Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Gideon leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared at the data spread across the center monitor. His eyes felt like sandpaper every time he blinked. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make the information tell a different story.
Darwin sat in the chair near Zadie’s desk, his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward.
Coulter stood behind Gideon with his arms folded, the graze on his left arm wrapped in white gauze that Wynn had reapplied the second they'd walked through the bunker door.
Zadie was at her desk, cross-legged in her chair, her screens synced to the wall display.
The cipher pattern from the hub had been lifted perfectly.
He’d mapped, time-stamped, and overlaid the regeneration cycles against network traffic variables.
He'd run the predictive model three times.
Each run gave him the same answer, and each time, the answer made his muscles tighten another notch.
"Twenty-six hours," Gideon said. "That's the next activation window. Based on the regeneration pattern, the cipher will be vulnerable for approximately ninety seconds before it cycles and the window closes."
"Ninety seconds," Coulter repeated.
"Give or take."
"Where?" Darwin asked.
Gideon pulled up the network topology on the wall display. The map showed the ETHER infrastructure from the Fraser Valley to the Interior—nodes, hubs, relay paths, all of it rendered in the interconnected grid he'd designed. He tapped a point on the western edge of the map.
"Here. SYN-7."
Darwin studied the location. "That's close."
"Forty minutes from Hyperion's campus." Gideon zoomed in.
The hub sat in a narrow valley between two ridgelines, accessible by a single road that branched off the main highway.
Remote enough to be unmanned. Close enough that a response team could be on site in under an hour.
"It's the only hub in the network where the activation window aligns within the next seventy-two hours.
After that, the cipher pattern shifts and I'd have to go back to a node and start reading from scratch. "
"So, it's this hub or we start over," Zadie said.
"That's the math." Gideon rotated his chair.
Coulter leaned closer to the screen. "What makes this hub different from the nodes you've been destroying?"
"A node is an endpoint. It collects and transmits field data.
A SYNAPSIS hub is a junction point. It aggregates data from multiple nodes and routes it upstream to Hyperion's central servers.
" Gideon stood and went to the screen. He traced the data path on the map with his finger.
"SYN-7 is where I can access the dual-key hardware and activate it during the cipher window. But there's a complication."
"Of course there is," Coulter said.
"SYN-7 is linked to a PNEUMA corridor." Gideon pointed to a line on the map that ran from the hub directly to a cluster of icons representing Hyperion's server farm. "PNM-6C."
"Why is that a problem?" Coulter asked. "You designed it."
"PNM-6C is the backbone protocol. It carries bundled data streams from hubs like SYN-7 to Hyperion's central servers.
It's not a physical cable or a device. It's an encryption layer with randomized routing paths and layered authentication at every relay point.
Data enters the corridor encrypted, bounces through a randomized sequence of routing nodes, and arrives at the other end reassembled.
It was designed to be untraceable and impossible to intercept without an internal access key. "
"English please," Coulter said.
"Think of it as an armored convoy for data," Zadie said. "The data gets loaded into a truck, the truck takes a different route every time, and the only way to know where it's going is to be driving the truck."
"Make sense, but you know it’s there. Can’t you deal with it?" Coulter asked.
"PNM-6C by itself isn’t the issue." Gideon sat down and tapped his fingers across the keyboard, pulling up the notes and code he’d made on AEGIS less than an hour ago. It was the best he could to do because there was no record of it anywhere.
"What is AGS-2?" Neve asked. "And what does it have to do with any of this."
"AEGIS or AGS-2 is what I built for the military. It’s classified. It was never meant to leave the government’s hand." Gideon pointed to the screen. "It’s a checkpoint system bolted into a highway system, like PNM-6C—"
"Wait a second." Coulter was on his feet, standing in the middle of the room, waving his hand. "You created a similar telemetry system like ETHER for the Canadian government?"
"No." Gideon shook his head. "I added a layer of protection that no one had ever seen before. It’s a credential verification protocol that authenticates the identity of every transmission at every handoff point. It was designed for battlefield communications so that transmissions couldn’t be spoofed. Every message had to prove it was real at every stop. It’s like having an ID checked at every exit before getting back on the highway. "
"And you didn’t do this for Hyperion?" Neve asked.
"Legally, I couldn’t," Gideon said. "The tech is owned by the government. Also, my work with Hyperion involved medical data. He held up his hand. "However, what I did was create something similar based on tech that’s already being used."
Coulter frowned. "It sounds like you’re implying that Hyperion has this AGS-2."
"A version." Gideon pulled up a side-by-side comparison on Zadie's secondary monitor.
Two columns of code, similar in structure but divergent in execution.
"The routing algorithms are degraded. The authentication layers are thinner.
The randomization pattern is less complex.
It cycles through maybe forty routing variations instead of the several hundred I built into the original.
It's a cheap imitation. Functional, but not as stable. "
"What does that mean exactly?" Coulter asked.
"And explain it to me like I'm five," Neve added.
Gideon stared at the code on the screen.
"The only people who had access to the original AEGIS architecture were military personnel with top-level clearance.
I led a four-person team when we developed this.
We implemented it in cycles with a six-person team.
My hand cramped from signing a multitude of NDAs and agreements when I left.
Talking to you about it could send me to prison for life. "
"Isaac was in the military," Neve said. "But I thought you and he never crossed paths."
"They didn’t know each other until Hyperion," Zadie said.
She turned her chair to face the room. "Isaac handled demolitions and communications. He would have received comparable training to Gideon and me, and been knowledgeable about AGS-2, because of the second component. He would have had some training, but he wouldn’t have seen the code.
Only reason I saw tiny snippets of it was because the government wanted me working on new systems."
Coulter moved closer to the screen. "How did Hyperion get AGS-2 attached to your telemetry system?"
"It looks like Isaac stole some of it and tried to write the rest of it," Gideon said. "It’s not very sophisticated. There are cracks in his code, but he’s running it alongside what I built with PNM-6C, and that system is picking up some of the slack."
"Can we use the breakdown to infiltrate?" Darwin asked.
"That's what I've been working through." Gideon stood and moved back to the wall display. "When I activate the dual-key at SYN-7, the activation signal has to travel through PNM-6C to reach ORACLE's core. That's the only path."
"And it’s an armored convoy," Coulter said.
"It’s the best way of putting it." Gideon turned to face the room. "We have two options. The first is we try to bypass AGS-2 entirely. Route the activation signal around a different corridor. One that dumps into a sub server and then try to get into ORACLE that way."
"And what’s your thought on doing that?" Darwin asked.
"We’d have find a sub server that we can hack into, and it could take days. Weeks even, before we find a path to ORACLE."
"Option two?" Coulter asked.
"We follow the protocol. Use the credentials Zadie planted to authenticate through PNM-6C and let AGS-2 authenticate.
The credentials are native to the system, so AGS-2 should accept the handshake and pass the activation signal through to ORACLE.
" Gideon rubbed the back of his neck. "But the moment those credentials authenticate, the corridor logs the source hub, sets the timestamp, and the credential signature is locked.
The AI's post-event sweep will find it. And when it does, the credentials are burned. "
"So, that means, by the time we activate the dual-key and get inside ORACLE's core, we have no way to plant the backdoor," Zadie said.
"The very same credentials that allowed us entry are now a glaring issue in the system logs, and the AI will be actively looking for anything that matches that signature. "
"Which means we need a second set," Gideon said.
"How do we do that without standing in the blast radius when the bomb goes off?" Coulter asked.
Darwin took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt. "Can Zadie build the second credential set in advance? Sort of like we did the first time?"
"It’s too risky to dive back into the system that way," Gideon said.
"I could pre-build the framework, the shell of the credential package, but the actual encryption keys and permission tokens have to be written in real time using data I can only access once we're through the dual-key."
"Let me get this straight." Darwin put his glasses back on. "You need ninety seconds to activate the dual-key, plant fresh credentials using live data you've never seen before and establish a backdoor—all while the AI is chasing the burned first setback to your location."
"Let’s not forget that by that time, enhanced soldiers will have been deployed as well," Coulter said.
"That about spells it out," Gideon said.
"That's insane." Darwin leaned back.
"I'm open to suggestions." Gideon sat down and swiveled his chair back and forth.
"I don’t see any other way." Zadie tapped on her keyboard, and the screen shifted. "It means we’re down a man in the field, and that will last longer than the last time. But Gideon and I can do this. I know we can."
"There are some things we can prep before mission time," Gideon said.
"The credential shell is eighty percent of the work.
That can be pre-built and loaded on a portable drive before we leave the bunker.
Once we're inside ORACLE's core, we pull the live encryption data, inject it into the shell, and deploy. "
"It’s not as easy as it sounds. It's not four minutes of work.
However, if I know exactly what I'm looking for—and I will, because you're going to walk me through ORACLE's core architecture tonight until I can navigate it blind—I’m sure I can get us where we need to be under four minutes. " Zadie tapped her fingers on the desk.
"That still leaves the burn timeline," Gideon said. "The log sweep could flag the first credentials in thirty seconds."
"Then we control the timeline." Zadie uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. "If I can predict the sweep cycle, I can tell you exactly how many minutes we have between the credential authentication and the flag."
Gideon smiled. "You want to time the burn."
"I want to know exactly how long the fuse is before I light it."
"Can you do that?" Neve asked. "Can you predict that now?"
"We have traffic data from the node tap. The sweep cycle should be embedded in the routing logs, and all we need to do is find them." She tossed her braid over her shoulder, and her fingers flew across her keyboard. "Give me a couple of hours."
"This could be a gamechanger," Gideon said. "We activate the dual-key, Zadie plants the backdoor, and it’s possible we could be gone before the AI sends an alert and Isaac sends his team. They could arrive to an empty hub, and we’d have what we need."
Gideon looked at the map. SYN-7 sat in its valley, forty minutes from the place that had taken his career, his identity, and his purpose. Less than twenty-six hours from now, he'd be standing inside his own system—not to destroy it—but to destroy the man who’d taken everything from him.
And from the people who had become his team.
His family.