Page 8 of Hollow Code
"Your approach to PT sucks," Coulter said. "And that’s me speaking from experience."
Wynn laughed loudly which was unheard of in these meetings. She kept things quiet. Professional.
Zadie suspected it was a show for Darwin, and she’d told Wynn so. That hadn’t landed well, and Wynn came back with a zinger about MacGyver—the gamer—and a man she’d never met. Neither comment was hurtful. Or mean. Just banter among teammates, but there was a bit of truth to both of them.
"You’re not the best patient," Darwin said to Coulter. "Kane will continue to recoup here. It’s safer. We know Finch is looking for me, so we have to assume he has eyes on the institute. But Kane will need to go back in the near future. I don’t have all the imaging and other testing equipment here that we need." He looked around the table. "Are there any questions?"
"What happens when shit goes sideways, and we’re out there?" Neve pointed to the wall. "Zadie’s looking for a way into Hyperon’s partitioned servers. We know there are more enhanced humans out there. If there aren’t currently, there will be. Something’s going to happen. It’s only a matter of time. So, who protects the bunker? Who protects Kane?"
Coulter's hand rested on Neve's arm. "Nothing’s changed," he said. "This bunker is safer than any other place Kane could be. Shepherd is here. Darwin is here. We keep moving forward with our plan."
"Not to be a downer, but we don’t have much of one," Scout said.
"We wait. We watch. We plan." Coulter laced his fingers with Neve's.
It was a small, private thing shared with a room full of what had become Zadie’s family. The warmth that spread through her body watching them connect had been something she hadn’t experienced in quite some time.
Against everything that had been blocking their path, Coulter and Neve, they'd found their way back to each other. And the fact that no one outside these walls could know any of them were alive somehow made it more rather than less. This life they'd built down here in the bunker hadn’t been something any of them had planned on, but she knew none of them would trade it, either.
"It’s all we can do," Coulter said.
"And sleep." Zadie glanced around the room.
Everyone chuckled.
But it was her way of telling them she’d heard them. That she would try harder to take care of herself while she tried to find the holes in the system. But it was more than that. Zadie didn't have anyone special on the outside. Not unless she counted MacGyver, who was a screen name, but she did miss him and the gaming community they belonged to. Being cooped in the bunker wasn't the worst. Being with her team was fine. That didn't bother her. And she loved Shepherd for the gaming system.
However, not being able to connect it to the outside world made Zadie so antsy, she thought about asking Darwin if he had a straightjacket in her size.
She pulled her tablet closer. She’d been working for days on the server salvaged from the Ramsey operation, but the partial reconstruction had provided no useful information. She switched over to the ETHER network map set up by Gideon Rhodes. It wasn't much. A fraction of the full architecture, but it was enough to see the shape of the system in this part of the country.
Nodes and regional hubs scattered across the BC interior like a partial constellation. The only problem was that a few of them had randomly gone offline.
Her tablet dinged, startling her, even though she was holding it. A blip appeared on the screen.
"What’s going on?" Wynn asked, leaning in.
"Looks like an ICHOR field transmitter in the Bridge River Valley corridor just went dark." Three other ICHOR nodes had vanished from the grid since she’d found it, and none of them had come back online.
She pulled up her log. That made four nodes in two weeks. All in the same general corridor. All dead.
"That doesn’t sound good. Can you break it down?" Coulter asked. "And speak English, please."
"Give me a second." She tapped her fingers on the tablet, following the pattern and comparing it against what she knew about the ETHER architecture. The system's backend, ORACLE, and the main server, had been her white whale. It was Hyperion's digital brain.
She'd been picking at it for days, and it had picked back—in the most literal sense. It had what was called a zero-trust model that treated every access attempt like a personal offense. Air-gapped systems woven into legacy code she couldn't fully predict. Network segmentation shifted on her. She'd nearly walked into honeypots and decoys twice, which was two times more than she'd ever walked into anything, and she was still annoyed about it. An AI-driven anomaly detector that had once locked her out for two hours and, as best she could tell, flagged the attempt somewhere she couldn't see. And the cherry on top of all of it was the phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA).
It wasn't un-hackable. What can be constructed can also be dismantled. But it was the most hostile architecture she'd ever encountered.
The entire encounter almost made up for the lack of her gaming community and MacGyver. But not quite.
Darwin splayed his hands on the table and leaned forward. " You look like you're becoming one with the technology. Talk to us."
She turned the tablet so that he could see the map. "One more went offline in the Bridge River Valley corridor." She tapped her finger across the dark blue dots, which indicated nothing was happening, as opposed to the bright green ones that were flashing. "This looks like a pattern. Like it could be leading somewhere. Like someone is doing this systematically."
Darwin took the tablet in his hands and pulled it tighter. He was a medical doctor, a neurologist, a drug inventor, and a researcher. He might not understand the telemetry system or computers the way she did, but he understood patterns.
So did everyone else in the room, and they were all standing behind him in seconds.
