Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  She couldn’t explain this to Essie either. Oh, the cost of keeping secrets. They poisoned everything, every relationship, every interaction. She could be totally honest about her deepest sexual desires and fears with Essie, but she couldn’t even share the basics of her relationship with Angie.

  Fuck that. What was the point of hiding anything anymore? How many of the problems she and Essie were having were because of the artificial distance between them? She was so sick of secrets.

  “She was more than my boss,” Igloo said, setting her coffee on the nightstand. “She was my mentor, my friend. I built conversational AI as a way for people to form friendships and get emotional support when they couldn’t get it from the actual people around them. She made my dream a reality. Hundreds of millions of people talk to my personalities.”

  Igloo turned onto her side, facing away. Essie stroked her back.

  “But it’s more than that. She was my friend in ways I can’t describe. In ways that I don’t think anyone could ever be again. We did stuff together, stuff I can’t talk about.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Essie curled against Igloo and wrapped an arm around her.

  Igloo moved Essie’s hand to cradle her boob, then raised her head. Essie slid her other arm under Igloo’s neck, and Igloo wiggled closer.

  She hesitated. Angie would talk about operational security. She shouldn’t talk about this stuff with Essie, but she knew she was going to do it anyway.

  “Computer stuff. Hacking stuff. Angie trusted me with parts of her life, her plans that she would never let anyone else get involved with. Matters of life and death.”

  Essie petted Igloo’s hair.

  Igloo flipped back over so she could look into Essie’s eyes. “What’s happened to us, Essie? We used to talk about everything, but I feel like we haven’t really talked in months. I’m always so upset about you and Michael.”

  “Or you’re distracted texting Charlotte and Heather.” Essie kept playing with Igloo’s hair.

  “I know. But I’m only so distracted by them because I feel like there’s so much distance between us.”

  Essie sighed, and her hand slowed. “I know. I feel the distance too.”

  “I left so much unsaid with Angie, and now she’s gone. I don’t want to do that with you.”

  Essie pulled Igloo close. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “We have to work harder,” Igloo said. “We can’t just coast along assuming everything is going to work out. We have to build the relationship we want.”

  “We will,” Essie said. “We will make the future we want.”

  Igloo looked deeply into Essie’s face. Essie was speaking the truth. Essie was finally totally here and present for her. Such a precious thing.

  But the future was so much bigger than just the two of them. What would happen now, without Angie to carry on? Tapestry would survive, but would all of Angie’s secret plans live on? Getting T2 out. Influencing the news stories. Altering the outcome of the next election.

  The words she’d uttered a few minutes ago ran through her head again. Angie trusted me with…her plans that she would never let anyone else get involved with.

  Suddenly the conversation they’d had last week made so much more sense. Angie expected her, Igloo, to carry on those plans. Angie had known this was going to happen. She had fucking known.

  She jerked upright, almost flinging Essie aside. “Where’s my phone?”

  “What?”

  “My phone? I need it.” She looked around the bed, didn’t see anything. “Where’s my bag, the one I had last night?”

  “I don’t know,” Essie said. “I don’t remember seeing it after the explosion.”

  Igloo tried to think back, but she didn’t even remember going to the hospital. She must have dropped it somewhere.

  She slid her a spare computer out from under the bed. She waited impatiently for it to start, then switched over to a secure partition. Without her phone here, she needed to use a backup set of codes to bypass her normal two-factor authentication and get logged into her secure Tapestry account. She checked for a message from Angie.

  7:54PM.

  Jesus, she was right in the middle of greeting people then. That couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes before the explosion.

  Stay focused on the long game. AOM.

  Was that supposed to mean something? AOM was short for Angie’s old handle, Angel of Mercy.

  Why would she leave such a meaningless message, at that moment, of all times? Why didn’t she say something more important?

  “Duh!”

  “What?” Essie asked.

  “She left me a message, just not here. This is her way to remind me to check my secure messages.”

  “More secure than those hoops you just jumped through?”

  Igloo turned on a VPN, then started onion routing over Angie’s network. She let Essie watch. She was no longer going to hide anything. She couldn’t live that way. She connected to the server she and Angie used for their most secret hacking work.

  She had a new message from Angie, dated this morning. For a brief second, her mind wanted to believe that Angie was still alive despite the obvious certainty of watching Angie die last night. But no. This was just Angie’s dead man’s switch, her kill switch, sending out a last message after Angie was gone.

  I’m keeping this deliberately short because I can never put into it everything you want to know or I want to say. If I try to select a few things, you’ll read into everything I didn’t say, and jump to the wrong conclusions.

  Why the fuck did Angie think she always knew best? Igloo was a grown woman.

  You’re probably angry at me for thinking I know better than you. Forgive me. If you’re getting this message, then it should be obvious that in the future you can and will do exactly as you see fit.

  Igloo found herself leaning against Essie, barely able to hold herself upright. She rubbed at her eyes because she couldn’t see the screen. She was distantly aware of Essie wrapping an arm around her.

  You will find a detailed plan for developing, deploying, and making maximum use of Tapestry 2.0. This is of the utmost importance.

  T2 alone is necessary but insufficient. It technologically guarantees certain basic human rights in perpetuity, such as privacy, free speech, and freedom of association, but those rights are irrelevant in an unjust world where people are discriminated against, jailed, or killed. To that end, you must follow through on the conversation we had during our hike.

  You are opposed to outright manipulation. But sometimes one moral imperative so significantly outshines and outclasses all others that sacrifices must be made in pursuit of it.

  Tapestry arose from the ashes of Tomo. We would not exist today if Tomo had not been burned.

  Don’t let the sacrifices be for naught.

  Igloo’s mind reeled. Tomo? Burned? Angie used burn to mean destroying someone or something in a computer hack. Tomo wasn’t destroyed by Angie, but by competition with Tapestry. Of course, Tapestry got its chance to shine thanks to the actions of Lewis Rasmussen, the former CEO of Tomo, who’d hired a dangerous mercenary, Chris Daly, to discredit Angie. Daly turned out to be a rogue government agent who tried to kill Angie after she and Igloo took steps to flush him out. When the news of Rasmussen’s crimes hit the web, Tomo stock went into free fall, their users flocked to Tapestry, and Tapestry went big.

  How was that a burn? A burn would imply Angie had engineered all that.

  Oh. Igloo’s thoughts came slowly, as though they were arriving down a long tunnel. Everything faded away.

  What if Rasmussen hadn’t hired Daly in the first place?

  What if, instead, Angie hired Daly to discredit Rasmussen? Knowing that she could defend herself against him, Angie could have set up a long game where she built up a mass of evidence to frame Rasmussen. There’d be no way Rasmussen and Tomo could survive something like that.

  “Angie wouldn’t…”

  A chill d
escended on Igloo like a cold, wet blanket. Angie would.

  “What?” Essie said. “She wouldn’t what?”

  “Frame an innocent man and send him to jail. But she didn’t, did she?”

  “She didn’t what?” Essie shook her head, clearly puzzled.

  “Rasmussen didn’t go to jail. He got off on a technicality over the chain of custody of the evidence. Sure, he lost his role as CEO, but Angie would claim he deserved that because he was intentionally screwing his users on privacy stuff. But he never went to jail for the attempted murder.”

  “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  Igloo couldn’t speak the words out loud because the realization was too awful. Making sacrifices for moral imperatives… One of those was explicit: sacrifice Rasmussen and Tomo for Tapestry.

  But Angie wrote sacrifices, plural. The other was implied. Angie had killed herself to buy the time to release T2.

  Chapter 33

  “What do you mean, dead?” Enso hissed into the phone. He shouldn’t even be talking in an unsecured room. He looked at the door, hoped his wife was still in the kitchen.

  “The car battery exploded,” Alice’s voice was tense. “She was dead within seconds. We had agents across the street and in the hotel. No evidence of any wrongdoing, other than the explosion.”

  Shit. “Let me call you back on a secure line.”

  He went to the spare bedroom, pulled the heavy Faraday curtain closed, and reconnected to Alice via a secure video connection. He didn’t even wait for her to speak.

  “Is there any chance it was us, or another faction inside the government?”

  “Not that I can tell. Robin was at the scene, and she didn’t notice anything.”

  “Another hacker then? Foreign agency?”

  Alice shrugged. “There’s no evidence supporting that. We’ve had 24-hour surveillance on them for weeks. With the exclusion of Thomas and Angie’s friends, no one else entered the house, no one else was around the car. It could have been done remotely.”

  “What’s the media done so far?”

  “Live coverage from the local news affiliates, and of course, all the national networks have picked it up. Fortune 500 CEO, all that. Theories about the battery pack exploding, interviews with electric car experts, etc.”

  Enso weighed the possibility that it might just be an accident. Accidents did happen, and at the most inopportune times. There was that one time when they’d tried to assassinate a CEO, only to discover him dead in his hotel room.

  Enso sighed. They’d been preparing to plant evidence framing Angie’s husband to use as leverage against Angie. Now that was pointless, since there was no Angie to manipulate.

  “I know this is going to sound crazy,” Alice said, “but hear me out.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We know Angie fabricated the Tapestry leak designed to get the President to call off Tapestry spying.”

  “Yeah,” Enso said.

  “We stopped that from happening. What if this is her backup plan? What if she faked her own death to forestall the FISA court order, to give their engineers time to release this new version of Tapestry that they’ve been working on?”

  “Wait, faked her own death? I thought it was real.”

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It’s not conclusive yet. The battery fire was too hot, too intensive. Everything suggests that it was real, and there are human remnants in there, but it’s possible it’s not Angie.”

  Enso wanted to pound the table. “With all the surveillance we have, how can we not even know if she’s dead or alive? She’s making a fool of us still.”

  “Okay, ignore that. Maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s not. Would she be willing to kill herself to get this software released? Is that possible?”

  Enso found himself believing it. “Yes, it is. If it got her what she wanted, she’d be willing to do it. But what can we do? The FISA court is almost certainly going to grant the company an extension. How can we convince them otherwise?”

  Enso’s phone buzzed, and he glanced down to see his phone indicating a call from Feldson.

  The SIGINT Director didn’t normally call on weekends. Griz must have heard the news.

  “I gotta take this, Alice. I’ll talk to you later. Keep the team digging to see if we can turn up any evidence of what caused the vehicle explosion. If we can conclusively prove it was her own tampering, then that might help with the FISA court.”

  Chapter 34

  Since uncovering Angie’s final message, Igloo had been reeling from the revelation of Angie’s sacrifice. It was just too much to deal with, and she crawled back into bed.

  Now late morning, still wrapped in Essie’s arms, she realized she couldn’t spend any more time wallowing. Hours had been lost.

  She forced herself to sit up and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I’m wasting time. I can’t do that. Angie’s…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it, wasn’t even sure what to say. Death? Accident? Suicide? “Angie bought us a couple of days. I can’t squander another second.”

  She stumbled out of bed, put on her socks and boots, then sat down, suddenly confused. What was she supposed to do? She looked down at her boots. Oh yeah, she needed clothes first. She wasn’t thinking straight.

  “I need more coffee. I have to get functional.”

  Essie climbed off the bed and came around to look into Igloo’s eyes.

  “You might need coffee, but the bigger problem is that you’re still in shock. I don’t know what you’re trying to do. Let me help.”

  “I have to do this alone.”

  “You’re in no shape for that.”

  Igloo thought about what she needed to accomplish. She reluctantly nodded.

  Essie helped her get dressed, made her coffee, shoved a nut bar into her hands, and got Igloo to the car.

  “I’m driving. You’re in no condition to drive.”

  Igloo just nodded and climbed into the passenger seat.

  Essie got behind the wheel. “Where are we going? Tapestry?”

  “No,” Igloo said. “Wait, yes.” She rubbed her face. “I’m not sure. I need to get the T2 team together, and make sure everyone is working.”

  “That sounds like Tapestry, then.”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  Essie drove toward Tapestry. “What is this T2 team, and why is it so important?”

  “Oy. Legally, ethically, and for your safety, you shouldn’t know…” Igloo thought about it. That was the old way. Angie’s way. “There’s a software release that we were supposed to get out by Monday or some very bad things will happen. Starting a few days ago, we knew we were going to miss the deadline.”

  “Really? A frigging software release? You can’t give yourself a couple of days to grieve for Angie?”

  Igloo stared out the window. “I can’t explain it, but no. The software is more important than you can possibly imagine.”

  “It’s a website. It’s not more important than taking a few days for yourself.”

  Igloo turned to Essie, who was focused on driving. “It might be the last chance for free speech or privacy of any kind.”

  Essie glanced at Igloo, then turned back to the road. “I get that Tapestry is a big deal, but it’s not the center of the universe. It’s just a social network.”

  “Tapestry might seem that way, but it’s a much bigger deal than you realize. It’s the backbone of how we communicate, get our news, plan protests, how we tell each other our secrets. Tapestry’s role is about to get much bigger…”

  She trailed off, unsure of how to continue.

  “Essie, I haven’t really thought this through. In fact, I’ve been deliberately not thinking about it. But there’s some chance I could go to jail for this.”

  Essie hit the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Igloo sighed. “The government spies on us. Everyone.”

  “Yeah. We’ve all se
en Snowden. So what?”

  “Some of us believe we deserve privacy. We believe that the government shouldn’t be able to read our emails and listen to our conversations. That they don’t have a right to blanket court orders that enable them to spy on everyone at once. I can’t say more, I really can’t.”

  “What does any of this have to do with going to jail?”

  “Tapestry 2.0 will be the new de facto Internet. Secure, private, and resistant to intrusion. The government won’t want Tapestry 2.0 to be released, because it will mean the end of blanket court orders. After Monday, we’re supposed to be in compliance with…” Legally, she couldn’t mention the FISA court order. “Well, just, after Monday, if we release this software there’s a chance we’re going to go to jail, unless we get a stay on the implementation date…look, it’s complicated.”

  Essie’s lips quivered. “I don’t care what the reasons are. I don’t want you to go to jail. We’re supposed to be life partners. How can you do something like this and not discuss it with me first? What were you thinking? Or is this like poly, where you just don’t think? You do, do, do with no thought as to how it’ll affect me.”

  “I never do that,” Igloo said. “I always think about you.”

  “Really? You think about me when you make plans with Charlotte without even checking with me first? I don’t think so. You tell me after the fact.”

  “It’s hard to coordinate plans.”

  “Oh yeah. So hard. It takes thirty seconds. You message me, ask if it’s okay. That’s all. Did you think about me when you decided to have sex with her? No, you did it, and then you told me afterwards.”

  “I just want to have fun. I’m not trying to hurt you.”

  “Poly doesn’t mean you’re single and free to just do anything you want. We’re committed partners. That means something to me.”

  Igloo was silent for a minute. There were a lot of things that she didn’t ask Essie about. Usually because she was afraid that Essie would get angry. How much of that was in Igloo’s head?

  “I’m sorry,” Igloo said. “I’ve been avoiding a lot of discussions.” She didn’t know what else to say. “Sometimes it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”