Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  Forrest knew that with everything going down, sacrificing Angie’s safe houses didn’t mean much, but she still found it sad how Nathan could dismantle someone’s entire world so quickly. Did it matter that Angie was dead, and that Igloo would fall under Nathan’s influence, and never use those safe houses again? Or that the safe houses were themselves deliberately sterilized, bereft of anything personal for Angie or Igloo? No, somehow these safe houses were still intimate, intended for Angie and Igloo alone.

  “You are going to actually let them release T2?”

  “Let them?” Nathan replied. “Everything is contingent on them getting that software out. We’re going to make sure it’s released. You’re going to help them every step of the way.”

  “Then why don’t we just leave them be?” Forrest said. “Let them do their thing on their own. Or better yet, sneak them out of the country. Put them somewhere where no one will be able to reach them again.”

  “Not possible,” Nathan said. “Once T2 is released, it fundamentally changes the Internet. Everything is fully distributed, fully secure. Anyone can release their software in containers. In six months, the server and the data center as we know them will disappear. Only distributed client/server environments will remain. You could put this team in a bunker in Sweden, and the government would still hunt them down and destroy them to stop that software release.”

  Implicit in all of that: if there’s going to be a new world order for the Internet, Nathan’s going to be part of it. She wished that someone, somewhere could stop him.

  Igloo switched back to the chat room.

  Igloo > I have a solution.

  She told the group about the plan to rely on Forrest’s help to get them to a government safe house.

  Ben > You’re putting us into their hands? That seems ridiculous.

  Diana > Igloo’s not trustworthy. Not about what was going on with her girlfriend, and not about this. We need to be running away from the government, not buddying up with them.

  Several members of the group chimed in with Diana. Would they never drop this? They’d wasted a good portion of a day so far. Most of the team were half-heartedly coding amid the dissension, but they needed more progress, faster.

  This would have all been avoided if she’d just been fully out about her kink life from the start. If she’d always been open, there might have been some people who would have been critical all along, but she wouldn’t be in this situation now where her reputation and leadership were in jeopardy because someone revealed what she got up to in her spare time.

  Igloo could think of only one thing that might still sway the group’s mindset as a whole: Maria. Maria knew about Igloo’s relationship history and also knew how Angie felt about it. She could give them a second perspective. There was a good chance that Maria was the mole… Screw it. If she kept everyone who might be a mole close to her, then she could keep an eye on them.

  She told the group she’d be back in a minute, then established a new connection to Tapestry and initiated a video call with Maria. It took a few moments to connect, and then Maria appeared on screen.

  Maria’s face was tight. Anger? Igloo couldn’t say.

  “Igloo, these news reports are concerning.”

  “Those videos are lies,” Igloo said. “A smear job. And you know it. Someone recorded the consensual BDSM scenes I did with Essie, I don’t know how, and they edited those scenes down to make it look like abuse. It’s a deliberate campaign to discredit me.”

  “I know it’s a lie,” Maria said. “But the campaign is directed at Tapestry as a whole. The media is condemning Tapestry by association with you. What I don’t understand is why someone would try to destroy Tapestry this way.”

  Igloo took a deep breath. “You don’t know the bigger picture. I haven’t killed T2. Everything I told Amber was to distract her and convince her I’d really abandoned the effort. But Angie was very specific with me that I was to keep working on T2, at all costs. They want to discredit me to stop the T2 effort.”

  “They? Who is they?”

  “The government. There’s a secret government agency that is specifically out to stop what we’re trying to accomplish with T2.”

  "Really? You think some black agency is actually out to do that? That sounds kinda paranoid, Ig."

  Igloo resisted reacting to that. She decided on a different approach. “Look, I’m fulfilling Angie’s mission, as she specifically requested of me to do both before she died, and again afterwards, in her dead man’s switch message.”

  “And yet Amber is the one in control of the company. Legally and ethically, we are bound to follow her leadership. Angie would have put you in charge of the company if she wanted us to follow your leadership.”

  “Look at me,” Igloo said. “Do I look ready to lead a company? Do I look like I want to lead a company? Angie put me in exactly the right position to do what needed doing, and she put Amber in charge of the company to do all the other necessary stuff so I wouldn’t be distracted by it.” As the words came out of Igloo’s mouth, she realized they really were true. Angie had always been a few steps ahead of everyone else.

  Maria considered Igloo for a moment, then nodded. “What is it that you need?”

  Igloo explained, and a few minutes later, Igloo had the T2 team in a video chat with Maria. She considered keeping the T2 members anonymous but decided against it. She needed Maria to be convincing, and that meant allowing Maria to see each person face-to-face.

  “So this is Angie’s special team,” Maria said. “I thought the T2 team was bigger. Angie told me more than twenty people.”

  “There’s been a lot of attrition,” Igloo said. “First Angie, now the government. Everyone is scared.”

  “I bet you are,” Maria said, and paused. “Look, I’ve only been on the periphery of Angie’s plans, but I know how important Tapestry 2.0 was to her. I also know Angie and Igloo enjoyed a relationship that went beyond the bounds of what one might guess looking at an organizational chart. They were friends and collaborators in projects that went beyond the ordinary scope of work at the company.”

  Ben interrupted. “Maria, without meaning any disrespect…I don’t know you, and I don’t know how Angie involved you in what we’re doing, but she never mentioned you in connection with T2. I find it hard to believe that she was confiding in you and yet never mentioned it to us.”

  Maria raised a hand in acknowledgment. “I’m not. I mean, she told me about it, but I was never deeply involved. That’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here because of the video that’s been released. I’m not sure what you all believe, but Igloo previously disclosed her kink life to both Angie and myself. Angie had, as I’m sure you can imagine, a difficult time accepting what Igloo did, because at first all she could see were the parallels to physical abuse. It was a topic she and I discussed several times, and eventually she came to understand that she was seeing it only through the filter of her past experience and through social norms that stigmatize kinky behavior. Eventually she was able to look past that and grew to accept that part of Igloo’s life.”

  “She knew?” Diana said. “Angie knew specifically what Igloo did? The beatings? The stuff in that video?”

  Maria nodded. “I can’t say for sure that she knew about every single thing in the video, but she knew about a lot of it: we talked about bondage, we talked about impact play. Angie read some of the existing research studies about BDSM, and she also mined Tapestry data to correlate kinky people with other patterns of abuse, and she was satisfied with the results.”

  Igloo sensed this was her chance to finish things. “I know some of you would like to continue this discussion forever, but we really need to move quickly. You might not be perfectly happy with my behavior, but can we at least get along enough to agree to accept Forrest’s offer of a safe house and finish up T2, so we can get this done?”

  “I hate so much about this,” Diana said, “but fine. I’ll go along.”

  Everyone e
lse agreed.

  “Everyone leave all your electronics, and get to Lloyd Center, using the practices we talked about.”

  Maria cleared her throat, and Igloo looked back at Maria’s video window. “Do you want me to come along?”

  Igloo was suspicious. Maria was one of the possible moles. But there was a test.

  “There’s no reason to,” Igloo said, “but thanks for your help. I’ll be in touch if we need anything more.”

  “Okay. Good luck.”

  Igloo almost ended the connection then. But she thought the whole thing through. She’d asked Maria for help, and then Maria had shown up and helped in exactly the way Igloo had asked. She’d been there for Igloo. And what had she said back at Tapestry headquarters? She’d said she was on Igloo’s side. And just now, she didn’t protest when Igloo said she didn’t want her to come.

  “Wait!” Igloo called. “Yes, I want you to come with us.”

  Chapter 46

  Butterflies swam in Igloo’s stomach as they passed into the shade of the parking garage. So much work spent avoiding the government, and now she was going to walk directly into their hands. Hiding directly under their noses.

  She ushered Essie through the door into the mall proper. It was crowded with families with rambunctious kids, teens cruising the walkways, shoppers loaded with bags. Caffeine and panic pulsed through her veins, giving a brittle edge to everything she saw, increasing the surrealism of the experience.

  They made their way to the lower level. A door marked “Employees only” at the end of a hallway. A woman in yoga pants and an oversized t-shirt, looking like any of the many other shoppers, opened the door as they approached. She waved them inside.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  “You’re not going to scan us first?” Igloo said, taking Essie’s hand and pulling her along.

  “You were followed since you approached the mall, and you’ve been under scan the whole time. Nothing broadcasted in the fifteen minutes we’ve been watching. It doesn’t mean there’s nothing on you, but if there is, it’s not broadcasting. We’re taking you inside a safe conduit van. EMF proof.”

  “And then?”

  She glanced back at them. “You’ll strip inside, and we’ll provide clothes for you.”

  They descended the stairs and entered a sub-basement utility corridor thick with pipes and electrical conduits.

  Forrest waited in the corridor. “You’re the last to arrive.”

  Igloo glanced past Forrest, and saw the rest of her team, haggard and tired, but all together.

  Diana and several of the others wouldn’t meet her eye. The conflict over the BDSM video wasn’t over, apparently.

  Maria was there though, and she came over and hugged Igloo. “We have to talk at some point.”

  “But not right now,” Forrest said. She grabbed Igloo’s arm, pulled her away from the rest of the crowd. “The videos had the desired effect, I see.”

  Igloo recapped the morning. “It was someone inside the government, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  Forrest nodded. “Yeah, but we’ll deal with that later. We have to get going.” She called back to the rest of the group.

  “Follow us.”

  She led the way down the hallway, staying close to Igloo. “I’m not sure where the video came from, but yeah, the decision to release it came from BRI. I only found out after the fact. I had assumed it was a move to discredit Tapestry, not you personally. But now, it’s hard to say which was the real purpose.”

  They arrived at an interior loading bay where two white cargo vans waited.

  “Now we scrub you.” Forrest gestured at the first van. “In you go, one at a time.”

  Igloo stepped in through the back door, which Forrest closed behind her. The compartment was only a few feet deep, then there was a wall with a door in it.

  A voice spoke through a speaker. “Remove all clothing, jewelry, and accessories and deposit them in the bag.”

  Igloo hesitated. “Can’t you just give me a full spectrum scan?”

  “How’s that been working for you so far?” the voice said.

  Igloo sighed and pulled clothes off, banging her elbows and head in the tight space. When she was naked, she shoved the last of her clothes into the large metallic plastic bag on the floor.

  “The necklace too, please.”

  Igloo fingered the leather thong on her neck that held one link of Essie’s collar. “It’s just leather and solid steel.”

  “We can’t take any risks.”

  “But I made it myself. I know exactly what’s in it. There’s no risk.”

  Forrest’s voice came on over the PA. “Come on, Igloo. We’re on a timetable. Just take off the necklace. We’ll help Essie with her collar.”

  Oh, fuck. They were going to cut Essie’s collar.

  She untied the leather thong and let it slip into the bag.

  The door unlocked in front of her. She stepped into the next compartment, which also had another door in front of her.

  “We show that you don’t have any medical implants. Can you confirm?”

  “That’s correct.”

  The interior light blinked out, there was a short thump, and then the light came back on.

  “What was that?” Igloo asked.

  “Medium duration EMP. If there was anything inside you, it’s fried.”

  “Couldn’t you have done that while I was dressed?”

  The next door unlocked. “We’re following standard protocol.”

  Igloo went into the third compartment. There were stacks of clothes waiting, each labeled with initials. She grabbed her pile and dressed in blue jeans and a t-shirt. Ugh. Did the government shop at The Gap? She held up a hoodless jacket. What was the world coming to?

  When she was dressed, the last door opened, and an agent escorted her into the second vehicle. There were no windows. Just seats packed close together.

  She sat and waited for the others, rubbing the empty space where her leather and link necklace had been.

  The others trickled in one by one, subdued. She nodded to them but didn’t speak.

  When Essie joined her ten minutes later, her neck was bare. She climbed into the seat next to Igloo and cuddled up against her.

  Essie leaned close. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into Igloo’s ear.

  “It’s just a chain,” Igloo said, with a twinge in her heart. How could there be so much meaning in a few stainless steel links? “I will get you a new collar. One of the solid rings you’ve always wanted.”

  Essie nuzzled her, and Igloo put an arm around her.

  The door closed one last time, and Forrest took a seat at the front of the passenger compartment, near Igloo. She addressed the group as the van pulled out. Igloo felt the van climb a long driveway.

  “This is as clean as you get. I’m taking you to a secure facility, and I’ll have two of my top techs helping to secure your data trail.”

  “There’s still some record of the place we’re going,” Igloo said. “We’re going to show up on your FBI systems. There’s no way you can account for us, the building we’re going to, the data we’re going to generate.”

  “It’s not an FBI facility. It’s something we have access to. And the data trail will be fully secured. You’ll be going out over a connection that’s not monitored.”

  “Everything’s monitored,” Igloo said.

  “Not this one. It’s one of the last of the hardlines. It goes through a data center in Japan, and it’ll be multiplexed there by a tech I have on-site who will personally patch every router and server the traffic passes through. The minimum time it will take until they backtrace is forty-eight hours.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Diana said.

  “It’s better you don’t know,” Forrest said. “There’s less to leak.”

  “Aren’t you worried that one of us will say that we’re being helped by the government?” Ben asked. “And then you’ll get in trouble?”

  Forrest smil
ed. “Have you seen a badge? Do you have proof the government is helping you? Maybe you’re just making up a story.”

  Ben looked at Igloo.

  Igloo shrugged. “She has a point.”

  They had no way of keeping track of time, and Forrest didn’t volunteer anything. They were all exhausted from days of too little sleep and non-stop running, and as people fell asleep, Igloo found herself nodding off. She rested her head on Essie.

  Igloo woke to a bump and a lurch. The ground was rough under the vehicle’s tires. Finally, the ride smoothed out, and they stopped.

  Forrest opened the door, and everyone followed her out of the van.

  They were inside a concrete structure. Forrest ushered them down a hallway. The place was bare concrete and metal everywhere. Some sort of industrial building, Igloo guessed, but she couldn’t surmise more than that.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “No questions about the place,” Forrest said. “Just work.”

  She opened a door and let them into a large room. There were generic PC workstations on a row of gunmetal desks. The near side of the room had coffee, sandwiches, and deli salads laid out on tables. A collapsible partition at the far end partially obscured a row of cots already made up with bedding.

  “You do your thing, I’ll do mine,” Forrest said. She made to leave, but then she looked around at the rest of the team.

  Igloo followed her gaze. Everyone looked dead tired, angry, and disillusioned.

  Forrest put her hands on her hips and turned to address everyone. “You’ve all been through a lot. You’re exhausted, you’re scared, you’re divided—angry at Igloo. But there’s one thing I’ve got to tell you. That video you saw of Igloo and Essie was one hundred percent a manipulation job, targeted at the eight of you engineers. Nobody else in the world gives a damn about Igloo’s credibility except you all. Some faction within the government edited that video, released it, and orchestrated mass media coverage, all for the sole purpose of sowing dissent. If you let them succeed, they win. I don’t know Igloo or Essie, but what two consenting adults choose to do on their own is their business. Stay focused on the goal: Get your software out there in the world. Fulfill Angie’s vision.”