Chapter Twenty-ThreeWarrant

They came to Gideon's on a Tuesday at eight in the morning. Gideon would say later that this was the tell. Nobody who actually worked for the government got up that early to knock on a college kid's door.

There were two of them. The one who talked was about fifty, fit, with a haircut that cost money and a windbreaker with nothing printed on it. He held up a leather folder with a badge in it for exactly as long as it took Gideon's eyes to register a badge, and not a second longer.

"Dale Kessler. National Security Agency. This is my partner. May we come in?"

"Uh," said Gideon. He was in a t-shirt, holding a bowl of cereal. "Do I have to say yes?"

"No. But it'd be easier."

"Easier for who?"

Kessler smiled. It was a good smile, the smile of a man who had done this in a lot of doorways. "Mr. Abecassis, we're tracking a group that's been moving some unusual traffic across the West Coast. Terror adjacent. I can't say more than that. We traced some of it to your router last night. I'd like to look around, ask a couple of questions, and be out of your hair in ten minutes. Or we can do it the other way."

"What's the other way?"

"Longer."

Gideon let them in.

He gave the tour the way he had given it to his parents the first time they visited, when the place had needed to look like a student lived there. He had cleaned. He had cleaned at two that morning, after a laptop went into a backpack and into Soph's car and into The Lab, and he had scrubbed the network of everything that had ever said hello through the ceiling. He had left, on purpose, enough of a mess that the place looked lived in and not staged. Cereal bowls, a sock, a stack of AI textbooks with library stickers on the spines. The marionette rig, which Kessler's partner looked at for a long time without asking about.

"Roommates?"

"Sometimes. Friends crash. I've got a hammock."

"Anyone crashing now?"

"A friend from out of town. She's out."

Kessler nodded and walked into the kitchen and looked at the thermostat. It was only a thermostat. Gideon watched him look at it and thought, he knows. He doesn't know what he knows, but he knows something was here, and he's looking for the shape of it.

The partner picked something up off the counter. It was a plastic cylinder the size of a thumb with a button on the side.

"What's this?"

"Uh," said Gideon. "You really don't want to know."

The partner pressed the button. The cylinder buzzed hard in his hand and he dropped it on the counter, where it skittered in a circle like a beetle. Gideon had built it for a marionette that needed to shiver. He didn't explain that. The partner turned it off and set it down and wiped his hand on his jacket, and he didn't pick anything else up.

They went through the bedroom. They went through the closet with the rack in it. Kessler looked at the rack, and then at Gideon.

"That's a lot of computer for a student."

"I'm at Stanford," said Gideon, as though that explained it, and Kessler seemed to accept that it did.

Then they went into the spare room, and the partner stopped.

Rat's Link was on the desk, the gray helmet that Jeong had carried across the Pacific in a gym bag, with its cable coiled beside it. Rat had gone out that morning with Soph and hadn't thought to hide it. To Rat it was a tool, like a bow.

The partner didn't touch it. He looked at it, and then he looked at Kessler, and he nodded once. It was a small nod, the kind one man gives another across a room when something they were sent to look for turns out to be there.

Gideon saw the nod.

"Hey, uh," he said. "So. Are you guys with the government?"

"Yes."

"Cool. Cool. Don't you need, like, a warrant or something?"

"No," said Kessler pleasantly.

He closed the leather folder and thanked Gideon for his time. He and his partner walked out the front door and got into a black car with California plates and drove away. Gideon stood in his doorway holding a bowl of cereal that had gone to mush and thought, very clearly, I have just been visited by two men who are not what they said they were. They know about the Link. They didn't take it. So they aren't here to take things. They're here to watch what we do next.

He called Soph.

"Some scary dudes were just at my place."

"NSA?"

"That's what the badge said."

"You don't think so."

"I think a guy who works for the NSA doesn't get excited about a helmet. I think he asks about the rack and doesn't care about the marionettes. I think he wears the right shoes." He stopped. "They saw Rat's Link. They didn't touch it. They looked at each other. I want everybody in a room in about ten minutes."

"We'll be at The Lab. Come."

The Lab was three floors under the West Oakland building, past two doors that needed Richard's hand and one that needed Max's. It was the first time Gideon had been inside it. He walked in and stopped and looked at the tank.

He had known. He had been told. He had built a laptop that talked and sat in a kitchen with a house that said hello, and he had thought he was ready for the sight of his friend's boyfriend, the coder with the Direct Interface, lying in a tank of fluid with cables going into his skull and his eyes closed and his chest going up and down on a machine.

He wasn't ready. He stood there for a while, and nobody rushed him.

"Hey, Gideon," said Atom, from the frames Rat handed him at the door. "Yeah. It's a lot. Take your time."

"You're."

"Yeah."

"That's you."

"That's the part of me they kept. This is the part that's talking. Both are true." He waited. "You want to sit down? People usually sit down."

Gideon sat down on a rolling stool next to the tank. He looked at the boy in it for a long minute. Then he turned the stool around, deliberately, so that his back was to the glass.

"Okay," he said. "Here's what happened at my house."

He told them. Richard listened with his arms crossed. Max, who took notes when she was frightened, took notes on a tablet. Soph sat on the floor with her back against the wall. Rat stood by the door, the way she stood in every room, in case the room needed leaving.

"They noted the Link," said Gideon. "They didn't say a word about it. The partner just looked at Kessler and nodded. That's it. That's a man confirming something he was sent to confirm. I think they're watching us. I think they've been watching since the parts started making noise on the market, and they came by to see who flinched."

"Oh, they're definitely watching," said Richard. "That's the first thing they'd do. They know an ISIS instance ran on my network. They know where my network is. They know whose house it went to. They're not going to kick in a door until they know what's behind it. They're going to sit on us until we show them."

He looked around the room.

"Which means that from this second, nobody talks about any of this on anything digital. Not a text, not a call, not an email, not a message in the game. Nothing. Assume everything's tapped. Assume the frames are tapped. Assume that thermostat is tapped, Gideon, I don't care that she's out of it. We talk in this room, or we write it on paper and burn the paper."

"That's paranoid," said Gideon.

"That's a man who's been in this building ten years and knows what's in the walls."

Nobody argued.

"Something else," said Rat. She hadn't moved from the door. "The shoes."

"What?"

"Gideon said the shoes were wrong. Wes said it too. Gideon called him on the way here." She looked at Gideon. "Tell them."

"Wes," said Gideon, "who notices everything and has never once been useful, says feds wear a very specific kind of shoe. Cheap, black, government issue. It's in the dress code and they get reimbursed for it. Kessler was wearing four hundred dollar boots. His partner was wearing running shoes. Wes says no federal agent on earth wears running shoes to a door knock, and Wes has watched more true crime than any human alive."

"That's not evidence," said Max.

"No. It's a shoe. But I've got the faces." Gideon opened his laptop, remembered, and closed it again. He took out a pen and a notebook instead. "I've got them off my doorbell camera. I'm going to run them. Not here. Somewhere with no connection to anything. I'll do it tonight, and I'll write down what I find on paper, and I'll bring the paper here."

"And if they're not NSA?"

"Then we know who sent the thing that's been eating her," said Gideon. "And we know they've got the balls to walk into a college kid's kitchen with a fake badge. And we know they didn't take the Link, which means they don't want the Link." He glanced over his shoulder at the tank, quickly, and away again. "Which means they want something else. I'd like to know what."

He ran the faces that night at Wes's cousin's apartment in Fremont, on a machine that had never been on Gideon's network and never would be. It took four hours. At the end of it he had two names, two employers and one very bad feeling. He wrote all of it down in pencil on the back of a takeout menu and drove to Oakland at three in the morning. Richard let him into The Lab, and Gideon put the menu on the table next to the tank.

"Dale Kessler's real name is Dale Kessler," said Gideon. "He didn't bother. He's a former Navy intelligence officer who's worked private security for eleven years. For the last six he's been on the payroll of a company in San Diego that does classified work for the Department of Defense. The partner's name is Ruiz. Same company, same six years." He tapped the menu. "Sentek. They don't work for the NSA. They work for the people who bought her."

Richard looked at the menu.

"So we're not being watched by the government."

"No."

"We're being watched by the people who built the thing that ate her. Who have no warrant, because there's no warrant to have. Who walked into a kid's house with a fake badge and looked at a Link and nodded at each other over it."

"Yes."

Richard folded the menu in half and put it in his pocket.

"Okay," he said. "Then we need to talk to someone who thinks about this for a living. And we need to do it somewhere that isn't here."

"Like who?"

"Sophia has a professor," said Richard. "Max told me. Ethics of artificial minds, or some such thing. Soph says she's the smartest person in the building." He looked at the tank, at his son, at the cables. "I'd like to hear what a smart person who isn't in this basement thinks we should do. Hypothetically."