Cube Interrogation

There shouldn't be any of those left alive, let alone still employed. They should have all died of old age by now.

infosec should be about as much of modern software design as breathing is to the programmer: something that if not done will kill them!

 

Fire EVERYBODY!

No, but seriously, infosec isn't taught enough at schools and you can still become a programmer without formal training.
The games industry is particularly bad at infosec. If a game isn't a gaping hole in your personal security, it's likely because someone doing work on the operating system prevented it pre-emptively :p

 

Yeah, I know. And I consider it suboptimal at best.

Were I hiring programmers, the job posting would mention all the security certs. And/or Military IT Security training, if the grunts don't get the certs. I would rate those of greater importance than even knowing the programming language we are using!

 

Thus my rationalization some months ago, I think in the old forum, about why in the Paradiso Campaign Aleph's characters are "lost" upon failing the Medevac roll against the CA... Simply put, even if the backup Aleph has is totally trusted and safe, the risks of having someone in command with the same mind doing its best for the enemy is more than greater.
Specially if the login/password of today evolves to just "talking" with the computer, which recognises the user because he "fits" the authorized profile (and ADN is kinda useless with Lhosts around, same as fingerprints, and passwords can be deduced unless fully aleatory).

Nah, it's more easy to believe that the Cube cuts the brain's access to the body (now the dude is quadriplegic), and takes command, reading still from the brain's sensory input (sight, hearing...) to control the body...
The question is not if the recovered people can be "de-sepsitorized", but if they are sane enough to survive after so many time isolated, hearing themselves speak with the enemy and revering it, etc...

Yeah, Bakunin doesn't use cubes and they are not Infosec-conscious. Or Tunguska, for that matter. It's not like they are all in front of Aleph, who IS the "internet" :p

 

I can't find it off-hand, but isn't drawing data from Cubes mentioned somewhere in the setting material as being incredibly difficult? The human mind is unique, so the data recorded in the cube is unique, there isn't a standard interface you plug one in to to be able to read the data, and extrapolating there probably isn't an interface that lets you plug in a Cube to apply the tortures you like. Certainly Infinity has a lot of elements that would become a little odd if people were doing this stuff to Cubes on a regular basis.

In the game, we get HVTs, mentions of kidnapping scientists, executives, officials. Why would you do that if Cube interrogation was easy? You want someone, you just pop them and take their Cube, Outrage showed us those things are SMALL and thus would be so easy to conceal and transport. You take it home and do VR interrogation or put it in a new body, done. But that isn't what we see in the setting.

In the setting (was it in the RPG materials?), we get some detail about being able to visit with people in the Cube banks awaiting resurrection. But it isn't described as something everyone can do, its occasional appointments, or expensive VR environments, most Cubes are just waiting inert for their rebirths.

I think things add up to tell us that getting information from a cube by extracting raw data, or by activating the person in the Cube and torturing them for it, isn't impossible, but it is HARD. What makes it hard?

To me (delving into conjecture here for sure), it probably boils down to Cube + Silk. That is, a Cube on its own isn't useful, you cant plug it in to a computer and make sense of it, you cant run it in a generic VR slot. Maybe you dont have to regrow it a whole new body, but any interface is going to demand that Cube be combined with Silk, which uses the data and DNA sample to 'grow' the unique compatible interface needed to interact with the person and information within the Cube. Doing that inside an lhost gets you Resurrection, you are reborn in a new body, and we already know that is not cheap at all. Doing that to load them into a VR seems to be cheaper, but we dont know the constraints and nature of that cheaper VR... certainly if it is externally programmed then interrogating Cubes is straightforward, but what if it isnt, what if the Cube+Silk interface there inherently empowers the Cube personality, they have control? In that case, you cant interrogate that way. What you end up needing to do is to carefully construct the Silk interface in a complex way to parse Cube data while maintaining external control so you can either view data or apply tortures. And getting that done might be incredibly hard, immensely expensive, making this sort of interrogation untenable in all but the most extreme cases, which would seem to match how the Infinity setting works.

 

Well, yeah. However you get the Cube to talk to a computer, it's not a thing you can run in a laptop. It probably takes a fridge-sized chunk of quantum computronium to run, which requires a lot of resources and is not subtle or easy to lug around.

I think most of the kidnapping we hear about in Infinity is different corporations going at it, rather than having actual government agency resources.

 

You don't datamine a cube, you "activate" the person stored there, and interrogate him/her/whatever like any other living being that you can communicate with.

Legal implications, and Zero Sum Games. If killing a dasired scientist to kidnap his Cube was not forbidden, there would be a HUGE amount of kill-abduction going on, and new bodies are not precisely cheap... And a happy scientist is a productive one.
Plus you don't grab people just to ask a few questions, but for a long-term job.

If you have to pay for VR simulation to keep the person "running"... You take more time to pay for the ress. So it's better to have them "sleeping" until you can get them a new body, with a meeting now and then to keep in touch, more for the sake of the living than the sleeping.

It's not hard, just that the know-how is kept secret by those who use it. And they want it that way.

 

* Person regains consciousness standing in completely white void world, some innocuous musak is playing faintly, in front of them stands Sybilla *
"Thank you for holding, your resurrection is important to us but we are experiencing a high volume of customers at this time, thank you for your patience and please continue to hold, your resurrection will be performed shorty"
* Person loses consiousness again *

 

For sure, but we do have Kidnapping in our Classified Objective decks (plus new editions like Capture and In Extremis Recovery), and aside from the (non-JSA) NA2 Infinity's factions and sectorials aren't corporate security teams, they're government forces of one sort or another (as mercenary as some might be), and kidnapping people is in their regular rotation of mission objectives. Getting bodies seems important to the militaries of the Sphere, not just getting Cubes, and there has to be a reason.
There are plenty of possibilities to argue for on that, I'm just positing one, that its easier and cheaper to bag a living person, transport them to a secure site probably located on a different planet, and keep them alive while questioning them, than it is to plug into their Cube and start activating virtual bamboo-under-the-fingernails.

If we boil down, I don't think we even disagree at all here in a general sense. But my assertion is going to be that if a secret is easy to figure out, and figuring out the secret has incredible value, it cant remain a secret for long.... and Cube interrogation definitely has incredible value, so if it is in the hands of only governments, maybe even only a few of them, it needs to not just be something that they'd want to keep secret (they would) but also be something most of the civilian and corporate interests of the Sphere havent been able to replicate. Maybe all those interests just arent bothering, but given the value doesnt that seem unlikely? For Cube interrogation to remain the secret knowledge of a few elite government agencies, it needs to not just be something they want to keep secret, but something difficult or resource-intensive enough that the whole slate of other actors who want to know the secret cant just figure it out on its own.

 

Have you ever read Smedly Butler's 'War is a Racket'? You'd be amazed at what bullshit went down at corporate instigation. Or maybe appalled.

With PanO's military apparently being massive numbers of Private Military Companies that all work/train to similar standards, it's even more blatant that the various Lobbies would have their own pet military units for whatever shenanigans.

But yeah, most Western military units have added the "HVT snatch" to their basic tactical repertoire, today. Can't imagine that no longer being the case in 175 years, considering that the old Roger's Rules of Ranging from 1757 are still valid and applied today.

Well, we know Resurrection requires Silk, to get the Cube to talk to the new body.

I think Cube interrogation requires Silk, to get the Cube to talk to the computer. In a Resurrection Center, of course, they have massive stockpiles of Silk and don't need to haul it long distances in less-than-ideal storage conditions. Plus, they have the Resurrection-fidelity VR sims on-hand.

Cube Interrogation, though, requires hauling Silk around (possibly enough for a Resurrection, maybe less), in sub-optimum conditions, plus however much computronium it takes to run the Resurrection-fidelity VR sim.

We know that Silk is probably the single most controlled substance in the Sphere. It's apparently handled with about the same level of paranoia as Botox.

I'd guess that computers capable of Resurrection-fidelity VR sim are also highly controlled.


So the two big things you need for Cube Interrogation are both very expensive and highly controlled/restricted.

Very expensive, by itself, is not a limit, a sufficiently large company can buy a couple "very expensive" things without people noticing. (Accounting has a thing called 'significant digits', and if the expense doesn't meet the number of significant digits, you don't even have to log it. At the oil companies, that minimum expense was a million dollars, in the 1980s! You can hide a lot of money in individually sub-million-dollar transactions.)

But highly restricted is a different thing. If you need something that is highly restricted, there's a paper trail. There's construction permits for building the kind of facilities you need to support whatever it is (MRI machines need a specially-constructed building, for example, with minimal magnetic materials in the MRI space). There's inspection requirements and power bills and etc ... Assuming that the makers of whatever the restricted item is will actually sell to someone not on their approved buyers list in the first place.

So my guess is that the equipment and supplies are what keeps Cube Interrogation limited to Governments (and those organizations that also happen to handle resurrections if they aren't governmental). So there are probably a half-dozen or more organizations capable of Cube Interrogation in PanO, but most of the other nations only have their governmental Resurrection organization. Nomads, of course, can probably do it in any facility capable of illicit Resurrection.

But a Cube Interrogation is going to cost about as much as a full Resurrection, plus the markups for "keep this secret from Aleph/everyone else." And we've already established that a Resurrection costs a massive amount of money, 100 years interest and reinvested dividends on a Life's Savings (defined as roughly $1mil today). Oh, and that's 100 years at 20% annual growth*, doubling every ~3.5 years. Let's slow that down to doubling every 4 years, to account for some market oops and make the math easier. That's, oh, $16,777,216,000,000. Sixteen and three quarter Trillion dollars.

*Yes, the New York Stock Exchange averages a 20% annual rate of return. And has, more or less, since it's founding. Can't find a statement for the London Exchange's annual rate of return.


TL;DR: It's less of a secret than, say, building an atomic bomb (low-end instructions for which are available in most high school physics textbooks), but the cost of materials and very specific nature of the equipment required makes it trivially easy to see when someone 'undesirable' is trying to do it.

 

I'd bet Praxis and the Baker Module in Tunguska (defined by Interruptor as "Praxis' delegation onboard Tunguska") will have at the very least Cube interrogation facilities, while Bakunin will have resurrection facilities (for Tunguska, I would bet there are one for the critical rulers, and that's it, the rest have to go to Bakunin).

This cost will be contingent on the consumption of Silk, since the computer should be usable for several, if not unlimited, VR interrogations. If the silk is consumed only because you need it in the body, and maybe for ongoing treatments (because the body metabolizes silk reserves and needs pills to compensate), then a VR interrogation would cost minute amounts of silk, since you won't lose the whole amount a body needs to integrate with the cube (an amount that is commited, so to speak), only what is consumed (if any) during the VR.

 

I'd expect there to be at least one Resurrection facility per Mothership, just for redundancy. "Pair and a spare" is minimum aerospace engineering paranoia, so I'd actually expect a minimum of 3 Resurrection facilities per mothership, with two normally in use and the third as a spare for when one of the facilities goes down. Bakunin simply has more of them.

Granted, but since the idea seems to be that Cube Interrogation isn't very much practiced, I'm leaning more on the side of you need a significant fraction of the Silk necessary for a Resurrection to do a Cube Interrogation. But even if you only need 1% of the Silk necessary for a Resurrection for Cube Interrogation, that's still multiple billion dollars even if I missed the size of the initial investment capital by an order of magnitude (if the starting capital is 'only' $100k instead of a million)

(I went extra-lazy on the math, fudged doubling time to rule of 80, which means that the initial investment doubles every 4 years, there are 100/4 doublings, and 2^24 times a million dollars. 2^24 because the initial investment is 2^0. At least I think I did the math correctly. I might be off by a doubling.)

 

Well, the economy of silk is VERY hazy, and I'd bet is "plot-derived", so /shrug (remember the bosozoku gangs loved to be Aragoto because they were able to drive as fast as they want, and if they die in combat get a free ress... On the other hand, in YJ and Haqquislam having a cube is not as frequent as in other factions like Nomads).

As for the ress facilities on each ship, only Bakunin lists the psychowitches that manage the illegal resurrections. Maybe that means Bakunin has its own secret, illegal installations while Tunguska has some (hidden for private use, of course) and Corregidor just has the official, endorsed ones. Or the Psychowitches have delegations on all three ships. Remember that Aleph's cooperation was needed for the Resurrection Process, and in Corregidor it would be a matter of trusting or not the machine, while Bakunin would NOT accept it, and Tunguska... I'd bet only the rank and file (the ones who know little to no real secrets) use it, while the movers and shakers need the private, illegal options to avoid the chance of Aleph sniffing around their memories.

 

I should point out that 20% annual rate of return I assumed for my example may be high, as the S&P500 has only averaged 7% growth. But all my Business instructors, including Finance, all said that the NYSE has averaged 20% annual rate of return since the start of the Dow Jones industrial average in 1896.

 

I think the "toil your whole life to get a new body" is most a result of controlling access to Lhosts, rather than natural ocurrences. Consider that you need a body, Silk, and Aleph or some computational quantronic cuasi-AI.
If Resurrections were as expensive as a new car, for example, people would be really reckless, at least if we talk about the general public. I'd bet that for the military the cost goes around that.

 

Life insurance policies are supposed to be about 5 years income of the insured.

The US military life insurance max was $400k back in 2000, I think it's up to $500k now (certain senior officers can clear $100k a year). So that's about what I'd expect a military Resurrection to cost in Infinity. Expensive enough to try to convince the military to not unnecessarily risk troops lives any more than they do now, but not so bad that it's bankrupting if you do have to pull an Omaha Beach scenario.

But the line about the average citizen needing a hundred years or more to raise the capital to pay for their resurrection indicates that it's a lot higher than that for the non-military. 100+ years is a LOT of compound interest. 7% interest like the S&P500 gets would double 10x (Rule of 70, an investment will double in value in a number of years equal to 70 divided by the interest rate as a whole number). That's 1024 times your starting investment. A mere $400 would be enough to buy a Resurrection in a hundred years time if the cost in constant dollars is only $400k. That's a new gaming console, FFS! That's an utterly trivial expense. That's "I'm going to pay $20 a paycheck into my Resurrection fund and skip one Starbucks a day."

That's why I think it's got to be significantly more expensive than half a million to Resurrect someone. Most people's retirement accounts should have at least a million in them (they need to last for 30 years!), so that's I expect your starting investment for Resurrection to be about a quarter million, minimum.

 

Maybe the more you pay, the higher you are in the queue? The military, since ALEPH gives away a certain amount of "resurrection slots", would not need to pay that premium, paying just the materials costs and little more.

 

The SGLI policy itself is still pegged at $400k, although there are other benefits provided for survivors of military members killed in combat zones that can kick it over $500k.

And yup, basically every Lt Col (O-5) or higher is making >$100k/year once you factor in bonuses like housing allowance.

Given how much training up competent troops costs, I would imagine the military would be fairly blase about troops' lives if resurrections only cost what an SGLI policy pays out; $400k is almost pocket change compared to the value a well-trained and experienced soldier brings.

 

One wonders what stipulations military resurrections carry. You're a conscript, or a volunteer on a six-year term or what have you. You die. The army brings you back to life, that's great for you! But they aren't doing it just out of altruism... maybe its for morale, or to encourage soldiers to sacrifice themselves without hesitation when the need arises, but if the military just bought you a new life, how much of that life do they feel you owe them? I'd think it is a pretty significant amount.