Vlad set the Mini on a flat rock with a clear view of the sky.
Marcus sat on his pad with both boots off. He took his socks off, wrung them out, pulled them up to his face, sniffed, and grimaced.
“Is it going to charge tonight?”
“No.”
“So what do we have.”
“Thirty-seven percent.” Vlad watched it. “Thirty-six.”
Samantha was lying down, shivering, with her jacket over her face. Everything they owned was drenched.
“Talk while it comes up,” she said, in a muffled voice.
“Give me a minute.”
Vlad put his hands inside his shirt against his stomach and held them there as they warmed up.
“Do these dry if I put them in the sleeping bag when I’m in it?” Marcus said.
“No.”
“Have you tried it?”
“I do not have to try it,” Vlad said. “I have smelled you.”
He pulled his hands out, picked up the tablet, and looked at it.
“Four of the seventeen,” he said. “Not seventeen. Four. I told you it would take days.”
“Which four.”
“Two universities and two of the companies. The ones that publish anything, constantly, including all the useless stuff.” He scrolled. “Three of them ran normal weeks. Booked, published, boring.”
Marcus put his socks over his boot tops and fiddled with them. “And the fourth.”
“The fourth stopped publishing nine days ago.”
Samantha took the jacket off her face.
“Stopped how.”
“The page is still up. The last thing on it is nine days old.” Vlad looked at it again. “They put their calendar out every Monday for four years. Then they missed Monday. Twice.”
“That’s maintenance,” Marcus said.
“They list maintenance on the calendar.”
“Where is it,” Samantha said.
“Outside Osaka.”
She lay back down and put her arm over her eyes. She struggled to wrap her still wet jacket around herself and groaned. She got up, set up her pad and sleeping bag on a somewhat dry spot under a tree and got in the bag fully dressed.
“Okay,” she said. “Get me the other thirteen.”
Vlad went down the feeds. “There is a second archive,” he said.
Marcus looked over.
“Bigger than the one this afternoon?”
“Eleven terabytes.”
“That’s — how much is that.”
“Everything that crossed one pipe for nine years,” Vlad said. “It is a cable tap. It has been running the whole time.”
He read down it.
“It is commercial,” he said. “Contracts. Freight. A bank’s internal mail. Some of it is a hospital group that is now going to be in court for ten years. They are pretty fucked.”
“Whose tap?”
“It does not say. Nobody signs these.” He kept going. “There is a third one. Different pipe, different years, and it went up two hours after the second.”
“Why now?”
“Because it stopped being worth anything,” Vlad said. “They sat on it twenty years because nobody could read it. Including them. Now anybody can.”
The wind gusted. Water streamed off a tree and went down the back of his neck. He didn’t move.
“One more thing and then I turn it off,” he said.
“Go,” said Samantha.
“Somebody built a search box.”
“Over what.”
“Over all three of them. It went up an hour ago and it is somebody good. You put in a phrase and it comes back with what is in the buckets.”
Marcus said, “That fast?”
“It is not hard. It is only eleven terabytes of text.” Vlad put the tablet down on his knee. “It’s built on OpenSearch. It probably took them an hour to set it all up. They call it thebuckets.org.”
He held it out toward Samantha.
“Do you want this.”
She looked at it for a second.
“In the morning,” she said, and rolled over.
Marcus was asleep before she was.
Vlad sat with his back against the tree. He wanted to lie down so badly that his eyes were watering. He wiped them with his sleeve and went back to the tablet.
He searched thebuckets.org for Samantha’s list first. Two of the seventeen ran their procurement through the second pipe, and it was all in there — purchase orders, freight, a laser vendor’s invoices, and the name of a person in a building who signed for things.
Four names in eleven minutes. He had spent two days on this from the other direction and gotten nothing.
He pulled out his notebook and wrote the names on the back page.
Samantha mumbled, “Did you get anything.”
“Four names. People who signed for equipment at two of the seventeen. Not the people in the room.”
“That’s fast.”
“thebuckets.org is very good.”
She did not say anything else. He waited until her breathing changed, and then he cleared the box and typed the handle.
No results.
He typed the second one. Then the third, which he had used for less than a year and had not thought about in a decade.
No results. No results.
He sat there with his thumb on the edge of the tablet. Thirty-three percent.
He checked for more information about where the data was coming from. The second pipe was a carrier in Frankfurt and the third was a landing station, both of them fat. He’d never used either of them. The years were wrong too. The third one started when he was nineteen and by then he was careful.
Anything from before they switched the key exchange came off a classical one. All of it was open.
He had used four providers as a kid. Two were small European outfits that ran email and a chat network for most of the people he talked to.
He remembered that someone in Belgrade had offered to send him a motherboard when he was fifteen.
They had gone back and forth about it for a day. He remembered the argument better than the motherboard. He had been wrong about how the thing clocked and obnoxiously loud about it. Eventually, he gave an address to send the motherboard to.
He rolled over the address in his mind. Street, number, the apartment, the city.
His mother lived at that address. She still did.
He typed the street in the search box. Then paused. Whoever had stood that box up would be tracking every search.
He backspaced a character at a time until the search box was empty. Then he turned off the tablet.
He sat for a while, staring at the trees. He was frightened. That didn’t happen very often, so he sank into the feeling, hoping it would pass.
Something came down through the timber below him and hit the ground hard. He jumped up, tablet in one hand and pack strap in the other, frantically searching for what made the noise. He was surrounded by silence.
It was a branch letting go of its ice.
He sat back down.
He went through the writing on his arm. All twenty-six, out loud and barely voiced, then the two orderings. He got to twenty-two, realized his chin was on his chest and that he had lost the thread and had to start over. The second time he made it to the end, and the last three came off the first two.
He did it another time, from start to finish, flawlessly. He stood up, walked in a big circle around where Marcus and Samantha were sleeping, sat down, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and did it one more time.
When he finished and opened his eyes, he reached for the water bag. He unbuttoned his cuff and pushed his sleeve up past his shoulder.
He worked at the ink with the tail of his shirt, in circles, scrubbing slowly to get it all. He kept going after the numbers were gone, down the forearm and over the place above the wrist bone where he had run out of room until his arm was numb and red with irritation.
The numbers were completely gone, except for in his head. And Samantha’s head.