Chrysalis

43

“They nabbed Cardiff,” Kramer told the group that had reassembled in Peyton’s bunker. “He’s on his way to detention now.”

“Good,” said Peyton. “Now Mossby will have some company.”

“What was his job description?” Logan asked.

“He was a software engineer in BioCertain.” Peyton reached for a keyboard, typed briefly. “Excellent performance reviews — until just recently. He seemed to develop an attitude over the last half year or so. Thinking he’d outgrown the job, apparently — not uncommon with coders as they start to age out.”

“But no red flags?”

“Nothing obvious. Let me check the tangential data, bar tabs and off-hour activities, that sort of thing.” After a moment, he sat back in his chair. “Shit.”

“What is it?” Asperton asked.

“As I feared. The Helix — it’s slow coming back online. This SQL query I just ran on Cardiff keeps coming back with flaky results.”

As Snow moved over to help, Logan turned to Asperton. “He’s checking on this Cardiff’s ‘tangential data.’ In other words, the guy’s been watched the entire time he’s worked here at the Complex. All of us have. And the data from all that surveillance captured tangentially in the immutable, unerasable Helix.”

Asperton said nothing.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Arc X before?”

“Why didn’t you guess?”

Logan frowned in surprise.

“How many sections did I tell you the Torus was divided into?”

“Eight.”

“And their designations? The ones you called boring?”

“Arcs A through G…” Logan counted on his fingers. “Shit.”

Asperton smiled a little smugly.

“Here’s a theory I’m developing that may wipe that smile off your face,” he said. “Down in the bowels of the earth, you were telling me about all the wonderful things this next-gen blockchain will do for humanity. Eliminate hackers from the financial sector. Bring world peace.”

Asperton rolled her eyes.

“But what you left unsaid are all the other uses it might have. For example, I think an autocratic government might find a persistent, omnipresent tech platform like this — that sees everything, forgets nothing, makes data-mining its citizens a breeze — useful indeed. Same for law enforcement or intelligence services.”

“Jeremy, you’re exceeding your brief,” Asperton said, only half joking.

“They’d pay a pretty penny for a Helix of their own — once all the kinks were worked out.” A new thought occurred to him. “Is that perhaps why your friend at the Agency, Gerald, is being so helpful?”

Asperton frowned, touched a finger to his lips. “I told you: the Helix began as internal research, to see if the true potential of blockchains could be leveraged.”

“And look where we are five years later: with the world’s biggest server farm under our feet — your very own database supercollider — and a secret Department X… and a potential source of revenue even greater than Omega someday. If we can get through the next twenty-four hours.”

Asperton started to object, then just shook her head.

Grace’s silky voice abruptly spoke in his ear. “Jeremy, Dr. Purchase wishes to speak to you.”

“Okay.”

Purchase came on, sounding a little breathless. “I’ve finished that comparison you requested. Running the names of the first Voyager recipients against people with BioCertain implants.”

“And?”

“There are roughly thirty-five hundred hits.”

Logan sat forward. “No shit.”

“Of course, we’re talking a dozen different kinds of medical implants, but…” His voice trailed off for a second. “There’s one person you’ll want to know about in particular.”

“Go on.”

“It’s Janelle Deston.”

“The woman who—” Logan stopped. “The early adopter?”

“Yes. She had a vagus nerve stim, with the usual shoulder implant. It’s one of our newer products, but they’ve taken hold very quickly, because people with Parkinson’s or clinical depression often have difficulty sticking to a treatment schedule—”

“Hold on.” Turning to the others in room, Logan called out: “Janelle Deston had a medical implant.”

Peyton was slower to raise his eyes than the others but was the first to speak. “So?”

“Don’t be an ass. We’ve established that Voyager units can’t kill people. But we’ve never established that medical implants can’t.”

“We haven’t established it because, obviously, medical implants can,” said Asperton.

“She’s right,” said Peyton impatiently. “A pacemaker could fail. Or, if you really want to be paranoid, imagine some terrorist with the right connections, pushing out a firmware patch to a particular model — firmware that would make it intentionally malfunction, cause ventricular fibrillation — and kill everyone implanted with one.”

Now that was a disturbing thought indeed. Logan recalled that the same tech that made Omega devices work — background updates, two-way communication — was also used in many advanced medical implants.

But, having reeled this nightmare scenario out, Peyton now reeled it back in. “That’s one of countless doomsday scenarios keeping us up at night. So naturally we have safeguards in place. Now: Where’s your beloved ‘commonality’?”

“Over three thousand early adopters, going live with Voyager tomorrow, also have Chrysalis-branded medical implants.”

This stopped Peyton — but only for a moment. “Okay, I’ll admit it: that’s a comparison I never thought to make. But where are you going with this? BioCertain makes dozens of different devices — implanted and maintained by doctors worldwide, with no affiliation to us. That market is on fire, closing in on two hundred billion dollars a year.”

“Our opponents are threatening to kill a thousand Voyager clients. We know Voyager itself is harmless. Yet four people have been killed. One of them was poisoned… and it turns out the other three had medical implants designed right here.”

“Three unrelated implants,” said Peyton. “Are you seriously implying sabotage? Of different devices? After all the workers we’ve questioned? We don’t even know for sure if any of those particular three malfunctioned.”

This was true, and Logan couldn’t argue. Still, his sixth sense told him this was the right path… the only path left.

“You’re right,” he said. “Countless doctors, outside your control, implant those devices. And the Voyager units, which I’m banking aren’t involved here, basically implant themselves. Obviously, all those surgeons aren’t involved in a massive conspiracy to blackmail Chrysalis. That means we have to look at the implants themselves — the ones fabricated here, before they enter the supply chain — if we’re to have a chance of finding any sabotage.”

Peyton sighed. “I told you, we did that already. Yesterday, we interviewed everyone in charge of the fabrication and fulfillment teams — for both medical implants and Voyagers. They came up clean.”

“Then we need to look again. We’ve obviously missed something, just like we missed the commonalities the first time,” Logan retorted.

“There was that one guy,” Kramer piped up. “Prawn. For one shift, he had to man both the implant line and the Voyager line… remember?”

“Sure,” Peyton said. “But we saw the video. There was nothing.”

“It’s an anomaly,” Logan said. “And it’s one of the very few we’ve found. Isn’t it worth checking out?”

Kramer shrugged, turned, and walked toward the windows overlooking the security hive. As he did he spoke into his Sentinel unit, ordering a team to bring Prawn down for some follow-up questions.

Peyton meanwhile turned back to the workstation where Snow was tending to the troubled Helix. He frowned with obvious frustration. “I’m going down to watch Cardiff’s interrogation,” he told Kramer. “You should come along.”