February 7, 2:37 p.m.
It was late March now. Peter wasn’t sure of the exact day. It’s what happened when you lived outside, without anything that might be called a job. He thought about how June’s mother had described the algorithm. A stupid cockroach, she’d called it. But getting smarter.
June kept typing. “What did Tyg3r discover at that time?”
See below.
A small window popped up in the lower corner. June clicked on it. It was a string of emails.
June scrolled through.
“These are the emails from Nicolet to my mom. He says he represented a third party. He offered her ten million dollars for exclusive rights to an unfinished private project.” June scrolled down. “She wanted to know what project he was talking about, but either he doesn’t know what it really is, or he’s not saying. He calls it a search algorithm.”
“I guess that might be technically correct, right?”
“Whatever, she wasn’t interested. He kept raising the offer. She stopped returning his emails when he hit forty million dollars.”
“Wait,” said Peter. “Where did Tyg3r get that email? It just pulled that out of some server somewhere? Out of the cloud?”
“Sure,” said June. “It probably already had all her passwords.” She looked at him. “Forty million dollars?”
Peter had spent eight years in the Marines and two more in the mountains, but he also had a degree in economics. “What’s Google’s market cap right now? Four or five hundred billion? That all started with an algorithm, right?”
“Yeah, but Tyg3r was her baby,” said June. “She wanted to make the world a better place. To make powerful groups and individuals more accountable for their actions. What if you used Tyg3r to disclose all campaign contributions? That information alone would change the world.”
“So forty million was a lowball.”
“Not even in the ballpark,” said June. “But she wouldn’t have taken any amount. She was pretty stubborn.”
Just like her daughter, thought Peter as June turned back to the keyboard and typed another message.
“Did Tyg3r discover the identity of the third party mentioned in the email?”
No. This program was unable to penetrate the security of law firm Sydney Bucknell Sparks, where the email originated.
“Has Tyg3r discovered more information since February 7?”
This program was not requested to do so.
“Has Tyg3r advanced in its capabilities since the last request?”
Yes.
“Please try again. Do this and every future action in a manner that cannot be traced back to this computer or this user personally.”
Multiple variable proxy servers are already in use. Please wait.
A blur of smaller windows popped up on the screen, overlapping each other in a fractal pattern, like tree leaves, in a constantly shifting and growing pattern, tens of windows, then hundreds. The effect was hypnotic. Peter glanced from the road to the screen and back. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes, long enough for Peter to make it through downtown, Puget Sound on the left with the Olympic Mountains on the far side, the raised highway providing an excellent view, then through a tunnel and back on the surface in a dip between two big hills, getting closer to their destination.
Then the windows began disappearing, one by one, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until the screen was left with only four small windows open in the bottom right corner of the home screen with its simple empty text box and a response below:
Sydney Bucknell Sparks’s corporate servers and Jean-Pierre Nicolet’s personal computer are very well protected against intrusion. This program has obtained administrator-level access to both systems.
The cockroach, thought Peter, was definitely getting smarter.
He wondered if that tone of pride had been programmed into the software’s interface.
June opened the windows. One was a Mac desktop with a photo of an empty racquetball court, which Peter took to be Nicolet’s personal computer. The second window was open to the law firm’s website. The third was a commercial email program with Nicolet’s work email address at the top. The fourth was the server’s main dashboard.
“Shit,” she said. “We just hacked a law firm.”
“Not me,” said Peter. “Definitely not me. But you should search Nicolet’s work email.”
They crossed a long high bridge over a canal, a lake on the right and a narrow channel through to the sound now on the left. Peter made himself keep his eyes on the road. He didn’t like the clouds, but he definitely liked the geography.
June wasn’t looking at the view. “I just did a search on his work email using my mom’s name,” she said. “But all I got was the same email string back and forth between her and Nicolet. We’ve seen these already.”
“What about anything coming in? We want to know who asked Nicolet to make the offer.”
June scrolled through her search. “These look like the only emails with Hazel Cassidy anywhere in the From, To, or the body of the email.”