Idempotency (41 page)

For Kristina, these thoughts were far removed now, even if she had only been here a few days; she looked quite at home slouched into the couch behind the team. The twins had followed her lead, slumping onto the couch with a thud. Mitlee was somehow dozing off and on against Kristina’s bony shoulder, while Chicklet absentmindedly played with his green mohawk. It was pulsating red less often these days. Even Jay-san and Grepman seemed to be losing steam: They slouched in their black mesh chairs, twirling slightly. Jay-san was in discussions with acquaintances in the darkNets about potential vulnerabilities in cycling key encryption security models. Grepman was flicking his hands at his BUIs, trying in vain to do something helpful. He feared his chances to ask Sindhu out were dwindling rapidly.

Mitlee yawned and looked up at Kristina, who in turn responded with a gentle smile. Her hand moved away from covering her yawn, and began petting Kristina’s brown bowl-shaped head of hair.

“You have pretty blue eyes, Kristina.”

“Thanks, Mit. That’s nice of you to say.”

“Dylan’s going to be okay, Kristina. Simeon will save him.” Mit gave Kristi a big hug as she said this. Kristina’s eyes welled with tears.

Mitlee had taken to Kristina immediately, much as she had during Sindhu’s brief stay. Mitlee was thirteen now, and she was craving female companionship, something Nimbus was perhaps too old and too motherly to provide. The rest of their company was quite boyish. Kristina, too, enjoyed the newfound relationship; caring for someone other than Dylan had been a relief. The entirety of her albeit fledgling SOP experience had lit a spark in her. She’d found an instant family and an impassioned cause, both of which added up to motivation—the first motivation she had felt since attempting to find the bug with Dylan’s deathTrip.

“Damn it. I should have told her. How much time left? Can we put the countdown timer up here? We’re going to have to figure out a way to get her out of there. Jay-san, any updates on—”

Without looking away from his BUI, Jay replied, “I have some ideas on how we can gain more access, but I’m at a loss at how we can hide Sindhu for more than an hour. I’m working on it, boss.”

“Grep, can you please put the timer up here?” Simeon implored.

Grepman sighed. “Yeah. Fine. Here.”

Atop the holographic map, a timer materialized. Everyone stirred when they saw it. The timer was lit up with glowing green dots the size of Ping-Pong balls, the seconds bouncing backwards. It read:

12 minutes, 53 seconds

-52 . . . -51 . . . -50 . . .

A dashboard of metrics spun around Sindhu’s virtual world. Behind the metrics, images sped past her at dizzying speeds. She was witnessing the passing of a life. Whose, exactly, she wasn’t certain. The metrics were monitoring the health of the participant; she was certain this was Dylan.

The life she was witnessing was of a man who seemed to be attending a college of some kind. The images were from his point of view. She could see glimpses of a young man as he awoke in the mornings and combed his hair. He would walk among a tree-lined sidewalk, sometimes taking a different path through a park. Classrooms shuffled past in quick succession, and the classes often ended with brief chats with the lecturer.

Sindhu watched in awe, but the repetition of waking, educating, eating, and sleeping quickly became bland. She allowed her eyes to focus on the metrics in front of her. An employee ID number was prominently displayed at the top of the metrics. After minimal tinkering in the interface, she was able to bring up data on the employee in question. Among a myriad of other data, her eyes immediately rested on the following data:

Name: Dylan Dansby

Role: Business Development

Location: Bellevue

Access:
Titus - Level 2

Proof. There was no question Dylan was within a deathTrip. Most likely being brainwashed, Sindhu assumed. And she knew where he was. But why? What was so special about Dylan, and his great-uncle Randy before him? Sindhu was confused, and she didn’t deal with confusion well.

She backed up and drilled further into the data around his ongoing deathTrip. Charts and graphs, all consistently updating, swooshed in front of her. At the top of the data, a simple list of information displayed the following:

Session:

23FF787EA8B998 2:34:43:23.2139

Location:

Titus_StTitus_Exec_Lab_000.999.599

Duration:

58:23:37.081

Iterations:

2

Duration of current iteration:

10:23:37.081

Two iterations. She assumed this meant he was on his second consecutive deathTrip. She backed up again and drilled into the information on his present physical state. Again a myriad of charts and graphs enveloped her. She scanned them quickly, but cursed her lack of knowledge surrounding human neurophysiology. Her eyes came to rest on a specific chart:

Current Idempotency Variance:

0.9931,

2nd iteration,

10:23:37.081

EV Idempotency Variance 1 iteration:

0.0321

EV Idempotency Variance 2 iterations:

1.5201

EV Idempotency Variance 3 iterations:

TBD

Sindhu was unsure what this meant, but it couldn’t be good. She feared this chart didn’t take into consideration the specific subject, and in this case, the subject had already nearly failed idempotency in a previous single deathTrip experience.

An image grabbed her attention, and Sindhu focused on images behind the data. The previous repetition of attending classes had halted. Graduation had come to the young man in the sped-up images. He was now on vacation somewhere—Africa, maybe. He was building houses, helping to feed long lines of people. She saw shades of browns: dirt, huts, barren dryness. Jarringly, the man was suddenly in an airplane. Packing, unpacking, sleeping. And suddenly, the man was in a small church. In the front of a church, to be exact, looking out at a congregation.

Sindhu blinked in wonder, wishing she could solve this puzzle, but an internal timer was
dinging
within her mind. She spun the UI and quickly found the way to exit.

In the span of a single second, the everything flashed away. In its place, an empty classroom surrounded her. Notifications were buzzing all around her. Grepman was desperately trying to reach her. Sindhu glanced down at the timer she had previously opened. It read:

-0 minutes, 15 seconds

+16 . . . +17 . . . +18 . . .

Since the dawn of the Internet, the life of an IT specialist had been thankless work, and it would be no different for Andy Chancellor on this day. On the previous day, Andy had been out partying with a few colleagues. Alcohol was strictly forbidden on Titus facility grounds, but that hadn’t stopped an enterprising group of techies to learn the centuries-old practice of fermenting types of agave plants into a strong alcohol known as mezcal. The hardest part of the process had been carving the hearts out of the native maguey plant without proper gardening tools, but the IT department embraced their high expectations, finding the will to persevere. Once the team figured out a way to rip the leaves off by utilizing an overly complex pulley system, the rest was easy: Allow the sun to bake the hearts in a dirt pit, grind them up, add water, some yeast, and finally the hardest part— wait.

This waiting process had been at play for several weeks. A new recruit, fresh out of school—the boyish, tall, curly-haired Andy—had arrived at the serendipitous moment where the team was able to finally bask in the fruits of their complex labor. And bask they did. All day, outside, in the blistering heat of the Mexican mountain sun, the IT team drank as much mezcal as was humanly possible, and then they drank some more. It had tasted simultaneously terrible and grand.

By 2:57 the next morning, the entire team had passed out, excepting Andy who, being the new guy, was working the night shift. Working the night shift hammered. And he was in dire straits, badly needing to expunge the last few drinks from his previous evening’s festivities. However, he was not allotted another bathroom break until 4:00 (he had already taken five breaks, and the bathroom doors were locked to him for the next sixty-three minutes).

Andy’s head swayed and his eyes began to water. The tears mixed with a cold sweat that was dripping from his forehead. Panic welled up within him, and the panic mixed with the bile building in his stomach. He was becoming more certain that he would require an exit strategy, and soon. The holoVid images his eyes were supposed to be focused upon—real-time security and performance metrics of the facility’s environmental systems—began to waver, losing any semblance of meaning. Andy hiccupped, then swallowed hard, forcing down chunks of yesterday’s delights.

A thought entered his head: If this had been an IT status meeting, he would have described his current situation as representative of a nonscalable solution in steady-state. He smiled. Thank God this wasn’t a meeting. He clamped his eyes shut, waving off the glaring holoVid display in front of him. This provided a minimal respite, but another hiccup was coming, and it was not traveling alone. Finally, he slouched off his chair and ducked under his desk. His hands gripped the plastic compost receptacle next to him and immediately his body gave in.

He puked on and off for nearly seven minutes.

“Jesus, Andy,” a coworker shouted from a few workstations away. He would have continued berating Andy had he himself not gagged and rose quickly to head to the bathroom. Several others followed him out of the cavernous main room of Titus’s southern Network Operations Center (or NOC) and into the break room near the back.

A pitiful “sorry” floated up from under Andy’s desk.

The wracking passed, and Andy tied off the disposable liner within his receptacle—it was the considerate thing to do. He slowly crawled back into his ergonomic standing chair and slumped forward, leaning his elbows upon the narrow desk in front of him, rubbing his hands against his short, curly hair. He then rubbed his temples, wishing desperately that the ringing in his left ear would subside. He began to chuckle at the absurdity of it all.

As his head cleared, Andy realized that the ringing wasn’t from inside his brain, but from the BUI in his left ear. The alert had been going off for some time. He waved his arm and the holoVid display reappeared in front of him. Abruptly, warning messages garnished with graphs began attacking his vision all around him.

Behind Andy, the double-door main entrance to Titus’s NOC slammed open. A blinding stream of bright, laser-infused light streamed in from behind the silhouette that was storming into the room. Andy winced in pain.

“Andrew! What the hell is going on? We have an autocut priority two ticket out of SLA by five minutes! You haven’t even put it into work in progress. Something about a resident moving too far, too fast?”

“Yessir,” Andy slurred.

“Yessir? Yessir what?” Andy’s boss asked incredulously.

“Yessir . . . sir?” Andy laughed.

“Jesus, Andy, are you . . . are you drunk? Who the hell got you
drunk
? You reek. And where did you even get the booze? Never mind that. We’ll discuss this later. Start doing your damn job.” Andy’s boss frowned, furrowed his bushy brow and watched as Andy wavered while waving his hands across his holoVid. Andy pointed at the image, about to show his boss something, then paused.

Andy’s boss glanced back at him and asked the obvious: “What?”

Andy swallowed hard, slumped down off his desk, grabbed his trash receptacle, tried to rip open the plastic liner he had already tied shut, and then puked all over his hands.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Andy!” Andy’s boss hopped backward and sat down at a different desk, mumbling obscenities about college hires being unable to handle their liquor.

Andy’s boss was a meticulously dressed large man, with a cleanly trimmed beard and bushy eyebrows that hung above large brown eyes. He had come up through the ranks due to hard work, a gregarious spirit, and a perspicacious mind. Within two minutes he had discerned exactly what the data was telling him: Employee ID #A98324CD124-EE01B had been located in her room at 2:59 a.m. and suddenly appeared in an area over a kilometer away at 3:00 a.m. He quickly grabbed all pertinent data of the employee: Indian nationality, lowest security clearance, female. Nothing obvious stood out.

Andy’s boss was pondering three possible explanations. One, a person utilized a matter transportation device that had yet to be invented—not likely. Two, some type of nefarious subterfuge was underfoot—also unlikely, but possible. Or three, software error—extremely likely.

While Andy’s boss was fairly certain that some blip had occurred in the system, there were standard operating procedures to follow for cases such as these, and Andy’s boss hadn’t reached his current leveling by eschewing standard operating procedure. They were there for a reason. As such, Andy’s boss dialed up security and had them check the room of Employee ID #A98324CD124-EE01B. As they did, Andy’s boss scoured detailed server logs. His eyes paused on a few spurious warnings, then came to rest on a warning that didn’t look right, which highlighted a too-long server request that contained an odd piece of data: a binary blob of text, streaming across wires where it shouldn’t be. He was trying to deduce this strange packet of data when a notification rang in his ear. He leaned back and answered his BUI.

An innocuous face appeared in Andy’s boss’s periphery. It said, “Sir, the requested employee is not in her room.”

Andy’s boss didn’t respond, he merely waved the image off his screen. His brow furrowed again, and he leaned back in his seat, staring at the logs.

“Can I help, sir?” Andy had pulled himself up to his desk. He was leaning hard on his chair.

“Doubtful,” Andy’s boss scoffed. He waved his BUI open and dialed up Andy’s boss’s boss directly.

“Mr. Kane, I think we may have a serious problem.”