by Sean Platt
“This is where the elevator took me.”
Spooner rolled his eyes. “Right. I forgot it did that.”
He didn’t bother to explain what “that” meant. Noah was going to ask, but Spooner seemed to lose interest. He turned and sprinkled water onto a plant Noah had never seen before. The water never reached the plant; it struck one of those shimmering fields and turned to steam as it entered a transparent bubble, creating instant humidity.
Unsure what to do, Noah followed Spooner as the man meandered and watered. It was like he’d already forgotten Noah and had returned to his rounds.
The pattern of watering (some turning to steam, some sinking dutifully into soil at the plants’ feet) looked almost random, but Noah knew it wasn’t. Spooner wasn’t the good-natured bumbler he sometimes showed to the press. This man was ruthless behind closed doors, Noah felt certain — and had heard from powerful friends more than once. You didn’t stake a claim in the world and win the hearts and minds of a planetary population by accident. You didn’t get billions of people to unite and build your empire for you without a plan.
“What is all of this?” Noah asked, watching Spooner on his rounds.
“Relaxation. This tending can be automated, but I can’t resist coming down here to do some of it myself. My grandfather had a garden back in Merry Old England, and I used to help him weed and maintain it. I suppose this is my way of going home.”
Noah was watching the plants as they passed. He doubted Spooner’s grandfather’s garden had been anything like this. Almost every plant was in a capsule of some sort, though the separations were mostly invisible. The diversity of foliage was baffling. Noah saw orchids next to water-sparing desert vegetation. There were many plants he didn’t recognize. In one large enclosure, tomato vines had slithered around stakes…but the stakes had left the soil and now floated with the tomatoes and vines, defying gravity.
“This is moon technology,” said Noah. He blinked up at Spooner, suddenly wondering if this had been an accidental meeting after all. The building’s spire was twisted, as if the architect had grabbed its top floors while the Ryan steel had been cooling and turned it a few times around. The elevators traversed the building’s spiraling exterior at the edges to look across the city, and at top speed the ride up had managed to make Noah dizzy. Now Spooner was showing him high-end technology in a way that seemed casual and doddering, but its side effect was to make it clear to Noah exactly the kinds of things a man like Clive Spooner could afford to take for granted.
Spooner turned. His smile didn’t look manipulative, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t.
“The moon is a rock. The technology is ours.”
“But it’s suited to one-sixth gravity and vacuum.” Unable to help himself, knowing the conversational advantage it offered the billionaire, Noah squatted to inspect the tomatoes. He looked up. “Rumor said that toward the end of the moon project, you could grow grass on the base’s front lawn.”
Spooner’s smile widened. He looked like one of his thousands of magazine covers.
“I heard that one. But no matter how excited people were back then, the sad truth is that even our project couldn’t grow life in absolute zero temperatures, in the dark, without an atmosphere.”
“But with a permeable force field…”
“Terraforming,” Spooner said, nodding. “I know; I read some of that research myself. Which is saying a lot, considering all the wikis crowdsourced for various operations relating to our lunar base.” Noah noticed Spooner’s careful use of the plural pronoun: our. Off-guard, though, he felt quite sure that Spooner would have said my lunar base. “It interested me enough to poke around a bit, unlike all the tech specs. Truth is, I could make neither hide nor hair of most of the structure up there now. All of the technology. There may be a million of those little POV cameras flying around, but I have no idea for sure, and I’ve never used one myself except for when they were demo’d for my approval. It’s like I said: the moon is just a rock, and it never interested me much.”
Spooner caught Noah’s expression and laughed.
“Don’t act so shocked. I doubt Henry Ford was fascinated by automobiles, and I’ll bet Edison and Tesla got enough shocks to wish electricity would go away. You’re one of us, Mr. West. It’s innovation that’s interesting to people like you and me, not its substrate. People see the radio telescope and the far-side labs as world changers, but it was the people’s fascination with them that drove their crowdsourced, crowd-funded construction. I was the impresario. I had the ideas and made it happen. Then the planet put its collective mind to work solving the problems of construction and emptied its pockets to pay.”
He nodded toward the floating tomatoes.
“It’s not really anti-gravity, and it’s not vacuum or absolute zero in there,” said Spooner. “Call it hydroponics without hydroponics. Something we discovered helped the tomatoes grow, in this case taken a degree further. They oscillate periods of lower simulated gravity with one-fifth gravity, just heavier than they’d have been on the moon. But it’s not much more than a parlor trick down here on Earth. And it’s definitely not a solution to terraforming, if the world still cared about such things.”
Noah looked through the glass ceiling. The moon was barely visible, white against blue sky, nearly full.
“Yes, it’s still up there,” said Spooner. “But if you didn’t know that, you wouldn’t be here.”
Noah met Spooner’s eye. The charm was still there but shuffled back. How could he have been taken in by the man’s casual manner? He’d known who Noah was all along, and his arrival in the high-up greenhouse was in no way accidental. Noah had always been excellent with technology, and terrible with people. Now between the two of them, Spooner had seized the advantage.
“What are you here to get, Mr. West?”
His bluntness took Noah off guard, but he quickly recovered. He’d never been a charmer but was every bit as confidently bold as Spooner himself. Real magic was convincing others to do what you wanted while making them believe it was their idea. By those standards, both men were magicians. And as magicians, they could speak plainly of things that couldn’t or shouldn’t be because both knew that impossibility was only an illusion.
“I need to look at your fragmentation engine,” Noah said.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“EverCrunch didn’t use its algorithms for bandwidth shuttle compression before Quark,” Noah continued, watching Spooner’s wary eyes. “I wrote most of that code myself, and know it better than anyone. Your moon project sent more data across the network than any single entity ever has, even excluding the terrestrial components — on-Earth wikis and local clusters, things like that. Just the Earth-moon pipeline was enormous — so enormous that if you’ll remember, Quark built you a dedicated in and out that did literally nothing other than relay For the People data. Using our compression. Using our bandwidth.”
“Of course I remember.” Spooner’s affability was draining like water from a tub. Noah West had surprised him. Spooner seemed to thrive on three things: wealth, popularity, and a sense of permanent control. That meant always knowing more than your opponent. But Spooner could sense something coming that he’d been blind to, and it was making him uneasy.
“We can speak plainly, can’t we, Mr. Spooner?”
Spooner set the watering can down. “Call me Clive.”
“Call me Noah, Clive.”
“Would you like to come up to my office?”
Giving this conversation breathing room would be a bad idea, so Noah shook his head and spoke plainly without specific permission.
“The problem with encryption is that you can’t truly lock anything down without using a key. The more I worked with Ben Stone’s algorithms, the more that became an obvious weakness. Because the prime keys used on both ends were so large, they were considered unbreakable, but it’s always been a case of good enough. Our solution to make data safe, as with our predecessors, w
as to make those keys increasingly bigger. No brute force attack — simply trying sequential key after key until the code finally broke — could crack our encryption, especially as fast as I made it move. Until we solve the idea of resident AI code makers in the network, it’s the best we can do.”
Spooner sat on a bench amid the plants, and Noah felt himself looking down.
“But then I asked a question. We made the Internet faster by applying our compression algorithms to data packets traversing the network. So what would happen if the same thinking was applied to encryption?” Noah shrugged. “Or, maybe, to decryption.”
“You found a way to use the EverCrunch algorithms to break codes?”
“To speed up brute force code breaking engines.” Noah smiled. “How fast can you count to a nonillion, Clive? Because I’ll bet we can do it faster.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with — ”
“Comparing the stream leaving Earth and returning through veracity buffers on the moon, an interesting pattern emerged. We realized that although we were able to expand all of the confidential data you were quite illegally siphoning from the bottoms of the wikis and what’s supposed to be aggregate user metadata, we couldn’t make sense of it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Noah sat on a bench opposite Spooner. Around them, the greenhouse teemed with leaves, moving sunlight, and shadows.
“Water under the bridge, as far as humanity is concerned,” Noah said. “The Fall and the end of the East sort of cancel all of that out. I’m in a unique position to understand why you were pulling user data you shouldn’t have been, believe me. It’s why I’m here in the first place.”
Spooner watched Noah, unsure.
“It’s a staggering amount of information,” Noah continued. “Using EverCrunch, Quark can compress that data to nothing. We can make it manageable in size. Send it quickly across the network. We can, as I said, pop the cork on compression and peek in all we want. But there’s too much of it to be worth having, like the proverbial needle in a haystack…if you didn’t know what a needle looked like or why you’d care to find it.” He resettled on the bench. “In other words, the one thing we can’t do — and the thing you seem able to do, somehow — is to use all that information.”
“Knowing details about the underlying users let us tailor experiences and target our fundraising requests,” said Spooner. Noah knew it was a partial answer but didn’t care for reasons. He cared much more about the man’s methods.
“Best we can tell,” Noah said, “some sort of engine was fragmenting that incoming gusher of data then assembling it like a puzzle.”
“Why would we fragment data that was already overwhelming?”
“I don’t know, Clive. Why did you?”
Spooner looked like he might try to protest further, but neither man was a fool. As far as Noah had seen, Spooner’s fragmentation process was akin to shaking wheat from chaff then drawing a highly cogent data web from whatever remained. It was like breaking two vases so some of the shards from each could be glued back together into a superior new vase. Like putting a deck of cards in order by first throwing them across the room to get the old disorder out of the way — except that the deck in this case had a nearly infinite number of cards. It mattered because Spooner’s process held a secret that Crossbrace would require to thrive. The world was overflowing with information, and that problem would only intensify once the new network rolled out. Without an excellent and supremely selective limiter, Noah’s baby would die. He’d wire the country and let everything talk to everything else…but if he didn’t learn what Spooner knew about fragmentation and reintegration, the network’s first breath of all that informational garbage would choke it.
To Noah, the unseen process cast an elegant shadow: the ability to make something purer by shattering it into a billion pieces. Even without Quark, he’d have wanted to peek into this mystery’s innards.
“Maybe you should tell me what it means to you,” Spooner said, his voice even but assessing.
“The same as any of this means to you, Clive. Legacy.”
“Legacy.” Spooner scoffed.
“Power then. The ability to cheat.”
“Cheat?”
“Come on. Everyone with a brain knows the true value of the lunar base to you.” Noah softened his voice, made his body language more casual. “The dark-side telescope rallied the world behind a common cause, but that’s just the hook to hang everything on, isn’t it? No sovereign country owns the moon. I remember reading about your deal where, almost as a stunt, you bought the Mare Frigoris land from that nut who once claimed the moon as his property — but it’s nobody’s dominion. That makes it international waters, where you can do whatever you want. You can cheat. And accordingly, some of your business up there, from what we could see in your decrypted data, ranging from medical experiments to the creation of pharmaceuticals — ”
“Now wait just a minute…”
“I don’t fault you for any of it, and I won’t tattle. Besides, it’s right, in a way. Spooner-birthed hive thinking caused many of the problems that your Lunis drug claims to solve. I’d have considered it, even if just for altruism.” Noah gave Spooner a smile. “The problem is that no one will adopt it.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody wants less connectivity and distraction. They want more.”
“You’re sure of that, are you?”
Noah nodded. “I’ve based my entire business on it. Enough that, frankly, I’d have used the access I just told you about to quietly insert faults into the incubator programs controlling Lunis production if I saw it as a threat. But the world needs opposites to keep its edge. Agonist and antagonist. But in the end, there’s no good and bad. Only variety. Those who understand that — and have the means to control it — will need to band together.”
Spooner chewed his lip, waiting for Noah, seemingly unsure of what was coming.
“I don’t know if you truly don’t know me or if you’re just playing stupid,” Noah said, “but some day, all the world will know my name as well as yours. I want what my team calls your ‘fragmentation engine’ because one of my projects needs it — but I’m really after a larger prize. One that assumes the engine because it would be part of the bigger deal.”
“What deal?” Spooner asked. “What are you playing at?”
“Partnership.”
“Between For the People and Quark? It doesn’t make sense. FtP is finished. Officially, the lunar base is barely functional. People stopped caring about staring out into space when problems hit at home. Although the East was willing to keep holding hands and get through this little global calamity together, the NAU seems to have realized it was better off and could get through on its own — especially if it didn’t squander resources trying to help those beyond its borders.”
“I’m not talking about partnering businesses,” Noah said. “I’m talking about partnering us.”
“Who, us? You and me? I’m not looking for another mastermind group to join, Mr. West. I have more money than I can spend.”
“Noah,” Noah said. “Call me Noah.”
“Fine. Noah.”
“I’m not only talking about you and me. And I’m not just talking about money.”
“What then?”
Noah told him.
The charismatic Brit dropped his doubtful expression and began to smile.
Micah tried to access his dashboard several times while waiting. Each time, he felt stupid and lost when it failed to appear in front of his virtual eyes.
He needed to lower the temperature. It was too hot inside this immersion. His chair was hard and uncomfortable. He also needed a dose of calm. He didn’t like to show nerves, and these days he had plenty. It wasn’t so much sending Kai after his mother that had him on edge, and it wasn’t worry that Rachel’s friends in the secret club he suspected she belonged to would find out. Anyone who knew Micah wouldn’t be surprised by
his siccing an assassin on his mother, and anyone who knew Rachel wouldn’t blame him. It wasn’t even Carter Vale’s Prime Statement bombshell about Project Mindbender that made Micah uneasy. But the stew of all three, taken together, was working on his gut in a way that no one stimulus could by itself.
Micah hated the idea that any of his seams might be showing. He hated the way he felt less than totally in control. Most of all, he hated knowing that he’d chastise Isaac for being exactly as he was right now. If you didn’t like the way a situation stood, you changed it. You didn’t sit there with clammy hands like a victim.
But he couldn’t change any of what was happening. He couldn’t accelerate his wait. He couldn’t make the inner office door open early. He couldn’t bully Lawrence, who Micah suspected might not be a real person, seeing as the real Lawrence would be nearly a hundred by now and not rich enough for the best enhancements.
And now, he couldn’t even pull up the immersion’s dashboard, no matter how many times he tried.
Maybe he was failing because he was too nervous for control, even though he should feel perfectly calm. Or maybe he was failing because The Beam — in this place of all places — didn’t obey Micah above everybody else. But mostly, Micah suspected he was unable to pull up the immersion dashboard because he wasn’t in an immersion…and that he was, as hard as it was to believe, actually in Clive Spooner’s genuine office, in the for-real, non-simulated world.
That wasn’t really a shock. Of course he was in the real world, but he kept wanting to pinch himself. It was so damned hard to believe. Clive never took meetings in person. Not even with the man he’d known since he was a manipulative little toddler — or at least that’s how it sometimes seemed.
Clive had known Rachel Ryan back when she’d still had human bones. He always had and always would dwarf even the great Micah Ryan in ways Micah could barely understand. Micah bowed before no one, but he’d grown up in the shadow of the man who’d turned the rock circling the planet into an international treasure. Nobody pulled as many strings as Clive once had — as he still, in all probability, still pulled better than anyone today, even in the walled-off East. Micah was too good for heroes, but he’d watched Clive Spooner captivate the world, same as everyone, and that conditioning ran deep.