Authors: John Scalzi
“It’s a little esoteric,” I said.
“Which is my
point,
” Tony said. “Chomsky is a language that has to be esoteric, because it’s interfacing directly with the brain.
“Now, a side effect of this is, because Chomsky allows so many different ways to tackle any one specific problem, programmers who are truly fluent in Chomsky end up developing their own voice. By which I mean they address goals and parameters in a way that’s idiosyncratic to them. If you spend any real time looking at the code, eventually you can tell who wrote it.”
“Like someone who writes novels.”
“Yeah, precisely,” Tony said. “Like one novelist puts in a lot of description while another one is all dialogue. Same thing. And like novelists, some Chomsky programmers are good, some are competent, and some suck. And if you’ve seen their code before, you can tell which programmer it is from the first line of code.”
He pointed to the code on display. “This is the code in Brenda Rees’s brain that’s variant from the latest point release and patching for the Ovid 6.4,” he said. He pulled up some more code. “Here’s the code of the software in Johnny Sani’s head. It reads the same. Whoever wrote Sani’s code wrote Rees’s code.”
He pulled up a third column of code. “This is code Hubbard wrote back in the day, when he was still pushing out patches and updates at Hubbard Systems,” he said. “Believe me when I say that if you ran all of this through the Chomsky equivalent of a semantic and grammatical analyzer, it would light up across the board. All of this was written by the same person. All of it was written by Lucas Hubbard.”
“Is that something we can use in a court of law?” Vann asked.
“You’d need a lawyer to tell you that,” Tony said. “But if you put me on the stand I would tell you, hell yeah, this is all the same guy.”
“Is that enough?” I asked Vann.
“To bring him in?” Vann asked. I nodded. “For what?”
“For killing Brenda Rees, for one,” I said. “For Johnny Sani, for another.”
“We don’t think he killed Rees,” Vann said. “We think Schwartz did. We still don’t have anything court-worthy connecting him to Sani, either.”
“Come on, Vann,” I said. “We know this is our guy.”
“We go in with what we have and Hubbard’s lawyers from Schwartz on down are going to blow our heads off,” Vann said. “And I know you don’t really need this job, Shane, but I kind of do. So, yes. Hubbard’s our man. Let’s make
absolutely sure
we can get him.” She turned to Tony. “What else you got.”
“Two more things,” Tony said. “The first is about Rees’s code.”
“What about it?” Vann said.
“It doesn’t bypass her long-term memory,” Tony said. “Either Hubbard couldn’t find a way to make it work, which is possible because the neural network layout is non-trivially different, or he decided not to waste his time because—” He paused.
“Because he didn’t plan on keeping her after he or Schwartz was done using her,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “And now you know why she was carrying around a grenade.”
“So she was aware the whole time,” Vann said. “Aware and awake and unable to stop her body from doing anything.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “And no way to get the client out of her head.”
“Fuck,” Vann said and turned away for a second. Tony looked over at me, confused.
Later,
I mouthed.
“You okay?” I asked Vann.
“If we go in to wheel out Hubbard’s body after all this is done, I’m going to need you to watch me very closely,” Vann said. “Otherwise I’m going to punt that asshole hard right in the balls.”
I grinned very widely. “That’s a promise,” I said.
Vann turned back to Tony. “What’s the second thing,” she said.
“Once I figured out how Hubbard hacked Rees’s brain I went back into Sani’s brain to see what things I missed before because I didn’t have context,” Tony said. “And I got this.” He scrolled very quickly through the code until he came up with a sizable chunk of it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I didn’t know at first,” Tony said. “Because it didn’t make any sense. What I think is that it repurposes part of the neural network into a relay.”
“A what?” Vann said.
“I know, right?” Tony said. “It’s a transmitter. It transmits the Integrator’s data signal, but not
into
the network. Instead it mimics the network.”
“Does it have to be the Integrator’s data signal?” Vann asked.
“What do you—” Tony stopped, apparently getting it. “Oooooooh,” he said.
“What?” I said. I was the only one in my own liminal space entirely left out.
“Fucking Hubbard,” Vann said. “We were asking why Johnny Sani was trying to integrate with Nicholas Bell. He wasn’t. He was acting as a goddamned relay station for Hubbard.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Then that means that when you were interrogating Bell—”
“It was
never
Bell,” Vann said. “It was Hubbard. It was
always
Hubbard. The bastard’s been playing us right from the start.”
“To get close to Cassandra Bell,” I said.
“Yes,” Vann said.
“For what purpose?” I asked.
“You’ve been following the news, right?” Vann snapped. “Rumor is, there’s a march on Sunday. Imagine what happens to that march when Cassandra Bell is killed by her own brother, who then spouts some sort of anti-Haden bullshit. D.C. is going to burn down to the ground.”
“Right, but what point does that serve?” I asked. “Why start a riot?”
“To tank the market,” Tony said.
We both turned to him again.
“I told you I follow the sector,” Tony said. “It’s how I stay employed. The Haden-related companies are already trying to merge or exit the sector because of Abrams-Kettering. Investors are already offloading their stocks. A full-scale riot in D.C. will scare the shit out of these companies and all their investors. They’ll flee the scene. And then Accelerant can pick and choose which companies to snap up and which to let die. It’ll be lauded for stabilizing the sector when what it’s really doing is sniping its competitors in the head. They’ll save billions on their merger with Sebring-Warner alone.”
“But what’s the point?” I said. “Abrams-Kettering is gutting all these companies’ profits. There’s no gravy train anymore. You said so yourself.”
“You know who AOL are, right?” Tony said.
“What?” Vann said.
“AOL,” Tony said. “Information services company around the turn of the century. Made billions connecting people online through their phones. A ‘dial-up’ service. Was one of the biggest companies in the world. Then people stopped using their phone lines to get online and AOL shrank. But for years it still made billions in profit, because even though the dial-up sector had died, there were still millions of customers who kept their dial-up service. Some were old people who didn’t want to change. Some were people who kept the service as a backup. Some probably just forgot they subscribed and when they remembered, AOL made it too hard to unsubscribe to bother.”
“Lovely story,” Vann said. “And?”
“
And,
when all is said and done, there are still more Hadens in the U.S. than people who live in the state of Kentucky. On average another thirty thousand people a year contract the disease and experience lock in. They’re not going away. Even a shrunken market can make a lot of money, if you milk it. And Hubbard’s the one to milk it.”
“Because he’s a Haden himself,” I said. “He’s one of us.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “That’s what swooping in and saving the Agora is about. Establishing goodwill among Hadens.”
“Once he has that, he can roll over every other company, because he’s already got every single Haden as a customer,” I said. “He’ll use the Agora as leverage.”
“Right again,” Tony said. “And then Accelerant will be doing two things. Using the money he’s raking in from Hadens to diversify—even now Haden-related companies are the minority of its portfolio—and getting ready for the day the FDA says neural networks and threeps aren’t just medical devices for Haden use only. Because
that’s
the real end game. Hubbard’s looking to the day when
everyone’s
got a threep, everyone’s on the Agora, and no one ever has to feel old again.”
“That’s why Hubbard could spend a billion dollars on something he’d never take to market,” I said.
“And why he’ll spend a bunch of money now on companies that look like sucker bets,” Tony said. “He’s not looking at the shrinking Haden market. He’s looking at the market that’s coming after that. The market he’s going to make. The market he’s locking in right now.”
“You really think that’s what happening here,” Vann said.
“Let me put it this way, Agent Vann,” Tony said. “If you two don’t arrest him this weekend, on Monday I’m going out and putting everything I own into Accelerant stock.”
Vann stood there for a moment, thinking. Then she turned to me. “Options,” she said.
“Seriously?” I said. “We’re doing this now?”
“It’s still your first week,” Vann said.
“It’s been a busy week,” I said.
“And I want your thoughts, all right?” Vann said. “I’m not just asking you to have a goddamn teachable moment. All this affects
you
. This is
about
you. And people like you. Tell me what
you
want to do, Chris.”
“I want to go after the son of a bitch,” I said. “Hubbard and Schwartz both.”
“You want to arrest them,” Vann said.
“I do,” I said. “But not just yet.”
“Explain,” Vann said.
I smiled at her instead and looked over to Tony. “Hubbard’s code,” I said.
“What about it?” Tony asked.
“Can you patch it?”
“You mean, close the hole in the interpolator?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Now that I know it’s there, closing it up’s not a problem.”
“Can you do more than that?” I asked.
“Are you going to pay me to do more than that?”
I grinned. “Yes, Tony,” I said. “There is payment involved.”
“Then I can do whatever you need me to do,” he said. “Hubbard’s good, but I don’t suck either.”
“What do you have planned?” Vann asked me.
“So far we’ve been a step behind Hubbard on everything,” I said.
“That’s an accurate assessment,” Vann said. “Are we going to try to get ahead of him?”
“We don’t have to get ahead of him,” I said. “But I want us to arrive at the same time.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Vann asked.
“Well,” I said. “As our friend Trinh would say, it might require you to be a little sloppy.”
Chapter Twenty-two
A
T ELEVEN FIFTEEN
I called Klah Redhouse and asked for a meeting with him, his boss, the speaker, and the president of the Navajo Nation, to catch them up on the latest with Johnny Sani and Bruce Skow. The meeting happened at noon.
They were not pleased with my report. Not for how I’d been doing my job, which was not in dispute, but that two of their own had been victimized.
“You are working on this,” President Becenti said, in a manner that was not a question.
“Yes,” I said. “Johnny Sani and Bruce Skow will have justice. That is my word to you.” I waited.
“What is it?” Becenti said.
“You said yesterday that anything you could do to help, you would,” I said.
“Yes,” Becenti said.
“Did you mean that only within the parameters of the investigation, or would it extend further than that?”
Becenti looked at me doubtfully. “What do you mean?” he said.
“There’s justice, and then there’s sticking a knife in someone’s ribs,” I said. “The justice will come no matter what. Like I said, you already have my word on that. But the knife-sticking may come with an extra added benefit to the Navajo Nation.”
Becenti looked at the speaker and the police captain, and then back at me. “Tell us more,” he said.
I glanced over at Redhouse as I spoke. He was smiling.
* * *
At one thirty I was at my parents’ house, sitting with my dad in the trophy room. He was in a bathrobe and had a tumbler of scotch, neat, dangling from one of his long, large hands.
“How you doing, Dad?” I asked.
He smiled. “Perfect,” he said. “Last night someone broke into my house to kill my kid, I killed him with a shotgun, and now I’m hiding out in my trophy room because it’s one of the only rooms in the house that photographers outside don’t have a clear shot into. I’m doing great.”
“What did the police say about the shooting?” I asked.
“The sheriff came by this morning and assured me that as far as he and his department are concerned, the shooting was justified and no charges are coming and that they’ll be returning my shotgun to me later today,” Dad said.
“That’s good to hear,” I said.
“That’s what I said, too,” Dad said. “They also said the FBI came for the man’s body this morning. Does that have anything to do with you?”
“It does,” I said. “If anyone asks, the fact that you were about to run for the Senate meant that we had an interest in discovering whether the attacker had any ties with known hate or terrorism groups.”
“But it’s not really about that at all, is it?”
“I’ll answer that for you, Dad, but you have to tell me you’re ready to hear it.”
“Jesus, Chris,” Dad said. “Someone tried to kill you last night in our house. If you don’t tell me why, I might strangle you myself.”
So I told Dad the entire story, up to my morning visit to the Navajo Nation.
After I finished, Dad said nothing. Then he drained his scotch, said, “I need a refill,” and stepped out into the gun room. When he came back in he had considerably more than two fingers of scotch in the tumbler.
“You might want to ease back, there, Dad,” I said.
“Chris, it’s a miracle I didn’t just bring in the bottle with a straw,” he said. He took a sip. “Motherfucker was in my house three nights ago,” he said, of Hubbard. “In this room. Acting all
chummy
.”
“To be fair, three nights ago I don’t think he had planned to have me killed,” I said. “Pretty sure that came after.”
Dad choked on his scotch on that one. I patted him on the back until he stopped coughing.