Information: Dark Matter Volume 1

Chapter 1

Ari was working through a series of searches, watching the icons in her glasses, when her external monitor pinged and an alert flashed. She adjusted her focus to see what was happening. Nothing good came from an alert like that and in this case it was the WISO backdoor into her equipment being triggered. That felt strange. What did the World Security bots want with her right now? They might have the rights under the world terrorism code, but they rarely came snooping. Too many machines, too much data, no one typically ran an active search unless something had set them off. She certainly hadn't done anything to set them off. She looked at the code on her monitor. The algorithm she had running to manage just these kinds of events said this intrusion was weeks ahead of any routine inspection. No wonder it felt strange. Her intuition on these things was pretty good. But it was not the first time an algorithm had been wrong. Oh well, let them inspect. They would only see what she wanted them to see. She wasn't sloppy. Anyone who worked in the dark web was either expecting an inspection and prepared, or they were no longer working in the dark.

Then as she watched the orange dot turned red and the audio pinged again. Anomalous search—not something it was programed to deal with. There was some real punch behind this intrusion into her equipment. This wasn't a routine inspection. WISO was looking for something. It was probably downloading a package into her stuff. Not nice. Of course, they didn't know who she really was and what she really did and this package wasn't getting past her firewalls. It would end up sitting in an emulator feeling happily at home, reporting on exactly what she wanted it to see. She'd examine it later and decide how nasty it was.

She went back to her work, running a series of searches on a set of investors. She was poking through everything that was anywhere in the information universe that might relate to a half dozen top managers in a business start-up—it was the type of information that comforted the investors: Who had an expensive drug habit? Who was in a crisis paying off an ex with six kids? They wanted to know who they were dealing with before they put their money down. That was her job—find the real story so they could make a decision with confidence. Or if she didn't comfort them, her information told them what kind of 'not-okay' they were dealing with. Any negotiations would then proceed from a clear understanding of the risks and vulnerabilities.

A normal search by the other agencies looked at the relatively public and potentially problematic aspects of a person's life. But she had a reputation: She looked for so much more. She ran down everything in the person's life, and then ran out along the relational tree. If anything you had ever done had touched a networked computer anywhere on the planet, it was likely she could find it. Then, she looked at what that information touched, and on out through the web of people and information that surrounded everyone on the planet. If it was of interest, she could probably find it. She was good.

Of course, her searches couldn't crack the really high-end government or corporate systems, but there was an astonishing amount of information sitting there with dangling threads. She couldn't get your tax records from the government, but maybe she could pick them off of your machine, or your accountant's machine. And so it went. She was very skillful at finding information that was not fully hidden.

But that was just the start. She cross-correlated all the data, finding the linkages—did your anxiety medication overlap with business events or family life? Often both, so then she had to determine the causal direction. This was her art. She could find associative webs, weird correlations, intricate patterns in your life. By the end of a real search she knew more about the people she was searching than they were likely to know about themselves.

There was the mining executive she tracked down once. Real hotshot. He was looking for investors for a palladium play. He had assays for a rich lode in Northern Ontario. Palladium, she quickly learned, was a key element in fuel cells and in high demand. The assays suggested a very rich ore body. This was worth a lot. However, Northern Ontario was hell for access; nothing but rocks and water, blackflies and mosquitos, or unbelievable snow and cold. It was one of the places where her father went in his work and she'd heard the stories. Just getting to the ore body was going to cost a fortune—carving a roadway out of the hard rock of the Canadian Shield. So he needed a lot of money from investors to get the mine going. One of those potential investors came to her. This was business!