💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › shorts › defcon › 19 › Insecure_Box.txt captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19.
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Insecure Box By episkipoe
I'm sitting on the stone floor of the Rend Lake rest area.
Vending machine Sun Chips on my left side, sitting cross-legged
with a trackball on my thigh, laptop in front of me. Plugged
in, recharging. Back against the wall, cranking out some code
that came to me while I was driving. He comes in dripping,
waiting for the rain to stop. The dark clouds rolled in sudden
and fierce, but they won't last long. He sits next to me,
periodically peering at my screen. Looks at me quizzically.
I'm swearing at my machine, but when I notice that he's
listening to me I subdue my stream of obscenities and start
explaining. "I refactored the learning algorithm, trying to
more faithfully model LTP." "What's that?" "Using a modified
hidden Markov model to determine the deltas for the weight
vector utilizing a time by signal matrix." "What's that?" "Which
part is confusing you?" "All of it." "Well, look. I loop over
the elements here. Shit, I'm missing an equal sign, resulting
in assignment rather than a test for equality. No wonder it's
crashing. " "Cool" "Yeah, totally." I realize that explaining it
to him forces me to think about the code quite differently.
More pedantic and careful. Traits I tend to eschew. He could
help me find bugs before I even compile the code, let alone fire
up the debugger. A tool like this is too powerful to pass up.
I decide to take him with me. I don't bother phrasing it as an
offer; thankfully he seems eager to come along. He tells me
that his name is Voltaire. I don't think that is his real name.
I decide to call him Volt. I tell him my name is Edgar Illin'
Poe, but he should call me EIP. I pretend that I've long
forgotten my given name, but I just hate being called Bob.
I'm making room for his suitcase in the car, displacing the
ramen and whiskey. He asks me about the box. I picked it up
last night from Nick Oliveras, an individual I met in one of the
shadier back alleys of the Internet. He offered me 160 dollars
to deliver a package. I needed an excuse to get out of town for
a couple of days so I found myself in Grant Park at 23:00
meeting a lanky kid with a mop of tussled brown hair, wearing
black slacks, a black wife beater and a pistol in his waistband.
He apologized for looking disheveled, "I was just working out."
He handed me a shoe box wrapped up in duct tape and a piece of
paper with a Tampa address on it. Nick held it underneath a
street light to show me that the one end that is not covered in
tape is adorned with drawings of little skeletons. He then
whispered to me "Do not tarry. Death follows this package." I
think he intended a dramatic exit, slipping into the shadows,
but I parked my car in the same direction he was headed so we
walked alongside each other in awkward silence until I reached
it.
Volt grabs the box. "Dude, are you kidding me? You have no
idea what's in there? Could be drugs." "Yes, I've hitherto been
operating under the assumption that's what's in there. Now put
it back." "Feel the weight of this. Now I'm no expert, but this
has got to be worth way more than one sixty. Screw Florida,
let's just sell it ourselves." "Look. This isn't ebay. If I
fail to deliver this box it isn't negative feedback I have to
worry about. My life depends on it." Volt cradles the box in
his arm, pulls a knife from his pocket and cuts through the
tape. The little knife sticks and snags. Some gray powder
spills out. "Cocaine! Jackpot." "Uhh, I don't think that's
cocaine." I sigh as he sniffs it. "Does it smell like cocaine
to you?" "I can't really tell." He dips his finger in and
scoops some into his mouth. "Are you high?" "I don't know, I
don't think so. This tastes like ash." "Why would someone put
ashes in an Adidas box? Wait, what's this?" There's a piece of
paper glued to the underside of the lid that reads CREMAINS OF:
LAVERNE R. ERSBO "I got dead person up my nose!" "Well, you
shouldn't have sniffed so hard. I tried to stop you."
"Bullshit" "So, what's her street value?" He laughs
sarcastically. "Fine. We'll take Grandma to Florida. It's
where she belongs." We apply some fresh tape to the box and put
it back in the trunk. We get in the car and take the highway
south.
Voltaire is quiet for a while as he familiarizes himself with
the radio controls. Failing to find a song that holds his
interest he clicks it off and asks me "So, what do you do? I
mean, besides stuff like this." "Well, I was a programmer for a
bank. It was fun at first, just to have a job where I could
spend the whole day coding. So much to learn, fueling my
curiosity. But it wasn't long until it became boring. I
decided to move on to something more my line. A place where
creativity is encouraged and bad code can be rewritten rather
than maintained. You can't imagine the nightmares I had."
"Scary?" "Yeah. Like the one where I'm a webserver and can only
speak in SQL and PHP. "That doesn't sound scary" "Well, I woke
up drenched in sweat. And it took a long time to convince
myself that it wasn't real. And the whole thing is just so
symbolic of my role. I'm just a tool, but I want to be the
samurai, not the sword. So for now I've gone ronin, freelance."
"Do you have any games on this thing?" "Well, I've been working
on this neural net to control a killer robot." "What?" "Hold the
wheel. Here, click load, click Stabby. There's the robot."
"That's a square" "Cube. A 3D simulation. Use the arrow keys
to rotate. Robot. Press space to watch him destroy some
humans. See, villagers." "These are teapots." "Right. Well,
no. I mean, they're simulated people." "This thing isn't really
intelligent, is it?" "Well, that is an excellent question. It
is commonly called 'artificial intelligence' but by artificial
we don't mean not-real, but rather, simply that it was created
by the artifice of man, as opposed to created by not-man, which
in this context would be called nature. It's just a game of
semantics, but really you could say that our own intelligence,
that is to say human intelligence, is artificial in that it was
created by man. Well, man and woman, but I mean man in the sense
of the species, not the gender. And now we're only starting to
get at the question of what it means to be intelligent. What
really constitutes intelligence? An arbitrary threshold on a
continuous variable which emerges from an amalgamation of
relatively simple components. I find this discourse to be
rather invigorating, don't you?" "Um, no. I mean that it's
stupid. The square isn't moving. These teapots aren't getting
destroyed. Oh, now the whole thing crashed. This sucks."
We stop in Paducah for dinner. I check my email and find
another death threat waiting for me. I've been going back and
forth with some chuckle-head that's upset because I managed to
grab the username EIP on a couple sites. He seems like a real
nutjob so I conceded it to him on all servers except for those
on my personal domain. After he started going after my home
network I wrote some scripts to mailbomb him. After a few
escalations there was some collateral damage. It really wasn't
my intention to expose his mother to a dump of rotten.com and
all that porn, but I must admit I'm kinda glad it got him kicked
out of the house. Well, he's decided that I should die for
that: "I am the EIP and that to which I point will next be
executed. And tonight I point at you." Now, this isn't the
first time some Internet tough-guy has threatened to kill me,
but this one did attach a .jpeg of my apartment so I decided it
would be best to play it safe and be elsewhere until this blows
over.
I'm putting gas in the car when Volt reaches down and taps his
knees. "I just realized that I'm not wearing pants." "I wish
you wouldn't say things like that." "I didn't even know I'd
packed a pair of shorts. But look at me, I'm wearing some. Hot
damn! Hey, let me drive." "Alright, fine."
Coding in the passenger seat I work through a few bugs and read
a book while the simulation runs. I'm currently going through
the Norton Anthology of English Literature. To save a few bucks
I usually buy my books used. While I personally don't write in
books I have on occasion enjoyed the insight of readers that
have come before me. However, the previous owner of this copy
of volume 2 went overboard. Like in Don Juan, where it reads:
"Her struggles ceased with one convulsive groan; On her sire's
arm, which until now scare held Her writhing, fell she like a
cedar fell'd." The note in the margin reads "she falls." This is
the literary equivalent of commenting i++; with /*increment i
here*/ Infuriating.
I'm looking out the window. Without my glasses things in the
distance look softer. The world is swathed in fuzz, it loses
the perception of precision The trees at the horizon are just a
solid smear of green. Clouds melt into the blue sky. Strange
though, that the things nearby are also so blurry. Eyes must be
getting worse. Then I realize how fast we're going. "Hey, slow
it down a little, will ya? We're trying to fly under the radar.
Do NOT get us pulled over." "Sorry, chief. But I'm racing this
Miata." He glances in the rear view window. "We're winning"
"Does he even know that he's racing?" "He might have figured it
out when I flipped him off. He stopped signaling his lane
changes, so I've done the same." "Jumping Jesus. It's a wonder
you still have a license." "I guess it would be. Technically I
never got my license." "Wait, what? No license? But that story
you told me... The one that ended with you getting a DUI. You
think that you would've mentioned not having a license."
"Actually, that time I was on a horse. Didn't I mention that?
That was the best part of the story." "You can't get a DUI while
riding a horse." "That's what I said!" "Pull over." "I'm not
going to pull over here, too dangerous. Can you wait until we
get off the highway a little bit" "Fine, fine. Just slow it
down a little. OK?" "You got it. I'll try and keep it in the
double digits."
It's getting dark as we come up on Nashville. "Hey boss, don't
you think it's quitting time? It's beer thirty. Let's hit the
bars." We each order a pint then find a booth near an outlet so
I can plug in the laptop. "Don't look now, but I think that the
guy from Miata just walked in." "This should be great. I really
hope you don't expect me to get involved. You had this coming.
Just take it like a man." "Oh, he's coming towards us. I'm
getting out of here." Volt dashes from the table and is out the
back door as I'm still gathering cords. I hear breathing in my
ear. I turn around and come face to face with a pasty, balding
gentleman, about two stone overweight. He's grinning oddly. I
start to apologize on behalf of Volt and explain that while it
was my car I wasn't the one driving it. But he cuts me off
before I can get through any of that. "Hello there, Y.T., my
little courier. Hand me the package and no one gets hurt."
"Just who in the hell are you calling 'whitey'? You're paler
than me and that's quite an accomplishment. I'm actually rather
proud of my deathly pallor. And you'd better keep your hands
off of my package." "No, no, you philistine. It was a Snow
Crash reference." "And you want to be my Hiro? I'm sorry, but
you seem to have mistaken me for a teenage girl. Who are you?"
"Just give me the box." "Uh huh. You want my box. But we just
met. Buy me a drink at least." "According to your dossier you
may still prove useful to us. It'd be a shame if I had to kill
you." He pulls a snub-nose revolver from his pocket and leads
me outside. I open the trunk and hand him the box. "So, who's
Laverne?" "She was my partner. You have been hired to take her
to the trophy room, but I cannot let that be her final resting
place. She will be avenged. Give me the address and I'll let
you walk away. But remember that we'll be watching you. And so
will they."