Chrysalis

41

Logan occupied himself by counting the seconds of frantic activity. He’d just reached 190 when Snow popped his head up from the workstation.

“Prep’s done,” he said. “At least, everything I can do from here. If we’re going to minimize possible damage, we have to do the rest from I/O control.”

“You mean… touch it?” Asperton asked, as if they were discussing El Greco’s Laocoön.

“Hell yes, touch it. We don’t have much time. As it is, we’re weighing our chance at catching this bitch against the harm a cold interrupt might do the Helix.”

“What about Omega?” The decisiveness she’d shown moments before seemed now to be mingled with lawyerly reservations.

“It’s indirectly integrated — I can put a moat around the virtual environment. Beyond that, though, no guarantees.”

Asperton hesitated, in an agony of indecision.

“What’s it going to be?” Peyton asked angrily. “I’m not making this call.”

“Go,” Asperton said.

Almost before the word was spoken, Snow was out of his chair and headed for the door. Peyton told Kramer to stay and monitor developments, then followed, Asperton and Logan on his heels.

The four trotted along the corridor, then Snow stopped to unlock and open yet another unmarked door. Following the others, Logan ducked into a utilitarian concrete stairwell, painted battleship gray, which they began descending quickly. The thrum of machinery grew briefly louder, then faded as they continued, floor after floor. Then, from the far side of the cement wall, Logan heard the distinct grinding of a diesel engine. He glanced at Asperton, rounding the stairwell landing below him.

“Delivery trucks,” she said, noticing the glance. “Heading up from the Fabrication loading docks to the exit portal.”

They kept descending until the stairwell ended at a door marked no entry under any conditions. Peyton used a palmprint analyzer and the door opened into a narrow corridor with security cameras and — to Logan’s surprise — two guards armed with automatic weapons manning a hatch at the far end.

“Sir?” one of the guards said, looking from Peyton to Asperton and back again.

“Open it,” said Peyton.

Now both guards looked at Asperton, who nodded.

The guards took up position flanking the hatch and fished out digital keys, hanging from lanyards around their necks. They simultaneously inserted and turned the keys in identical mechanisms.

“It’s like Fort Knox,” Logan said.

“You’re closer than you realize,” Claire Asperton replied.

Beyond lay a wide corridor, dimly lit and cold enough for Logan to see his breath. From its lazy arc, he guessed this corridor matched, more or less, the circumference of the Torus, its base now perhaps a dozen floors above them. On the closer wall there were stenciled numbers and small control panels. Parked against it in a neat line were half a dozen sleek electric warehouse vehicles, like futuristic golf carts.

The far wall drew Logan’s eye and made him do a double take. It consisted of black metal racks framing identical CPUs mounted vertically, each arrayed in columns half a dozen rows high. The series of racks followed one after another along the curve of the corridor until they disappeared around the curve and out of Logan’s vision. Each blade server was winking with a variety of green and red lights; so many, he realized, they rendered additional illumination unnecessary. Thin strands of fiber-optic webbing were everywhere: similar to what he’d seen within the synaptichron, but in logarithmically greater abundance. A scattering of people in black jumpsuits, digital tools snugged into utility belts, were moving around the racks like worker bees. One after another, they stopped and looked at the new arrivals in surprise.

“How did they get down here?” Logan asked nobody in particular. “Surely not the same way we did.”

“No,” Asperton said. “A much slower route. They live as well as work here, rotating on and off at monthly intervals.”

The dazzling array of computing horsepower had occupied Logan’s full attention. Now he turned to look the other way, where the broad corridor ended in a confused tangle of equipment surrounding another hatch, marked simply i/o, manned by another pair of armed guards. Snow and Peyton were just now stepping through it.

As it closed with an echoing slam, Logan looked back toward Asperton. “Maybe now would be a good time to tell me what all this is.”

Asperton looked at her watch. “Why not?” she said.

She appeared to have made peace with the mysterious decision she’d made in Peyton’s office. She crossed her arms and leaned against the near wall as the workers returned to their duties. “I suppose you’ve heard of blockchains?”

“The things used to keep track of digital currency?”

“That’s what they’re commonly known for, yes. And, actually, a chain of blocks is a pretty good metaphor. In banking, every transaction involving cryptocurrency — purchases, sales, transfers — is stored in a block. When that block is packed full of data, a new block is created and linked — ‘chained’ — to the previous block by a unique algorithm, derived from that first block’s contents. More transactions start pouring into the new, empty block… and when that is full as well, a ‘hash’ is derived from its contents and sent to yet another newly created block. And so on and so on. This way block five, say, knows the contents of block four because they share a consensus algorithm. If somebody messes with the contents of block four, its hash will no longer match block five’s and alarms will go off. Then the suspect block four will be replaced with a backup.”

“And that’s why people trust cryptocurrencies? They’re tamper-proof?”

“It’s a big reason. Another is the fact blockchains are immutable: no data is ever lost. Old blocks are never deleted — new blocks just keep getting added to the end of the chain. This gives you a complete, uninterrupted history.” She paused. “Companies are only beginning to wake up to the potential of blockchain technology, and digital currency is the tip of the iceberg. Investments, intellectual property, medicine — imagine a hospital where every patient’s data is available instantly, and can be added to or referenced at any time: meds scanned for contraindications or surgical X-rays from twenty years ago always at your fingertips, via a distributed network where everything is transparent. And why stop at one hospital? With the decentralization blockchains allow, why not a chain of hospitals? Why not all hospitals? The possibilities for leveraging vertical markets are endless.”

“And I suppose all this” — Logan waved his hand at the endless procession of CPUs — “is Chrysalis doing just that, ahead of the curve as usual.”

Asperton nodded. “These nodes you’re looking at form a complete circle, in the bedrock here beneath the Torus.”

“My God.” Logan started to mentally calculate how many individual computer servers that added up to. Roughly ten CPUs per row, half a dozen rows high, meant sixty nodes per rack….

“Of course, only a fraction of the potential servers are in place and currently operational,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “We need room for future growth. Actually, that’s one of the downsides of blockchains.”

“So there is a downside,” Logan said.

“For all their benefits, they’re inefficient. And costly. All those distributed CPUs gulp energy. And despite the rosy picture I’ve painted, the consensus algorithms used for security make them a little hard to scale up.”

“But we clearly wouldn’t be down here if Chrysalis hadn’t found a solution,” Logan said. “And this, ah, Helix wouldn’t be so critical to the conglomerate, so deadly secret, if you weren’t planning to go to market.”

Asperton didn’t answer immediately. “Are all ghost hunters so cynical?” she asked.

Logan smiled, letting the low whir of CPU fans answer for him.

“I doubt Thomas Edison had GE in mind when he perfected a filament for the incandescent lightbulb,” Asperton told him. “The Helix was originally — like so many other things here — an experiment. Proof of concept, undertaken by X.”

“X?”

“What began as a modest internal investment five years ago has turned into the biggest — and most classified — project at the Complex. We’ve been using ourselves as test subjects, recording every transaction, every video stream… every damned thing going on in this valley that can be captured as data. And in the process we’ve solved some of those downsides I was telling you about.”

“How?”

“Photonic computing.”

Logan winced. “Don’t tell me.”

“I won’t. I don’t understand it myself. All I know is that what we’re doing at this particular moment is a big risk. Hence, Peyton getting so hot and bothered.”

Logan glanced down the corridor, at the hatch through which Peyton and Snow had disappeared. “Why?”

“Because, despite all the hardware, this is still something of a seat-of-the-pants design. Imagine building an engine and starting it up, only to realize you forgot to include a clean way for turning it off without crashing. You’ll fix that the next time, of course… but what about now, while that first engine is running you down the road at full speed?”

Logan whistled.

“That’s essentially what happened here. Oh, there are protocols for shutting it down — but they’re time-consuming and have only been modeled. With all the data streaming into the Helix, from everywhere in the Complex simultaneously: think terabytes per minute, all needing to be processed by the registry system and stored in real time… there’s no mechanism in place for pausing.”

“Hence, Peyton’s example of yanking open an airplane hatch midflight.”

Asperton nodded.

“But why, exactly, would that be so dangerous? You called it a test subject.”

“I did. But already, it’s proven so valuable that many sectors of our everyday processing have begun to rely on it. How do you think the Omega virtual machine can store, and access, so much imagery, let alone the usage logs of a hundred thousand clients? It’s all stored in the Helix. Luckily, Snow said he was able to sequester that data. Otherwise, if the Helix crashes and we can’t go live tomorrow…” She fell silent.

“Okay. But there’s still one thing I don’t understand. If this huge info-ring of yours records everything, why can’t you just comb through it and find out who’s been naughty? You said every data point here at the Complex feeds into the Helix.”

“Every data point. But if somebody has garbled, stenographized, or otherwise corrupted that data before it’s transmitted, then we’ve got nothing. That’s why this moment is unique: for some reason, this one time, the antagonist who just sent me that message forgot a single step in anonymizing himself. So if we can stop the most recent blockchain buffers from purging, there’s a chance we can find out who sent the message.”

“And possibly crash the Helix in the process.”

Now it was Asperton’s turn to wince.

Suddenly, the hatch at the end of the corridor opened and Peyton emerged, followed by Snow. They walked quickly past the guards. Peyton had a look on his face that Logan could only compare to a doctor having delivered his own stillborn child.

The two men each got into electric vehicles, turned on the power, then drove slowly out into the corridor like two golf carts heading for the next tee. As they approached, Peyton slowed; Asperton jumped in; and then the two sped off down the passage at remarkable speed. Logan looked over at Snow, behind the wheel of the second cart.

“Shotgun?” Logan asked.

“Be my guest.”

He got in, and the personnel carrier — with surprising acceleration — followed Peyton down the long, lazy arc of the subterranean tunnel.