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Data Ghosts
by Jimmy Jacobson
Chapter 2: EOF
Question:
Two cars are traveling toward each other over a distance of 45 miles. Car A is traveling at a steady rate of 65 mph while Car B is going 45 mph. At what time will they intersect?
Answer:
Never. When the passenger in Car B dials 555-3214, an explosive device placed in Car A will detonate and kill anyone inside.
A man with a perfect manicure in Car B picked up the phone and started to dial 5... 5... 5... 3... He then informed his driver to speed up. Twenty minutes later, the man in trendy leather shoes stepped briefly to the pavement and retrieved a messenger bag from a young man waiting on a bicycle.
The man in the perfect, dark suit sat back down in the rear of Car B, secured the tan bag under a seat and took out his phone. After dialing a number, he placed his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and instructed his driver to return home. As the driver executed a U-turn, a police car and ambulance sped past. The wailing sirens obscured the faint sound of a computer in the tan, shapeless satchel with a small keyboard fitted into the strap, powering up.
Five miles away, Frank Crane sat in the burned wreckage of Car A, barely conscious. His skin was fused with the leather of the seat, the steering wheel smashed into his chest. The smell of burning steel and plastic mixed with the charred flesh and leather. Frank thought it queer that this was the last thing he would notice before dying. As the car continued to burn, Frank's pants caught fire and began to consume his body. Also destroyed was the membrane taped to his inner thigh that was transmitting his vital statistics to his computer in the back of Car B, and when the monitor was destroyed, it stopped receiving them. Taking this loss of vital signs from Frank along with other information concerning his activities in the last twenty-four hours, the code Frank had handcrafted to run on his mobile deck executed a series of logical somersaults and reached a conclusion: Frank Crane was dead. A new batch of code started execution and caused LEDs in dark places to glow.
From the back seat of Car B through Australia, San Francisco and ultimately to a FBI database in Oklahoma, a series of backdoors in various electronic systems ranging from a home automation system to a bank of web servers were opened and exploited by code that Frank had carefully written and tested during the last five years of his life. The process searched deeply through the information in the database, quickly and intelligently picking its way to every location of data stored on Frank Crane. It was all relayed back to the tan satchel’s occupant. All physically distinguishing data such as mug shots, finger prints and dental records was unlinked from the numerical data that represented Frank Crane and replaced it with that of another person. To the eyes of anyone accessing government records the real Frank Crane never existed.
Officers Parker and Rayne arrived on the scene of the explosion and gathered as much information as they could from the corpse before allowing the paramedics to bag the body. Parker used his knife to pry open the blackened mouth while Rayne slid his handheld between the still white teeth and used the camera to take a scan of them. The same process was repeated for scanning fingerprints and a sample of what hair was left was bagged to be used for DNA discovery later.
While the paramedics loaded the burnt body into the back of their ambulance, Rayne’s handheld beeped as the computer systems back at HQ returned an identity of the corpse with a 99.9% probability of surety. Noting that the deceased’s next of kin was four counties away, Officer Rayne was relieved he wasn’t going to have to notify Sid Cantwell’s next of kin about the horrific way their loved one passed on.
As Frank’s code retreated from the FBI database, its connection monitoring process noted with slight satisfaction that one of the messages in the queue was a request for the data it had just altered.
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