Chapter 1 #2
Zadie suspected it was a show for Darwin, and she’d told Wynn so. That hadn’t landed well, and Wynn came back with a zinger about MacGyver—the gamer—and a man she’d never met. Neither comment was hurtful. Or mean. Just banter among teammates, but there was a bit of truth to both of them.
"You’re not the best patient," Darwin said to Coulter. "Kane will continue to recoup here. It’s safer. We know Finch is looking for me, so we have to assume he has eyes on the institute. But Kane will need to go back in the near future. I don’t have all the imaging and other testing equipment here that we need.
" He looked around the table. "Are there any questions? "
"What happens when shit goes sideways, and we’re out there?
" Neve pointed to the wall. "Zadie’s looking for a way into Hyperon’s partitioned servers.
We know there are more enhanced humans out there.
If there aren’t currently, there will be.
Something’s going to happen. It’s only a matter of time.
So, who protects the bunker? Who protects Kane? "
Coulter's hand rested on Neve's arm. "Nothing’s changed," he said. "This bunker is safer than any other place Kane could be. Shepherd is here. Darwin is here. We keep moving forward with our plan."
"Not to be a downer, but we don’t have much of one," Scout said.
"We wait. We watch. We plan." Coulter laced his fingers with Neve's.
It was a small, private thing shared with a room full of what had become Zadie’s family. The warmth that spread through her body watching them connect had been something she hadn’t experienced in quite some time.
Against everything that had been blocking their path, Coulter and Neve, they'd found their way back to each other.
And the fact that no one outside these walls could know any of them were alive somehow made it more rather than less.
This life they'd built down here in the bunker hadn’t been something any of them had planned on, but she knew none of them would trade it, either.
"It’s all we can do," Coulter said.
"And sleep." Zadie glanced around the room.
Everyone chuckled.
But it was her way of telling them she’d heard them.
That she would try harder to take care of herself while she tried to find the holes in the system.
But it was more than that. Zadie didn't have anyone special on the outside.
Not unless she counted MacGyver, who was a screen name, but she did miss him and the gaming community they belonged to.
Being cooped in the bunker wasn't the worst. Being with her team was fine.
That didn't bother her. And she loved Shepherd for the gaming system.
However, not being able to connect it to the outside world made Zadie so antsy, she thought about asking Darwin if he had a straightjacket in her size.
She pulled her tablet closer. She’d been working for days on the server salvaged from the Ramsey operation, but the partial reconstruction had provided no useful information.
She switched over to the ETHER network map set up by Gideon Rhodes.
It wasn't much. A fraction of the full architecture, but it was enough to see the shape of the system in this part of the country.
Nodes and regional hubs scattered across the BC interior like a partial constellation. The only problem was that a few of them had randomly gone offline.
Her tablet dinged, startling her, even though she was holding it. A blip appeared on the screen.
"What’s going on?" Wynn asked, leaning in.
"Looks like an ICHOR field transmitter in the Bridge River Valley corridor just went dark." Three other ICHOR nodes had vanished from the grid since she’d found it, and none of them had come back online.
She pulled up her log. That made four nodes in two weeks. All in the same general corridor. All dead.
"That doesn’t sound good. Can you break it down?" Coulter asked. "And speak English, please."
"Give me a second." She tapped her fingers on the tablet, following the pattern and comparing it against what she knew about the ETHER architecture. The system's backend, ORACLE, and the main server, had been her white whale. It was Hyperion's digital brain.
She'd been picking at it for days, and it had picked back—in the most literal sense.
It had what was called a zero-trust model that treated every access attempt like a personal offense.
Air-gapped systems woven into legacy code she couldn't fully predict.
Network segmentation shifted on her. She'd nearly walked into honeypots and decoys twice, which was two times more than she'd ever walked into anything, and she was still annoyed about it.
An AI-driven anomaly detector that had once locked her out for two hours and, as best she could tell, flagged the attempt somewhere she couldn't see.
And the cherry on top of all of it was the phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA).
It wasn't un-hackable. What can be constructed can also be dismantled. But it was the most hostile architecture she'd ever encountered.
The entire encounter almost made up for the lack of her gaming community and MacGyver. But not quite.
Darwin splayed his hands on the table and leaned forward. " You look like you're becoming one with the technology. Talk to us."
She turned the tablet so that he could see the map.
"One more went offline in the Bridge River Valley corridor.
" She tapped her finger across the dark blue dots, which indicated nothing was happening, as opposed to the bright green ones that were flashing.
"This looks like a pattern. Like it could be leading somewhere.
Like someone is doing this systematically. "
Darwin took the tablet in his hands and pulled it tighter. He was a medical doctor, a neurologist, a drug inventor, and a researcher. He might not understand the telemetry system or computers the way she did, but he understood patterns.
So did everyone else in the room, and they were all standing behind him in seconds.
"Whoever’s doing this knows the network," she said.
"But then why is this person skipping nodes?" Scout pointed to two different blinking dots between two that had gone dark.
"I’m not a fan of guessing, but if I had to, I’d say it has to do with avoiding a cascade alert while blinding the system." Zadie twisted her fingers throughs the edges of her braid.
"What does that mean, exactly?" Coulter asked.
"Finch would see a node that’s down, but only if it’s one that isn’t bounced around," Zadie said. "Some are touch points. It’s easier to go through them because there’s nothing else there. Others are found when the device that’s looking for them are set to certain coordinates."
"Zadie, English please," Neve said.
"This person is crippling and pulling data at the same time without being seen until it’s too late," Zadie said. "They must know the original architecture."
"Or they’re the one who designed it," Darwin said quietly.
Zadie jerked, nearly toppling her drink over. She snagged it with one hand. "You think Gideon Rhodes is destroying his own system?"
Gideon Rhodes was a legend in her field. And he was the gold standard. He was what she was supposed to strive to be in the military. Even though he left nine years in, people still considered him the best.
"I can’t think of anyone else who’d want to destroy it," Darwin said. "He was angry when he left Hyperion. And for a full month, I waited for his retaliation. I knew it wouldn’t come right away because he’s not only patient, he’s methodical.
He might not have been cut out to be military, but he knows how to plan a mission better than most."
"I’m offended," Coulter said.
"Don’t be." Darwin glanced over his shoulder. "I should’ve listened to him when he was fired. I didn’t, and that’s on me. But we can’t let him destroy ETHER. And we need him. He can help us get into ORACLE."
"The server can’t be the only way to have eyes on the inside," Scout said.
"It’s not," Darwin agreed. "But it is the only way to see how Finch monitors enhanced humans. Where they are. Who they are. What he’s actually using. More importantly, how to save them."
"What happened to clearing your name?” Wynn tentatively reached out and touched his wrist.
"I’m sure if we get in and prove what Finch is doing, that happens. But no matter what, we need to protect ORACLE until we can get inside it. We need to stop Gideon and bring him to our side."
"So, we need to predict where he’s going to hit next," Neve said. "Okay, we send Zadie. She can follow the system. And Scout can go with her."
"I don’t think that’s a good idea," Darwin said.
"Sending her out alone isn’t smart." Coulter shifted, pressing his hip against the table. "Explain to me why you think it’s a good idea to send someone out there alone?"
"I know Gideon. He wouldn’t hurt anyone." Darwin held up his hand. "I believe he has the same end goal we have. He’s just going about it differently. We need to send in someone who can speak his language. Someone he’ll understand, and that’s Zadie."
"I don’t like it," Neve said.
"I’ll start by observing. If it’s him, I’ll approach carefully. If it's not, or if I need back up, I’ll call. This location isn’t that far away." Zadie took the tablet and stared at the map. Four dark points scattered across the terrain like a trail leading somewhere she couldn't see yet.
"You better," Wynn added.
"I’ll find him. I’ll figure out what he’s got planned. Hopefully, he’ll be on our side of things."
"He will be," Darwin said.
"I hope so, because we need the architect to get into ORACLE." And she’d hate to think about what she might have to do if Gideon turned out to be on the wrong side.