Chapter 2

Finn Miller glanced at the silent timer showing on his phone. Two minutes left. He watched the progress bar on the screen and tapped his fingers on the edge of the ancient wooden table the third-hand terminal sat on. The flat screen was cracked, but still functioned. He hoped the location would give him a few more minutes of anonymity if the task took too long. He stood, stretching from his hours-long effort, preparing his body to flee. It was going to be close. He had three exits to choose from. If it took too long, he would have to pick which to run through. The fourth approach, how he had entered the room, was not an option. That path led to an open street that he knew had cameras. It had crowds as well, despite the late hour. It was, after all, a city that never slept.

He heard a sound and glanced at the main door. His temporary locks were still firmly in place. The plastic shims were inserted on the hinge side of the door, preventing it from swinging open. He glanced at the monitor, then crossed the small room to insert two additional wedges in the door, one high on the opening side and then the other on the floor, also away from the hinges. A tap of his finger sent the signal to them, causing the adhesive on the edges to expand and bind with the frame and the floor. Even a heavy battering ram would take several swings to shatter the door now. The wedges would hold much longer than the thin metal shell of the door itself. It was the best he could do to buy some extra time.

He glanced at his phone. It looked old, bulkier than the most modern models, but he would not trade it for anything. He knew every chip, circuit, and wire in the device. A commercial phone would have too many avenues of attack for him to ever trust. He should know, he had helped design the hardware compromises built into them for years. He had written parts of the low-level operating system they used as well. Finn had thought he was making the world a better place.

He shook his head at how naïve he had been.

Most people, even the technical elites, thought their phones were secure with end-to-end encryption and industrial operating systems. He knew better. His master’s thesis had gained him the job with the No Such Agency. They had placed him with a chip design company. He thought giving the agency the ability to by-pass all the commercial security efforts was warranted in the war on terror. Using quantum entanglement and post-deployment modifications to the processor’s microcode instructions let his superiors trigger a backdoor into anyone’s device. The agency had then subsidized the chips so heavily that no manufacturer could afford not to use them. He had been proud of his work. It should have earned him accolades. Instead, he was patted on the head and brought back into a windowless office hidden deep in a secure facility. He consoled himself with further refinements to the modified microcode running on so many phones.

A few years later, he realized that no one he worked with could understand what he did. They nicknamed him “microcode”, since they only seemed to understand that he did something that would modify how the processors operated. He began to wonder. If they did not understand how he did his exploits, did they understand the data collection those exploits enabled?