Ross Eckhart Private Office | Curie Motors Facility
“Sir,” one of the security detail said. “There’s something you should see.”
Ross Eckhart still didn’t like being called “sir.” It had felt weird to him for nearly all of his adult life. No matter how much money he made, no matter how many businesses he built, no matter how many times his face appeared on the news or his voice echoed back to him from an interview, Eckhart always felt like people who called him sir were either addressing someone else or being contemptuous.
Sometimes the latter was true.
It had been about an hour since he’d managed to escape the press and the public, and to duck into his private office in the Curie Motors facility. And this really was his private office—not the Executive Suite he used when he was entertaining investors or other CEOs or even just the media. This little space, tucked into a corner of the ground floor of the Curie Motors building, was a replica of others he had scattered among all of his various businesses. It was a largely utilitarian space, with a drafting table and a workbench dominating one whole wall, and research materials adorning all the others. If anything, this looked more like the space he’d started in—a tiny garage apartment in San Francisco, where his landlord had forever been threatening to kick him out for being late with rent or, sometimes, for setting the place on fire.
These little offices were replicas of the very space where all of this had started for Eckhart. A humble space, too small for much more than him and his obsessions. It was comforting to be in such a humble setting. It was a reminder that billions of dollars shouldn’t change who he was at the core, if he was determined enough to keep his values in check.
It was kind of an indulgence, otherwise. And a private haven to retreat to, when he’d extroverted enough for one day.
Usually, no one bothered him when he was in here. And he would have preferred to have a couple of hours alone, to come down after the press conference. But security always had a pass on interruptions. Eckhart had learned years ago that in this business, in any tech industry business, the key to keeping things from going sideways too fast to handle was to let security types have their say and their way. Paranoia could be very useful.
He waved for the man enter and took the digital tablet when it was handed to him. He watched the footage, then looked up in surprise. “Who is she?”
The man shook his head. “We’re not sure yet. We’re trying to run facials, but it’s like there’s a glitch. She looked dead into the retinal scanner, but we show no record of it. Every interaction with those scanners is usually recorded, but there’s nothing.”
“Which camera is this?” Eckhart asked, pointing to the tablet. The footage was weird—like a recording of a security monitor, taken from a handheld camera.
“The stairwells have three sets of cameras at each landing. One is networked, connecting to the general system. The other is infrared, also networked. The third is direct, connected to a DVR and monitors from inside the air-gapped lab. No network. Your rules.”
Eckhart nodded. “I see. And let me guess… the networked camera and the infrared camera aren’t seeing anything?”
The guard nodded. “It’s like she’s invisible. To the networked cameras, at least.”
“She’s using some kind of live masking,” Eckhart said, awed. He studied the woman on the screen. She looked familiar, but he hadn’t quite clicked to who she was yet. The footage hadn’t given him a clear image of her face, just quick profiles as she moved past. “This is the second floor. Did she come down from the third?”
“Yes sir,” the man replied, nodding.
“And she had a badge?”
“Yes sir, and she passed the biometric scans.”
“The stairwell camera on the third floor is hard wired, isn’t it? Direct line to the DVR?”
The security agent thought for a moment, “Yes sir, I believe that’s correct.” He immediately took out his phone and made a call. After a few short moments there was another knock on the door, and the agent answered, taking a tablet from the guard outside.
He handed it to Eckhart. “Every time they try to send any video of her over the network, it vanishes.”
Eckhart nodded. “I don’t know how she’s doing it, but it’s impressive. She’s live-masking herself out of any footage, and whatever she’s using is doing it in real time, across the network. We’re never going to see her that way.”
“This was shot on a tablet that isn’t on the network,” the agent said, handing it over. “Handheld, but it should be clear enough.”
Eckhart took the tablet and opened another video clip. This one was a shot of the third floor doorway. Sure enough, the door opened, and the woman stepped through, holding a file folder and a cup of coffee. She must have been nervous, because she paused and leaned against the door. And in that moment, she tilted her head back, giving the camera an unobscured view of her face.
“Alex Kayne,” Eckhart whispered.
“Sir?”
He looked up at the security agent. “Tell security to start quietly locking down the building, especially the first floor. Get someone on every exit and stairwell. She’s headed for the air-gapped lab. Let her. But once she’s in, surround it. No one gets in our out without my say so.”
The guard nodded. “Do you want us to call the police? FBI?”
Eckhart considered, then shook his head. “No.” He looked back at the footage. “I want to talk to her.”
Air-Gapped Lab | Curie Motors Facility
Something was wrong.
Kayne checked her phone. QuIEK wasn’t indicating anything, and as far as she could tell there hadn’t been any alarms or other signals. In fact, she had nothing to go by, as far as why she was suddenly feeling her guts twist. It was just… instinct.
PaPa Kayne had always taught her to listen to that instinct. You’re body and your mind know more about the world than you do, he’d say. He was a man who had lived by his gut instinct and intuition all his life.
Kayne had, too. In fact, gut instinct and intuition were sort of the secret sauce of how she’d invented QuIEK in the first place. Because while it was true that she had mad coding skills, she would be the first to admit that she was not the world’s best programmer. She wasn’t the super-hacker that the FBI and other federal agencies made her out to be, either. She was just someone who had a decent level of skill, who also listened to her gut and made intuitive leaps.
And though she wouldn’t exactly say that QuIEK was just an example of “lucky guesses,” she knew that it had come about as a sort of synthesis of ideas—most of which were based on her intuition and instincts.
So Kayne trusted her gut. Instinct had saved her a million times since becoming Fugitive Number One among the nations alphabet agencies and law enforcement the world over. She listens, when she got that nudge. And now, as she made her way closer to her target, instinct was telling her that something was up.
The door to the air-gapped lab was ahead of her. She still had half a dozen ways to escape, right now, if she needed to. All of them involved running, but at least she’d brought the right shoes for that.
The trouble was, if she ran now she’d blow this opportunity. And given the level of security in this place, there was no way to know when the next opportunity might come, if ever. If she was going to get whatever records were inside that vault, and find a way to help Shai Salide, this was the time. It had to be now, instinct or no instinct.
She dropped the file folder and coffee cup and tucked her phone into her pocket. Time to keep her hands free.
The door to the lab had the same biometric security measures that she’d encountered at the third-floor stairwell. She scanned her card, palm print, and retinas, and got the same blue glow and tiny-harp welcome. She opened the door and slipped inside.
There was a loud thunk from the door, when it closed behind her. It coincided with a thunk in her chest.
Something was definitely wrong.
Moving cautiously, Kayne stepped deeper into the lab, watching for any sign of doom approaching. Her paranoia sense was tingling, big time, and she knew that ignoring it was a bad idea. But she was in it now. No turning back.
Oh hell, let’s just turn back, she thought.
She turned and pushed the bar on the door.
Nothing happened.
She pushed again, harder, but it wouldn’t budge.
She took out her phone and accessed QuIEK, looking for any sort of release for the door. No good. The lock appeared to be on a direct connection to some switch within the facility, and there didn’t appear to be a network linked to it. It was effectively deadlocked.
She cursed herself for being stupid and tried the door a few more times. When it still wouldn’t give, she turned back to the room she’d worked so hard to get into. She took a few deep breaths, made herself calm down, let the adrenaline flow through her until it began to fade, at least a little.
Nothing to do now but face whatever came next, she decided. She stepped forward and began moving cautiously down the corridor and out into the lab itself.
One of the reasons Kayne had chosen to infiltrate on this particular day was the fact that most personnel were still off site. Those who were returning were primarily out on the assembly and manufacturing floor. There were people in the offices on the levels above, but not many. Enough to provide her with the camouflage she needed to get in without standing out as an intruder. And the air-gapped lab had limited personnel most of the time anyway, so she’d gambled that it would be the last space to “fill up” as people returned to business.
She’d apparently been more right about that than she’d realized. As she made her way deeper into the lab, the space began to feel eery and creepy. The lights were dimmed, with only a few overhead panels lit for security and safety. The few offices and cubicles she passed were all darkened and empty. The only sounds were from various machines and devices running throughout.
According to her 3D map, the server room was up ahead and on the left. That was where she had determined she’d find the data that could link the stolen patents to Shai Salide, and possibly others as well.
Since Kayne had alarms going in her head anyway, and she was pretty sure she was on the verge of being caught, she might as well try to complete the mission—some good should come from all of this effort. And if she was about to lose her freedom, she’d go out doing the job.
No sense being sneaky when no one’s around, so she moved at a brisk pace now. She made a rapid circuit through the labs and offices, and in a moment she stood before the door she was looking for.
She hesitated.
There was no sign of locks or scanners or anything preventing her from opening that door. There were no windows, either. And, scanning through QuIEK, there were no cameras inside. At least, none that were networked. No eyes for her to see what lay on the other side.
She was about to go in blind.
Her paranoia sense shifted from a tingle to an impending migraine.
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and opened the door.
The room was empty.
Not literally empty. The room was filled with dozens of server racks, each containing rack-mounted CPUs and hard drives, and thousands of twinkling lights that pulsed on and off in an indecipherable rhythm. It was like seeing a time lapse of a city skyline at night, a digital urban landscape populated by beings made of pure data.
Her favorite kind of room, traditionally.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, then got to work. If she was caught, she was at least going to complete her mission. Because the data she needed was here, and QuIEK could copy and offload it and follow through on her directives, even if she was chained to a wall somewhere in a federal prison.
There was no WiFi network associated with these servers, and she had no way to physically plug her phone into any of the systems. But she’d thought ahead on this.
Though the servers were not accessible via an external network, they were networked to each other. So, accessing one would give her access to all. Handy.
The next bit was a little more complicated.
When most people think of wireless data transmission, they’re usually thinking about either WiFi or Bluetooth. These are the two most common names for referring to wireless data, and from a public perception the two are unique and distinct. But the reality is that both are simply forms of radio transmission. And just as with FM or AM radio, there is a transmitter and a receiver, and if both are tuned to the same frequency, communication is possible.
What many people do not realize, however, is that the physics behind radio also apply to smaller systems. In digital electronics, there are millions of tiny “antennas” at work all the time, in the form of circuitry and components. There’s a certain amount of “bleed” that happens as data moves within a network. IC chips, like all things that use electricity, have an electromagnetic signature. And that signature pulses and changes as the various gates open and close—virtually speaking.
QuIEK was built as a quantum-based artificial intelligence. Effectively, rather than relying solely on the binary states that most computers used—ones and zeros, switches that go from on to off and back again—QuIEK used four quantum states, or what was known as a “qubit.” And though it might seem that with four states, instead of two, you’d basically just get twice the computing power, there was a concept known as “superposition” that made it possible to stack operations, and get far more out of a processor than one might expect.
It could get complicated—the understatement of the millennium—but in general for every 1 or 0 in a standard operation, QuIEK could apply hundreds of additional states beyond “on or off.” And those increased states added up to giving QuIEK the ability to process far faster than a standard computer.
All of that was the heady, sciency, brain-melty stuff. But what it meant, in this exact moment, was that by placing her phone close to one of the CPUs, and allowing QuIEK to use the phone’s various built-in radio antennas and sensors, it could mirror the flow of ones and zeros, and interpret those millions of binary states as raw data.
Basically, QuIEK could read the server’s mind, if it was in close proximity. And not only that, it could interrupt and insert itself in that flow of data by transmitting its own signal via EMF, and effectively take over the system.
Digital mind control.
It took a beat, but Kayne had worked ahead on this, setting QuIEK up with parameters for what she needed so that it would already know how to prioritize the data stream. Rather than burning time having to interpret the data from the servers, she had QuIEK simply copy all the data into Smokescreen. There, in her own private cloud space, thousands of microcomputers all networked together and running QuIEK could make short work of deciphering and translating all of those files and searching for what was relevant.
Ideally, Kayne would return to one of her rentals now, and bundle up in a warm blanket while she sipped hot chocolate and sifted through the files and the results that emerged with the highest relevancy scores. And, if she were so inclined, she might use anything she found to help nail Curie Motors and Ross Eckhart for corporate espionage and other nasty stuff.
But as the door behind her clicked and opened, and the negative pressure of the server room definitely shifted, first her ears popped, and second she realized there would be no blanket, no data-sifting, and no hot chocolate.
Surprisingly, now that the data she was here for was safely copied into Smokescreen, her paranoia sense settled down a bit, and the alarm bells from her gut went quiet. She felt a serene sort of calm come over her. Reservation and resolve regarding her fate.
She’d been running for a very long time. It was inevitable that she’d eventually run too far to stay lucky.
She turned to face what would surely be a well-armed group of security personnel or police officers or even FBI agents. She wondered, briefly, if Eric Symon would show up.
But instead of a gaggle of armed personnel, there was only one man standing in the doorway.
Ross Eckhart.
“Hello, Alex,” he smiled. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to meet you.”