Page 38 of Hollow Code
"Couple of hours."
"Then we'll get out of your way." Neve jumped off the desk. "Let us know when you've got something."
"Scout, do you have twenty minutes?" Coulter pushed off the desk. "I want to go over the perimeter check."
"I thought you’d never ask." Scout followed Neve and Couter out into the corridor, and the room settled into the low hum of electronics and recycled air.
Zadie exhaled and leaned back in her chair. The monitor glowed with six stubborn, silent dots.
Gideon didn't sit down right away. He stood in front of the screen with his hands on his hips. "You think there’s something to these waypoints?"
"Ramsey and his men were scrubbing the vehicle. They didn’t want anyone to know where it had been. If we’re going to take down Finch, we need to understand more than just the enhanced soldiers."
"I created my system to save lives. To go hand in hand with what Darwin was doing." He turned, grabbed the second chair, and rolled it next to her desk. Close enough that his knee brushed hers when he sat down. "Not to create supercharged soldiers who’ll end up suffering catastrophic side-effects and die because Finch doesn’t understand the science." He ran his fingers through his hair.
"That keeps most of us up half the night."
"I can understand why." He rested his forearms on the edge of her desk, fingers loosely laced. "I want to get into ORACLE."
Zadie's hands stilled on the keyboard. "Last time we talked about this, you told me it couldn't be done."
"I told you it couldn't be done the way you were trying to do it. And I told you I'd sleep on it."
"That was two days ago."
"I'm a slow sleeper." He unfolded his hands and leaned back. "You got inside ORACLE. You got three layers deep before the AI flagged you and started moving everything. Most people wouldn't have made it past the first perimeter."
"I still got chased out, and now I can’t get back in."
"My point is, you got in." He tapped his finger on her knee. "The AI is the gatekeeper. Nothing gets past it, because nothing is supposed to. But every AI system has limitations."
"Because they’re built by humans, and they can’t truly think."
"That’s part of it," Gideon said. "This system is one of the most sophisticated ever built. It creates shadow servers, reroutes data, dumps everything to secure partitions. It's fast, and it's relentless. But all of that processing power is reactive. It responds to what it detects."
"Wait a second." A flutter rose in her chest. "Are you trying to tell me it can’t chase two things at once?"
"It’s not that it can’t, but if it detects two simultaneous threats from different vectors, it has to prioritize. And it will always prioritize the one that looks more dangerous."
She leaned back and swiveled in her chair. "So, we both hack from what appears to be different IPs. One of us goes for the inner circle, making it look like we’re going for major data, while the other one crawls on the floor and finds a way in."
"Something like that," he said. "We need one of us to make the kind of noise that looks like a full-scale breach attempt. Real traffic patterns, authenticated-looking credential pings, enough volume that the AI commits every resource it has to tracking and containing it." Gideon's hands moved. Palms open with his fingers mapping invisible architecture in the air between them. Zadie had seen engineers talk with their hands before. She'd done it herself. But watching Gideon do it was like watching someone conduct music. "The insertion would need to be fast. You'd have to know exactly where you're going and what you're planting before you touch the system."
"I take it you have something in mind."
His lips curved into a smile. "Fresh authentication data. Nothing fancy, and I can show you the code where they sit in the architecture. When the AI finishes dealing with the noise I’ll be making, and scans for damage, the credentials will look native, because they are."
"Why not build new credentials?"
"The AI would quickly re-evaluate its threat assessment, deeming my noise as a deviation." He drummed his fingers on the desk. "I’d need to make a dummy server and do my best to rebuild as much code as I can. We’d need to practice because we’d only have one shot at this."
"The cipher doesn’t run on a clock. That’s makes the second part even harder."
"The only way to predict when the next window opens, is to watch it happen and read the pattern," Gideon said.
"That's going to take time. Hours, at least. On a live node that's connected to a system with an AI that already caught me once."
"Which is why the credentials have to be perfect. If the AI sees anything out of place during the monitoring phase, it flags it, and we're done. Isaac gets the alert, and he'll know what we're trying to do."
