handing it back, she said, “I have no idea.”
“It's one of the Guidance Computer Modules from the Apollo program. The first use of integrated circuits. This is the Block 1 version and it had 4,100 ICs, each containing a single 3 input logic gate. Made by Fairchild Semiconductor, it used Resistor-Transistor Logic. That module there cost the taxpayers well over $20,000 in 1965 dollars.”
He looked wistfully at it. “Now, your average wristwatch has more computational power than the computers used to put men on the moon.”
Setting it back in the tub, he said, “What can I do for you?”
“I need to talk about what your company coded for Nathan before he died.”
“He told me that you'd be coming to talk me about this.”
She didn't know what to say. Was there not anything that Nathan hadn't predicted she would do? She resented his manipulating her life from beyond the grave.
“I really need your help.”
Jared said, “I've been here so much that they let me use the break room whenever I want. We probably better sit down for this.”
She followed him to the rear of the building where an area had been set aside in the piles. A battered table and four mismatched chairs sat in front of a dusty refrigerator and a microwave.
After they sat, Jared said, “What do you want to know?”
“Was there anything strange about what you were coding for him?”
He nodded. “That depends on your definition of strange. Nathan had been acting weird for the last two or three years involving projects that defied logic. While I never saw the whole picture, the pieces that I caught glimpses of scared the hell out of me — some of it was cutting edge, others were really simple, but very illegal.”
“Illegal?”
He looked at her with eyes magnified by his glasses. “For the record, I didn't want anything to do with any of it, but Nathan's money was always good — with the expansion of my business, I needed it. And I figured out ways of breaking up the coding modules so no one besides he and I had any idea what we were doing.”
“So, what were you doing?”
“You know that credit card swipe machine program that White Hat sold?”
She nodded.
“Well, every so often, it takes the rounded off calculations from a transaction and deposits that into an account. Maybe two or three tenths a day from each machine, but with as many credit card swipe machines as there are, it can add up quite quickly.”
“Where did the money go?” She sure as hell could use it. Maybe to get her company up and going again and try and put together the rest of her life.
He shrugged. “I have no idea at all. That was all Nathan's doing. My understanding is that the account it was deposited into varied depending on some strange formula that he came up with. It probably didn't stay in any place very long.”
She thought about the implications of what he had said. “I can think of several dozen laws that are being broken. Why'd you do it?”
Leaning back in his chair, he said, “I didn't do it. I just suspect that was what was happening. You know the score — from experience, despite being in the dark, you can infer a great deal of information. I've been in this business a long time and know a lot of the tricks.”
She realized that he was getting hostile. Dealing with him required more diplomacy, otherwise he would clam up and she wouldn't be that much further ahead with the information she was seeking than she was now.
“Anybody else in on this?”
“Nope. Nathan didn't trust many people.”
“You mentioned other 'strange' projects. I'm assuming that they were financed through the company, but weren't products for sale. Any clues what he was up to?”
He took a moment to reply. “Mostly having to do with complex decision tree learning. Some really esoteric stuff here.”
“Decision tree learning?”
“Yeah. Using data mining, say from online newspaper sources, it maps observations about an item to conclusions about the item's target value, and then acts on them. It's a foundation of machine learning. Not real Artificial Intelligence, but damn close. Ported a bunch of stuff over to a scripting language, can be run anywhere, on almost any machine.”
He had said 'Target,' hadn't he?
“How about a web-based application?”
Slowly, he nodded. “Yes.”
She didn't know how much he knew or was willing to tell her, but she decided to lay all her cards out.
“Have you been watching the news?”
“What aspect of it?”
“The Children of the Constitution thing. Recognize anything from what they've said and done?”
“Yes. That can't be what Nathan was involved in, is it?”
Somehow, she knew he was lying. He probably had drawn the same conclusions that she had, but much earlier on. She wondered how much his silence cost. That he wasn't already dead like Patrick, and anybody else associated with the company, was the thing that stuck out for her.
“In theory, if the Children of the Constitution is a computer program, how would you access it?”
He shrugged. “Honestly, I don't know. For what we developed, we used a pretty powerful computer to test it. With the scope of the algorithms we used and the amount of data you have to churn through, it's not something you can run on a desktop PC. You'll need some sort of distributed operating system, one heck of a lot of powerful processors and massive amount of storage — maybe as much as a petabyte, a thousand terabytes.”
“Where would you find such hardware?”
“You’re going to need a server farm of some sort. Not as big as say Google, but probably as big as one of their off-site units. Not cheap, sucks down power like water and needs to be secured and maintained. There are places that will turn-key one for you, and some people have built their own, but that's fraught with its own major problems.”