Chapter 10
DAR
Ihave been avoiding the implications of my own expertise for days, and the avoidance is becoming structurally unsound.
The forensic comparison tool requires deep immersion in Tommy's code.
Not the surface layer, not the external-facing protocols and defense matrices that any competent analyst could study from the outside, but the deep code.
The core systems, the foundational logic, the decisions he made in the earliest days of Echo Base's construction when the facility was bare rock and possibility and a man with a laptop and a mandate to build something that could keep people alive.
Reading someone's code at this depth is an act of intimacy that most people outside the technical world would never understand.
Code is thought made visible. It carries the fingerprints of every decision, every compromise, every moment of brilliance and frustration and middle-of-the-night desperation that went into its creation.
Tommy's early code is rougher than his current work, built with the urgency of someone who didn't have time for elegance, and the evolution from those early functions to the sophisticated systems he runs now tells a story about who he was becoming while he was building this place.
I can see where he was confident. The encryption modules are clean, decisive, built with the certainty of a man who knows his strengths.
I can see where he patched over uncertainty, places where the code forks into redundant pathways because he wasn't sure which approach would hold under pressure, so he built both.
I can see the elegant solutions, the moments of genuine brilliance, and the comments he left at those moments:
// this works and I don't entirely know why. don't touch it. // if this breaks, future Tommy owes past Tommy a drink. // Kane needs this by 0600. Sleep is for people who don't hold lives in their hands.
"'Sleep is for people who don't hold lives in their hands.'" The comment leaves my mouth before the decision to speak passes through any approval process. Reading someone's code is one thing. Quoting it back to them crosses a line I didn't intend to cross.
Tommy's typing doesn't falter. "Quoting my code comments is a form of surveillance I haven't consented to."
"Your code comments are a cry for therapy."
"My code comments are documentation. The fact that they occasionally read like a memoir is a feature."
I'm reading his mind. The humor is there, even in the comments, but beneath it is something meticulous, something that cares about getting it right with a ferocity that borders on compulsive.
The compulsion makes sense when I remember that the code he writes is the only thing standing between his team and the forms of death their work invites.
The parallels to my own work make my skin prickle. My code carries the same fingerprints: the urgency, the overengineering, the perfectionism of someone who builds alone because relying on another person's competence is a risk I calculated once and can't afford to risk again.
Reading Tommy's code is like reading a translation of my own thought process into a slightly different language, and the recognition is the thing I've been avoiding because recognizing yourself in someone else is the fastest path to vulnerability, and the last time I was vulnerable, someone died.
It's past midnight. The workspace is dark except for our screens, two stations casting pools of blue-white light that merge in the space between our chairs.
Tommy's coffee has gone cold. My Mountain Dew has gone flat.
We've been working for more hours than I want to count, and the pressure of the deployment timeline sits on my shoulders with physical weight.
Tommy is close enough that I can hear him breathe, and the sound of his breathing has become familiar in a way that frightens me because familiarity is the first step toward need, and need is the vulnerability I refuse.
Except. His sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are right there, in my peripheral vision, tendons flexing with each keystroke.
The body I saw in the gym is underneath his clothes at arm's length, and I have been thinking about that body at inconvenient intervals for days, and the thinking is getting louder, and the code in front of me is making it worse because reading his mind and wanting his body simultaneously is a sensory overload my system cannot process cleanly.
"Your exception handling in the comms module is inconsistent.
" I say it without looking up, because looking up means making eye contact, and eye contact past midnight in a dark room after hours of intimacy with someone's thought process is a detonator I am choosing not to trigger.
"You catch errors in the primary loop but let them propagate in the secondary.
If the weapon targets the secondary loop with malformed packets, your system will crash before the defensive protocols engage. "
"The secondary loop handles non-critical traffic. Social comms, admin updates, internal messaging. Crashing it doesn't compromise operational capability."
"The weapon doesn't distinguish between critical and non-critical. It will use any crash as an entry point. You designed the secondary loop as disposable. The Committee designed their weapon to exploit disposable components."
"Then I'll harden the secondary loop."
"You'll harden it with what? You're already running at capacity. Every cycle you allocate to hardening non-critical systems is a cycle you can't allocate to defending critical ones. The resource constraint is the problem, and your refusal to acknowledge it is making the problem worse."
Tommy stops typing. The cessation of his rhythm is abrupt, a clean break in the steady cadence I've been using as a metronome for hours.
The silence that replaces it has a different quality than the productive quiet of two people working in parallel.
"My refusal to acknowledge it?"
"You've been treating the defense as a solo project with an assistant.
You assign me offensive tasks, decryption tasks, analysis tasks.
When it comes to the core defensive framework, you keep me on the outside.
I'm building countermeasures against a weapon I can see, but you won't let me build them into the system I'm supposed to be protecting. "
"The core defensive framework is the nervous system of this entire operation. If I open it to external modification and something goes wrong, people die."
He pushes his chair back and stands. The movement is sharp, frustrated, and it puts him above me, his hip against the edge of his desk, arms crossed, jaw tight. "Operators in the field lose comms. Extraction coordinates go dark. Those aren't abstractions. Those are lives."
"And keeping me out of the core is somehow safer?" I stand too, because this conversation isn't going to happen with him looking down at me, and the workspace is small enough that standing puts us closer than sitting did.
"I broke into your system once already. The Committee is about to break into it with a weapon I understand better than you do. Your choice isn't between security and risk. It's between which risk you trust more."
"That's not what this is about."
"That's exactly what this is about. You hide behind your systems the way you hide behind your humor and your glasses and that gym nobody is supposed to know about.
" I can feel the heat of his body from two feet away, and the heat makes my words sharper because the anger and the attraction are running on the same circuit and the insulation between them is burning through.
"You've built layers and layers between yourself and the possibility that someone might actually get close enough to see what's underneath, and when someone does get close, you redesign the perimeter to keep them out."
"And you hide behind your independence." His voice is quiet, the kind of low register that means the load-bearing structures are under stress.
"You've been alone so long you've turned it into a religion.
Anyone who gets close is a threat. Anyone who sees you is a liability.
You'd rather spend the rest of your life dismantling systems alone in a dark room than risk trusting someone and having it go wrong again, because the last time you trusted a system, someone died, and instead of blaming the people who ignored your warnings, you decided the answer was to never need anyone again. "
The silence that follows is loaded with enough voltage to trip every circuit breaker in the facility.
My hands are still, dead still, the tell screaming, and he can read it.
The fact that he can read it is the proof that he's closer to right than I want him to be, because only someone who has gotten close enough to learn my patterns could identify the absence of motion as meaningful.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Maybe not. But I know what it looks like when someone builds walls and calls them principles. I see it every morning in the mirror."
The air between us is charged space, dense with hours of proximity and the residue of an argument that cracked both of us open. His chest is rising and falling faster than normal. My pulse is elevated.
The workspace is dark except for the screens, and the screen light paints his face in blue and shadow, and his eyes behind his glasses are locked on mine with an intensity that has abandoned every defense his humor usually provides.
The alert hits both our screens simultaneously.
Red text scrolling fast. The Committee probe is hitting Echo Base's outer defenses with the sharp precision of a testing pulse, and the timing is either coincidental or catastrophic.
Tommy's hands hit the keyboard. My hands hit mine. The argument evaporates, the personal vaporizing into the operational with the instantaneous priority shift of two people who understand that their facility is under active probe.