The Fixer 05

Posted on April 23, 2017 by ehurst

They had given up on that morning’s workout, and were changing back into street clothes.

“Ned, when did your AI wake up and start working independently?”

Ned had pulled on one sock and stopped for a moment with the other foot still bare. “I don’t think there was a single moment I can point to. There were a couple of little things over the past few weeks, but after I snagged that criminal database, it just took off. I was worried about whether it would choke on having to parse all that narrative, but I guess it found an approach that works.”

They continued dressing in silence for a few moments, then Ned spoke again. “I see two questions here. One, how are we going to protect our brother Franklin? Two, and probably connected, is how much can I tell my hacker buds. They’ve never pried into my work, but any time I ask them stuff, you can bet it tips them off about things.”

Tim thought for a moment. “Let’s stand on the principle that exposure can do no harm in the long run, but timing does matter. Ask them to give us a day or two before they try to use anything. If we try to give Franklin new and better versions of his current equipment, that will only make things worse, since our culprit or culprits would know about it and could block it. But if your buds can craft a little brother to your tablet, something like a cell phone that can use the field sensor technology to talk to his equipment, and maybe then link back to your AI, he’ll have a major advantage. I’m sure he won’t complain about that.”

Ned grinned, “Nor would I. Having a live tactical feed for AI would expand… I can’t even imagine all the sources AI could discover with an inside link to all the military and corporate stuff over there.”

Tim agreed. “Yeah, we could sure use that. Seems to me there are several different Coalition countries with people on the ground there. I’ll ask around and see who has the best privacy in their mail delivery system. Maybe we can get them to deliver to Franklin. I’ll tell the lab to get ready for a custom cell phone build. Let’s offer your buds an incentive to push out a sharp design quickly.”

Ned still didn’t have his shoes on, but grabbed the tablet and keyboard and got to work on it.

Tim turned at the door. “You stay on that for now. I’ll have to attend lots of closed door meetings over that attack. I think I know how I’m going to pass the buck and make the contractors fix their own insider threat.”

Once at work, it was as Tim had expected: The CEO of the contract outfit was called into the senate offices. Because of the rigmarole in formal procedures, there was a dead spot on the agenda and Tim was able to catch the CEO on a smoke break outside. God alone knew how many secret deals were made on that balcony. The man knew who Tim was, and nodded as he approached.

“Mr. Dalmer, I’m not thrilled seeing you under this much pressure. It can’t be much help to our troops or the construction project.”

“Well Tim, you tell me — how do we get past this and back on track?”

“I’m not in this for reputation or revenge; I want the bleeding to stop any way I can. I think you are quite competent to handle this without interference. I can’t stop the freight train in its tracks, but I believe I can give you an escape hatch before the senators order me to take a scalpel to your business.”

The CEO threw away his cigarette and faced Tim. “You’ve got my attention.”

“I have evidence that, by itself, won’t meet the official guidelines. I can share it with you. It says you or someone in your company is embezzling on the military contract. They invested quite a bit of small change in this attack, even to the point of tweaking the firmware to brick the crawlers.”

Dalmer’s eyes widened at that.

Tim went on. “Somebody wanted that whole team destroyed to trigger an emergency clause that would boost the contract and maybe boost their chances of scraping more. I have no illusions of perfect accountability. Nobody is going to miss a little graft here and there, but that was going too far. Give the senators a sacrificial lamb or two, but make damned sure this crap stops today.” Tim raised his a hand with the index finger extended. “Those men in the field matter to me.”

“Deal,” the man said firmly.

Tim turned to go, then stopped and added, “If you want some details on what I know already, tell me where to send it. You know how to get hold of me.”

As Tim walked away, the CEO turned to face the cool autumn wind one more time before turning and following him back inside.

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Psalm 128

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ehurst

This is another Psalm of Ascension that wasn’t composed specifically for pilgrimage. Rather, it is didactic in nature and presents the pilgrim’s goal of Jerusalem as the capstone of blessings. God’s favor on Jerusalem was the foundation of national welfare, and people of faith were the king’s true treasure.

There is no distinction in Hebrew; the same word is translated “blessed” and “happy.” God’s favor is the ultimate reward. Everything implied by that image becomes a reward in itself, not least of which is communion with Creation itself, and a life consistent with God’s revelation. This is how we claim the fullness of whatever it is God offers to humans. Thus, reverence for God is just words unless we walk in His ways.

In the Ancient Near East, eating your own harvest is contrasted with crop failures and theft from raiders and invaders. In short, everything will go well for you. The image of the wife as a fruitful grape vine is an ancient symbol for a whole lot more.

Consider that her life is rooted at home, not wandering. She’s fruitful and it all contributes to the family’s welfare. His children grow up like olive trees already at the table, supplying a generous diet and the means to light the house. Both are symbols of God’s Spirit resting on the household, which is more to the point. This is what a reverent and faithful servant of God can expect; it’s what God has promised.

In the best of times, the City is busy and wealthy. In the worst of times, Jerusalem is the one place that must be defended. But the symbolism is that God must be the center of every believer’s universe. If you don’t make Him first in your life, don’t bother with the rituals of pilgrimage. With genuine faith in God, there will be a Zion and a Temple to visit every year, and you will lead your children and your grandchildren there to worship.

This is the shalom of God.

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Clay Pots

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ehurst

You’ll recognize the reference to 2 Corinthians 4:7: “But we have this treasure in clay pots, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”

It’s all about the treasure, not the jars. This is more precious than the Qumran scrolls, because this is something that lives, not fragile shreds of dessicated animal skins with ink. By the same token, we could benefit from a little psychology of persecution. That is, we need to understand the bottom line: We keep this faith alive on the earth. Nobody’s pretending that ours is the only valid expression of truth; it’s valuable as one that is far different from the mainstream. Thus, should the Lord decide to add to our numbers, we rejoice that others are being set free. Should that number He adds be very few, we should rejoice that He has chosen us for something rare.

This isn’t as bad as having to hide in the catacombs. We shall be permitted to operate freely, for the most part. However, there will plenty of people and places who will not welcome us. We can dance outside in the parking lot, singing and humming the music to ourselves. We’ll learn acapella worship. I’d love to have contributions of instrumental music for some of our videos, but there is a place for doing it with nothing except what we carry with us everywhere. The whole idea is seeking what God can do with what He grants us.

This is what I’ll do in some of my videos. Be aware that my project on adding a video channel to our mission will take time, because I seek to portray this strong effort to keep faith alive when there’s virtually no support from human sources. A part of this is teaching folks to think about all the DIY work we can do with minimal stuff. At least part of the time, I’ll restrict my video-taping to just a cellphone. It’s more than just a strong preference for the natural setting; it’s shining the light of God’s glory from cracked clay pots.

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The Fixer 04

Posted on April 22, 2017 by ehurst

In Tim’s line of work, a few good successes brought trust and access that ensured continued success. Granted, he was handed inquiries from the committee, but usually he knew about them long before through private comments and off-the-record guidance. Lots of business was done that way, all the way up the chain to the Coalition and trans-national corporations that did business with the government. Tim wasn’t even awake when he was notified of a very strange attack on one of the military contract teams in the Middle East. He met Ned for their morning workout just a short time later and mentioned it.

For Ned, it rang a bell in his soul. He delayed the start of his own workout and grabbed his tablet. It came with a folding keyboard that worked with the built-in field sensor. If the tablet was ever seized by authorities, it would offer no options other than standard commercial tablets did. However, the tablet knew Ned’s DNA fingerprint and recognized the keyboard, offering a whole range of possibilities that matched a lot of much larger desktop computers, and some that simply weren’t matched anywhere. Ned typed in the outline of the story and pertinent details. The tablet conferred with the AI system in Ned’s basement computer office. Before Ned could get past his warm-up, the tablet let out a warning signal. He came over to check; AI reported that a member of the virtual family was involved.

The reference was via the Shepherd family role-playing games, based on satellite matching of the IP address. Ned really didn’t play that often any more, but ran an AI simulation that kept on eye on things. So he directed it to send a message to their family member, someone he had never met, even in virtual terms. Then he chuckled, because AI reported that it had anticipated his wishes and done so as soon as it picked up the traffic from the secure network link. Thus, Ned was able to confirm to Tim a lot more than he had first heard from his leaker.

This was the first time Ned had gotten that kind of response. He decided his workout was already ruined for the morning and spent more time querying the AI. His hacker friends had assured him it would never outright disobey, so he wasn’t worried about that. And he had already made a few attempts to get the AI to anticipate his queries on some things, but this was the first time it sent a message on his behalf. And it was appropriate. Even better, the AI had taken advantage of the timezone difference and had ensured the family member on the other end got the message quickly, so he wouldn’t have to wait for Ned or Tim to respond in real time.

Finally, it was now showing the first-hand report sent from a Franklin, who worked as a sniper on a crawler security team. Ned wasn’t too sure AI could understand the kind of moral view the virtual family had about reality, but it clearly understood what mattered to Ned and Tim. It was treating Franklin as a highly trusted VIP source, whereas it usually handled such things with algorithms that offered varying degrees of probability.

It had all taken only about fifteen minutes and Ned decided to let Tim know what his AI had found.

First was a better summary of the attack and how it differed from previous rebel tactics. The satellite history indicated that the attackers had been moving into place over several days, one piece at a time. The tree-covered wadi had seen quite a bit of traffic: first some people with a small tent, then a small truck with crates. Later the two new pick-ups came over two nights. Another truck came with a welder. Then another with a some truck parts. The welder stayed a few days, then left. A few more loads came as trucks stopped only briefly, then drove on out the other end of the wadi. For two days it was quiet there while random mopeds kept coming spaced a few hours apart in other locations around the area.

There were more small truck loads to each of the four marshaling areas. Once the attack started, it was the satellite alone that had noticed the mortar firing from the place where the mopeds rolled out behind Franklin’s sniper nest, but dropping the mortars on his previous nest. That data was delayed for some reason, and only showed up in a subsequent query.

Finally, AI confirmed that the disk image that had been delivered to the camp the day before the attack contained code that would bricked the crawlers entirely. It was this that seemed most threatening to everyone. While speculation was rife, AI suggested it was all an inside job. Pulling together all the pertinent fallout, it announced that the attempted bomb attack a few days prior — where Franklin shot the woman approaching the team’s utility truck — was part of this whole game. Thus, AI suggested that the parts driver had chosen the village as the exchange point to set up the senior technician. Further, the parts delivery driver had received a sudden boost in income without a change in salary. His supervisor was also spending more than he made on the contract.

Tim turned to look at Ned. “Why in the hell would someone on contract make common cause with the rebels? Where did the rebels get that kind of money, both the bribes and all those expensive arms, and then to have gotten their hands on the software upgrade and rewrite it? It’s making my head spin.”

Ned typed in another query. The answer came in stages, probably to show how AI arrived at it. The state forensic database had offered hints to the type of crime: Someone on the inside was skimming on the contract. To increase their take, they tried to make the contract more expensive by activating emergency clauses that would kick in with serious combat losses. If the rebels were suddenly more dangerous, the Coalition would have to increase the payout for better security, more equipment and personnel, which in turn would have to come from the petroleum companies. While it’s possible the Coalition would choose more uniformed troops for the job of increased security, politics made that unlikely.

What AI couldn’t do at this point was find the culprit. Too many corporate officers hid their banking offshore. Instead, it offered a list of those who were in a position to do this kind of stuff.

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Net Effects

Posted on April 21, 2017 by ehurst

Once again, I find myself up against the limitations of communicating in English. It’s not the language itself, but all the demented intellectual baggage that comes with it. Bear with me.

When we are encouraged to stop an think for a moment, we recognize that the concept of a cultural climate is a generalization. That’s the nature of social sciences, making broad generalizations that are never precisely true, but useful enough to learn something about human nature. We have to back away from the the subject matter at hand in order to see the broader trends. Precision is simply not the point. It’s when people lose awareness of it that we see those generalizations abused to manipulate the general public.

Let’s back up for just a moment and refresh some important ideas. Biblical thinking is indicative, not descriptive. Biblical Law is part of that. We don’t slavishly obey such law with legalistic thinking, but we absorb the character and personality of God as indicated by the record of Biblical Law. Biblical Law is the broad and intentionally imprecise overview of various Law Covenants and prophetic pronouncements, all of which must be discerned from a Hebrew Mystical frame of mind.

In Biblical Law, centralized control is inherently oppressive. No good moral person would ever consider using centralizing controls; good people do not want control of other people’s behavior. Nothing you can dream up as morally good can justify what most people today think of as “government.” Instead, the moral character of God teaches us to avoid it. When the duty of control is thrust upon us by circumstances, we would rightly seek to discern the path of least control. At the same time, government is a dire necessity under Biblical Law. So it becomes a question of seeing government as an art form, and trying to avoid kitsch and gilding the lily. It’s damned hard work.

This is according to divine revelation. Never pretend that you can just lay down some principles and let it run. Fallen human nature most fully expresses creativity when trying to circumvent moral justice. The problem is that it is a moving target.

Some of you may be aware that the military is one big concrete block of nit-picking regulation. It got that way layer upon layer as those under military regulation have sought endless variations in flouting the painfully obvious intent of the regulations. But when a particular fashion of contempt for law moves on to other things, the wholly uncreative process of regulation never goes back to relax something that no longer matters. Thus, military “justice” is loaded with hide-bound and frankly hateful regulation from centuries ago.

Just so, genuine government requires a deft hand of wisdom to notice when something can be forgotten and pay more attention to things that are a current problem. It requires genuine intelligence, not merely a prodigious memory for minutiae. You cannot govern by robot; it requires a person. The dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy kills both the governed and the government. It violates reality; it is unnatural by definition. It bears the seeds of its own destruction, and reality patiently waits until that seed bears fruit.

A primary manifestation of that fruit is a shift in cultural climate. Culture is never all one thing; the word “culture” represents a conceptual construct. It’s the net effect of multiple subcultures and various cultural influences on a wider whole.

American culture has shifted dramatically, and too many government figures haven’t noticed. Pay no attention to the rhetoric; major figures have recently betrayed a truculent blindness. They are holding their hands over their eyes tightly to avoid seeing. The reins of control are tatters and dust. A primary symptom right now is the vast troves of government secrets bleeding out into the public eye. The old culture of subservient reverence is gone; the new culture is open mockery by exposing blatant lies. The only way anyone in government can hope to capture the public imagination now is to join in that mockery and start tearing down the goofy stuff that no longer fits the current cultural trends.

The voters thought they had elected someone like that. He lied; he was just a salesman and the voters bought it without a warranty. Meanwhile, he has unleashed upon the public a hoard of scolding idiots who belong in the ancient past. Every moment of recidivism in government aggravates the depth of conflict with reality. The ability of that mocking culture has risen rapidly against the declining talent of bureaucrats trying to protect government secrets. Virtually nobody working in a bureaucracy is driven in their work by conviction; virtually everyone opposing the bureaucracy is driven by conviction. Professionalism can’t compensate for the dehumanizing task of secret-keeping, never mind corrupt politics; the computer crackers have the advantage, if only because they have nothing to lose.

DHS Secretary Kelly’s dismissive response to criticism has made him far more enemies than he knows. It’s not just Congress and entrenched NGOs that are offended. This isn’t merely a matter of illegal immigrants and Muslims; he is defending some of the most egregious policy mistakes from Obama’s administration or even earlier, and intentionally making them worse than they have to be. His blindness to the moral boundaries presents a threat to everyone who actually belongs in his country. Worse, it represents a direct provocation to the hacker culture that already dominates whatever American culture will become. This is going to result in outright warfare, and he doesn’t have the means to win. If there’s anyone likely to provoke a literal civil war, it’s this man, and he’s apparently stupid enough to relish the idea.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s hostility to Wikileaks is not merely pointless; it guarantees the snarks on 4chan (and the entire hacker subculture) will turn him into a laughingstock. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner has painted a target on himself. Yes, Mr. Sensenbrenner, we do have to use the Internet; we don’t have your personal staff funded by taxpayers to do it for us. You couldn’t do your job without it. The Internet will crush you, sir. And the abysmal incompetence of government bureaucrats to secure the secrets will only get worse, so there will be more leaks from the CIA, NSA and FBI.

We are staring multiple crises in the face, and many of them are rooted outside the US, making them totally out of government control. For many issues, there is simply no good answer because the US government policies destroyed all the good answers long ago. We are seeing once again the statue with feet of clay. What makes this less than apocalyptic is rather complex. It has to do with a global entanglement via the Internet, as well as the rising and already existing social order that is hardly dependent on the current system of government. It’s like a parasite that outgrows the need for a host, so the what’s left of the host will simply fall away. The government that gave birth to the Internet will be displaced by it.

Meanwhile, you and I will suffer at least some from the turmoil as these incompetent nitwits provoke chaos, even without any particular interest in the fight.

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The Fixer 03

Posted on April 21, 2017 by ehurst

Ned’s employer was a senate staffer.

Most people called him Tim, but his name was Tymek. His parents saddled him with the traditional Polish variant of Timothy in honor of his grandfather. Tim’s family had been involved in banking and finance. Before the credit crisis, Tim had followed in that tradition, amassing a substantial fortune, though hardly anything like the bigshots. Some of those bigshots lost everything in the credit collapse, and only those who actually ran the system kept their obscene wealth.

Tim escaped with his more modest accounts almost by accident. The craziness during the days leading up to the crisis found him questioning his own purpose in life. In the process of his soul searching, he ran across a virtual community called the Shepherd’s Household. While he never really became that close as a family member, he did absorb the radically different approach to moral questions. Oddly enough, instead of working in finance, he felt he should be working in government. He was especially intrigued with uncovering fraud, and knew plenty about it from his wheeling and dealing in credit and currency swaps. So he just pulled all of his accounts one day and called someone he knew working in government oversight. He parlayed some insider information for a job helping to expose even more. One thing led to another and he ended up as an investigator for the committee that oversaw banking and finance; Tim specialized in keeping an eye on government contracts.

It was through the virtual family that he met Ned. It began mostly with Ned offering to serve as a personal fitness coach. Ned’s hobbies supporting the hackers taught him the value of superior physical fitness and agility. It was all his other talents at snooping that made him even more valuable to Tim. So Tim hired Ned full time as his personal assistant, paying him out of his investment income when he moved all his accounts into various business that seemed to have a future in the chaotic political and economic climate.

Ned had learned to trust Tim and welcomed him as a member of the family. Ned’s own history with the Shepherd family was quite different than most. He was the only one they had who joined early in life. For Ned, it was the best way to combine his Iroquois heritage with modern Western existence. His parents were quite active in keeping alive their native traditions. For Ned, the beliefs of the Shepherd family were substantially consistent with Iroquois mythology. It was the same basic approach in dealing with reality. It also helped him quell the apparent conflict between what the Western world seemed to demand and his burning sense that it was filled with lies and injustice. His grades were high, but it seemed to him the school system was determined to crush his creativity and sense of what was truly just. As an avid Internet user, he had stumbled across the Shepherd’s Household through gaming.

Ned eventually came to terms with the obvious conflict between the burning sense of morals in his heart and the world in which he lived. He became far wiser about not provoking people in authority, but routing around them when possible. His native intelligence led him to understand how to game people without violating his own conscience. And he learned all of this before he graduated public school, largely because he sought the counsel of Shepherd folks who had all been through the same stuff, and encouraged him to stay at it.

Both Ned and Tim shared the same passion for justice, with the sober reality of just how much and what kind of justice was possible in the current political context. It was a friendly conspiracy to infiltrate the system to answer their sense of calling. The bond was rather like an uncle and his favorite nephew, along with genuine friendship, keeping each other sane.

So Ned was coming home to a building his boss owned, to a free apartment in the basement, next door to the computer server room that Ned maintained with the help of his self-programming AI to provide networking for the numerous client businesses leasing space upstairs. This provided Ned with a maintenance badge to come and go at will. There were eight different entrances. Three were guarded and easily found; two more required access codes. The other three were a simple matter of accessing some other secured area with internal passages. Ned’s badge got him into far more than just this one building, and he used all of the different paths regularly.

Today he come in to find the computers next door already churning through the data he had pulled from the state’s old system. Through Tim, Ned already had access to the federal criminal data, but it was sanitized by security agencies. While Ned had often been able to work past those roadblocks, it was dicey and had to be targeted. This state data dump’s primary value to Tim was linking names to businesses and criminal deals that were never prosecuted for whatever reason. An awful lot of federal contracts were handled by the same people who made money from state contracts. It was a priceless history of underworld dealings far into the past. For Ned, it was priceless in terms of patterns of human behavior. He was looking for anything that helped him project future criminal dealing based on how they thought and acted, and casting that against a different technological background. This was his own long-term personal project, in that both he and Tim were also protecting their virtual family. They were always keeping an eye on trends that might present a threat.

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You Are Entitled

Posted on April 20, 2017 by ehurst

You are entitled to your own fantasy world.

Most of our world shares a certain common core of fantasy in the first place. That fantasy presumes that there is such a thing as “objective reality.” That’s a bad lie and it has dominated society for way too long. All they really have is an agreement to proceed on a highly enforced track of a particular set of false assumptions.

It so happens that God permits folks to do this. In His longsuffering mercy, He has granted people enough moral rope to hang themselves. And there’s a whole lot of hanging going on right now.

It doesn’t take much to realize that we stand in the midst of very loud and ugly dispute that fractures and divides the common belief system into competing sub-systems. This has been encouraged by manipulators who were just a little bit smarter — in a predatory sense — but still suffering their own blindness about what’s real.

And there have always been a few who realized that all the flavors of this social orthodoxy were wrong, but lacked the moral discernment to reject it assertively. Instead, they fled from it into all manner of diversions that at least seemed to feel okay at the time.

In all of these efforts to chase one flavor or another, the primary missing ingredient is not a failure to choose the “right” flavor, but in the fundamental assumption that there even is a “right” flavor. There is no such thing. The truth is not available on that level in the first place. The search for such an answer is doomed from the start. It’s not that we cannot get along and share a certain amount of functional assumptions, but that we take too seriously what should be regarded as provisional.

There was a time humanity didn’t suffer under such delusions. People managed to get along fairly well working from their own unique approach to fundamental questions of reality. That is, however much peace and stability is possible in the first place, they were doing a decent job of obtaining it through that provisional agreement. Most of the human race was cynical and skeptical about their senses and their own logic and regarded “reality” in that sense as a dubious proposition. They accepted that one must make decisions and act, but that the sense of identity and stability didn’t rely on such things. They never expected any two people to consistently see the same thing in any particular shared experience.

They didn’t trust apparent “reality” and whatever part of them lived within that sphere. Instead, they understood quite consciously that we all have a faculty well above that level of existence, a faculty that connected to something beyond. Most of ancient humanity had learned to develop a different faculty, above and beyond mere intellectual capability, a faculty that was fully able and ready to handle the chaos of reality that was alive and active, sentient and willful, and entirely personal.

We seek to understand this ancient society and their higher faculty. Whether or not we have achieved anything isn’t important; we are at peace with a capricious and unpredictable reality because we believe we are friends with it. We proclaim to you that your fantasies, however outlandish they may seem to others, are no less appropriate than what the mainstream pretends is reality. We believe it’s possible that you can find your own place to stand and experiment with what calls to you from inside your soul.

We will share our own approach with you, but only if you feel drawn to it and you sense it will work for you. We won’t rush to correct your alleged fallacies. We will most certainly not waste time squashing your personal reality unless you ask for help making adjustments. That help will consist of pointing how we do things as an example, not as a template. And while we do have a template, it cannot be expressed in concrete terms, but requires teaching the intellect to serve, not rule. We know that truth makes its own path in your soul, and if this is going to do you any good at all, our best hope is helping you see the barriers and letting you remove them yourself. We are utterly confident you’ll find your own answers after that.

Don’t let anyone take your fantasies away from you. They will die on their own as you awaken and allow that higher faculty to set all things in order for you.

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Divine Appointment

Posted on April 20, 2017 by ehurst

My third granddaughter was born yesterday. But I had a divine appointment, so I rode my bicycle out to Draper Lake and will visit with mother and baby today.

It is necessary to approach this video project with my best efforts. Not that I expect any kind of high-end professional production, but that I can’t blow it off. Whatever I can do will have to be good enough. So spent some time searching for an outdoor studio.

Consider that, here in Central Oklahoma, the wind is seldom still. On top of that, during the summer months we have a pretty strong representation of deer ticks and chiggers. They hang out in vegetation, so the trick is find some place to stand that has none, while offering a natural background. And it needs to have trees to dampen that ever-present wind. With the recent construction of a new road, and some added parking area, I found a very nice spot for one of my outdoor studios.

Draper has long had roads and parking areas on about half of the points around the lake. For some reason, Parks Department added one parking area that’s not on a point, but simply atop a ridge. It would overlook the lake, but it’s screened by thick trees. Because so much of the underbrush was scraped away and dirt moved around, they dropped roll-out turf patches. It didn’t cover everything. Thus, I had this open patch of dirt in a spot that isn’t likely to grow anything because of foot traffic. Yet on a weekday morning, the place is generally vacant and I should be able to shoot some short videos without background noise.

I tested it with my iPhone — the product isn’t worth posting anywhere, just a kind of “testing, testing” thing. Still, it came out well, so we have identified one good spot. I still have to test my camera for video production, so there will be some more goofing around, but I propose to record a couple of short clips singing acapella in some other natural settings. That is, provided I can have a day when the allergens aren’t dampening my voice. Please don’t take this as boasting, but I’m a baritone with a very wide range. Not all of my vocal range sounds that good all the time. Post-nasal drip can really shred my bottom end, which is actually down in the bass range, and can make it a struggle to sing on the rest of it.

Pray with me, because it’s highly variable regardless of things I’ve tried to reduce the problem. If it works out well enough, I may be able to start posting a few simple worship choruses that you can sing along with. My real talent isn’t singing, but leading others to sing.

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The Fixer 02

Posted on April 20, 2017 by ehurst

It was just a few blocks home.

As he walked, Ned went back over the whole operation in his mind. The state was forced by class action lawsuit to make available a collection of old databases. The one that interested Ned was the forensic investigation files from white collar crime cases. It was part of a larger collection of case files. They were segregated internally, but all part of the same database. The state handed off the actual work to a contractor with a couple of state employees overseeing the operation. People would have to show up at this understaffed operation in one of the old office towers where the aging computers were still housed, and present whatever justification they had for one or more cases. The bureaucracy would decide what to release and charge for a primitive paper printout.

Ned had no intention of submitting to the painfully intrusive queries of the government and call attention to himself for just one record, when he actually wanted the whole database. In modern terms, it wasn’t that large, but there was simply no way to persuade the state to let him copy the whole thing. That wasn’t part of the settlement in the first place.

But he knew that if he could get close enough to some of the terminals, he just might be able to pirate the whole thing using a new proximity field technology scanner. Ned was by no means a hacker, just a serious technology user. He did poke around computer hacking in school, but decided it wasn’t his forte. Instead, he befriended the kids who were quite talented, and worked to support their exploration in other ways. One of those ways was using the kind of physical talents that got him out of that office building without capture. He would sneak into places that had things those kids wanted for their work.

While there was a turnover in those friendships, by early adulthood Ned was still actively supporting a group of hackers working on peculiar projects of interest. One of those projects was that electronic lock pick. But the real crown jewels was an alternative AI project. Despite all the big technology corporate and government hubbub about how AI could challenge humans, Ned’s friends never believed it. They were content with AI just doing more of what computers had always done: process data. The AI angle was to process it better and on much bigger scales. One of the yields from this project was using AI to write its own software, to reprogram itself after surveying existing software. Ned never had to be a hacker because he could tap into their AI to write the stuff he needed.

In return, Ned used his connections through his employer to get them hardware and server space. And not just existing computer hardware; Ned’s employer had access to industrial 3D printers that could construct custom computer components to order. These days just about everything was “system on a chip” as more was crammed into the CPU. Using his friends’ expertise and his boss’s manufacturing lab, Ned had his tablet built to facilitate such things as his electronic burglary of the crime database today. He didn’t simply copy data from their machines, but transferred it through his tablet and uploaded it via the ubiquitous municipal wifi back to his server. The only problem was that his tablet was pulling so hard that it slowed all the machines in that office. It was just his bad luck that one of the state employees was a cop who knew how to use that bug scanner. It wouldn’t pinpoint him, but told her there was a data draw over radio link from very nearby. She guessed correctly that whomever was doing that would be holding an electronic device that was visible.

Ned was hoping after his escape that it would appear to be a mere nuisance, not a wholesale plunder. Otherwise they might keep looking into the incident. Interference was one thing, but the technology he used to pull from those old computers, so far as he knew, was otherwise totally unknown to anyone outside his boss’s lab, where it was developed. Ned never told his friends all that the chip could do, and they didn’t ask. It was their unspoken code of friendship. Besides, they could have worked it out if they wanted. But Ned was also friends with one of the researchers at the lab who allowed Ned to test implementations of ideas like this.

As the researcher explained it, everything in the universe was constantly bouncing and emitting particles and energy waves. From a close proximity in particular, it was possible to read the signature of such emissions passively. That included electrons moving in wires, human DNA signatures, the presence of a void behind stone or steel, etc. All it needed was a tuned sensor and enough AI to interpret the data. Ned’s friends supplied the AI; the lab provided the hardware. Between the two, with Ned acting somewhat as a firewall, he was permitted to field test a chip that worked from a few meters away reading the activity of those old computers.

This allowed him to find out how to work through wifi to slip into the state’s internal network without facing their firewall against outside connections. Then he could emulate a signal that the old servers received as actual commands from a master terminal. Ned had ordered the system to dump the entire white collar crime database through his tablet, onto the Internet via the external wifi and down to his servers at the building where he lived. It had taken two days of hanging around the office in different disguises, each time analyzing and tuning the procedure. It took only a half-hour that morning to get the data, but at the cost of annoying the employees with his hogging the system resources.

But it was his boss who wanted the data. Not that Ned didn’t have his own uses for it, but he would have done almost anything for his boss.

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The Fixer 01

Posted on April 19, 2017 by ehurst

(This is part 2 of the same story that started with “The Sniper.”)

Just a few more seconds and Ned would have it.

You wouldn’t likely have noticed him, sitting in a chair with his ticket curled out from between two fingers of his right hand. The people at the desk were taking numbers to process requests. Someone farther down was taking money in various forms and handing over fat wads of cheap paper. Most of the supplicants were attorneys in various versions of business attire, a few were reporters; everyone else seemed to represent a wide range of personal and academic interests. So this man appeared to be among that latter diverse group — an older guy, scruffy with grey hair beard, and a jacket that stank.

He held a magazine in his hands, but if you looked closely you could see a tablet computer was inside the open journal near the bottom. Out of the corner of one eye Ned had been watching the rotund security guard, who normally sat near the last station where money changed hands. The guard rose and approached the corner of the counter at the far end from where he sat, drawn by a minor commotion among the workers at the ancient computer terminals along the back wall. They were talking and pointing at their screens. Eventually someone came around the corner from a back office. A little more chatter and this woman left, returning shortly with a device in her hands.

Ned recognized the device: Essentially a “bug” finder. It could pickup low powered transmissions across a very wide range of frequencies. A device like that would be run periodically so it would learn to ignore the ambient signals already coming from the office equipment. She watched the thing as she turned around and faced out over the counter. She looked up and said something to one of the people near her, who then came over to the counter and spoke to the guard.

He looked a little concerned, then turned and began scanning the supplicants sitting in chairs and on benches lining the walls of what amounted to a wide hallway. Ned slid his right foot up under his chair. The nearest exit was the stairwell door on his left. The display on his tablet indicate it was just seconds from completion of its task. He secured the grip of his left hand on the tablet as the magazine started to sag in his right. Just as the countdown hit zero, the guard yelled from just a few feet away.

“Hey, you!” His fat finger pointed directly at Ned.

Ned never looked up. It was all one fluid motion, and people who were actually looking at him didn’t even catch everything. Lurching upright on the right leg already under him, the other foot was planted off to his left at an angle. His right hand flung the magazine straight into the guard’s face. Despite the blinding distraction, the burly fellow lunged forward and grabbed Ned’s jacket. The rotten fabric ripped in his hand and Ned was already yanking open the stairwell door. Passing through the narrow minimum opening to admit his body, Ned jerked hard on the other side. The valve in the ancient door closer surrendered the door slammed shut behind him. By the time his foot hit the first step on the right side, he had flung off the remains of the jacket down the stairs on the left.

In steps entirely too quiet for someone sprinting, Ned flew up the stairs and was out of sight before the guard could wrestle open the door again. His radio squawked as he entered the stairwell and he spotted the jacket on the down side. Without really paying much attention, he loudly trod down the stairs and lifted the rag to compare with the fragment in his hand. “Hah! Gotcha. There ain’t no exit from this stairwell.”

He stood and listened a moment, then turned and clambered slowly back up to the landing, turning his face upward to the faint sound of patter from Ned’s flying feet. He snatched up his radio, pressed the key and barked into it, “Stairwell 3, sounds like he’s climbing.” A few seconds later a somewhat younger and fitter guard burst through the door and took off up the stairs. The older guard followed at a more leisurely pace.

Ned knew none of this, but thanked God for all the years he had invested in just this very form of exercise. It was his favorite and he had done it obsessively in his youth. Whether up or down, he had never met anyone who could catch him. His pace barely slowed as he reached the top floor after twelve flights of stairs. He had even managed to slip the tablet under his shirt into a pocked built into the thin mesh vest clinging to his skin. It was a long pouch with a zipper opening vertically along the front. Stowing the tablet inside this, he zipped it down as his hand came out. He could hear the pounding pursuit still far below.

From a pants pocket, he pulled out a small device with a long wire snout protruding from a fat rectangular box smaller than his palm. He inserted the wire into the lock on the door in the dark alcove at the there atop the last flight of stairs. His thumb pressed a button, then slid a toggle switch. The device was silent, but the lock was not, clicking loudly when the electronic pick had done the job. He twisted it quickly, then yanked it out. Thrusting it back into his pocket, Ned turned the stiff knob and slipped through the door, resetting the lock as he closed it behind him. It was designed to keep people in, not out.

The roof was covered in loose gravel. Without pausing, Ned changed to a stride that was more like cross country skiing, keeping his feet close to the surface. This allowed him to gain what little traction was possible and prevented him losing his footing on the forward plant. At the far corner of the ledge, he spun partway and dropped over the side. His hands caught the upturned edge of the roof, allowing him to reach around the overhang and grab a large pipe attached to the wall. Ned had noticed it when casing the building; it turned out to be PVC and pretty solidly clamped to the wall. Although the rubberized coating on his palms kept him from sliding down the pipe, he didn’t regret painting the stuff on. He took advantage of the firmness of the pipe, braced the soles of his feet on the surface and walked himself quickly down some three floors to another small section of roof atop an extended portion of the main building.

He was luckier this time, because there was a long section of the roof that had been raised due to repairs and it was bare of gravel. He stood just a moment, took three deep and calming breaths, then sprinted along the strip. Launching himself across the narrow alley far below, he landed just on the edge of the roof another story below. There was a parapet around this one. In a dive, his hands just caught the edge and he yanked his body toward it, rolling to his right side to protect the tablet snuggled against his ribcage on the left. It was ruggedized, but not impervious to impact. He rolled neatly to his feet again.

From here it was matter of vaulting across a series of connected shorter buildings, dropping a story or two with each transition using various fixtures. He ended up on a series of fire escapes, dropping smartly from one to the next using the outside railing of each. He enjoyed working out with the Parkour guys in the park, but wasn’t interested in the visually showy stuff, just the skills for moving quickly and confidently through obstacles. The last drop left him in a dead pocket alley. Around the corner was a foul-smelling dumpster used by a restaurant.

He crept up behind this huge bin. Reaching back to the base of his skull, he peeled off the grey wig and tossed it in with the stinking trash. Cheaply bought at a thrift store, he wouldn’t miss it. With his other hand he rubbed off the dabs of rubber cement that had held it in place. His other hand joined the rubbing routine on his face, removing the fake whiskers, heavy eyebrows and a few other bits and pieces. What was left was a fairly young Native American visage, incapable of growing whiskers. He jerked off his loose-fitting dark gray short-sleeved t-shirt, snapping it from the sleeves. This reversed the shirt and yanked out long sleeves at the same time. His sweating torso shivered in the cool autumn air and he hurried to put it back on, now bright red. In turn with each sleeve, he pinched and twisted the edge, then rolled it up, creating a cuff that held the billowing sleeves tight to his wrists.

Coming around the dumpster, he joined himself to the pedestrian traffic and disappeared.

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