Chapter 19
Aboard the Oregon
Off the Pacific coast of Mexico
“Eat my plasma bolt!” Murphy screamed as the automaton exploded. The robot’s heavy shields had been damaged enough by the grenades tossed by Murphy’s squad mates. He was able to take out the mechanical monster with a short burst from his plasma sniper rifle.
“Thanks, guys—couldn’t have done it without you.”
Murphy was stretched out in a gaming lounge chair, his face covered with a virtual reality mask, his hands gripped on a virtual rifle.
His gaming chair was attached to one of several consoles in his private cabin, which was designed to match the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar from his favorite movie, The Matrix, steel deck plates included.
He and his best friend, Eric Stone, spent countless off-duty hours destroying all manner of malicious aliens and were world-class masters of the most popular online games.
Murph was another of the rare Oregon crew members with no former military experience.
But his previous career as a cutting-edge weapons designer, his unmatched brilliance and unique skill sets had proven invaluable to Cabrillo.
Murphy had taken every security precaution to protect the Oregon from any kind of hacker shenanigans, using multiple aliases, VPNs, and other measures when he played his online games.
He shut them all down whenever they went into any kind of threat area to avoid electromagnetic detection.
He wasn’t due on shift at the weapons station for another twelve hours.
“Let’s move out,” the squad commander said.
She was a twenty-two-year-old Romanian from Bucharest. She wisely used a voice alteration device to mask her youth and gender in the highly competitive, verbally abusive, and testosterone-fueled world of online gaming.
He let her lead the squad and pretended to be a newbie on this mission.
If the other players had known his most famous gamertag they might not have wanted to play with him for fear of being humiliated by his prowess.
“Roger that,” Murphy said as he advanced his mechanical soldier out of the asteroid’s long shadows and ran to catch up with the rest of his unit.
Suddenly, an anonymous private text message scrolled across the top of his screen:
U2FsdGVkX19yZGcAuzVxwZ2C+xodE6TPAGWlSx3YV58=
What would have appeared to be gibberish to most people was instantly recognizable to the brilliant MIT graduate.
“Guys, I’ll catch up.”
“Okay back there?” his squad commander asked.
“All good. Gotta take care of some business.”
“Mommy said it’s time to go night night?” one of the other fighters asked.
Murphy resisted the temptation to put a plasma bolt in the back of the punk’s virtual helmet. The kid needed to learn some manners, but right now Murph had a puzzle to solve.
“You guys stay frosty,” Murphy said.
“You too, amigo,” the Romanian said as the team pressed forward toward an alien shipwreck on the horizon.
Murph turned his attention to the string of lower- and uppercase letters, numbers, and mathematical symbols. He instantly recognized it as Base64 encoding. He also knew Base64 was commonly used to represent binary data in the ASCII string format.
A code leading to a code.
Murph bailed out of the game window and pulled up an online calculator.
He hardly needed it. He often relied on his own split-second mental calculations for firing solutions when he was the weapons officer.
Cabrillo compared him to John Glenn performing trajectory calculations faster than Mercury’s onboard computer.
Murph opened up a new terminal window and began decoding the encrypted text by entering the command:
base64 -d encrypted_file.b64 > decrypted.bin
Moments later, the result he came up with was a long binary data sequence of fifty-three digits and characters.
The “Salted_” prefix in this new sequence probably meant the data was encrypted using OpenSSL’s default method.
But now he had a problem. He needed a password to decrypt it—and no idea how to find it.
Suddenly, a second message appeared on his screen:
Find the positive integer solution to the equation: 7^x ≡ 1 mod 20
Murphy tugged on his wispy beard, intrigued. Whoever was sending this stuff was no idiot and didn’t think he was one, either. He needed to solve for x in the equation. He popped open his terminal and fired off a quick Python command.
The result was an infinite arithmetic sequence of numbers beginning with 4.
But Murph knew that “infinity” couldn’t be the answer. In fact, just the opposite. In cryptographic puzzles, the shortest viable solution was always the most efficient choice. He noticed the numbers all advanced by a factor of 4.
That was the answer.
He then saved the encrypted data to a file, opened a new terminal window, and used the OpenSSL command-line tool. When it prompted him for a password, he entered “4” and crossed his fingers.
Yes.
Murphy flushed with another dopamine hit. The decryption was a success.
The only problem was that it yielded another coded hexadecimal message:
45 65 72 6F 20 53 61 61 72 69 6E 65 6E
Murphy paused. He was being led down a rabbit hole, exactly the kind of thing a super hacker would do if they wanted to crack into the Oregon’s system.
He did a quick gut check and, more important, a mental inventory. There was no way that anything happening in his gaming computer could possibly affect the Oregon. Still, it would be smarter to quit this little dance and not take any chances with the intriguing puzzle.
But…he was so close to solving it.
He decided to trust his intuition and press on. Besides, converting hexadecimal to ASCII was child’s play; a mere matter of consulting a table. He pulled one up, threw it onto a spreadsheet, and then converted each hexadecimal pair to its alphabetical equivalent.
The result surprised him:
EERO SAARINEN
Where did he know that name from? His fingers twitched as they hovered over the keyboard. A few simple strokes in a search engine could pull the name up. But that wasn’t any fun.
He rewound his mental computer and could practically hear the high-pitched gibberish of an old audio tape playing backward in his mind. The tumblers finally fell into place.
Eero Saarinen was the Finnish-American architect who designed two famous buildings at MIT. One was a chapel, the other was the Kresge Auditorium.
Murph hadn’t thought much about school since he came on board the Oregon.
He was quite the nerd—a character straight out of The Big Bang Theory.
But crewing on the Oregon had matured his body and his mind.
Intense physical workouts, training in tactics and small arms with the Gundogs, and operating the Oregon’s advanced weapons systems had changed him for the better.
Those MIT memories were still sweet. The scene of several intellectual triumphs and a few emotional crashes.
Suddenly, a third message appeared:
Find the value of the integral: ∫0^π sin(x) dx
Another math problem. Murph tore off his virtual headset and dashed over to his steel work desk.
He tapped the keyboard and a mirror image of his gaming console pulled up.
He grabbed paper and pencil from a drawer and scribbled away.
It was the kind of problem he was solving when other kids his age were still watching cartoons.
It took just a couple of moments of noodling to calculate the resulting cosine values at the boundaries. He came up with the number: 2.
How did this relate to anything?
As if reading his thoughts, another message appeared:
Decode this Base64 string: UXVhbnR1bSBMb3ZlICYgdGhlIENoYW9zIEtpd2lz
Once again, Murph opened up a new terminal window, uploaded the text, and deployed the Base64 command. The result shocked him:
QUANTUM LOVE & THE CHAOS KIWIS
That was the name of his favorite punk rock band in grad school. How crazy is that?
He was too busy and too broke to follow them around on tour back then. But he owned two bootleg tapes he had listened to until the magnetic oxide layer began flaking and the tape stretched out like an old rubber band.
The only time he ever saw them in concert was when they came to MIT’s Kresge Auditorium…designed by…Eero Saarinen.
That concert was the first time he’d ever taken a girl on a date.
Murph’s face suddenly flushed red, a combination of sheer delight and utter dread. He wanted to shout with joy and puke his guts out all at the same time.
Maybe all of this wasn’t just a game. He throttled back his emotions and typed a short burst of hexadecimal code into the anonymous text box:
“Linlin?”
She responded in hexadecimal.
“UR the only one that can help me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to die.”
Murph’s mind raced with endless possibilities.
Linlin was the first girlfriend he’d ever had, the only girl he had ever loved.
He drove her to the airport when she left Boston years ago.
Her parents were sick, and they needed her back in China.
But she never came back to Boston. Didn’t even reach out to him.
All these years, he had no idea where she was or what had happened to her.
He assumed it was all about him. She broke his heart, and it had never fully mended.
Murph continued the coded speech with her.
“Why will you die?”
“Can’t explain. No time. Can you meet me here?”
Linlin sent a set of coded GPS coordinates.
Murphy pulled up a map. Thailand.
“Ok?” Linlin asked.
“Ok”
“How soon?”
“24hr +/- Are your comms safe?”
“Comms?”
“Communications. Safe?”
“Must go now.”
Before he could type a response, her text window disappeared.
Murph’s eyes narrowed with confusion.
What had just happened? Was that all a fever dream? He could hardly believe it.
He’d never gotten over Linlin. She was brilliant, beautiful, funny. In his juvenile heart, he had even thought he was going to marry her.
Now she was back in his life. It seemed too good to be true.
Or maybe it was just good. He wasn’t sure.
She said she was in trouble.
He had to find her.