She wasn’t wrong.
He set his pack at the edge of the blanket to use as a pillow and inched closer.
"What do you all want with me?" he asked.
She lay down on her side, propped up on her elbow. "We need you to stop destroying the nodes."
"No. It’s the only leverage I have. If he’s doing what you say he is, then he’s using my telemetry system to monitor those enhanced humans. Killing the system will kill the operation."
"Maybe. But it won’t help Darwin. And yours isn’t the only system out there. It’ll only delay him for a short period. What you’re doing is throwing a tantrum with a really sophisticated toolbox."
He chuckled. "That's fair."
"In order to connect Finch to everything—the enhanced soldiers, the unauthorized trials, Darwin's framing, what they did to my team—we need to get into the server. Into ORACLE. Darwin needs to see what Finch has been hiding and everything’s in there."
"Even if you found the software back door," he said, "you wouldn't be able to do it."
"I might not be the great Gideon Rhodes, the legend in signals intelligence and electronic warfare, but?—"
"That's what you do, did, in the military?"
"Yes." She rolled onto her back and clasped her hands behind her head. "I got a degree in computer science and programming before joining the military. You were always the standard of what the rest of us were supposed to be."
"That’s ridiculous." Gideon slid down, pulling the thermal blanket over their bodies. "Everyone brings value. No one should be put on a pedestal. I hate that." He turned, catching her gaze. "But I can’t help you get into ORACLE. It has a built-in failsafe and so many firewalls, invisible perimeters, decryption keys, social engineering?—"
"I know. I tried to get inside and ran into the AI."
"Wherever you did that from, the routing has been stored, and the AI is trained to look for it. Search for those specific parameters. It will try to detect patterns you used to help it locate you."
"Not surprised, and not the first time I’ve run into it." She smiled. "There are ways around that."
"Maybe, but the only way to get inside it unless you’re already there, like Finch, is a digital and a physical key. Both have to be activated at the same time. The digital key is a rolling cipher that regenerates randomly. I used to hold that key, but now I suspect it’s the hands in Isaac."
"And what’s the other one?"
"The physical key is a hardware token built into the architecture. There’s more than one. For all I know, they’ve been moved. And regardless, they’re useless without credentials."
A gust pushed through the sagebrush, and the temperature dropped another degree. Zadie pulled the blanket higher. Somewhere below them, Carpenter Lake shifted against its stolen shoreline.
He'd built a failsafe at two in the morning on a Tuesday, running on only cold coffee and a moment of clarity. He remembered the exact moment he'd finished—leaning back in his chair, staring at the code, and thinking that no one would ever get past this. And how that was such a good thing. And it was. The idea had been to protect the data. To protect and save lives.
"That’s a problem," Zadie said. "But every system has it’s weak points."
"Agreed." He sat up slightly, propping himself on his elbow. This was the part that had taken him two years to design and another six months to test. It was his version of a moat filled with alligators, except the alligators were also encrypted and the moat moved.
"But once someone hits a certain firewall, the system reroutes itself. The AI component creates shadow servers. It data dumps in different places. It also has a built-in back-up. An alarm will go off once the system fights back against a hack, and ORACLE itself appears to shut down. It doesn’t, it just becomes something else, and the hacker has to start over," Gideon said.
An owl called from somewhere in the timber. The sound was close enough to be startling, and Zadie's hand twitched toward her weapon.
He shifted again, letting the tension from the noise ease. Hearing himself explain the system to someone who actually understood what he was describing did something he hadn't expected. It made him miss it. Not Hyperion. Not the office, nor the politics, nor the man who'd fired him. But the work itself. The elegance of what he'd built. The hours alone with the architecture, shaping something that could protect people who'd never know his name. That was the part Finch had stolen, and destroying the nodes hadn't given it back. It had just made the loss smaller.
It made him miss being inside, sitting at a desk, keyboard under his fingertips, staring at a minimum of three screens, while he solved problems he didn't even know he had.
"ORACLE’s not impossible to hack. But without those two keys, what’s the point? You won’t find much, and you certainly won’t be able to shut down the system." He reached out and traced the side of her jaw with his finger. He had no idea why he did it, except that he was drawn to her in ways he hadn’t been drawn to anyone. "You need someone inside, and I’m not inside anymore."
"No. But you built it." The corner of her mouth lifted. "And I’m the girl that can help you bust back in."
"If it were only that simple." He stared into her intense brown eyes. The light was almost gone, and it softened the angles of her face, warmed her skin, made her look less like an operative and more like a person he might have wanted to know under different circumstances.
