“I keep sending her messages but she doesn’t reply.”

  “Did you do bad fuck with her?”

  “I did exceptionally good fuck with her, thank you very much. Several times.”

  “Then why she don’t tell you? Don’t give you software normally? This”—Marius gestured with a screwdriver at the phone, the drum-clean cycle—“this secret spy bullshit is not normal.”

  It felt a long time now since Zhen had last seen Martha. She’d thought she’d read the signs right, thought something real was happening. At least something kind, something sincere in the moment. She loved Marius and he loved her, but of course people who tend to paranoia—for good reasons, for reasonable reasons—do sometimes choose friends who are a bit paranoid too.

  “Have you thought,” said Marius, “you’re famous survival expert. Can get out of anything. Maybe she using you to test her software?”

  6. if it was really bad, there’d have been an alert

  martha

  It wasn’t difficult to make a small and unobtrusive happymeal code package, and given that each of them had high-level access to systems at Fantail or Medlar or Anvil, it wasn’t hard to disseminate it. Selah and Albert created a package with an insertion mechanism. They each left the hotel with a flash drive. Badger had bought the drives at a convenience store with cash. The drives were shaped like miniature hamburgers because Badger was always going to be exactly who they were. They said goodbye in the hotel room like old friends, people who’d been on a long journey together, and Martha, hugging each of them in turn, smelling Albert’s musky three-day shirt, Selah’s fresh spritz of bright scent, Badger’s bubble-gum-and-fried-food odor, thought: I am never going to know how to live without a community of purpose. I am going to keep looking for this for the rest of my life, whatever happens.

  They went back to their worlds. Lenk asked how Martha’s vacation had been in a tone that let her know that he was fairly genuinely somewhat aggrieved that she’d even need a vacation from all this. And of course he was right. She hadn’t taken a break. That was what she and Lenk had in common. Anytime you didn’t look exactly where you were going, a Frito-Lay truck might come out of nowhere and sideswipe you. Only now, she thought, I am the truck. She was in Lenk’s blind spot. It wasn’t personal.

  It took a couple of weeks for the timing to be right. Until Badger was with their mom in Antigua, and Selah was in Tokyo with Zimri. Until enough distracting things were going on that the moment was right. It had to all happen at roughly the same time.

  Badger “borrowed” their mom’s laptop.

  Martha logged on using Lenk’s passwords.

  Selah waited until Zimri had walked out of the room without locking his AnvilSurface.

  Across three time zones, the flash drives made contact. Inside the systems a password-approved worm worked its way to the appropriate place and unpacked itself. Carefully, word by word, it began to change certain sentences and certain comments. It iterated.

  To try to do this at scale would be noticeable. Still, it must be worth a try. They had to try something.

  There had been, however, no chance to balance this worm with other system requirements. No time to monitor its performance or to see how it interacted with other functionality. To find out what resources it would take and how much of them it would use. The worm began to draw a great deal of system time. An iterative process rippled through the mobile towers. An algorithm testing and retesting a way to produce more smiling faces, more thumbs-up.

  In Shanghai, five hundred dancing drones shone lights of blue and silver and gold, spelling out words of peace and harmony for a celebration. Connected to an Anvil-powered mainframe via mobile signal on Medlar devices, they moved in unison, shimmering. Until they didn’t. The signal was overwhelmed, just for a moment. Above the crowd, children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders looked up, puzzled, as the drones stuttered. Swiveled. Stopped spelling out anything at all. Began to plummet. The ballet fell to earth, heavy and hard, smashing into car hoods, shattering on pavements. The people ran.

  The same weekend, in San Francisco, at Fantail headquarters there was a server overload causing a cascade of system failures. It was a system that had never been expected to overload. When it failed, a software engineer sitting in his spare bedroom next to a drying rack loaded with his baby daughter’s damp onesies panicked. He attempted to manually reconfigure the network traffic to send the overflow to a different data center. The baby was crying. His wife shouted that she was on the john and on a video call at the same time for Chrissake, could he not just get the baby? He typed in an instruction that was almost, but not entirely, perfect. Rather suddenly, in all the countries in the world, Fantail and its subsidiary apps and products all stopped working.

  In Peshawar, Pakistan, a polio vaccination team could not use Fantail anonymized services to coordinate their pickup of the vaccine. Thirty-eight thousand doses of vaccine went to waste. Among the people these doses were intended for, five children subsequently contracted polio.

  In Manitoba, Canada, systems of weather alerts housed on Medlar servers crashed. Even though Medlar servers came back up within four minutes, this alert system did not reboot. Road clearance measures were not dispatched in the face of an oncoming blizzard and warnings were not displayed on cell phones and thinscreens. Most people turned around when they saw the heavy snow. One group of eight people, desperate to reach a long-planned family reunion and reassuring one another that “if it was really bad, there’d have been an alert,” froze to death in their minivan.

  In Norfolk, England, the antiquated Anvil messaging app used by the home caregiving teams went offline. Officially, it wasn’t supported by Anvil any longer and it was low on the priority list for review after the outage. An elderly woman, unable to contact her usual nurse and unwilling to stain any other furniture, sat in her feces for almost two days, waiting for help.

  During the subsequent inquiries internally at Fantail, Medlar, and Anvil, it was determined that an unobtrusive code package had somehow been introduced into the systems. A worm, possibly created by a state actor, causing an iterative process whose purpose was—at this point—difficult to determine.

  Martha went to sit in Albert’s study. The same room where she’d saved his life.

  “It’s not all our fault,” said Albert. “A lot of these systems should have been more robust. Should have had more failover.”

  “But we knew they didn’t,” said Martha. She had been here before. “This is where it ends. I’ve seen it. You think you can change something big about the world and it ends with destruction. Every single time.”

  “Anvil is already selling secure, walled-off backup in case anything like this happens again. Seventeen governments are already creating laws specifically protecting ‘these named companies’ from this kind of attack with insane punishments. They’re just going to be stronger after this.”

  Martha said: “What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?”

  Albert said: “I’ve tried despair already.”

  Badger and Albert, Martha and Selah took another several weeks to communicate as a group, using the private messaging system on a forum for roasting celebrity fashion choices.

  We can’t do this again, said Badger. The iterative effects, rippling outward, were still incalculable. It wasn’t possible to just destroy these companies. They were everywhere. To live even for a day without their services was a disaster.

  We can’t do it like this, said Martha, not ever like this. Whatever we do, we have to make it as small as it can possibly be. Invisible.

  We need higher level access than this, said Selah. It can’t sit in the code base randomly drawing more and more server capacity. It has to be part of the system.

  It wasn’t the answer anyway, said Martha. I mean like maybe it’s part of the answer, but being willing to click on an e-petition isn’t enough. We need something faster than that. These have been the years when we could have been solving it and we haven’t. We’re close to them. We can figure it out. We need to try something different.

  7. the right level of failure

  zhen

  In Chimopar on the outskirts of Bucharest, three of Marius’s former students had set up a hackspace in an abandoned chemical factory. They ran power and high-speed wireless from a generator and server bank in a school bus. Inside, the factory was lit with strings of LED bulbs and the walls were a palimpsest of graffiti. A red angel with a sword spread its wings across the roof. A dragon with a human face vomited words that dripped down the stones and onto the floor. Death metal played from a speaker in the corner of the room, and all the tattooed, pierced, head-shaven, and bearded people at the terminals knew Marius by name. This was as safe as it got.

  Zhen had scrubbed all the real data about herself she could find from the internet. No one knew she was living with Marius. She’d set up a story about herself that she’d moved to Mexico, faked up some photographs next to an imaginary pool in a nonexistent villa. When she posted videos online she bounced her signal around. She wanted it to look like business as usual, but somewhere she definitely wasn’t. She only used the internet from untraceable terminals. She did not post a video about the Seasons Time Mall. She took on boring consulting gigs to review corporate crisis plans. She read paper books and paid for purchases with a prepaid card Marius filled with cash for her, like a child. She never mentioned or engaged with Enochites online; she neither responded to nor deleted their angry posts under her videos. She did not use Anvil or Medlar or Fantail from any but the most encrypted servers and then never using her old accounts or her own name. No one came for her in Bucharest.

  Over a series of visits to this hackspace, she had of course done the obvious searches.

  Seasons Time Mall assassin

  Seasons Time Mall murder

  Seasons Time Mall frozen corpse

  Seasons Time Mall death

  Seasons Time Mall accident

  There was a short piece in the Straits Times, picked up by a few other papers in the region. There had been an electrical malfunction at the Seasons Time Mall in June. Several people had been injured slightly when a glass light fitting had exploded. That wing of the mall had been sealed for six days for essential repairs.

  And? And? Deeper news sites. Analysis, discussion. Weren’t they looking for a young Asian woman with a backpack who had been spotted fleeing the scene?

  No, they weren’t. Very sadly, during the maintenance, it had been discovered that a homeless woman had died in one of the ventilation shafts. By the state of the body, she’d been there for several months. She had perhaps crawled in for warmth during the unseasonable cold snap the previous December and died. Some of the coolant pipes had been improperly fitted, which may also have contributed to her death. A tragic affair, said the Straits Times. One of their columnists wrote movingly of the plight of drug-addicted homeless people and then turned the subject rapidly to the need for even harsher penalties for drug smugglers.

  On the hidden web, the death of the woman in the ventilation shaft had excited some interest. A couple of sources said the body had been “in an advanced state of decomposition,” and one poster on a Singaporean site said his brother’s cousin worked with the police and had seen the body and it was “basically liquid, man, suuuuuuper gross.” He claimed to have a photograph of the body, but when Zhen clicked on it with dread, it was nothing she recognized. A soupy container of body parts with a dress, coat, and hat laid next to it. Nothing that looked anything like what the woman who’d chased her had been wearing.

  “Some fucker trying to look cool,” she said.

  Marius said, “Death squads always cool until they knock on your door.”

  More searching. Anything.

  refrigerant murder

  refrigerant death

  coolant accident

  coolant snow

  Seasons Time coolant

  A brief mention in Global Refrigeration News. A coolant company in Taiwan had been purchased by Fantail toward the end of June. They had made the coolant systems for the Seasons Time Mall. Their products were now to be used solely for a series of Fantail chip fabrication plants.

  “Look, someone cleaning up after you,” said Marius. “Your lover Martha. Cleaning up after test of their software.”

  “No,” said Zhen, but at the same time she knew the answer could be yes.

  There were two versions of Martha in her head now all the time. One, an extraordinary woman who had fallen so improbably and extravagantly in love with her over the course of a weekend that she’d gifted her a piece of experimental software that had saved her life. The other, a manipulative asshole who’d picked her up—the hotel key! the champagne!—in order to test a piece of experimental software, possibly for the slightly flattering reason that she thought Zhen would be more likely to survive than normal and possibly for the somewhat alarming reason that Martha had seen Zhen was under attack by Enochites and thought this would be a great test of AUGR’s capabilities.

  Zhen had believed it when Martha said that she had a project. A project! And it was getting to its busy phase. And she wouldn’t be able to be in touch. And she liked Zhen more than she’d liked anyone for a really long time. Zhen had believed it all because the normal human need is to believe, to connect. To reach out and to trust. And obviously also because the sex had been great.

  But there is a limit to what you can take on trust. To know anything about Martha now, Zhen would need to understand what it was that Martha had put on her phone.

  She and Marius found out a little more about AUGR. There had been a company called AUGR. Its description, Marius said, sounded “boring as shit”—“trend analysis for corporate markets.” It had gone into liquidation following a series of “disappointing results.” Its CEO, Si Packship, had made a vague statement citing “technological difficulties.” There was a tiny roundup story on TechCrunch: “AUGR, a predictive analysis software suite aiming at the hedge fund market, has failed to attract funding after a series of tech errors.”

  “This is the right level of failure,” said Marius. “If Anvil, Medlar, and Fantail bought it out, wanted no one to know what they doing, this is right.”

  Not dramatic, not exciting, the software just didn’t work. No one would go trying to buy up algorithms or hire the small team that made it. If anyone had said on an internet forum that they’d heard a rumor that AUGR had been purchased by a consortium backed by Lenk Sketlish, Ellen Bywater, and Zimri Nommik, they would’ve sounded like a fantasist.

  “It’s bullshit,” said Zhen. “The thing I had was survival tech, superefficient AI. Incredible permissions and schematics. It said it was…” Those moments were crystal clear, the most extremely clear anything had been in a really long time. “Predictive, protective software.”

  “That’s what they cleaning up,” said Marius. “Buy the company, pay off the mall. They don’t want no one to know what they got.”

  Weeks went past like this. Looking and puzzling. All the while, Marius’s reconstruction program was probing Zhen’s phone. They plugged it into the mainframe in the Chimopar hackspace—twenty-eight AnvilTabs linked together and stacked in a metal dish rack—and left it working all night every night, hard against the metal roof to keep cool, sheltered by an umbrella from the rain. It was weeks and then it was months while the device with the washing-machine screen tried to figure out what code had been chopped into tiny pieces when the program had deleted itself. Put it back together. Iterating. Never hurrying, never tarrying.

  It was an unseasonably cold autumn that year, snow falling and settling, melting, and falling again. In October at the hackspace, they bounced a signal through twenty-two different servers and Zhen called her dad in Sunderland for his birthday. Saying sorry she hadn’t called for ages. Her dad said, in a way that allowed Zhen to know instantly that he hadn’t been certain at all, that if something really bad had happened to his only daughter, he’d have heard.

  Zhen said: “I’m fine, Dad, I’m fine. I love you. Just busy, OK? And… something’s happened to my phone. I’m traveling a lot. Just… if you need to contact me, email?”

  Zhen was depressed after that call. It didn’t feel like she’d left the world, it felt like the world had left her. She and Marius walked to shake their bodies out as dusk was gathering over the slush-covered streets of Bucharest. Snow was falling, thin but persistent, a constant drizzle of cold wet flakes that sat in immediately dirty clumps on the pavement. They bought burgers from a rusted van on the street—they were surprisingly good, juicy and thick.

  They sat under the eye of the angel and the dragon, eating burgers and watching the gray snow dance and tumble.

  One of the other coders said: “That your homebrew on the upper shelf? Under the umbrella?”

  Marius nodded morosely. Zhen wondered whether he always felt like she felt right now and, if so, how he managed to be so happy about it.

  “It made a chime. While you were out. I went to look. Don’t know what’s happened.”

  Zhen would never have thought Marius could have got up the metal stairs so quickly. There was triumph in his voice as he called down.

  “Sleeping Beauty ready to talk in her sleep,” said Marius.

  There had been a new and very powerful malware in Zhen’s phone. Something that took control of all its systems when a set of commands from a particular program labeled only with a long string of numbers and letters was activated. It had also been spying on her, taking passive information from Zhen’s phone since it was installed, monitoring her health, her location, her communications. They could see the reconstructed program overriding protections, gathering constant information.

  “Bad infection,” Marius tutted softly. “Dangerous infection.”

  What they could not find out was what the program had done with all that information and all those overrides.