The gauge said eight point nine.
Eli wrote 8.9 and the time in the log book taped to the side of the table. On Saturday afternoon it had said four point three. It had doubled over the weekend.
She opened Agilent’s support page for the controller. The fix had been on it since Thursday. IT had banned her from installing it. Now the page said Firmware 2.3.1. Re-signing under Ostvik PQ1 in progress. Expected availability: Monday.
It was Monday. She refreshed it. Nothing changed.
IT’s email had come in at 7:02. It was the fifth one in a week.
Effective immediately, updates signed under the new Ostvik PQ1 root may be installed on MIT equipment after you confirm that the file appears in the PQ1 Transparency Log (instructions below). Updates signed only under the old root remain prohibited. When in doubt, do not install.
Her phone rang at ten past eight. Her mother never called before nine because of the long-distance rates, which hadn’t existed since before Eli was born.
“They had your friend on again,” her mother said. “With the boyfriend.”
“He’s not her boyfriend, Ma.”
“He’s always next to her.”
“Because they only have two pictures.”
“Your father went to the bank in person. They gave him forty dollars and a form.”
“What’s the form for?”
“To get more than forty dollars.”
“Does he need money?”
“Your father has never needed money in his life. He needs a bank.”
The controller beeped twice. Eli put her hand on top of it like that would help.
“Wasn’t there another one?” her mother asked.
“Another what?”
“Another boy. When Samantha came to dinner. The tall one. He didn’t say a word all night and he ate three plates of brisket standing up at the stove. He said thank you in Russian.”
“Ukrainian,” Eli said.
Her mother was quiet.
“So there was another one,” she said.
“Ma. Don’t say that to anybody.”
“Who would I say it to?”
“Everybody. Don’t tell Dad. Don’t tell Aunt Ruthie.”
“Is he in trouble too?”
“I don’t know.”
“You sound tired,” her mother said. “You sound like your father. Eat something.”
Eli hung up. “Shit,” she said to the phone, and put it face down on the bench. Her mother had told the entire Hadassah chapter when Eli failed her driving test.
She wanted to know if he was alive.
Omar came in at half past eight with two coffees and put one on top of the ion pump controller.
“Not there.”
He moved it to the floor next to her left foot. He had his phone in his other hand, and it was restarting.
“IT says we can update again,” he said.
“IT says we can install things signed under the new root.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The old signature can be faked now. Anybody who can do whatever they’re doing can make an update that says it’s from Apple, and your phone believes it. The new one is lattice math. Nobody has anything that touches lattices.”
“How do I know mine’s the new one?”
“Every signature they make goes on a public list the minute they make it. You look your file up. If it’s on the list, it’s real.”
Omar looked at his phone. The logo was still on the screen. “Nobody is going to look their file up.”
“Your phone did it for you,” Eli said. “I’m going to look mine up.”
He went to the far end of the lab, put his headphones on, and started taking apart the optics he’d spent all of Friday putting together.
Eli turned her phone back over and opened her contacts. Vlad was between Uri from undergrad and Walt Plumbing. There was no last name. She’d never known it. She only had a number, and her three texts in Messages.
If Pittman came back with a piece of paper that let him take her phone, the first thing he would see was Sam, and the second thing would be a man with no last name.
She opened the contact and scrolled to the bottom, where it said Delete Contact in red. She pressed it. The phone asked her again. She pressed it again.
Then she went into Messages and deleted the thread with the three texts in it.
She didn’t know the number by heart.
She looked down the lab. Omar was nodding to whatever was in his headphones. She turned the wifi off on her laptop, got the bag out from under the desk, dug under her keys for the thumb drive, and plugged it in.
She opened the picture from the roof.
There were eight of them along the railing with Building 32 behind them. She was on the left end with her eyes shut. Marcus’s shadow came in from the bottom of the frame with one arm up, holding the phone. In the middle Samantha had turned all the way around to say something to Vlad, and he had turned toward her.
He was the tallest one in the row. His hair was too long and stuck out over his collar. One hand was up, the way he held it when he was explaining something he thought was obvious.
She zoomed in on him until the back of his head was brown squares.
She remembered the heavy brow and the square jaw, and eyes so pale that she’d asked him once if they were contacts. “Why would I wear contacts that make me look like this,” he’d said. He looked at the ceiling when he didn’t want to answer something.
It was a terrible picture of him.
She closed it and ejected the drive. She put it in the chest pocket of her flannel and buttoned the pocket. She put the bag back under the desk and left it there.
At twenty to ten the support page changed. Firmware 2.3.1. Signed under Ostvik PQ1. Available.
She downloaded it and ran the file through the hash program in a terminal, which gave her sixty-four characters of nonsense. She opened the PQ1 Transparency Log in another window. It was a plain white page with a search box, and at the top in small grey type it said 2,157,904 entries. Ostvik had signed two million things since Sunday morning. Somebody there wasn’t sleeping.
She pasted the sixty-four characters into the box.
Entry found.
Omar had come back down the lab with his headphones around his neck. “Is it on there?”
She turned the laptop around so he could see it.
“Nobody looks their file up,” she said.
She copied the file to a different thumb drive from the drawer, the one with ELI DO NOT TAKE written on it in Sharpie. She touched her shirt pocket to make sure the other one was still buttoned in. Then she plugged the new one into the front of the controller. She held the two buttons down and counted to five. The display went dark. It came back with a version number she had been staring at on a web page since Thursday. The fault light went off for the first time in four days.
Eight point nine. Eight point seven. After ten minutes, eight point one.
She wrote all three in the log book with the times. In three or four days it would be back to one. She wasn’t going to have to bake the chamber for three weeks.
“Thank fucking God,” she said.
Omar put a bagel on top of the log book.
She ate half of it before the next reading.