Samantha wrote until her hand cramped.
She wrote down everything she could think of that had never taken PQ1, starting with whatever would hurt the most people if it stopped working. Building controllers went at the top, because of Eleanor’s email. Then the boxes on the poles. Then traffic signals, door locks, elevators, the cameras in parking garages. She wrote “water plant” and stopped, because she didn’t actually know what was in a water plant. She put a question mark after it and kept going.
Next to each line she wrote who would have to fix it. Almost every line said somebody in a truck.
Cooper came over and lay down on the notebook. She wrote around him for a while, then pushed him off. He went and lay on Marcus’s foot instead.
“Ow,” Marcus said. “Okay. That’s fine.”
She paged back to look for the number from the pole. It was three pages in, under her numbers from Tuesday. She copied it onto the bottom of the new page. She doubted anybody on Eleanor’s list owned that pole. She didn’t know who did.
At quarter to nine she had forty-one lines. Nobody could call forty-one kinds of people from a porch, four minutes at a time. The only way she could think of to reach all of them was to put the whole thing out, the list and the algorithm both.
She wanted Vlad on her side before they talked about it.
He came in from the porch at nine and looked at the pages spread on the floor around her.
“Doug is going to want his notebook back,” he said.
“I’ll buy him a new one,” Marcus said.
“With what?”
“I have money.”
“You have a foot.”
Samantha laughed. Then she held the pages out to Vlad. “Read this.”
He read it standing up. He turned the last page over to see if there was anything on the back.
“This is a list of things that are broken,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Who else wants this list, Sam?”
“The people who have to fix them.”
“Yes. And?”
She didn’t answer. He handed the pages back.
Marcus held his hand out. She gave them to him because he’d asked nicely an hour ago and she’d said no. He held the second page at arm’s length.
“Is that a seven or a one?”
“A seven.”
“Your sevens look like ones.”
“My sevens look like sevens, Marcus.”
At ten to ten she took the case out to the rail. Vlad followed her out. Marcus stayed on the couch with the door open so he could count.
“Thirty seconds,” he called.
There were two emails. The first was from E. Voss.
The council has agreed to the room and to no recording. It has not agreed to the request that nobody take notes. I was told a record is required, and I did not win that argument. I raised your last line as well. The answer I was given is that the council will decide who is notified and in what order, and that it cannot promise more than that this morning. I would rather you heard that from me before three than in the room.
The second was from her too, sent four minutes later.
Two more vendors since this morning. Same key.
“That’s three,” Samantha said. “Whoever has R2 has a list too. They’re going down it.”
“Ninety seconds,” Marcus said. “Read me the first one again.”
She read it again, louder.
“That’s mostly a yes,” Marcus said.
“It’s a no to the one I wrote.”
“She is telling you the truth,” Vlad said. “That is something.”
“Do you want to answer her?” Marcus called.
“No.”
Samantha pulled the plug at four minutes and carried the case inside. She put it down on the floor and sat on it.
“I don’t want to go at three,” she said. “I want to put it out. All of it. Everywhere at once, so nobody can take it back.”
Marcus took his foot off the crate. “Sam.”
“The two others we know about have it in weeks. Eleanor’s list is the people Eleanor knows. The box on the pole down the road I saw while running probably isn’t on anybody’s list. As long as the algorithm is in my head and nowhere else, anybody who wants it comes for my head.” She looked at Marcus. “They’d start with you. You can’t run.”
Her hands were shaking. She put them between her knees.
“Jesus,” Marcus said.
“You give it to everybody, you give it to Virginia,” Vlad said. “You give it to whoever signed those updates this morning.”
“They’re getting it anyway.”
“In weeks. Not today.”
“Give it to the council,” Marcus said. “They have the vendors. They have CISA. They have people whose whole job is deciding who gets the phone call first and who gets it second. Let them decide who goes first. That’s the whole point of them.”
“Then the council has it,” Samantha said. “And the council has a boss.”
“That was my line,” Vlad said.
“It was a good line.”
She held the pages up so he could see them. “Forty-one lines. Every one of them is somebody in a truck. Eleanor can maybe call the first six by tonight. The rest find out when something breaks.”
“And somebody in Virginia reads forty-one lines by lunch,” Vlad said.
She waited for him to say something else. He didn’t. He was right about lunch.
“We said we’d decide together,” Marcus said.
“We are deciding,” Vlad said. “Two to one.”
Samantha was furious. She couldn’t think of anything new to say to convince Vlad. She folded the pages in half and then in half again.
“Burn it,” Vlad said.
“No.”
She put them in the inside pocket of her jacket and zipped it.
Marcus had the tablet on his knee. “What do I tell Eleanor at noon?”
“Tell her I’m thinking about it.”
It wasn’t true. Marcus nodded and started typing. She couldn’t watch him do it.
She took Cooper out and sat on the top step. He leaned against her leg. She could type maybe thirty words a minute with her thumbs. That was a hundred and twenty words a window, and there were two windows before three. The list alone was longer than that. It was the easy part.
She didn’t know yet how else to do it.