Chrysalis

42

They continued so long that, for Logan, the racks speeding past became a blur. He estimated they’d traveled almost half a mile before he asked Snow: “So, you’re one of Peyton’s computer security experts?”

“I wear two hats,” Snow replied from behind the wheel. “I help with the more problematic security breaches — such as this, which to date is the mother of them all. But I’m technically part of Department X.”

“X?” Logan echoed, for the second time.

Snow laughed. “I know. Sounds like an old spy movie, right?” Then he glanced over, saw the look on Logan’s face. “Shit. You don’t know about it.”

“No details, no.”

“I was told you had complete clearance. All the trimmings.”

“I do.” Before Snow could say anything more, he went on: “So what is it?”

“It doesn’t have a name. We do the more advanced computing work — crypto counterespionage, AI, a little of the heavy lifting for Omega’s coders… and, of course, maintain the Helix.”

A secret within a secret within a secret. Hoping to get the worried look off Snow’s face, Logan changed the subject. “Asperton was telling me you used photonic computing to solve some of the problems of enterprise-scale blockchains.”

“She did?”

“She did. One question, though: Did you buy the photons from Star Trek, or Star Wars?”

Snow chuckled and appeared relieved. “It’s also known as optical fiber computing. Maybe that sounds less intimidating. Conventional computers and storage devices use electrons. The Helix uses photons. Not everywhere yet, of course: we’re simply grafting photonics onto our blockchain platform, to help solve its biggest downside.”

“You mean, speed?”

“Precisely. Give us five years: instead of just data pipes, we’ll have developed CPUs of nonlinear optical crystals.”

Abruptly, the brake lights went on in Peyton’s cart. A moment later, both Peyton and Asperton jumped out. Three people in regulation jumpsuits were waiting for them.

“Showtime,” Snow said, pulling in behind. “We initiated the freeze. Now we have to complete the circuit, so to speak, and temporarily pinch off any new data blocks from being added while we find the metadata of that message. Otherwise the Band-Aid won’t hold… and you’ll be witness to the first, and last, cascade shutdown in history.”

Logan looked out. The line of rack servers stretched on ahead of them, as unchanging as the hundreds or thousands they’d passed already. “I thought we had to go to the newest data block if we were going to track that rogue message.”

Snow turned to reply, but Logan raised a hand. “Never mind. You’ve got more important things to do.” He’d recalled what Asperton told him: Only a fraction of the possible servers are in place and currently operational. We need room for future growth. That “future growth” was obviously the line of computers stretching still farther down the curve of the corridor, ready and waiting to be populated with fresh blocks….

…That is, if the Helix could be unfrozen — and restarted.

He stood back as the workers in black jumpsuits surrounded Snow. To Logan they now looked less like worker bees and more like surgeons, in worried consultation over an operation that was going poorly. He heard fragments of meaningless sentences, spoken in tense voices. All he knew for sure was whoever sent them this last message — he felt sure it wasn’t the same person as before — had rushed things slightly, and this sloppiness allowed Chrysalis a chance to put a name to some text, get an ID… at great potential risk to this vast, secret dynamo.

The workers had now gingerly navigated countless fiber-optic linkages and disappeared behind the racks of servers. It was obvious that manhandling the data flow of this vast machine, using fingers instead of keyboards, was an almost unheard-of scenario. Voices rose and fell: first eager, then deflated, then eager again. One worker stood not far from the carts, looking intently back down the endless array of blinking lights, radio raised and at the ready. Logan wondered what on earth he was staring at… until he realized the man wasn’t staring so much as being the lookout for disaster. The Helix activity had to be frozen… but that meant idling in cryogenic sleep, not shutting down. If something went wrong now, while they initiated something that had never been modeled — if Snow’s feared “cascade shutdown” occurred and all those endless blinking lights went out…

Then, as Logan stared down the corridor with the same intensity as the nearby worker, he saw all the countless tiny lights abruptly pause. Even though he was only a bystander, his heart seemed to pause along with them. He felt a shudder, real or imagined, course through his frame. And then the lights once again began winking on and off as before. And then Snow appeared from behind the webbing, relief practically etched on his face.

“Looks like the Helix tolerated the data pause,” he said as he made his way back to them. “And we’ve got an ID for you. That message was sent by employee 4281292.”

Peyton activated his Sentinel. “Cardiff, Benjamin R.” He took a moment to pass this information along to Kramer, waiting in the office. Then he turned to Snow. “Return to I/O control and roll back the freeze. Blaze it up. Now.”

Snow nodded, jumped back into his cart, negotiated a smart three-point turn, and shot back down the corridor, while more jumpsuited workers — Department X, Logan assumed — rushed behind the servers as if to suture up the patient.

Three minutes later, Ben Cardiff — principal software engineer, level II — was walking along a well-appointed passage on the nineteenth floor of the Chrysalis Tower. His buzz from the Bloody Marys was wearing off, and he now wondered a little anxiously if the message he’d impulsively sent — meant to save his own skin if things went south — might have been as rash as Wing intimated. He had left BioCertain early, before his shift ended, and was heading back to his room to sleep it off.

As he approached the door to his quarters, however, he saw a woman and a man standing before it. Noticing him, they turned in his direction.

Without needing to be told, Cardiff sensed immediately: security.

He prepared to bolt, only to see two men he hadn’t known were behind him now advancing. Both were armed.

“Mr. Cardiff?” the woman said. “Would you mind coming with us, please? We have a few questions.”

Instinctively, he tensed to run, but the woman reached out with jaw-dropping speed and grasped his arm. Her grip was viselike. “It’ll be much easier if you come with us,” she said.

For a moment, Cardiff hesitated. Then he seemed to go limp. One of the men took his other arm, and the little group continued past Cardiff’s doorway and down the hall.

The corridor remained empty for ten seconds or so. Then a figure emerged from a secondary corridor and walked up to where security had stood a minute earlier.

The guest registered as Reginald Bryant took a few more steps until he reached the door to Cardiff’s quarters.

This was an unexpected development. Unexpected, indeed.