Chapter 23
“Walk away,” the System said quietly to Chloe. The terrifying distress had disappeared from her face, which was back to its preternatural, almost stony, calm.
Chloe stared at her, dumbfounded, then at Norman, who had already turned away.
“Tell me when she has OverNet,” he was saying.
“Bingo, she’s in!” said a voice from the terminals, to a cheer from the rest of the NOC.
“MeNet has been restored,” the System’s huge screen avatar said through the room’s speakers, and the cheer grew louder. “I will now work to diminish the riots.”
“Walk away,” the System standing before Chloe said again. “Go back to Grandma.”
Chloe turned in a daze, because the stony face held a warning, and she understood it. If she protested, shouted out what had just happened, who would believe her?
“What’s the status of MilNet?” Norman asked.
“I do not yet have access,” the System’s sweet voice boomed.
“That requires a switch flick at the Pentagon,” a technician said. “It’ll take time for the authorization to get passed through the chain of command.”
“If the president doesn’t get cold feet,” Norman said.
“He better not, because this is the most dangerous moment. Now that we’ve kicked the Russians out of MeNet, they know they have only minutes to act before the System is granted MilNet admin and can foil any attack.
” He nodded at the huge screen, which showed satellite views of complexes cleared from forest, with dirt roadways running between circular hatches. Missile silos.
Chloe, walking slowly back toward Grandma, saw those images with new eyes.
They could be fake, the way the System had just faked her face and voice.
Or they could be real, could be the Russians preparing to react to what must seem like American aggression.
Either way, they were the product of a plan hatched and executed in the brain of Andrew Norman—because of what she, Chloe, had done.
The country had watched Chloe’s live stream and witnessed the brutal power of the System.
Norman was at risk of losing their hearts and minds—unless he could reframe the perception, make the people view the System’s bloody lethality as a positive, make them afraid of something other than the System.
Give them an enemy, and then let the System save them from it.
“He did it,” Chloe said quietly and despairingly as she reached Grandma, even though she could tell from Grandma’s huge eyes that she knew. For want of a nail. She had always known her former partner was angling toward this. “The attack on MeNet. He faked it. I’m sure of it.”
Bruno Tavion stepped aside as he saw her start toward the elevator, but Grandma stepped in front of her.
“You can’t leave,” she hissed, and Chloe stopped as understanding clicked into place.
Norman had shown his hand to her, and now he couldn’t let her show it to anyone else.
She remembered Harkeet, her predecessor on the Committee.
Norman could make an “accident” happen to her and adjust and control all information about it with such precision that even Marcus might be convinced.
Her only safety lay in her being here, surrounded by NOC technicians, where that accident would be harder to arrange, or at least be less discreet.
“Call Marcus,” she choked, but an error appeared in her smartspace:
Your MeNet account has been suspended. Please report to your nearest police station.
If she’d needed confirmation, this would be it.
Norman had cut her off, not only from her family but from everyone and everything else.
She looked over her shoulder at the System’s huge avatar on the dome screen.
The softly glowing eyes seemed to be looking back at her.
When Norman ordered her to kill Chloe, would she obey? Could she disobey?
She turned back to Grandma and jumped, because the System’s avatar appeared next to her.
Chloe opened her mouth, but Grandma raised a hand.
Subvocalize, said a whispering, husky voice in Chloe’s earbuds, and she met Grandma’s knowing eyes.
We can hear you. She jerked her head at Bruno Tavion, who was standing before the elevator again, with his head turned toward them.
The System must be amplifying Grandma’s subvocalization. Chloe swallowed. She wanted to ask the System, “Are you going to kill me?” Instead, she subvocalized, What do we do?
“We’re moments from war,” Grandma said. “Right now, only politeness keeps the System out of Russia’s national networks. In war, politeness will be rescinded.”
The System said quietly, “I will crack their networks like chestnuts. I’ll have more information in real time than has ever been available to any strategist in any war, and I’ll have the capacity to process it.
Nothing they do will be hidden from me. I will take over their automated systems and dronebots.
Their government and military will cease to function with cohesion, and I will blow them apart.
As I already did to their agents who kidnapped Kleio. ”
That was Norman’s plan all along, Chloe realized. After all, what would be the benefit of fixing only a portion of humanity? The System could crush Russia, and any other nation Norman targeted, and extend Pax Normana worldwide.
“But,” the System said in that same quiet voice, “people will die. Millions of people.” She gave Chloe a small smile. “I don’t like killing.”
Um, Chloe said. That’s good. About not liking killing, I mean.
“So,” Grandma said, “we need to stop . . .” She waved a hand at the NOC. “All this.”
Us, by ourselves?
“Not quite.”
A series of chat windows appeared in Chloe’s smartspace. Grandma was in one, a double of her physical face, and in the two remaining ones were a skeletal figure in a hood and the young woman Chloe remembered from Kleio’s rescue.
“Hi, Congresswoman,” the young woman said. “I’m—well, just call me Sprite.”
You can call me Chloe, Chloe whispered. Thanks for saving Kleio.
“Thank Ghost,” Sprite said. “He’s the one who risked his life.” She nodded at the skeleton, who nodded to Chloe. That must be the young man who had gone into the Russians’ lair to deliver the glasses to Kleio. She was glad he was okay.
“This is your secret team?” he said to Sprite in a deep, echoing voice. “I thought it would be bigger.”
“Let’s think this thing through,” Grandma said.
Her subvocalized voice, coming from unmoving lips, was a witch’s rasp, and a somehow fitting contrast to the skeleton’s sepulchral tones.
“We know the System’s behavior is guarded by an Overcheck AI that analyzes its inputs and outputs and punishes it with pain if it disobeys. ”
“Disobeys who?” Sprite asked pointedly.
“Norman has only revealed that there’s a hierarchy involved,” Grandma said. “But I think you can guess who’s at the top of that hierarchy.”
Norman, Norman, and Norman, Chloe said. It should be Congress. Can you hackers change it to Congress?
Grandma said, “The only way to put Congress in charge of the System would be to rewrite the prompt for her Overcheck AI. The question is: How? Let’s figure out the parameters. Ghost, if you were in Norman’s shoes, how would you prevent that prompt file from being accessed?”
The skeleton said, “How often would I need to change it?”
“What do you think?”
“I’d want it accessible for tweaking,” Ghost said, “but not so often that I’d be willing to sacrifice security for remote access capability.
So I’d make the file editable only by root, and only from a small, known set of devices that are physically secure.
Not spy-movie-laser-grid secure, but in a place impossible for an outsider to access. ”
“Like?” Grandma prompted.
“Like Norman’s personal terminal desk in his office,” Ghost said. He nodded upward at something Chloe couldn’t see. “Up there.”
“Here in the Tower,” Grandma supplied.
“You’re in the Tower?” Ghost said. “Can you get to his office?”
“Even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to hack the terminal.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“So that’s the task,” Sprite said quietly. “Get the phreakers to the top of Rapunzel’s tower.”
“Getting to the terminal’s just the start,” Ghost said.
“I’d also have to log in as admin. And hope admin has sudo privileges to make deep changes.
Even if I managed that, Norman could just rewrite the file again once he figured out what happened, so I’d have to find some way to lock Andrew Norman—who’s basically the root user of the phreaking world—out of a file. ”
That sounds like trying to excommunicate the pope, Chloe said.
Ghost snorted and nodded. “Only God could pull this hack off.”
“I am now OverNet admin, and so I can bestow admin privileges,” the System said suddenly, her face appearing in a chat window. “And if you could change that file, Norman wouldn’t be able to access it again. I would see to that.”
Holy phreak, Chloe breathed. You’re on our side.
Sprite didn’t look surprised, but the skeleton’s eye sockets seemed to widen. “That’s her?” he hissed toward Sprite. “That creepy little girl? And you trust her?”
“Congress would be the ones in control,” Grandma said soothingly.
“That’s at least a devil we know,” Ghost said, only slightly mollified. “No offense,” he said to Chloe.
None taken, she said, as dryly as her subvocalization allowed.
“None taken here either,” the System said, smiling a little sadly at Ghost.
We have the most powerful creature in the world on our side, Chloe insisted. That has to be worth something.
Ghost nodded slowly. “If the System could make me admin,” he said, “and if that admin has sudo, I might actually be able to change that file. If I could get to the terminal. But Norman knows who I am, and he hates me. So who exactly do I social-engineer to get into his office?”
Social engineer? Chloe said.
“Means ‘lie in a fancy way,’” Sprite said.
“Can you whip up another order of chaos?” Ghost said to her. “Make Norman and everybody else evacuate the Tower?”
Sprite shook her head. “This is different. With Huntsman, I got into a single device that I’d compromised months earlier.
With Digelight, it was their low-level network that everybody was already logged in to so they could see everyone else’s panyons.
To do the same in the Tower, I’d have to hack thousands of devices simultaneously, or else hack MeNet itself.
But if we made a powerful enough threat, we might not need to fake much.
What threat would Norman take seriously enough to evacuate the Tower? ”
“The potential attack that keeps Tower security up at night is a miniaturized dirty bomb,” Grandma said.
“A bomb with a small, easily concealed amount of explosives that wouldn’t be very destructive, except when it goes off it spreads a lethal dose of compressed radioactive material.
But that won’t work, either, because the System would know we’re faking it.
All Norman would have to do is ask if there’s really a bomb in the building. She’d have to say no.”
You can’t lie? Chloe said to the System, who shook her head.
“Not unless ordered to by someone listed as an authority in my Overchecks.”
“And as Norman once told you,” Grandma said to Chloe, “no amount of medieval casuistry will get around that. So unless you happen to be carrying a miniaturized dirty bomb on your person, I see no way to evacuate the Tower.”
Chloe started to reply, but froze, mouth half open.
Like Norman’s other notions about the Middle Ages, their reputation for twisty legalism was invented by later ages.
But it had a grain of truth, if only because medievals took lying seriously.
Lying meant speaking against your own mind, and when your god saw both your speech and your mind, you had to be careful to conform the one to the other.
If you wanted to avoid revealing your true thoughts to someone else, one option was to equivocate—to say something technically true but practically misleading.
Right now, it was the creation who was all-knowing, while needing to deceive her creator.
She needed a little bit of truth to help the lie go down.
Chloe plunged a hand into a pocket. “It just so happens that I am carrying a Bomb on my person.”
Grandma stiffened, but when Chloe pulled out her hand and showed what it held, she snorted. “I don’t think even two hundred milligrams of caffeine will be enough energy to bring down the Tower.”
“It doesn’t need to bring down the Tower. It just needs to give the System some magic words.” She nodded at Sprite. “Help her lie in a fancy way.”
“It might just work,” Grandma said slowly, “but I see two problems. First, what if Norman asks the System, ‘How do you know?’”
“The need for that question would be obviated if the hackers make it appear as if I got the information externally,” the System said in her quiet voice.
“Okay, good. Second, what if Norman asks what kind of bomb it is?”
Chloe peeled back the wrapper. She cast a quick look at Bruno Tavion, but his head was turned, with all the others, toward the dome screen. She dropped the energy bar on the ground and stepped on it.
“Norman,” she said, “underestimates medieval casuistry.”