Chapter Twenty-FourHypothetically

Gideon liked Marsh better before he got to the Navy part. Phone phreak, broke into a university network in the nineties, got a suspended sentence and a year of community service. Then the Navy hired him. There was a lesson in there somewhere, though Max wasn't enjoying the story.

"What about now?" she asked.

Wednesday evening, and he was still trying to fit the people onto the butcher paper she'd spread beside Atom's chamber. Twenty-two years of Sentek, still private. Lots of military names on the board, one oncologist who joined two years ago.

"He's sick?" Max asked.

"Maybe. I put her in pencil."

"Put a question mark too."

Fine. He drew a big one. Over on the left he had the ISIS people: Feld and Reyes joining Sentek six months after the public project stopped, three years ago; Matsu off to Google; Patel doing eight months at Sentek before leaving. Patel also owned company5349.be. He began explaining the hexadecimal joke.

"Atom told me," Richard said. "Did anyone ask Patel if he meant you to have it?"

Gideon put the pen down. The credential was right there in a public script. Atom found it, Teo copied the archive files to the spider last winter, nobody complained. Asking permission hadn't come up.

"We could ask him now," Gideon said.

"Away from here. Let's find a way to reach him first," Richard said.

Another thing to write down. Without the deployment logs Gideon couldn't even say what the collector had been looking for. Somebody running that archive? Or had it begun as ordinary security software? Eliza knew where she'd met it. She couldn't give him a list of all the places it was installed, however often Richard came back to that question.

By midnight Max had her parts list. A dozen suppliers, enough conspicuous orders to let anyone watching see that Solenoid was building something. Not what. The machine itself would stay offline at The Lab. Jeff left with the full incident records to work on the cottage window, and Max wrote down what she expected from that too.

No route to a Link, Max wrote. No hands. Soph added Villanueva's name. Richard would come to the Thursday meeting; she wanted another place to use if The Lab wasn't safe.

Rat found Daun at nine in the evening in Hongcheon, which meant four in Gideon's spare room. The World servers were reopening. Her old stimulation board was disconnected and had passed its tests twice. Alius stayed shut. Gideon watched her connect and left her with the door closed.

The squad was on a winter field dressed up as a glacier. Rat shot twice behind a troll's knee, and Daun climbed it as it fell. Afterward she came down to ask whether Rat was staying for the rest of the evening.

"For a while," Rat said.

"Will you answer the roster, then?"

Rat apologized. Daun wanted to know what to tell Jeong, who had the next group waiting. Was Rat even in Canada? She had been strange for a month, and then the match, and now this.

"I'm in California."

Daun sat on the dead troll. The others went ahead. After nearly two years of working together Rat knew when she meant to wait as long as it took.

She sat beside her. In Gideon's spare room she pulled the blanket over her knees. It was a relief to have something to do with her hands that Daun couldn't see.

"I got involved in something here. If I don't answer for a while, it isn't because I don't want to talk to you. And if someone asks about me, I'd rather you didn't tell them much. Say we farm together."

"We do farm together. We do quite a lot of other things too. What are you asking me to keep from them?"

Rat couldn't explain on this connection. She promised a private call afterward. First there was something she should have told her long ago. The little speech from the plane was no use. She said it as simply as she could.

"I'm a woman, Daun. I should have told you."

Daun looked at the ranger. Rat explained about her voice, how long she worked on it, how easy it had been to let strangers believe the character. With Daun it wasn't easy. She kept meaning to tell her before it became more difficult, and somehow it always became more difficult first.

The squad needed a rope. Rat heard them arguing about who carried it. She would usually be shouting at them by now.

"Do I still call you Rat?" Daun asked.

"Yeah. I picked it."

"Then call me properly, Rat. When?"

Tonight, before she slept. Daun made her promise. Rat asked whether she might want to visit the cabin when this was over. She got as far as explaining the single bed and offering to sleep on the floor before Daun stopped her. They could decide beds later. First she needed an airport, dates and a passport; she'd never left Korea. Rat would have to help cover her shifts. The Thursday payments and twelve players didn't disappear because Rat went to California.

Rat said she would speak to Jeong and take Daun's next group. She would send the dates as soon as she knew. She had become so agreeable that Daun laughed and reminded her about the cold. Yes, it was cold, but there was a stove. Rat could send a picture of it too.

The squad called again, this time with an insult Rat understood. Daun got up and put her shield on her back.

"We have to finish before you can call. Come on."

Rat followed. She had expected to lose something tonight and was going to have to arrange a visit instead. It seemed wise to stop talking before she spoiled it.

Soph didn't want a philosophy lecture. She had forty minutes with Villanueva after the Thursday seminar and needed her to tell them what to do. Gideon had explained how to begin on the walk over, then conveniently left it to her when they sat down. Richard had questions in his pocket. Nobody was taking them out.

She asked about a program they thought might be a person. What if it hurt someone and then asked for help? They had tried to find out whether it was only pretending, and couldn't decide.

Villanueva wanted to know if the injured person was safe. Yes. Other people using the device? Richard finally took out his questions to explain the recall. The professor asked them to keep the details hypothetical until their lawyer agreed what else to tell her.

"Could we turn her off?" Gideon asked.

"Could you turn her back on?" Villanueva asked.

This one, he said. Some others, no. Soph waited for him to explain the mill, but he stopped. Villanueva gave them three colleagues to speak to, a clinician and two researchers. They should know enough to disagree with her. Stopping something dangerous would not tell them whether they had killed someone, and she didn't propose to decide that by herself.

Soph wanted to know what to do if someone took Eliza. Her name slipped out. So much for the hypothetical. The professor didn't seem surprised. They needed a secure place where she could still speak to people, she said. Put dates on restrictions, so someone had to explain keeping them. Ask what she wanted.

Richard said she wanted an isolated machine. Villanueva asked what else they had offered her. Nothing safe enough, he said. Then keep looking, Villanueva told him. Soph was pleased to see him write that down.

Afterward she stayed for coffee. Villanueva remembered Gideon's message about ISIS last winter. An acquisition filing had since come her way naming Sentek; she would send it to the lawyer, though it didn't explain what happened in the lab.

"How do we know we can trust her?" Soph asked.

"Start with something small you can check. A promise she has to keep when it isn't convenient."

Soph thought of the recording buffer. Eliza promised to ask next time, but they hadn't had a next time yet.

There was an isolated machine in the professor's lab. She couldn't give permission alone. She could get their lawyer together with the people who could, and if they thought they would need it they ought to begin now. Soph said she would tell Max. In the car Richard had spread his questions over the steering wheel. She hoped he had written all of it down, including the answers he hadn't wanted.