DAY 6
Twenty miles uphill took them all night. Vlad would not let them use the headlamps on the road, so they walked the white line by starlight and got off it and jumped to the side of the road each time they saw headlights.
They came over the top at first light, got three miles down the other side into timber, and slept through the middle of the day. Nobody had eaten anything except bars since the store.
When they woke, Samantha got the stove going and made coffee.
Marcus drank his sitting on the ground with his back against his pack and his boots off. His feet were wrecked. She looked at them, tried to patch him up with some tape, but gave him two more days of that kind of walking. Maybe three.
“I want two things,” she said.
Vlad looked up.
“The first is time. Not a day off. I want to sit down with the machine list and the migration numbers and actually work. While I do this, I need you both to be quiet so I can concentrate.”
“How long.”
“I don’t know yet. That’s why it’s an ask.”
Vlad put his cup down on a rock. “The people looking for us are also working.”
“I know.”
“Every day you think, they get a day.”
“Vlad. I know.” She poured the rest of the pot of coffee into his cup without asking him. “I have run that number more times than you have. If we contain it the way you want, the world has it in eight months. Maybe, best case, a year.”
“A year is a long time.”
“No it’s not. What’s exposed is firmware, which sits in hardware nobody replaces for fifteen years. Hospitals, cars, water plants.”
Marcus had stopped drinking his coffee.
“What’s the second thing,” he said.
She had been going to lead into it. She looked at the fire instead.
“I want us to talk about how we deal with what I have in my head. Not me deciding. All three of us. And I want to discuss it, carefully, together.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’ve already thought about writing it down,” she said. “Anything I can write, somebody can find. If I split it into multiple pieces, if people get each piece, they can put it back together.”
“So there is one copy,” Vlad said.
“There’s one copy. If somebody gets to me, it stops. It’s over. That is a real outcome. I’m scared of it, but it’s not the worst one on the list.”
“Sam,” Marcus said.
“I’m not being dramatic. I’m telling you where we are.” She held her hands out toward the stove. “The problem is I don’t know if it’s the right answer, especially if someone else is going to figure it out in a year.”
“You are asking whether to teach one of us.”
“Yes.”
Vlad looked distressed. He said, “Do not ask me that.”
“I’m asking.”
“Then no.” He said it fast. “No. I do not want it.”
Marcus sat up. “Are you scared of knowing it?”
“Yes,” Vlad said.
Samantha waited.
“I have spent eleven years making sure there is nothing to find,” Vlad said. “Giving it to me is not a safe place to keep it. If someone finds me and takes it, no one will know what happened.”
She turned the stove down.
“Marcus.”
“Me,” he said. “Obviously me.”
“Why.”
“Because it can’t be him and it can’t only be you.” He was already leaning forward. “And because if something happens to you, somebody has to be able to explain it to someone.”
“Explain what?”
Marcus opened his mouth and then closed it.
“It would take a week to get you to where you could describe it to the right person and then I’m still not sure you’d get it right,” she said. “It would take Vlad an afternoon.”
Nobody said anything to that.
“You’d be carrying a description,” she said. “Not the thing. You’d find somebody like me, and you’d have to be right about her, and she’d need a year, and you’d have to keep her alive for it.”
“Then I’d do that.”
“You might. I’m not saying you’re wrong.” She looked at him for a while. “I’m saying you just volunteered for something without knowing what it really means. That’s the part you need to stop doing. Please slow the fuck down. That’s what I meant earlier when I said that I want us to discuss this carefully.”
“Okay,” Marcus said.
The sun went off the ridge and the timber got dark fast.
“So nobody wants it,” Samantha said.
Silence.
She stood up and got her water bottle and one headlamp and left everything else where it was.
“I’m going up to the bench above the creek. I’ll be back when it’s light.”
“Alone,” Vlad said.
“Yes.”
“Take the radio.”
“No.”
“Then nobody knows where you are either.”
She did not respond. Marcus started to get his boots on, and she put her hand flat on the top of his head, and he stopped.
“Sit,” she said. “The two of you have something to talk about.”
She went up through the timber with the headlamp off until she could not see the fire.
Then she sat down on the cold ground, fired up the tablet, and started on the seventeen machines.