"Why is that a problem?" Coulter asked. "You designed it."
"PNM-6C is the backbone protocol. It carries bundled data streams from hubs like SYN-7 to Hyperion's central servers. It's not a physical cable or a device. It's an encryption layer with randomized routing paths and layered authentication at every relay point. Data enters the corridor encrypted, bounces through a randomized sequence of routing nodes, and arrives at the other end reassembled. It was designed to be untraceable and impossible to intercept without an internal access key."
"English please," Coulter said.
"Think of it as an armored convoy for data," Zadie said. "The data gets loaded into a truck, the truck takes a different route every time, and the only way to know where it's going is to be driving the truck."
"Make sense, but you know it’s there. Can’t you deal with it?" Coulter asked.
"PNM-6C by itself isn’t the issue." Gideon sat down and tapped his fingers across the keyboard, pulling up the notes and code he’d made on AEGIS less than an hour ago. It was the best he could to do because there was no record of it anywhere.
"What is AGS-2?" Neve asked. "And what does it have to do with any of this."
"AEGIS or AGS-2 is what I built for the military. It’s classified. It was never meant to leave the government’s hand." Gideon pointed to the screen. "It’s a checkpoint system bolted into a highway system, like PNM-6C?—"
"Wait a second." Coulter was on his feet, standing in the middle of the room, waving his hand. "You created a similar telemetry system like ETHER for the Canadian government?"
"No." Gideon shook his head. "I added a layer of protection that no one had ever seen before. It’s a credential verification protocol that authenticates the identity of every transmission at every handoff point. It was designed for battlefield communications so that transmissions couldn’t be spoofed. Every message had to prove it was real at every stop. It’s like having an ID checked at every exit before getting back on the highway."
"And you didn’t do this for Hyperion?" Neve asked.
"Legally, I couldn’t," Gideon said. "The tech is owned by the government. Also, my work with Hyperion involved medical data. He held up his hand. "However, what I did was create something similar based on tech that’s already being used."
Coulter frowned. "It sounds like you’re implying that Hyperion has this AGS-2."
"A version." Gideon pulled up a side-by-side comparison on Zadie's secondary monitor. Two columns of code, similar in structure but divergent in execution. "The routing algorithms are degraded. The authentication layers are thinner. The randomization pattern is less complex. It cycles through maybe forty routing variations instead of the several hundred I built into the original. It's a cheap imitation. Functional, but not as stable."
"What does that mean exactly?" Coulter asked.
"And explain it to me like I'm five," Neve added.
Gideon stared at the code on the screen. "The only people who had access to the original AEGIS architecture were military personnel with top-level clearance. I led a four-person team when we developed this. We implemented it in cycles with a six-person team. My hand cramped from signing a multitude of NDAs and agreements when I left. Talking to you about it could send me to prison for life."
"Isaac was in the military," Neve said. "But I thought you and he never crossed paths."
"They didn’t know each other until Hyperion," Zadie said. She turned her chair to face the room. "Isaac handled demolitions and communications. He would have received comparable training to Gideon and me, and been knowledgeable about AGS-2, because of the second component. He would have had some training, but he wouldn’t have seen the code. Only reason I saw tiny snippets of it was because the government wanted me working on new systems."
Coulter moved closer to the screen. "How did Hyperion get AGS-2 attached to your telemetry system?"
"It looks like Isaac stole some of it and tried to write the rest of it," Gideon said. "It’s not very sophisticated. There are cracks in his code, but he’s running it alongside what I built with PNM-6C, and that system is picking up some of the slack."
"Can we use the breakdown to infiltrate?" Darwin asked.
"That's what I've been working through." Gideon stood and moved back to the wall display. "When I activate the dual-key at SYN-7, the activation signal has to travel through PNM-6C to reach ORACLE's core. That's the only path."
"And it’s an armored convoy," Coulter said.
"It’s the best way of putting it." Gideon turned to face the room. "We have two options. The first is we try to bypass AGS-2 entirely. Route the activation signal around a different corridor. One that dumps into a sub server and then try to get into ORACLE that way."
"And what’s your thought on doing that?" Darwin asked.
"We’d have find a sub server that we can hack into, and it could take days. Weeks even, before we find a path to ORACLE."
"Option two?" Coulter asked.
"We follow the protocol. Use the credentials Zadie planted to authenticate through PNM-6C and let AGS-2 authenticate. The credentials are native to the system, so AGS-2 should accept the handshake and pass the activation signal through to ORACLE." Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. "But the moment those credentials authenticate, the corridor logs the source hub, sets the timestamp, and the credential signature is locked. The AI's post-event sweep will find it. And when it does, the credentials are burned."
"So, that means, by the time we activate the dual-key and get inside ORACLE's core, we have no way to plant the backdoor," Zadie said. "The very same credentials that allowed us entry are now a glaring issue in the system logs, and the AI will be actively looking for anything that matches that signature."
