Page 26 - Tales the Maggid Never Told Me

The Golem of NASA

Quickly running through the log-on procedure, Gabe suddenly
stopped, hands mid-air like a pianist ending a performance. He
glanced at the desk-calendar to his right. It was the first of the
month. That meant the new version of CERBERUS had been
installed overnight. And he had to invoke it in order to get at his
golem. This revised edition of the Agency’s access control
software corrected many minor flaws, or so the latest update memo
claimed. Thus Gabe’s accidentally-discovered trick of getting around
CERBERUS to link his own programs to ZAPSAT would no longer
work. He still had authorization to query the system without his
interrogations being logged, but he might never find another means
of short-circuiting the update block.
The announcement three weeks ago of CERBERUS’ impending
upgrade had spurred him to completing his golem way ahead of
schedule. The result, he feared, was a bug he could not fix without
revealing his sabotage. But what had gone wrong?
Tormented by the consequences of his guilty secret, Gabe
entered the final password:

masada

CERBERUS let him in—to browse only, a window-shopper in his
own labyrinthine mall. ZAPSAT, a linked series of killer satellites in
geosynchronous orbit, was known by that name only within the
Agency; to the world at large, the hovering hardware had no mission
other than the retransmission of commercial video signals. NASA
had launched the devices over a period of months, announcing them
in the press as civilian shuttle payloads. Any suspicions to the
contrary would merely have been that the military had positioned a
new series of surveillance cameras in the sky. But these were
weapons, a component of Star Wars hidden from the public in the
murky depths of the military budget. Each ZAPSAT unit was a silent
assassin, capable of focusing a high-powered pencil-thin beam of
laser radiation on human targets identified in its high-resolution video
camera by high-speed computers in the Agency’s suburban D.C. data
center.
Solomon, one of many scientific programmers developing the
pattern-recognition software used by ZAPSAT, had no idea of what

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