After lunch, which made Michael speechless for a whole minute, he decided to begin planning for the factory, while Ben asked me if it would be good for him to get neural cyberware.
A stupid question, I know, but he was still uninitiated. I told him so, a bit more courteous of course, and we spent a few hours designing his personal cyberware.
Naturally, if he had listened to me, he would have chosen the cranial board from the beginning, as I proposed from the get-go.
But no, he had to go individual, and add in module after module individually. Seriously, what good does it do to have access to not just an implant surgeon but an implant designer as well, if you dismiss their advice?
Needless to say, after nearly three hours of adding and removing features left and right, what we ended up with had around 80% of the functionality of a cranial board, not a single function that the board did not possess at least on a software module level, would take around 15 times the neural connectors, would cost nearly 10 times and would require at least three implant procedures to make it run.
If he at least had listened and decided to hook everything into a jack, it might have been easier, but for some reason, he thought it was a weakness.
Seriously though, the way he wanted the thing it would be a challenge to find places to hook all the connectors into.
After another half hour of arguing, I managed to convince him, finally, that instead of having one vulnerability in the jack, he would build in a couple of dozen.
Yes, the jack was a significantly greater vulnerability than any single one of the individual connections, as it had a much broader interface.
But, and that was a very big but, the way he wanted his implants to work together, they would have an even broader interface together than a single jack, even an ultra-bandwidth one, by more than an order of magnitude.
And the interconnection opened up all implants to the vulnerabilities of one of them. In other words, he needed to keep nearly 30 implants secure and patched up instead of a single one. And if one of them was compromised it would compromise the whole setup.
All that, and he would not even have the basic function of a jack, the eased access to cyberspace.
In the end, he grudgingly agreed to go with a cranial board on an ultra-bandwidth jack. Marvelous how easy it was to waste three and a half hours of our time just like that.
We would have been done in minutes if he had listened to me.
When I told him that, he grinned sheepishly, while Michael, working away on his personal computer a bit to the side began laughing out loud.
When Ben looked at his son with fire in his eyes, Michael laughed even harder and tried to stammer a few words.
It took a few seconds for him to get himself under control again, and start to talk:
“Seriously, dad, what are you doing? You have probably the world's best cyberware specialist at hand and outright refuse her advice.
Yes, I know, you must be the leader, the boss, the big honcho, but if Leon comes to you about cybersecurity you listen to him.
When Paul comes to you about money, you listen to him.
Sometimes you even listen when Richard comes to you with medical advice.
Not one of them is world-class talent. But Vivian here is. And you are just too stubborn to accept that.
So yes, it is very amusing for me.
By the way, I want to get a cranial board with an ultra-bandwidth jack as well, Viv.”
I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow questingly.
“Viv? Seriously?”
He seemed pretty unfazed.
“Why sure. I think you like it better than ‘Kitten’, do you?”
I slumped a bit and sighed.
“Yes, it is better than ‘Kitten’, but what is wrong with ‘Vivian’? It is my name after all.”
“Calling somebody by their given name is boring.”
“Whatever. But back to business, if you want a full cranial board then go to the big lab and the scanner. I have a bot bring two of them there.”
Both Ben and Michael frowned, and Ben asked me:
“Now? You have them ready now? How come?”
“I’ve known for a few weeks now that this was coming, and had my indyfab make the ultra-bandwidth jacks around the clock if it wasn’t used for anything else. I added in a few cranial boards later, so I have four jacks for every board. And I started to have the nano-filter applied to them three days ago.
I have a few dozen cranial boards ready for implantation right now. The… well kludge that Ben wanted would have taken a couple of days to make, and at least three days, more likely four or five to install, but fortunately, we can do away with that.”
Ben sighed.
“Yes, I got it. Listen to the expert. Sorry, but… well you know of the horror stories about cyberware, and the way a jack can lead to a fried brain. It is… not pretty.”
“If you do no combat dives, the risk of getting your brain fried is negligible. At this time, jacks are way too rare to be used as a venue for murder anyway.
And I will adapt the firmware of the ones I give to you so that anything that will be developed for the ones I sell won’t likely find the same vulnerabilities.”
Michael looked at me askance.
“You will adapt the firmware? How and why?”
“Every computer as vulnerabilities. There is no way around it. I once read about somebody designing a method to make a computer 100% secure.
He proposed to remove the power supply, cast the computer into concrete, and drop it into the Mariana Trench. And even with that he only estimated it to be 95% secure.
The point is, anything the user can actually influence makes it possible for an attacker to influence.
To make your implants absolutely secure I would have to make them unusable. Add in that any complex system, and believe me, an ultra-bandwidth jack is an extremely complex system, will contain errors.
There was once an estimate by a rather big software developer that anything sold has an average of one bug per 2000 lines of code.
I believe I am a bit better, but the firmware for the jacks I am preparing for you is somewhere in the range of 130 million lines of code.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The OS for the cranial board adds another 30 million lines. Even if I am good enough to only make an error every million lines of code, there are likely 160 bugs in it. And while I am good, I am not that good. My estimate hovers around 500 bugs.
Then of course there are the compromises that I had to make between usability and security.
Again, there is an extremely effective way to protect your system. Have the system ask for authorization every single time anything, regardless of user, system, or app, tries to change any settings. It has been tried.
Somewhere around 200, maybe 250 years ago, the then primary software developer, with a market share of more than 90% in operating systems at the time used that to secure its software.
In the very next version, they included the option to limit the scope of the protection down to shutting it off completely.
It became a meme that ‘the user moved the mouse, do they authorize the change”.
Unsurprisingly the version of the OS that contained this security feature flopped. Hard.
So yes, the implants will be vulnerable. But I have created several versions of the firmware, each with the vulnerabilities hopefully somewhere else.
I have one, you two will get another, and the vast majority of people will get a third.
When the time comes and people look into vulnerabilities for the jack, they will almost certainly not look into the virtually unknown version with at most a couple of dozen users, but instead, go for the version that, if my estimation is even close to correct, will have several thousand if not million users.
And considering that the version I will give you will only go to people I reasonably trust not to try to break it, I think it should be relatively secure.
Not quite as secure as the version I use, as that goes to nobody besides me, but unless I have baked some fundamental error into the system it should be secure.
Well, at least as secure as you let it be. You will need some external access if only to boot it up. And that needs a strong password.
Alternatively, I could include a direct connection to Warden. She… well, as long as you are important to my safety or my undertakings, she will use reasonable measures to protect you.
I would be surprised if somebody could break her security, at least quickly. The disadvantage though is that… well you will have Warden in your implants. No more privacy.”
Ben nodded slowly and answered as I had expected.
“No, thank you but no Warden, please.”
Yeah, nailed it there. I did not, naturally, explain to him that direct connection or no direct connection, he could expect that Warden would know everything he did.
She probably already had some exploits for the firmware I would give the two. And most likely include a rootkit from the get-go.
But I decided to let him have his illusions here.
Michael, after some consideration, agreed with his father.
“I would have been surprised if you had chosen the direct connection. But then the security of your implant depends heavily on your password. Don’t get me wrong, it is inherently much more secure than your com, as… well nobody can simply steal it. As soon as it is installed it can only work if it is inside your living body, or if it is completely reset.
But if somebody gets physical access to it, meaning you, well, I would strongly advise something stronger than ‘password123’.”
Michael now looked a bit unsure.
“Uhm, what would you say is a strong password?”
I had to chuckle at that.
“You are asking the wrong person here. I have two passwords, one only to initiate a boot, the other for access. Both are 1024 characters long and use the Unicode private use area, which contains 6400 codes. The number of possible passwords is 8 with more than 19 thousand digits. Even a modern quantum computer or a supercomputer like my cluster will take months to break that.
Of course, I have to have two 1024 character long codes memorized. Not to disrespect you, but I doubt that you can do that easily.
That is an advantage of being a Pure, especially one interested in such things.
There are options, like a hash generator, that, with a master password and a seed phrase can generate a repeatable password for you, and you just need to remember the settings, the master and the seed, or, well, the cranial board will most likely replace your com, so no point in having a password safe on your com. We could create a safe in a secure computer for you.
In that case, I would seriously suggest you use Warden. The probability that she is… taken out is minuscule at this point. And it is highly unlikely that anybody or anything unauthorized could get access to the safe then.”
Ben smiled at that.
“And will give Warden access to the file as well.”
“You think anywhere would be at once safe, accessible, and protected from Warden? Sure, you could take a tablet or your old com, offline it, run the safe, and then put it in a drawer somewhere.
In a year or two, you will most likely have forgotten where you put it, or somebody has found it and taken it.
You could put it in a physical safe. And everybody knows it is important. Sorry, there is just no perfect solution here.”
“I understand that, but I don’t have to be happy about it.”
I just shrugged, while a bot brought the two jacks and the cranial boards into the lab.
“Yes, I agree with that. Now, I need a short scan of you, and a detailed scan of Michael. It would be better if you go first, and I start the implantation before I scan Michael.”
Michael literally lifted his hand to ask a question.
“Uh, why do you need to scan us, and why only me detailed?”
“I already have some very detailed scans of your father, and now I have just to spot-check that nothing has changed dramatically. It is not strictly necessary, but it is good practice.
For you, I still need a baseline, to know how to program the auto-surgeon. And while I am doing that I can just as well have it scan you for problems due to genetic errors. That will only take 20 or 30 minutes longer than the baseline scan. By the time we are done with that, your father will most likely be finished in the surgeon.”
“Oh, ok.”
Ben’s scan showed no surprises, as expected, and he soon laid in the auto-surgeon which began the implantation process.
I had an eye on it, via cyberspace, while I had Michael in the scanner.
I found, unfortunately, proof that my warning about the executive service was justified. Michael's heart had some problems. Nothing major, but he would need a new one before he was 40, maybe 45.
At least I assumed that it was the result of the genetic screening as the defect seemed to be congenital. A proper screening should have found the problem and corrected it beforehand.
When he came out of the scanner, he looked at me expectantly.
“And? Found something?”
“Yes, I did. Luckily nothing too bad. You will need a new heart in 15 to 20 years. But nothing that will stop us from giving you the jack and cranial board now.”
His face fell.
“Seriously? I… shit… I never thought… fuck, I thought that even if you were right, that… damn, I’ve always been fit. I would’ve never thought that I would be one of the unfortunate.”
I could just shrug helplessly.
“I feel with you. And I get that it is a shock. But, honestly, it is relatively minor. I would expect you to get a cyberheart in the not too distant future anyway, just from your father’s organization.
And you know to use the special service when the time comes for you to get a clone. At the worst then the error will be corrected.”
“Yeah, I guess. It is just… fuck, that is a bummer.”
“Also, we don’t know if the problem has been introduced by the cloning process or if your father had the same defect.”
He frowned.
“Hm, shouldn’t you know that already, as often as you’ve scanned him the last few months?”
“He didn’t have his original heart for a long time when I scanned him the first time. No possibility for me to find the problem there. What’s left is a genetic screening, and I can’t help you there.”
The auto-surgeon had by now finished and opened up.
A couple of Ben’s bodyguards lifted him out of it and placed him onto one of the cots I had placed at one of the walls, to let him come out from the anesthetics.
Michael on the other hand seemed a tiny bit unsure.
“And… it is really safe for me?”
“As safe as any operation can get anyway. The chance that something happens is remote. That would mean tenderness, a bit of pain, a slight infection, or something else that will resolve itself with a couple of days of taking it slow.
The chance that you have to get treatment for anything that happens here is even smaller. Something around one in a million.
The chance that something goes seriously wrong and you are in actual danger is negligible. Not zero, but, statistically, every human would have to climb into one of the better auto-surgeons three times a year before one of them gets a serious complication over the course of a decade.”
He nodded.
“Ok, that… yeah I agree that is negligible.”
And with that, he climbed into the auto-surgeon.
Ben on the other hand began to wake up. Honestly, I would love to use these modern anesthetics for myself, but as a Pure, I was limited to much older, clunkier drugs.
Ben would be fully up and running in another 20 minutes or so. I would have been out of it for the rest of the day and most of the night.
While I supervised Michael's implant procedure with my implants, I helped Ben to boot his up for the very first time.
He had taken my advice and had Warden provide a password safe for him. It took me quite a bit to explain the basic functions to him, but that was mostly due to the pure amount of things to explain.
And before somebody asks, of course I gave him the manual. But… well the thing is nearly 800 pages long. There was a quick guide, but somebody explaining it was in my opinion still the best option, at least for the basics.
And yes, I did inform him about Michael’s heart condition.
As soon as I was done helping Ben, I could repeat the experience with Michael.
In the end, both were happy with their implants, even if they were a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of functions. But they would get used to it.
In the evening, my worry that Ben was just too big for my bed proved to be right.
It was not a big problem though. I could spend another night in his home as well as in my home.
I also already had set the bots to clean and renovate the owner suites. It would take a couple of days to get them habitable, but I could wait that long.