Breakpoint by Richard A. Clarke

computers are at Stanford and UC San Diego.”
    Folding her hands together under her nose, Susan framed her question carefully. “What was Globegrid really going to do?”
    Again, Myers pushed herself up out of the chair and began sketching on the whiteboard behind her. “Once the supercomputers were linked, a special version of the new Living Software would be added to them as the control program. It would be given the task of making the three supercomputers into one virtual machine. Living Software would then be proliferated throughout cyberspace to prevent another cyber crash like the one in 2009. A grid with that power could also solve the remaining problems in genomics and brain science. And that’s what they intended to use it for. Their first task was to test the results of the consortium’s work on reverse-engineering the human brain.” Myers looked at her former student, who sat in front of her silently, glumly, with a facial expression that cried out, “I still don’t get it!”
    â€œSusan, Susan, Susan…don’t worry. I didn’t understand much of this either until the last year or so. You have to master so many disciplines simultaneously to get it, and even then you can’t know everything that is going on in the labs now. Much of it has gone underground.”
    Susan stacked the last of the fallen books back on Myers’s desk. “Underground? What about your principles of open scientific inquiry, about sharing information?”
    â€œSome of the work on genomics and the human-machine interface activity have raised so much of a political stink that its gone quiet. We really should not have laws telling scientists what they can and cannot do.” Myers moved the mouse to access a database on her screen. “There are two people here in Cambridge whom you need to see in order to understand the computer science part of this. Let’s start there, while I put together a reading package for you on the other technologies, genomics, pharma. First, go see the boys up the river at Kamaiki Technologies, while I set you up on a date with a young man named Soxster, the best hacker in town.”
    â€œA date? Oh, no, no! Socks who?” Susan tried to stop Myers from calling the hacker. “Really, my social life is great. There’s this doctor in Baltimore, a brain surgeon. I don’t need any dates, expecially with geeks…”
    Myers let her glassess lip down her nose so that she could look over them at Susan. “Do you really know who blew up the internet nodes for the Chinese? No. Do you have any real leads? I doubt it. Do you think they are going to stop there? I know you don’t. Have you figured out where they will attack next? No because you don’t understand the technology, either open or hidden. So you will go to Kamaiki and then you will have a beer with Soxster and be nice to him. Then, maybe, just maybe, he will tell you what you need to know.”
    1400 EST
Kamaiki Technologies, Technology Square
Cambridge, Massachusetts
    â€œSo…what you see below us is a live reflection of cyberspace, a multidimensional model of it. We’re currently showing it geospatially, so you can see physical nodes in the same relationship to each other that they would be on the Earth’s surface or on a map. You’re standing over Virginia, Mr. Foley.”
    Susan Connor and Jimmy Foley were on a catwalk almost twenty feet above a surface in a cavernous, windowless room at Kamaiki headquarters in Cambridge. Below them, green and yellow lights shot horizontally to nodes, then shot up vertically, some almost reaching the catwalk. Thick, glowing green lights converged on northern Virginia, New York, and Boston. Tom Sanders, the chief technology officer at Kamaiki, hit a touch screen on the guardrail and said, “So. Now let’s zoom back so we see most of North America.” The surface below seemed to drop off quickly.