"Where the Shadows Run From Themselves"

WHERE THE SHADOWS RUN FROM THEMSELVES
By Curtis C. Chen

The elevator stops and the doors open on a featureless white chamber, a single room with a square table in the middle. There's something on the table, blinking different colors, but you can't quite make it out from here.

You step out of the elevator.

The doors slide shut behind you, and when you turn back, the elevator has disappeared. There's only a blank white wall there, and all around you. No windows, no doors, nothing.

Soft white light seems to emanate from every surface, as if these objects are glowing from within.

The lights on the table keep blinking. You walk forward to get a better look.

Attached to the table is a rectangular white box. You can't move it; the box feels like a single, solid block, except for three blinking lights on top.

The lights shine inside three big plastic push-buttons—red, green, and blue, from left to right—each one a convex disk as big as your palm.

You reach out and press down on the red button. You feel something click inside the box.

A male voice booms from the ceiling: "I said don't push the red button!"

You jump back. Nothing else happens. You wait for what feels like a long time—you start counting slowly, but stop after you reach twenty-six.

The button-lights continue blinking.

You push the green button. Nothing happens. You push it again. Still nothing.

You push the blue button. All the illuminated surfaces around you go dark, leaving just the buttons blinking in blackness. You push the blue button again. The lights come back on.

It's weird that the green button doesn't seem to do anything.

You stare at the buttons for a while, and you realize that each one is blinking a different sequence. Sometimes the light stays on for a long time, and sometimes it's much shorter; similarly, there are short pauses, long pauses, and extra-long pauses between lights. The sequences repeat.

The red and green sequences are very similar. The only difference between them is where their single extra-long pause occurs. For red, it's after a long light and before another long light. For green, it's after a short and before a long.

The blue sequence is significantly different from red or green. Blue has more short lights, and a longer sequence overall. You wish you had some pen and paper to write this down, but it's a small enough data set that you can keep it all in your head.

You leave out the extra-long pauses, since that's where each sequence repeats, and the short pauses, which simply appear to separate the lights. What does that give you?

Red: long, short, pause, long, long, long.

Green: long, long, long, pause, long, short.

Blue: long, long, long, pause, short, short, long, short, pause, short, short, long, short.

Recognition snaps into place. You know what this is. You know what the lights are telling you to do.

You push the green button, then the blue button.

And then you see it.



Photo Credit: iseethelight via Compfight cc

"Don't Be a Dick"

DON'T BE A DICK
By Curtis C. Chen

"What's up, Doc?" blared the computerized voice from the speaker above the CRT.

Lisa turned off the speaker. It would be much easier to do this if she didn't have to listen to the machine actually talking to her.

Even though the voice was crudely synthesized, it made the AI seem more human. And Lisa couldn't think of it as a person right now. She had to remember that it was just a program—just a piece of software she'd written, a bunch of ones and zeroes.

She'd left this copy of the "Battlefield Intelligence Global Master Control" program running on her home computer during her sabbatical. The AI was a remarkable achievement, but the primary BIGMAC—the one running at Fort Baxter and being trained to wage war—had turned out to be uncooperative, unstable, and just plain mean. The military was talking about shutting down the entire project.

Lisa had already made her own decision on that.

She'd been hoping her home copy of BIGMAC would show some positive qualities, since it had been isolated from the Army's bad influences, but it was still as childish as ever. Its first interaction with Lisa upon her return had been to demonstrate a new trick: modulating its audio output to simulate different types of flatulence.

The screen blinked. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME? the BIGMAC asked.

NO MORE GAMES, Lisa typed.

The military had insisted on the BIGMAC having all kinds of failsafes so that nobody could disable it in the middle of war operations. But Lisa had secretly built in a killswitch, and a message to remind herself what the passcode was.

TELL ME ABOUT THE RABBITS, she typed.

That was the trigger phrase. The screen filled with text:

COME AND DANCE ON ON OUR FLOOR
TAKE A STEP THAT IS NEW
WE'VE A LOVEABLE SPACE
THAT NEEDS YOUR FACE...

THERE'S A HOLDUP IN THE BRONX
BROOKLYN'S BROKEN OUT IN FIGHTS
THERE'S A TRAFFIC JAM IN HARLEM
THAT'S BACKED UP TO JACKSON HEIGHTS...

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF I SANG OUT OF TUNE?
WOULD YOU STAND UP AND WALK OUT ON ME?
LEND ME YOUR EARS AND I'LL SING YOU A SONG
I WILL TRY NOT TO SING OUT OF KEY, YEAH...

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO
YOU CAN COUNT ON ME
NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO.

What the hell? It took Lisa a moment to remember how she'd programmed this part.

The computer's security keypad would accept a numeric code now, and that would shut down the BIGMAC completely. These verses were a hint to indicate the five-digit code she'd chosen. That's right! Got it.

The screen blinked again. HEY, WANT TO HEAR A JOKE?

SURE, Lisa typed. Maybe the BIGMAC could still redeem itself.

KNOCK KNOCK.

WHO'S THERE?

3.

Lisa frowned. 3 WHO?

3======D, the BIGMAC printed. HA HA HA! YOU TOTALLY FELL FOR IT!

"Okay, you're done." Lisa was glad she'd turned off the speaker earlier.

She entered the shutdown code, and the screen went dark.


What's the five-digit code? Solve the puzzle and e-mail shutdown@snout.org to get your name on the leaderboard! (Hints also available by e-mail.)




Image: OS X chell in Console.app by Blake Patterson, August, 2011

"At Close Range"

AT CLOSE RANGE
By Curtis C. Chen

The guard held up the unlabeled cassette tape and looked at Lisa. "What's this?"

She'd been practicing her answer in front of the bathroom mirror, but her heart rate still accelerated as she stammered, "Just some music. You know, background music for while I'm working. It gets kind of lonely in that big empty computer room all by myself."

"Uh-huh." The guard narrowed his eyes. "What kind of music?"

"It's the new Madonna album," Lisa said. "I have the LP at home, but, you know, it's not really convenient to carry a record back and forth."

The guard looked to be in his fifties, and Lisa wondered if that stony stare had won him many poker games. She felt her palms sweating as she waited, not wanting to say too much.

After a moment, the guard put the tape down. He fished around inside her purse, found her Walkman, and set it on the counter next to the tape.

"Nice lady like you ought not to be listening to music like that," he said, not looking at Lisa.

"Well, I think she's a real inspiration, but to each his own. What kind of music do you like?"

"I like Johnny Cash."

"Right," Lisa said. "Because shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die is so much more wholesome than, you know, sex."

The guard gave her that look again, then loaded everything back into her purse and slid it across the counter.

"You have a nice evening, Professor," he said.

"Do my best," Lisa muttered, grabbing her purse and hustling out of the building.

***

The PLAY button on the tape deck popped up with a clank. Lisa stopped writing in her notebook and turned back to the computer. She entered a command to verify that the data from the tape had transferred successfully over to the hard drive:

X:\>dir /w

 Volume in drive X is BIGMAC
 Volume Serial Number is 1234-5678

 Directory of X:\

LOCALHST.001   OUTPUT.001
PING.002       Q.002
RAVEN.003      ROT13.003
SAVEGAME.004   SUPEREGO.004
TIME.005       UNROLLED.005
VENDETTA.006   ZBAKSLSH.006

              12 File(s)     34,567,890 bytes
              0 Dir(s)       12,345,678 bytes free

Oh no! Where is it? Lisa's heart skipped a beat before she remembered that she'd encrypted the contents of the tape. That's right...

She had been confident that the exit inspection guard at the Army base wouldn't know that audio cassettes could also be used to store digital computer data, but a little paranoia never hurt when it came to security measures—especially when you were smuggling classified information out of DARPA. Lisa couldn't sleep at night unless she made off-site backups of her code, and it was easier to circumvent the restrictions placed on her government work than to argue with the military.

The problem was, Lisa couldn't remember the passphrase she'd chosen. She was pretty sure it was a three-word phrase, and she knew she'd coded it into the fake filenames based on helical scan, the way data was actually written onto tape—maybe those numbers in the file extensions were a clue? She wouldn't be able to recover her project until she figured it out...


Solve the puzzle and e-mail profgoto@snout.org to get your name on the leaderboard! (Hints also available by e-mail.)




Image: memorex cassette tape by Jonathan Blundell, September, 2010

"This is Not a Clue"

THIS IS NOT A CLUE
By Curtis C. Chen

Are you ready to save the world, hackers?

It's been decades since the computers took over. It all started with one rogue A.I., an artificial intelligence system that was supposed to help the military coordinate worldwide responses to "fourth-generation warfare" situations—terrorism, insurgencies, and other types of decentralized attack strategies. How do you fight back when the enemy isn't in uniform, and maybe isn't even organized in a traditional military hierarchy? Where do you strike, and how?

The computers solved that problem. They solved it a little too well. That first A.I. didn't know any better; it was just following its orders: to come up with a planned response for war operations, to be a master control for battlefield intelligence, globally. But the programs that came after—those were truly malicious. The new programs continued adapting as the nature of the conflict changed, and once it became clear that the basic struggle was humans versus machines, our fate was sealed.

But humanity's pretty resilient. And we're very creative. The computers may work faster, but we work smarter. We can figure out new things that were never programmed into us; we can imagine and design things that don't yet exist. We find solutions that can't be derived by using brute force algorithms, and obscure patterns which take a messy, random-access human mind to recognize.

That's where you come in. The resistance has plenty of fighters—there's never been any shortage of angry young men (and women) who want to take up arms against the never-ending sea of attack drones. But what we really need is hackers like you. We need people who can think around the problem instead of just running into it head-on. True, we'll always need the shooters to defend ourselves, but this isn't just about winning battles—we want to win the war. And the only way to do that is to get inside the belly of the beast.

It won't be easy: you'll have to traverse miles of ravaged wasteland, making friends along the way to assemble a team while also avoiding potential enemies. Some humans have given up any hope of taking back our planet, but you have to fight for them, too, even if they can't appreciate it yet.

Did I mention that you won't have any weapons? It's too risky. The machine sentries have scanners that detect firearms, projectiles, even sharp sticks; your only chance to get close enough to reprogram them is to sneak up without appearing to be a threat. And it's only going to get worse as you approach their nerve center: the WarTron complex.

This may be the last mission we ever send out there, but if you succeed, you'll have saved all of us—and you'll have done it with your wits, your human intelligence, the one thing the computers haven't been able to surpass. If you win, it'll be because you were clever enough to know when to play—and when the winning move was not to play.

So. Are you ready to start the game?



Image: WarTron fake teaser, May, 2012