The ocean roared.
After a moment Feed took one, popped it in his mouth and reached for his drink.
"No no no" said Poulpe. "Taste it. Savor it. This night is here for you to enjoy. Take all your time."
The strange little man smiled at Fede again and leaned back, closed his eyes. After a while Fede did the same. He listened to the sound of the waves. The candy tasted tangy against his tongue, artificial cherry flavor filling his mouth. Some time later Poulpe got up and wordlessly walked away into the darkness. Fede didn't mind.
The beach called to him, long slender waves like girl's arms sighing his name, begging for his company. He rose and walked down through the moonlight. The stars overhead glimmered and danced, shrinking and flaring through the edges of his vision. The silvery light rolled over the crests and dips of the beach, footprints of ancients next to his own, dripping and flowing over everything. He started, noticed the water was moving still. And again. He moved on.
Suddenly he was standing in the surf, felt the wet cling of the water on his pants' legs. He didn't remember coming here. The water was warm, welcoming. It ran, soft and gentle, up his leg. It kissed the hairs on his thighs, each one individually.
Out in the middle distance the dark line where the sea met the sky twisted and jumped. Fede gasped, stumbled back out of the water. He noticed the moon. It was - lonely.
Fede was sitting on the beach. He was dry, his whole body was soft and malleable, putty-like. He felt the lumps of the beach under his ass, the way his muscles rolled over them. The stars overhead called to him, he felt like they had been calling him for a long time, and he looked up. It was his first look, ever, to see the sky. It was beautiful.
He felt that part of him that was his humanity dance and jiggle inside him. He was human, it was so beautiful to be so human. So full of pride and spite and beauty. He pulled on his goggles, set the opacity to minimum, and watched the stars wink through the scan lines.
He began coding the universe.
Time passed.
He started, realized the sun had risen.
Cessus came and said some things, came again and brought him a sandwich and a bottle of water. He didn't touch them.
Some time later, Tonx came and carried him back to camp.
He slept.
A long time later Fede woke to a gentle buzzing against his face. He woke slowly, wiping one hand against his cheek and rolling over, the soft edges of his consciousness curious but lazy. The sensation faded.
He woke again, unsure how much time had passed, suddenly aware of what the feeling had been and of what it had meant. He sat up. There was sand on the futon, his stumps itchy where a bit of seaweed had stuck to them. His brain reeled, and he staggered up and out of the truck. It was cold, the top of the beach soft with a thin layer of dew.
The chairs and tables were empty except for Cessus. His hair was unkempt, twisted dreads sticking out at odd angles atop his white robe. One long black leg stuck out cantilever, his foot buried in the sand, and his fingers drummed a mad beat on the tabletop.
Fede rounded the table and dropped into a chair, his thoughts confused. Cessus's eyes were distant over the horizon, the light of his lenses glimmering and winking against his corneas.
"What time is it? Did I sleep all day? What's going on?" asked Fed, fumbling to get his goggles into place.
Cessus grunted, then; "Morning; yes; and see for yourself."
Fede scanned the local data network and found Cessus's com. He logged in with his guest account and opened up a view.
His hands trembled.
"What's that?" he asked.
"That's your code. Those are results" said Cessus.
"But" said Fed. "But that's almost the complete data set."
Cessus let his hands fall flat on the table, turned towards Fed, smiled.
"You don't say" he said.
"But how?" asked Fed.
"It looks to me like your code took a while to propagate, but pretty much did as we'd planned. We got 67% penetration by midafternoon yesterday. That in itself is pretty good - better than expected. The spike in downloads from the data set peaked around 9 last night. Six hours later we started seeing results, and the upload rate has increased exponentially until now."
"That's… nine hours from the peak download of the data set to peak data return. That's incredible!" said Fed.
"That's some impressive fucking code is what it is" laughed Cessus. "Go get Tonx. I'll keep monitoring this. We need to know how to verify our results, now that we have some."
Fede ran out to the tents, not sure which of the identical white cotton V-shapes was his brother's. He danced around between them, shuffling sand and shivering in the morning air, frantic with excitement.
"Tonx" he hissed, peering at sandals in front of a long tent. "Tonx!"
A bleary Japanese face stuck out from between the flaps of the tent. Fede caught a glimpse of shadowed tattoos spilling across the man's back before he met his steel-hard eyes. The head disappeared with a frown.
"Tonx" he hissed again, softer.
There was a rustling followed by a stream of quiet curses from the opposite side of the field of tents. Fede heard Cass's laugh and saw Tonx stagger into view, pulling on his shorts. He saw Fede and ran over, limping as he lost one sandal.
"Cessus comm'd me. What is it?" he asked.
"We got results. Almost the whole data set" said Fed. He was hopping up and down now, rubbing his goose-pimpled arms to keep warm. The sun broke over the horizon and spilled onto Tonx's face in a golden glow. He shaded his eyes, squinting at Fed.
"Already?" he asked.
"No shit. Cessus says my algorithms adapted faster than expected. China's networks are going to have a glut from all the traffic" he said. His own gut clenched as he realized what he'd said, thought about the high traffic rates Chinese officials would see from all over their network. The algorithm would be changing itself, spreading new versions with each iteration. If it was producing results at this kind of rate it must be rewriting itself on every system as fast as it could spread.
Fede stopped moving, pulled his chord out of his pocket and stared at Tonx's bare chest through the data field overlaid by his goggles. He pulled up a news filter, watched. There was nothing. No news from China about overworked systems, no decrease in traffic in or out of their networks - nothing unusual.
"Come on" he said, breathless. He turned to run back, but Tonx was already ahead of him.
They skidded to a stop next to Cessus just as Marcus was returning with a pair of cups of coffee. He looked at Tonx and handed one to him and one to Cessus and turned and went back towards the bar.
"Why aren't we seeing anything from China if we've got this sort of data rate?" asked Fed. "It should be propagating like mad and… "
Cessus held up one long hand, sipped from his coffee cup.
"Calm down and think it through. All this shit's load balanced. You wrote the code, Fed, you know that. It'll propagate, but no faster than standard updates would, and it's only a small subset of the code. It's a lot more processing than usual, but nothing that'd break anything down. Nothing China would want to brag about."
"But that data set is huge" said Fed. "Its crunching major numbers across… "
"Across thousands and thousands of computers" interrupted Cessus. "Dude, have faith in your code. It's exceeding your expectations. So be happy. I'm sure we'll see reports of congestion in the Chinese systems later on. Just because it isn't making the headlines doesn't mean it isn't working."
"Can I see what we've got?" asked Tonx. He was excited too, his face flushed pink and eyes wide.
"Sure, but it won't make any sense. It's filtering in bit by bit, so you won't be able to get any useful data for another couple hours. That's if we keep our current rate. It's leveled, by the way. Still freaking incredible turnaround time, though."
Fede ran back to pull on his jeans, cleaned and pressed in the truck with the water filtration system and delivered to him tied with brown twine. When he returned Tonx had gone to get some more clothes on himself and to ready his com. Once the full data set was returned he would have to run a simulation over the differences Fed's code recommended, but unlike the actual combination matching it should only take little while to confirm it made sense.
Fede and Cessus and Tonx huddled together over Cessus's laptop, pulling over a couple beach umbrellas for shade to make Cessus's screen readable as the sun came up. They drank hot coffee and, later, fresh rolls cooked by the bread machine in the bar. The data trickled in.
"That's it" said Cessus. They watched as the peaks and troughs of the uploads to the three online locations suddenly dropped. The lines bounced a few times, peaked once or twice, and went flat.
"We got it" he said. His fingers flew over the tabletop in front of the laptop's keyboard as he keyed in a copy function to Tonx's machine.
"All you, man" he said, pointing a long finger at Tonx.
Tonx started the process and Fede showed him how to connect the results screen over the network to Cessus's laptop so they could all watch. It didn't make much sense to him, number chains and DNA sequencing color-coded and flashing, but the rising progress bar was clear enough.
They sat, and waited. Cass came by, sat quietly next to Fede as she ate her breakfast. Marcus fussed about the truck, cleaning out cookie wrappers and soda bottles.
The computer dinged.
"What do we got?" said Cessus and Fed simultaneously. Tonx's face showed nothing, his eyes scanning a long list of odd-sounding acronyms and short chemical chains. He slowly shook his head.
"Something's not right. This doesn't make sense" he said.
Fed's gut twisted. His head ached, suddenly, a rising pounding heat across his temples.
"What's not right?" he asked.
"This is all wrong" Tonx said again, tabbing through his results. "Let me run it again. Give me the data. Maybe it got corrupted in the transfer."
"I'll re-download the entire set. Maybe we got a little spike afterwards with corrections" said Cessus. He pushed Tonx's window behind his own and reconnected to the data Fed's code had returned. There were no new uploads, but he got all the data again anyway and pushed it to Tonx. The colored tabs and number chains processed, again, and they waited.
There was a faint taste of metal in Fed's mouth.
It seemed to take twice as long to process this time. The ocean roared distantly, the light suddenly tinny and cold. After a short forever the computer dinged again. They all stared.
Tonx shook his head.
"These results are completely incompatible" he said softly. "Something's fucked with the data set."
They spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what had gone wrong. From everything Fede could tell his code had run correctly. Tonx couldn't make any sense of the errors he was getting. Huge swaths of the genetic recommendation fit perfectly, and then there would suddenly be a chunk that just didn't fit. There was no gradual combinatory degradation as he'd expect from a near-fit solution.
Then, in late afternoon just as the sun seemed suddenly to cool, Fede found something strange.
"Cessus" he said, nudging an elbow into his ribs. "Give me some screen room. Look at this."
He pulled up a window on the laptop in front of them. He pointed at one of the sample chunks of RNA they'd posted for processing in one column, the genetically developed algorithm for processing it in another. The result was shown in a third column, an RNA combinate like all the others they had received from the virused machines. Fede took the numbers representing the RNA chunk and ran the algorithm on it. A second later a result appeared. It wasn't the same as the result they'd downloaded.
"What the fuck?" asked Cessus.
"Is your code screwed?" asked Tonx.
"No, man. The code works fine. But we got a weird result posted" said Fed. His face tightened into a scowl. He copied the function again, jumped to a terminal window and ran a carefully worded search string.
"What are you doing?" asked Tonx. Next to him Cessus narrowed his eyes. Fede thumbed his comm lightly and the screen suddenly filled with scrolling lines, all identical.
Fede slumped backwards in his chair, head tilted, gazing upwards at the sky as the lines scrolled past his vision.
"He searched for other instances of the same result or formula" said Cessus, his eyes scanning the screen. "Those are all the times a combinate was suggested that was identical to the first error."
"What the fuck does that mean?" asked Tonx.
"It means we've been cracked" said Cessus. "It means that our data got intercepted on the way to being posted and huge chunks of it were replaced with bogus results."
The lines stopped, displayed a blinking cursor on an empty line.
"Who?" asked Tonx.
"We don't know" repeated Cessus.
Fed's head snapped up.
"You got the Rijndael/CTR encryption you used on the background image for the initial data set?" he asked.
Cessus nodded. "Yeah, why?"
"Run it on our results" said Fed.
Cessus stared at the younger man for a moment, then began to drum his fingers on the tabletop. He paused a moment, watching the results scan over the back of his eyeballs. He wasn't synced to the laptop, so they couldn't see what he did, but they saw his eyes grow wide.
"Anybody here speak Chinese?" he asked after a moment.
Tonx jumped to find Cass and Fede pounded on his chord, syncing Cessus's view to the laptop. The murky background image of the Latin American Jewish Association of Hawaii homepage appeared, crisp white text laid across its middle. The top seven lines were each in a different language, followed by a long sentence in tiny Chinese characters laid across the bottom. The English sentence read:
'What are you doing?'
Cass confirmed that the rest of the text was contact info for an anonymous-sounding Chinese government address along with instructions. They wanted a full explanation of what the combinate results were intended to do. The message was businesslike, succinct, and final.
Cessus thought that whoever had sent it was most likely in the Chinese governmental system and had seen the increased data load. Because all Chinese internet traffic ran through extensive proxies on the way out of the country he or she'd been able to sniff and replace all their recombinant sets on their way out. What was impressive was that whoever they were, they had distinguished Fed's results from all the other random noise and postings going out in the same direction, and had coded up a response right after Fed's had finished propagating. It was a neat hack.
Tonx spun into damage control as soon as the news hit, contacting those people he'd pulled favors from to warn them that there was a delay. Fed's first inclination was not to tell anyone anything, but Tonx assured him that he hadn't got this far by hiding facts from his investors.
After examining everything they had it was clear they couldn't rework the remaining data themselves - there was too much information lost and no way of confirming if any of the rest of it had been scrambled. Cessus told Fede to prep a sampling app to run random confirmations on what they had and disappeared into the back of the truck. As soon as he'd shut the door Fede got a message on his comm; "don't let anyone bother me" it said. Signed, Cessus.
Around dinnertime a small Toyota sedan with tinted windows picked up a group of Japanese men. An hour later a tourist bus dropped off three hard-looking Italians in expensive looking suits. They pitched a tent farther down the beach and reappeared in shorts and Hawaiian floral-print shirts. Nobody talked to them. Fede coded, exhausted. What the hell was he doing here, on some weird Mafioso beach in Mexico, big players waiting for him to pay out. Friends waiting for him to deliver. Screwed.
Somebody lit a bonfire between the chairs and the beach. Fede stopped to get a plateful of shirred pork chops and BBQ beans. He coded, eventually finishing his app. It would take days to run, but it would do the job. It was messy. Fede didn't care.
After dinner Tonx reappeared, his shoulders peeling. Cass was with him, carrying their plates as Tonx wrote, fingers flying over his comm. His Hello Kitty glasses glowed and pulsed, his face hard behind them.
"Where's Cessus?" Tonx asked.
"Working" said Fed.
"Doing?" asked Tonx.
"Don't know. Probably trying to trace the guy who cracked us" he said.
Tonx looked down the beach at the fire, noticed Cass and took his plate. He sat and ate.
After a while a tall, beautiful boy with dark curly hair mixed classic operatic pieces with hip-hop tunes on his lapcomm; they'd patched him into the speakers mounted in the bar.
Eventually Cessus reappeared. He looked like a black woolly octopus was eating his head, three-day scruff turning his face dark. His eyes shone in their hollowed sockets.
"I got him" he said.
They stared.
"It's one guy. Or a small number of guys. Got to be an important muckity-muck in China's IT dept. Big into networking, but his security's got some holes. Small ones."
"But big enough?" asked Tonx, his voice hopeful.
"Big enough" agreed Cessus, reaching over and grabbing a pair of pork chops from Fed's plate.
"So what do we got?" Tonx asked.
Cessus chewed, grimaced as his lenses rolled back to the sides of his head. His eyes were a bloody red.
"Like I said, likely one guy. Not enough stuff done concurrently to be otherwise. He followed the data uploads until he had a good sample rate and spoofed the rest. Fooled us, though. No idea what the actual processing rate was like, but the boxes I owned were all done by the time I got to them. Looks like your code did about as well as we thought, Feed."
"We just didn't get the results" Fede said.
"So who is he? How do we get our data?" Tonx asked.
"There's the rub" said Cessus. "He took the real combinate results and put them on a private machine in Beijing. A roach motel."
"What's a roach motel?" asked Cass.
"They were originally used for credit card numbers," said Fed. "E-vendors use them for making credit card transactions. When they want to make a transaction the vendor sends them a packet with an identifier, like 'ID #12345, $125.00, for Fuzzy Eggbeater' and they match the ID number with an actual credit card. Then the roach motel runs the transaction."
"So why are they called roach motels?"
"Credit card numbers check in, but they never check out" said Tonx.
"Is that bad?" Cass asked.
"It means we can't get at the data from here" said Cessus. "Roach motels only do one thing - you send them packets, and they run a transaction completely separately. In this case they're just passing it requests, and the roach motel is sending the recombinant information out some other way we don't know about. Since we can't see the packets going out, we can't intercept anything useful."
Cass snorted loudly through her nose.
"I thought you guys were uber-hackers. You're telling me you've got a machine that only does a single thing -
only
takes packets in - and you can't hack it?"
"Kind of breaks the illusion, but yeah" said Cessus.
"So how'd you find out he put our data up there?" asked Fed.
"One of the people who was trying to look at the information screwed up. He'd set up an anonymizing proxy before making the request to the roach motel. The guy who got our data put it on a web site somewhere - probably the roach motel itself, but we have no way of knowing - and when the person using the proxy tried to access it his browser kept asking the roach motel for the data instead of the web server. I just listened to what his browser was asking for and figured out that whoever had our data had put up a web page with a bunch of DNA data. A recombinant."
"He put the whole thing up there?" asked Tonx.
"No, he didn't. That's the funny part. He put up half of it. The web page was extremely simple, but it took a really long time to load. The guy using the proxy kept pounding the reload button on his browser, which sends a new request each time. That gave me a nice sample set to figure out what he was trying to pull down. I compared the size the actual recombinant would be against the web page, and it comes to about half and change."
"Who was asking for it?" asked Tonx.
"The request I saw was run through an anonymizing proxy, like I told you, but the packets it sent out to make the original request were all signed with a user ID" said Cessus.
They waited.
"And?" said Fed.
"The ID was C.Hintao" said Cessus. "The only person with that name that comes to mind is the president of China, and it
was
run through government proxies. The anonymizer is maintained by their equivalent to the secret service."
"But then why didn't he put the whole recombinant up?" asked Fed.
Tonx laughed. "The fucker's playing them" he said.
"Probably" said Cessus. "Either he's claiming the full data set isn't done yet, or he's ransoming it until he finds out what it's for."
"So does he have the correct data set somewhere?" asked Fed.
"If it exists, he has it" said Cessus.
They turned to Tonx. The ocean roared behind them, the gulf stream stirring its waves, winds from Brazil to Finland pushing its currents. Fed's brother tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and looked around at them. He reached over and put a hand on Cass's.
"So you want to go to China?" he asked.