“And that would help us…?” John let the question trail off.
“Okay, I agree,” Paul continued. “A computer working here, one in Asheville, another in Morganton… big deal other than the convenience of using writing machines we once took for granted. To talk with others? We already have some telephones up and running. Cell phones and Wi-Fi? Forget it for years to come, so yeah, I can see your point on that score. I agree; our more immediate concerns are firewood and food.”
“I’m not saying stop working on this,” John interjected. “It’s just that as of the moment, I’m not seeing the short-term benefits. We replicate computer technology of the 1980s, maybe the ’90s, and then what?”
“We eavesdrop,” Ernie said with a smile, acting at least somewhat nonconfrontational for a change, “like I said the other day when Paul showed you the first machine up and running. Come on, John, I’m talking about Bluemont. You’re ex-military. When you were in the Middle East, how did the White House and Pentagon micromanage every move you guys made?”
“Commodore 64s and Apple IIes?” John replied with a cynical smile.
“Not much better, actually, if you go back a few years. When Linda and I were writing software for Apollo, its guidance systems were 40K computers—40K! Think of it. We went to the moon on 40-kilobyte computers.”
Ernie sighed and looked out the window at the snow-covered lawn in front of the library. “America did that in the ’60s, and it seems crazy today. The first shuttle flights had little more than a meg on board. All that data going back and forth on something your cell phone, at least before the system fried off, trumped a thousand times over. Again, Moore’s law.”
“So with what you are doing downstairs, you think you can hack into Bluemont’s communications. How?”
“First of all, the data goes up and down. Sat comm. Even low-earth orbit satellites are super hardened against EMPs generated by the sun, coronal mass ejections. For military use hardened against EMP hits as well. But a lot of that stuff goes all the way up to geosynch orbit. How did you get your television before the crap hit the fan?”
John started to smile. “An eighteen-inch dish.”
“Exactly.”
“But it’s encrypted, isn’t it?”
“It all comes down to zeroes and ones in the end, John. When Linda and I left IBM, we set up our own business, writing software and providing some of the precision hardware for large-array tracking dishes—mostly civilian business contracts, but a few overseas governments as well. Recall a scandal a few years back of a high government official with an unsecured server in their home that was hacked by some guys in Poland, Romania, somewhere overseas?”
John had some recollection of it. So much of what happened before the Day, which had once seemed all so important, was now becoming hazy memories.
“John, you remember this college was starting on a cybersecurity major before the war started.”
He nodded with memory of that. President Hunt had even asked him, as an historian and ex-military, to think about creating a course on the history of technology. The idea had intrigued him, and he had even done some preliminary research into the fascinating history of World War II, the tales about Enigma, Ultra, the tapping into Japanese and German radio traffic, the work of the legendary Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, England.
Is that where these two were leading?
“Take me to the conclusion,” John said, looking out across the windswept yard in front of the campus library. Lowering clouds were sweeping in from the northwest, a light sprinkling of snow flurries swirling down. If another storm was coming in, he wanted to get home, split some more wood, and huddle in close to the woodstove with Makala before it hit.
“Remember those huge satellite dishes folks used to have in front of their homes twenty years ago?” Ernie asked, pressing in.
John chuckled. It was a bit of a stereotype of ramshackle trailers, with a dish half as big as the trailer planted in the front yard for television.
“They nearly all disappeared once the big mainstream servers came in with an eighteen-inch dish you could tack to your living room window.”
John nodded, remembering installing one himself when he and Mary moved here with two young girls. A hundred-plus channels to choose from, and he had visions of all the educational programs that could be offered, rather than what most stations had degenerated into with the advent of the nauseating reality-show craze.
“If I could get my hands on some of those big old dishes, which hopefully were off-line and disconnected on the Day, and cobble together parts that were not cooked off, I think in a few weeks I could be tapping into communications traffic.”
“Of…?”
“Bluemont, for starters,” Ernie replied enthusiastically. “Raw reportage from BBC uplinking and downlinking out of Canada, even the Chinese. They still must be using comm sat systems. You just point, listen, download, and evaluate.”
“Just? You make it sound easy, Ernie. So you got gigs of data flying around, and chances are the stuff we want to know about is highly encrypted. They’re no fools.”
“No chain is stronger than its weakest link. No data is foolproof. Turing built a system from scratch and was able to break down the German codes, looking for patterns of usage coming from those German Enigma machines that supposedly could be programmed to create billions of variables and thus thought to be uncrackable. Come on, historian, how did we figure out the Japanese were going to hit us at Midway in June 1942?”
John smiled at such an easy underhand pitch. “You know as well as I do if you asked the question. Paul, do you know?”
John looked over at his electrical wizard who had once been a student and was surprised to see the quizzical look and shake of a head.
“I remember you being in my World War II class, Paul.”
“Sorry, sir, I was diverted a lot that year,” he replied, smiling. John remembered how Paul and Becka had shared the same class and spent most of it staring at each other.
“All right, then. We were picking up radio chatter about a ‘Target X,’ indicating the Japanese were preparing for a massive naval strike. One of the cryptanalyst guys at Pearl Harbor came up with the idea of Midway Island sending out a report that their desalinization plant to provide fresh water on the island was off-line and they were desperate, the message to be sent via a code we knew the Japanese had already cracked.
“The message was sent, and only hours later, radio traffic from Japan was monitored that extra desalinization equipment would have to be shipped to Target X once taken. Bingo—we knew where their next offensive would hit; we had our carriers waiting to receive them and wiped out their carriers in a surprise counterstrike. It is a textbook example of code breaking changing the course of a war.”
“How many kids from this school’s old cybersecurity program are still here?” Ernie asked.
“I’m not sure.” John sighed. Too many of his students were now long gone, killed in the fighting or dead from disease and malnourishment. Those left were serving in the community’s defense force, working in the ever-expanding electrical parts factory down in Anderson Hall, or assigned to other equally crucial tasks.
“If I could pull in four or five—even just two or three—and put them to work to help me,” Ernie pressed, with Paul nodding in eager agreement, “John, I just might be able to get something useful out of our tinkering in the basement. Just imagine if you had known Fredericks’s orders before that piece of trash even came to Asheville.” Ernie pressed in with his argument, “Hell, for all we know, five hundred troops with more choppers could be on their way here right now, and we are clueless until they arrive.”