Chapter 9
After a day walking in the heat, Jason could feel the air finally cooling.
The setting sun sliced occasional rays through the towers and trees.
He pulled his hoodie tightly around him.
Ironically, the seat of Andrew Norman’s cyber-surveillance empire was also the ideal place to disappear.
DC was a tourist mecca. Jason was at this moment passing Digelight, a nightclub famous nationwide as the destination for anyone who wanted their panyon to more fully instantiate in the real world.
A long and boisterous line of hopefuls waited under its overhang, the lenses in their eyes reflecting pinpricks of multicolored light from the neon above.
It was a good bet many of the other people thronging the shaded sidewalks were here to visit the Fallen Guard Memorial, or the Smithsonian, or Tower Park, or just gawk at the treescrapers, or all that and more.
In summer, DC was the densest city in America by population, and that population was two-thirds tourist. There was no better place to blend in, to become just one more unremarkable mote in a multicolored throng.
The speed with which the System had dismantled his attack was shocking.
He’d known it was powerful, but it was one thing to know that intellectually and another to see it in action.
He could only hope that destroying his phone had succeeded in rendering him invisible, and hope that the electric glimmers behind the lenses passing him didn’t hide a malevolent counterfeit mind, looking out through each pair of eyes that crossed his.
He ached for info, yearned to check NewsNet and see how the OverNet glitch he’d caused was being reported, to scan the MeNet feeds of people nearby to see how they were talking about it, see if he was mentioned, make some guess about how close he was to being caught.
His eyes kept trying to focus inward on his missing smartspace, and his throat and tongue kept tensing, wanting to subvocalize a command to check notifications.
Without a phone, he was more than usually disconnected from the people on the footlanes about him.
That slim, tall girl jogging past, dressed to show her toned figure, her eyes sliding over him and off again, their depths glinting briefly with the glow of her smartspace—usually he would reflexively ping her MeNetID, get a quick idea of who she was, wonder what she might think of him if she got to know him.
Not that he ever followed up on those idle thoughts, but this was a different feeling—they weren’t even occupying the same world.
Without lens glow of his own to attenuate and direct his focus, the world he occupied contained an uncomfortable amount of detail.
The reddened sunlight filtering through the leaves, the motion of feet and the swing of arms around him, the knots in the pedestrian flow created by bipedal delivery bots moving at their safety-mandated walking pace, the glints off aircabs arrowing above—it was all slightly disorienting, and it didn’t help that his deactivated smartbuds no longer sorted but merely muffled the one-sided conversations, the delivery bots’ friendly chirps, the rumbling tires on the vehicle street parallel, the drone of propellers above.
The growling of his stomach.
Without a phone, he couldn’t eat. Civilization provided public drinking fountains, but there was still no such thing as a free lunch. His steps felt peculiarly light, but when he looked at his feet, he found he was almost shuffling.
He couldn’t even check the time. But if it was late enough for people to line up for Digelight, it was late enough for Jason to stop wandering. He crossed the street, giving the club and all those camera-bearing eyes a wide berth, and turned southeast.
The moment he crossed the asphalt shoreline was obvious.
Maryland had done its best, but the mere fact of its having less regulation while being close to DC meant this side of the line was crowded with close-set towers that didn’t need to worry about energy neutrality.
After so much time in the Green, it took a mental adjustment for Jason to remember that the natural state of the skyscraper was naked.
As the last of the sunlight faded, Jason found himself wandering a cityscape that was positively industrial.
A rust-encrusted sign informed him that the Capitol Access Commercial Hyperloop station was ahead.
Most signage these days was virtual, and the newer green-and-blue signs around him held only digital patterns that would be replaced with the most up-to-date information when anyone looked at them with smartlenses, but a minimum level of signage was required for the few unfortunates who didn’t have lenses, and by following these, he managed to find the station.
He vaulted the fence into the shipping yard behind it.
At the far end of the yard, just past the tall piles of peeled softwood logs, the squat shapes of empty shipping containers crouched, long steel boxes in green and white and blue, waiting to be loaded into the hyperloop for transfer to New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago.
He stepped over an ancient strip of pre-hyperloop rail, twisted and overgrown with weeds.
The last time he’d been here, the busy end of the yard had been alive with the whine of cranes maneuvering containers into hyperloop pods and the compressed, explosive hiss of the launches.
Now it was after union hours, and the yard was silent except for the splatter of the sprinklers keeping the logs wet.
Deactivated dronebots dotted the yard, their angular humanoid forms frozen in foot-planted poses like statues commemorating the commerce that would start up again in the morning.
He slunk through the shipping containers, keeping to the pools of darkness between the floodlights, keeping an eye out for cameras.
They’d be at the other end of the yard where the full containers were.
Over here the containers were empty and unlocked.
He found the one he was looking for—a rusty red one that would be the last anyone would pick if they had a choice, since it was close enough to the logs to sit in perpetual artificial rain.
Judging by the rust, it had probably been there a decade.
The sprinkler rain was refreshing as he took long, careful steps across the mud and ducked through the container’s cracked door.
The sound of the rain became a metallic patter overhead as he slipped to the dimness in back and felt along the ceiling there.
It took a moment to find the magnetic case, but when he pulled it down, the compact solidity of the phone sliding into his hand made him close his eyes briefly in relief.
But his stomach gave a powerful clench, because this was the moment of truth.
He powered on the phone and paired it, experiencing another wash of relief as its interface lit in his lenses.
It asked for his MeNetID, but he put it in diagnostic mode and bypassed the gateway.
You couldn’t interact with polite society without a MeNetID, but you could interact with impolite society if you knew how.
He navigated to an address he’d set up earlier in a shadowy corner of the dark web and entered the passkey.
A folder opened, containing a single file.
It was a tiny bit larger than it had been this morning.
Good sign. He held his breath and opened it.
Circles bloomed on a map like roses, overlapping clusters of red over red. He’d feared they’d be centered on the NNA Tower, but they gathered instead over DC’s richest neighborhood, the one so exclusive it was nicknamed the “Enclave.” The edges of each circle overlapped at a single address. Bingo.
The bots in MorDread’s botnet were distributed across the country, and they’d all connected directly, rather than through obfuscating proxies, to the NNA’s internal network once Jason had breached it.
The System’s counterattacks had mostly gone back along the same route.
But not all. As Jason had hoped, as that doorway had become clogged, the Final System had counterattacked directly from its own hardware, bypassing the NNA’s network, bringing all its power to bear.
Each bot, as it was attacked, had sent a single message to this file, containing three pieces of information: the exact time it had begun its attack, the time the counterattack had been received, and a traceroute list of addresses with time stamps to seven decimals of precision.
Each bot’s traceroute command had sent a packet of information back toward its attacker and logged each node it had to pass through to reach it.
Most bots were silenced before completing this, and others had their traceroutes go down obviously incorrect paths or through nodes that couldn’t be matched to a physical location, but those bots were filtered out by Jason’s hand-coded analysis tool, leaving a dataset of only the most direct counterattacks through the fewest nodes, the locations of which were known.
The analysis tool then calculated when the System had begun its counterattack.
The Final System was ungodly fast, but it was constrained by the laws of physics.
Communication couldn’t exceed the speed of light, and even light took time to travel.
It was possible to make an educated guess about how far the communication from the Final System had come, and so, how far away the System itself was.
And if you had thousands of bots making that same guess from all around the country, the resulting triangulation was better than a guess.
Jason now knew the top-secret physical location of the Final System.
He had social engineered the System. Its absurdly powerful defense would be the cause of its destruction.