She plugged the seashell into Kimmie’s port. At its core, the seashell was a packet sniffer, a digital bloodhound that followed the communications between systems—devices chatting over long distances, or the interlocking utilities of, say, a Driverless prototype car.
She began to type, mirrored by Dierdrax’s hands at her dark web terminal. Otto was so complex that all his independent programs, from the AI that formed his personality down to the mechanism that controlled the tire pressure, had to be in constant communication. If she rigged it properly, the seashell should allow her to see the network that connected all these systems.
A riot of code swept across the terminal. The packet sniffer was doing its job, but she was having the same problem she’d had the first time she booted it up back in the CB Lounge: information overload. She toggled over to her documents—the sight of her Epheme intercepts, labeled Buffalo_Financial_Aid, gave her a little rush—and opened the Driverless research data files she’d created before the trip. A minute later she had it: the lynchpin of a Driverless car’s innumerable systems, the operational HQ to which the life sync and rearview cameras and LIDAR sensors and everything else reported, was called the CAN bus.
Back at the terminal, she commanded the seashell to “paint” the CAN bus root directory. An underlying architecture emerged from the data stream. Christina practically screamed in triumph when the connective tissue of Otto’s brain arranged itself before her. She leaned forward so that her entire body was curled around the computer and her neck was angled uncomfortably down at the screen. If Melissa bothered to look up from her phone, she would see Christina having what looked like a disturbingly intimate moment with a piece of electronic equipment.
Making CAN bus visible was like peeling away the skin on a cadaver to note how slick wires of muscles worked in concert with tendons every time knee or elbow joints hinged. Up front, Melissa flipped idly through the ambience settings—air fresheners and lighting schemes—while Christina watched Otto simultaneously perform his duties as a concierge and catalog the pattern of Melissa’s movements like spyware stealing keystrokes.
As they whipped through eastern Ohio, Christina explored CAN bus until a hierarchy revealed itself. The surface-level elements designed to entrance the passengers (club-ready sound system, high-def window displays, privacy shrouds, 3-D holo-browsers) spread through a decision tree that intertwined with the automotive programs (LIDAR, fuel economy, solar micropanels, engine monitoring) and then ballooned exponentially into an umbrella program called ARACHNE.
She could penetrate no further. The millions of lines of code she’d been sifting through constituted just a tiny fraction of Otto’s brain. It was as if she’d scratched his head with a fingernail, piercing digital flesh to poke him with a hangnail-
size bit of herself. The bulk of his brain was an undiscovered continent—no, an entire planet—cloaked in an atmosphere called ARACHNE.
She had a name. That was a good start. Now she just had to find a way in.
Otto came to a sudden stop, and she glanced out the window at a huge empty parking lot where weeds grew through cracks, and heartier plants claimed big chunks of pavement.
She disconnected the seashell and guided Dierdrax away from the terminal. When her avatar turned to reach for the door behind her, Dierdrax froze in a three-quarter profile. The flesh of her face had been torn away, exposing her metal skeleton. The chrome surrounding her cheek and eye socket was a bulbous mass, as if Dierdrax’s mechanical soul had become too big for its skin.
Something horrible was inside her, an infection struggling to break free. A shining silver corruption.
Christina wiggled her finger on the trackpad, and Dierdrax seemed to shiver in place. The metallic glitch vanished, and her face reverted to normalcy. Christina waited half a minute, but nothing happened. She told herself her eyes were playing tricks on her; she’d been hunched over the screen for way too long.
She closed the lid of her laptop and blinked the real world into place. She’d been so preoccupied, she hadn’t thought to question why Otto had dragged them across the entire state of Pennsylvania, only to stop in Middle of Nowhere, Ohio.
“A mental institution?!”
The cracked and faded sign arched over a slice of the parking lot’s northern edge. Vines snaked up rusted posts and twined around the sign. The sky was full of dusky plumes that made the dying of the day seem like a real event.
“‘Higginsburg Asylum,’” William read. They had all crossed the lot together, eager to stretch their legs after eight hours of mind-numbing highways. William looked and sounded like he’d returned to his default state of Fired Up. It was at moments like these, when his potential hadn’t yet become the kinetic charge that made him crazy, that Christina found herself with an overpowering urge to place her fingertips lightly against the side of his face.
“Cool place to get murdered,” Christina said. She turned to wave at the car, parked a hundred feet away. “Thanks, Otto!”
“Maybe it wasn’t for criminally insane people,” Melissa said. “Maybe it was more like a hospital or something.”
“I feel like I’m still inside that shroud,” Daniel said.
Melissa raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Paging
