DAY 14
Vlad didn’t sleep. At twenty to six Seth got up off the floor by the door, put the atlas on the table, and started water for oatmeal in the dented pot.
Vlad stood up from Doug’s chair. “Take Cooper for a walk.”
Seth looked at him, then at the clock on the microwave. “It’s dark out.”
“It will be light in twenty minutes. Go down to the tracks. Take a long time.”
Seth turned the burner off. He looked at Samantha asleep on the floor with her cheek on the notebook, and at Marcus on the couch, and then back at Vlad.
“Eat something first,” Seth said. “Whatever this is.”
“No thanks.”
Seth put his boots on and clipped the leash to Cooper’s collar. On his way out he took a granola bar off the counter and put it in Vlad’s hand. Then he walked out the door and Cooper went with him.
Vlad was grateful he hadn’t asked why. He needed to tell Samantha and Marcus first.
At six he set the dish on the porch rail. The sky over the ridge had gone grey. Ostvik’s page said two million and thirty thousand, as of eight in New York. He powered the dish down at a minute and fifty seconds. Two hours left, give or take.
He went back inside and pulled the milk crate out from under Marcus’s foot.
Marcus’s heel hit the floor. “Jesus, Vlad. That’s the bad one.”
“I know.”
He crouched down by the stove. Both knees cracked. He hadn’t brushed his teeth since Saturday. “Samantha.”
She opened her eyes. There was a red crease on her cheek from the notebook’s spiral. “What time is it?”
“Six. Ostvik is at two million and thirty thousand.”
She sat up and looked at the microwave. “Sooner than eight fifteen then.”
Marcus had his foot back up on the couch cushion and both hands around his ankle. “Where’s Seth?”
“Walking the dog.”
“At six in the morning?”
“I asked him to.”
He took his tablet out of his jacket, opened the draft, and put it on the floor between Samantha and the couch where both of them could see it.
“Last night I wrote this for nib,” Vlad said. “It says what is wrong with the sampler, and it has the one-line fix. It asks Ostvik to stop signing until nib ships it. I did not send it.”
“Why not?” Marcus asked.
“Because it comes from nobody. Nib only changes that file if two maintainers approve it and the change is signed by somebody they know. Last night was the first night of the rotation. A stranger asking them to change the sampler and asking Ostvik to stop everything looks exactly like the people breaking R2. They would close it. I would close it.”
“Then who does nib listen to?” Samantha asked.
“Me.”
He was more scared than he ever had been before. He forced himself to keep talking.
“The sampler is mine,” Vlad said. “I wrote it the summer I was seventeen, on a twenty-dollar circuit board. I wrote the small one first. A month later I copied the file to make the big one, and I did not change sigma.”
“I called you lazy,” she said.
“It was accurate. Nib picked it up a few years later. There is a file in nib that lists who wrote what. It says sampler: kolobok. I read it when I was at MIT. I was very proud of myself. I never told anybody.”
“Who’s kolobok?” Marcus asked.
“Me. Since I was fifteen.”
“What does it mean?”
“It is a round bread in a children’s story. It runs away from everybody.”
“How does the story end?”
“A fox eats it.”
Marcus snorted.
“So sign it kolobok,” Marcus said.
“Kolobok gets it read. It is the only name nib knows for that file. But the key that proves I am kolobok is on a laptop under my bed in Basalt, so this morning the name is just a word anybody can type. And the minute kolobok asks Ostvik to stop, everybody watching nib goes looking for kolobok. There are old chats where kolobok gave a man in Belgrade my mother’s address. By lunch somebody can walk to her door.”
“You fixed my tree,” she said. “Yesterday. You knew then.”
“Yes.”
“You sat in that chair while I counted it. All afternoon and most of the night.”
“You were right every time. I checked.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I wanted to fix it before you knew it was mine. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Were you going to tell us?”
“No.”
Marcus let go of his ankle. “Why now?”
“Because it is six o’clock. And I do not know whose name to put on it.”
Samantha closed the notebook. She got up, put her boots on without lacing them, and went out onto the porch. The door banged shut behind her.
Vlad was still holding Seth’s granola bar. He put it down on the stove. The microwave said 6:14.
He didn’t know if he should go out after her.