Round Rock, Texas
“Ok, Ross Eckhart… who are you, really?”
Kayne had set herself up in a rental in Round Rock, close enough that she could simply walk to restaurants and grocery stores as needed. The FBI and other agencies were currently scouring Brooklyn, New York, after several video clips of Kayne had been flagged. She’d had QuIEK plant all of those, of course—copies of videos she’d kept aside from a previous trip to Brooklyn.
For good measure, she also had QuIEK replicate digital records for the purchases she made at the various locations she’d visited months ago, and ping IP addresses at several local coffee shops, bars, and hotel lobbies. When the FBI looked into it, they’d see a trail that matched her activity on video. It would be pretty convincing, and it should be enough to keep their attention glued to the absolutely wrong place to find her for a couple of weeks. Maybe. The FBI didn’t tend to employ idiots, and by now they knew her M.O. pretty well. This was a very “fool me three times” kind of tactic. But Kayne knew that they would follow up on any lead that came their way, regardless, and that meant she could keep them busy. Busy enough for her to focus on her current case without worrying too much about looking over her shoulder, at least.
This cold snap in Texas had been a bit unexpected, and was putting a couple of kinks into her plans. For one, her new Uber driver friend aside, most car services weren’t running at the moment. The freeze had made conditions too dangerous. Ice on the roads in the middle of Texas was a much bigger deal than it would have been in the northern states. Texas just wasn’t as equipped to deal with this sort of thing.
That was even more in evidence as she scanned the local news. Traffic accidents were at an all-time high for the area. Worse, the cold was having an impact on the local power grid. Some parts of the state were experiencing scheduled blackouts, with power cycling on and off throughout the state in an effort to keep resources stable. This meant that millions of people were freezing in their own homes, sometimes for days.
It was a mess. State and federal officials were making all sorts of wild comments and accusations. Few were offering any real solutions.
The potential for this to derail Kayne’s plan was huge, too. Power was kind of essential to everything she did. QuIEK, for all its digital muscle, was vulnerable to all the same things any technology is vulnerable to. No electricity, no worky.
So far, the little rental she was using had maintained electricity. But given that she could find herself stuck here, she’d made sure to stock up on food, water, and lots of batteries. She’d also splurged and bought a ton of satellite equipment to help her stay connected and online even if the grid went down.
Kayne’s background was more engineering than programming, when it really came down to it. She’d gotten into coding because it was becoming an essential skill, even as far back as her high school days. Her PaPa had drilled that into her, along with his own brand of jury-rigged, cobbled-together, makeshift engineering.
So building things like the microcomputers she used as part of Smokescreen, or the can antenna she’d used to sniff out the Curie Motors WiFi, that was all lightweight stuff. And so was building a satellite relay that would allow her to stay connected, even if the power grid failed. QuIEK was able to get her access to even the most secure satellites in orbit. A power she tried not to abuse—unless it was absolutely necessary.
One of the new toys she’d picked up was a very compact but powerful satellite smartphone. It was a little bulkier than her regular phone and had a knob-like protrusion on top that functioned as the antenna. If anyone looked closely, it wouldn’t be hard to see that it was different from the standard smartphone. But a casual glance would probably gloss right over it. And having a device that could always be online, even in the most remote locations, was too handy to pass up. She should have done it sooner.
She installed her own operating system on the phone, effectively wiping out everything that came pre-programmed. Including, she was amused to see, the bevy of spyware that relayed everything from her location to the numbers she called or texted. Even her keystrokes and site visits were logged. She had QuIEK trace this back and found that the company was keeping these records as part of a secret contract with the NSA. They were exploiting a loophole in the privacy laws, which didn’t adequately cover direct-to-satellite communications. Basically, they had a back door into any satellite mobile device. Sneaky, sneaky.
And probably unconstitutional, though anyone caught up in the web of an NSA investigation would likely never get the opportunity to protest in court.
She was suddenly very glad she’d taken the extra paranoid precaution of having the phone shipped to a service two counties over, at any rate. The extra time it had taken to get to the drop point and then take a circuitous route back to the rental all felt worth it.
With her internet and power needs met, Kayne settled in with a hot cup of noodles, bundled head to toe in warm clothes, and scanned through everything QuIEK had found of her on Ross Eckhart.
The son of German immigrants, Eckhart had become a US citizen when he was eight years old. His dual citizenship had been something of an advantage for him over the years, allowing him to first attend the Technical University of Munich, where he received a Master of Science with honors, with an emphasis on information technology, of all things. He entered a doctoral program at Berkeley, at the age of 22, but dropped out to build and launch his first company.
And that first startup was, obviously, a digital greeting card website.
It was an odd beginning for a man who would eventually become something of a legend in the tech industry, but it wasn’t all that unusual. Silicon Valley was ripe with stories of entrepreneurs who started with one idea, then parlayed it into another. Elon Musk started Zip2, which provided city guide information to newspapers, of all things. And look how he turned out.
Eckhart’s first business was something of a financial success, but it never quite took off for him. Eventually, he sold it to a similar company, which eventually sold to yet another. The ecosystem of Silicon Valley startups was omnivorous and veracious of appetite. Every fish at every other fish, eventually.
Eckhart applied what he’d learned from the venture, however, along with the money he’d gotten from selling it, to make into a much more stable business: Virtual landscape planning.
Kayne laughed out loud as she read through Eckhart’s eclectic resume of business ventures. From landscape planning, he branched into home and office planning, then into a small startup that sold custom eyeglasses, then into an app that let users share selfies to a limited network of friends and family. And the list kept going like that, with each venture selling to someone else, merging with some other business, usually with a small but not insignificant profit for Eckhart.
These were all small potatoes, of course. Dinky, almost funny ventures that were never going to make someone a billion dollars. But the more Kayne dug into Eckhart’s past, the more she started to see a pattern.
These little businesses weren’t the point. They were research.
With each ridiculous, small-time business that Eckhart built, he took away lessons and data that would help him with the next venture. Greeting cards gave him a system for collecting user contact information, and even personal preferences for things like color, music, even clip art. Landscaping and interior planning allowed him to crowdsource data about spacial organization and manipulation, as users both created virtual spaces and organized objects within them. That data would later help him to perfect automated systems that guided the design of his cars, as well as other spaces, training a rudimentary AI to see each space the way humans see it.
The selfie app gave him data for perfecting digital security over a peer-to-peer network, again crowdsourcing key aspects of the software out to people who were voluntarily training his AI in facial recognition and location tracking.
These dinky, seemingly pointless little forays into technology looked like jokes to the outside world, but as QuIEK showed Kayne the whole picture, she saw it for what it really was. These apps and services weren’t what made Eckhart a billionaire, but they were the foundation he used to make billions. He patented and leased his technology to other industries, and in turn captured more and more data that he could turn into an ever-expanding digital empire.
Even Curie Motors was part of a larger plan. Electric cars that also served as part of a roving network of internet relays.
That caught Kayne’s attention. The idea was to provide high speed internet to even the most remote locations on the planet, by having turning his cars into mobile hotspots, all designed to share their internet connections, as part of a wide, virtual cloud. It was smart. It was ambitious.
It was… familiar.
It was, in essence, Eckhart’s version of Smokescreen.
For years now, Kayne had been planting her little discreet devices all over the place, using them to create an enormous virtual private network that QuIEK could use as an outsized memory. Each Smokescreen relay was part of a serious amount of redundancy, not only storing its own data and sharing it with the rest of the network, but routinely housing copies of that data, along with thousands of other units, for quick access. It was similar to RAID storage—a “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” that computers could use for data redundancy and improved performance.
Basically, QuIEK’s “memory” was constantly in motion, never reliant on any one device, but always spread across thousands of devices.
And over time, Kayne had looped other computers into that network as well. QuIEK’s roving memory sometimes resided, at least in part, in systems maintained by huge corporations or even government, military, and law enforcement servers. Without knowing it, the FBI was often supplying the processing power QuIEK needed to keep them good and fooled about Kayne’s actual location and activities.
All of that was part of Kayne’s strategy for self preservation, of both her and QuIEK. But at its roots was something she’d originally intended to benefit the whole world—the idea of an ever-expanding network of devices that could relay data to wherever it was needed whenever it was needed. And in that, Ross Eckhart had created a nearly identical network in the form of his cars. Kayne’s idea, realized through Eckhart’s tech. Or, at least, it would eventually be realized. It stood a much better chance in Eckhart’s hands, at least.
For the moment, Eckhart’s network was depending on local broadband services, connecting to LTE and 5G networks across the US and the world. Satellite connectivity was already being implemented, however, with new models connecting directly to Eckhart’s much-vaunted private network of micro-satellites. And in time, every car he manufactured would be tied directly to that network, while also operating as a connection point for it.
Basically, if a Curie Motors car was anywhere in an area, it would link to local mobile phone towers and other transmission devices, and share its internet connection. The more of those cars (or any other devices manufactured with this tech) that showed up in an area, the better the network would get.
Broadband for everyone. But also Ross Eckhart’s network, everywhere.
It was Alex Kayne’s plan for Smokescreen, gone large-scale and corporate.
And she had to admit, she was impressed.
But also suspicious. Because what Eckhart was building was a system entirely independent of any sort of oversight from the outside. Even if world governments decided to implement some sort of restrictions on this, it would be easy for Eckhart to ignore them. Or, more likely, placate them by pretending to do as he was told, while continuing to put more and more relays out in the world. There would definitely come a time when no one could stop him, or reverse what he was doing.
And that scared the hell out of Kayne. Because it was exactly the problem she was being hunted over.
Kayne had gone on the run precisely to keep QuIEK out of the hands of anyone who would abuse it. It was a digital master key—a way to empower someone to flat-out ignore any barrier to access, and to operate in a sort of God Mode among the communication networks of the world.
And while Ross Eckhart’s network lacked QuIEK’s ability to infiltrate systems as if their security didn’t exist, it opened every network up to the vulnerability of being at least visible to Eckhart. And given the man’s track record with iterative digital development, turning aspects of his various apps and services into pieces that added up to a greater whole, it was only a matter of time before Eckhart managed to build his own version of QuIEK. One that no one but he, and now Kayne, would know existed.
The “evil billionaire” cliché might have made her groan, but it just got serious.
The cold started to fade after the fifth day.
Thank God, Kayne thought.
She’d spent three days with no power, which meant no means of heating the rental or keeping herself warm beyond a small kerosene camp heater and a pile of blankets. And while she’d managed to keep her laptop and other devices powered up and her internet connection active, it was so cold in her little space that her fingers ached as she tried to work. In the end, she resorted to giving QuIEK verbal commands through chattering teeth, letting the AI show her whatever she needed as she bundled up and sipped hot soup and coffee.
Now, as the world thawed, and it looked like there might just be a chance for things to start getting back to normal, she was preparing for a little excursion.
The polar vortex, and the impact it had on Texas, had yielded her an unexpected opportunity.
Ross Eckhart had announced in a press conference that he would be visiting the new Curie Motors facility, in Round Rock, and speaking with his employees. He would do a press conference from the grounds, and once there, he would give details regarding some of his plans for helping Curie Motors employees and their families.
Again, it was a heartwarming and inspiring speech, and Kayne founder herself drawn to taking it at face value. But her continued research and profiling of Ross Eckhart had made her less sure, and more suspicious.
The troubling thing was, in many respects, Eckhart seemed to be everything he advertised about himself. Kayne had dug in on the guy for a week now, scanning every public interview and private email, scouring the files on his various laptops and tablets and mobile phones. There was plenty of “dirt.” Kayne had long ago come to the conclusion that nobody becomes a billionaire without some sort of skeleton lurking in a closet somewhere. And Eckhart had his, for sure. There were hints of dirty dealings, leveraging his wealth and influence to get his way. But most of it was aimed at people in power—senators and governors and other government types who were blocking his progress. The few times one of his companies strong-armed an everyday citizen, there was inevitably some sort of compensation made, and usually a very public apology as well.
In other words, if Eckhart ever found out that one of his business dealings had a negative impact on someone who lacked power and agency, he made it right.
That discovery irked Kayne. Because if it was true, then her current case was off to a bad start. It was entirely possible that Shai Salide’s work wasn’t stolen by Curie Motors. At least, not intentionally. And if that was true, then she might be wasting a lot of time looking in the wrong direction.
Really, it all came down to whatever was on that air-gapped network tucked away inside Curie Motors. The one with limited access that might be hiding more than she could sniff out remotely. And Kayne was determined to get to it.
But first, she wanted to meet Ross Eckhart.
She spent an hour cleaning the rental, putting everything back in place. She gathered what few things she’d brought in with her, stuffing everything into a rolling suitcase that she’d drop into a dumpster later. The electronics she broke down and put into her backpack. She’d stash that in a locker she was renting. It might come in handy later.
The little kerosene heater was the only thing she’d leave in the rental, and she touched it with an almost fond gesture. Her gift, to the next miserable soul who might have to huddle here for warmth.
With that, she left the keys on the kitchen counter, just as she’d been told to do, and let the door lock closed behind her. This had been the longest stay she’d had in one place for almost three years, and only because of mitigating circumstances. She already had multiple other rentals and hotel rooms and AirBnBs lined up, all over the area. She’d pick one as she needed it.
For now, though, she had a press conference to attend.