NINE

This would be their last year in the OACET mansion. The lowest bidders had been scrambling to transform the husk of an old post office into a new headquarters for the cyborgs. It was shaping up to be spectacular, government contractors notwithstanding. Mare Murphy had argued to Congress that if OACET was to serve as the public face of American technology, they should receive a building to match their status. The underlying theme of And you owe us! had sealed the deal, and an abandoned postal hub near Judiciary Square was being retrofitted to the Agents’ specifications. The design would incorporate the best of both worlds, with the original neoclassical architecture preserved, and the crumbling plasterwork rebuilt over a complex web of structured wiring and point-to-point cabling. From a cyborg’s perspective, the building would sing.

Rachel was sure she’d loathe it.

OACET’s temporary headquarters were located outside of the city proper, in an old mansion on a hill overlooking the Potomac River. The mansion had been seized in a drug raid in the 1980s, and had remained unsold and uninhabited until it had been turned over to OACET the year before. During its decades of vacancy, the government used the mansion as a property overflow warehouse. Security was tight, but it had been used much in the way of a family storage unit: rarely, and largely ignored unless something went wrong.

The mansion was a comfort in the way of an old pair of jeans, a favorite song on the radio. It was crammed to the rafters with the accumulated clutter of three decades of asset forfeiture, with everything from oil paintings to catering equipment to the occasional speedboat shoved into every square inch of available space. OACET had cleaned the mansion as best they could, and had reminded the many federal agencies who used the place as a dumping ground to auction off some of the valuables that had been gathering dust. Unfortunately, as soon as space was cleared, new items flooded in to fill it. The federal government abhorred a vacuum, especially one located within easy driving distance.

Rachel picked a cautious path up a rear staircase. A tumble of antique rugs had been left there, courtesy of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. She scaled three flights like a mountain goat, then paused at the top to take in the chaos below. In the early days of occupation, the Agents would have had the rugs sorted and stacked in the solarium within hours. Lately, it had become harder to find Agents with enough spare time to handle the routine housekeeping needed to control the mess. Almost everyone in the collective had assignments which kept them out of the mansion during the workday. Their fledgling hivemind no longer needed a hive to survive. She knew this was progress, but she still felt the loss.

Time to buy my sapphire, she reminded herself. Down in the medical lab, a small pink sapphire was waiting on four final payments to the Department of the Treasury. She had picked out the stone when they had first moved into the mansion, its electron resonance a peaceful note within her mind. It had been more expensive than she had expected, and she wasn’t sure what she’d do with it (either a necklace or a ring, that was a given; she couldn’t afford a second sapphire to make a matched set of earrings), but she’d be glad to have it once the mansion was no longer home.

She passed through two sets of mahogany doors and the upper floor of the atrium to end in the west wing. Back in the mansion’s prime, this area had been set aside for guests, and the top floor was made up of massive bedrooms and overdone en suites. The doors down the length of the hallway stood open, the clatter of keyboards and muffled media blending with her footsteps into white noise.

Correction: one door was closed.

Rachel knocked on this door, a politeness they maintained for the toddler usually found playing in the confines of a deep marble soaker tub converted to a crib. Avery was the child of two Agents, and this had placed her parents in the unique position of two telepaths raising a non-telepathic daughter. Mako and Carlota had realized early on that their daughter wouldn’t be exposed to language unless the Agents made the effort to talk when around her, and this had been a rule since the day Avery was born.

It took her parents a little extra time to realize that they needed to impose more rules. The Agents hadn’t fully recognized how many social norms they had phased out of their repertoire. Agents didn’t bother with doorbells or phones. They spoke and laughed and shouted at things no one else could see. They manipulated and twisted technology as their needs demanded, usually without physically touching the machines. When they were interacting with non-Agents, they tried to keep these behaviors in check, but Avery had three hundred and fifty convenient babysitters who allowed themselves to be themselves within the safety of the mansion. Hence, the closed door and its printed sign:

 

THE OUTSIDE WORLD BEGINS HERE

 

“Who is it?” The voice came, loud and booming, from within the cavernous bedroom on the other side of the thick mahogany door.

“It’s Aunt Rachel,” she said, smiling. Mako had known she was coming from the moment she was within a mile of the mansion.

The door opened, and a giant black man with a familiar core of forest green greeted her. “Rachel! Good to see you! Please come in!”

She stepped into the room, and Mako Hill grabbed her in a bear hug. He was open in a way his cousin could never be: Matt Hill had been to hard places, but Mako was still soft. At least, as soft as a seven-foot-tall, three-hundred-pound mountain of weightlifter’s muscle could ever be.

“Air…” she gasped into Mako’s chest.

“Right, right. Sorry, tiny one!” Mako released her, and headed off to the workstation where Santino was fussing over a stack of stray papers.

Rachel waved to her partner on her way to the makeshift nursery. She wasn’t surprised to find Avery strapped into several full-body onesies. With a multitude of surrogate aunts and uncles, Avery was guaranteed constant adult supervision, but she was a brilliant child and had entered the phase where she had started testing limits. Lately, Avery had found that she could get an immediate reaction when she hurled her diaper at her babysitters, and that this reaction was all the more intense when the diaper was full. Mako and Carlota had begun strapping Avery into jumpsuits. She could still wiggle out of them, but it took her a minute or so to fumble with the buttons, and that was enough time to intervene (or, if Avery was especially quick about it, to scramble for the paper towels and the Lysol).

The toddler was playing with her stuffed dinosaurs, and she held one up when Rachel knelt down beside the sunken tub.

“Hello, Avery!”

“Ankle ’osaurus,” Avery said, and threw the plush toy at Rachel’s head.

“Sweet pea?” Mako’s voice was even louder on this side of the door, and Avery instantly started to pout. “We don’t throw things, and we never throw things at other people.”

“ ’orry,” the little girl mumbled.

“Thank you for apologizing, Avery,” Rachel said, as she scooped up the bright purple dinosaur. “Do you want me to play with you?”

“Yes!”

Rachel climbed down into the sunken tub. It was big enough for four adults to share a comfortable soak, and made a paradise of a playground for a toddler. Mako had lined the bottom and sides with slabs cut from gym mats until every square inch of marble was thickly padded, and filled the tub with toys and board books. Avery waddled over to Rachel and dumped one of these books into her quasi-aunt’s lap, then curled up in her arms, stuffed dinosaurs forgotten.

Rachel read aloud to Avery, something sweet about a bear in love with the moon, until the little girl’s head grew heavy. She gently slid Avery across the mats to the warm spot within the sunbeam, and tucked the purple ankylosaur beside her.

“She’s asleep,” she told Mako, as she quietly stepped out of the tub and closed the bathroom door behind her.

“Oh, thank God,” Mako said aloud, blue relief washing over him. “Poor kid’s due for another growth spurt. She’ll sleep like a champ when that happens, but right now you can’t get her to nap. You just have to try to run down her batteries until she crashes on her own.”

A television mounted on the wall just outside of the bathroom turned itself on, and a camera moved itself around the bathroom until it focused on Avery, still slumbering in the tub. The monitoring system was programmed to pick up physical cues from the toddler, and to notify the nearest Agents within a minute of when she was likely to wake. Rachel had decided that she’d invest in whatever innovations Mako and Carlota decided to take to market. They might force themselves to behave as normally as possible around their daughter, but they had also elevated cyborg-centered childcare to an art.

Rachel pulled the nearest chair out from the table, and rocked it to make sure its legs were still attached. None of the furniture in Mako’s office matched, and all of it was in terrible shape. The man’s size alone made him murder on housewares, and when he was deep in a project he became the stereotypical absent-minded scientist to boot. As he tended to crush a chair to kindling every other week, and as everything in the mansion was technically intended for auction someday, Mako insisted on filling his office with the junk nobody would miss if it happened to end up in the trash.

He had also filled his office with computers. Unlike Jason’s system, Mako’s wasn’t comprised of a series of new, polished machines networked together to form a whole. These computers were ancient, and clunked along like cars with broken axles roped together in a caravan: they got to where they were needed, eventually, but the ride was terrible.

Mako loved them. He said he spent his day around grumpy old men who made bad jokes and didn’t care if anybody laughed.

The back wall was covered in whiteboards. Rachel approved: dry erase ink fluoresced at a unique rate, and it was easy for her to read Mako’s notes.

Read? Yes. Understand? No. But that was expected, as Mako’s purpose as their resident computational physicist was to determine precisely how the implant functioned, and he wasn’t making any progress. Nearly a year ago, he had set up the wall of whiteboards and had grouped the facts under the KNOWN and UNKNOWN headings, claiming he’d start with the basics and develop a working body of knowledge from there.

He had stalled out within hours.

Patrick Mulcahy had a not-so-secret trove of documents. These were earmarked as blackmail material, and thus far had never been distributed outside of the collective. Receipts and bills of lading, mostly, with the occasional email printout between certain members of Congress on the topic of Problematic Cyborgs, Management Thereof.

Mako hadn’t cared about that, claiming the Agents already knew they had been manipulated and abandoned. What they didn’t know was how their implants worked. Mulcahy could chase after blood, but Mako would pursue knowledge. He had pored through this trove looking for data, and had found too little for comfort. He insisted that a device as advanced as a miniaturized quantum organic computer would have been developed through small incremental changes, each one building upon the successes of previous trials. There was no evidence of this. Oh, there was some data, scraps of information here and there, on the previous test subjects. There was none on the techniques used to develop the technology. As far as the record showed, the methods and materials needed to construct the implant had emerged from thin air within Hanlon Technologies nearly ten years ago, and had been used to put the first version of the implant into production soon after.

Rachel walked towards the nearest whiteboard. Items listed under the KNOWN heading took up a single board, while the UNKNOWN heading had been written across each of the rest. She paused to read the new notes added to the section on their avatars, and tried not to laugh. Mako might not swear aloud around his daughter, but he had no problem writing out descriptive profanities.

The other Agent came up beside her, and laid one huge hand against the board. “I’m about ready to give up. There’s a piece missing,” he growled. “A huge piece. I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere! I can’t explain how we can do what we do, not with the information I have now.”

She grinned. “Maybe I can get Senator Hanlon to talk to you. Think you can shake it out of him?”

“Please!” Mako stared at the board. “That’s probably the only way I’ll get answers. Nothing we do makes sense.”

“Well, yeah.”

“No,” Mako said. His colors took on a professional blue, and Rachel realized he meant what he said. “I’m not trying to be funny. The range of abilities we have doesn’t correspond to what we know about the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Here,” he said, and a puppy appeared. Like all of their projections, it was bright green. Mako waved, and the puppy wagged its tail at him and barked before gamboling off around the room, three feet off of the ground. “Just look at that thing. It’s an autoscript I wrote for Avery, so it’s essentially a computer program. Once I get it running, I don’t need to micromanage it. As long as I have peripheral awareness of what it’s doing, it’ll function. That, I understand!

“But I wrote this script for Avery, because she can see it. Now, how did that work, I ask you? She doesn’t have an ISO, and it’s—”

“Wait.” Rachel cut him off. “What’s an ISO?”

At the table behind them, Santino turned purple and squeaked.

Mako stared down at her. His colors had stopped moving altogether. Even the bright green puppy had stopped galumphing about on its too-big feet. “That would be the Implanted Spectrum Operator,” he said. “The…uh…”

“The chip in our heads,” she sighed. “Got it.”

“Did you honestly think it didn’t have a name? Technically, it’s the ISO-157, which suggests there were over a hundred and fifty iterations before they made a successful prototype, but I can’t find—”

“I got it!”

Mako paused, and she saw the same purples appear within his conversational colors. These warred with her Southwestern turquoise as he tried not to poke fun of her.

“Mako? Honey? I shoot people for a living. Choose your next words carefully.”

“Yup.” He stared at the ceiling for a few moments. The green puppy wandered back over to the table and sat at his feet. When the purples finally dissolved, Mako patted the nearby tabletop. The puppy leapt up in a movement more feline than canine. “I made this little guy for Avery because she can see our projections. I can take a stab at how that happened: she’s the daughter of two Agents. There’s a persistent myth that brains stop changing after we turn thirty, but we got the implants when we were all in our early twenties. Also? That myth is bullshit. Our brains continuously rewire themselves based on our tasks and our environment. We’ve gradually rewired ourselves to be more attuned to frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s possible that Carlota and me, we might have passed part of this rewiring down to Avery. That’s not how trait inheritance works, but it’s the best explanation I’ve got until she’s old enough to consent to testing.

“Now, our ears and eyes? We didn’t change those. Physiologically speaking, human beings have a limited capacity for what we can perceive. There are entire bands of the EMF that we can’t detect without the right tools. This little guy,” he said, pointing at the puppy, “exists on a frequency we’re already biologically predisposed to perceive. It’s like discovering you can suddenly see a whole bunch of brand new colors that were already there.”

“Don’t forget people like Hope,” Santino added. “How do you explain her?”

Hope Blackwell was Patrick Mulcahy’s wife. She had no problem seeing or hearing the Agents’ projections. They appeared as clearly to her as they would to any Agent.

(In Rachel’s opinion, nothing explained Mulcahy’s wife. The woman was just plain weird.)

“Santino’s got his glasses, so he can see what we project—”

“—I’m making progress on the auditory hookup, too. When I get that to work, I’ll be able to hear them—”

“—so these things we create? If it were just Agents who could perceive them, I’d say they were a shared illusion. But they exist, even if they are made of electromagnetic radiation. Which begs the question: how can we shape light?”

“And why different shades of green?” Santino said, as he passed his hand through the puppy’s head. “If you can control the EMF to the point where you can generate constructs, you should be able to render in every single color in the spectrum.

“Really, the only explanation is that we don’t have an important chunk of data,” Santino added. “I think the implant gives you access to a part of the EMF nobody knew about.”

Mako’s colors glazed over in irritation.

“You two have this argument a lot?” Rachel asked him.

“All the fuckin’ time,” Mako muttered. His colors shifted towards Santino’s cobalt core, and Rachel caught the hints of the sharp-edged blues and yellows of intent within them. “Actually, this is relevant to your case.”

“Motive or device?” she asked, and when a confused orange appeared, she clarified her question. “Would this be relevant to why the item was stolen, or how the Mechanism works?”

“Maybe both,” Santino said. “This is what we were talking about before you got here.”

“Great, she said, and claimed a chair at the table beside her partner. She pulled Jason’s metal copy of the fragment out of her suitcoat pocket, and dropped it on top of a stack of papers. “I’m dying to know why a chunk of an old clock was worth robbing the White House.”

“The inscription,” Mako said.

“We’re not done translating it,” Santino said. “The fragment is conclusively from the Mechanism. The forms for the text match—”

“The size and shape of the letters,” Mako explained.

“—but there’s so much erosion that we have to fill in the blanks.” Santino pointed to Mako’s computers, chugging and whirring along as they crunched the data.

“It might take weeks!” Mako, delighted by the scope of the problem, banished the puppy to the aether with a wave of his hand.

“How much could they write on a small chunk of metal?” Rachel muttered.

Santino was glowing. “Definitely enough to fill in some of the gaps in its history,” he said. “If we’re lucky, enough to fill in the gaps in the math it uses.”

Rachel closed her eyes. Anything that came out of her mouth was sure to backfire on her, she just knew it.

“Penguin?”

“Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll bite. Why are there gaps? Isn’t math just…math?”

Both men’s colors took on a semi-opaque glaze, a phenomenon that Rachel associated with persons trying to manage a sudden confluence of stupid questions and civility. “Humor me,” she told them.

“Right,” Santino said, his colors weaving blues and greens and oranges together as he tried to think of the best way to explain the problem. “What’s your opinion about math?” he asked. “Gut response.”

“Study your math, kids. Key to the universe,” she said in her best Christopher Walken.

“Good. So, why does that quote come to mind?”

Rachel went with the safe answer. “It’s the only universal language that exists. It’s fixed, constant. The rules never change. If we ever bump into an alien race, we’d be able to communicate with them using math.”

“That’s right,” Mako said. “Now, what if we told you that’s wrong?”

“Wait,” Rachel said, holding up her hand. “Am I right or wrong?”

“Yes,” Santino said.

“Holy Jesus,” she sighed. She got up and raided an old mini fridge that held Avery’s snacks, looking for something harder than a soda. Nothing. She returned to the table and passed out three juice packs in silvery pouches.

“Perfect,” Santino said, holding out his pouch. He took a Sharpie from a cup on the table, and sketched out a triangle on the side of the pouch. “So, say your alien race shows up. Which one of these ‘rules’ of math will you use when you want to talk to them?”

“The…uh. The right ones?”

“Okay. How do you decide which ones are right?” he said, showing her the triangle. “Seventh-grade geometry… In triangles, all the angles add up to 180 degrees, right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s basic Euclidian geometry—”

“—or normed vector space—” Mako added, trying to be helpful.

“—but if you move a triangle onto a curved space, the angles don’t add up to 180 degrees anymore,” Santino said, squeezing his juice pouch to bend the triangle out of its flat plane. “So is that basic rule of math right or wrong?”

“Depends on the situation?” Rachel hazarded.

“That’s the easiest way to say it. It’s also incomplete,” Mako said. “It’s a rule that can be simultaneously proven both wholly accurate and inaccurate.”

“Here’s where Mako and I disagree,” Santino said, his colors turning orange and yellow with annoyance and confusion. It had the hallmarks of an ongoing battle between the two men. “I say all rules of mathematics are conditional. They can either be proven right, or proven wrong, depending upon strict conditions of application. Like my trick with the triangle, and changing the conditions in which it exists. You have to have these conditions, or there’s no reason to have these rules at all because they’re of no practical use. But Mako? He believes all rules of mathematics exist in some philosophical state in which they’re both right and wrong.”

“Not true,” Mako said. “I believe that mathematics is an evolving set of constructs, and the rules which can be used to explain them—not define them!—evolve along with them. Like the dinosaurs.”

Rachel put her head in her hands.

“It’s not as confusing as it sounds,” Mako said.

“Santino is orange,” she said without bothering to pick her head up. “And if Santino thinks this is confusing bullshit, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to explain it to me.”

“Don’t be such a defeatist,” Mako said. “Did you know we’re closer in time to the Tyrannosaur than the Tyrannosaur was to the Stegosaur?”

“What?” Rachel sat up, and threw her scans towards the bathtub. Avery was still sleeping soundly, one arm draped comfortably over her plush Ankylosaur.

“We hear the word dinosaur, and we think of a single period in time,” Mako said, as he picked up Santino’s marker and sketched a thick black line across the old wooden tabletop. “As if all of the dinosaurs that ever lived were a single lump sum of animals. But that’s not the case at all. The timeframe during which they occupied the planet stretched over millions and millions of years. The Stegosaur lived 150 million years ago,” he said, marking one end of the line with an X. “We live here,” he said, as he marked the other end. “And the Tyrannosaur lived 66 million years ago. That’s 84 million years between the Tyrannosaur and the Stegosaur, and only 66 million years between the Tyrannosaur and us.”

Mako’s third X was slightly closer to humanity’s end of the line. It was big enough so Rachel could see it without adjusting her vision. He tapped on it with the marker’s tip, dotting the table with permanent confetti. “In evolutionary science, we have rules which explain the Stegosaur, the Tyrannosaur, and us. Since we generally think of both the Stegosaur and the Tyrannosaur as dinosaurs, we assume the same set of rules can be applied to explain both of them. But they lived millions of years apart. The planet had changed substantially during that time.

“See what I’m getting at? If this is an analogy for math, we can use one set of rules to explain a Stegosaur. Some of those rules can also be used to explain a Tyrannosaur, but we have to add some rules and take away others to clarify that explanation. And then we get to our end of the timeline, and we have to change the rules again if we want to explain human beings. See?”

“I see it’s all conditional,” Santino grumbled.

“I see it’s all evolutionary,” Mako said, pointing the marker at his friend. “Math is the universal language of explanations, not absolutes. Saying math is situational imposes limits on how and when terms can be used.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Santino shouted. Mako jabbed the marker at the closed bathroom door, and Santino lowered his voice. “You’re arguing philosophy, not math! If math is to have practical value, it needs restrictions. You can’t put a space shuttle on the moon using dinosaurs.”

“Said the man who forgets where rocket fuel comes from,” Rachel grumbled.

“Precisely!” Mako said, his colors lighting up with praise for Rachel.

“Come on, Mako, that was a joke!”

“Doesn’t mean you aren’t right. Math is conceptual, not conditional. Pieces of rules can be moved around, but within the set parameters of a specific set of circumstances, the rules can only be used to explain themselves.

“That’s why they’re useful,” he continued, looking straight at Santino with blue intent. “They explain concepts, not situations. You can’t use math to explain anything general.”

“Guys, please.” Rachel started stabbing at the weak spot on the juice carton with the plastic straw. “Mechanism. Murder. Motive.”

“All related,” Mako said.

“What Mako and I both agree on,” Santino said, “is the Mechanism predated what was known about applied advanced mathematics by fifteen hundred years. Any new information in that inscription could be invaluable.”

“Like...urh!” Her straw bent sideways and split down the center. She threw it in the general direction of the trash can, and pushed the silver pouch away from her. “Like the name of the person who made it?”

“That, or new mathematical formulae,” Santino said.

“There is no such thing as new—”

“Some of us think that there are better ways to verify old mathematical problems.” Santino’s words ran over Mako’s. “And the inscription on the Mechanism could provide insight into these methods.”

“That, we also agree on,” Mako said. “There are huge gaping holes in our knowledge. The Mechanism uses Babylonian math, not Greek, and—”

“—there are nearly as many different types of math as there are languages, because math is not universal—”

“This is like watching your parents argue when you’re too young to understand it,” Rachel said. “I’m not getting anything out of this.”

“Right.” Mako resigned himself in a purple-gray sigh. “Okay… What we’re talking about is missing knowledge. Information changes everything. When we were first activated, how did you know you could talk to machines?”

“It was obvious,” Rachel replied. “The damn things never shut up.”

Mako nodded. “And how did you know you could control them?”

“I…” Rachel paused and thought back to the chaos of those first few weeks. She had lost her eyesight just days before full activation, and juggling two life-changing events at the same time had left her memories in a muddle. “Someone told me? I don’t remember.”

“What if you hadn’t been told?” he asked her. “Would you have figured it out on your own?”

“Yeah, no doubt. Machines are noisy as hell. At some point, I would have snapped and told one of them to be quiet.”

“Okay,” Mako said. “Now, what if machines weren’t noisy? What if they didn’t impact your daily life at all? Would you have still discovered you could control them?”

“Hm.” Rachel leaned against the table. She ran her finger along the rough chronology of the line Mako had drawn on its surface. Millions and millions of years… “Good question. I really don’t know.”

“We probably would have,” Mako said. “Someone would have tripped over it, given enough time. But you’re right—machines are everywhere, and they never shut up. Learning we could control them was…” he snapped his fingers. “Bang. Easy. Done.

“There’s no way we’ve reached the limits of what we can do,” he said. “The EMF is part of every single experience we have as sentient beings. As we acquire new information, we expand our abilities.”

“Actually, Rachel, you might be the best example of this. You know, when you figured out your eyes didn’t have…to…” Santino’s voice trailed off. Her Southwestern turquoise was wrapped within grays, with voids where nothing could be seen, his emotions tiptoeing around the topic of her blindness.

She nodded, quick and hard, to shut him up. “I get it.”

“We’re still learning,” Mako said. “There are holes in our knowledge. The potential applications for what we can do are remarkable, but until we get the information we need to patch those holes, we’re just a bunch of kids with neat party tricks.”

“Take me, for example. I can block the EMF, and…” He looked down towards Rachel. “May I? It’ll help prove my point.”

She nodded again, and braced herself against what was coming.

When she wanted to block the EMF, she pulled frequencies together into a tight weave. She usually imagined the EMF as strands of thread as she worked, selecting and drawing the best of these threads into themselves to form a light, flexible barrier. Practice had made perfect: at first, she had been unable to see clearly within the shelter of her shield, but now she could use most of her usual visual frequencies while also keeping out the busy chatter of machines. And she could always feel the collective, no matter which frequencies she used, or how tightly she drew them together.

Mako’s abilities were one of a kind. The Agents were limitless, uncontrollable… Except when Mako stepped in. He could wrap an Agent in his mind and set them down beside him. He was OACET’s ultimate designated driver; on more than one occasion, Mako had been the one to break up a bar fight and keep an Agent from making a huge mistake involving someone’s credit score.

His shield slammed around her like a steel prison. The steady presence of the collective that she could always feel in the back of her mind ceased to exist, and the dark came crashing down.

“Can you break it?” Mako’s voice rumbled across her body.

She pushed, hard, her mind pressing against every part of his barrier. Then, when she had made no progress, she started to test for weaknesses. She found there were no seams to Mako’s shield, no points where separate frequencies had been joined. He had forged them into a whole. Where she wove frequencies together, he created a single impenetrable, impermeable alloy.

“No,” she said. “And I’m trying.”

He let his shield drop, and Rachel’s world came back in a wave of color and shared minds.

“See? Every time we discover a new party trick, we expand our understanding of what we can do. But why am I the only one who can do this particular trick?” Mako asked. “I can’t teach the others how to block our access—I haven’t even been able to develop methods to test how I do it.”

“It is a good trick,” Rachel admitted. Even Patrick Mulcahy with his iron will couldn’t force his way past Mako. Together, the two of them had finally answered that age-old question of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object, which was black out, regain consciousness, laugh, vomit, laugh again, and then head off in search of beer to kill the headaches.

“This is a hole in our knowledge we need to patch, the sooner the better,” Mako said. “There’s nothing else out there that can block our access to the EMF. Just me. The telecommunications industry has been working on blocking us since we went public, but they’re making no progress. If Santino and I can figure out how I do it, our problems would be over.”

Rachel started laughing. The very idea that their problems could ever be over…

“Think about it,” Mako said. “People are scared of us because we can control machines. But if there are OACET-specific security protocols, then we won’t be able to access them.”

“Update the firewalls to keep Agents out,” Santino said, “And people will have lost most of their ammunition against you.”

“Except I’ll still be able to see through walls, or be accused of mind reading, or go out-of-body into a secure area…”

“Most ammunition,” Santino repeated. “There’ll always be those folks unhappy with OACET, but somebody’s always going to be unhappy about something.”

Not able to talk to machines? Interesting…

It wouldn’t be the end of the world for Rachel. She thought back over the last couple of weeks and, with the exception of Lulu, couldn’t remember the last time she had interacted directly with a machine. Some of the others might miss the constant chatter of the digital ecosystem in their heads, but her?

She realized she was smiling.

Mako grinned back at her. “Right? Okay, I’ll admit it might not fix everything, but it’d be a good start. All we need to do is find out what’s unique about me, and then we can start to develop what I can do as a security protocol.”

“This all ties back into what we’re saying about the Mechanism, too,” Santino said. “A little bit of information can change everything. It might reframe our entire perspective.”

“Or,” hedged Mako, “help us to better understand something we already think we know.”

And there’s our motive, Rachel realized.

Any private collector who wanted the information on the fragment could have simply sent an anonymous email to the Greek embassy and attached a copy of the photograph. That would have gotten the procedural wheels turning. Months later, the information on the fragment would have been released, joining the rest of the data on the Antikythera Mechanism within the public domain.

Time-consuming, maybe, but cheap and easy. And zero chance that your hired cat burglar would be caught in the process. It was certainly the best option.

Unless you wanted to keep that information a secret.