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There was an audible gasp in the room. Pierce watched the brass, looking for anomalies. But the brass all looked shocked. They understood immediately the import of what they were seeing.
“What was supposedly troops of the PLA attacking American scientists turned out to be operators of the Sommers Group attacking American scientists. In a very rabid fashion. And seemingly unprovoked.”
Riley let the video run its course, pausing it at the last minute, before the satellite overhead passed over the horizon.
“As everyone knows, the scientists were part of a research group from the CDC and Yale University, studying emerging viruses. They were gathering samples of what was suspected of being a new strain of Ebola. This video made its way to me because I am considered an expert on Chinese troop movements. But when I realized that the video was a deepfake, I called my boss, Henry Yu, to come look at it. No matter which way you looked at it, it was a political hot potato. Dr. Yu took a copy I made of both videos, and was going to take it upstairs to his boss, Dr. Morris Sartan, but I don’t know if he did. Soon after, word came that Dr. Yu was dead of a gunshot wound to the head. I then saw operators from the Sommers Group, heavily armed—and I have no idea how that happened because we walk through metal detectors to get into the NSO—come marching toward my office.”
She paused, switched off her mike, drank half a glass of water. Pierce marveled at her cool, realized how scared she must be. But she’d also managed to give the brass some clues. She couldn’t follow through, but they sure as hell could. They could find out where Yu had gone, and whether he’d made it to his boss’s office.
“I … ran away from the NSO, and I understand that the Sommers Group is after me. It’s … frightening.” By not a flicker of an eyelash did she let on that she was protected by Jacob Black and four of his men, and by Pierce. She was protecting them.
“Ms. Robinson,” General MacBride began.
“Dr. Robinson,” Riley answered, and the General’s mouth tightened. He wasn’t tall, but very broad, with a square blunt face. He was unsmiling, eyes narrowed.
“Forgive me. Of course. Dr. Robinson. That is quite a story you’re telling there. But the fact of the matter is, we’re in the middle of a geopolitical crisis, and our enemies are escalating. And according to you, it is all because of actions taken by the Sommers Group and not by soldiers of the PLA.”
He leaned forward a little, face hard and hostile.
Pierce’s cell vibrated slightly and he took it out carefully. He shouldn’t be checking his phone during a meeting like this, but there were a lot of balls in the air and he needed to keep on top of everything.
HER ROOM:General MacBride signed a contract to work with the Sommers Group when he retires at the end of the year. The job will pay triple what he earns at the Pentagon.
Blessthe girls in the Her Room back at ASI. Somehow they had found out that General MacBride was in the room and that he was going to be on Adrian Sommers’ payroll. Something that he should have said immediately. He had no business staying in this room once Riley accused the Sommers’ group operatives of the massacre.
“Dr. Robinson, isn’t it possible that the order of things is backward? That Chinese soldiers attacked American scientists and someone tried to turn that video into a deepfake, accusing operators of the Sommers Group? Which, I’ll remind the room, is one of our country’s biggest and most reputable security companies.”
Pierce saw Jacob Black shift in his seat at that.
Riley looked astonished, as if someone had just stated that two plus two makes five. She leaned forward. “General MacBride, the videos are time-stamped. The order is quite clear.”
Scowling heavily, the General turned and beckoned to a young aide. The aide sprang forward and they consulted in whispers, the young aide at the end shaking his head adamantly. The General frowned. The aide pointed to the mike and the General tilted his body to the side, but didn’t invite the aide to pull up a chair.
“Dr. Robinson, did you run those images through CircleGAN? For those unfamiliar with the program, it is a generative adversarial network pitting two AIs against each other. It is used not only to generate deepfakes but to spot them.”
“No, I did not.” Riley gave a small smile. “CircleGAN has a 72% reliability rate. I ran it through a program of my own design, which has a 98% reliability rate.”
The aide’s face lit up. “Really? What—” Then he noticed the General’s deep scowl and he wiped the interest from his face. “Um. So, my understanding is that the data is transmitted in frames. Is that correct?”
Riley nodded. “Yes. That is correct. Each frame is encoded with a Reed-Solomon error-correcting block code. 32 parity bytes are added to every 223 bytes of data. Framing patterns are added, and the resulting stream is encoded with a rate 1/2 constraint-length 7 Viterbi-decoded convolutional error-correcting code. Each bit is converted into a pair of bits that depend on the current bit as well as the previous six bits. The combination of these two codes is called concatenated Reed-Solomon/convolutional coding.”
As Riley spoke math, there were five people in the room—two men and three women—who were following, with a great deal of interest. All aides. Everyone else, including the brass, was lost at sea, like him.
But he didn’t have to understand convolutional coding, he had to understand the code of human behavior, and while there were those who understood her, and those who admired her without understanding her, there were those who were becoming openly hostile with every passing minute. The General most of all.
“Stop this!” The General pounded the table with his fist. Riley stopped in midstream. Pierce could tell that she had almost forgotten the reason they were here, as she went into the granular details of her job, in nerd heaven. “Dr. Riley, did you know that the People’s Republic of China shot a hyper-missile at theUSS Ronald Reagantwo hours ago? Hyper-missiles are capable of penetrating the decks of our aircraft carriers and sinking them. China is escalating and positioning itself for war, while we are here talking about how many pixels can dance on the head of a pin. This is perfectly useless, when we should be drawing up war plans. We are wasting precious time.”
He started gathering the briefing papers before him.
But Riley hadn’t finished. “I didn’t know that the PRC had shot a hyper-missile at theUSS Ronald Reagan, no sir. I imagine it was in retaliation for our new and massive presence in the Taiwan Strait. The hyper-missile did not penetrate theRonald Reaganbecause they programmed it that way. The PLA is extremely capable and they would not miss if they wanted to sink theRonald Reagan. We both have the capability of causing massive damage to our militaries and to our countries, not to mention the terrifying prospect of nuclear warfare. It is the terrible consequences of this escalation that leads me to insist that this military escalation is happening as a consequence of a lie. I am a patriot, and if I can possibly stop massive damage to my country, on the basis of a lie, I will do everything in my power to do so.”
The General was barely listening and stomped out of the briefing room. But Riley got a lot of sympathetic looks as everyone filed out of the room. Pierce suspected that a lot of them had been convinced by her presentation.
He came away from the wall and put a hand on her shoulder, struck again by the delicacy of her. During the presentation she had seemed a giant, invincible. And yet she wasn’t. She was a young woman with no defenses except her excellent mind.
Well … except for him, his company, and Jacob Black and his company.
“Good job,” he said, voice low. “I think you convinced a lot of people.”
