The Pieces of My Self

48 - Interrogation

NKUMBRA

LESA, The Floating Arcology, 21 June 2174, Tuesday 2 pm

William Nkumbra reached for a glass of water—not to quench his thirst, but to give himself time to think. He swirled the liquid, creating a mini whirlpool—chaos in a glass.

"Answer the question."

The staccato voice came from behind the glaring lights. He knew the source—the director, Thomas Argonon. Head of LESA. A brilliant but arrogant mathematician. A megalomaniac in the mold of Artois Mangalotte.

Nkumbra took a sip of water.

The outcome of the inquiry seemed foreordained. He had failed to keep the president safe. Mangalotte's system of avatars had been penetrated, and the Agency needed a fall guy. The trick was to convince Argonon and the other six inquisitors he had information they needed—something that would save him.

"I agree we missed the clues," Nkumbra said. "We thought we had tracked and destroyed all the working code and data responsible for the intrusion. I let you down. I let the president down. But I believe I now understand how Knightly's system works. If that is not of any interest to you, then lock me up. Kill me. But if you want me to help defeat the intruder, then listen to what I have to say. Listen."

He couldn't see into the darkness beyond the lights. There were no clues from expressions or postures, but the silence was telling.

"Go ahead," Argonon said, his voice resonant. "Tell us what you know."

"I believe we are dealing with a system organized like Matryoshka dolls. They nest inside each other, like a mother carrying a child in her womb."

Silence beyond the floodlights.

"Mangalotte's avatar is a simulacrum of the president. The ring enabled its development. But Mangalotte's avatar lives in one dimension of keyspace and Knightly created an avatar in a second dimension that can see and control everything in the first dimension."

"What do you mean? I think you're grasping at straws to save your skin."

Behind Argonon's skeptical words, William Nkumbra sensed an interest. He had thrown the hook. Now, he needed Argonon to bite. "As a simple analogy, suppose I have two intelligent agents who can sense the world through a bit counter, whose pattern determines behavior. The first agent sees and responds to the world in three bits. The second sees the world and acts in it using four bits, three of them redundant with the first agent's octal counter. Both agents can see and operate on the binary equivalent of the numbers zero through seven. Only the second agent can see and add higher numbers. The actions of the second agent may appear almost magical to the first agent."

"So, this is a bit like the old novel, Flatland," Argonon said.

"Exactly." Nkumbra tugged at the line, reeling in his accuser. "In the book, beings living in a two-dimensional world have no knowledge of three dimensions. Three-dimensional beings, on the other hand, have perfect knowledge of 2D people, and can even see inside them, and exert hidden control."

"How do you know an avatar lives in a different keyspace?"

Nkumbra sensed a hardening of Argonon's skepticism and tried to address it. "In Flatland, the 2D people infer a third dimension from the dynamics of an interaction. With the avatars, we see an inability to trace some events. The tracks vanish like ghosts. Then, there is the almost magical ability to modify the appearance and behavior of Mangalotte's avatar. Finally, the smoking gun: the roadmap Knightly provided in his memorial plaque."

"What roadmap?"

"There is a woman—an outside consultant," Nkumbra said, "who discovered that a section of the binary string on Knightly's plaque is actually the zeta hash of the poem. I was intrigued, so I threw more computational power at the encrypted string and discovered something remarkable—a zeta-2 hash encapsulating both the poem and the original hash like a Merkle tree. A nesting if you will. An additional dimension."

"If you've got stuff hiding in a different keyspace, wouldn't that—" Argonon fumbled his words. He lapsed into silence for a moment before continuing. "If I understand correctly, the hack doesn't require code modification."

"That's partially correct," Nkumbra said. "Mangalotte's avatar uses obfuscated code. It operates as a distributed entity with encrypted pointers to code sources across the net. Knightly's 'super-avatar' could work the same way, except it accesses a different keyspace—essentially, a different dimension."

"This is conjecture."

Nkumbra pushed back against Argonon's deepening skepticism. "I can't prove it, but think about what happens if I'm correct. We could have a growing monster on our hands—an invisible, sentient synth able to modify anything else that depends on encryption, including the monetary system and civil records. It would be a national security threat of the highest order."

"I'm inclined to give you some rope, William—to either climb out of the hole you've dug for yourself or fashion a noose. You understand? Given the president's high interest in this whole affair, I can't simply go back and tell him Nkumbra may be right. In his mind, you are already guilty of incompetence."

He could see where this was going. He was falling from his perch as a senior executive in LESA. But, if Argonon even halfway believed his idea, at least he would survive. They needed him. Perhaps, in some future scenario, he could be redeemed. Vindicated. Resurrected.

"How will you resolve this affair?" Nkumbra asked. "If you imprison me or kill me, it will be your neck on the block the next time Knightly's ghost appears."

Murmurings and whispers issued from the other side of the bright lights. Argonon cleared his throat. "You have one week to prove your conjecture. But I'm not going to just let you roll away like a loose cannon. Your constant companion from now on will be someone the president trusts completely. That individual will report directly to me on a daily basis."

"Who might that be?" Nkumbra said.

There was more whispering beyond the interrogation lights. When the murmuring quieted down, Argonon replied, "Tony Brown."