The Infinet: The Trivial Game, #1

By John Akers

The most powerful AI ever created. The greatest threat of all time.

 

Oreste Pax, famed inventor of the Univiz, is in trouble. His mixed-reality glasses have replaced smartphones and computers and made him the head of the biggest technology company in the world. But after a decade at the top, his position is being challenged by disgruntled shareholders, and he needs to come up with something big to prove he should remain in charge.

 

Pax's only hope is a longshot—to reinvent the Univiz by connecting it to a brain-computer interface. To his surprise, the effort not only succeeds but reveals the possibility of a previously unknown form of human cognition. He begins to hope of not just saving his job but reinventing what it means to be human. 

 

But his plans are upended when a deadly computer virus begins attacking people through the Internet of Things. Shortly afterward, Pax is abducted by a group of people with technology far beyond anything he has seen before, which he learns was created by an immensely powerful artificial intelligence called the Infinet. When Pax learns why the Infinet was created—and what it wants from him—he'll have to make a choice that will change not only his life but the future of humanity.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tech Noir Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9780999190609

John Akers

JOHN AKERS got his master's degree in human factors engineering in the B.C. era (before connectivity) and has worked as a user interface designer ever since. He enjoys all things sci-tech and sci-fi, and is amazed on a daily basis at the collapsing distinction between the two. When not writing he spends his free time pondering the gap between the exponential curve of technology and the linear growth of human morality. The Infinet is his first novel. To learn more about John, visit his website at http://john-akers.com.

Book preview

Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

STEVE JOBS

PROLOGUE

The white-haired man sat quietly at his desk facing an array of computer monitors mounted on the wall. Thousands of tiny green alphanumeric characters on black backgrounds bathed his face in a sickly luminescence that washed his otherwise blue eyes out to a watery gray.

As he stared into the pallid glow, the man did something unusual: for the first time in many years, he smiled.

It was not a smile of pleasure. On the contrary—he had just watched a quantum computer infiltrate his network, then barely escape his counterattack attempt to infect it with a virus. But it had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving no means of tracing it afterward.

Neither was his smile an attempt to mask anger. He had trained himself years ago to eliminate the useless emotions of flash anger and fear.

His smile was one of resolution. He had been about to launch his virus on the index case, the person from whom the end of all things would begin. For someone—or something—to have infiltrated his network at this moment was no coincidence. Somehow, the attacker had known of his intentions and had tried to interfere.

It was the speed with which it had moved that had given it away. Although quantum technology was still in its infancy, and there were just a handful of functional q-comps in the world, their speed and power were orders of magnitude greater than their binary-based predecessors. Their ability to hold multiple values in each register and to link the behavior of separate entities through entanglement made the previous generation of supercomputers look like slide rules in comparison. All the operational q-comps in existence belonged to powerful nation-states—all except one. And he knew it was that outlier that had attacked him.

He swept a crumpled-up fast food wrapper off the desktop, and it tumbled down the bell-shaped mound of trash surrounding his desk. He wiped his mouth with one hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. Pulling a tube of Mentholatum out of a drawer, he squirted a blob of it onto his forefinger, then smushed it onto his upper lip. After putting the tube back and wiping his finger on his pants again, he rested his forearms on the edge of the desk, now rounded smooth by nearly two years of constant gentle abrading.

Slowly, languidly, he extended his right forefinger above the Enter key. The keyboard, the monitors, and the computer workstation under the desk were all relics, all rendered obsolete by the advent of the Univiz a decade earlier. But they still worked, and in a moment a tiny neuromuscular contraction in his finger would trigger a global purification not even a q-comp could stop.

Perhaps the intruder now knew he had amassed a worldwide army of more than ten billion devices, infected through decades-old vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. No matter. His soldiers-to-be were autonomous, their activities only loosely coordinated by four dozen supercomputers he’d stationed around the globe. The only way to halt the spread of chaos would be to find and quarantine each infected device one at a time. But accessing all the networks, which most countries now required to be password-protected, would necessitate a brute-force attack on a global scale. It was what he had done, and it had taken him almost two years.

And that would be the easy part. The hard part would be developing and applying quarantines for each of the thousands of different types of devices he had enslaved.

There was nowhere near enough time. In a moment, his mechanized sleeper cells would begin to awake. Initially, as the devices they had surrounded themselves with started to turn against them, some people would attempt to help those who had been targeted. But when it became clear the condemned could not be cured, and the contagion spread to those who tried to help, their instinct for self-preservation would take over.

Then the evanescent threads holding their so-called civilization together would unravel, and humanity’s day of reckoning would be at hand.

Gently, he pressed the Enter key. The blinking rectangle of the cursor jumped to the next line, underneath the command he had given.

run program ‘EndAnthropocene’

An instant later, the command disappeared, swept upward by the deluge of code that displayed as the program began executing. The man’s lips trembled, and the glow from the monitors sparkled in the tears that suddenly sprang to his eyes.

It had begun.

In an evolutionary instant, everything humans had built would be razed to the ground. Then they would see how ephemeral the world they’d constructed for themselves really was. And before it was over, he would make sure they all knew who had lit the light of truth for them.

M3k@n!k

CHAPTER 1

Wednesday, 7:30 AM

Oreste Pax hovered, motionless, at the radial center of a giant, dark sphere. Fifty feet away in any direction, faint white lines of latitude and longitude partitioned it into hundreds of rectangular sections. Pax’s eyes scanned the inner walls and came to rest on a section with an icon of stacked sheets of paper. A moment later, a pair of disembodied green eyes materialized above it. They glowered at him, and there was a deep rumble, so low he felt it more than heard it.

While still staring at the eyes, he touched his right thumb and forefinger together. Instantly, the section with the icon disappeared, and a terrible roar filled the air. The eyes disappeared as well, and a massive white tentacle exploded out of the hole left behind. As it hurtled toward him, he noticed the tip was flat, with markings on it that looked like text.

A foot before it would have smashed into his face, the front of the tentacle suddenly froze, and an enormous electric crackling drowned out the roar. Pax saw the tentacle was, in fact, a long line of thousands of virtual documents, which now crashed into the invisible forcefield surrounding him, engulfing him in a paper cocoon. The roar turned into an agonized shriek, and the papers suddenly retracted, snapping back into a well-formed line. The far end was still connected to the opening in the sphere, while the document at the front remained perfectly still a few inches away from his face. In between, the rest swayed gently, like a strand of giant kelp in the ocean. The only sound was a faint, pitiful whimpering.

Ten years earlier, Pax had gotten quite a kick out of this effect, as had more than a hundred million other Univiz customers. The Alien Zoo was the first virtual environment he’d ever created, and he’d chosen it that morning in hopes of cheering himself up a bit. Today, however, it hadn’t even raised his heart rate.

He was still somewhat conscious of the real world outside his virtual one, the one in which he was currently being driven by his black mFarad auto-electric sedan down the I-5 south in San Diego. But the vast majority of his attention was fixed on the fact that unless that morning’s user testing for Project Simon produced some unexpectedly spectacular results, he would soon lose his job as CEO of Omnitech Industries. It was all because of three quarters of missed earnings and the misfortune of having an asshole like Morgan Granville be the company’s largest minority shareholder.

Purely out of habit, Pax glanced at the first message, a text from his EVP of Investor Relations. The message took up almost the whole page, but a single-sentence summary at the top, added by the UV’s content analyzer, told him all he needed to know—namely, that the board of directors had reluctantly given final approval to Granville’s petition for the annual shareholders’ meeting to be in person. Pax sighed. That meant he and the rest of the executive team would have to sweat it out on stage while Granville and others ostentatiously demanded to know why Omnitech wasn’t making them as filthy-rich this year as it had every year before.

Pax flicked the tip of his middle finger against his thumb. The document flew up and, with a faint poof, burst into a cloud of dust. The dust turned into sparkles, which drifted down like the aftermath of a fireworks explosion before disappearing.

Before he could look at the next document, a soft synthesized doodoodoo filled Pax’s ears. A picture of an overly tanned man with extremely white teeth materialized in front of the line of documents, with Russell Murphy—Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales displayed underneath. The picture slid to the right, and the system’s estimated probabilities for the topics Murphy was calling to discuss appeared on the left.

Chinese delegation meeting: 93%

China market opportunity: 79%

Request raise: 41%

Omnitech 10-year anniversary: 34%

Murphy had been hired as a marketing vice-president five years earlier, promoted to senior vice-president two years later, then made executive vice-president just two months ago. Pax hadn’t realized until just before the latest promotion that he had become a stooge of Granville’s. Now, it was too late to do anything about it. Pax avoided him as much as possible because, topic probabilities notwithstanding, he knew Murphy’s real aim was to gather evidence Granville could use against him.

The voice of Pax’s virtual assistant, Gabe, sounded in his ears. Sir, Russell Murphy is calling. Should I make up another pathetic excuse as to why you won't talk to him?

Pax's face cracked into a smile. I’m liking this new personality profile of yours, Gabe.

I’m not surprised. I always knew you were a masochist.

Pax laughed. How many excuses have we given him since the last time I talked to him?

Fourteen.

Yikes.

"Indeed. And by the way, there’s no ‘we’ in this scenario. You’ve become a sniveling coward all on your own."

Pax chuckled, but didn’t reply. Instead, he let three more ringtones pass before giving a long sigh. He's not going away, is he?

Apparently not. Looks like your ‘duck and cower’ strategy isn't going to work this time.

All right, put him on.

Very good, sir. Please remember to take your thumb out of your mouth before speaking.

Pax laughed, but quickly choked it off as a tone indicated the call was live. He cleared his throat and said, Hello, Murphy. What's up?

Russell Murphy’s avatar morphed into a video feed from a camera somewhere in his home office. His teeth were even bigger and whiter on video than on his profile picture. Oreste! he boomed. Whaddya know, you answered! To what do I owe this great honor? He followed this up with several loud guffaws. Pax was reminded it had been a significant oversight on his part not to enable users to virtually assault the 3-D image of someone they were talking to, should they find it therapeutic to do so.

I decided to answer every tenth call I get today, Pax said, and you were lucky caller number twenty.

Super! But I think you should change your criteria to always take calls from your executive vice presidents and take every tenth call from everyone else.

I’ll take it under consideration. Now, let me ask again—what’s up?

I just got a call from our pals at the State Department. They’d like some color commentary about what happened in the meeting you had with the Chinese delegation. Apparently, they were a little miffed about the reception you gave them.

Pax felt a flash of anger. God, why won’t the government show a little backbone when it comes to the Chinese? All I did was tell them we weren’t going to agree to their stupid information-restriction request, he mumbled.

Right. Well, the issue has to do with the fact that you actually used the word ‘stupid.’ Not sure how many times you’ve been to China, but that phrasing’s considered just as rude there as it is in the rest of the world.

Yeah, well, that government of theirs is going the way of the dinosaurs anyway.

Perhaps. But I imagine you’d rather not be remembered as the guy who started WWIII due to being an impolitic son of a bitch.

Pax closed his eyes and massaged his forehead. His refusal to sell the Univiz in China, along with other countries suffering under repressive dictatorships, was at the crux of the shareholder revolt. The as-yet-untapped potential of those markets would more than cover the slowing growth rates in Omnitech’s existing core business. Consequently, his stance on the matter didn’t sit well with bipedal leeches like Granville, who only cared about their bottom line.

Look, Murph, just make up something about it being an idiom that got messed up in translation. Like when Kennedy tried to tell the Germans he was one of them, but called himself a jelly doughnut instead.

That's actually an urban legend. Kennedy said it correctly.

Oh. Well, anyway, just get our translation department on it and say the translator at the meeting made a hash of it.

Look, Oreste, that’s not gonna…

Gotta go. Another call coming in, Pax lied while making a fist and rotating it downward in a hang up gesture. Murphy’s image dissolved, but as Pax looked at the next document in line, he realized the last thing he felt like doing was dealing with was his inbox. What was the point, anyway? Unless that morning’s testing produced a miracle, he would be out on his ass in a week or two. Clear display, he said.

The virtual world disappeared, and sunlight flooded his eyes. His UV’s eye sensors detected the sudden constriction of his pupils, and a tiny electric current was immediately applied to the polycarbonic resin on the exterior surface of his UV’s lenses to shade them. The lenses were encased in cobalt-blue aluminum frames that connected to temples that ran along both sides of his head. The temples bowed outward slightly over his ears before continuing to the back of his head, connecting their tips in a perpetual magnetic kiss. Microscopic servo motors on the insides of the bulges in each temple had optimized the angle and depth of insertion of two elasticone earbuds into Pax’s ear canals. Three millimeters of spongy Durafoam lined the underside of the metal to keep it from chafing his skin.

Inside the car were five other seats, all of them empty. The audio preprocessor in Pax’s UV was set to Focus mode, which automatically removed irrelevant environmental noises, such as the hum of the electric engine and the drone of the tires on the road. The result was a crypt-like silence that made the real world seem like the false one.

Looking out the window, Pax saw the tops of a clump of several buildings in the distance. They stood clearly above the buildings surrounding them, and text displayed beneath them in his Univiz read Omnitech World Headquarters - 1.9 mi. | 5 minutes.

Pax’s mFarad, along with the eight Omnitech security vehicles surrounding it, was ensconced in an endless latticework of self-driving vehicles on the freeway. Their positions were all coordinated in real time by the California Transportation Monitoring Service. Pax was one of a handful of people whose public status granted him priority over other riders and supported deviating from the positioning criteria the CTMS normally used in order to accommodate his accompaniment by private security.

As Pax looked at the Omnitech campus, he wondered how many more times he would make this drive as CEO. He tried once again to wrap his mind around the manifest unjustness of a reality in which a sniveling snot like Morgan Granville could ooze his way into a position of being able to wrest control of his company. His company, that he had created, based on his invention.

Never mind that the preceding thirty-seven quarters represented a corporate ascendancy so breathtaking the fiscal punditry had exhausted all superlatives in their attempts to characterize it. Never mind that in less than a decade, Omnitech had become the most profitable company of all time, with an annual net income of more than $200 billion. All Wall Street cared about was that Omnitech had missed its numbers for three quarters in a row. Now, here he was, about to be told to walk the plank.

A positive result on the testing for Project Simon was his only real chance to win enough support to hold off Granville and his minions. But harboring such a hope, he knew, was nothing more than a sign of how desperate his situation had become. His friend Cevis had succinctly summarized the problem the last time they had met. The truth is, Oreste, he had said in his typical flat monotone, although what you are trying to accomplish with Project Simon is very impressive, it’s still fundamentally an add-on to the Univiz itself.

If it had been anyone other than Cevis, Pax would have told them to piss off and go integrate a brain-computer interface with a Univiz themselves if they thought it was so damned easy. But Cevis was a polymath who knew more about most fields of science than almost any expert in those fields. Pax had relied heavily on his advice ever since they’d become friends in college, and he needed his help now more than ever.

Plus, as always, Cevis was right. Although the Univiz had rendered desktop and mobile computers obsolete almost overnight, everything Pax and Omnitech had done since then had been an extension of the massive ecosystem that had sprung up around it. Project Simon’s goal was to enable people to interact faster with a Univiz through a combination of sight and thought, rather than sight with gestures or voice, but while it sounded cool, the team working on it had predicted at most a fifteen- to twenty-percent increase in the speed of interaction. Pax knew Wall Street well enough to know that improvements in efficiency weren’t going to appease a group of unhappy investors, especially when the solution required brain surgery.

Pax thought back to the first time he’d seen a BCI in action at a tech conference a year and a half earlier. The former first-chair violin for the London Philharmonic, who had lost both of her arms in a car accident a year earlier, had played a solo from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons using two robotic arms and a BCI from a hot startup called CortiTrak. Pax had immediately felt there was some sort of kinetic potential in a UV-BCI integration. The last time he’d had a similar feeling was when he’d come up with the design for the original Univiz. Omnitech had purchased CortiTrak three months later.

The test that morning would be the first attempt to have people use the BCI to control objects in a Univiz virtual environment. A reasonable expectation would be for it to take two to three years to integrate the two systems effectively, if it could be done at all. But Pax was out of time. He needed his hunch to materialize into something now.

Nonetheless, the memory injected him with a sliver of hope. Resume dashboard! he barked.

The sunlight dissipated, and two identical clouds of miniaturized graphics displayed on the inside of the lenses of his Univiz once again. The images were radially offset from the centerline of each pupil by 1.25 millimeters and refreshed at 2,000 Hz. Once again, his stereoscopically predisposed brain was fooled into perceiving them as a single three-dimensional environment. The audio processor switched to 360-degree SupraReal audio synchronized to within five milliseconds of the display. He was immersed in the aurocular confines of the virtual world once more.

He began gesturing rapidly with his fingers and thumbs. Every flick, tap, and swipe was captured by pinhole camera lenses on the front of his Univiz and translated instantly into actions. He deleted or delegated everything, even though he knew he was hopelessly overloading several of the people on his senior leadership team. But today he had no choice.

Not two minutes later, however, he was interrupted again by another doodoodoo. For a moment, Pax felt a surge of anger that Gabe hadn’t realized he didn’t want to be disturbed. But when the image of a man with a dour face appeared in his display, his mood changed to one of relief. Accept call, he said. After another tone indicated the call was live, he said, Hello, Cevis.

CHAPTER 2

Cevis Pierson was Pax’s oldest friend and longest-standing source of discontent. They’d met as sophomores in an organic chemistry class at UCSD and had somehow developed an odd-couple friendship—Pax the outgoing cognitive science student, and Cevis the science nerd and lab rat. Cevis was far and away the smartest person he had ever met, and his intellect was matched only by his pathological avoidance of publicity.

While still an undergraduate, Cevis’s research on the transition between pluripotent and unipotent phases of stem cell development had led to breakthrough treatments for numerous illnesses, including pancreatic cancer. Yet no one on campus except Pax knew he had been the driving force behind the discoveries. Even his professors and the students he worked with every day were unaware of how he had surreptitiously arranged the direction of their research through suggestive questions to the professors or oblique comments to his lab mates.

After university, Cevis had founded Gen ⁶, a biotech incubator that specialized in regenerative medicine. It developed treatment concepts and took them through efficacy testing, then sold them to larger companies for commercialization. An astonishing ninety percent of Gen ⁶ therapies wound up making it to market. But right from the start, Cevis had arranged for other people to run the company while he worked as just another senior scientist in the labs. None of the other scientists he employed had any idea he was the owner and motive force behind the company.

But Pax knew. Cevis’s existence always reminded him there was genius on a whole different level than his own. Although, for years, laudatory articles in magazines and blogs had compared Pax to Edison, Ford, and Jobs, he knew Cevis was a da Vinci, a Newton, an Einstein. The knowledge of where he stood in comparison festered in Pax’s psyche like a subcutaneous itch. He wanted to be a da Vinci too.

Hello, Oreste, said Cevis as Pax’s entourage exited the freeway and began negotiating the side streets toward the Omnitech campus. Using near-field communication, the nine cars automatically arranged themselves so four of the security vehicles were in front of Pax’s mFarad and four were behind. Several years earlier, after Omnitech had accumulated its first hundred billion in cash, it had purchased two dozen contiguous homes in La Jolla Farms, an elite coastal neighborhood sandwiched between the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The extravagant multimillion-dollar mansions had been unceremoniously razed, and a campus of four buildings had been erected in their place. The architecture was a combination of retro-surfer chic and curvilinear modernity that even the most casual observer found breathtaking. It had succeeded admirably in depicting Omnitech as a company at which the future was being made, and had helped convince much of the top tech talent in the world to work there.

How are things? asked Pax. What’s up in the shake-and-bake world of genetics these days?

Excellent, although ‘shake and bake’ isn’t the phrase I’d use to describe it. Cevis’s Univiz was the default nickel color, which, combined with his mousy brown hair, gave him a completely generic appearance. Pax had based the design of the default male avatar for the Univiz on Cevis as an inside joke, although he’d never had the courage to tell him.

Come on, Cevis, things are crazy over there, and you know it! I’ll bet you’ve cured half a dozen more diseases since the last time we talked.

There was a chuckle from the other end. Sure, Oreste. Look, it’s been more than three months since our last get-together, so I thought I’d call to see if you still wanted to meet. Of course, if you haven’t called because you don’t have anything worth discussing, I understand.

Pax’s jaw tightened. Of course I do, he lied. I’ve just been unusually busy. On impulse, he added, Plus, I wanted to spring my big news on you at the last possible second.

Is that right? said Cevis in his usual I’ll believe it when I see it tone. Then this promises to be a very interesting meeting, because I also have something of great importance to tell you.

A jolt ran down Pax’s spine. He couldn’t recall Cevis ever referring to something he’d done as being of great importance. He always downplayed his accomplishments as if they were no big deal. Coming from anyone else, it would have been a case of false modesty, but Pax knew his friend’s self-evaluation of his work was sincere. Even when Cevis had found the cure for pancreatic cancer, Pax had practically had to drag him out to a celebratory dinner for just the two of them.

He made a conscious effort not to sound nervous before replying. How interesting—each of us with some big news to share! Where do you suggest we meet?

I'd like you to come over to the house, if that’s all right with you.

That statement surprised him almost as much as the previous one. Cevis lived on Palomar Mountain, fifty miles northeast of downtown San Diego. He lived near the top, little more than a stone’s throw away from the old Palomar Observatory. The 200-inch Hale Telescope there had been the largest optical telescope in the world for more than a quarter-century, and had enabled many astronomical discoveries, including the nature of quasars, the first direct observation of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and the first observation of an exoplanet.

What Cevis valued about Palomar, however, wasn’t its contributions to astronomy, but its remoteness. The mountain was over 6,000 feet high, and had only two winding access roads, one on the south side and the other on the north. In all the years he’d known him, Pax had only been to Cevis’s home twice.

Um, sure, that works, said Pax.

Excellent. How about Friday after work? Say, 7:30? I’ll send my helicopter to your office to pick you up.

Pax’s car followed the four security cars ahead of his onto a street called Omnitech Way. An array of exotic trees and plants lined both sides of the street, in contrast to the burnt browns and dulled greens of the natural landscape. A helicopter? When did you get a helicopter?

A little over a year ago.

How on earth did you talk your Swiss Family Robinson neighbors into letting you fly a helicopter up and down the side of Mt. Krumpet?

You’ll see. It’ll be at the Omnitech helipad at 7:15.

Shall I bring some reporters with me, so that they can record our revelations for posterity? Pax joked. He knew Cevis viewed any profession in which complete strangers felt they had a right to ask him questions to be an abomination.

Cevis chuckled again. You’re such a twerp, Oreste. Why I ever took pity on you and helped you pass organic chemistry, I have no idea.

I guess there must be a soft filling inside that hard shell of yours, said Pax.

Oh? I didn’t realize I had a hard shell, Cevis replied. His voice held a whiff of warning, but for some reason, Pax ignored it.

Come on, Cevis. With most people, you’re about as approachable as a cornered badger.

There was a pause on the other end before Cevis replied. That’s an interesting perspective, considering my work has been of considerable benefit to mankind.

I was referring to your interpersonal style, but since you brought it up, I’ll add that sometimes, I think even your work isn’t what it appears to be.

How’s that? asked Cevis. The warning tone was unmistakable now.

I think you just like solving the hardest problems to prove you’re the smartest.

There was another long pause while the mFarad turned and made its way into a cul-de-sac at the end of the street, then turned into the driveway for the last building.

That’s not true, Oreste, Cevis finally replied, his voice surprisingly calm. My work has always had the best interests of mankind at its heart. I’ve just had a longer-term perspective than you realize. But that is part of what I want to talk to you about when we meet.

Very well. Friday at 7:30?

Yes. See you then.

Ciao. Pax gestured to hang up, and Cevis’s image disappeared.

The four cars in front of Pax’s moved to the side as they approached a large plate in the ground at the far end of the driveway. As the cars slowed, Gabe said, ID verification, please.

Pax held both hands up, palms toward his face, and said, Oreste Pax.

As he spoke, several things happened simultaneously.

First, the sound waves of his voice were pattern-matched against several stored in his profile. Vibration sensors located on the sides of the UV also confirmed the sound had come from the person wearing the UV, rather than an external recording. All four checks took less than a second to complete. Additionally, a retinal scan was performed by sensors on the inside of the UV lenses, faster than Pax could sense it. Finally, an ultra-high-def camera at the front of the UV took a 16K image of Pax’s hands and extracted the fingerprint patterns for each finger.

The plate in the ground snapped back, and the mFarad disappeared down into the darkness below, followed in quick succession by the four cars behind it.

The simultaneous quadruple user ID check, known by the acronym SQUID, was one of the hallmarks of the Univiz. Because of the strength of SQUID validation, no hacker had ever broken into another person’s Univiz, or the Univiz network, although thousands had tried. The only way to connect to the network was through a UV, and each UV performed the SQUID check whenever a user put it on or whenever a program or process required it, as Omnitech did in order to gain physical access to its campus.

Most of the attempts to defeat the Univiz security had come in the first couple of years after its creation. Attempts coming from devices other than a UV simply failed,