Orthogonal Procedures Read online

  ORTHOGONAL PROCEDURES

  Adam Rothstein

  Arche Press

  Agencies of the Executive Branch

  circa 1970

  In the Department of Commerce

  The Weather Service

  The National Standards Service

  The Census Service

  The Patent and Trademark Service

  The US Geodetic Service

  The US Geodetic Service Corps

  The National Park Service

  The Forest Service

  The Smithsonian Cultural Service

  The General Land Service

  The Fish and Wildlife Service

  The Agricultural Service

  The Reclamation Service

  The Indian Affairs Service

  In the Department of Transportation

  The Postal Bureau

  The Aeronautics and Space Technology Bureau

  The Electromagnetic Bureau

  The Mass Transit Bureau

  The National Airspace Transit Bureau

  The Coast Guard Bureau

  The Infrastructure Bureau

  The National Automated Transport Safety Bureau

  The Advanced Research Projects Bureau

  Chapter 1

  Parallel Tangential Orthogonal

  The time is 8:00 AM, Eastern Postal Time. This is the Post News Morning Report for April 17, 1970.

  The top story this hour: reports of electronic conflict brewing in Southeast Asia. The South Vietnamese undersea electronic mail cables have been cut again, and while there is currently no evidence, many commentators in the United States are pointing at the United Russian Economic Republics, or their proxies in North Vietnam. Currently the Postal Bureau's overseas assets are responding with electronic countermeasures and defensive jamming in order to allow microwave communications to make up for the loss of undersea bandwidth. Officials estimate that US Postal Bureau-carried traffic between Southeast Asia and Pacific points east will decrease by 9%, and although they refuse to speculate, it's believed that this will allow Russian State Post services to expand further in the region.

  Meanwhile, in domestic news, the Infrastructure Bureau had announced new development plans for the five-year period through 1976. The plans, to take effect next year, included a much needed upgrade of elevated trackways in various Midwestern states along the Lincoln Transcontinental Arterial. However, the controversial plans for the Central Baltimore track connection were not included in the over one-thousand-page-long development plan report. It appears that Baltimore neighborhood activists, whose anti-track protests made national news earlier in the year, have gotten a reprieve, at least for now. The activists, focused around the Leakin Park area, had demanded that the tracks be buried in a tunnel rather than cut through the popular park.

  ☆

  Sunlight streamed through the small window in the tall office complex of the Electromagnetic Bureau, illuminating the charts and models strewn about the office, piled on the small table and the cabinet against the wall. If Fred Mackey angled his head just right, standing where his engineering degree was framed on the wall, he could just see out the small window past the opposite office buildings, and catch sight of the Potomac over the arterial P-car trackway along the river. It wasn't much of a window. But it was a window that Mackey had earned through hard work and devotion to the Bureau's procedures.

  And so ignoring the spring sunlight and the radio quietly playing the morning Postal Bureau News Program, Mackey concentrated on the charts on his desk—the latest data sets from the new interference shielding they had put through its paces last week. It was a decent design, certainly not breaking any records, but just as effective as the shielding on current proximity radar units, and half as heavy and expensive, while twice as physically strong. This was the last stage of testing before the Electromagnetic Bureau's laboratory would give it the stamp of approval and fill out the Part Six certification initiation forms. With any luck, production units would roll out on the rails of the P-car transport system within nine months. He tried to think about the report he would be writing to summarize the data sets—how to summarize the conclusive nature of their findings.

  Luckily he had the help of his colleague Lynn Thacker, who was standing across the desk from him, in mid-sentence about propagation pathways around non-ferric metals. She had one of the finest minds in the section, and she knew it. Thankfully, she and Mackey had always had a good working relationship, because it would take the both of them to get through all the figures and explanations on schedule.

  Hearing a slight fuzz of static breaking through the normally crystal clear news transmission, Mackey looked up and caught sight of a short, dark-suited figure, standing perfectly center and straight in his doorway. Popping to his feet, Mackey forgot to button his jacket.

  The slight woman in the doorway spoke, her quick, commanding voice quickly establishing a stature where her silhouette left off. "I'm sorry . . . is it Miss Thacker? Yes, Lynn Thacker, author of the recent report on physical contact propagation patterns in micro-helical antennas. Some fine work, Miss Thacker. But I'm sorry to inform you, Mr. Mackey won't be available to help with this Part Six report. I'll be needing him for a special assignment, effective immediately. Mr. Mackey, I am Assistant Secretary of Transportation Grace Hopper."

  Miss Thacker was for once thrown off her immaculate poise, even if only for a moment. She stammered, perhaps the first time Mackey had ever heard her speak in such unsure tones. "Yes, Assistant Secretary Hopper, absolutely." Gesturing quickly with the folders in her hands, she spoke quietly to Mackey as she took her leave: "Fred—I'll handle this, and let me know when you are free." And she was gone, with only a slight click of her heels and a whisper of her polyester pantsuit.

  There were few government executives who could make Lynn Thacker disappear so quickly and quietly, and one of them was standing in front of Mackey now. Hopper stepped into the office, her business-wear absolutely silent, bereft of any mark or accent, save a small blue Department of Transportation lapel pin. Her flat shoes had thick heels of some sort of rubberized polymer, audibly invisible across the tiled Bureau floor. She wore a trilby over her short brown hair, the headgear only slightly feminized, a black so dark it seemed to absorb light, perfectly matching her suit. Her glasses held thick frames, separating the woman of sixty-four years of age from the room. And yet, she peered through them at everything before her, actively, as if she were a pilot surveying the landscape from a jet cockpit. She did not remove her hat as she approached Mackey. "You know who I am, Mr. Mackey." It was not a question.

  Mackey finally remembered to button his jacket. "Yes, ma'am. Of course, ma'am. How can I be of help to the office of the Secretary of Transportation?"

  Grace Hopper, Assistant Secretary for Innovation, and special deputy to the Secretary of Transportation, shut the door with an agile, backward swipe of her arm. Almost shockingly agile. As if completed by a person half her age. As if rehearsed a dozen times, until the exact placement and weight of the door had been memorized by her arm muscles.

  She continued the quick pace of her elocution, not taking pains for the listener in the slightest. "I know who I am and where I work as well, but thank you all the same. You, for your part, work in the Electromagnetic Bureau, Domestic Interference Engineering Section, one of the many diverse areas of our illustrious Department of Transportation. You work on P-car sensor upgrades and the like. Nothing military grade, as you have no security clearances. You make the cars run without smashing into each other, preventing the pulverization of the fine citizens of this nation. That is all very good,
and important work. But I see here from your file," she held nothing in her hands, "that you are also rated Level G in Bureaucratic Literacy. Is that so?"

  It was a fact his co-workers often teased him about. "The G-Man" was their adopted name for the unglamorous bureaucratic distinction. Some government employees worked in the Electronic Combat Reserve forces, or had training in off-track vehicle operation for remote installations. Mackey's specialization included weekly time in a basement office suite for training and updates, reading through a manual that took up several shelves.

  But the extra training he had undergone for the certification had its benefits, besides the pay bump. His supervisors enjoyed having someone in-section fill out particular forms and certify cross-Department reports, which ordinarily required bureaucratic specialists. Mackey, always happy to take on extra responsibility, would add these tasks to his engineering workload, to the delight of his managers. And there was the spectacular memory for the faces of executives, which certainly never hurt. Being popular with his bosses had never hurt him before.

  He was wondering what sort of trouble it had landed him in now.

  "Yes, ma'am." His Level G certificate hung framed on the wall next to his engineering degree, but he thought better of directing her towards it.

  "And you are also the closest Level G engineer to my office, and that is why I've come to borrow you. I like working with engineers better than career bureaucrats. I used to be an engineer, you know, and still am one on occasion. I've cleared things with Minot, your Bureau's Secretary. I need you to come with me on a special assignment. Someone has been messing with my computers, and we're going to find out who."

  Normally if he was being taken up to the Department level from the Bureau level, there would be a Form T561 from the Office of Personnel Management, signed by his immediate superior. Hopper did not appear to have one on her. That was Level A bureaucratic training procedure, and Hopper would know he knew that. He decided not to bring it up at this time.

  "What—seems to be the trouble?" he asked instead.

  Assistant Secretary Hopper took a step towards his desk and smiled. It was that disarming smile, the one she was famous for. There were more stories and rumors about Hopper than anyone in all the Bureaus of the Department of Transportation. She appeared like any other administrator in a sharp suit. Far younger looking than her years, her short frame hiding an inner power, running off of an unknown energy. Beneath her exterior was a core of intrigue and strategy, as if she was constantly reverse-engineering a person through the window of her thick glasses frames.

  Despite whatever official position she had held, she was known as a problem solver—first working for the Office of the Postmaster General since the days of World War Two, and then for the Secretary of Transportation after the great reorganization in 1958. The fact that she had survived the 1958 reorganization and was still in the top echelons of the Department belied how important she was.

  Mackey had heard a story about how she once openly threatened an Admiral, after naval ships were causing provocations over an important electronic mail cable route. Another story said she once ordered an Air Mail jet to ditch into the sea, rather than risk flying through a compromised electronic warfare zone. And there was even a story that she had commanded a Postal Bureau combat orbiter. A conspicuous lack of details about when, and against whom, in that last story. But these factors just helped the rumors spread wider and wilder.

  But now, in Mackey's office, Secretary Hopper casually brushed aside this veil of mystery as she dived into the technical specifics of her computer system. "It's really quite simple. We've been slowly connecting the computer systems of the various departments, using a sort of telephone box called an Interface Message Processor. Are you familiar with these systems?"

  The phrase was familiar, but he couldn't quite place what the device was. "Is that part of the new ASPIC protocol?"

  "No, this is fully digitized signal transfer, not analog. The IMPs were developed by the Advanced Research Projects Bureau agency of the Department of Transportation. The project is called ARPNET. At Level G you should be receiving the Canonical Acronym Naming Office Notice bulletins."

  Mackey did, per his training, memorize the new CANON list every month when it arrived in his inbox. But even though ARPNET lit up a part of his memory, cross-referenced to the ARPB, he had no idea what it actually was. And the details were likely classified, anyway.

  "The gist, Mackey, is that the IMP breaks computer data into packets before transmission across the telephone lines, which then can be verified one by one upon receipt to make sure no data is lost. Each IMP can interface with all the others, to bounce the packets around a number of connected lines, to get all the packets to their destination. By creating a network of these IMP units, any computer system in-network can send and retrieve data from any other system, without any loss, and low latency. This network is the ARPNET. Are you with me?"

  Mackey barely had time to nod.

  "Fantastic. Now, the computer system for the Postal Bureau has been compromised. Some person has managed to connect into the ARPNET, and is retrieving information without authorization."

  Mackey's eyes went wide. "Someone is messing with the P-car system?"

  "No, of course not. The P-car's analog radar group-scoping communicate between cars directly. The track signal systems are maintained by the Mass Transit Bureau, and they certainly aren't allowed to connect to something as experimental as the ARPNET. We aren't idiots, Mackey. If this experimental network crashed any vital signals, we'd have a disaster on our hands. The computer in question merely stores data on Postal customers. But, specifically, data about members of the Department of Transportation. Our Department." Hopper placed an unusual emphasis on the last sentence.

  "I don't really program computers. I occasionally write routines on our PA/360 for wave modeling. If some sort of private interest or criminal has found a weakness in code developed by ARPB, I'm certainly not the person to look at it."

  "I don't require your programming abilities at this time. I need your bureaucratic expertise. You see, I already know where the intrusion is coming from. The footprints are a mile wide, if you know what you're looking for. It's the Weather Service. One of their facilities is accessing the data, and I need you to help me negotiate up the chain to get to the bottom of it. So to speak." She smiled that smile again.

  "Why on earth would one of the Services of the Department of Commerce be breaking into one of the Bureaus of the Department of Transportation?"

  "They aren't breaking in. They are compromising the system controls in order to send and receive unauthorized data. They are—so my young engineers have come to call it—hacking in. And we are going to find out precisely why, if we can ever get out of your office."

  Hopper walked to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway. Mackey left his work on his desk with anxiety at the many tasks left to be completed and snatched his hat off the hook by the door, attempting to look like he was moving with even more haste than he was.

  At the underground entrance to the Electromagnetic Bureau building, Assistant Secretary Hopper's P-car was already waiting. The car's gullwing doors were open wide, while the parking assistant waited along aside, disappearing back into the parking office as he saw the Assistant Secretary approach.

  She stepped in without even bothering to grab onto the chrome handle and waited patiently on her seat for Mackey to clamber in opposite her, awkwardly grasping the handle that was not in the standard place, but appeared to have been modified lower for the Assistant Secretary. After he had finally cleared the entry way and stepped across the wear-resistant carpeting and established himself on the gleaming, black patent-leather bench, Hopper hit the requisite button, and the doors pulled shut with a pneumatic hiss. The P-car rolled forward on the track with a deep, electric hum, exiting the underground area and rejoining the streaming sunlight. H
opper slid a punch card into the console, the navigation system chimed, and the car joined the flow of traffic heading across the river.

  The P-car, Mackey couldn't help but notice, was top of the line. Only the best for the highest executives of the Department of Transportation, it seemed. Given how long P-cars tended to last until safety requirements finally forced them into retirement, a new model was something that caught one's eye. The interior was finished with real wood, dark in color, inset with cleverly crafted accents. Mackey's Bureau-issue car's interior was constructed entirely from plastics. Showing through the wood of the Assistant Secretary's car, he saw only the newest in technology.

  While the car ran on punch cards, it also had a system for magnetic cartridge addressing systems. It meant that the car had an upgraded atlas memory, storing the current signal maps not just for the metropolitan area, but likely for the entire Eastern Seaboard. And yet the small size of the navigation console gave away just how new it was, and the limited space it required allowed a number of other features and systems that Mackey couldn't quite identify. There was a multi-band radio, a radio phone, and also a number of other control surfaces that weren't immediately identifiable, but also didn't seem to be quite at home in an everyday means of transportation.

  The radio snapped on automatically, and continued the same news program that had been playing in Mackey's office.

  Despite the brewing conflict in Southeast Asia, President Nixon's trade visit to the URER was a success, and it was announced that the Postal Bureau would begin manufacturing P-car systems for the further expanses of the Central and East Asia system, to complement the Russian models.

  A minor satellite malfunction disrupted radio simulcasts across Eastern North America this morning. The Aeronautics and Space Technology Bureau reported that the disruption, coupled with sunspot activity, might decrease broadcast audio quality throughout the day until backup satellites could be positioned in orbit.