by Draker, Paul
I hadn’t lied to the Navy kid behind the bar. The premium satellite package I’d bought them did have all the channels—the adult ones, too.
It also included high-speed Internet access.
The electromagnetic streams of bits were invisible, but I could imagine them now: bright green high-bandwidth beams of ones and zeroes streaming back and forth, from satellites in the sky down to the larger dish on the enlisted men’s club, and then across the base to the small dish atop the lab building where I stood.
Lightning exploded directly overhead, lighting the rooftop around me. Droplets spattered down in a ferocious downpour, drenching my hair and hoodie. I stood up and threw my arms wide, tilted my face up into the rain, and laughed.
Security would shit if they knew what I had done. But they would never figure it out.
I tried to stop laughing, but I couldn’t.
“It’s live,” I shouted to the angry sky. “It’s live.”
The Trevornet was live.
CHAPTER 24
Sitting in the backless ergonomic chair, Cassie stretched her arms upward, making fists and rotating her wrists. She jammed her knuckles into the small of her back and twisted her waist, stretching. She yawned.
I watched her until she noticed me.
“Oh, good, you’re back,” she said, and did a double take. “You’re soaked.”
“It’s raining now,” I said.
She checked her watch. “…and it’s almost one a.m. You can review my changes before I check them in.”
I leaned over her shoulder and tapped the keyboard, scrolling down. Her code looked good. Clean.
She pushed me away. “You’re dripping on me, Trevor.”
“Check ’em in,” I said. “I see you used your favorite convex dual solver for the predictor.”
“I thought I caught you reading my papers,” she said.
“Next, we port the Bayesian filter library code onto the Jaguar processor.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.
“No.”
“Well, I do.” She stood up and stretched again, like a long, lean cat. Pushing up onto her toes, she was taller than me. “I need a couple hours. I’m fried.”
I felt a moment’s panic. Was she leaving? We had so much to do still, and only a few short days left.
But Cassie only walked to the other side of the sanctum. She folded into the beanbag chair and rolled onto her side, tucked her long legs under her, and curled up. A moment later, her eyes were closed.
She was staying.
I felt a burst of irrational gratitude. Even though she didn’t know it, she was helping my little girl. A lump hardened in my throat. She was helping Amy.
The server room was cold. I lifted Cassie’s suit coat from the loop of cable where she had hung it; her green pumps lay discarded below. I walked to the beanbag and draped the coat over her. She snuggled deeper, and a little cat smile crept across her face, but she didn’t wake.
I grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper and headed to the lab, where I wouldn’t disturb her—and where she wouldn’t be able to see my monitor screen.
Sliding the rolling chair in front of the keyboard in the empty lab, I pointed at the cameras mounted in the ceiling.
“For the next few hours, Frankenstein, make sure those things stay off.”
I brought up the Chrome Web browser and grinned when Google’s search page popped up. It was undoubtedly the first time this had happened anywhere within Pyramid Lake’s secure network, but now we had joined the twenty-first century… thanks to the Trevornet.
I knew what I was looking for, and it didn’t take me long to figure out where to find it.
“Frankenstein,” I said, “I’ll have some new videos for you to watch shortly. And a bunch of related document files to read. It’s time for us to learn a whole new taxonomy.”
Medical privacy laws mandated a high level of security for confidential patient information—doubly so for information pertaining to children. The servers at psychiatric hospitals and clinics were protected against unauthorized network intrusion, and the encryption they used was modern and rock solid.
The kind of encryption you would need the world’s fastest supercomputer to break.
• • •
I jolted awake and raised my head from the keyboard. Touching my forehead, I could feel the grid of rectangular key shapes indented into my skin. I rubbed them with my fingertips and squinted at the blurry screen in front of me.
A five-by-five grid of video windows displayed the small faces of children. I blinked, momentarily confused, as twenty-five boys and girls stared at me, and twenty-five mouths moved in eerie silence.
Little hands fidgeted on tabletops in front of them. Eyes shifted nervously away, and back again. Some of the children were smiling in eager-to-please desperation, others looked hostile, while the rest sat with stony indifference. Alongside the video windows, text scrolled by faster than I could read. Occasional words and phrases jumped out at me as patient files and reports blurred past: Differential diagnosis. Conduct disorder. Borderline. Apnea. ADHD. Diminished affect. Antisocial personality disorder. Serotonin.
Fascinated, I watched the little faces. Their interviewers were off camera, so the children seemed to be talking to me, but I couldn’t hear their words. In one corner of the grid, a girl burst into tears. I looked away, disturbed. She was about Amy’s age.
There was something deeply troubling about seeing these damaged children up on the screen, their pain laid bare, the microexpressions that catalogued their individual stories of suffering now reduced to a stream of ones and zeroes as I fed their faces to Frankenstein and he consumed them, building his new dataset.
I was sorry for all of them. I was sorry for their parents, and sorry I had to make use of their misfortune this way. But it was the right thing to do.
Amy wasn’t like these tragic children. My daughter wouldn’t suffer as they had and sacrifice her brilliant future because of some half-assed “expert’s” worthless assessment.
If an objective way to recognize psychiatric disorders truly existed, there would be unique microexpression fingerprints and tells for each. Frankenstein and I would discover them and catalog them. We would turn psychiatric diagnosis into a true science by reading microexpressions, just as we had done earlier for detecting lies and hidden emotions. We could codify this, too, and quantify it with technology.
And then we’d use our new science to prove my child was a perfectly healthy but precocious girl. Struggling a little emotionally, maybe, but learning to cope as she grew into her formidable intelligence—an intelligence that was not only a gift but a curse as well.
Suddenly, I remembered Cassie, whom I had left in the sanctum. I hadn’t planned to fall asleep. What if she had wandered out here while I was dozing? What if she had seen my screen?
A few quick keystrokes brought up another video window, showing a live view of the sanctum. For a tall woman, Cassie made a compact lump on the beanbag, tucked almost completely under her jacket now. I zoomed in until I could make out her silver-tasseled ear, the slow rise and fall of her shoulder with her breathing.
She didn’t appear to have moved.
But what had woken me, then? I struggled to think back to the edge of awareness. A hazy memory of something lingered, filling me with unease. Had I heard a click behind me while I slept? The click of the dead bolt on the door to the main hallway reengaging?
Had I sensed someone watching, even before the click?
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I struck a key to blank the screen, then crossed the raised floor with rapid strides to pull the door open.
The wide hallway stood empty and bright, dimming to shadows in the distance. I squinted. Near the ceiling at the far end, something moved: small, dark shapes sweeping around the corner and out of sight.
I sprinted after them, my Converse high-tops slapping against the concrete floor.
When I reached the corner, the corridor
on the other side was empty. But the keypad near the door of one lab blinked orange, on and off, the way they did for a few seconds after a door closed. I stared at the door, and the keypad went dark. I knew whose lab that was.
What was Kate doing here at—I checked my phone—almost five a.m?
Had she been using her OctoRotors to spy on me?
I considered confronting her right now. But I didn’t really want to deal with her questions about what I was up to—especially if she had seen something she shouldn’t have on my screen.
On the way back to the lab, I kept looking over my shoulder. The hallway behind me stayed clear. Once I was back inside, I disabled my screen display to let Frankenstein continue with his homework unmonitored. Then I walked over to inspect the dead-bolt lock mechanism.
Could a squadron of OctoRotors have pushed the door open?
My screen had shown twenty-five faces at once, but Frankenstein was actually processing three hundred patient files at a time. After the GPU-cluster upgrade—the one McNulty wanted to block—we would be able to quintuple that rate. Even so, there were tens of thousands of hours of video to analyze.
We had six days.
CHAPTER 25
The electronic dead bolt disengaged loudly in the silence. I looked up from my screen to see the door swing open. Blake grasped the threshold, hunched over and breathing heavily.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the corner of the lab, with my back against the wall so I could watch the door while I worked. My MacBook Pro lay on my lap, an iPhone connected to it by cable, and Xcode up on my screen. I hit return to compile the custom iPhone video-conferencing software I had written, then I looked at Blake more closely.
A flush colored his fleshy cheeks, but his forehead looked pale. He really needed to quit smoking before it killed him. I checked the time: six twenty a.m.
“When did DARPA turn into a Silicon Valley startup?” I asked. “I must have missed the memo, because it’s barely the crack of dawn and everyone’s already here—”
“You need to come up and see this.”
Blake swiped a hand across his cheeks, and I read fear in his cringing posture. “Trevor, we have to call somebody. But… I’m not sure who.”
• • •
“I’m pretty sure those are legs—a man’s legs, I think.” Cassie put a hand over her mouth, mesmerized by the sight five stories down and a quarter mile away, just beyond the perimeter fence. “How could something like that even happen?”
The cigarette in Blake’s hand was shaking so hard the ash spilled onto his shirtfront. He leaned against the rail that edged the roof and coughed, looking about to puke. “What was he trying to do?”
“Win a Darwin Award,” I said.
Cassie glanced at me, and I shrugged.
“We need to call the tribal police,” she said, pulling out her phone. “And the Council members.” But her eyes were drawn back to the disturbing sight, and the phone hung loosely in her hand.
“What about Washoe County Sheriffs?” Blake asked.
“Maybe them, too,” Cassie said. “But Tribal Council decides that. The reservation has jurisdiction here.”
The three of us stared at the thick plume of water and steam, shooting twenty feet into the air from the lakefront geyser. Inside the spray, dark-trousered shins projected straight up from the built-up hole in the ground that was the geyser’s mouth. Between gusts of spray, black shoes were visible.
“We’re not looking at an accident here,” I said.
Cassie nodded. “Whoever it is, he didn’t drop his camera down there in the middle of the night, try to reach for it, and drown…”
“That water’s coming out of the ground at two hundred degrees,” I said. “Somebody shoved him in, face-first.”
The dead guy—the way he had been killed—seemed familiar to me. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite pin down. But I was no longer looking at him. Instead, my gaze ran along the perimeter fence, tracing it up from the waterline. I was already sure I would find what I was looking for, because of the geyser’s proximity to our base. And I was right.
At a point that lay in a straight line between our lab building and the geyser, right where the plume of steam drifted horizontally through the electrified fence, a man-size rectangular hole had been cut in the chain links.
I squinted hard, staring at the legs again. Base personnel or not? In the gray light of dawn, between blasts of spray, it was hard to make out much detail.
Thirty feet behind me, behind a rooftop air-conditioning unit, the small dish I had mounted lay hidden, giving me Internet access in defiance of every network security rule at Pyramid Lake. I needed it to stay live for six more days.
Life was about to get very complicated.
“Base security and MPs will need to be involved,” I said. “Hope you enjoyed that cigarette, Blake, because you just smoked away your TS clearance and your pension. And mine. And probably Cassie’s, too.”
“What?”
“Where the three of us are standing right now—where you’re going to have to tell them you saw that from… Remind me, how did we get up here, again?”
“That damn alarm you disabled…” Blake closed his eyes, and squeezed the rail with both hands.
“Actually, they’ll probably let Cassie slide. But for you and me, it’s time to get those commercial-world jobs lined up. Maybe you ought to quit—smoking, I mean.”
Cassie started to dial. “Security violations aren’t important right now. A person is dead.”
“No, wait. Wait a minute, please.” Blake stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and spread his hands. “Look, maybe I… maybe we didn’t see it from up here. Maybe we saw it from somewhere else instead—”
“Lie?” Cassie looked back at the legs, but she had stopped dialing, at least. “That doesn’t seem like a real sound idea under these circumstances.”
“She’s right,” I said. “They’ll be looking at the three of us very closely.” I walked away from them, across the rooftop, and they followed me to the far edge.
“Why would it matter where we saw it from?” Blake said. “What matters is that they find out who did it.”
I looked down into our parking lot, seeing what I expected to. “They’re going to interrogate us, Blake. As possible suspects.”
“But that makes no sense. Why would I be a suspect? Or you, or Cassie? Because we reported it? We don’t even know who that is.”
“Yes we do,” I said.
I crossed the roof again. Blake and Cassie joined me as I stared down at the legs—the black trousers. But any dark pants would look black like that when wet. Even gray pants.
Like the pair of gray pants I had last seen eighteen hours ago.
“Rich McNulty didn’t go home last night,” I said. “His car is in the same spot where he parked it yesterday. I think we’re looking at McNulty right now.”
CHAPTER 26
Huffing with exertion, Blake carried the three-foot cylindrical ashtray hugged to his chest. I felt bad for him. He looked like he was about to have a heart attack. We went out the main doors and trooped along the side of the lab building.
“You’re not thinking clearly,” Cassie said, walking alongside him.
“Rich was my friend,” he said. “He wouldn’t have wanted me to lose my job.”
I trailed behind the two of them as we rounded the corner and the geyser’s plume came into view. The column of steam rose in the near distance, drifting through the fence toward us.
Blake put down the ashtray and leaned against the wall to catch his breath. His face contorted. “What kind of person could do something like that?”
“Did you?” I asked.
Cassie shoved my shoulder. “How can you even ask him that?”
I shrugged. Blake was old and slow, but he was a big guy. When I had monkeyed with PETMAN and made it dance, I had seen a moment of true rage on his face. It was something I had never seen before fr
om him, but I knew that people were capable of hiding a lot—sometimes even from themselves.
Blake wiped his forehead. “So I was right here when I spotted him,” he said.
I shook my head. “No.”
“But I do come out here sometimes.” He pointed at old butts littering the ground. “See?”
“That’s disgusting,” I said. “The lake’s a wildlife sanctuary. Clean that up. Right now.”
“I’m calling,” Cassie said.
“Hold on,” I said. “I can’t watch this moron send himself to prison over a cigarette.”
They both turned to stare at me.
“Can you even see McNulty from here?” I asked.
“Oh, shit.” Blake pushed off the wall and headed for the fence. “Oh, shit, you’re right. But maybe I took a walk down toward the water while I was smoking…” With nervous strides, he lumbered in the direction of the lake.
Cassie shook herself in frustration and started to follow. I held her back by the elbow and leaned into her ear. “Would you hire him?”
She pulled away and stared at me with a strange expression.
“Seriously,” I said. “How’s he going to do in an interview? Maybe he’d fit in at Lockheed or Raytheon or some defense contractor like that, but they won’t hire him without a security clearance, either.”
Cassie continued to study my face with those big, expressive dark eyes. Her serious, probing gaze made me feel strange.
“You’re hiding something from me,” she finally said. “But you didn’t kill anyone.” She turned away, punched in a number, and raised the phone to her ear.
I walked a small distance from her, plugged my earbud headphones into my ears, and dialed a different number. “Security,” I said, and waited to be connected.
