Crux

71 LIBERATION

Thursday November 1st

The wind was starting to blow in earnest as Holtzmann made his way back home Thursday night. The house felt empty without Anne. He unpacked his cargo – Becker’s workstation, his slate, the gold memory foil, the bottle of Laphroaig.

Now to find a way to read the digital memory Warren Becker had left behind. The memory foil was a format both old and specialized. His slate wouldn’t read it. His workstation wouldn’t read it. He hunted through old electronics in his garage for an hour, came up with nothing. Then he searched online, looking for any data. Tools were out there. They were specialized and rare. The electronics lab at the ERD would have what he needed…

Tomorrow, then.

He set about making the house ready for the coming storm, nailed fitted plywood they’d had made after Hurricane Catherine over the windows, made sure the house batteries were charged, filled up a barrel of water for himself.

And then he slept, as the wind and rain peppered his home.

Friday November 2nd

Friday morning he rose to fiercer winds. They howled outside. He checked the power, phones, and net. All were still online, but the news broadcasts warned that all systems could fail with Zoe’s advance. Be prepared.

There was another message on the Nexus board.

[Fire alarm will go off at 7.22pm. Be ready.]

He loaded emergency supplies into the car, in case he was stranded – food, water, a raincoat, a flashlight, and the first aid kit their oldest son had insisted they keep in the house. Then Holtzmann told the car to make its way to the office.

From inside the car the storm was a surreal thing. Not yet the hurricane proper, but already its effects were being felt. Trees bent under the onslaught. The rain was a near horizontal spray, splattering in rapid fire across the windows of the car. The windshield wipers couldn’t hope to keep up. The car drove itself, without need of Holtzmann’s eyes.

There were thousands of cars on the roads, all headed out of the DC area. The police had turned all the lanes of the highway into an exodus eight cars wide. Only the shoulder was heading in towards DC. Holtzmann instructed the car to take it, overrode its emergency warnings about traffic out of bounds. He kept his hands on the wheel, ready to take over if the car became too confused.

The police stopped him, then again, then a third time. He was going the wrong way. This was an emergency vehicles only lane.

Each time he flashed his Department of Homeland Security ID. The word “Director” was emblazoned under his picture, and for once he used that rank, dropped phrases like “national security” and “mission critical”.

They let him through each time. On the third instance they offered him an escort. Holtzmann declined and drove on.

At the DHS campus he found no one at the outside gate. The automated defenses were active. He waved his badge, held his eye up to the retinal scanner, and the gate rose, letting him and his vehicle onto the grounds.

Inside the building it was a ghost land. The hallways were empty. Lights were off. Holtzmann fetched his slate from his office, made his way to the Human Subjects wing. The same guard was there. He looked up in surprise as Holtzmann approached.

“I want to see Shankari,” Holtzmann told the man.

“Director Holtzmann… We’re on emergency staffing only. I don’t have anyone to bring him to you.”

“Issue me a taser,” Holtzmann told the man. “I’ll be fine.”

The guard looked flustered. “Director… the protocol is to have security with you. The prisoner’s dangerous…”

Holtzmann stared the man down. “The protocol doesn’t work today. The prisoner is a college student, and you have us on camera.” He pointed at the bank of screens in front of the man. “I need to talk to Shankari. This is a national security matter. Now issue me that taser.”

Three minutes later he opened the door to Shankari’s cell, his cane in one hand, a taser in the other.

Rangan looked up as the door opened. Holtzman was back. His heart beat faster.

“Have you reconsidered?” Holtzmann asked him. “Thought of anything new?”

Rangan shook his head. “I’ve told you everything.”

[holtzmann]File transfer request. File: tonight.txt. Accept? Y/N

[rangan]Y

A file started downloading to his brain.

“Keep thinking,” Holtzmann told him. “I’ll be back tonight, and if you haven’t thought of something new then, you’re going to regret it.”

The file download completed. Then Holtzmann turned and left the cell, closing the door behind him.

Rangan waited, then opened the file.

Inside he found instructions. Instructions for his escape, and for the children’s.

Holtzmann returned the taser to the guard. “See?” he told the man. “No problem at all.”

The electronics lab was on the fifth floor. Holtzmann used his badge to unlock the door, let himself in, and flipped on the lights.

He knew what he needed. And it must be here somewhere. He pulled up the inventory on the open terminal in the lab, and started hunting.

Two hours later, in frustration, he gave up on finding exactly what he was looking for. The foil format was fifteen years old, and had only ever found narrow usage. No new readers for it had been built in a decade. There were readers here that could load the foil, could read the data on it. But none of them would talk to a modern slate or workstation.

He wasn’t going to find a ready-made solution. He was going to have to build one.

It took him most of the rest of the day, resurrecting skills he hadn’t used since grad school, chaining components together, testing the data path, until he had something he thought might work. The wind howled outside as he worked, picking up speed, sending a spooky moaning sound through the building. What a day.

Holtzmann took his connected components down to his office at 6pm, grabbed coffee and a pre-packaged snack from the break room on the way. He delicately seated the foil in the kludge of a device he’d built, then plugged it into his workstation.

Garbage. The thing wouldn’t load properly.

He spent half an hour debugging, cursing his rusty computing skills, until he figured out the problem. One of the components had an ancient version of its firmware, more than a decade old, that wouldn’t properly interface with his modern workstation.

He hunted online for the right update, found that the device manufacturer had gone out of business, hunted further, found an obscure site with an archive containing what he needed. He downloaded the new firmware, loaded it onto the component, then held his breath.

Loading files… Load successful.

Yes!

The interface was slow, painfully slow. He started the files copying onto his workstation.

And then it was almost seven. Time to get Rangan and the children out.

Rangan looked up from the floor of his cell as the door opened. Holtzmann again. The man had a taser in one hand, his cane in the other.

“Tell me more about how to reverse-compile Nexus,” Holtzmann said.

Rangan shrugged. “It’s not gonna be easy. There’s a lot of evolved code in there. The neural connectivity map. The synaptic weights. The mapping models for different parts of the brain. They all look like garbage, like random numbers. The obfuscator would have seen that as great camo. The back doors are probably woven into that, split up into a thousand little pieces of code, spread around in little random-looking blocks.”

“So how do we peel it apart?” Holtzmann asked.

“I have no idea,” Rangan said honestly. “Brute force?”

They went back and forth, back and forth and nowhere at all.

Then the alarm sounded. It blared and blared.

Holtzmann turned around, as if looking for the source. The taser hung loosely in his right hand.

Then Rangan was up, running forward, tackling the man. The cane fell from Holtzmann’s grip. Rangan shoved the older man against the wall, got his right hand on the taser, punched Holtzmann in the back of the head with his left fist, then jabbed the taser into the man’s back and pressed the button.

Holtzmann’s body jerked and spasmed, then crumpled to the ground.

Rangan reached into the man’s pockets, found his badge, found his wallet, grabbed them both. Then he yanked Holtzmann’s shoes off, put them on his own slippered feet. They fit for shit, but they were better than nothing. Now was the test. He waved the badge at the door with his left hand, the taser still in his right.

And the door opened.

Booyah.

He jumped into the hallway. It was deserted. Right turn. Down the hall. Next door. He waved Holtzmann’s badge at the door reader and the door opened, and a dozen young minds greeted him.