by Martha Carr
He sat up and propped his elbows on the desk, plopping his chin onto the top of his hands. There was so much to do but he was having trouble getting started.
He missed Juliette. It had been months since he had seen her last and at the time they were too busy trying to outrun George Clemente’s goons to find any time to be alone. Besides, Trey and Will never caught the hint and gave them some privacy. All he wanted to do was hold her hand.
He slid open the thin drawer in the middle of the desk and reached into the back for a small wooden box shaped like a butterfly. Juliette had made it for him out of different pieces of wood and it was full of small, hidden drawers. Inside one of them was a bracelet of engraved agate beads Helmut had brought back for him from Tibet.
“They’re called dzi beads,” Helmut had said, “and are thought to give protection to whoever wears them. Like an amulet of some kind. I thought you might like to give them to someone special.” He had gently elbowed Ned in the ribs when he said it.
“Don’t know when I’m going to get the chance,” he said, fingering the thin carved black and white beads. He slid the drawer shut in the butterfly box and reached into the drawer till he could feel the back and gently replace it.
All he was feeling lately was frustration over everything. The more he found out about Management and the Circle and how much they controlled everyone’s lives, the more he wanted to do something about it.
He had told his mother he wanted to bring them both down, dismantle them and she had gently put her hand on his shoulder and told him that was a complex problem that would take time to solve.
Ned kicked the wall underneath his desk leaving a dirty imprint of his sneaker.
“I think something can be done about it now,” he whispered. He sat up straighter and started typing.
The wireframe he had been building with Daniel Kozak was coming together. They were spending all of their time testing it for structural weaknesses and asking other members of the Butterfly Project to build on top of what was there and share the information securely.
The information from the Apollo network was coming in faster every day. The entire thing was set up with open code, at least open to the network, and already others had taken his initial ideas and come up with enhancements to make the system faster, more secure and break things into categories.
Forums were springing up and people were sharing ideas and building on them at an ever-increasing pace.
“There has to be some way to organize all of this even more efficiently,” he muttered. He typed the question into a forum and changed monitors.
On the other monitor was the side project he was only sharing with a few people like Jake out in Montana, and Daniel, George Clemente’s son who had taken off for Montana and was in hiding with Jake and his family. Jake told his dad Daniel’s real identity but left out the part about Daniel stealing all of Clemente’s diaries. No one knew about that detail except Ned and Juliette, and Will and Trey.
They all knew that once Clemente realized the notebooks were gone he would use every resource to try and track down the mysterious man who appeared in the security feed.
It was important for Daniel to be as off the grid as they could get him, for now, and Mark Whiting had set up his home to be invisible to the online world and even difficult for visitors to approach up on Haskill Mountain.
Ned looked at the spreadsheet on the second monitor that wasn’t connected to anything and had no browser installed. It was an airgap that could give him the chance to work out the details of how to spend the nearly billion dollars and dismantle the two old organizations all at the same time. But it would still take some input, mainly from Daniel.
Ned had created an account on Pastebin that was only accessible to Daniel and together they were sharing bits and pieces of a way to distribute the money to pay for college for anyone in the Butterfly Network as well as set up different anonymous scholarships throughout the world.
Even on Pastebin Ned was concerned about someone finding out what they were concocting. It was such a bold idea. Not the money, so much. Pastebin was full of deals just as large and another billion dollars passing through a lot of different hands wouldn’t attract but so much attention.
In the end, Ned knew the money would be useful to a lot of people but not have any lasting effect on the survival of Management or even the Circle. The two groups, as a whole, would barely notice. If there was any effect it would be slow in coming and with so many variables it was hard to say what would be the outcome.
He was guessing it was one of the reasons George Clemente hadn’t hunted him down and taken it back, yet.
But Ned had another, bolder idea that was going to be a lot harder to pull off and with no way of knowing if it would work, and if it did how much destruction it would cause in the long run. That was the idea he was sharing in bits of code too small to spell it out for anyone who might come upon them.
He looked at what he had managed to figure out so far and realized it had a chance of working.
Ned was creating code that could eliminate, just for a day, any kind of debt all over the world. Just the thought of what he was attempting to do made it hard for him to catch his breath. The plan was waking him up at night out a dull, dark dream where everyone he cared about was just out of reach. He’d stare at the ceiling wondering if he should leave well enough alone.
But then, the adults would gather and talk about what George Clemente had done lately and Ned would watch the suspicious side glances that everyone was sharing, not quite trusting each other. And he’d think about his Uncle Tom who had to stay away in order to protect the Circle.
Or worse, his Uncle Harry who had seen his entire life get twisted around inside of a cause until one day he gave his life in defense of it. Executed at the hands of George Clemente trying to protect a relic.
His mother had left out that detail but his grandmother told him, saying he deserved the whole picture. Harriet seemed to get his new idea that transparency was the only way to break the back of the old way of doing things.
Still, here he sat, typing away on an airgap computer, and only one other soul knew he was trying to bring down structures that had been in place for some of them for hundreds of years. It made him understand his mother a little bit more even if at times he still felt like she thought she was seeing a child.
Ned sat back, trying to take in the scope of what he was creating on the large screen. Each layer of the spreadsheet showed a different subset of institutions that would need to be affected.
It would take a virus that recognized key words to know where to start eating the data but do it so slowly at first so that no one noticed till a worldwide critical mass was achieved. Firewalls would have to be violated as well and the virus able to seep in undetected.
Billions of pieces of data would have to be erased from every possible kind of source. Fortunes would evaporate overnight and for just a moment there would be a level playing field.
But in the next moment, when everyone started to realize what had happened, Ned knew the chaos would begin. The information that supported mortgages, and medical debt, and college loans, and large loans between countries, and credit card debt that ran in the millions and supported entire industries would all be gone.
Whatever leverage different companies and countries used to create policy would have evaporated, along with their power. The same would be true of Management and to a lesser degree, the Circle.
No country, no company, no individual would feel obligated to make decisions based on what they owed.
If they could bring it to a critical place where all of it was gone and irretrievable then it could work. A baseline would be established and an enormous vacuum would be created, waiting to be filled. That was the last piece of the puzzle and would take even more contributors to come up with viable ideas.
He would have to trust the Apollo network and hold nothing back in order to have even a small chance at succeeding. He would have
to do what no one in Management or the Circle had ever been able to do and risk everything by trusting so many to see what could be built together.
And yet, he could see it was possible. The different bits of code that others had offered based on what they had seen were getting him excited.
“Next step, a test run,” he said, punching his fist in the air. He had been searching for days for a real-world place to try out the virus but before he could do that he needed to know the virus couldn’t be detected. There was too much at stake.
That was where Daniel had come up with a clever twist to let the Apollo network help out. Coders were building the most secure firewall they could come up with to detect any kind of intrusion.
“What are you doing?”
Ned startled and looked up to see his grandmother standing in the doorway, leaning on her cane. Joe, the bichon was standing next to her, panting loudly. Lately, he acted like he was more his grandmother’s friend, than Ned’s dog.
It was a sign of how focused he was on the project that he didn’t hear the inevitable tap, tap on the steps up to his crow’s nest of a room at the top of the house.
“I’m trying to create ways to break down a very sturdy firewall,” he said. He knew it was best to share what he could with his Grandmother Harriet than shut her out entirely. That would only make her dig further and she always had a way of coming up with the very information someone wanted to keep hidden. Ned always told her it was her super power.
“Here, let me get you a chair,” he said. “What are you doing all the way up here? I would have come down to you.”
It was late but Harriet was still dressed in a wool skirt and heavy cardigan with a gold add-a-bead necklace that hung down past her collarbone. Ned was already in the sweatpants and the black and gold VCU Rams t-shirt he liked to wear to bed.
“What’s the fun in that,” said Harriet, settling herself heavily into the one good overstuffed chair in Ned’s room. She ran her hand over the brown duct tape Ned had put over a hole in the armrest. He had made it poking the arm with a ballpoint pen over and over again, trying to solve a problem.
A move like that would have annoyed his mother till she said something to Harriet but Ned appreciated that she wasn’t asking him how it happened. Lately, he would get lost in a problem, mulling over the solution and feeling the pressure of what needed to be done. The anxiety had a way of coming out sideways and poking holes in all sorts of things.
“Besides,” said his grandmother, “you come downstairs and instantly a crowd gathers. This way, I get you all to myself. I’m a very selfish grandmother, you know,” she said, smiling with the slightly crooked grin she had since the stroke. Ned looked away. He didn’t like being reminded of how fragile she was and what it could mean. He was used to a grandmother that dressed up to go to the grocery store and was usually packing at least a small pistol in an expensive leather purse that would hang from her wrist.
Harriet looked back and forth at the two monitors. There was a spread sheet on one and on the other the flow of information was crawling, changing the figures at the bottom and adding in information. “Quite an enterprise you have here. Reminds me of your father. That’s right, I paid dear Norman a compliment,” she said, the crooked smile showing up again. She settled further back into the chair, emphasizing her small frame. “Humor me, what’s a firewall?”
“Well,” said Ned, curling up in the office chair, lacing his fingers around his knees. He was warming to the chance to explain to someone a benign part of what he was working on without having to explain any of the details of his plan. Keeping it all to himself was wearing on him.
“A firewall originally described the type of wall specifically designed and constructed to slow the potential spread of a fire,” he said, his hands working in front of him. Harriet was watching him closely, taking it all in and occasionally smiling but not interrupting the flow of words.
“Not quite sure when this term was created. Most of the online references has it back in the 1800's. On a car, the firewall is the part that sits in front of you in the car that separates the engine compartment from the passengers in the interior of the car, okay?” he said, waiting for his grandmother to nod that she was still following along.
“There are holes in the automotive firewall that allow the steering column, peddles, wiring, and other items to come through between the two sections. In computers, the firewall is a piece of software that has the capability to determine the types of communications into and out of a computer. You see, computers communicate on networks using different types of protocols and ports. Think of these like a type of message and a specific pipe,” said Ned, curling up his hand and looking through it at his grandmother, “through which the message is transferred.
“Many messages may be sent over many pipes between computers. The firewall’s job is to look at the allowable types of messages along with the correct pipes to ensure that these messages are passed along while non-allowable types are stopped from entering or leaving. The fewer message types that are allowed, along with only the pipes used to transfer those messages.”
“You are a very smart young man. I think you get that from me,” said Harriet, letting out a laugh as she pulled an embroidered handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the corner of her mouth.
“Mom says the same thing,” said Ned, spinning back toward the screens. He ran his hands through his hair making the curls stand up higher on the top.
He wanted to see if anyone had added on to his code yet for the virus but so far there were only small bits and pieces, like coded suggestions. Nothing solid that he could work with yet. He turned back around to his grandmother to see her pull out a small stack of photos from the pocket on her sweater.
“What do you have there?” he asked.
“A little bit of the reveal to the mystery of your family,” said Harriet, fanning out the pictures face up in her lap. Ned wheeled the chair over to get a better look.
Most of the pictures were black and white with scalloped edges and had the occasional crease through a portion. Some were in color but the colors looked faded or slightly washed out.
“Who are all of those people?” he asked, tilting his head to try and get a better look. “Is that you?” he asked, pointing to one of the photos. “Is that granddad? You look so young,” he said, peering closer at the small figures. “Wow,” he said, “is that Mom? Who’s that?”
Harriet held up the photo, tapping the tall man holding a little girl’s hand. “That is my father,” she said, smiling, “and that is not your mother. That’s me. It’s an old photo,” she said, batting at his hand. Ned noticed how the paper-thin skin on the back of her hand showed the veins underneath. He grasped her hand gently and felt the soft skin and thin, bony fingers that were just like his hands.
Joe came and settled down next to them, walking around in tight circles before finally settling down and curling up into a ball, slowly closing his eyes. Ned smiled, and rubbed Joe behind the ears for a moment.
“Those looks like ice skates,” said Ned, looking back at the picture.
“That’s right,” said Harriet. “That was when we lived in Chicago and we would go to Humboldt Park on the West side. The park stretched out as far as I could see and then some. Sometimes the men would line up on one side to race each other. It was all very thrilling. Those were easier days,” she said, letting out a heavy sigh.
“Before you had to pretend to be someone else?” asked Ned. Harriet’s head was bowed down looking at the photos and Ned could see the crown of hair that was almost white in neat pin curls near her face.
“That’s right,” she said, glancing up at him. For a moment, he could see the same girlish face as the photo in her hand. “I had such a wonderful time. In those days ice skating was an occasion to dress up and everyone came out wearing their best sweaters and coats and scarves. The mittens were mostly handmade and beautiful cables and colors.” Her voice went up in a lilt as she moved her hands th
rough the air in small waves.
Ned had never seen her so nostalgic.
“It must have been hard to hide all of this for so many years,” he said, as a heavy feeling of sadness crept up through his chest. “It’s like you were having to lie with every breath, every day of your life.”
“For a good cause,” said Harriet, letting the picture come to rest in her lap. “But the part I regretted most was how little history your mother, and then you actually had of the past. My past. Fortunately, there’s still a little time to rectify that. No time like the present to get started.”
Harriet pulled out another picture. She was a young girl standing on a wooden box in front of a large glass counter, smiling broadly.
“This was your great, great grandfather’s candy store. He owned quite a few shops in the small town where he lived in Louisiana. That’s right, you don’t know that part. My mother’s grandfather was actually Welsh, not German. He was such a successful businessman. His name was Albert Davies and he had this grand house with so many rooms and a porch that wrapped around nearly every side of the white house. It was wide enough to hold a dance and some nights my mother and all of her friends would make the men come out and spin them around a time or two. I loved watching them and sitting out under the stars. They were easier to see back then. Not so much light around and they’d be so bright in the sky.”
Ned slid out of the chair and settled on the floor by his grandmother.
“He would let me come into the store after school and get a piece of candy. Any kind I wanted. I was the princess of that store,” she said, her laughter came out as a tinkle in the air.
“Here’s another picture. That’s my chow, Buster Brown. Isn’t he beautiful?”
Harriet was holding a photo of herself as a young girl with a large, furry chow on the end of a leash. Harriet was wearing a wool coat and neat white socks with white leather MaryJane’s. She looked like a miniature version of who she was now. Neat as a pin and with a certain amount of careful and expensive affectation.
