* * *
“Glasses on,” I told Vann.
She put on her monitor glasses. “Hit me,” she said.
I pinged her and let her into my liminal space. Then I entered it myself.
There was a threep standing on my platform. It was Vann.
She held out her hands, looking at her representation. “So this is what that’s like,” she said. Then she looked over to me. “And that’s what you look like.”
“Surprised?” I asked.
“I hadn’t actually thought of you having a face before, so, no, not exactly,” she said.
I smiled at this, and realized that it was the first time that Vann had ever seen me smile.
She looked around. “It’s the goddamned Batcave,” she said.
I laughed.
“What?” she said.
“You reminded me of someone just there,” I said. “Hold on, I need to bring Tony in.” I pinged Tony a door.
He stepped through and looked around. “Spacious,” he said, finally.
“Thank you.”
“Kind of looks like the Bat—”
“Tell us the bad news,” I prompted.
“Right.” A neural network popped up above us. “This is Brenda Rees’s neural network,” he said. “It’s a Lucturn model, the Ovid 6.4 specifically. It was a fairly common model from eight years ago, and it’s running—well, was running—the most up-to-date software for its model. I’ve done patches for this network a few times, so I’m pretty familiar with its design and capabilities.”
Tony pointed to Vann. “You asked me if I thought it would be possible to lock in an Integrator with a commercially available network.”
“You said no,” Vann said.
“I said I didn’t think so,” Tony said. “I didn’t think so because the code that allowed it to happen in Sani’s brain was optimized for a network that was itself optimized for locking in Integrators while giving the client control. Purpose-built software for purpose-built hardware.”
“But you were wrong,” I said.
“I was wrong,” Tony said.
“Why were you wrong?”
“Because I was thinking about Johnny Sani’s network incorrectly,” Tony said. “I told you that it wasn’t a prototype. That it was a release-level brain. Well, it is. But it’s also a proof of concept, the concept being that if you knew the hardware and the software really well, you could have the client take total control of the Integrator’s body. It’s not something anyone tried to do—well, that we know about. There’s probably some asshole NSA initiative to do just that.”
“Focus,” Vann said.
“Sorry,” Tony said. “Sani showed that it could be done. Now all anyone needed to do was translate that proof of concept into existing, general networks. And to do that you would have to do a couple of things. One, you’d have a deep understanding of the networks you were using. You’d have to know the hardware really well. Two, you’d have to be a complete fucking wizard at programming.”
“Hubbard,” I said.
Tony touched his finger to his nose. “Lucturn is the second-largest manufacturer of Haden neural networks, after Santa Ana, and Hubbard is famously involved in the design process. The programming forums are full of horror stories about him coming in and tearing up his engineers’ early designs for being inelegant.”
“And how is he as a programmer?” Vann asked.
“It’s how he got into the field,” Tony said. “He founded Hubbard Systems to manage corporate legacy computer systems, and then after he got Haden’s he started focusing on programming for threeps and networks that were orphaned when their manufacturers got out of the field. He did a lot of that programming himself back in the day. The programming system networks use is called Chomsky. Hubbard didn’t invent it, but he did write most of the 2.0 version, and he’s on the board of the Haden Consortium, which approves new versions of the code.”
“The Haden Consortium,” I said.
“What about it,” Tony said.
“Hold on,” I said. I fished through my e-mail and pulled up one for Tony and Vann to look at. “L.A. finally got back to me about the ninja threep,” I said.
“Ninja threep?” Tony looked puzzled.
“I’ll explain later,” I said. “The point is the threep’s design wasn’t a commercial design—it was a low-fee license version that the Haden Consortium offers potential manufacturers in developing countries for use in their countries. You can’t buy them or sell them in North America, Europe, or developed Asia.”
“So you were attacked by an imported threep,” Vann said.
“It could be made here as a one-off,” I said. “All you’d need was an industrial 3-D printer and an assembly robot.”
“Who has a setup that could handle that?” Vann asked.
“Pretty much any design shop or manufacturer who does full-scale modeling,” I said. “L.A. said they would look into it but it would take some time. My point here is that Hubbard’s involved with both Chomsky and the threep design that went ninja on me.”
“Which could be coincidental,” Vann said.
I opened my mouth to respond but Tony butted in. “Hold that thought,” he said. “I’m going to tell you why Hubbard’s your guy, but I have a couple more things to walk you through.”
“All right,” Vann said. “Take us to the next thing.”
Tony turned to me. “You remember me telling you that early on the network manufacturers had problems with people hacking into the networks.” I nodded. “So they made it harder to do. One, they made the network architecture more complex so it was more difficult to program for and to casually hack. But that’s a very low-level measure. Ambitious hackers tend to be top-flight programmers. So another way it’s done is that all software updates and patches have to be from approved vendors, who are identified by a hash they put in the header of the patch. A patch is downloaded and the hash is checked. If the patch is verified, then it downloads and installs. If it’s not, then it’s purged and a report is made.”
“And that’s impossible to get around,” Vann said.
“Not impossible,” Tony said. “But it’s difficult. In order to work they have to be stolen and they have to still be active. When I do white-hat hacking of these systems, half my job is getting a verifiable code. That’s a lot of psychological spoofing. Making people think I’m their boss and need their hash, finding ways to look over their shoulder while they’re writing code, shit like that.”
“How would you do that?” I asked.
“Lots of different ways,” Tony said. “One of my favorites was the time I put a basket on a remote-controlled toy quadcopter, filled the basket with candy, and then flew the candy into the programmer wing of Santa Ana’s headquarters. The quadcopter went from pod to pod, and while the programmers were grabbing at candy, I was grabbing shots of their work screens. I got eight programmer hashes that day.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Everyone likes candy,” Tony said.
“So someone could steal a hash and get into someone else’s network,” Vann said, dragging us back on point.
“Right,” Tony said. “The problem for the hacker is that even when they’ve got the hash, they’re still coming through the front door. Everyone’s looking for the stolen or spoofed hash and the malicious code. Which is why every patch is first unpacked and executed in a sandbox—a secure virtual machine. If something malign is in the code, it’ll execute there and get caught. And there are other security measures as well.
“The story here is that it’s very difficult to get any suspect code into the network in the established route. Even for a brilliant hacker, it’s a long walk to a dry well.” He turned to Vann. “Which is why I told you that it was very unlikely.”
“But then Rees tried to kill me,” Vann said.
“Actually that’s not the part that convinced me I was wrong,” Tony said. “It was the part where Chris said Rees tried to get away from the grenade after intentionally pulling it to avoid being caught. It’s possible control was taken by the front door, but if it was there’d be a record of it—patches installed when they shouldn’t have been, sandboxes launched to test the patches, a record of the acceptance of the validation of the patch and the hashes of the programmer and company who sent it along. There was nothing out of the ordinary.”
“So there’s another way in,” I said.
“There is,” Tony said. “Think about it.”
It was Vann who got it. “Fucker did it when he integrated,” she said.
“Yes,” Tony said. “When a client connects with the Integrator, there’s a handshake of information, and then a two-way data stream opens up. This aspect of the network is meant to be a totally separate process from the internal operation of the network, and it is … but the code isn’t perfect. If you know where to look you can find places to access the network’s software. And that’s what happened.”
Tony zoomed into the network to focus on the nodule that included the receiver for the client data stream. He pointed to a structure. “That’s an interpolator,” he said. “If there’s any short disruption of the data stream, a millisecond or less, the interpolator polls data on either side of the gap and fills in the gap with averaged data. But to do it, the interpolator has to access processing from the network. It’s a break in the firewall. And that’s what Hubbard exploited.”
The image changed to a schematic. “Here’s what I think he did,” Tony said. “First, he handshakes a data feed with the Integrator. Then he intentionally introduces gaps into the data stream, long enough to activate the interpolator. Then he uses the interpolator’s channel to the processor to feed it an executable file. It does this as long as needed in order to download the file. Then it unpacks and rewrites the network’s software.
“It’s going directly into the processor, so no sandbox. It’s avoiding the verification process, so no need for a hash. It’s a small file, so the Integrator’s network doesn’t have to close the session to execute it. The Integrator never even knows they’ve been compromised.”
“Why the hell hasn’t something like this been fixed already?” Vann asked. I could tell she was seriously creeped out by what Tony was telling us.
“Well, think about it,” Tony said. “This is a pretty damn big bug, but it’s a bug that has a very narrow pathway to it. First someone has to know about it. Then they have to have the technical ability to exploit it. Then they need the technical means to exploit it—by which I mean that the ability to introduce intentional disruptions into the data stream isn’t something your average Haden is going to be able to do in their own head. This needs a specialized instrument between the client and the Integrator. And by ‘specialized,’ I mean that as far as I know it doesn’t actually exist. It would have to be created.
“No one’s patched this bug because up until now it wasn’t actually a bug. It was a benign quirk at best. Basically you would have to be a Lucas Hubbard to exploit this.”
“But Brenda Rees never integrated with Hubbard,” I said. “She integrated with Sam Schwartz.”
“Hubbard created the process and tools,” Tony said. “Once they existed, they could be used by someone else.”
“Sam Schwartz is Hubbard’s lawyer,” Vann said. “He’s in the perfect position to assist him.”
“Not a very ethical lawyer,” Tony said. “But, yeah. There’s no reason Hubbard couldn’t hook Schwartz up to his machine and let him have a go at it.”
“You seem pretty sure that it’s Hubbard,” I said.
“You seem pretty sure about it, too, Chris,” Tony said.
“I know, but what I want to know is whether you think that because I do, or whether you think it because you have another reason to.”
“I believe it because you believe it,” Tony said. “I also believe it because the scope of what we’re talking about here—both for this and for what happened with Johnny Sani—requires resources of either a small country or a very wealthy person. But most of all I believe it because of the code.”
“The code,” Vann said.
“Yes,” Tony said. The schematic disappeared, replaced by lines of code. “How much do you know about Chomsky?” he asked. “The programming language, not the man.”
“I don’t know anything about either,” Vann said.
“Chris?”
“I got nothing,” I said.
Tony nodded. “The programming language was called Chomsky because it was designed to talk to the deep structures in the brain. It’s a ‘deep language’ pun. The great thing about Chomsky as a programming language is that it’s amazingly flexible. Once you know it—once you really know it—you find out there are all sorts of ways to address any problem, or issue, or goal. This is essential for neural networks. They have to be flexible because every brain is different. So the language you program them in has to have the same sort of flexibility. You’re keeping up with me so far?”
“It’s a little esoteric,” I said.
“Which is my point,” Tony said. “Chomsky is a language that has to be esoteric, because it’s interfacing directly with the brain.
“Now, a side effect of this is, because Chomsky allows so many different ways to tackle any one specific problem, programmers who are truly fluent in Chomsky end up developing their own voice. By which I mean they address goals and parameters in a way that’s idiosyncratic to them. If you spend any real time looking at the code, eventually you can tell who wrote it.”
“Like someone who writes novels.”
“Yeah, precisely,” Tony said. “Like one novelist puts in a lot of description while another one is all dialogue. Same thing. And like novelists, some Chomsky programmers are good, some are competent, and some suck. And if you’ve seen their code before, you can tell which programmer it is from the first line of code.”
He pointed to the code on display. “This is the code in Brenda Rees’s brain that’s variant from the latest point release and patching for the Ovid 6.4,” he said. He pulled up some more code. “Here’s the code of the software in Johnny Sani’s head. It reads the same. Whoever wrote Sani’s code wrote Rees’s code.”
He pulled up a third column of code. “This is code Hubbard wrote back in the day, when he was still pushing out patches and updates at Hubbard Systems,” he said. “Believe me when I say that if you ran all of this through the Chomsky equivalent of a semantic and grammatical analyzer, it would light up across the board. All of this was written by the same person. All of it was written by Lucas Hubbard.”
“Is that something we can use in a court of law?” Vann asked.
“You’d need a lawyer to tell you that,” Tony said. “But if you put me on the stand I would tell you, hell yeah, this is all the same guy.”
“Is that enough?” I asked Vann.
“To bring him in?” Vann asked. I nodded. “For what?”
“For killing Brenda Rees, for one,” I said. “For Johnny Sani, for another.”
“We don’t think he killed Rees,” Vann said. “We think Schwartz did. We still don’t have anything court-worthy connecting him to Sani, either.”
“Come on, Vann,” I said. “We know this is our guy.”
“We go in with what we have and Hubbard’s lawyers from Schwartz on down are going to blow our heads off,” Vann said. “And I know you don’t really need this job, Shane, but I kind of do. So, yes. Hubbard’s our man. Let’s make absolutely sure we can get him.” She turned to Tony. “What else you got.”
“Two more things,” Tony said. “The first is about Rees’s code.”
“What about it?” Vann said.
“It doesn’t bypass her long-term memory,” Tony said. “Either Hubbard couldn’t find a way to make it work, which is possible because the neural network layout is non-trivially different, or he decided not to waste his time because—” He paused.
“Because he didn’t plan on keeping her after he or Schwartz was done using her,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “And now you know why she was carrying around a grenade.”
“So she was aware the whole time,” Vann said. “Aware and awake and unable to stop her body from doing anything.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “And no way to get the client out of her head.”
“Fuck,” Vann said and turned away for a second. Tony looked over at me, confused. Later, I mouthed.
“You okay?” I asked Vann.
“If we go in to wheel out Hubbard’s body after all this is done, I’m going to need you to watch me very closely,” Vann said. “Otherwise I’m going to punt that asshole hard right in the balls.”
I grinned very widely. “That’s a promise,” I said.
Vann turned back to Tony. “What’s the second thing,” she said.
“Once I figured out how Hubbard hacked Rees’s brain I went back into Sani’s brain to see what things I missed before because I didn’t have context,” Tony said. “And I got this.” He scrolled very quickly through the code until he came up with a sizable chunk of it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I didn’t know at first,” Tony said. “Because it didn’t make any sense. What I think is that it repurposes part of the neural network into a relay.”
“A what?” Vann said.
“I know, right?” Tony said. “It’s a transmitter. It transmits the Integrator’s data signal, but not into the network. Instead it mimics the network.”
“Does it have to be the Integrator’s data signal?” Vann asked.
“What do you—” Tony stopped, apparently getting it. “Oooooooh,” he said.
“What?” I said. I was the only one in my own liminal space entirely left out.
“Fucking Hubbard,” Vann said. “We were asking why Johnny Sani was trying to integrate with Nicholas Bell. He wasn’t. He was acting as a goddamned relay station for Hubbard.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Then that means that when you were interrogating Bell—”
“It was never Bell,” Vann said. “It was Hubbard. It was always Hubbard. The bastard’s been playing us right from the start.”
“To get close to Cassandra Bell,” I said.
“Yes,” Vann said.
“For what purpose?” I asked.
“You’ve been following the news, right?” Vann snapped. “Rumor is, there’s a march on Sunday. Imagine what happens to that march when Cassandra Bell is killed by her own brother, who then spouts some sort of anti-Haden bullshit. D.C. is going to burn down to the ground.”
“Right, but what point does that serve?” I asked. “Why start a riot?”
“To tank the market,” Tony said.
We both turned to him again.
“I told you I follow the sector,” Tony said. “It’s how I stay employed. The Haden-related companies are already trying to merge or exit the sector because of Abrams-Kettering. Investors are already offloading their stocks. A full-scale riot in D.C. will scare the shit out of these companies and all their investors. They’ll flee the scene. And then Accelerant can pick and choose which companies to snap up and which to let die. It’ll be lauded for stabilizing the sector when what it’s really doing is sniping its competitors in the head. They’ll save billions on their merger with Sebring-Warner alone.”
“But what’s the point?” I said. “Abrams-Kettering is gutting all these companies’ profits. There’s no gravy train anymore. You said so yourself.”
“You know who AOL are, right?” Tony said.
“What?” Vann said.
“AOL,” Tony said. “Information services company around the turn of the century. Made billions connecting people online through their phones. A ‘dial-up’ service. Was one of the biggest companies in the world. Then people stopped using their phone lines to get online and AOL shrank. But for years it still made billions in profit, because even though the dial-up sector had died, there were still millions of customers who kept their dial-up service. Some were old people who didn’t want to change. Some were people who kept the service as a backup. Some probably just forgot they subscribed and when they remembered, AOL made it too hard to unsubscribe to bother.”
“Lovely story,” Vann said. “And?”
“And, when all is said and done, there are still more Hadens in the U.S. than people who live in the state of Kentucky. On average another thirty thousand people a year contract the disease and experience lock in. They’re not going away. Even a shrunken market can make a lot of money, if you milk it. And Hubbard’s the one to milk it.”
“Because he’s a Haden himself,” I said. “He’s one of us.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “That’s what swooping in and saving the Agora is about. Establishing goodwill among Hadens.”
“Once he has that, he can roll over every other company, because he’s already got every single Haden as a customer,” I said. “He’ll use the Agora as leverage.”
“Right again,” Tony said. “And then Accelerant will be doing two things. Using the money he’s raking in from Hadens to diversify—even now Haden-related companies are the minority of its portfolio—and getting ready for the day the FDA says neural networks and threeps aren’t just medical devices for Haden use only. Because that’s the real end game. Hubbard’s looking to the day when everyone’s got a threep, everyone’s on the Agora, and no one ever has to feel old again.”
“That’s why Hubbard could spend a billion dollars on something he’d never take to market,” I said.
“And why he’ll spend a bunch of money now on companies that look like sucker bets,” Tony said. “He’s not looking at the shrinking Haden market. He’s looking at the market that’s coming after that. The market he’s going to make. The market he’s locking in right now.”
“You really think that’s what happening here,” Vann said.
“Let me put it this way, Agent Vann,” Tony said. “If you two don’t arrest him this weekend, on Monday I’m going out and putting everything I own into Accelerant stock.”
Vann stood there for a moment, thinking. Then she turned to me. “Options,” she said.
“Seriously?” I said. “We’re doing this now?”
“It’s still your first week,” Vann said.
“It’s been a busy week,” I said.
“And I want your thoughts, all right?” Vann said. “I’m not just asking you to have a goddamn teachable moment. All this affects you. This is about you. And people like you. Tell me what you want to do, Chris.”
“I want to go after the son of a bitch,” I said. “Hubbard and Schwartz both.”
“You want to arrest them,” Vann said.
“I do,” I said. “But not just yet.”
“Explain,” Vann said.
I smiled at her instead and looked over to Tony. “Hubbard’s code,” I said.
“What about it?” Tony asked.
“Can you patch it?”
“You mean, close the hole in the interpolator?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Now that I know it’s there, closing it up’s not a problem.”
“Can you do more than that?” I asked.
“Are you going to pay me to do more than that?”
I grinned. “Yes, Tony,” I said. “There is payment involved.”
“Then I can do whatever you need me to do,” he said. “Hubbard’s good, but I don’t suck either.”
“What do you have planned?” Vann asked me.
“So far we’ve been a step behind Hubbard on everything,” I said.
“That’s an accurate assessment,” Vann said. “Are we going to try to get ahead of him?”
“We don’t have to get ahead of him,” I said. “But I want us to arrive at the same time.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Vann asked.
“Well,” I said. “As our friend Trinh would say, it might require you to be a little sloppy.”