Marcus started writing while she was running.
He used Doug’s notebook, the back pages, because the front was Samantha’s numbers. He sat on the couch with his foot on the milk crate and wrote a list. He crossed out the third thing and wrote it again lower down.
Vlad watched him from Doug’s chair with his cup of cold oatmeal.
“Burn it after,” Vlad said.
“It’s not that kind of list.”
“Every list is that kind of list.”
Marcus kept writing.
Samantha came up the two-track at ten after seven. Her face was red and her hair was stuck to her forehead. Cooper had found the creek. He came up the steps ahead of her, walked straight to the couch, and shook himself all over Marcus.
“Thanks, buddy,” Marcus said.
“He likes you,” Samantha said. She drank a glass of water standing at the sink, then another one. “Eleanor. Go.”
She sat down on the floor and started stretching. She looked up at Marcus.
Marcus had the list on his knee. He didn’t look at it.
“I think you should go at three,” he said.
Nobody said anything, so he kept going.
“Not to Cyber. To Eleanor’s council, in Eleanor’s room. We set the terms before you walk in. No recording. No FBI in the room. You tell them what they need to defend against, and nothing else. We put it in writing and Eleanor agrees to it in writing before the car comes.”
“There is no ‘nothing else,’” Vlad said.
“Let me finish.” Marcus held up a hand. “On Tuesday I sent four sentences to five companies, and they turned the rule on in an hour. Not because of me. Because the government woman could say yes and they believed her. Those people can make a thousand other people do the same thing on the same day. We can’t. We have four minutes every two hours. And Cooper.”
Cooper heard his name and thumped his tail on the floor.
“And the two programs,” Marcus said. “You said you can watch two. Who watches them, Vlad? You? From a porch?”
“Yes,” Vlad said.
Samantha had her knees pulled up and her arms around them. She had stopped looking at Marcus once he started talking. He thought he’d lost her somewhere around the part about terms.
“Who goes with me?” she asked.
“Eleanor.”
“Not you.”
“No.” He’d known this part was coming. He took a deep breath. “If I walk in, they’ll want to talk to me. And I’ll want to talk. I’m the guy from the news.” He looked down at the list. It was the third thing, the one he’d moved. “My name slows things down. You saw that. I’ll just fuck things up.”
“That is new,” Vlad said.
“Don’t.”
“I mean it. It is new.”
Marcus couldn’t tell if Vlad was making fun of him. He decided it didn’t matter.
They were silent for a while. At five to eight he got up off the couch on his own and took the case out to the porch before Samantha could. His foot hurt, but he kept quiet about it. While he was plugging in the dish, they came outside with Cooper, who sniffed the dish, decided it wasn’t interesting, and bounded out into the trees.
There was one email, from E. Voss.
One of the building-systems vendors reported this morning that an update signed with R2 went out to some of its controllers at about 7:20 your time, and that they did not send it. We do not know yet how many accepted it. Nothing we turned on this week checks those devices, because they never took PQ1. I think we have to assume R2 is gone.
Marcus read it out loud. Then he read the last line again. He felt sick.
“What does that mean, exactly?” he asked.
“Everything that never took PQ1 just lost its lock,” Samantha said. “Whoever has R2 can tell it to do anything, and it’ll believe them.”
“Then that’s exactly what the council is for. They can push it out. They can call every vendor in the country by tonight.”
“And tell them what?”
“That R2 is broken.”
“And then what?” Samantha was looking at the trees, not the screen. “Any fix for those has to be signed with R2 too, and whoever has R2 can sign the same thing. The thing in their wall can’t tell us from them anymore. Somebody has to tell the world that all these devices are lying to them now, and there’s nothing to install that will fix it.”
“The council can do that.”
“To who? The ones on their list?”
Marcus started to answer and didn’t. He hadn’t thought about anybody outside Eleanor’s room all morning.
“Two minutes,” Vlad said.
“I want to send Eleanor the terms,” Marcus said. “Before three. So she has time to say no.”
He typed them with his thumbs, as short as he could make them.
“Add that nobody takes notes,” Vlad said.
“That’s not going to fly.”
“Add it.”
Marcus added it. He held the tablet out so Samantha could read it. She took it out of his hands, added one line at the bottom, and handed it back.
Who tells the people who aren’t on your list?
Marcus didn’t love it. Eleanor would have to show it to people, and it read like a threat.
“Send it,” Samantha said.
He sent it. Vlad pulled the plug at four minutes exactly and carried the case inside.
Samantha went in. Through the door Marcus watched her pick up Doug’s notebook off the couch and page past his list. She tore out a clean page from the back, sat down on the floor against the stove, and started to write.
He went in after her and lowered himself onto the couch with his foot on the crate. From there he couldn’t see the page. She wrote fast and didn’t look up.
“Want a second pair of eyes?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
He’d spent an hour on his list. She’d already written twice what he had in sixty seconds. He sat there, pondering his foot, and didn’t ask again.