Twenty-Nine Cozy Bears

05

Moscow, Russia

The large gymnasium room on the left with the double doors served as their operations room. At some point in history the room held racks of weights and barbells or maybe ballerinas worked their bodies into lithe wires across the large space. Now those uses were gone. The Soviets and their perfections moved on. But, state sponsorship still had its places to go, to sustain, and enhance.

He felt very formal wearing his uniform jacket and creased pants. Taking off his jacket as he crossed room to his station he fumbled out his keychain and touched a dongle with his thumb. The boot system at his station fired up. Power strips lit with blues and oranges and deep pulsing reds — clicks and beeps woke up fans and motors.

By the time he had his jacket hanging and his sleaves rolled up, his system had bootstrapped and come on line.

Each of the operators in his group had the same hardware setup, Top of the line, packed full or RAM and cores. Periodically hardware specialists would come in like shadows and upgrade a card or change out a board. System administrators with gnome fetishes for hardware. Same class of bent. They strove for minimalist purity in ware and the mind.

This mindset did not always translate into other areas of life.

"Mind if I watch you break it? " Luca asked.

"Yes," he told him. "Get your laptop and help out. Do not just sit there and watch."

Luca smiled and darted for his station. Across the room Alek's machines purred and whirled to life. By the time Luca returned with his laptop Alek's screens were alive and feeding displays with rolling lines of green orange blue data in clean multi-console glyphs.

Returning his attention to his own displays he focused his mind and took in the scrolling logs of tests and status information. There were three screens. The main large screen mounted in the middle ran a virus scan and deep systems checks. Another console on the same screen had nmap roaring a brute force systems against his own system, searching for the slightest of changes in port and firewall status since he turned the machine off yesterday.

Two other monitors, to the left and the right, displayed inside multiple consoles his bot army of drillers coming back in from the cloud, with their progress reports and manifests of failures. These reports scrolled up the transparent window displays — stacked like glass panes on the monitors black and blue themes. The hazard sharp colors of the glyphs filled his eyes. He didn't read them. He scanned them, watched the the familiar dance, tapped his fingers to the time and beat of line lengths and patterns, waiting for something to catch his attention; for a spark to catch fire in his mind.

Without distracting him, Luca pulled a chair over and opened his laptop.

Without a doubt, the man thought, this would be the most difficult trial — playing well with others or being with others at all. It was not in his experience that there were people with his kind of experience, that wanted to share that experience with anyone else.

There were, admittedly, several loosely connected partnerships, dissolving as subtly as they arose. They might start in a Discord chat, where she describes a sweet algorithm and you said, "I could really use a girl like you. Let us have some fun?" and flash her some python — a function that slices through data much like the algorithm she had just discussed. A spark bounces from one mind to another mind, and you feel a frisson; electric across the teeth and over the scalp; her arm hairs bristle as she reads the code. Minds meet, hearts beat, and two become more than three or four because magic happens.

Sure, it happens, but then it doesn't happen and the window closes, the storm fades away, and its just him alone with the cyphers and codes. Again. And grateful he was home again.

He really felt this was going to be the hard part. Turned out that no, the GRU Special Training officers had much harder obstacles to run him. Working with others was so easy after learning to keep his focus while being shot at with live rounds — knowing that others who have gone before have been accidently shot... more than once.

He likes to jest about it, to make fun of what once passed as a worry, even to himself. Because it did feel as though it had a normality about it now. And it did not feel that way before. Ever. And prior to this, prior to coming to this assignment with the SVR as a Zaslon officer there was a strange connection even with the brightest of ... algorithm creators. There always came the moment when he had to not be, again.

Wonder then what is this Zaslon? How is it that he can be, here, yet unsuited for human consumption everywhere else?

The Zaslon are aggressively trained in the skills needed to support the SVR and the President's Office. They go through the Spetsnaz training, and then specialized training, just as the Spetsnaz do. In fact the elder team, the ones they went to for secondary training, their instructors came from a GRU Cyber group, who were seasoned Spetsnaz officers, with an impressive campaign ledger. They western investigators, their FBI and CISA called them APT collectively. Advanced Persistent Threats.

The Americans, after recognizing repeated techniques and codes singled some of them out and their instructors they called them Fancy Bears. APT28. The security companies and white hat 1337s told their government that they were real, and a serious threat, but the words fell on unwise and closed ears.

No surprises. Their congress takes nothing seriously, except what their orange leader is tweeting.

Probably should not have named them Fancy Bear if they needed to project fear and cause activity.

Though Заслон does not strike much fear either, as it just means Barrier.

In his case it is 'barrier breaker.'

Luca shifted in his chair and said, "There, its opened."

"What did? Opened where?" he asked, leaning toward the left side monitor.

"Port 6899. That is Messenger File transfer and BitTorrent uses it. No, over here, look, see the instability?" Luca said, leaning and pointing to the center monitor... where nmap what punishing his own system.

The man felt a chill as he turned his attention to his center screen, and saw the streaming numbers and the instability. An instability that already allowed a connection — which was why it was acting that way. "That's not me breaking into them. that is someone else breaking into me."