‘So where do we go from here?’ she asked. ‘We have thirty-seven providers in our pool, all with impeccable reputations, all audited and certified as thoroughly as…’
‘As thoroughly as each other?’ Falaki suggested. ‘The standard industry protocols are valuable, but they’re not a watertight guarantee of anything. What you really need to do is put pressure on them to install third-party hardware monitoring.’
Yeah, right. The major providers of Cloud computing took security very seriously, allowing independent auditors to perform snap inspections and random integrity tests. But yanking thousands of processor chips right out of their sockets and forcing them to talk to their circuit-boards through extra hardware that watched and verified their every move would not only be hugely expensive; in some of their customers’ eyes it would amount to a stark admission that there really was a problem demanding that level of overkill. For one company alone to adopt those measures would be commercial suicide. For the whole industry to adopt them, all at once, would require a miracle.
‘We don’t have the clout to make that happen,’ Nasim said bluntly. ‘If we banded together with all the other high-end users, we might be able to start negotiating the introduction of hardware monitoring… maybe ten years down the track. But pointing the finger at thirty-seven companies and saying “The blame lies either with one of you, or with us” is not going to cut it. They’re not going to invest millions of dollars to fix a problem that might have nothing to do with them, when they can pass the buck between themselves – or even better, pass it right back to us.’
Falaki said, ‘I understand. It’s the ideal solution, but we’re not living in an ideal world.’
Nasim turned the USB stick over in her hand. Most of the report’s weighty appendices would be automated analyses of log files, software settings, and hardware tests for Zendegi’s own equipment. Falaki’s team had scrutinised everything from personal notepads – her own included – to the company’s workstations. They’d found no evidence of an external hacker gaining access, but then they’d found no evidence of impropriety by any of her staff either.
‘So short of hardware monitoring, what’s the next best thing?’ she asked Falaki.
‘Software overseers,’ he replied. ‘Every process you run in the Cloud gets twinned with a supervisor process that watches its back – preferably from the vantage point of a different provider. It’s not foolproof and it’s quite expensive; maybe a fifty per cent resource increase if you don’t want your customers to experience lags.’ ‘But it would make life complicated for whoever’s screwing with us?’ ‘Absolutely,’ Falaki replied. ‘And it would make it far more likely that we’ll either end up with evidence against them, or succeed in blocking them out completely.’ ‘Unless they’re geniuses who can subvert anything.’
Falaki smiled. ‘No one has magic shortcuts for every possible challenge. Even if one of your providers is completely corrupt and is messing with your processes more or less at will, we can still make it very costly for them to do that and look innocent.’
‘More than it costs us?’
‘I believe so,’ Falaki said carefully.
Nasim was doing her best to put off imagining sharing this news with the board. A fifty per cent increase in their computing outlays would be painful, but it would be money well spent if it led them swiftly to a lone saboteur. At the opposite extreme, though, if Cyber-Jahan had decided to play dirty, the prospects could be very different. A company like that would have the expertise and resources to bleed Zendegi from two wounds at once – customer losses and expensive countermeasures – and to keep it up for months, even years.
She held up the memory stick. ‘I will read this, I promise, but we might as well get as far as option three.’
‘All right.’ Falaki cleared his throat. ‘This only pertains to the possibility that a member of your own staff is involved, but you might want to consider it, for peace of mind.’
‘Go on.’
Falaki said, ‘I sometimes find it useful to bring in another firm, run by an old business partner of mine, that employs some skilful interrogators. They could interview your staff and pursue the issue more robustly than we’ve been able to so far.’
Nasim stared at him, waiting for his earnest face to crack. She wasn’t used to being teased by people she barely knew – it had taken Bahador a year to start including her in his office pranks – but maybe this was Falaki’s way of defusing tension in a stressful job. ‘Skilful interrogators’ was a common euphemism for a very specific kind of person in post-2012 Iran: former VEVAK agents who’d had the connections and resources to cushion their fall.
Falaki gazed back at her blandly. He was serious.
Nasim said, ‘I think we might pass on that.’
Martin had been taking the disinhibitor for nearly a week before Nasim finally found the time to sit down and review the effects of the drug. There’d been an initial rise in the number of new synapses being characterised, but that much was almost inevitable; for a major pharmacological intervention to have revealed nothing new would have been as strange as if the shift from winter to summer had left the pedestrians of Tehran traipsing out identical routes through the city – making no tracks to hitherto unrevealed parks or outdoor cafés.
Even beyond that anticipated surge, though, the drug had continued to pay off. Before, the barrage of images had been sending Martin rapidly into a glazed, unresponsive state, almost independent of the details of the content being shown to him. Now, each new image elicited a fresh response; Nasim could see the splash of activity in every scan.
They had long ago dragged Martin up and down the highways of his life, engaging with every significant biographical event, every ethical concern, every strongly held belief and aesthetic preference. But that had not been enough to map the whole landscape – to delineate the topography that kept those highways from tumbling away into the void. What made any given human brain entirely distinct from another came down to details that were far too minor to be recounted by the subject, too minor even to be of interest to them, too minor, in fact, for any sane person to tolerate having to contemplate them, hour after hour, day after day. Only by shutting down the parts of Martin’s brain that were choking on the sheer quantity of minutiae had it become possible to start gathering the information they needed.
Now the side-loading software had massaged the Proxy into a form that mimicked virtually all of Martin’s fragmentary responses. If the data kept coming through at the current rate, within a month or so they’d have the Proxy in a stable state, ready to test in short scenarios.
Ready for a conversation.
Nasim cleared all the scans and histograms from her screen and sat contemplating the endpoint of the process. A child could take comfort from just about anything: a stuffed animal, a cartoon character, a mythical figure in a storybook who lived out the same plot over and over. The imprisoned Zal that Javeed had been so delighted to encounter had been nothing but a set of branching script fragments.
But Martin was not Javeed’s cartoon hero. He could not be replaced by a clip library of favourite scenes. Either the Proxy would capture the actual dynamic between them, or it would be useless.
The question was, could it be enough without being too much? When she’d built the blank receptacle for the side-loading process, Nasim had used the best functional maps available, but every choice had involved a trade-off. Every region she’d omitted risked robbing the Proxy of something it would need for its task; every region she’d included risked burdening it with goals it had no power to achieve and desires it had no power to fulfil.