Ernie produced a bottle of fine brandy from under the kitchen sink and offered to put something extra into their coffee, and though tempted, John declined. This was not a social visit; the business was dead serious, and he wanted a clear mind to evaluate why Ernie had so urgently requested his visiting the “Franklin Enclave,” as everyone now called it, a visit that few had been permitted to experience.
“Let’s head upstairs,” Linda announced without further ado and social small talk with the rest of the family. Linda had rarely attended community meetings, and John thought her to be somewhat standoffish, until Makala, after meeting her, told John she suspected Linda had Asperger’s. Unlike most, John knew what it meant, and for him it carried no negative stereotypes. An “Aspie,” John knew, might not be up to par on most social skills, especially the ability to wander a crowd, meet and greet, and engage in small talk hour after hour. They tended to be mono-focused at times to the point of absolute obsession. It might be something society might think inane—the history of pinball machines and how to repair them or nineteenth-century railroads and the hauling capability of every engine ever made back then. In fact, if he could find people with that knowledge, he would have embraced them and put them to work to actually make such a machine to use on the abandoned Norfolk and Southern rails.
For Linda, it was software design, and in a long-ago world she had been one of the first programmers for the guidance systems for Saturn V rockets. She was a lone woman in a sea of techno-geek males of the early 1960s, writing guidance software for computers that had yet to even be made, so intense was the space race back then to get it done within President Kennedy’s timeline. He had learned that Linda’s task was to write the software for the third stage of the Saturn V rocket, several years before it was even built and flown, for what was called TLI—trans-lunar injection. It was software that at a very precise moment would fire off the third-stage rocket to propel the Apollo spacecraft out of earth orbit and send it soaring toward the moon at nearly twenty-five thousand miles per hour.
The challenge: she was aiming at an imaginary place in space where the moon would be three days later in its orbit around the earth so that the Apollo spacecraft would skim past the edge of the moon at a precise angle just sixty miles above the lunar surface. It was compared to aiming a pistol shot at a piece of paper set edgewise at fifty yards. Miss by even a fraction and the command module would crash into the lunar surface; too far out and lunar gravity would not sufficiently grab the spacecraft and it would just go winging off into deep space with no hope of return.
She did all of that before she was twenty-three.
Reaching the second-floor landing, John paused for a moment to soak in the view of Mount Mitchell, hidden briefly by a snow shower and then standing out again, cloaked in deep snow. The heat from the fireplace radiated up from the living room below, and John took off his sweater and enjoyed the warm, comfortable feel.
“Good morning, sir.”
Several of John’s old students were sitting at a long table where half a dozen computer screens were set up, several of them old Apple II screens, the others a mix from a first-generation Macintosh with its terrible blue nine-inch cube screen and two PCs, one in full, vivid color. As always, John felt a touch of embarrassment with his inability to remember names, though he recognized the young faces who at one time had sat in his one hundred–and two hundred–level history classes but could usually be found across the hall from his classroom in the room set up as a lab for the college’s cybersecurity program.
Linda motioned to a couple of chairs set up behind the three and then pulled up a chair herself in front of the color monitor. “Ernie just finished another calibration this morning on a geosynch sat comm device we think is of interest.”
“Froze my ass off up on the roof in this damn weather,” Ernie growled. “Samantha, that’s your job from now on.”
He tapped the shoulder of one of the girls sitting in front of an Apple screen. The young woman’s hair was unruly, pulled back in a ponytail, and definitely needed a good washing. John remembered her as someone who had been quietly defined as 4-F for service with the college’s militia due to asthma and a propensity for catching any bug floating around and had been down with pneumonia more than once. If not for the town’s production of antibiotics, the last bout would have killed her. She had finally been tasked with helping to weave the wire for the generators being produced down in Anderson Hall and was doing a rather poor job even with that, but now she apparently had found her niche.
“Ernie, you keep this girl out of the cold,” Linda said protectively. “She’s needed more right here.”
“So I freeze at my age, and she sits here snug and warm.”
“Just shut up and leave her be.”
Even as the two started to argue, Samantha pointed at the screen where an endless stream of numbers and letters without any semblance of order or reason were cascading down at a near-blinding rate at times. “There it is again, same pattern.” Samantha hit a button on the keypad, which froze the image with an old-fashioned screen capture.
Ernie leaned over her shoulder to look.
“What is it?” John asked, curiosity filling him.
“Encrypting,” Ernie announced, continuing to stare at the screen.
“Bluemont?”
“No way of knowing yet. If we were sitting on top of a hill looking down at the Bluemont facility, that would be easy enough. Aim a little eavesdropping antenna at one of theirs and start listening in. Most people just assumed everything on computers just flashed around on fiber optics or microwaves, but a lot was going up and down as well, especially government stuff, and of course it was encrypted. You have the right software on your computer, and what looks like gibberish in raw form becomes standard text.
“Do you remember Kindles? You buy a book, and thirty seconds later it’s in your computer, but what was sent was not the actual real text and photos; it was all encrypted to keep hackers from snatching it and then torrenting it out on their own.”
“Torrenting?”
“The bane of every author, for starters. Easy, actually. Some bum just scans the text of a book into his computer and then just put it out there as a PDF file. They make a buck or two, the author gets ripped off. Go downstairs and ask my daughter’s husband about it, and he’ll start raving like a crazy man about getting robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars from torrenting.”
Ernie continued to stare at the screen while talking. “All those Internet sources for books, music—like Kindle, Nook, iTunes—were dependent on encrypting, and they were damn good at it and were updating their codes almost daily. So that is what we’ve got to get around.”
John looked at the other screens. The color one that Linda was sitting in front of was actually showing a wavering video image filled with static.
“And that?”
Linda smiled. “Raw feed from the BBC. Off-the-air stuff. A reporter somewhere up in Canada cursing about getting kicked out of the country. Stuff like that is going out all the time.”