"Yeah, well, we’re gonna need more condoms because those will be gone by lunch tomorrow."
"Then we better get some rest." He kissed her softly. "Because I won’t say no to that."
Chapter Eleven
Gideon leaned back in his chair and stared across the comms room at Zadie. She sat at her desk, a soda in hand and a straw between her lips. When they’d first met, she’d described him as a legend. As someone she looked up to.
Except she was the one worth admiring, not him.
Glancing up, she set her cup aside. "Why are you two here?"
"Thought you might want an audience," Coulter said.
"I told you how much she hated that." Neve pulled out the only extra chair in the room and sat in the middle of the space. "But we’re curious how this is going to work."
Gideon cracked his knuckles, rolled his neck, and pulled the keyboard closer. He’d never worked well under pressure. He preferred to close his door and do his thing in private. But the military had beaten most of that out of him. As a department head at Hyperion, he’d stood over plenty of shoulders, it wouldn’t kill him to allow the same.
"It’s fine with me." He reached for the headset and looked at Zadie. "Are you ready?"
"Let’s get this party started." Zadie pulled her headset over her ears. "Comms check." She wiggled her fingers over the keyboard.
"Check check." Gideon adjusted his chair, glancing around his workstation, double-checking everything. He had two monitors on his desk and two on the wall. Zadie had the same setup to his left, so they could both track each other's movements in real time.
Coulter leaned against the doorframe, one hand stuffed in his pocket, the other holding a mug of coffee.
Neve sat in a chair in the center of the room with her elbows on her knees, eyes scanning the screens.
"This battle might play out between these screens and a remote server," Gideon said. "But the danger is as real to us as a gun pointed at our chests. If I ask you to be quiet, it means I don’t want to hear you breathe. If I need you to clear the room, it’s because shit is happening, and I can no longer focus with you watching me."
"Understood." Coulter lifted his mug and took a sip.
"Not my first digital rodeo," Neve said.
Zadie pulled up the entry architecture on her left monitor. The dummy server Gideon had built over the last three days sat on her right. It was a mirror of ORACLE's lower-level access structure, accurate enough to rehearse the credential plant but disconnected from anything live. They'd run it eleven times. She'd completed the insertion in under four minutes on eight of those runs. The other three, the simulated AI had flagged her.
Four minutes. That was the window. Anything longer, and the noise Gideon generated would start looking repetitive, and the AI would deprioritize it and start hunting for secondary threats.
"Clock starts when I ping the first node," Gideon said. "You don't move until I've got full engagement."
"I know the plan." Zadie glanced at him sideways.
He tried not to chuckle, but it was impossible. "I know. I'm saying it out loud because it calms me down." They’d been at this for hours, and they’d found each other’s hot buttons. In a curious way, it made everything real—especially his feelings for her.
"You don't look calm." Coulter eased into the room, setting his mug on the far table and sat on that because there was nowhere else to sit and he'd forgotten the golden rule when it came to the comms room.
If anyone on the team wanted to sit, they had to bring their own chair—a lesson Gideon was glad he'd never have to learn because the comms room was part of his domain.
"I'm calm on the inside." That wasn’t a total lie. But his pulse sat somewhere around ninety. However, that would change the moment the clock started running. He planted his palms flat on the desk, breathed in through his nose, and pulled up the entry script he'd written. A sequenced barrage of authenticated-looking credential requests designed to hit ORACLE's perimeter from six spoofed IPs simultaneously. It would look like a coordinated breach attempt. Sophisticated. Aggressive. The kind of attack that would force the AI to commit resources.
"Going live in ten seconds," Gideon said. He launched the first volley.
The left monitor exploded with data. Request packets streamed out of his terminal, hit the first layer of ORACLE's perimeter, and bounced. That was totally expected. The AI would catalog the attempt, log the source, and begin building a behavioral profile of the attacker.
Standard response in any AI system. He needed it to do exactly that—to focus on him, study him, commit processing power to understanding his methods.
"Contact," he said. "AI is logging. No active response yet."
He launched the second wave. Different vector. Different spoofed origin. The requests were heavier this time. They probed deeper, poking at authentication protocols two layers in. It was still designed to fail. But designed to fail in ways that almost looked like they were succeeding.
