The Last Iota

by Robert Kroese

  “But you told him where we were,” I said.

  “Yes,” Olivia replied. “I had to, so that he would trust me.”

  “Why did you need him to trust you?” I asked.

  “Because if he didn’t,” Olivia said, pulling a folded sheet of paper from her purse, “I would never have been able to get my hands on this.” She handed the paper to Keane.

  Keane unfolded it, and I saw shock come over his face. I got up and looked over his shoulder. What I saw was nine rows of tiny marks.

  “These are the codes from the other coins?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” Olivia said.

  “Then Canaan really does have all the coins,” I said. “So we’re screwed.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Keane.

  Olivia nodded. “Gerard seems to have been a little overconfident. He’s got all the numbers, but he doesn’t know how to use them. Of course, his primary goal was always to prevent someone else from using them, not to use them himself.”

  “So if we can figure out how to use them ourselves,” I said, “we’re back in the game.”

  Keane shot a puzzled glance at me. “That’s one way to put it, I suppose.” He turned to Olivia. “How did you manage to get this from him?”

  “I made a copy while Gerard was in the shower,” Olivia said. Keane raised his eyebrow at her. She just shrugged. “Gerard has a thing for Selah. I made use of it.”

  I shuddered. Olivia was definitely cut from the same cloth as Selah.

  Keane seemed skeptical. “So you sleep with him and suddenly he trusts you with his top-secret papers, just like that?”

  Olivia sighed. “Is the cross-examination really necessary?” she asked. “I’m here. I have the codes. What does it matter?”

  “It matters because you already double-crossed us once,” I said. “We don’t trust you.”

  Olivia took a seat on my bed. “Fair enough,” she said. “I suppose I have to tell you everything, then.”

  “Just the high points will do,” said Keane. “Starting with who you really are.”

  “My name is Olivia Fiore. But I have all the memories of Selah Fiore, up until about two weeks ago, anyway. I’m her clone.”

  “And the stuff about being a college student?” I said.

  “Pure fiction. A cover story I memorized. Or that Selah memorized, I suppose. This stuff gets a bit confusing. As far as I know, I have no false memories implanted. Only Selah’s actual memories of devising a cover story about her estranged daughter.”

  “Very good,” said Keane. “I suspected as much. What did Gerard Canaan offer you?”

  “A chance to live,” Olivia replied.

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  “Meaning that I’m dying, Mr. Fowler. I have maybe six months to live.”

  “Because of the accelerated aging,” Keane said. “Canaan told you he had a cure?”

  “That’s right,” said Olivia.

  “But you didn’t believe him.”

  “Gerard did his homework. Three years ago he bought a Brazilian biotech company called Aviro, apparently in a bid for leverage against Selah. Aviro has recently developed a way to override the body’s natural aging process by injecting the subject with a customized virus. Trials with test subjects have been very promising.”

  “This sounds like the sort of thing Selah—that is, the sort of thing you would have been aware of,” Keane said.

  “Yes,” said Olivia. “Aviro would seem to have been a likely target for acquisition by Selah, assuming she was aware of their work.”

  “And was she?” I asked.

  “Selah had a spy inside the company who provided her with some of Aviro’s research. She had this research evaluated by the scientists at her research facility, the Tannhauser Institute. Their consensus was that Aviro’s virus-based aging solution was incompatible with the accelerated-aging process used by Selah’s clones.”

  “Incompatible how?” asked Keane.

  “The accelerated-aging process Tannhauser uses on its clones is essentially a virus as well. Dynamic reprogramming of the subject’s DNA. Injecting a Tannhauser clone with the Aviro virus would overload the body’s immune system, killing the subject within days.”

  “So Canaan offered you a cure you knew would kill you.”

  “Right,” said Olivia. “Of course, he didn’t know that. So I played along, acting like I was willing to help him in return for the cure.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this?” asked Keane. “Why the ruse?”

  “Because I have Selah’s memories,” Olivia said. “Including her memories of you.”

  “You mean you remember trying to kill us,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Olivia. “I could argue it wasn’t really me, but I had no reason to think you would trust me.”

  “But you expect us to trust you now,” I said.

  Olivia shrugged. “I think that you want to get Gwen back, and you don’t trust Canaan. And I think you need my help.”

  “What do you want, Olivia?” Keane asked.

  “I want to preserve my legacy. Flagship Media and everything else I—that is, that Selah has built. If Keane is right about the code, Canaan is a threat to that legacy. He’s already taken over half the DZ, and his possession of the iota code is a threat to the global financial system.”

  “Is that all?” Keane asked.

  “No,” said Olivia. “I want revenge on Canaan. For murdering Selah. In the end, the rest of this is just business, but I take Selah’s murder personally, for reasons I’m sure you can imagine.”

  Keane nodded, apparently satisfied. I still didn’t trust her, but I figured I’d follow Keane’s lead this time. If he thought Olivia could still be of use to us, I didn’t see any harm in letting her stick around. It wasn’t like we had anything left to lose.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Now if you’ve finished your interrogation,” said Olivia, “I’m hoping you have some thoughts about those numbers, Mr. Keane.”

  Keane went back to studying the numbers. “Hmm,” he said. “Looking at the rest of the codes, there does seem to be a pattern.”

  “There does?” I asked. To me, they just looked like random chicken scratches.

  Keane grabbed a pen from the desk. He made a small tick mark just above a blank spot on the first row. Then he moved to the right slightly and made another mark. He did this several more times, leaving a series of equally spaced marks, each of them over a blank spot in the series. Then he moved to the next row, doing the same thing. I began to see what he was doing: each row started with a series of fifty or so lines with no gaps between them. These were just unnotched reeds. Then there was a series of lines that were broken at seemingly random intervals by one or more spaces. But with Keane’s pen marks, I could see that the intervals were not quite random.

  “There’s a gap every eight reeds,” I said.

  “Right,” said Keane. “The pattern suggests the sequences are composed of octets, each octet storing exactly one byte of data. Each byte has a value ranging from zero to two hundred fifty-five. In the early days of computing, all standard keyboard characters could be represented by a number in this range.” Keane tapped at his comm and brought up a table of alphanumeric characters. He transcribed the code while we watched, writing the result next to the tick marks. When he was done, each row had a word and a five-digit number next to it. It looked like gibberish to me.

  “What order are these codes in?” Keane asked.

  “I think Gerard made them in the order of the serial numbers,” said Olivia.

  “Hmm,” replied Keane. “If there’s a message here, it’s scrambled or encoded.” He grabbed a pad of stationery from the desk and wrote the first word along with the corresponding five digits on a sheet. He tore the sheet off and wrote the second word and its five digits on the next sheet. He continued this process until he had a stack of nine sheets, each with a word and a number on it. He got up from the chair and spread the sheets out on my
bed.

  They looked like this:

  the 33842 are 43713 one 80465

  up 91482 down 53574 and 17190

  path 58364 and 36044 the 36145

  “Each number has five digits,” I said. “Could be ZIP codes. Are the words related to the numbers somehow?”

  “Not that I can discern,” said Keane. “I believe they’re two separate codes. Several of the words appear to be related to physical directions. I suspect that if we could determine the correct order, they might tell us how to use the numeric code.”

  Keane shuffled the words around so they read:

  the up and down one are the path

  That clearly didn’t please him, so he tried again, putting the are in front like it was a question:

  are the one path up and the down

  After several iterations like this, he gave up on that line of pursuit. Next he tried:

  the path up and down are the one and

  Unhappy with this, he switched a few words:

  the up and down path are one and the

  “It seems like it’s missing a word,” I said, showcasing my viselike grasp of the situation.

  “Yes, it does,” said Keane, picking up his notebook from beside him. He tapped a flurry of keystrokes, then leaned back, regarding the display and nodding slowly. “It’s a quote from Heraclitus,” he said. “‘The path up and down are one and the same.’”

  “Rachel Stuil’s namesake,” I said.

  “But we’re missing the word same,” Olivia said. “And the number that goes along with it. Are you sure the words aren’t related to the numbers? Maybe if you run the word through some kind of algorithm, you get the corresponding number. So if we can figure out what that algorithm is, we can apply it to the word same and get the missing number.”

  “It’s a possibility,” said Keane, “but I’m having a hard time imagining what that algorithm would look like. Why would a two-letter word and a four-letter word both produce a five-digit number? It just feels off. Also, why would we need nine instances of the algorithm to identify it? If we could figure it out from nine, why not eight? No, I think the association of the words to the numbers is arbitrary.”

  “So what other explanation is there?” I asked.

  “Canaan is still missing a coin,” said Olivia.

  Keane nodded, setting down the notepad on the table and getting to his feet. “That would be my hypothesis.”

  I stared at him. “There’s a tenth coin?”

  “A zeroth coin,” said Keane. “Programmers tend to number from zero, which would allow him to stick with the single-digit serial number. I’m willing to bet the last iota has a serial number of zero.”

  “But only nine were auctioned off.”

  “Yes. The zeroth coin was never released. It’s probably still in the hands of the creator of the coins. The trickster.”

  “So we have to go find Ed Casters in Costa Rica?”

  “Something like that,” Keane said. “Olivia, do you know where the Minotaur servers are located?”

  “Of course,” Olivia said. “In the Empathix building in Riverside.”

  “Good,” Keane said. “I’m going to need you to go there.”

  “You want me to break into the Empathix building?” asked Olivia.

  “You don’t need to break in. As far as their security systems are concerned, you’re Selah Fiore. Go to the server room, locate the Minotaur server. Give me remote access and leave. I’ll write a patch allowing me to remotely administer Minotaur.”

  “What’s this about, Keane?” Olivia asked. “What does this have to do with finding someone in Costa Rica?”

  Keane glanced at me. I could tell he was trying to figure out how little he could get away with telling Olivia.

  “I’m not running your errand for you unless you tell me the plan,” said Olivia.

  I shrugged at Keane. “Whatever it takes to get Gwen back alive,” I said.

  Keane nodded. “Ed Casters is not in Costa Rica. At least not any more than Fowler was in Mendocino earlier today.”

  “You think he’s still in L.A.?” I asked.

  “I think he’s hiding in the DZ, just like Gwen was. Probably took off when the Project Maelstrom people started disappearing. He was never officially part of the team, but Canaan probably would have tracked him down. So he fled to the DZ. He lives in a virtual world anyway; might as well be in the DZ as anywhere else.”

  “Do you know where in the DZ?”

  “I have a pretty good guess. One of the LAFF safe houses.”

  “But Canaan was part of LAFF,” Olivia said. “Wouldn’t he know to look there?”

  “Not if Ed Casters’s hideout wasn’t on the safe house list,” Keane said. “LAFF bought these properties or secured long-term leases, and made sure to locate them in places that were unlikely to be perceived as desirable to criminals or warlords. Pockets of calm in the maelstrom, you might say. Casters worked on the algorithm for identifying these pockets. There were maybe two dozen of them, altogether. One day, a few weeks after the leases had all been signed, Casters messages me and says he made a mistake. The algorithm was a little off. He sends me a new one, and one of the locations we’d selected no longer qualifies. So we removed it from the official list. I thought it was funny at the time; I mean an algorithm like that isn’t usually ‘a little off.’ It either works or it doesn’t. But I had bigger problems to worry about at the time. We had plenty of other safe houses identified, and it’s not like LAFF was short on money.”

  “So,” I said, “LAFF owns a building in the DZ that Canaan doesn’t know about.”

  “He could find out if he dug a little,” said Keane, “but why would he? And even if he did, LAFF probably owns hundreds of properties. Unless he somehow knew that this particular property had once been identified as a safe house, he’d have no reason to suspect Casters was there. Casters was never even supposed to know what the algorithm was for, but obviously he figured it out.”

  “And you know where this safe house is?”

  “I do,” said Keane. “It’s right in the middle of the DZ. Just north of Compton. The safe house is an early Cold War–era bomb shelter underneath an office building.”

  I groaned. “Keane, there’s no way I can get to Compton right now. If it’s not an active war zone, it’s going to be crawling with Green River mercenaries. I wouldn’t get a hundred yards inside the DZ.”

  “I have an idea for that,” Keane said.

  I was pretty sure I knew what his idea was, and that I was going to hate it. “Please don’t tell me you’re going to send me back into the DZ posing as a Green River merc,” I said. “It was pure luck I got out last time. If I go into the DZ wearing Conroy’s gear, their system will ID me as Conroy, and since Conroy is dead, that’s going to be kind of a red flag.”

  “The system will do what the system was programmed to do. We’ve just got to alter its instructions.”

  “Easy as that, huh?” I said.

  Keane shrugged. “I’ve got the source code for the Minotaur platform. Olivia has Selah Fiore’s fingerprints and retinas, which will get her into Empathix server room.”

  Olivia thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it. If that’s what it takes to get the missing coin. I don’t blame you two for not trusting me, but in this case our interests are aligned.”

  “What good will it do to hack Minotaur?” I asked. “What are you going to do, make all the Green River guys go blind?”

  “We don’t want to be too obvious,” said Keane. “They’ll have protocols for dealing with a situation where Minotaur has been compromised. Best-case scenario if they find out, they’ll just shut it down. Worst case, they’ve got a way to automatically restart the system with the last known secure configuration and lock down any changes. Also, if they realize they’ve been hacked, they’ll track me to the nearest network node and send mercenaries to surround this building.”

  “Okay, so no mass blindne
ss,” I said. “What can you get away with?”

  “For starters,” Keane said, “I’m going to add a new user to the database and reassign Conroy’s helmet. As far as anybody in Green River is concerned, you’ll be just another new transfer to help out with DZ pacification. Beyond that, I can’t make any promises.”

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Olivia left shortly thereafter. She was going to drive to the Empathix building and give Keane remote access to the server. Once she did that, Keane would need some time to upload his patch and add me to the database. I decided a nap was in order; it was going to be a long night. I was awoken half an hour later by my comm chirping. It was April.

  “Hey,” I said groggily into my comm.

  “Hi, Blake,” April replied. Her voice sounded terse and worried. “I’m at the FBI building in Beverly Hills. My friend Deacon Walthers has been running interference for me with the LAPD, but they’ve gone over his head. I’m going to have to give them something concrete soon, or I’m going to be sharing a cell with your girlfriend.”

  “Keane and I are working on something,” I said. “We just need a few more hours.”

  “Really?” April replied. “Because it kind of sounded like I woke you up from a nap.”

  “Tactical catnap,” I said. “Give me a second to confer with Keane.”

  Keane was still working at his notebook. There was no sign of Olivia.

  “Time to suit up, Fowler,” said Keane. “The patch is almost done.”

  I muted my comm. “The feds are going to turn April over to the LAPD,” I said. “We need to give them something.”

  Keane looked up from his notebook and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “All right,” he said. “Have her tell them everything.”

  “Everything?” I said. “Is that wise?”

  “Everything but the location of the last iota,” said Keane. “That’s our ace in the hole. We agree to give them the coin in exchange for dropping all charges against us.”

  “Seems like you’re betting pretty heavily that the feds will actually care about the iota flaw.”