CROSSFIRE - Atlantis DSV - New Cape Quest

Ainsley nodded slowly. “That‟s what concerns me. I did. And it withheld the results
from me.”
“What?”
“Apparently it‟s classified.”
Banick stood up and shook his head. “Admiral, I appreciate that you want my help
with this, but unless you can tell me why NSIS is so interested in this – I‟m not sure I can.”
Ainsley looked down for a moment and thought about it. He smiled. “What I‟m about
to tell you doesn‟t leave this room,” he ordered.
Banick‟s arms were folded as he looked at the Admiral expectantly. “Done.”
“Good. When NSIS picked up these messages, I told you they were encrypted with a
UEO Signals protocol. What I couldn‟t, and should be telling you, is that the cipher they used
was the sort used exclusively aboard DSVs.”
Banick stared blankly through Ainsley for a moment, as if he didn‟t quite believe what
he‟d just heard. Finally, he suggested, “What about the seaQuest?”
“That was the first thing I checked. I made the call to Captain Hitchcock personally.
The protocol identifier attached to these codes doesn‟t match anything seaQuest has ever
transmitted from her SOC.”
“Why is this cipher so special?”
Ainsley sniffed. “Schrader told me that the reason this code is unique is because they
needed something with the sophistication of an AHAI to keep track of a floating point
encryption. Annie is the only thing on the planet capable of encoding and then decoding a
fractal algorithm, and to have any hope of decoding it otherwise, you would need to know the
exact time and place from which the message was sent, accurate to the second.”
Banick frowned. “But... NSIS doesn‟t have any AHAIs. seaQuest is the last one we
have. How did they decode it?”
Ainsley smiled and pointed at the code on the holo display. “That‟s what concerns
me.”
“Annie...” Banick repeated, looking at the code again. “Ninth of September, 2041...”
Ainsley sighed, and shook his head.
Banick thought otherwise, and frowned. “That‟s not right...”
“What?”
“You‟re assuming these dates refer to events, rather than a record of events, as the
order would suggest. By records, Atlantis wasn‟t lost on the ninth. She was reported lost on
the tenth when Admiral Morgan signed off on it. That is the entry that would have been made
on the official record.”
It hit Ainsley like a bolt of lightning. “Annie. We lost Annie on the ninth.”
Banick spun the display around again and quickly typed in a search of records.
“Thirteenth of the November, 2021...” he said with a measure of finality. “Action report filed
by UEO seaQuest DSV 4600-II by Captain Nathan Hale Bridger. Reported the destruction of
the autonomous SSN code-named Marauder...”
Ainsley turned from the window at the side of the room. “Marauder wasn‟t the name
of the submarine... it was the name of the AI project it was running.”
Banick nodded. “She launched ballistic missiles against New Cape Quest the same
day. I remember it set Artificial Intelligence development back twenty years when the
Security Council banned development of autonomous smart-AI.”
“That‟s the key,” said Ainsley excitedly. “ANNIE was the first such AI they managed
to develop since the attack. Run a search on the other two dates, 2039 and 2040. Cross
reference it with records on ANNIE‟s development.”
Banick shook his head as he tried to fill in the requests. “I don‟t like your chances. If it
bounced back as classified the first time, I don‟t see what you‟re going to get now.”
“No, you‟re right. Try something broader. Check low-level classification records for
the entire DSX project, checking only those dates.”
Banick stopped at that and looked at his former commander even more sceptically.
“That will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Maybe, but at least we know what the needle looks like.”
- 88 -