She lets the fugue fade until she’s once again aware of her body and of the sun on her face; she keeps her eyes closed, compels herself to breathe deeply until her heart slows. She remembers the last time she connected directly to Cloudbreaker—in theory, doing so gives her more control—and the aftermath, lying on the grass, staring blankly up into the void, feeling like a fragment of the machine’s hurtling dream, and for the benefit of her future selves she’d said, “It’s very important that you never do this again.” She reminds herself that Cloudbreaker is just an artifact in software, not a malignant spirit, and is by its nature an opener of doors.
Legally grey, Cloudbreaker, and of no known state, its owners hiding behind layers of darknets and blinds, though Philip, obsessed with the secret systems of the world, and sometimes reckless, once tried to learn their names. Nominally for testing computer security, which is how she’s twice come to work with it, it’s more often used by the most technically sophisticated thieves.
She’d been surprised when Iliou suggested using Cloudbreaker against W&P, as she’d thought only specialists were aware of its existence, but had thought maybe that’s just the kind of thing the rich know about now. “Maybe you can find what’s left of Constantin, and erase it,” Iliou had said. “In any case we’ll know what Cromwell really wants.” She’d recalled a line from Plutarch: “Let no one call himself rich who can’t afford his own army.”
She finds she wants to just lie there in the sun—the consequences of what she’s about to do are unforeseeable, but likely to be extreme, and she’s already feeling shaky, but then she remembers what Iliou’s paying for each second of Cloudbreaker’s time and makes herself reconnect.
Ever mercurial, it’s already lost interest in her, and ignores her until she opens the gate that’s been keeping it from the net and points it at W&P. As it explodes outward she finds herself imagining its relief even though she knows it’s just a program.
Cloudbreaker’s attack is like an obliterating wave. Water and Power’s defenses waver, hold, and there’s the slightest sense of anticlimax but the next assaults are closing fast and she feels the elation preceding cataclysm.
Impact, and chaos—for a moment she’s disoriented, and the ragged hole in W&P’s perimeter is closing but they’re already swarming through, which puts her on the wrong side of many laws but she’s happy to have taken the initiative.
A security AI manifests and in the same beat Cloudbreaker swallows it whole, like something out of a nature documentary and somehow as hideous, but there are more of them, hundreds, thousands appearing out of nowhere, which is more resistance than she’d expected, in fact it’s absurd, for fuck’s sake it’s not the Pentagon, and things are already getting out of control.
W&P’s data is there, the pending short sells and minute shifts in the energy markets and all the keystrokes of the employees below the level of VP and there’s a blank space and a resistance that draws her attention, a core of denser security which Cloudbreaker eviscerates at her command and then she’s into Cromwell’s private archive.
Constantin, she thinks, saluting him in her mind as she flashes through the files but there’s no mention of him, just decades worth of financial records and contracts, and the absence of reference is surprisingly painful, a little like losing him again, but there’s another blank, a core within the core, and though Cloudbreaker is hard-pressed she compels it to ignore its assailants and dissolve this final barrier.
“I hold the keys to the kingdom of life and death” is the phrase that captures her attention, is in fact the full text of the first message sent to Cromwell by an anonymous stranger from a secured offshore server, the kind of setup favored by terrorists and drug traffickers, and attached to it were a digitized genome and the catalog number for a genetically standard laboratory mosquito.
“The genome is for a retrovirus,” wrote Andy Simoni, W&P staff scientist. “It’s obviously engineered, but I don’t recognize the style of design.” Later he wrote, “The natural lifespan of this mosquito is about two days but the ones I infected just hit a week and still aren’t getting old. Also, as I discovered, they can regenerate lost tissue—wings, legs and in one case most of a thorax—a capacity heretofore unobserved in the dipterids. I haven’t been able to figure out how the retrovirus works, but many of the mosquitoes’ cells have new organelles, or things like organelles, whose function remains opaque. Also, I tried the virus on some mosquitoes of the same species as, but genetically distinct from, the first batch, and they all died within a minute.”
Cromwell emailed to the stranger: “You have my attention in its entirety. What can we do for each other?”
The security AIs are mobbing Cloudbreaker—she thinks of white blood cells swarming a bacterium. Chunks of Cloudbreaker’s substance break off and dissolve into nothing, which seems to enrage it, its counterattacks coming so fast they look like static.
Her time is short so she skips through the negotiations to where they settle on terms and sees the stranger wants a dozen high-end fabricators from Metafacient Inc., that famously innovative failure—its fabs, capable of printing matter with atomic precision, were the best thing going for prototyping exotic materials and artificial cells, but had been too expensive to find a market, and only thirty-odd were ever made before the company folded. They mostly ended up in the research labs of the military and the tech majors, and are dear even by Cromwell’s standards, when they can be had at all—she sees Biotechnica, which apparently has three in its Bay Area R&D complex, has repeatedly declined Cromwell’s tenders—and then she starts to wonder if it’s all a practical joke when the stranger instructs Cromwell to drop the fabs into the ocean twenty miles west of San Francisco in what’s now three days’ time. She thinks of the Doge of Venice, how every year he threw a gold ring into the waves to wed his city to the sea.
The stranger’s other demand is six months’ worth of human memory recorded through an Ars Memoria implant, and somewhere under the sun Irina is smiling at having justified the last few seconds’ felonies.
In exchange, the stranger undertakes to do for Cromwell what it did for the mosquitoes, after which they’re never to speak again.
They’d settled on terms at four p.m. on a Sunday but that night around four a.m. Cromwell wrote, “I know we have an agreement, but I need you to make a retrovirus for one other person. Failing that, I’d take a cure for Kubota’s syndrome. You can have what you like for it. I’ll give you cities. Nations, if you want them.” She doubts whether even Cromwell could deliver nations, unless they’re small, bankrupt, and marginal, but she’s read about Kubota’s, a rare hereditary disease of the nerves, invariably fatal in midlife, which Magda has, according to her medical records, but in any case the stranger doesn’t reply.