Samantha had been awake all night, once again on the floor. At least Cooper was snuggled up next to her.
She had sent it at two o’clock the day before. For most of the night, she had tried to convince herself that what she had done was the end of the issue. She’d made the decision, done it, and it was behind her. But she knew she was bullshitting herself and at some point in the dark it stopped being over and became a thing she was going to have to deal with for a while. At least she was alive. For now.
The light was coming up and she felt a combination of relief that it was morning and increasing anxiety of what she faced. Marcus was curled up on the couch snoring, looking soft and rumpled this morning. She turned to look at Vlad, who was in Doug’s chair. He was wide awake, not looking at her, just like he’d been every time she’d looked at him during the night.
She drifted off finally and woke up at quarter to ten. She got up, made coffee, and took the case out to the rail. Cooper followed her out and went down the steps to the aspen.
“Ten o’clock,” Marcus said from the couch. He was awake after all.
She plugged the dish in at ten and the bars came up and she pulled the inbox down.
There were nine hundred and some messages under hers now and she didn’t read most of them. Someone had pinned a thread to the top of pqc-forum, and the first post in it was a wire item somebody had pasted in whole.
A hospital. It didn’t name the city. The headline said medical devices had taken a firmware update overnight that had been forged. She paused at the word forged, realizing that was good because regular people would understand it. As she read the article, she realized whoever wrote it was good at their job. It talked about a code-signing certificate, and how the devices had installed the update because the forged signature checked out. It mentioned that the devices were old and still trusted the key the whole world was supposed to have stopped trusting. Infusion pumps, the item said. Patient monitors. One line said a patient had been harmed, but gave no further details.
Samantha held the tablet and did not move.
Samantha trembled. She knew exactly what had happened. It was her method. Not her hand — she would never know whose hand — but her method, off her pages, run against a key on a machine she would never see, and signed, and pushed to a thing on a pole next to a hospital bed attached to the patient. She had written the method so the people who owned the boxes could fix the boxes. Somebody had used the same forty lines to hurt someone.
Infusion pumps.
In the dark, trying to write a forty-third line, she had gotten as far as the thing on a pole by a bed that beeped and not known what it was called. Eleanor had known. You should have put hospital equipment on it.
“Sam,” Marcus said. “What is it.”
“A hospital,” she said. Her voice came out level, which surprised her. “Somebody forged a medical company and pushed firmware to the pumps. A patient got hurt.”
The cabin was quiet. Vlad didn’t say anything. She could feel his glare on her back.
Fuck. Vlad had been right. He had stood in this room four days ago and told her to burn the pages, and his reason had been exactly this, that she would hand the list to whoever wanted it and some of them would not want to fix anything. Fuck fuck fuck. She was an idiot. If she hadn’t released the algorithm yesterday, the hospital — whatever hospital it was — would have had the same two weeks everyone else had, instead of a target on it, published, signed, by her.
She let the rest of the thought roll through her head. The managed systems were rotating this morning that would not have rotated for months. People who had never heard of this were pulling cables today. The head start was real and it was already working everywhere the systems were new enough to use it. She believed that this morning the same as she had believed it yesterday. And a person she would never meet had been hurt because of a line she did not write.
Both were true. She knew all the clichés about good and evil and had watched way too much Twilight.
“Fuck me,” she said, quietly. Then, at the top of her lungs, “FUCK ME.” Cooper, on his way back, started barking and ran toward her. She sat down on the stairs with the tablet in her hand and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth until she calmed down.
Cooper came up the steps and leaned against her leg. She let him.
A truck went by on the road below, slow, a county truck with a plow blade up even though there was no snow. She watched it to the tunnel. It was nobody. She had three minutes left on the window.
She picked the tablet back up.
“What are you doing,” Vlad said. It was the first thing he had said.
“I left the pumps off.” She was already typing. “I’m putting them on.”
“It is out, Sam. It is everywhere. One more line does not —”
“The next hospital hasn’t happened yet.” She didn’t look up. “Eleanor read my list at two o’clock yesterday and the first thing she saw was the hole in it. If she saw it, the people fixing things saw it, and the people breaking things saw it. The ones breaking things already used it. The ones fixing things are waiting for me to say it out loud because it’s my list.”
She opened a reply to her own thread and wrote it the way she had written the first one.
Line 43, which I left off and should not have: medical devices still on classical roots — infusion pumps, patient monitors, anything in a hospital that takes signed firmware and can’t be updated to a new root in the field. These are first, not last. I was wrong to leave them off. If you run or maintain any of these, take them off the network and verify by hand until they can be re-rooted. I am sorry it took a patient hurt in a hospital for me to put them on the list.
Samantha Hale
“You said you would stop asking us,” Vlad said.
“I’m not asking you.”
“I know,” Vlad said. “I am telling you that I noticed.”
She looked at him then. He wasn’t angry. He looked like a man watching something he had tried to prevent go the way he’d said it would, with no pleasure in it at all.
“I know you were right,” she said. “About the cost. You were right.”
“I did not want to be.”
“I know.”
“Thirty seconds,” Marcus said, from the couch, because somebody had to count.
She pressed send. The bars held. It went.
Her own words came back to her off the list a few seconds later, line 43 under forty-two others, under her name, with the time on it. She unplugged the dish and the screen went to the spinning thing it did when it lost the signal. She sat down on the top step with the case between her feet and the dog against her side. She felt absolutely shitty.