DAY 16
Samantha was growing tired of sleeping on the floor, but she was anxious and wanted to be near the door in case Seth and Vlad showed up during the night. After a fitful night, she finally got up at a quarter to six. Cooper was snuggled up next to her so she petted him for a minute until he got up and walked to the door. She followed, opened it, and let him out to pee.
Marcus was dead to the world on the couch. She nudged him and turned his ankle so she could see it. He was getting better. The red was inside yesterday’s line. She drew today’s over it anyway and wrote 5:47 next to it.
“Ow,” Marcus said, without waking up.
At six she carried the case out to the porch. Marcus followed and Cooper bounded back to the cabin stairs looking pleased with himself.
“I’ll count,” he said.
“Out loud. Every thirty seconds.”
She set the dish on its spot on the rail and plugged it in.
“Ten,” Marcus said.
“Every thirty, Marcus.”
“Twenty.”
The satellites came up at forty seconds. There was one email, from the NIST address, sent at 5:41.
From E. Voss. The companies report to us on the hour. This is the 11:00 UTC table. Your friend says you will want the numbers and not my reading of them.
He was right. Under it were forty-one rows. Eleanor had numbered them.
Samantha read down the column that said held.
“Six thousand one hundred,” she said. “Twenty-eight hundred. Thirty-one. Nine thousand four hundred.”
“Is that them?” Marcus asked.
“That’s them getting caught.”
“Sixty seconds.”
The phones were all zeros, which was right.
“Twenty-six,” she said. “Zero.”
“Who’s twenty-six?”
“The boxes on power poles. They have switches that open a line when a tree comes down on it.” She read across the row. “Eight hundred and ten thousand of them. Rule on since 21:10 yesterday. Held zero. They check in once a day, at fourteen hundred.”
“Zero’s good, right?” Marcus asked.
“For phones. Nobody went after phones.” She put her finger on the row. “These are all tail. Everybody else with boxes like this is holding thousands.”
“Maybe they got lucky?”
“They’re not looking.”
“Ninety seconds.”
She knew how they’d done it. They were checking the signature on each receipt and never asking the log, which was the simple way to do it. The log signed with P-256. P-256 had taken thirty-three minutes in Broomfield. Every receipt theirs had written would check out.
Fuck. She’d written Check every one against the log Ostvik serves. She should have written Don’t check the receipt. Look up its line in Ostvik’s own log.
“One-twenty.”
She opened a reply.
26 has held zero since 21:10 on a fleet that is all tail. They are checking the receipt’s signature, not the log. They have to fetch each receipt’s line from Ostvik’s log before 14:00 or every unit that checks in takes theirs.
“Two-ten,” Marcus said.
She read carefully again and hit send.
“Time.”
She pulled the plug.
Marcus waited until she had the cable coiled.
“What happens at fourteen hundred?”
“Eight here. Their boxes wake up once a day and take whatever’s waiting for them.”
“What’s waiting?”
“Theirs. It got there yesterday.”
“And if it gets in?”
“Then whoever has the key can tell eight hundred thousand switches when to open. Until somebody drives out to every pole and fixes them by hand.” A crew did maybe twenty poles a day. “Forty thousand truck-days.”
“How many trucks does a power company have?”
“Not forty thousand.”
“Did you ask about Vlad?”
“No.”
“Sam.”
“I had four minutes.”
They went inside. Samantha made oatmeal because Seth wasn’t there to make it. It took her twelve minutes.
“It’s good,” Marcus said.
“It’s not.”
“It’s not,” he agreed, and ate all of it.
Marcus washed the pot.
At ten past seven a car came up East Portal Road. Samantha got to the window fast enough that Marcus sat up. It was a Subaru with a dog in the back seat, going up to the trailhead. She was more disappointed than relieved. She stayed at the window until it was out of sight.
If she was wrong about twenty-six, she had just made a power company change its check on live traffic, on a guess. She did the numbers again. Row nine was building controllers, a hundred and forty thousand of them, and it had held six thousand one hundred. Twenty-six had almost six times as many boxes.
She went out and split some kindling on the porch to stay occupied. She badly wanted to go for a run, but didn’t want to be out of touch for even a minute.
After a while Marcus opened the door.
“The whole canyon can hear that.”
She split one more piece and came inside.
At two minutes to eight she carried the case back out. Her hands were cold. It took her two tries to get the plug in.
“Ten,” Marcus said.
There was one email, sent at 7:52.
From E. Voss. 26 found it. They are correcting it one server at a time. As of 13:50 the correction is on six of their nine servers, and those six have held 431,000. Their units begin checking in at 14:00.
“Six of nine,” she said. “Four hundred and thirty-one thousand held.”
“Jesus,” Marcus said.
If theirs was spread evenly over all nine, there were another two hundred and fifteen thousand sitting on the three nobody had fixed yet.
The tablet said 8:01. The boxes were waking up.
“Come on,” she said to nobody. “Come on.”
“Two minutes,” Marcus said.
She opened a reply, typed Is my friend under arrest? and sent it.
“Three thirty.”
She watched the inbox.
“Four,” Marcus said.
She didn’t reach for the plug. Marcus looked at her hand on the rail and kept counting.