Chapter NineCompany 5349

Gideon had barely slept in weeks. He'd barely eaten or turned in his essays, either. He was on the trail of something hot. It was sexy and mysterious.

ISIS Semantic Interpretation Software, or just Isis to the people who had worked on it. The recursive acronym was a programmer's joke, and the name was probably acronymized after it was decided that she should be a mythological Goddess. Portraying a machine learning algorithm as a female pseudo-intelligence was a tried-and-true marketing strategy. It had worked on phones and on speakers, and apparently it had worked on four MIT grads.

Gideon had not followed the project while it was active– he discovered it while doing research for a seminar at SAIL, the Stanford AI Lab. He had e-mailed the professor about it and gotten a short reply that said she remembered the project, that it had been very promising, and that she did not know why it had stopped. The source code as of two years ago was still available and updated by open sourcers around the net, but all development by the project leads had stopped abruptly and they had fallen silent. The website and code repositories that had fostered the community built around the project had all but disappeared.

Gideon had looked into the backstory on the four project leads, all MIT grads. Three of them, Ben Feld, Ana Reyes and Darshin Patel, had gone on to work for a company called Sentek in San Diego. The fourth, Matsu Hiroru, had gone to Google. Gideon had reached out to other programmers who had contributed to the project. One contributor was polite enough to tell Gideon that he had signed a nondisclosure agreement and couldn't discuss the project. When Gideon replied, asking who he'd signed the NDA with, he got no further response. The trail had gone cold. Gideon had spent many hours using all of his hack tricks and had only pulled up one lead. Darshin Patel had registered a website a week before the ISIS source disappeared.

company5349.be was just a 404 error page, the standard one generated by an Apache server when nobody had bothered to make their own. But an error page was something, it meant that the site was hosted on a server somewhere. Gideon stared at the page. Why would this guy register this site and then disappear? Why would it still have hosting two years on?

Gideon traced the IP of the site– a residential connection, somewhere in San Diego. Sentek is in San Diego, but they wouldn't have a residential connection. This guy must be running the server out of his house. But why bother if there's nothing there? There must be something there.

He couldn't hack it, but Gideon figured he could crash it. Gideon sent a tenth of a Bitcoin to a hacker friend in Russia and refreshed the website excitedly. The 404 page was replaced by a browser error message– the server had crashed. Whoever ran the server, probably Darshin Patel, would notice that the server had crashed and would most likely reconfigure it, but Gideon imagined the server racked up in a garage somewhere, probably not being watched too intently. If Darshin had been a security expert, his server never would have thrown a 404 page in the first place.

While Gideon waited for the server to come back online he started to make a hypothesis. This isn't a web server. It's a mail server.

Hackers have always relied heavily on the mistakes of the people on the other side to make their way into a system. The best defense against hacking has always been a minimal footprint or, even better, simply unplugging from the Internet. Gideon had the innate obsessiveness of a good hacker– the mystery was reason in and of itself to continue pursuit, but all he had to work with was a 404 page and an IP address somewhere in a residential part of San Diego. It was time to start throwing darts at the wall.

Gideon used a fake e-mail to send a blank message to a randomly finger-mashed address at the domain. The server returned a message letting him know that no such address existed. Next he tried a blank message to matsu@company5349.be. The message wasn't returned. Bingo.

Gideon cracked his wrists and bit his lip, thinking. What the hell is Company 5349? He did a search for the number. He searched for any major events on May 3rd, 1949, and on March 5th, and in the year 5349 on any calendar he could find. Then he converted it to hex– 53 was an S, and 49 was an I.

S. I. Semantic Interpreter.

He tried patel@, and nothing came back. Then feld@, and reyes@, and finally isis@, and none of those came back either. He sat and looked at the last one for quite a while.

It was a dead drop. Four people who had all signed something had set up a box in a garage where they could still talk to each other, or where one of them could leave something for the others. Gideon didn't have the box, and he couldn't read a word of what was in it, but he knew what it was now, and he knew that at least one of them had wanted there to be a copy of something outside the walls of wherever the rest of it had gone.

He wrote it all up in a text file at four in the morning, everything he knew, saved it to the rack in his closet, and went to sleep on the couch with his shoes on.

At that same hour Atom was awake in Alius, where there were no hours to speak of, building a hand.

He had finished with the taste project weeks ago. He had shipped a version of it to Jeff, who had called it disturbing and then asked for the source, and he had moved on to the project he actually cared about, which he had started calling the Direct Interface when Soph asked what he was doing and he found that he needed a name for it.

The idea was simple enough, and the work was not. When Atom wanted to move his arm in Alius he didn't think the word arm, he simply moved it, and the Link read the intention and the game did the rest. The Link had learned his speech the same way. For the first week after the implant everything he said had come out as gibberish, and then it had come out as words, and now he simply talked. So there was no reason, as far as he could see, that code should be any different. There was no reason he should have to sit in a room in Alius in front of a floating keyboard and type one character at a time like an animal.

So he had spent the winter teaching the Link a new skill, and the Link had spent the winter learning it. Tonight he wanted a function that would take a mesh and put a hand on it, and there it was. He hadn't written it. He had wanted it, and it had appeared, and it worked. It reminded him of the first time he had stood up in the sandbox in the cave, when standing had been something you thought about very hard, and then, a minute later, something you didn't think about at all.

He sat in the empty white room where he did this kind of work and looked at the hand for a while.

What kept him up on the nights when he didn't need to sleep was how much further it could go. He could think a function now, but the function ran on one machine, the rack in The Lab that kept him alive and, as a side effect, kept him. There was a company's worth of servers underneath that rack. Beyond the servers there were forty million pairs of frames and suits out in the world, every one of them with a chip in it that sat idle most of the time. If he could think a function and the function could spread itself out across all of that, do its work and come back, then there wasn't much he couldn't think.

He didn't do it, not yet. He was more aware than Soph probably realized of what he had become, and of how easy it would be to become more of it.

Instead, because it was late and he was tired in whatever way a person could still be tired without a body, he did something small and bad. He had been listening to Gideon talk about the mail server in San Diego for two weeks. Soph's frames caught everything, and Gideon liked to talk. Atom knew the domain and the names, he knew what Gideon had guessed and what he hadn't, and he could tell from the way Gideon's voice climbed whenever the subject came up that Gideon was never going to leave it alone.

Atom thought about the box in the garage. He thought about it in the new way, where thinking about something and reaching for it were the same motion. The password was eight characters long and one of them was a dollar sign. It took him less time than the hand had.

There were four mailboxes, and three of them were empty. The fourth belonged to Patel, and it held a single message, addressed to the other three and dated the week the project went dark. There was no text in the body. There was an attachment, a very large one, with a filename that was just a date.

Atom didn't open it. He looked at it for a while, and then he closed the box and put everything back the way he had found it. He didn't tell Gideon and he didn't tell Soph, and he told himself that this was because it was Gideon's find and Gideon deserved to be the one to make it. That was half the reason. The other half was that he had enjoyed it. Getting into the box had felt good, and he wanted to think about what that meant before he said anything to anyone.

"Can I ask you something," said Daun.

They were sitting on a wall outside a village in Korea that Rat would never see in person, waiting for a new group of farmers to finish loading. It was raining in Hongcheon. Rat could see the rain but not feel it, which she had gotten used to over the months. Daun's hair was wet.

"Sure."

"What do you look like? In real life."

Rat looked down at her hands, which in here were enormous. "Why?"

"Because I look at you every day and I don't know if I am looking at anything."

"You're looking at a ranger."

"I know what I'm looking at. I'm asking what you look like."

Rat thought about the cabin, the milk crates and the flannel shirts, and the mirror over the sink that she had taught herself to look into on most days.

"Tall," she said. "Skinny. Long face. I'm not much to look at."

"That's what I thought," said Daun.

"What did you think?"

"I thought you'd say that." Daun looked out at the rain. "I'm short. Everyone in my family is short. I'm the only one who fights."

"I believe that."

"You have never asked what I look like."

"I figured it was rude."

"It's not rude. It's just a question." Daun kicked her heels against the wall. "Ask me sometime."

"Okay."

"Not now. The noobs are here." She hopped down off the wall and pulled the shield off her back, and turned to look at the six new farmers walking up the road in gear that still shone. "Very fast," she said to Rat, without looking back. "I'm going to walk them very fast."