Zimmerman's Algorithm

2.02 Mon. Mar. 16

J ULIA Zimmerman lived in a house just outside Annapolis. At least that's where the directory listings put her. Gideon approached it with the same caution with which he'd approached his own house, expecting a similar ambush even though it was midday and Zimmerman's neighborhood was far from abandoned.

He passed by it three times, watching an old man jogging, breath coming in puffs of fog, a college-age couple with backpacks slung over their shoulders, a trio of teenagers passing a cigarette—or more probably a joint—on the corner, a woman walking a dog. Any of them, all of them, seemed threatening. As if any one of them would pull a gun and start shooting, like the homeless man.

The final time Gideon decided that enough paranoia was enough. If there was an assassin here, he'd already had more than an adequate opportunity to shoot at him. He pulled into the drive.

Zimmerman's house was a small brick colonial hedged in by a white picket fence. The fence needed painting. Gideon turned off the engine and studied the house for signs of life. He didn't see any. The windows were blind and dead.

He opened the car door, taking one of his crutches and levering himself out into the cold. The air bit his skin, and he wondered how the old man could stand running in this type of weather.

He leaned on his crutch, taking a look at the neighbors. Both houses to either side had more of a presence of life than this one—even if he didn't see anyone specific at the moment. Curtains were open, a large plastic tricycle was in the driveway of one neighbor, and from the other steam vented from a basement window carrying the scent of drying clothes.

He walked up Zimmerman's driveway. The asphalt was covered with brown leaves that'd been flattened by the last snow. He walked up to the detached garage and peered through one of the tiny rectangular windows into the gloomy interior. Gideon could see the outlines of a car inside.

Gideon tried the garage door, and found it unlocked. He pulled and the door came up an inch, screeched, and his weakened hand slipped from the handle, burning the skin on his palm and almost toppling him backward. Gideon looked around, convinced that everyone on the block was staring at him.

As he looked down the driveway, he couldn't see anyone who was paying any attention to him.

He sighed, bent over, and pulled at the door, more slowly this time.

It resisted him, but once it made it halfway, it loosened enough to slide home by itself. The garage smelled of mold and old oil. A ten-year-old Ford Taurus sat in front of him. The paint job used to be a shade of blue, but it was gray now with a layer of dust.

The tags had expired three months ago. And on the concrete under the engine, a stain of black covered an area the size of a manhole cover.

There wasn't much besides the car—a couple of empty trash cans, and a pair of plastic recycling bins. One bin was filled with newspapers.

Gideon bent over and checked the papers. The latest ones were dated December of last year. He opened the trash cans. Empty.

There wasn't anything else of note in the garage. Most people use their garages as storage, but Julia Zimmerman's garage seemed almost spartan. There were the trash cans, a garden hose, a lawn mower, and the car. Nothing else.

Gideon slid the garage door shut. It closed easier than it had opened.

He walked back down the driveway and knocked on the side door, trying the doorbell a few times. He could hear the bell ring inside the house, and as he leaned on it, he kept an eye out for the neighbors, or anyone else observing him.

No one answered the rings, and Gideon spent the next few minutes jimmying the lock on the door. Even as he forced the door, he knew he was erasing any chance of being able to return from the line he had crossed in Davy Jones' apartment. Swiping evidence was one thing—it had ended up in the crime lab, after all. Despite Magness, he might have been able to explain that.

But once Zimmerman's door popped open, he was beyond any return. Felony B&E. It sank in to Gideon as Zimmerman's door swung inward on a darkened stairway. He wasn't a cop anymore.

Who am I? What am I doing here?

The words he whispered weren't quite an answer. "Someone has to answer for what happened to Rafe." They came out in a puff of fog and fell with a fatalism that acknowledged that that "someone" might be him.

Gideon pushed himself over the threshold and into a darker world.

He stood in the hallway as the door swung shut behind him. The only immediate tangible consequence of his first felony was the dimming as the door shut out the daylight.

For a long time he listened. He knew he was listening for the masked men who had invaded his home. The house was silent. Silent and cold. It was only slightly warmer inside than out, and his breath fogged in the still, stale air.

He stood on a landing. A stairway to his left led down into a basement, and one in front of him led up half a flight to a short hall connecting what he supposed was the kitchen and the living room. It was hard to tell with the rooms so dark. All the shades were drawn against the daylight.

He looked at the stairways and wished that Zimmerman had lived in a ranch.

Gideon went upward to start. He stood in the little hall and stepped into the kitchen and hesitated a few long moments waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The kitchen looked spotless. Gideon stepped up to the counter and opened the blinds over the sink slightly, so a little daylight leaked into the room.

The place seemed almost antiseptic, not a dish in the sink, no food out on the counters. He opened the refrigerator. It was nearly empty. The only thing in it was a half-filled two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. He checked out the freezer, and saw an ice cube tray where the cubes had sublimated half way, and two blue freezer packs.

Gideon checked the cabinets and only found a can of asparagus spears and a few spices.

Zimmerman had obviously planned to leave. She hadn't done it on the spur of the moment. Enough forethought not to leave food or garbage in her house. Gideon wondered if that meant she intended to return.

Gideon moved through the house smelling a ghost of lavender, the only concrete evidence that a real woman once lived here. The other rooms on the first floor were eerily neat, the furniture arranged, the carpets vacuumed. But the dining room table, the mantle, and the glass coffee table were covered with a thick, undisturbed layer of dust.

Gideon passed a phone and picked it up. It was dead.

On the mantel there were a few photographs, their frames covered with the same layer of dust. There was one showing a ceremony where Zimmerman was receiving some sort of award.

There was her face again, framed by her black hair, the expression depthless and fascinating. Gideon stared into her gray eyes for way too long. . .

Gideon pulled himself away from the picture and turned to look at the others. There were two that obviously came from the Evolutionary Theorems Lab. Gideon found it interesting that Zimmerman would save those pictures if her departure was as acrimonious as Dr. Nolan said it was.

The last picture was of a young woman that, given the similarity in bone structure, had to be a relative.

Sister, niece?

Gideon took a few steps back and looked at the mantel again. No pictures of boyfriend or fiance—and no pictures of her parents. The only personal tie implied up there was the young woman, who—if not for the green eyes and curly hair—could be a younger Julia.

Gideon made his way upstairs.

The bedroom was like the kitchen. The closet and the dresser were both nearly empty. The only remnants were things that obviously didn't matter. The bathroom was just as empty.

There was one other room upstairs, and it was obviously Zimmerman's office. There was a desk with an impressive-looking computer setup with an oversized monitor. There were bookshelves on two walls, half-shaded windows on the other two. In the dim light, he could see the shelves next to the door piled high with stacks of mathematical journals. Gideon didn't realize that there were so many different publications on the subject. On the adjacent wall the shelves were packed with more standard books. Gideon's gaze followed the spines reading subjects like Number Theory, Public Key Cryptography, Cryptanalysis, and Artificial Life.

Why leave these ?

Her computer desk was oriented diagonally, facing the door. He walked around to face her computer. With the thoroughness that Zimmerman had abandoned this place, Gideon thought that there was very little chance that anything explicitly useful would be left here. There was little here except some idea of what Julia Zimmerman might be like.

He turned on the computer, expecting it to be dead, like the phone.

It wasn't. The electricity hadn't been shut off, and in a few seconds the screen flashed alive. After a moment it printed up a text file of stark white letters on a black background.

"All drives on this computer have been formatted to DoD specifications and overwritten. There's nothing here for you."

The message stayed on the screen while the operating system booted and got up to speed. Gideon stared at the screen thinking of the empty kitchen, and the empty closets. Julia Zimmerman really left nothing behind her.

The message flashed off and left the screen with a near-empty desktop. The only object was a small icon centered on the screen. The icon was a tiny grid half-filled with mulitcolored dots.

The icon was titled, "Life."

Gideon took the mouse and slid the cursor over and clicked it.

The drives whirred and suddenly the screen came alive. The whole screen was filled with a grid. In the center of the screen was a small group of dots blinking on and off. As he watched, the pattern of dots grew and mutated, spilling over into the rest of the screen covering the whole grid with a symmetrical, constantly changing pattern of dots.

There was something hypnotic about the pattern. After a few moments of explosive activity, the dot pattern dwindled off and vanished. After displaying a blank grid for a few moments, the program ended, returning Gideon to the bare desktop.

He did what he could to see what else was on the machine, but Julia had left it so bare that even basic parts of the operating system were missing.

The only information he could glean from the system was that the latest any file was modified was at 7:15 AM on December 31. Which seemed to coincide with how long this house had been abandoned. New Year's Eve.

An elaborate message, nothing more. The computer was little more than a digital equivalent of the Aleph spray-painted on the wall.

This means something, even if you don’t know what.

Infinity.

Life.

He returned to the desktop and the enigmatic icon. He clicked it again and watched another pattern of multicolored dots go through their paces. He wondered what it meant. The certainty began to sink in that he had to know this woman in order to discover what was happening.

"What the hell did you do for the NSA?" Gideon asked the computer.

And why does she need a Daedalus?