looked Lucchesi in the eye. “I’m not lying.”
Lucchesi held his gaze for a long ten seconds. “No, you’re not, are you?”
“The kind of people you’re worried about would’ve stopped talking a long time ago.”
“I will trust your word on that. So these weapons… They are bad?”
“Very. And the people who want them are worse.”
Lucchesi considered this for a few moments, then stood up, ran his hands through his disheveled hair, and said, “What do you need?”
“Ajax?” Lucchesi said after Fisher explained what he needed. “I abandoned that months ago.”
“We didn’t.”
“Too many bugs. We couldn’t get it to work with enough chipset brands.”
“Define ‘work.’ ”
“There were too many variables in the maintenance protocols. The bots would find their way to the correct location, then get stuck in a feedback loop. Even the simplest maintenance tasks crashed them.”
“What if they only had one task?”
“Wait a moment… You said, ‘We didn’t.’ What does that mean?”
“We built our own version of Ajax. But we ran into a problem.”
Lucchesi smiled. “Ah, the fail-safe code. That’s what you came here for. They refuse any execute commands you give them?”
“Right.”
“What is this one task you want them to do?”
“Use whatever internal communication hardware and software they come across to send out a burst transmission.”
“Like GPS coordinates, perhaps?” Lucchesi was smiling more often now, warming to his new task. At Fisher’s nod, he rubbed his hands together. “Interesting… So you essentially want them to phone home. What kinds of hardware?”
“Laptops, desktops, cell phones, PDAs, GPS devices — anything that communicates electronically.”
“Which is everything nowadays, yes? Oh, this is wonderful!” Lucchesi shook his finger at Fisher. “You see, this is the problem with scientists. We tend to overthink problems. Often, instead of reducing, we add… You have schematics for me? Code?”
“I can get it. But that doesn’t solve our problem — the line of code we need was confiscated along with everything else.”
“Hah! One line of code — what was it, six or seven thousand characters long?”
“Four.”
“Four!” Lucchesi waved his hand dismissively. “I can write that in a few hours. Come on, come on. Get me the data. I want to play!”
It took several exchanges on the OPSAT before Grimsdottir accepted the unusual course Fisher had chosen and acquiesced. When the schematics and code finally appeared in the OPSAT’s download folder, attached was a note from Grim:
You’re mellowing in your old age.
While Fisher had been communicating with Grim, Lucchesi had trotted off to a nearby file cabinet, retrieved a fifteen-inch MacBook Pro, and returned to the platform’s central conference table.
Fisher asked, “I thought you said—”
“They found it. There’s not a file left on it, but we don’t need those, do we? What media does that gadget accept?” Lucchesi asked.
“You name it.”
Lucchesi fished into his pants pocket, pulled out a 16 GB microSD card, and tossed it to Fisher, who inserted it into the OPSAT’s multiport and began the download process. Fisher sat down at the conference table.
“So you took quite a risk, yes?” Lucchesi asked.
“How so?”
“I assume men in your business aren’t encouraged to
Fisher found himself liking Lucchesi. The man was a pure scientist, a man without guise or ulterior motive. Fisher rarely met such people in his line of work. Outside his own environment Lucchesi was probably socially maladroit. In his element he was perceptive and amiable.
“I know you won’t,” Fisher replied, keeping any inflection from his voice.
“So these weapons and these men… What happens once you’ve tracked them?”
“Bad things.”
“Ah, the good kind of bad things.”
“Right.”
The OPSAT beeped. Fisher removed the microSD card and handed it to Lucchesi, who plugged it into an adaptor, and then into the MacBook’s USB port.
For ten minutes Lucchesi stared at the screen, scrolling, pausing, typing random notes, until finally he looked up. “Very elegant. Your people did this?”
“More or less.”
“I’m impressed. And they got the bots to work — all but the execute command?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need one more thing. That person you were talking to on the other end of your device… They have access to databases? The Internet?”
Fisher smiled. “You have no idea.”
On its face, Lucchesi’s request was daunting: He needed the specifications of every piece of hardware that matched their parameters and had been manufactured in the last decade. When Fisher put the question to Grimsdottir, she simply typed back:
What format?
Fisher put the question to Lucchesi.
“XML spreadsheet should do nicely.”
An hour later the OPSAT chimed again. Fisher read the screen, then looked up at Lucchesi. “Done.”
“You’re joking with me.”
“No. Give me the card.”
Grimsdottir’s data took up two gigabytes of space on the microSD card. Lucchesi spent a few minutes scanning the spreadsheet, then shook his head in wonder. “Amazing. You have a powerful friend there. Okay, I’ll get started. There’s a break room off the second-tier catwalk. Would you mind terribly much making coffee?”
“Twist my arm,” Fisher said, then got up.
Lucchesi was as good as his word. Three hours after he started, he gave the keyboard a final, definitive tap, then pushed away from the conference table with a heavy sigh. “Done. Can your people run the simulation?”
While Lucchesi went to the bathroom, Fisher plugged the microSD card into the OPSAT and uploaded the code to Grimsdottir. She replied:
Team already called in; standby. Ninety minutes to run sim.
Fisher and Lucchesi passed the time talking. It was, Fisher decided, one of the most surreal missions he’d conducted: He infiltrates a high-tech nanotechnology laboratory, finds it abandoned except for the chief scientist, who is sitting alone in the dark, dejected after being financially cut off by Daddy, and now they are sitting together, like old friends, over coffee.
The OPSAT chimed again. Fisher read the screen, smiled, then turned it so Lucchesi could see the message:
Sims complete. Green across the boards.
Lucchesi clapped his hands once, stood up, did a victory lap around the conference table, then shook Fisher’s
