“This is so much more than a hard drive,” Karl said. “It’s one big, solid silicon-based integrated chip. There’s no moving disk like a normal hard drive.”
He and Lisa started babbling about nonvolatile NAND flash memory, unpowered storage, fully integrated circuit design, and seamless controller chips, completely oblivious to the fact that no one else in the room understood a single word they were saying.
“There are plenty of solid state drives out there right now, of course,” Karl added, as if everyone knew that. “Price has kept them mostly on the fringes though, so they’re mostly in toys. This thing looks to be light-years ahead of anything I’ve ever heard of. It would have cost a small fortune to make, but the storage capability must be insane.”
“What kind of storage are we talking about?” John asked. “How much information could be stored on here?”
Lisa exchanged looks with Karl, who shrugged.
“Well, it’s all just theory at this point since this seems like a prototype, you know?” Karl said.
“How much information?” John asked again, firmer this time. “Five terabytes or something?”
The woman shook her head. “Definitely not. If all he wanted to do was store five terabytes, he could have used a normal hard drive. Heck, he could have used a flash drive for that. No, this thing is probably in the petabyte range, maybe a lot more.”
“I have no idea what that means,” John said in exasperation. “Is that a lot?”
Karl held up the black box. “A lot. As in the Library of Congress kind of a lot.”
John grinned. “How long will it take to download the data?”
Lisa studied the back end of the black box and grimaced. “I suppose I could come up with a transfer cable that would work. It might take a few days, though, not to mention a lot of trial and error because we don’t have a clue what kind of data transfer protocols this thing uses. The real problem is that we don’t have the key.”
“Key?” John repeated, the smile disappearing from his face.
Karl pointed at the irregular slot in the front of the box. “That’s a security key slot, like we use to switch on our classified phones. Without having that, it could take months to hack into this thing.”
“Even longer if the data is encrypted, which it almost certainly is,” Lisa added.
“Encrypted?” John said.
Karl nodded. “Like the encryption code on the wireless router in your home. Except we have no idea how long of a code it might be. These days, it could easily be sixteen digits. Unless whoever designed this thing was working for a paranoid type. Then it could be anything—twenty-four or thirty-two characters even. Regardless, the chances of stumbling over that code by accident is almost nil.”
John cursed. “You’re telling me that we likely have every piece of data that we need right here in this box, but we can’t get it out?”
Lisa shook her head. “We can get the data out. It will just take time. Maybe a few days to come up with an interface cable, then a few weeks to bypass the key interrupt. After that, it’s just a matter of working out the encryption code.”
“How long will it take to break the code?” John asked.
Lisa exchanged looks with Karl again. “We know a lot about Thorn, so that helps. Maybe if we get lucky, we could do it in a few months.”
John’s eyes widened. “Months?”
“That’s if it’s on the lower end of the security scale,” Karl said. “If the code really is thirty-two digits long, it will take longer.”
Ivy frowned. “John, we can’t wait that long. I told the shifter who stole this to get out of town for a while, but if we haven’t done something soon, it won’t matter what we do. Thorn will figure out her identity sooner or later and once he does, she’s dead. I promised her I wouldn’t let Thorn get to her. We’re going to have to give the box and the diamond back to him.”
John was silent for a long time. Finally, he nodded. “You’re right.”
Ivy blinked. She’d expected him to fight her a little more. While he had no desire to see Thorn get his hands on Dreya any more than Ivy did, he’d been after Thorn for a long time.
John looked at the two techs. “If you test this thing with mass spec or X-ray or whatever you people use, could you make a realistic model of it?”
Lisa looked confused. “Well, yeah, the material technology is well-known. It’s just a silicon crystal structure. Like a regular computer chip, but a lot bigger, with a few thousand layers of boron and phosphorus to form the semiconductor paths. Throw in a circuit card or two to handle the security key and the encryption code, and you’re done. But it won’t work and the data certainly won’t be there.”
John shook his head. “I don’t need it to work or for the data to be there because when you get done with it, you’re going to smash it.”
The two techs looked baffled beyond belief. “What?” they said in unison.
