As the week started, Matt realized he had gone two weekends in a row without going to a party or drinking anything. Was he missing out on the college experience? Most of his classes were really boring and he was not looking forward to spending two and a half more years sitting through boring lectures so he could get an entry level job. He realized a lot of his friends were probably drinking to avoid thinking about how much they hated school and their future as low paid adults in a few years.
Scott, Barry and Alvaro were kind of different from his usual friends. He could geek out around them without being embarrassed. Aside from Barry, they were kind of socially awkward and clearly didn’t enjoy the parties he dragged them to. When Scott showed him Glitch_HR he originally thought it was some elaborate prank. Scott was clever like that, and he wouldn’t put it past him to spend a couple weeks setting up a big trick. After a couple hours he knew this wasn’t a joke.
Engineering and Computer Science classes were boring, but he still got excited thinking about science fiction and new technology. The training on here was serving up cutting edge stuff but at a level he could understand. After finding a few treasures in between the occasional garbage, Matt was hooked. The first night he stayed up late. He only got to bed around 4 AM and slept through his Statics and Dynamics class. He dragged himself to the cafeteria at lunch time and tried to make it through Differential Equations in the afternoon but ended up sleeping. The professor made a sharp comment about his snoring, but the dude should try to make his class less boring! Matt was hardly the only person who couldn’t stay awake. It wasn’t that the class was too easy - it was actually that he didn’t understand anything the professor was talking about. Plus, his voice just droned on while showing a bunch of symbols Matt didn’t recognize. He was definitely going to fail this class unless he figured a lot of it out on his own and could catch up to what the professor was teaching.
Going back to his room, he decided to try and be a good student and stared at his math textbook for about 15 minutes. The book was written by the professor - obviously this was his side hustle to make students spend $200 on this boring and heavy manual. Matt contrasted this class to what he had been reading on Glitch_HR skill training. Hrmm… he opened up the screen. Instead of picking the top ranked training exercises he tried out the search feature and looked for Differential Equations. It pulled up a fairly long list starting with Primer for DiffEq - an article supposedly for students who showed up in class and felt completely unprepared to learn even the basics of this class. He laughed - yeah that described him! The article skimmed over some stuff he knew and gave some hints on how it would tie into the class. It described some new symbols he could expect to see and spelled out what they meant and why they had to invent new math symbols. Kind of helpful. He spent half an hour but felt like he got way more out of this than any of his professor’s lectures so far this year.
A couple more of these articles was all he could handle. He went to the gym - it was always good to take a break from studying to do something physically active. Barry went with him. They talked about the usual stuff - neither of them knew of any parties during the week. Barry asked him if he had played with Glitch_HR.
“So, Scott said I’m supposed to be designing some undersea mining robots. I would have totally laughed this off a couple weeks ago. Now, I actually have a few ideas and I’ve played with that CAD tool. I can’t believe this might actually work.”
“No kidding. I know I’m supposed to come up with some corrosion and pressure resistant materials, but that’s actually kind of easy. I had already figured some of that out after reading about those poor German and Brazilian research teams. They only needed what the other team had already solved!”
“Yeah, we’ll have to ask Melinda about how we can license what they have without admitting we probably accessed their research illegally.”
“No kidding. I’m still not sure how I feel about working for a crazy homeless lady, but it probably takes someone unusual to deal with all the weirdness we are likely to come up with!”
Matt did a set of Lat pulldowns while waiting for Barry to continue.
“So anyway, I kind of went back to the whole fusion reactor idea. I read a few other articles on what seemed like unrelated things, but it seems like the pieces fit together into something worth looking at. I think I need about $10k in equipment and a few hundred dollars in materials, but there are a few experiments I really want to try.”
“Another thing we need to discuss. We talked about getting this business started, then using it to launch other businesses. How can we fund these if we want to work on it while still building the initial business? Let’s make a list of questions and send them to Scott. He can pass it on - hopefully Melinda has some ideas how we can fund side projects. Maybe we could borrow money from our main business or get a salary?”
“Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
Matt sent a couple questions to Scott. “Does Melinda even have a phone?”
“I don’t think so. We probably need to get that in the budget too.”
After finishing their workout, Matt returned to the dorm. Barry is going to invent some super profitable fusion reactor and Scott has already built this genius HR tool. I need to start pulling my weight. Matt thought.
He started working on a design for a mining robot. Once again, he stayed up well past midnight. This time he got up in time for breakfast, decided to skip his “Mechanical Engineering Introduction to Design”. It used to be his favorite class but compared to what he was doing now it just felt basic.
He worked all day. He even shared his design with a NASA engineering group without giving a detailed description of what it was for. There were some snarky comments about how a lunar mining robot didn’t need such heavy environmental plating. Another more helpful person named Zaliha Min complimented him on the design and asked offline what project this was for. He/she? said it looked like it must be for a high pressure, high corrosive environment and didn’t know of any plans for sending something to an environment like that.
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Matt replied that he was a student, and it was for a class assignment. Zahlia was impressed - she said she hoped he applied at NASA when he finished his PhD. Hah! He was just a sophomore in undergrad, but he didn’t admit that. He had googled her and found out she was a fairly attractive girl who looked to be late 20s, although the picture was not very flattering. It looked like the typical mugshot they would put on a worker ID badge.
Zahlia asked about what the expected gravity and pressure were. Matt said he couldn’t share that because it was confidential. She accepted this - it was not unusual for advanced students to work on projects funded by corporations or government agencies. She pointed out that if it was in a high gravity or high-pressure environment it would likely consume the power in lithium batteries too quickly to keep it charged for long. She mentioned that the solar output on Mars or further out would have trouble keeping something like this running for more than an hour a day.
They talked back and forth - Matt realized this was a significant concern. He had underestimated the drain on power moving around underwater with heavy pressure, and power supply was likely the biggest problem for underwater operations. If Barry came up with a fusion reactor, it would really help keep the robots charged. So, they probably needed this to make it all work, but how would they account for it in their business proposal?
They could propose using a ship floating on the surface with cables running down to a charging hub. The ship could run big diesel generators to provide power. If they proposed this, they could provide a budget number but without committing to using this method. Then Barry could use some of this budget to do his research. If his idea worked, the power hub would be much cheaper. We could let the mining company keep the designs for the robots but exclude intellectual property for the charging hub. It would be fair to expect that no one would care too much about rights to a ship with a big diesel generator and really long power cables.
Matt was pleased. He felt like he had solved a problem. Also, he had met a cute girl from NASA. She was probably about 2 hours away, but he would keep in touch.
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Alexey Lukina was having a bad month. The trouble had started a few weeks ago when one of his programmers had lifted some code that he was quite excited about. The code came from an American University called Horace Mango. Alexey was well aware that this university did work for the United States military and the NSA with both agencies heavily recruiting from the graduate students.
Alexey ran a criminal organization with close ties to the FSB. They generated a lot of revenue from various internet scams and identity theft which was funneled into funding more heavy-handed activities. His organization would learn of illicit deals or embarrassing personal scandals and use it to gain access to the more secure corporate and government systems. They were known to hire thugs to intimidate low level workers and their families to get the access they needed. Threats, bribes or scams - whatever was cheapest. Usually, all he needed was someone to open an email or click a link in a text message and his team could get what they wanted.
He had stolen information about drones, targeting systems, sonar and radar systems from graduate students at Horace Mango. It was almost laughably easy to get college students to download free games or apps that had viruses. Sometimes, students on more sensitive projects required an agent to get them drunk and clone a keycard or encryption device. It had been a goldmine for stealing military technology.
Rarely, his team identified extremely high value projects that used a more advanced concept of operational security. Multiple locations would work on isolated parts of the whole. They used code obfuscation and only assembled the final project in very secure sites, often in remote locations that even Alexey was unable to get to. Typically, the code was assembled by automated processes so that there was no human weakness in the security. The organization was authorized to try to reverse engineer missing modules if they found something that looked like one of these high value operations. They would farm out parts of the work to various independents who would only see a fraction of the finished project - this allowed them to get results quickly without keeping a large staff on hand. These opportunities were rare: no more than once or twice a year. They were considered high risk, high reward. High risk in that it was likely their reverse engineering would fail, but if they could pull it off it might be the highlight of his career.
A project had appeared that had a lot of red flags. It was linked to Horace Mango University. It had code identified as self-assembling from various sources. It included code similar to many viruses and worms that Alexey was very familiar with. Also, there were signs that it was pulling code from other branch locations that their organization had flagged. The name of the project was “Human Resources Project” which seemed like a strong indicator that it was going to be used for espionage. Alexey had approved farming out missing sections and reverse engineering them. It had been very late, so he had left the office while his employees were scrambling to make sense of code. It was clearly using advanced techniques to confuse anyone trying to reverse engineer it. To an unsophisticated observer, you could mistake it for a childish attempt at a homework-writing AI.
The next day, his team was extremely nervous. They had spent most of his discretionary budget filling in gaps in the code, but the NSA had caught wind of their efforts. They had activated a worm buried in the code. The worm had encrypted all the code and attempted to return the contents of their project folder to several of their offices. Alexey’s network security shut this down quickly preventing the worm returning data to the NSA’s external sites. Unfortunately, his link was still open to the target computer at Horace Mango. Before his technician could shut it down, the contents of the project folder had been copied back to the target.
This was a disaster! The code was still running on his server farm, but the source was encrypted so strongly he didn’t expect to crack it in the next few years. It was even mining data from his network of covert projects on their server farm. So far, he was unable to determine what the software was doing.
After meeting with some very scary people in the FSB, he was ordered to leave the code running and perform analytics on what it was doing. The program was tied into some of his most successful data gathering operations, but he had not shared this embarrassing detail with his superiors. He valued his life and was determined to fix this before they found out.
Day by day, Alexey monitored what the program was accessing. He watched as this program uncovered some of his more successful hacks - top American companies, the FBI. Even though his assets were burned, he couldn’t find any confirmation from his sources. Whoever was running this operation on the American side seemed to be toying with him. He would never know which of his sources was compromised or when the Americans were feeding him bad intel.
Alexey could no longer sleep. He dreaded the day the extent of this nightmare was revealed to his bosses. No doubt he would be given the early retirement package. The worst part was not knowing who his enemy was. He did have one lead.
Somewhere at Horace Mango was a student or professor who would have information about this project. It was a slim hope, but Alexey was desperate. He made a few calls. After talking to some agents, he allowed himself the smallest hope that he could get out of this mess.