'What?' Ruth said.
'Look at this.' Gideon tapped his finger on a paragraph that he had just scrolled onto the screen. 'This whole process is based on very large prime numbers. . .'
'Okay, so?'
'That was at the heart of what she was doing at MIT, wasn't it?'
Ruth shrugged. 'I never followed it very well. She was way past me by the time she left grade school.'
Gideon scrolled through the article. 'Most of the security on the Internet is based on these huge numbers, and on the fact that it's supposedly a practical impossibility to factor a four-thousand-bit number by brute force.'
'So?'
'I'm not a mathematician, but one of the things that your sister's colleague, Dr. Nolan, told me—'Zimmerman was pushing the lab toward new theorems that could generate the primes, or factor huge numbers.'' Gideon shook his head. 'No wonder the NSA wanted her, and wants her back. With that kind of algorithm there'd be no such thing as a secure communication on the Internet—or elsewhere for that matter. E-mail, credit-card transactions, private databases—you could crack any of it, all of it.'
Ruth stared at the screen. 'Do you think she managed that?'
'Why not?' Gideon said. 'What would be worth more to an intelligence gathering agency? A factoring algorithm that renders the bulk of encrypted information in existence completely transparent.' Gideon nodded to himself, leaning back. 'And they have to be very careful bringing her back. If it became public knowledge that such an algorithm existed, it would become useless.' Gideon tapped his fingers on the table. 'That explains the government. . .'
Gideon was quiet a long while before Ruth interrupted him. 'You don't sound completely sure.'
Gideon shook his head. 'I can make it fit with everything . . . except your sister. It fits with what the old man said about her designing parts of the NSA's computer security—' He sighed. 'There's more to this. I know there's more to this. This doesn't explain why your sister disappeared. It certainly doesn't explain why she, or the IUF, would need a supercomputer.'
'It doesn't? This sounds kind of heavy to me.'
Gideon nodded. 'But the work she was doing at MIT was using equipment anyone has access to, not particularly sophisticated. 200Mhz PCs. I could get more powerful computers used. So, if what she did was a direct outgrowth of the ET Lab, why would she suddenly need the kind of power a Daedalus provides? Not to mention, this is exactly the kind of thing the NSA was using her for. I'm sure that whatever she's doing now would have to be something that she couldn’t do at the NSA—'
'I keep telling you. She's not stupid. She wouldn't jump ship at the NSA unless she thought the odds were in favor of her getting away with it.
Gideon nodded. He'd been thinking along those lines himself. There was another possibility that Ruth wasn't seeing. What if Zimmerman didn't care about the odds? What if she was working on something that she thought was important enough to risk being hunted down by the Feds as a traitor?
There wasn't any question in Gideon's mind that Zimmerman had her own agenda. What if there was something she was working on in secret, ever since MIT? Maybe since before . . .
But what?
What could she think is that important?
Gideon stared at the screen, trying to think. Ruth looked at him and said, 'Don't you think it's time to consider the FBI?'
Gideon looked at Ruth. 'I doubt the government's priorities match ours— I don't think they care about bringing your sister in alive.'
'And you do?'
The question made Gideon uncomfortable. He had been driven to this point by a need to discover what had happened in the warehouse, why Rafe had died. Somehow, his focus had changed. Julia Zimmerman had become his focus. He could rationalize it by saying that she had been the focus of what had happened at the warehouse. Was that the real reason? He was following this woman, finding himself fascinated by her history. . .
In his gut he knew that, if he discovered what she was doing, he could damage those who had shot him and killed Rafe. He knew he wanted to bring whatever happened to the press and to that Congressional hearing. He wanted to damage those who had damaged so much around him.
He wanted to vindicate himself.
But that wasn't it. Not completely.
He realized that he didn't want Julia Zimmerman to end like Rafe, or Kendal, or Davy Jones, or Kareem Rashad Williams. Whatever she had done, Gideon had an irrational belief that it wasn't treasonous. Somehow she was serving her first and only love. There was something in her that wasn't of Gideon's world. Gideon's world was constructed from self-serving politics, where his brother's death was some sort of bargaining chip, a political asset—or liability—depending on what side of the fence you were on.
Julia came from somewhere else. And, somehow, understanding her, what she was doing, would give Rafe's death the meaning that Gideon desperately needed. Gideon couldn't accept that all it had been was some interdepartmental screwup. . .
There was something larger, and much more important at stake.
Gideon looked at Ruth. Did he care about bringing Julia in alive? 'I do,' Gideon said quietly. 'Believe me, I do.'
Ruth looked at him a little oddly. 'You don't have a crush on her, do you?'
Gideon laughed. 'That's silly. I've never even met the woman.'
He turned back to the computer screen and started calling up searches on the other terms that related to Dr. Zimmerman's work. As he worked, the phrase kept running through his head, I've never even met the woman.
He searched for things relating to 'Evolutionary Algorithm,' 'Virus,' and, 'Information Warfare.'
The search presented him with dozens of pages on the Evolutionary Algorithm. A few pages were actually archived copies of papers from the ET Lab at MIT. There were so many documents that Gideon threw Zimmerman's name into the search to pare down the list.
When he did that, he found all the MIT papers, and a document titled, 'Tenth International Conference on Artificial Life.'
Gideon stared at the title for a long time before he opened the document. He was remembering something Dr. Michael Nolan had said. 'She began to act as if the programs we were creating were living creatures. . .' He also remembered the lone thing that she'd left on her own personal computer, a little icon labeled 'life.'
The document had an introduction to the term 'artificial life.' Gideon scanned the page, picking out phrases that caught his eye, or seemed important.
'Artificial Life labels human attempts to construct models—digital, biological, and robotic—that reproduce some of the essential properties of life. The goal of such models is to reveal the organizational principles of living systems on Earth, and possibly elsewhere . . .'
'. . . requires a truly interdisciplinary approach that knits together fields of knowledge as diverse as mathematics and biology, computer science and physics, engineering and philosophy . . .'
'. . . an important part of this effort is a search for independent principles of living systems, which apply to any living system, regardless of biology—or lack thereof. Artificial Life also considers the possibilities of life, artificial alternatives to a carbon-based chemistry.'
'This sounds like so much science fiction,' Ruth said.
Gideon nodded. 'But, according to Dr. Nolan, this kind of research has been going on for decades. He said some of the first Genetic Algorithms were produced on an Apple II computer.'
Gideon checked the conference schedule and found Dr. Zimmerman's name.
'Sat. June 29: 8:30-9:15 Keynote Talk, Julia Zimmerman, The Biology of the Internet.'
Gideon stared at the title of her talk for a long time. It was hard to reconcile with his idea of what Julia Zimmerman was involved in. So far he had pictured her as interested in obscure mathematical objects like the Zeta Function. The Internet seemed too 'earthy' a topic for her.
He looked across at Ruth. 'How interested is your sister in computers?'
'She's fascinated by them,' Ruth said. 'At least as far as they are a means to her ends. She once called them
