Day One

The moment broke. Young had remained frozen in place as the crying went on, but now she moved quickly to the closest monitor as the sound of the double doors flapping closed made Hawke turn; Vasco, Price and Hanscomb, who had remained at the entrance to the room, had ducked back out into the hall.

Hawke thought about following them but joined Young at the line of computers instead, where she was already typing, fingers flying over the keys. “Venus flytrap,” she said. “Lured us right in here. Should have seen it coming. Your wife is pregnant?”

“How the hell…?”

Young nodded. “Educated guess,” she said. “We’re easy marks.”

“You’re pregnant?”

“I was,” Young said, without looking up. “Lost it in week ten. About a month ago. It was better that way. I’m not…” She shrugged. “Mommy material.”

“I… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t exactly interested in being a father.” It came out hard, but her voice broke slightly on the last word. She tapped more keys, crashed the computer, waiting. “These terminals are running an unauthorized program. We have to stop it and reboot to get access to an outside line if we want to find out what’s going on.”

“If you gain root access—”

“It’s not going to be that easy.”

Hawke wondered how she knew that. He studied her in profile, the delicate features and doll-like quality of her frame, hair cropped short around her chin. What he had seen as an absence of emotion was… perhaps a bit more complicated. The shell she wore was more like cracked porcelain than concrete.

“Anne,” he said. “What do you mean, we were lured in? You think this was deliberate?”

The screen had come up blank. She was trying to crash the machine again and regain control, but it wasn’t responding. “I don’t know.”

“Come on,” he said. “You do know something, I can see that. We’re in trouble here. Talk to me.”

“You know how much of our lives can be hacked,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Medical records, bank accounts, text messages and e-mails and phone calls, computer hard drives, blogs. The most personal details. I don’t have to tell you this. Our weak spots are easy to find, right? It’s all available to anyone with the skills to get at them.”

“You think members of Anonymous did this?”

Young shrugged. “I’m not sure. Not yet.”

“Because I’ve got to say, that doesn’t make any sense. What’s so special about you and me, really? Why go to all that trouble for us? You really think Jim was right, that Eclipse is setting us up for something? This is some kind of damage control? That’s conspiracy theory bullshit. It’s not possible, not even for them.”

Even as he said it, something clicked in his head: the calls to action by Admiral Doe on Twitter, the protests being staged all over the city, bringing large groups of people to specific places. He remembered feeling like there had been some sort of pattern in the data he’d seen on the map, but the final answer kept eluding him. Had all of those people been prodded at their most vulnerable points, lured into some kind of spider’s web? Across the entire city of New York?

If so, for what possible reason?

That’s not possible to do on such a massive scale. We’re talking trillions of data points. How could anyone know everything about that many people?

Young wasn’t getting anywhere. “Let me try,” he said, and stepped up to another terminal. “I’ve got some skills of my own.”

“I don’t think—”

“Trust me for a minute.” He unplugged the power from the back, then plugged it in again, did a safe reboot with command prompt, named a batch file and opened it, trying to add new administrative and then root access to gain control of the system. Hawke felt light-headed, a little woozy, as if he’d had a few beers. The screen blurred and he had to blink to bring it back into focus. Strange. Maybe it was the aftermath of an adrenaline surge. Somewhere outside the morgue, he could hear a hollow booming sound.

He looked at Young and picked his next words carefully, probing gently around the edges of the truth like a tongue working at a sore tooth. “You worked for Eclipse, didn’t you? When Jim was there.”

At first, she seemed to ignore him; then she nodded once, short and fast. “I started as an intern in his office and stayed another six months as a junior engineer after he left. He offered me a position at Conn.ect. He was the reason I… Jim’s a brilliant man. I jumped at the chance to work with him again.”

Hawke was revising his earlier opinion of Young as someone who played by the rules. He thought of the phone Weller had given him still nestled in his left pocket. He’d forgotten about it in the aftermath of all that had happened since then. She was his mole, had smuggled this out. Or maybe not. Maybe she was up to something else.

Hawke had been making progress on the computer while she spoke. He didn’t have his regular tools with him, but he had a few tricks up his sleeve and he was good enough to get through. He’d installed an IDS sniffer program to log network activity and monitor intrusions before he shut down the Ethernet, cut it off from the outside, and now he worked through several debuggers. The computer seemed to come up clean.

“What was Eclipse working on, Anne? What do they want with Jim?”

“He swore me to secrecy. I signed confidentiality agreements; I did things that were illegal—”

“The world is burning. I think the time for worrying about who signed what is long gone. Why are they after him? What did he do?”

She hesitated again, then seemed to come to a decision. “It’s more like what they took from him. I’ll show you, if we can get access to outside.”

He reactivated the network jack. “Done,” he said.

She stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Like I said, I have some experience with this.”

“I won’t ask.” Young took over, bringing up a connection to a server. She hacked into a private repository of some kind. Documents popped up on-screen, marked as highly confidential. He leaned closer. Internal memos. Specs and code. Diagrams. A new kind of programming language. Patent documents, filed and pending.

“We stole these back from them,” she said. “The reason he founded Conn.ect was to develop security software that could find holes in the best networks and get access to their servers. We got into some, but couldn’t crack the last of them.”

“Jesus,” Hawke said. “What is this?”

“Evidence,” she said. “Stored on a secure remote server Jim set up. Thank God it’s still up and running. He was building a case to prove what they did with his baby.”

“His baby?”

She sighed. “Most programming still runs off simple ones and zeroes, binary code. Right?”

“Sure.”

“You can build the fastest operating system in the world, but it’s not capable of working the same way a brain can, with multiple paths, multiple choices in reasoning. It’s linear. Moravec and Kurzweil argued that the brain could be copied into software, that it can essentially be reproduced exactly. Some neural networks try to do that. But it’s still a simulation, the appearance of thought and perception, not the reality. Machines can’t learn on their own in the same way we can; they can’t be creative, make leaps of logic and discovery. They can’t feel, can’t imagine anything. They aren’t conscious, at least not in the way we define it.”

Hawke kept staring at the screen. He remembered the rumors he’d heard of Eclipse creating something based on quantum computing, but nobody he’d found had known anything more about it. The files were endless: Testing documents and reports, new hardware built to support it. Budgetary outlays and financial documents. And papers about government grants. Lots of them.

“Jim invented another approach, something that had been attempted for years. Adaptive intelligence based on human cognition. Algorithms that allowed for thought, for choice. It created an infinite number of paths, decision making based on multiple variables and learned behavior. But Eclipse patented everything without his