Jacob put down the deck he had been working on.
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” he said.
Xia looked at him. The anxiety could be seen in her eyes, a force clawing to get out. “You didn’t force me.”
Jacob looked away for a moment. Yuri slept in a chair in the corner, and Chen stood in the warehouse at a Triple B energy drink vending machine.
Jacob looked back to Xia. “No, but I may have guilt-tripped you into helping with our other plan.”
Xia nodded in agreement. “I said I would help. A guilt trip only works if you let it.”
“Well, I am sorry. It was a dick move.”
“I won’t argue. What I’ve been trying to figure out, I mean other than this damn code deck, is what this has to do with stealing the Q-chip from Your Better Life.”
“The Q-chip?”
“That’s what we call it on the team. Someone thought it was funny.”
Jacob turned to see Chen inspecting the contents of some of the other crates from the shipment and talking with Evgeny and Mr. Li. “I guess you need to know this. We need some resources to steal the,” he paused, “Q-Chip. The SRS has the resources, so we’re working with them to get what we need.”
“Since you keep checking on Chen, I take it the SRS doesn’t know about the Q-Chip?”
“No. And we don’t want them to know about it either. That would just add complications we don’t need.”
Xia closed her eyes for a second, her anxiety code doing its job. “Understood,” she said, much more relaxed.
“I think I’ve got something,” Sandy said.
Everyone gathered around Sandy’s table and she turned to face them. “Anyone know what a SQL injection is?”
“An old school hack on databases,” Gomez said. “They used to cause a lot of headaches, but programmers found ways to prevent injection attacks a long time ago.”
“Which is why we didn’t think of it before.” Sandy held up the deck she had been working on. “What did we notice was different about these decks?”
“They already have code loaded on them,” Xia said.
“Right. I’m not sure why, but they do.”
“Maybe NirvanaWare wants to edge out the legal coders to cut costs,” Jacob said.
“It doesn’t matter why,” Sandy said, “just that they do.”
“So,” Gomez said, “if all of the code is already on the deck, it’s stored in a database.”
“And if it’s in a database, maybe something like a SQL injection might work,” Sandy said. “The problem is, I haven’t come up with the injection yet.”
“At least it gives us something to work with,” Jacob said.
An hour later Xia cracked the first deck. After that, the rest of the decks were simple. Jacob showed Yuri and Chen how to set up the injection hack, and they helped. They moved much slower, but they helped.
When they were finished with the decks, Jacob picked up one of the chips. “What about these?”
“We have to make sure they’ll take code, both what’s preloaded on the decks and any other code we sent to it,” Gomez said.
Jacob returned the chip to the table. “Any ideas?”
Xia said, “If one of us could link with a chip, we would be able to see if it was receiving and accepting the code. ”
“How? Won’t someone need to have it implanted?” Sandy asked.
“No, we test chips in the lab all of the time. Of course, we have them hooked up to a chip monitor to see if they function, and we don’t have the interface we need for that or the power pad we use. But we don’t need much power,” she said, picking up a chip and looking around as if to materialize a power source.
“One of us holding some copper and some wire should make a battery with enough power,” Gomez said.
“Just like science class,” Sandy said.
“Monitoring it is still a problem,” Xia said.
“I could link with it,” Jacob said. “At least I think I can. I’ve never linked with a chip that wasn’t implanted.”
“Is it risky?” Sandy asked.
“I don’t think so,” Xia said.
“Let’s set it up,” Jacob said.
After getting some salt and vinegar from the warehouse break room, the experiment was ready to go. Gomez insisted on being the battery. He was the biggest person so he would conduct the most current, he argued, but then admitted that might not be good science and he wanted to do it because it was his idea.
“I’ll send some stored code from a cracked deck first. Then some of my code on that deck. Then some from my deck,” Jacob said.
Xia nodded. “Power up,” she said to Gomez.
Jacob sent a mild stimulant code to the chip and linked with it. At first, all was a blur and unfamiliar. The sensation was not like any other time he had linked with another person’s chip, or when he had linked with a network. Those experiences came with a sense of vastness, of almost unlimited space. This space had limits but wasn’t confining. It gave him a sense that there was an edge to the area his mind occupied. He searched for the code. It was a faint echo in the short distance. He went to it, taking it in. There was something about it he recognized. Something deep, buried in the layers of the echo, a faint signature, pulsated. A quiet noise, oddly familiar, tugged at his mind. Then the stimulant kicked in. He concentrated on the noise but it dissipated. He cut the link.
“It worked,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Sandy asked.
“Something about this code. Or maybe the chip. I’m not sure.”
“Should we stop?” Xia asked.
“No. It’s not important right now. Let me try some of my code on this deck.”
He coded in another mild stimulant. The deck and chip worked but with no quiet noise this time. He coded a mild stimulant on his deck and sent it to the chip. It worked perfectly.
“I think we’re good,” Jacob said after he severed his final link with the chip.
“Evgeny will be happy,” Yuri said. “I will
