Page 76 of Hollow Code
That was something.
"So, tell me, Gideon," Isaac started. "What exactly did you do in there?"
"Why would I do that?"
Isaac jabbed his weapon hard into Zadie’s gut.
She doubled over and moaned.
"Leave her alone." Gideon took one step forward, hands in the air.
"I take it you went poking around inside ORACLE? Found yourself a way in and got something important. Or did some damage to the system," Isaac said. "Whatever it is, I need to know." He jerked his chin. "Computer in the bag?"
"You know ORACLE is impossible to breach."
"Improbable, not impossible. And that doesn’t mean you didn’t pull something," Isaac said. "Or plant something. Now, let’s find out exactly what that was." He waved his weapon. "Open your bag slowly, and pull out the electronics."
Gideon shrugged the backpack off one shoulder, then the other. Crouching, he set it on the pine needles.
"Open the laptop, and fire it up."
"Why?"
"Because I want to see what you've been doing." Isaac's mouth tightened into a firm line. "You spent two months throwing bad data at my network. I found that amusing. Then you started pulling nodes offline, and I found that annoying. Now, you’re at SYN-7, possibly breaching my system with some random hacker?" He laughed. "That’s amusing in a different way."
"Why?" Gideon asked.
"Just the fact that the great Gideon Rhodes needed tech support." Isaac snorted at his own joke.
"Tech support who carries a sidearm and knows how to use a rifle." Zadie smiled with pride.
"I don't care who the fuck you are," Isaac said. "I care what you two clowns did. Open the damn laptop." He gripped Zaddie’s braid and yanked.
"That hurt," she managed.
Gideon unzipped the backpack and pulled out the laptop. He opened it on the ground between them, screen tilting up in the gray light. The last session was still active with his architecture notes, the monitoring scripts, the credential mapping he'd used to guide Zadie through ORACLE's core.
"Walk me through it," Isaac said.
"Let her go first."
"No."
"She's not part of this. She's not part of anything. This is between you and me."
"I agree. But she stays exactly where she is until I see what's on that screen." The barrel moved from her side to her temple. "Walk me through it, or I pull this trigger and then you walk me through it anyway."
"Tell him," she said, her tone hard.
Either they were both going to die, and Isaac figured it out, or Isaac was going to die, and it didn’t matter. Gideon hoped for the latter. "Fine." He might as well brag. Only, these weren’t his bragging rights, but Zaddie’s. "This is how we got the AI's attention." He tapped the screen. "It wasn’t that hard, really. I built the damn thing, and that one over there is a master hacker. Even if I hadn’t handed her the architecture and annoyed the AI, she would’ve gotten in all on her own."
Isaac leaned forward. His eyes shifted left and right finally widening. "Jesus," he muttered.
"It’s stunning, wouldn’t you agree?" Gideon went on. "It catalogued, classified, and pursued. It deployed shadow servers. Rerouted data. Built a behavioral profile of the attacker." He scrolled through the code. "But you already knew that, because you were sitting in the command seat. You overrode the tracking parameters manually."
"I was better than your AI that day." Isaac actually puffed out his chest.
"You were faster. That's not the same thing." Gideon pulled up the monitoring scripts. "After we tapped a live hub and read the cipher's regeneration cycle—variable intervals driven by network conditions. I mapped enough cycles to predict the activation window."
