“Don’t even say that.”
“Shut up and listen. This might be important. You have to establish an SNP session first.” Serial Neural Protocol, the language Sophie had designed for her neural networks. “Then you send a particular character block, it looks like a public key, I sent an interleaved version to your Hushmail account a long time ago and told you it was a PGP key I wanted you to keep for me as backup. You remember that? You still have it?” I nodded. “Good. That’s the override sequence. After that all command packets you send are obeyed without question until you close the session.”
“A back door,” I said. “You built a back door into your own system. Why?”
“I’m sorry. There were so many things I should have told you. I’m so sorry. I just – it was like I didn’t know how.”
“Things like what?”
I couldn’t tell if the sound that followed was a laugh or a sob. “Like my name.”
I turned my head to look at her more directly. We were lying so close together that our noses touched. “Your
“Listen.” Her voice was low but fraught. “When I was sixteen, I was just a kid, I did some bad things. Not just crimes. Really bad things. People died because of what I did. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have. And when I met you, after my dad died, I was trying to get away from all that, to reinvent myself, so it felt like I needed to obfuscate my past. Put all the bad things I’d done in a box and throw it away and not have it be part of my new life with you. You understand?”
I didn’t respond.
“I know that was crazy and stupid. But at the time it was what I needed to do. I was so messed up before I met you. You have no idea how good you’ve been for me. And I’ve wanted to tell you ever since, I swear, but I was scared. And the more I didn’t tell you, the bigger a deal it became, and the more scared I got, so the the harder it got to even think about bringing up the subject. Emotional negative feedback loop. I’m sorry. That’s no excuse. It wasn’t a secret I needed to keep from you, total opposite, it would have been so much better for both of us if I’d told you. But it was like I didn’t know how. And I really thought it was all behind me forever, dead and buried. But I guess Faulkner was right. And I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, that it’s coming out now, like this, when we’re already… ” she let that thought trail off unfinished, “but believe it or not, you know what, it’s such a relief to finally be telling you, even here, even like this. Even if it makes you want to punch me or something.”
“Telling me what? You changed your name?”
“I was born Sophia Ward, not Sophie Warren.”
After a stunned pause I pointed out, “You didn’t change it much.”
“Just enough to dodge most algorithms. This way I can’t get caught out by someone shouting my old name, and if I bump into someone who knew me, it sounds like they’re just misremembering. But to databases I’m a whole new woman.”
“Whole new woman from what?”
She sighed. “I’ll tell you the sordid details sometime when we get out of this, if you like. But honestly, they don’t matter, they’re not even relevant to my life any more. Except that’s the real reason I never took any military money for the lab. I’m a new woman according to the databases, but that wouldn’t stand up to a real background check.”
“Huh.”
“And also, maybe -” She licked her lips nervously. “You ever heard of a hacker named LoTek?”
“Sure. Of course. The only hacker ever made it onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, right? And then they took him off for no good reason.” Some thought LoTek had cut a deal with the feds; some claimed he had hacked into their systems and erased himself. I had never encountered anyone with a convincing claim to having actually met the living legend in meatspace. “Holy shit. That was you?” Everyone had always talked like LoTek was a man, but that didn’t mean anything.
“No. He’s the guy who had Jesse keep an eye on me.”
I started, looked up at Jesse, busy trying to steer the raft. He had known Sophie longer than I. I remembered something she had said on the boat, after we were captured, something that had prompted a look from Jesse:
“Was. Sort of. I don’t know.”
Not just her but him too. My two closest friends in the world had been keeping huge secrets from me for years, treating me like a child who couldn’t be trusted with the truth. I didn’t even feel angry. Just empty.
“That’s all I can tell you now,” Sophie said.
“Whatever.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shrugged as if disinterested. A defense mechanism. Sophie closed her eyes and tightened her grip on me. For awhile her breaths were long and shuddering. Then she slowly began to steady herself.
I told myself none of it mattered compared to the immediate question of whether we were all going to die here on this raft. We were drifting helplessly and no one knew we were out here except for the drug thugs trying to capture us. I wondered how long we would last before the sun killed us. They called it death by exposure, but it was really death by sunburn. It was so easy to forget, on land, in the shade, how deadly the tropical sun could be when you had no respite. We had nothing to cover ourselves, except maybe the raft itself, but turning it over and treading water would drain our strength.
A weird resentment towards fictional Pi took hold of me. He had been Indian and dark-skinned, he had only had a tiger to worry about, not sunburn and sunstroke and exposure. You could trick and evade a tiger. The sun was inescapable. Or maybe thirst would get us first. We had almost no fresh water. I gave us a couple of days at most.
“Wait,” Anya said sharply. “I saw something.”
Sophie and I sat halfway up.
“Where?” Jesse asked.
“Over there. A flash. Look!”
We looked. The ocean was an endless series of twenty-foot swells. A moment later we saw it too; a flicker of light, sun glinting off something in the distance.
“A paddle,” Jesse said. “Fishermen!”
We tried to call out to them, but they were too far away, and our voices too hoarse. Anya displayed an impressive talent for earsplitting howls, but even they were quickly swallowed up by the wind and the sea, and the fishing boat came no nearer. In fact, to our crushing dismay, it seemed to be moving further away.
Then Sophie said to me, “Your phone.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Give me your phone.”
“It’s dead. Soaked. We’re way out of signal range anyway.”
“I know. Give me.”
I passed it over. Water dripped from its innards. “What are you going to do?”
“Call them.”
“How?”
Sophie looked at the fishing boat, then up at the sun, calculating. She raised my iPhone, angled it carefully, and moved its screen back and forth through a small arc.
“Semaphore,” I said, catching on. The phone didn’t work, but its reflective screen could catch sunlight and flash it towards the fishing boat. If Sophie had figured the angles correctly, and if they had any curiosity at all -
“They’re coming!” Anya reported excitedly.
It was a crude wooden fishing boat, crewed by two men and four boys, dragging a hand-woven net. As they approached they stared at us as if we were aliens fallen from a distant star.
Jesse said, grinning, “Thank you, Steve Jobs.”
Chapter 32
