The Enigma Stolen

Otto began, “Thanks, team, for joining this meeting on such short notice. I wanted for all of us to discuss Quip and ICABOD’s preliminary findings with regards to a possible new threat from an unidentified source. I think we need to determine our level of involvement.

“I received a phone call from a political candidate, from my old home country of Poland, pleading with me to help rescue his information systems. I would have been suspicious of the call coming out of the blue, except he was directed to me personally by an old friend. His story was a tale of woe. I might have been more sympathetic to his cause except he began rambling on about what had happened to their computer systems. He used phrases like the ‘God-box’ had been turned into a ‘Chaos-box’ and that all their phone systems were floating with the dead fish in the river Vistula. He also suggested their databases were being held hostage by some drive-by masked men. I pretended not to understand the technology very well and, trust me, the way he described it, I wasn’t lying. I did, however, get enough to have Quip launch a modest investigation. Quip, can you continue the briefing with the useful information you found?”

Quip related, “Certainly, Otto. Team, we dug into the candidate’s predicament, and at first it just looked like your regular run of the mill bag of political dirty tricks. This wasn’t just order two hundred pizzas for delivery to your competitor’s place of business or high jacking your competitor’s phone number and placing a bunch of nuisance emergency services. No, this was a heavy-handed cyber assassination that was perfectly timed for maximum destruction of a political campaign.

“So I asked ICABOD to look at it as if the cyber assassination had never occurred to see what the outcome might have been. ICABOD came back with some expected answers as well as something unexpected.

“The easy one to surmise was that had the campaign gone on unmolested, the candidate and his pro-western economic policies would have been swept into office. This would have immediately put them at cross purposes with their neighbors to the East, Russia. I don’t think anyone would be surprised by that postulation of the future. This result, of course, gave us a likely place to start looking for perpetrators.”

Jacob asked, “What was the unlikely information that you received?”

Quip mused and explained, “ICABOD also provided me a list of other highly correlated events that were similar in their unprecedented randomness. Events that all suggest that something or someone had knowledge of the future. As such, someone was either betting on those divined future circumstances or sought to change the future by disrupting the current stream of events.

“I now have ICABOD trying to penetrate each of those peculiar scenarios. It would be critical to understand if they are all originating from the same source, or if these are disparate systems that are all converging to a similar point in the time/space continuum.”

Petra then questioned, “How were all these events correlated? Is this another one of those Big Data exercises that takes mountains of data, shifts through them, and then carefully maps the correlation of peanut butter to jet engines?”

A sullen Quip studied Petra for a moment, then clarified, “Just for the record, we have never mapped peanut butter to jet engines using the Big Data techniques that ICABOD and I have assembled.

“What we saw was a Mr. Clay Dough, in Tennessee, correctly placing stock futures and making a killing. We found a Mr. Mauro Rosati, in Argentina, correctly placing oil and currency futures reliably for months. We even had ICABOD rescue me and EZ from the clutches of the U.S. airport security goons. These, along with the recent example of the cyber assassination of a political foe in Poland. All of these events could not have been surmised without some heavy computer muscle somewhere in the background.”