Vitalik's Sci-Fi Novel "Snow Moon" Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Free City, United City-States · 3724 Fire Month 17

Yann passed through the turnstile of the Free City School of Economics and headed toward the cafeteria.

It was still early morning, and Yann deliberately avoided looking at the day's news—better to clear his mind first and enjoy the lecture playing on the cafeteria screen.

After a minute of walking, he arrived.

When he saw what was on the screen, his eyes froze in horror.

Special Broadcast

Arctic Empire Invades and Annexes Red County

Yann began listening intently as the reporter recounted the details.

At 15500 this morning, a massive fleet of Arctic drones and aircraft landed at major cities and military bases across Red County; simultaneously, the North launched a large-scale ground invasion, with thousands of vehicles pouring out of previously unknown underground tunnels.

Red County's military was completely caught off guard, and many suspect corruption at the highest levels. Major combat lasted less than two long-hours, with very limited casualties. By now, Red County's defenders have almost entirely surrendered.

He saw about ten people sitting in the cafeteria, including Utaku, who appeared as shocked as Yann.

Three government aircraft carrying President Alber, Prime Minister Celedir, and most members of the parliament attempted to take off. All three were shot down. Current indications suggest there are no survivors.

The President's son, Tafindel, is believed to be imprisoned in the Arctic.

The reporter paused, then began speaking again.

A new message has just come in:

The last remaining Red County garrison in the South has agreed to a conditional surrender. The garrison staff, along with thirty other personnel including two senators, will be allowed to fly to Devanville in exchange for the garrison ceasing all attempts at self-defense.

These three aircraft will take off in five minutes and will be the only aircraft permitted to take off. The Arctic authorities will not allow any other vehicles to enter or leave Red County. They have already cut off all communications and are actively setting up jamming equipment.

"What now?" Yann muttered, now standing at the table with Utaku.

"Take the threat seriously," Utaku replied.

Before Yann could even look away, Utaku was already typing rapidly on his handheld device.

Meldan Viridia

Gladias and Sera stared at the screen, with Febric and Hreda beside them. They had just woken up at sunrise, sunlight streaming clearly through the windows, the trees on the sidewalk outside already casting long morning shadows. This news was the first thing they saw.

Zwin was still asleep, and Lily was still in her own room.

Sera pulled out her handheld device and began typing frantically.

Please tell me you're in Free City and everything is fine.      → Send to Yann

She tapped send.

A few moments later:

Yann → Don't worry, I'm in Free City. 32117

Yann → We've been taking defense seriously here. Free City is about the farthest place in the United City-States from Red County, apart from Silver Beach and Marbley. 32124

Sera breathed a sigh of relief.

Gladias saw Sera messaging Yann and placed a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. He did not respond further.

His thoughts quickly turned to the rating standard. He thought, there's no way we'll relax the hardware openness standard next month now—we might even raise the tax tier.

A moment later, his anger turned toward Delvort.

Sera left the room to wake Zwin and find Lily. Within twenty minutes, the four of them were on their way to school, leaving only Gladias and Sera in the house.

Gladias walked down to the basement and closed the door.

"What do we do now, Mov?" he whispered through his neckband.

"It's clear that Delvort was wrong about a lot of things. Next time we talk to him, we definitely have a lot of questions to ask. We need a direct answer, not excuses."

"Remember, it turns out it's not just him who made such big political mistakes. This is something I learned a month and a half ago—the absolute organizational level of everything he's done."

"Have you found him again since then?"

"Only twice since. The first was a meeting with someone in a privacy robe, no idea who, and they talked a lot in Silver Tongue. The second was a meeting with a Guardian, and I overheard some conversation about Fear Knots. About a month ago, there was nothing more—either he changed his location or got better at hiding."

"So when's the vote?"

"The first one is probably in about twenty days."

"Delvort might make a move to try to 'verify' that you voted the right way. So remember the mechanisms the Order will set up to ensure he can't do that." Gladias recited: "Only ballots signed with a valid key count." "The voting key is generated by meeting with at least 5 people in the key allocation group and registering every blind share of the voting key with them. Once that's done, information about which keys are valid and invalid can only be decrypted by the obfuscation circuit under specified conditions."

"So neither Delvort nor anyone else—technically, not even me—will know which key, how many keys, or whether any keys were actually successfully registered. Only the voting results will be decrypted. So Delvort can't tell whether the ballot I submitted is real or fake. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to prove it to him. For Delvort to take over my ballot, he'd have to take over my identity, which means going to KAG and pretending to be me—difficult, because the whole point of KAG is that it includes people I've met in person."

"Humans—the ultimate trustworthy hardware."

"You've learned well."

"But I hope none of this is necessary, and Delvort will give me some reasonable explanation."

"Hope is not a strategy."

"Indeed it's not."

Pafogai Du, Zhego

Zeyi anxiously tapped buttons on his handheld device, sending the message for the fifth time.

Are you okay?????!

Please tell me where you are.  → Deluin

He sat at a table in the hotel lobby restaurant, weeping. On the table before him sat a pot of tea and a meal. He quickly finished the tea. The robot had refilled it four times. The rice and vegetables had barely been touched for a long-hour.

Finally, he received a reply.

Deluin → Don't worry, I'm alive.

Though it looks like I won't be back in Zhego anytime soon.  84690

This wasn't the outcome Zeyi wanted, but it was far better than what he had feared. He breathed a sigh of relief.

Deluin → I found a way to send messages.

Some Arctic soldier and his friend, or his AI, or something, wrote a method to embed hidden text messages into the real-time health data he sends back to his home command.

Other command personnel are forwarding that signal into weather information, which then gets sent to satellites.

He relays messages anonymously for people, and makes a nice profit on the side.  84714

Zeyi wiped his tears and began typing intently.

Wow. You... have contact with this soldier?  → Deluin

Deluin → I have an anonymous link. 84723

Ask him how he encodes the information placed into the health data.  → Deluin

Zeyi thought for a moment, feeling that perhaps it was his turn to be the teacher. He pulled up the keyboard and began typing rapidly.

Or actually, on second thought, he won't answer. But tell him that the random strategy of flipping the least significant bit, which everyone adopts the first time they encounter this problem, is not the ideal solution. Sometimes flipping a high-order bit is completely fine, but sometimes flipping even the least significant bit is dangerous.

What you want to do is:

* Train a large language model on the true data distribution, so that it can give the probability that a specified position should be 0 or 1 based on all the other bits

* Divide the data into multiple buckets—make sure to use the decryption key itself to randomly select the buckets—and require that the bits in the i-th bucket be XORed with the i-th bit in the ciphertext. Within each bucket, use the model to determine which bit's probability is closest to 50/50—meaning both values are "natural" for that bit in that context—and flip that bit to make the bucket XOR correct.

This way, it's the large language model that judges which bits are "least important" and most suitable for flipping, rather than always only changing the least significant bit of each number. → Deluin

Zeyi sat back briefly, feeling proud that he had not only successfully understood and explained a complex concept, but also understood and explained the exact complex concept needed for this work.

He decided to continue, out of personal pride in his understanding, and also out of a desire to let more Red County people secretly access information through Arctic censorship.

If you want to go further, you can make the buckets partially overlap. Say:

* The first bucket is 0...199

* The second is 20...219

* The third is 40...239

And so on, but remember the entire sequence should be in pseudorandom order.

Also, only select a random half of the positions in each bucket for XOR, so there are always some bits to flip that affect one bucket but not the bucket before or after it. That is, 204 might be part of the second bucket but not part of the third.

The happy path algorithm is:

* Choose a bit in 0...199 to flip to make the first bucket XOR correctly

* Choose a bit in 200...219 to flip to make the second bucket XOR correctly

* Choose a bit in 220...239 to flip to make the third bucket XOR correctly

And so on...

However, suppose among the 20 consecutive bits from 240...259, none is suitable for flipping—for example, in an extremely clear photo of the night sky, 20 consecutive pixels should all be pure black anyway, and similar situations occur in health data—then fall back and search within 220...239 for a set of flippable bits that makes the last two buckets XOR correctly; if that still fails, continue falling back and search within 200...239 for a set of flippable bits that makes the last three buckets correct, and so on.  → Deluin

Afterward, he realized the previous message sounded too much like showing off, so he sent another one.

This is what I learned from Deng's cryptography textbook.  → Deluin

Deluin → I'll forward it to him.

But I suspect for him, the priority is finding a higher-bandwidth channel to hide data. Optimizing which bits to flip is indeed clever, but it might yield a 2x gain, whereas finding a better data stream could yield a 1000x gain.

Always choose the stupid 1000x gain first, then the super clever 2x gain.   85190

Deluin → I learned that in business school.   85200

Zeyi felt more optimistic about how much improvement better steganographic encoding could bring, but decided not to press the point further.

Alright, let's just stay safe.

If I or any smart person I know can do something to help you get out of there safely, please let me know.  → Deluin

Zeyi considered saying "or Kungope could do it," or even "or the secret society of senior Zhegoans could do it." But he realized that first, letting outsiders—especially outsiders now in enemy-occupied territory—know about these things would violate confidentiality rules; and second, he couldn't fully trust this connection—he hadn't even asked Deluin a security question yet. So "smart person I know" it was.

Deluin → Will do. Thank you for caring about me.   84821

Zeyi put down the device and let out a breath. He glanced around the restaurant and found that no one else was there at this point. He finally began eating the rice and vegetables.

Zeyi felt a hand placed on his shoulder.

Zeyi turned around. It was Su.

"Sorry to hear about Deluin."

"I'm guessing Kungope is trying to figure out how to get him out?"

Zeyi realized that, technically, he had made a mistake: he had not actually confirmed that Su knew about or should know about Kungope—so far, only Deng and Mu did. "That was the first thing I asked Deng," Su began to answer. Zeyi let out a nearly inaudible sigh of relief. "So far, they've obtained a lot of Red County's internet links, and they received Deluin's message a minute ago, so at least he's safe for now. If there's any possible rescue plan, we'll let you know."

Zeyi