Twenty-Nine Cozy Bears

06

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt — Sun Tzu

"Why are you so intense over here all of the sudden?" Alek asked, as he stepped up behind him to look at the screens. "Did you lose something? Like your talent, perhaps?"

"My talent is fine, thank you Captain."

"May be you swallowed a bug?"

"You over heard me just fine Alek. If they are here this quickly it means they were already here, in the Cellar Door, which means you should check your machine as well."

"I have, they are all over me too, like wild dogs," Alek said, his tone nonchalant and unmotivated.

The man put this together and stopped his IP tracing. "What are you up to, Alek?"

"Huh?" Luca grunted, turning his attention on Alek as well.

"We have the Cellar Door for a reason," Alek began. "There is nothing on it. It has fast network speed and sixty-four gigs of RAM. If anyone came in after us, they hack into a dark box with nothing on it. And there are no State secrets on mine. You?"

The man set his hands lightly on his lap. "Nothing."

"You don't use that port? 6899?"

"Messenger? No. And no Torrents either."

"Really? How do you get your porn then? You don't slunk around the websites looking for clips do you?"

"That is not the subject. What about this? What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that we should have had a lot of interesting stuff on Cellar Door"

The man thought this through, "Interesting. But a missed opportunity. But one that should not be missed in the future."

"You want to put false information on the Cellar Door," Luca breathed, his brown eyes widening with a puckish smile curling his lips. "Brilliant. And so obvious. How could we miss that."

"Because you are attackers, not defenders," said a voice with perfect diction as there leader walked though one of the open doors to the gymnasium.

"Mr. President" Alek barked, and came to attention with an impressive salute.

The man stood quickly but without the panic that kept Luca off balance as he stumbled from the chair, caught his forward motion with a spin, came up facing the wrong way, and spun into a salute facing the right way.

The President inspected them with hard eyes, but they were not mean. Guarded, the man thought. Their leader gave them a curt nod of approval, and then began taking off his coat. "What do we have left of this opportunity. I understand, from what I heard, that we have a visitor."

Alek relaxed his arm out his salute, and said, "We haven't discovered anything about them yet, sir. It could be boys at the Troll Farm trying to yank our chain."

"If it is, find out which ones. I may need new recruits. Can we find out?" the President asked.

Alek relaxed a down another  P.Si, "Of course. That is just a matter of time. Though it might be wise to set the Hounds on them. They are tooled up and ready for that description of activity."

The leader glanced at Alek, and then at the other two. "That may have to be the course, this time. I have need for the three of you. It was to be just you two, but Luca, you speak Persian. yes? From your youth, correct. Your father is in Tehran now? Your mother here in Moscow?"

"The heat makes her angry." Luca replied, his voice flat, with no inflection toward any further meaning.

"You could be helpful for this. I want you with them."

"Yes, sir, of course."

"Good. It is not a long journey, but it is an important one. Iran and Russia, we are much like your parents. It goes so good. Then the one misstep, and it goes wrong,  quickly. I have often thought that we are just far enough apart that we wont kill each other."

"My dad has said as much, yes sir."

"Well" the President said, adjusting his sleeve slightly, "Let us take a look at what we can, while I tell you about your mission. It is a good one."

The man sat down again at his machine and put his hands on the keyboard. His curiosity beat in his ears. Iran? Would it be Israel? Syria? Did Syria have anything left to hack into?

"So, you were thinking to construct a misinformation manger," their leader said. "That's good. You have good instincts. But to make that good for Russia, and not just to amuse yourselves, we should construct a plausible action, a reasonable course — with two accurate mile marks of no consequence."

"And the third the trap," the man breathed. "Of course."

"Da, exactly. We say we will stage supplies there, and then we do. And then we say we will gather troops over there, and then we do."

The man nodded his head, feeling a rising excitement, "And then we say we are going to send a barrage of missiles over there..."

The President nodded, "And we don't. We send them to where they pulled their Patriots from to defend a non-target. But that is just an illustrative description. It depends on who is on the other side of Port 6899. "

The man nodded his head and felt the Flow state building inside his mind. A source-well of tenacity crackled inside his eyes. His hands danced on the keyboard, knowing the opening moves better than his mind. Muscle memory, and a yearning for a challenge.

A thought crossed the man's mind and his lips curled into a brief wicked smile. The answer to the question "should he" found its answer as he deftly slotted NATili and booted her. He wasn't quite done with her, but maybe she could help.

NATali existed in the Cyber Cloud. She was an AI model designed to break things that others had paid embarrassing amounts of money to make unbreakable.

Because of the intuitive demands of the Cyber world, she was ill-equipped to anything but the most basic tasks on her own. However, as an assistant with his guidance to keep her from spinning in a forever loop or falling into a logic paradox — which she was highly proficient at procuring — she might cut the time down to something more attractive. He typed the command:

💡 :]> NATili, there is someone in the Cellar Door on Port 6899. Let's find them.

💡 :]> Yes, I see them. Beginning back trace, utilizing a ping storm.

Smiling, the man glanced to his right into the ice blue eyes of his leader. He lost his smile.

The leader nodded his head to the monitor, "What is this?"

"It is incomplete, but it is a tool for operations. It is designed off the A.I. Gemini."

"The new one? I've seen this. I have been in wonder since the demonstration. You were able to acquire a copy?"

"No,, not such a exciting story. I had to succumb to close study of the science and then code it myself. She has the same descriptions all the same parts -- but so dose a Pinto and a Porsche. I was able to make use of some well done Open Source which sped up development."

The leader nodded, "Let us then see what NATili can do."