The Hidden Truth: A Science Fiction Techno-Thriller Page 6

  I called his bluff. “But, you didn’t succeed,” I pointed out. “She shot you down.”

  “Ah,” he said. “There you go operating under an erroneous assumption again. Yes, I took a shot, though I knew I probably wasn’t going out with her. It was good practice to try, though. And while I was chatting with her she pulled out her password sheet, so now I have the password for both their guest and secure Wi-Fi.” He showed me a Post-It note where the receptionist had written down the guest Wi-Fi information. Amit wrote the SSID and password for the main office Wi-Fi below it. “Don’t log in. Let’s just add it to our growing list of credentials.”

  Watching his moves was certainly… educational.

  By that time, Dad had finished, and we went over to the pawnshop for some used computers. On the way over he said, “No sense us all going in. That will just make us more memorable. Tell me what specs I should be looking for, and I’ll buy the computers.” Amit made some suggestions. Dad left us in his truck parked a block away from the store. He returned with six laptops. “They had a good deal,” he said, “so I bought us each an extra. Let’s go to my office and get them set up.

  Dad’s office was in a building just west of town. The folks who ran the office collected his mail, took messages for him, and had offices and conference rooms available. Sometimes he’d lease an office or two for the duration of a job. Like right now, he and Jim Burleson were still sharing a single, though rarely used, office. Other times, he’d just pay a flat rate for the phone and mail service, and an hourly rate for a furnished office or conference room as needed to entertain guests. He only had to pay by the use, which made sense because he did his design work at home and the rest of the time, he was out in the field at a job site. I suspect he chose the office because it gave him a Knoxville address, so he could keep all his business out of the county. It was far enough away from Sherman to avoid scrutiny by the Tollivers and the rest of the Lee County local establishment.

  We set up in the back conference room of the office complex, and Amit got to work. He wiped the computers clean and installed Linux. He disabled the onboard Wi-Fi so the laptop had to use a USB connected Wi-Fi to get online. “That way, we can be sure the Wi-Fi is only on when we plug in the USB Wi-Fi dongle,” he explained. As the installation completed, he installed Tor and Open Office. We had an assembly line going, so by the time the last computer was getting wiped, the first one was completing installation. Dad opened up a box and handed out three Pringles cans he’d adapted to use as antennas. He connected them to the USB Wi-Fi modules. Amit tried one out. Dozens of Wi-Fi networks popped up on the screen. One of the three antennas didn’t work, so Dad took it back, and said he’d build another one for us when he got home.

  Amit gave us a quick tutorial. “Don’t use your secure machine to log into your email or Facebook or any social media or any other site that can be linked back to you. Don’t even frequent the same web sites. Make sure there’s no cross over between your regular online presence and your secure online presence.”

  Amit asked Dad, “How much do I owe you for the computers?”

  “Consider it an even trade,” Dad said. “The computer in exchange for setting up these two and continuing to help us both out as needed. Let’s head out and get started.” We packed up our computers and took everything out to Dad’s truck. Amit and I set up in back with one of the machines.

  We stopped at a truck stop along the interstate. Sure enough, the setup allowed us to tap into the free wireless at a fast food place on the other side of the highway. While Dad filled up with gas, I searched for information on building a book scanner. I found and downloaded information about a variety of promising-looking options. Amit then took over and downloaded a couple of optical character recognition programs and some text comparison programs. By that time, Dad had finished buying gas. He’d paid cash inside and bought a few more items to slow down the process further. Dad walked slowly out and hopped in. “Need more time?”

  “I think we’re all set,” Amit said. “Now we just have to study what we’ve captured.”

  “You both could stand to study for the ham radio license test tomorrow,” Dad reminded us.

  Chapter 4: The Execution

  Somehow, I was doing more reading, studying, and test taking during the summer than I ever did at school. Amit and I both became proud holders of Technician Class amateur radio licenses. On the way back from the Knoxville Hamfest, I popped into a couple of stores, picking up some webcams in one place, and materials to build the frame for the scanner in another. I paid cash. Dad stopped at a different truck stop, and Amit downloaded the first batch of scanned books from Omnitia. That weekend, I built and tested the book scanner. Once I got into a rhythm, I could scan a good-sized book in as little as five to ten minutes. Dad had me start on some of his technical books. Amit also asked if we had a printer he could set up to use with our air-gapped laptop. Dad donated an old color inkjet from the office that he’d given up on because of the cost of the toner. Dad ordered a fresh set of toner cartridges and gave Amit the printer to use.

  Monday morning arose. Amit and I were ready to begin scanning. The library didn’t open until 10am, so we decided to start scanning at the library after my class. We’d been so busy that we had yet to get started on our preparation for debate. The goal for our morning at Kudzu Joe’s was to do something about that.

  We’d have to be ready to argue the affirmative, in favor of alternative energy incentives, or take the negative, against them. Toward the end of the summer, our high school debate class would have a round robin tournament. We were paired up in four teams and we’d have a chance to argue once in the affirmative and once in the negative with each of the other three teams for a total of six rounds.

  I always preferred taking the affirmative, because we’d get the initiative. The affirmative gets to pick the specific implementation of the topic to be debated, so the other team has to scramble to keep up. We were sure many teams would pick conventional aspects of alternate energy like wind, solar, hydrogen, or maybe nuclear, and of course we’d have to be prepared to argue against any of those when it was our turn to be on the negative. Amit and I planned to develop a case for Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generation (RTG). The idea is to use the heat from a radioactive decay to generate electricity. It’s a very safe and proven technology with a great track record: everything from interplanetary probes to pacemakers. We figured it was obscure enough that most of our opponents would have little research on it, until word got around about our case and other teams started digging. They’d oppose it with generic anti-nuclear power arguments and we’d be ready to cut them to shreds, because RTG wasn’t the same thing as conventional nuclear power.

  Preparing to debate on the negative was more challenging because you had to be ready to take whatever specifics the affirmative came up with and counter them. Occasionally of course, we’d run into an affirmative case that we weren’t comfortable arguing against, either because the opposition was too well prepared or because they’d come up with something too obscure for us to have thought about – in effect exactly what we hoped to do to the other teams. When that happened to us on the negative side, we had to be ready with a “counterplan:” agree with the affirmative case but offer a better plan to implement their program. Amit called it “agree and amplify.” He wanted to do a free market counterplan – yes, the affirmative notion is a good idea, but it should be implemented in the free market, not by government action, funding, or subsidy.

  We get a lot of free-market and libertarian types here in Tennessee as judges, particularly at tournaments with lots of amateurs, instead of professional debate judges. Read the judge right and a free market counterplan can be very effective. Unfortunately, it was also an obvious counterplan, so the affirmative would likely be ready to argue why government action was essential.

  In any event, we split up the debate research responsibilities and got to work. I took the lead on the RTG affirmative case; Amit took the le
ad on the free market counterplan. We divvied up the remaining alternate energy concepts we thought might come up and got to work. We broke for lunch and got back together at the library after my class.

  The scanner was harder to use than I thought. I’d built it so it could be disassembled and put back together easily. Amit and I split up the pieces and carried it into the library in our backpacks. Up in the stacks there was a row of a half dozen study rooms. Each room had a table and chairs. We could close the door so conversation wouldn’t carry, but a big window allowed passersby to look in on what we were doing. The scanner had a 90-degree bed for the book and two cameras, one for each page. Many of the books were old and fragile, so the scanner allowed us to copy each page without having to stress the bindings by laying the books flat. I wasn’t quite able to flip the pages once a second but it was close to 50 flips or 100 pages scanned a minute.

  The difficulty lay, not in the scanner, but in avoiding detection. We had a couple of close calls when a librarian or a student walked right past us, but fortunately didn’t notice what we were doing. Amit volunteered to serve as a lookout. That slowed down the scanning some, because I had to turn the pages and tell the laptop to capture the scans by myself. That afternoon, we scanned a dozen books. I focused on books from the same period, 1905–1915, that were in the vicinity on the shelves – Dewey decimal 537–538. It was a good start. Then, Amit took the laptop home to compare our scans to the online scans.

  The next morning I got a text from Amit: “Busy. No Joe this AM. Come by after class.” I studied physics at Kudzu Joe’s for a while. As I got up to get a refill from Emma, I noticed one of the truck drivers who used to hang around the place walk in. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen any of them in a while. The truck driver bought a coffee from Emma and was heading for the door when he noticed me behind him. He froze a second, and then said enthusiastically, “You’re Rob’s nephew, ain’t ya?”

  “Yes, sir?” I confirmed tentatively, confused about what was going on.

  He stuck out a hand. “Bud Garrety,” he introduced himself, shaking my hand vigorously. He had quite a grip. “That uncle o’ yours, he’s a godsend he is. Not a load to haul for months, and now more work than I can hardly keep up with. Lemme buy you your coffee,” he insisted, slapping a five-dollar bill on the counter.

  “Thank you, sir,” I acknowledge gratefully, but no less confused, “however, it’s actually free refills.”

  “Well then, yer next one’s on me, and the young lady can keep the change,” he insisted, undaunted.

  Emma took his money, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  He beamed proudly. “Well I need to be…,” he cut himself off and added quietly, “but I know your uncle don’t want no loose talk, now does he, son?”

  “No, sir.” It appeared Mr. Garrety and I were keeping Uncle Rob’s secrets so well that I was still completely clueless what this was all about.

  “You thank him for me when you see him again, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “And thank you, Mr. Garrety, for the coffee.”

  “See you over yonder,” he said, gesturing to the hills in the direction of Uncle Rob’s place.

  Mr. Garrety had to be involved in whatever it was Uncle Rob was doing that involved lots of trucks, but I was no closer to understanding the mystery. At least Mr. Garrety had just given me a great excuse to ask Uncle Rob about the trucks when I saw him next. I got back to work on physics.

  When I finished my homework and got tired of physics, I got online and researched alternate energy sources for my debate preparation. Finally, it was home for lunch, off to class, and then to the Berkshire Inn to see how Amit was doing.

  “I had trouble getting the optical character recognition to work,” he told me. “I finally set up the computer to flash the scans side-by-side so I could eyeball them manually. And, I got one!” He triumphantly handed me a couple of printouts. On one he had written “Omnitia” and on the other he’d written “Tolliver.” “I also got your old printer working,” he added, “so now I can print hard copy from a dedicated printer that’s not connected to the network.”

  The discrepancy Amit had found was on page 640 of The Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy by J.A. Fleming in 1906. I remembered scanning that book. It had been a real pain, because it had a bunch of pullout or foldout pages. The Tolliver copy listed “HEAVISIDE, O., On the Interactions of Electromagnetic Waves, 1905” in the bibliography of papers. The Omnitia copy, however, had no mention of Heaviside, and two entries down, a listing of a paper by Sir Oliver Lodge was stretched way out so “p. 72” fell on a new line by itself, just enough to fill in the space from the missing Heaviside entry.

  “When Franklin was talking about Heaviside’s work on the interference of waves and how it described bouncing electric waves, he may have been talking about this paper that Fleming had listed in his bibliography,” I concluded.

  “Seems likely to me,” Amit agreed. “There’s no indication the paper was ever published in a journal. Franklin must somehow have corresponded with Heaviside to know it was supposed to end up in Heaviside’s third volume of Electromagnetic Theory.”

  “Or some mutual friend shared the paper and the news,” I pointed out. “Heaviside’s process was to serialize his work in papers, then compile them in a book.” I pulled up my scan of Electromagnetic Theory Volume 3 and reviewed the table of contents. “That process was breaking down in 1905. He couldn’t find a journal to keep up with him, judging by the table of contents. Franklin might have just assumed Heaviside’s intention was to include the paper in volume three. But he didn’t.”

  Amit looked over my shoulder at the table of contents for volume three of Heaviside’s Electromagnetic Theory. “There’s no ‘Interactions of Electromagnetic Waves’ in Heaviside’s table of contents.”

  “Heaviside does talk a lot about electromagnetic waves,” I noted, “but I couldn’t find anything about electric waves bouncing off each other. Maybe Mr. Burleson will have better luck figuring it out.” It wasn’t spectacular, but it was progress: an obvious example of history having been rewritten, if only in a small way. We had a second clear discrepancy between an old book and a modern Omnitia scan. Our discovery confirmed that the Franklin edit was a deliberate attempt to hide information about Heaviside’s work. Amit and I transitioned to the exercise room to continue our discussion and speculations. Amit was convinced we were looking at a digitally altered copy of a scan of the same text that was in the physical book. I wasn’t so sure. Looking carefully at the scan, I could see hints of the texture in the paper in the borders of the type. No letter was exactly the same. I didn’t buy it. Would someone actually go to all that trouble? Someone meticulous enough to fuzz letters just right so as to simulate the soaking in of the ink? That would be almost as easy to do with real ink and paper. And these were the same electromagnetic villains sloppy enough to delete a page reference to Heaviside from the index of Franklin’s Electric Waves despite there being a mention of Heaviside on the page.

  Amit countered that modifying the physical printed copy would be even more difficult than modifying the scan. But he allowed it was curious anyone would go to the extreme difficulty of concocting such a convincing scan.

  In the end, neither of us was certain whether what we had discovered was a recent change made in a scan of an old book, or an accurate scan of a book modified long ago. If it was an old modification, then there were some old books with omissions and edits and others, like the copies we’d found in the Tolliver library, without the edits. We made little progress resolving the question before I headed home.

  * * *

  Every so often, Dad would sip from a small shot glass of bourbon after dinner, as he sat in his favorite chair in the living room. At the time, I found it a noxious drink – it would be years before I developed a taste for bourbon, myself. Somehow the interaction of time and temperature with wood and liquor turns raw ethanol into a complex mix of flavors. Something similar happe
ns to old books after a century or so. They acquire a subtle yet distinctive odor with hints of vanilla and musty grass. Even today, when I smell old books, it reminds me of the Tolliver Library and scanning books with Amit.

  “Interesting,” Dad said, thoughtfully, savoring a sip of bourbon, as he examined the two versions of the Fleming bibliography. “This does tend to support your theory that the edit was deliberate, but both of these edits are so minor, so subtle. I can’t imagine why anyone would go to the trouble. That’s why I tend to favor the notion that these are edits in the scans, not in the original hard copies of the books themselves.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Amit is right. It’s easy to alter a digital copy,” Dad explained. “Altering a physical copy? You’d have a real problem matching the paper and ink, unstitching the binding, and replacing a substitute page. It would almost be easier to reprint the entire book. Modifying a line or a page here and there and to do so in a way that a casual observer wouldn’t notice something off in the paper, ink, or font – that’s a real challenge.”

  Dad made good sense. “You don’t think it’s possible?”

  “It’s certainly possible,” Dad argued. “A skilled forger with sufficient time and motivation could pull it off. Get hold of period paper, maybe from other books of the era printed by the same publisher. Recreate the ink recipe, being careful not to include any modern chemicals or trace elements that might give the game away. Digitally match the font. Etch a plate. Reprint the page. It would take a real craftsman to pull it off, but it could be done.

  “There was a guy I heard about, Mark Hofmann, who made a career out of forging old historical documents. He posed as a collector of rare old books and papers, and he concocted some plausible but embarrassing forgeries that cast doubt on the origins and history of the Mormon church. He found period paper by cutting out blank pages in old books, so it passed carbon dating tests. He perfected a recipe for old ink. He’d hand write letters. He had a printing plate photographically engraved so he could reproduce some lost early colonial document that would be worth millions. Experts authenticated his forgeries. Church officials, prominent Mormons, and other collectors of historic documents bought them, paying lots of money.