Chapter 4 #2
"That’s ridiculous." Gideon slid down, pulling the thermal blanket over their bodies.
"Everyone brings value. No one should be put on a pedestal.
I hate that." He turned, catching her gaze.
"But I can’t help you get into ORACLE. It has a built-in failsafe and so many firewalls, invisible perimeters, decryption keys, social engineering—"
"I know. I tried to get inside and ran into the AI."
"Wherever you did that from, the routing has been stored, and the AI is trained to look for it. Search for those specific parameters. It will try to detect patterns you used to help it locate you."
"Not surprised, and not the first time I’ve run into it." She smiled. "There are ways around that."
"Maybe, but the only way to get inside it unless you’re already there, like Finch, is a digital and a physical key. Both have to be activated at the same time. The digital key is a rolling cipher that regenerates randomly. I used to hold that key, but now I suspect it’s the hands in Isaac."
"And what’s the other one?"
"The physical key is a hardware token built into the architecture. There’s more than one. For all I know, they’ve been moved. And regardless, they’re useless without credentials."
A gust pushed through the sagebrush, and the temperature dropped another degree. Zadie pulled the blanket higher. Somewhere below them, Carpenter Lake shifted against its stolen shoreline.
He'd built a failsafe at two in the morning on a Tuesday, running on only cold coffee and a moment of clarity.
He remembered the exact moment he'd finished—leaning back in his chair, staring at the code, and thinking that no one would ever get past this.
And how that was such a good thing. And it was.
The idea had been to protect the data. To protect and save lives.
"That’s a problem," Zadie said. "But every system has it’s weak points."
"Agreed." He sat up slightly, propping himself on his elbow. This was the part that had taken him two years to design and another six months to test. It was his version of a moat filled with alligators, except the alligators were also encrypted and the moat moved.
"But once someone hits a certain firewall, the system reroutes itself. The AI component creates shadow servers. It data dumps in different places. It also has a built-in back-up. An alarm will go off once the system fights back against a hack, and ORACLE itself appears to shut down. It doesn’t, it just becomes something else, and the hacker has to start over," Gideon said.
An owl called from somewhere in the timber. The sound was close enough to be startling, and Zadie's hand twitched toward her weapon.
He shifted again, letting the tension from the noise ease.
Hearing himself explain the system to someone who actually understood what he was describing did something he hadn't expected.
It made him miss it. Not Hyperion. Not the office, nor the politics, nor the man who'd fired him.
But the work itself. The elegance of what he'd built.
The hours alone with the architecture, shaping something that could protect people who'd never know his name.
That was the part Finch had stolen, and destroying the nodes hadn't given it back. It had just made the loss smaller.
It made him miss being inside, sitting at a desk, keyboard under his fingertips, staring at a minimum of three screens, while he solved problems he didn't even know he had.
"ORACLE’s not impossible to hack. But without those two keys, what’s the point?
You won’t find much, and you certainly won’t be able to shut down the system.
" He reached out and traced the side of her jaw with his finger. He had no idea why he did it, except that he was drawn to her in ways he hadn’t been drawn to anyone.
"You need someone inside, and I’m not inside anymore. "
"No. But you built it." The corner of her mouth lifted. "And I’m the girl that can help you bust back in."
"If it were only that simple." He stared into her intense brown eyes. The light was almost gone, and it softened the angles of her face, warmed her skin, made her look less like an operative and more like a person he might have wanted to know under different circumstances.
Under any circumstances, if he were honest.
"The only way to stop Finch is to destroy the system entirely," he said. "Take out enough nodes and the network degrades to where it can't function."
"And no evidence." Zadie's voice was steady. Perhaps too steady. "If you destroy it, you destroy the only record of what he's done. Every enhanced soldier he's created. Every unauthorized trial. Every person he's hurt. It all disappears with the system."
He hadn't thought about it that way. Or maybe he had and didn't want to admit it.
"If we get into ORACLE," she said, "we can pull everything. Every data point, every communication, every routing log. We can prove what Finch did. We can clear Darwin. And we can find every person he's experimented on and figure out how to help them before the compound kills them."
"You might not be able to prove anything."
"Why not?"
"You’re right in thinking that ORACLE is the center base of Hyperion.
It’s the main server. Everything goes through it.
But it doesn’t necessarily stay there." He rubbed the back of his neck.
Explaining this was like trying to describe the layout of a house he'd built room by room.
Every wall had a reason. Every door opened in a specific way.
And now someone else was living in that house, and he had no idea what they'd changed.
"Those shadow servers it creates if a hacker or malware enters the system aren’t just protection from that. Every department, every invention, every new project has its own shadow system. Each one has a double redundancy encryption key. I had ETHER, where the information you’re looking for goes."
"I don’t see what the problem is."
"Whoever took over my job would have that now. I don’t know if I can access that part of ORACLE—even if you could get me inside."
The weight of that admission landed like a brick in his gut.
He'd spent two months telling himself that destruction was the answer.
But the truth was uglier and simpler than that.
He was afraid. Afraid that he'd walk back into his own system and find it unrecognizable.
Afraid that whoever had taken his seat had gutted the thing he'd poured his life into and rebuilt it in a way that made it complicit in everything Finch was doing.
And afraid that some part of it had happened long before he'd left.
"But you created ORACLE, and—"
"Hyperion deals with classified government information. I had to protect the system—even from me. I added a layer of protection to the brain to make sure that the enemies of our country and allies can’t follow the trail of soldiers who were being monitored in the field.
Or any other program Hyperion might have that deals with highly private or classified information. "
He exhaled and stared up at the sky. There were more stars now, and it reminded him of how small he really was.
He'd designed ORACLE to protect the data that would ultimately help save lives.
That had never been abstract to him. Every encryption layer, every redundancy, every failsafe—he'd built them with faces in his mind.
His mother's. His father's. Every soldier who might bleed out on a mountain road because help didn't know they were there.
The system was supposed to be the thing that closed the gap between dying and surviving.
And Finch had turned it into a cage.
"We need your help," she said. "I refuse to give up."
"I’ll sleep on it."
"That's fine." She rolled away, her back to him.
"But I need you to understand something.
The people at the bunker—my team, Darwin, all of them—they've given up everything.
Careers. Identities. We're not doing this for revenge.
We're doing it because if we don't, Finch wins, and I can’t have that on my conscious. "
The wind moved through the sagebrush, and somewhere in the distance, water lapped against a shore that shouldn't exist—Carpenter Lake, settling into the bones of a town that had been sacrificed for someone else's version of progress.
"I'll come with you," he said. "I'll talk to Darwin. That's all I'm agreeing to."
"That's enough."
"For what it's worth, Felicity was the most interesting person I've talked to in two months."
"Flatline wasn't bad either."
He smiled in the dark. It was the first real one in a while.
"Get some sleep," she said.
"You first."
"Not a chance."
He closed his eyes, knowing she was right—she'd outlast him. His exhaustion was bone-deep, and there was something about having another person nearby, someone watching, that loosened the grip he'd been keeping on consciousness for weeks.
Just before sleep pulled him under, he heard her voice, low and almost to herself.
"Goodnight, Flatline."
He didn't respond, but he was still smiling.