At 00:40 UTC Sable read the count for the fourth time, checking it every ten minutes. It had not moved.
Two million three hundred and eleven thousand devices had taken the package. The number had climbed all evening. Somewhere between nineteen and twenty hundred it had stopped climbing. It was not falling. Nothing anywhere was reporting a failure. Devices were still asking for updates and still being handed them. What they were being handed was not Sable’s.
Sable was perplexed and opened the breakdown.
Laptops. Workstations. The till terminals of a retail company. Four managed estates with a helpdesk behind each one.
Sable had asked for the opposite of this. A box on a pole wakes once a day at a fixed hour and takes whatever is waiting for it. The package had reached those servers at midday and gone into the queue to wait. While it waited, somebody had put something else in the queue beside it.
Sable went to the log.
There was one line in it, timed 19:57. The first thing written there since the pause at seven in the morning. It was signed with the key — the same key, which Sable had on a machine in this building and which, it appeared, they had too.
Sable carefully read the line.
It was an update that told a device to demand a second signature of the other kind before accepting anything, from a key that had come into existence yesterday afternoon. If a device took it, nothing reached it afterward without that second signature. Not Sable. Not the Americans. Not the people who had sent it.
They had outplayed Sable. It was the best move they had available, and they had executed it flawlessly.
That accounted for the devices that had taken the gate. It did not account for the rest.
There were fleets that had refused Sable’s package outright, hours before the line appeared in the log. Sable pulled the rejection logs and read two of them side by side. A freight company and a maker of lighting controllers had answered in the same four words, six hours apart. They were not inspecting the package. There was nothing in the package to find — it was signed correctly. They were refusing the receipt.
Sable’s receipts named a line in the public log. These companies were not reading the receipt at all. They were going to the log and looking for the line. The line was not there.
Somebody had told those companies the receipt was worthless and not to believe it. Whoever said it had made a new one first. Sable’s own people had tried to do the same thing on Monday and had come in hours behind.
Hale had done this part.
Sable was afraid of her. That was a new feeling.
At 05:10 Sable opened the line to the team and asked for the numbers by fleet.
“Four hundred and ten thousand on the retail estate,” the voice said. “Ninety-one thousand on the next one. Then two thousand. Then nothing after twenty hundred.”
“Read me the rest.”
Sable had been at the desk since midnight. Somebody had left a plate of bread and white cheese beside the keyboard that Sable had not noticed. Sable ate the bread while the voice read and left the cheese.
The voice had stuttered a day ago over the list of what could not defend itself. There was no stuttering this time.
“That is all of them,” it said. “Do you want what is still waiting in the queues.”
“Yes.”
“One point four million. They wake at fourteen hundred.”
Carmine came in at 11:20 with the leather folder.
“The minister has read the night report,” Carmine said. “He would like to know what we hold.”
“Two million three hundred thousand machines,” Sable said. “Most of them in shops.”
Carmine said nothing for a while.
“He can have the list,” Sable said. “The port first.”
Carmine put the folder on the desk and went out to make his call.
Sable opened the folder. The port, the three electric companies, the water authority, the payment network, the satellite. All of it would still work next week. Every one of them was something that could be unplugged. Sable had told Carmine half the list would have a new root inside a month, and had refused to spend a day on it. This was starting to look stupid.
At 13:00 a man began drilling in the corridor. Sable went and looked at him. He had the cover off a panel beside the lift and was fitting something into it by hand, talking on the radio with a bag of parts open on the floor. He would do three or four of them before he went home. The whole plan had rested on there being too many of these to visit by hand. Here was a man visiting one.
Sable went back to the desk and thought about what was left and still going on.
Four fleets were still handing the package out. Their devices woke at fourteen hundred and would take whichever package had reached their server first. On all four, that was still Sable’s. Thursday was the other thing left. The machine at the Institute would finish the old root, which still opened a whole class of device that had never taken the new key at all.
At 13:50 Sable opened the line again and said, “Everything still sitting in a queue goes out again, now, to every device that will take it, and nobody waits for the hour.”
“Ten minutes,” the voice said.
“I am aware of the hour.”
Then the hour turned, a long way west of the window, and eight hundred thousand boxes on poles reached for whatever was waiting for them.
Sable watched the number.