Orbital Cloud Page 15

  Kazumi pointed to a spot on the ceiling. Akari spread her arms, and countless white dots came into view clustered around a red dot.

  “This is the sky that X-Man saw in the Seychelles,” Kazumi said. “The red dot is SAFIR 3, and the white dots around it are probably space tethers. That’s the conclusion that follows from the orbital data, at least. Something interesting happens right around the time of the acceleration that X-Man reported. Numata-san, can you advance the frame to two minutes, thirty-four seconds? Put the velocity and acceleration graphs up on the whiteboard, too.”

  With a nod, Akari followed Kazumi’s instructions, controlling the graphs and planetarium through keyboard and gesture control. It was like watching someone play a musical instrument.

  “Now that’s cool,” Sekiguchi murmured, forgetting for a moment to play it cool himself.

  On the whiteboard Kurosaki saw two lines, green and blue. Around the center of the board, the green one took a sudden step upwards, while the blue one came to a sharp point.

  “Here,” Kazumi said, indicating that central area, “is where the velocity increases by about three meters per second.”

  “So it still had some gas in it,” Kurosaki said.

  It was certainly unusual for an empty rocket body to accelerate, but it wasn’t unheard of for leftover fuel to be expelled for some reason and to propel the rocket in the opposite direction. To an amateur, this might appear to be an orbital correction.

  “Normally, that would be the assumption,” Kazumi said. “But …” He pointed at the place on the graph where the green line went up so sharply it looked vertical. “The time span is too short for that. Less than five milliseconds.”

  Kurosaki leaned forward in his seat.

  All spacecraft moved as a side effect of expelling fuel called propellant. A trickle of fuel leaking from a cracked tank could not cause acceleration that fast. But what could give such a kick to a booster that weighed tons in just five milliseconds?

  “It’s like—pow!” Sekiguchi said, punching his open palm. “Isn’t it? Almost like a collision.” He was right: that much acceleration that quickly was consistent with an impact. “Orbital debris, maybe? Scary idea.”

  “There isn’t that much debris up there,” Kurosaki said.

  The figures for 2020 estimated only five hazardous collisions per year throughout the entire low-altitude orbit zone.

  Kazumi agreed. “Given the current density of orbital debris, a series of impacts at this rate would be impossible,” he said. “In only five minutes of data, we see five velocity changes like this. And the acceleration is always along the direction of its orbit.”

  Kazumi paused for a moment, apparently unsure how to continue. Finally he turned to face Kurosaki and spoke again.

  “I think that what’s colliding with SAFIR 3 here is Jahanshah’s space tethers,” he said.

  “Hold on,” Kurosaki said. “We’re talking about things that aren’t even big enough to show up on radar. Could they really move SAFIR 3 like that just by colliding with it?”

  “The apparatus at either end of the tether—I call it the terminal apparatus—moves faster than three kilometers per second. That’s several times faster than a bullet fired from a rifle and probably five to ten times heavier. It wouldn’t be so strange for an impact from something like that to cause some amount of motion.”

  A chill ran down Kurosaki’s spine.

  This was no ordinary debris. The space tethers were rotating, and fast. They didn’t need a high relative velocity when they crossed paths with something to damage it. All they had to do was match the orbit of a satellite or space station and approach it at their leisure—the energy in their rotation would be enough to smash the target apart.

  “Fortunately, we were able to pick out the terminal apparatus that we think collided with SAFIR 3 at this point from the data,” Kazumi said. “Numata-san, please show us the orbits for objects 156 and 643. Enlarge number 156.”

  “All right,” Akari said a moment later. “Starting the animation.”

  She pointed at the ceiling, where a red dot began moving from the front of the room toward the center of the ceiling.

  “First,” Kazumi said, “please note the motion of SAFIR 3.”

  He pointed at the center of the ceiling, where a white dot had appeared. As they watched, the white dot approached SAFIR 3’s orbital path directly—but then dropped back, describing a circle. Even after Kazumi’s explanation of the space tether, Kurosaki couldn’t believe his eyes. Could it really be possible for something to move like this in orbit?

  As Kurosaki stared wordlessly, Kazumi continued. “The object that collides with SAFIR 3 is about to appear,” he said. “There it is.”

  A slightly larger white dot appeared at the edge of the wall where Kazumi was pointing and began to rise toward the ceiling as if holding hands with the white dot that had appeared first. It seemed to be in pursuit of SAFIR 3.

  Kazumi pointed slightly ahead of SAFIR 3.

  “Here it comes,” he said. Then: “There. That was the collision.”

  The larger dot had caught up with SAFIR 3 and disappeared. SAFIR 3 seemed to tremble slightly, but that might have just been Kurosaki’s imagination, since he was expecting a collision. The original white dot, having lost its partner, drifted away.

  “As you can see,” Kazumi said, “Jahanshah’s space tether caused SAFIR 3 to accelerate. At least, that’s how I see it.”

  His nervousness was obvious. He couldn’t be entirely sure that he was correct. Anyone would be reluctant to report something as outlandish as a collision from an unknown spacecraft to an organization like JAXA, even to nontechnical staff like Kurosaki and Sekiguchi.

  “This hypothesis relies on a lot of assumptions, and I’m unable to check them all,” Kazumi continued. He started to list the assumptions on his fingers: one, that the observational data from Ozzy Cunningham was accurate; two, that Jahanshah’s space tether theory was viable; and three, that space tether technology had indeed been launched into orbit.

  “That about covers it,” Kurosaki said. He saw Kazumi and Akari for what they were now: an exemplary pair of young IT professionals.

  The two of them couldn’t possibly be making a living off Meteor News. Realistically, they had to be doing it in between web design work. In other words, they’d made what might be the discovery of the century in what amounted to their spare time, and they still coolly recognized their own limitations as amateurs. If Kazumi were able to tackle this problem full-time, with Akari’s support, who could guess what they might achieve?

  Sekiguchi rose to his feet. “Thank you very much,” he said. “I think it’s my turn now …”

  He trailed off, looking at the conference room’s glass wall. A partition made of clouded glass for privacy. The people outside were visible as vague murky forms, moving busily in the Fool’s Launchpad lounge.

  “My apologies,” Sekiguchi said. “I’m a bit stiff from all that looking at the ceiling.”

  With his briefcase in one hand, he walked around opposite the whiteboard and stretched as he passed the partition.

  “You’re only twenty-eight,” Kurosaki said.

  “Age is nothing but a number,” Sekiguchi replied. “Let’s get started.”

  The North Korean leader’s speech appeared on the whiteboard, played through a projector that Sekiguchi had borrowed from Akari.

  “Look at the machine-translated English subtitles,” Sekiguchi said. “There’s a lot about them that strikes me as odd.” He stood in front of the whiteboard and drew a circle beside the subtitles, then turned to Kurosaki. “This is handy, eh?” he said. “We should get one of these high-reflectivity whiteboards for our conference room, too.”

  “Just get on with it,” Kurosaki said, waving his hand. Sekiguchi’s outgoing manner had helped warm the room up, but Kazumi and Akari prob
ably didn’t have all day.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Sekiguchi said. “Okay, this is the part that bothers me. The word in Korean is cheolgwon, which literally means ‘iron fist,’ although this is really just a metaphor for a strongly clenched fist. But the English subtitles read ‘iron hammer.’ ”

  He replayed that part of the video, filling in the circle he’d drawn earlier. Kazumi watched with obvious interest. Akari leaned forward in her chair.

  “The translation has a lot of other strange word choices in it, but the real issue is that it’s much more fluent than any machine translation has a right to be.”

  Akari pointed one orange-nailed finger upwards and said, “Maybe the translation engine’s corpus is contaminated!”

  Kazumi noticed Kurosaki frown and tilt his head at the word corpus. “The database of translation pairs that the translation engine uses,” he explained. “As for what the ‘contaminated’ part might mean, no idea.”

  “Try this,” Akari said. She turned her laptop to face Sekiguchi. He peered at the screen and saw that she had opened a well-known translation tool and set it to translate from Korean to English. “Enter the Korean for ‘iron fist’ in the left,” she said. “It’s set to hangul entry. Go ahead.”

  Sekiguchi thought for a moment, then muttered “Cheolgwon, cheol-gwon …” to himself as he typed 철권. On the right side of the screen, a single word appeared: tekken.

  “Huh? But that’s just Japanese in Roman characters,” Sekiguchi said.

  “And it’s all in uppercase,” Akari observed.

  The two of them stared at the screen, puzzled.

  Kazumi clapped his hands. “I get it,” he said. “It’s that fighting game series. They use the title Tekken in English too. Is this what you meant by contaminated, Akari?”

  “Yes,” Akari said. “That’s exactly it.”

  According to Akari, most cloud-based translation engines relied on translated content on the Internet to compensate for the fact that the meaning of words changed depending on the context. In theory, a single word might have many possible translations, and a machine could not know which was appropriate. To solve this problem, translation engines used online material available in two or more languages to see which words were more likely to correspond in certain contexts.

  “It makes sense, I guess, that the online engines would chose cheolgwon over the alternatives,” Kazumi said. “As a single word, it’s probably used to refer to those games more than anything else. Ugh.”

  “Sekiguchi-san,” Akari said. “Try entering more of the speech. Leave cheolgwon just as it is.”

  Sekiguchi moved the cursor to after cheolgwon and mumbled to himself in Korean as he typed the rest of the sentence in hangul.

  “Hey! There it is!”

  The text on the right had been updated to strike with iron hammer—the same phrase that appeared in the English subtitles still visible on the whiteboard. The source word cheolgwon itself had been left exactly as it was, but presumably its interpretation had changed from “Tekken” to “iron hammer.”

  “I knew it. It’s corrupt,” Akari said. “Let me track down the original translation data.”

  She spun the laptop back toward her. After a short burst of typing, she projected the contents of her monitor up on the whiteboard. She had done a web search for strike with iron hammer. Most of the results were on sites in the .kr domain. A lot of Korean results, in other words, for an English search term.

  Akari clicked on one and arrived at a product release announcement on a cell phone manufacturer’s website. They all stared at the top of the page.

  “Why is the English version of a North Korean speech at the top of this page?” asked Kurosaki.

  There it was, like a heading at the top of the press release. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the product.

  “Can you show us the Korean version of this page?” asked Sekiguchi.

  Akari tapped a few keys, and a hangul version of the page appeared on the whiteboard alongside the English one.

  Sekiguchi pointed at the top line. “This is what the North Korean leader said in his speech,” he said. “Word for word. Can we see the other results?”

  Akari opened a few of the other hits from the web search, but all contained a line from the speech. An official site for a television program, an interview with a musician, a fashion blog … The only thing they had in common was language: they were all pages on a Korean site with a corresponding English version available.

  Sekiguchi nodded eagerly. “I see what’s happened,” he said. “Someone’s been fiddling with these websites. They’ve chopped up the leader’s speech and injected individual lines into bilingual websites for the translation engines to pick up.”

  “So ‘iron hammer’ is actually a human translation,” Kurosaki said. “But then why is it wrong?”

  “Whoever did this wanted the phrase ‘iron hammer’ to spread,” Sekiguchi said.

  Kurosaki’s coffee turned sour in his mouth. “Why?” he asked. “And who?”

  Akari was still paging through the search results. “I know how they did it,” she murmured. “Site vulnerabilities. All of these web pages are using an old version of PHP. They just had to reach through known security holes and rewrite the content directly.”

  Was she talking to herself? All signs of her business-grade politeness had vanished. Looking at the projection of her screen on the wall, Kurosaki could see her opening one browser window after another. Hangul page, English page, web search …

  “The total number of sites affected is … about three hundred thousand,” Akari said. “The same source-translation pair on that many unrelated sites might well be enough to contaminate the corpus. The time stamps on the pages all show that they were updated after noon on Friday. Ugh … How can anyone run a website without patching such a terrible cross-site scripting vulnerability?”

  “Wait,” Sekiguchi asked suddenly. “What did you just say?”

  “Three hundred thousand sites, all wide open,” Akari said. “I can’t believe it. This problem was discovered three years ago.”

  “No, before that. The time stamps. Friday, did you say?”

  Akari nodded absently, clearly already slipping into work mode.

  “That’s before the speech,” Sekiguchi said. “Dianwang zhanxian … ?”

  “Dianwang—what did you say?” Kurosaki asked.

  Sekiguchi smiled. “The Cyber Front,” he replied. “North Korean cyber command. If the corpus corruption was done before the speech was delivered, it could only be the work of a group that knew what would be in the speech beforehand—a North Korean group. They want us to believe that their leader said ‘iron hammer.’ ”

  According to Sekiguchi, the speech wasn’t especially menacing in Korean. Countries friendly with North Korea, like Iran and Pakistan, would receive translations made directly from the source language and see nothing remarkable about it. But the English-speaking world would get the alarming “iron hammer” translation. Even if the Pyongyang watchers in those countries assured their leaders that the speech wasn’t as bad as it sounded, there would still be speculation on what the North Koreans really meant just in case the experts were wrong.

  Collecting a list of websites with security holes, then hacking them all at once when the time was right: this, Sekiguchi explained, was exactly the sort of thing the North would do.

  It sounded like something from a spy movie, but his voice was completely serious. And Kurosaki had to admit that if Sekiguchi hadn’t noticed something funny about the English translation, and if they hadn’t discovered the corruption in the translation engine, the question of what the “iron hammer” was would have made him very uneasy.

  “Could the Rod from God article have been faked too?” Kazumi asked. “Cunningham doesn’t strike me as the sort to do that. He’s not, you know, togethe
r enough.”

  Sekiguchi shook his head. “Cunningham’s discovery might have been a coincidence. But drawing the connection between the Rod from God and the iron hammer in the public mind—that has to have been the work of the Cyber Front. I knew the timing of those comments on the Geeple article was too perfect.”

  Kurosaki thought back to the alleged NASA engineer’s profile Sekiguchi had shown him last week. That had been the source of the original comment linking the Rod from God to the iron hammer, made right after the speech had been broadcast. Sekiguchi had been right to be suspicious.

  Sekiguchi stood up and turned to Kurosaki. “Do you have any contacts in the National Security Council?” he asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “All right. Then I’ll get in touch with a guy I know from my intake group.” Sekiguchi pulled his cell phone from his pocket and turned to face the door.

  There was a knock. The door slowly swung open. Sekiguchi froze.

  A woman in a suit poked her head in. “Kazumi, phone call in English for you,” she said, looking around the conference room. She waggled a cell phone decorated with beads at Kazumi. “Sorry to interrupt your meeting,” she added. “They say they want to send you a check and need your current address. A fan of Meteor News, apparently. They’re also after a recent head shot and your cell phone number. Should I oblige?”

  She pushed the door farther open and entered the conference room. Kazumi sighed and started to get up, but Sekiguchi quickly pushed him back into his seat and walked toward the door, spreading his arms wide to block the view of the room from the doorway.

  “Sorry,” he said. “This is important business.”

  Kurosaki craned his neck and saw a man in a moss-green coat standing outside the door. He had a camera in one hand, and he was clearly trying to angle it for a shot into the room past Sekiguchi and the woman.

  The woman stopped in her tracks, unsure of what to do. Sekiguchi put his hands on her shoulders and gently moved her into position to block the camera.

  The man’s camera shook. Sekiguchi spun the woman around and pushed her out the door, then closed it immediately and leaned his back against it to hold it shut. In his hand was the woman’s smartphone. He’d taken it from her.