Page 23 of Hollow Code
Under any circumstances, if he were honest.
"The only way to stop Finch is to destroy the system entirely," he said. "Take out enough nodes and the network degrades to where it can't function."
"And no evidence." Zadie's voice was steady. Perhaps too steady. "If you destroy it, you destroy the only record of what he's done. Every enhanced soldier he's created. Every unauthorized trial. Every person he's hurt. It all disappears with the system."
He hadn't thought about it that way. Or maybe he had and didn't want to admit it.
"If we get into ORACLE," she said, "we can pull everything. Every data point, every communication, every routing log. We can prove what Finch did. We can clear Darwin. And we can find every person he's experimented on and figure out how to help them before the compound kills them."
"You might not be able to prove anything."
"Why not?"
"You’re right in thinking that ORACLE is the center base of Hyperion. It’s the main server. Everything goes through it. But it doesn’t necessarily stay there." He rubbed the back of his neck. Explaining this was like trying to describe the layout of a house he'd built room by room. Every wall had a reason. Every door opened in a specific way. And now someone else was living in that house, and he had no idea what they'd changed.
"Those shadow servers it creates if a hacker or malware enters the system aren’t just protection from that. Every department, every invention, every new project has its own shadow system. Each one has a double redundancy encryption key. I had ETHER, where the information you’re looking for goes."
"I don’t see what the problem is."
"Whoever took over my job would have that now. I don’t know if I can access that part of ORACLE—even if you could get me inside."
The weight of that admission landed like a brick in his gut. He'd spent two months telling himself that destruction was the answer. But the truth was uglier and simpler than that. He was afraid. Afraid that he'd walk back into his own system and find it unrecognizable. Afraid that whoever had taken his seat had gutted the thing he'd poured his life into and rebuilt it in a way that made it complicit in everything Finch was doing.
And afraid that some part of it had happened long before he'd left.
"But you created ORACLE, and?—"
"Hyperion deals with classified government information. I had to protect the system—even from me. I added a layer of protection to the brain to make sure that the enemies of our country and allies can’t follow the trail of soldiers who were being monitored in the field. Or any other program Hyperion might have that deals with highly private or classified information."
He exhaled and stared up at the sky. There were more stars now, and it reminded him of how small he really was.
He'd designed ORACLE to protect the data that would ultimately help save lives. That had never been abstract to him. Every encryption layer, every redundancy, every failsafe—he'd built them with faces in his mind. His mother's. His father's. Every soldier who might bleed out on a mountain road because help didn't know they were there. The system was supposed to be the thing that closed the gap between dying and surviving.
And Finch had turned it into a cage.
"We need your help," she said. "I refuse to give up."
"I’ll sleep on it."
"That's fine." She rolled away, her back to him. "But I need you to understand something. The people at the bunker—my team, Darwin, all of them—they've given up everything. Careers. Identities. We're not doing this for revenge. We're doing it because if we don't, Finch wins, and I can’t have that on my conscious."
The wind moved through the sagebrush, and somewhere in the distance, water lapped against a shore that shouldn't exist—Carpenter Lake, settling into the bones of a town that had been sacrificed for someone else's version of progress.
"I'll come with you," he said. "I'll talk to Darwin. That's all I'm agreeing to."
"That's enough."
"For what it's worth, Felicity was the most interesting person I've talked to in two months."
"Flatline wasn't bad either."
He smiled in the dark. It was the first real one in a while.
"Get some sleep," she said.
"You first."
"Not a chance."
