Trepidation | Trepidation Trilogy | The Empty World Sequence

Eleven

Northeast they had traveled from Poznan, with the refugees from Warsaw who had joined. It seemed, for the first several days, they were two groups, or Claudia saw this in the treatment of those of one group to another. To her, they seemed to all be on one team which was hers.

      The first dangers they met were rain and small patrols of the Russian army from camp in Poznan. The rain could not be helped and so they stayed in their vehicles and wiped down the horses when they could. Avoiding the troops was a little trickier. Nearly all communications, whether audio or video, were transmitted by radio; be it site-to-site directly, or to receivers and hardlines, or to relay towers or stations. In addition, had a format for encoding data in the radio signal and then unencoding the radio signal for at the other end.

      It was simple technology really, the basis for learning the location of your vehicle while away from home or making a vidphone call. It was the way mobile computers talked to each other. But, this simple technology had many safeguards to prevent tampering or free use. The best means of security was sending the information in code, so that it was noise to everyone but those who had the assigned decoder built into their devices. But, of course, these decoders could be faked, even built from scratch, if one understood the principle. Trial and error was all that was really needed. Another safeguard was randomizing the narrow part of a wideband which actually carried the data during its transmission. This made simple scanners useless, as only tiny bits of a message could be picked up at once, making it like a jigsaw puzzle without its box. This security measure could also be defeated, with substantially greater effort. The entire band must be scanned at once, on all channels. Then, the algorithms used in randomizing must be figured. But it was possible.

      There were some transmissions based on laser lines and optical receivers, or on microwaves, but these were not in wide use. There were the physical hard lines, not easy to tap, but easy to be caught using the tap. Claudia had understanding of all this. She had used such information to program means of decoding devices from companies and organizations world wide.

Others who understood technology beyond being users, such as Robbie and Leonore were doing the same. Leonore made some amount of money building various scanners and decoders, which could provide information to her customers, even though they did not have her same knowledge or expertise. Leonore made signals accessible to users, for a price.

      Claudia had shared Robbie's car immediately after leaving Poznan, and suggested a complete sharing of knowledge. To show goodwill, she showed Robbie and Leonore both a list of codes she knew of to be current, and with which devices they were to be used. She explained her method of forging IDs, and threw in some of her tricks in disrupting target computer systems. She usually did not steal, change, or disrupt information for her personal gain, which Leonore did when selling black boxes; but Claudia had long done it for political or philosophical causes, which made her a cyber-terrorist, though "hacktivist" seemed a friendlier term.

      But being a notorious cyber-activist, yet uncaught, and having, as Claudia was aware of having, such a fine looking body in real life, was enough to make a certain type of operator loyal.

There were not that many European hackers, for want of a better word, much older than Claudia. Due to the whole socio-economic-political climate over recent decades. Nations had been in marked regression and decline. They lost innovators, and then they lost technicians, and finally even lost users. Technology, in parts of the globe, had become the domain of rare, obsessive hobbyists only. And some percentage of them were going to be mortal.

Things had been starting to improve, with Union assistance, which made the impending war a greater tragedy than mundanes could comprehend. Now, most people who understood technology in Europe were kids and many of them, knowingly or not, had caught on through some Darkling influence or foreign-aid to their schools.