DAY 4
They were hiking by six. The trail climbed alongside a creek in the trees for two hours until finally getting above tree line. The view was spectacular, including a basin, a lake at the bottom with bright green water, and a notch in the ridge above the lake.
Marcus caught up to Samantha and dropped his pack on the ground.
“That the pass?”
“That’s the pass.”
“How high.”
“Twelve five eighty-eight.”
“Hope Pass was twelve five forty-eight.”
“It was.”
“So this one’s worse.”
“Not worse. Higher. By forty feet,” Samantha said.
Vlad came up four minutes behind them and sat down on the ground without getting his pack off. His face was gray; he was clearly struggling.
Samantha dug a bar out of her hip pocket and dropped it in his lap.
“I ate,” Vlad said.
“You ate half of one yesterday. I watched you put the other half back.”
“It was a bad flavor.”
“Then learn to enjoy bad flavors. You need fuel.” She stared at him until he opened it and put it in his mouth.
“He does this at the office,” Marcus said. “He won’t eat lunch, and then at four o’clock he eats every piece of chocolate he can find in the candy drawer.”
“That is a different thing.”
“Give me a fucking break.”
She filled two bottles with water. She handed Vlad one of them and a SaltStick Fastchew Pink Lemonade.
“This will help wash it down.”
She turned to Marcus and handed him the other bottle.
“Find everything okay?”
“Yep,” Marcus said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I’m boring now. It’s awful.”
Vlad said, “I have been thinking about the file.”
Nobody had brought it up in two days. Samantha sat down on a rock across from him.
“Okay.”
“Whoever wrote it found a machine that has nothing on it and nothing pointing to it. I have gone back through every way I know to do that and none of them work.” He looked at the lake. “I want to know who they are. Not what they want. Who they are.”
“You built that machine yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Could someone have watched you build it?”
“That is what I have been thinking about for two days,” Vlad said.
“So read their mail,” Marcus said.
“That is not how any of this works.”
“Sam broke encryption.”
“I broke signatures,” Samantha said.
Marcus turned. “Those are the same thing.”
“They’re not even close. The world moved the locks six years ago. Everything anybody sends now is fine. What nobody moved was the part that proves who sent it.”
“Say that in English.”
“I can’t read anybody’s mail.”
“Then what did you break.”
“I can write something and put anybody’s name on it, and every machine that checks will say it’s them.”
Marcus opened his mouth and closed it.
“Sign what?” he said finally.
“Anything that gets checked. A certificate. A software update. A wire authorization.” She counted them off. “A federal warrant.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Wait.”
“No,” Vlad said. “You are going where I already went.”
“You want to hear it or not.”
“I want to say it before you do, so that when it turns out to be stupid it is mine.” Vlad sat up straighter than he had all morning. “We put ourselves in Utah. A bulletin goes out from a field office. Two people matching the photographs, at a gas station in Green River, yesterday afternoon. It is signed the way the real bulletins are signed, so it is a real bulletin. Every car between here and Denver turns west.”
“That’s good,” Marcus said. “Sam, that’s good.”
Samantha did not say anything for long enough that both of them looked at her.
“Where’s the machine,” she said.
“What?”
“To sign as somebody I need their key. To get their key I have to run it. And to run it—” She held up a hand and put fingers down as she went. “A neutral-atom machine. A few hundred logical qubits. A room I can stand in. The one I tuned is in Basalt, and we can assume there are a bunch of people already watching it. The next one that could hold the circuit is in Illinois. I have never touched it, and it would be several days of work for me before it does anything but make noise.”
“Days,” Marcus said.
“Days if it goes well. It’s a long circuit run ten thousand times. You build the answer out of the pile generated.”
“But you could.”
“I don’t know,” Samantha said. “I’ve never done it anywhere but my own machine.”
Vlad had gone quiet. He was looking at the notch.
“How long on the network,” he said.
“To reach a machine in Illinois from a rock in Colorado, hold a session, and pull down a hundred thousand shots? Hours. And not in one session.”
“Through Mirage.”
“Through Mirage.”
Vlad rubbed his face with both hands and then covered his eyes.
“Then no,” he said.
Marcus said, “Hold on—”
“It was my idea and I am telling you it is a bad one.” He dropped his hands. “Everything I have built keeps us small. Six hours on a wire, doing something no one else is doing? No way.”
“So we sit in the dirt and starve.”
“We do the boring things first,” Samantha said.
“Which are.”
“One. We walk to a road and buy food, which we already decided. Two. Seth. He’s four hours from Basalt, he has money, and he has lawyers.”
“And a phone,” Marcus said.
“And a phone. Three. The file. We answer it and find out what they are.”
“You said we don’t answer it.”
“I said not that night.”
Marcus looked at Vlad. “And four is the thing we just killed.”
“Four is last for now, but I think it’ll continue to go down the list as we come up with other ideas,” Samantha said.
Nobody argued with her. She stood up and got her pack on, and after a moment they did too.
The climb out of the basin was forty minutes of loose switchbacks and then a hundred yards of scree with no trail. Vlad cut himself up climbing over it on his hands and knees, swearing all the way. At the top, the wind was so brutal that they each had to lean into it. Samantha did a 360 looking for helicopters. She could easily see sixty miles and there was nothing except mountains and clouds.
Marcus stood in the wind with his hands on his knees.
“Sam,” he said, “this was worse than forty feet.”
The south side was steeper than the north side. It took them the rest of the afternoon to get down it. Vlad fell twice but did not say a word either time.
They stopped on a bench of grass with water below it. Vlad had the antenna out and aimed before he got his boots off.
Samantha reached into the bottom of her pack, under the food and the stove, and took out the tablet he had put in her hands at the Spur.
“That has never been on,” Vlad said.
“No.”
“What do you want.”
“A list.”
He looked at the tablet and then at her, and then he brought her onto the link.
“Ten minutes,” he said.
It took her six. She didn’t know how many machines were big enough since she hadn’t been paying attention to much other than her machine over the past year. There were nineteen machines that could hold the circuit. One was a company that had tried to recruit her last year.
“Vlad.”
“Yes.”
“Nineteen. I want to know who owns each one. I want to know who is allowed access to the rooms they are in.”
Vlad did not move. He looked at the list on her tablet.
“That is not a boring list,” he said.
“No.”
He picked up his tablet and got to work.