CHAPTER 13
Claire was being somewhat overconfident, but not much.
Over the week that followed, she explored the Fangbook network using Reginald’s login, which Claire, on her own, thought to spoof so that he appeared to be logging in from Europe so as not to alert any unwanted attention. Reginald didn’t give her his password; she simply thought her way in. She then proceeded to post photos which she’d cobbled together from her memory, from her creative subconscious, or from nothing: Reginald by the leaning tower of Pisa, which he’d never visited; Reginald standing on the bank of a Venice canal next to a man he’d never met; Reginald and Nikki and Maurice giving noogies to a wax museum figure of Margaret Thatcher, which they’d never done. At first, Reginald asked how she was creating the images, but after enough vague, disinterested, well-duh answers involving imagining pictures in the same way she’d think a thought, he stopped asking.
Claire reported that she was getting more and more comfortable with the process every day. She said that it felt like swimming. Swimming, Reginald said to Nikki, baffled. It wasn’t like looking at a screen and changing things in the way she used to do with a keyboard or a mouse. It was more like she entered the data itself and simply pushed it around. Encryption didn’t bother her in the least. She demonstrated that she could transfer money back and forth between Reginald’s bank and Nikki’s without credentials or an EFT authorization. She bought Nikki flowers using Reginald’s credit card because she said that Reginald was almost certainly not appreciating Nikki enough. She added a period in an obscure place in a New York Times online article so as not to attract notice, just to prove that she could do it. She asked Reginald if she could change the front page of CNN to read “Go Browns,” but Reginald objected on the basis of both the attention it would draw and the fact that he didn’t like the Cleveland Browns at all.
Then, focusing in on the task at hand, Claire tried manipulating inconsequential Fangbook votes. A minor measure was placed in front of the populous by the reestablished Council a week before the election that altered training requirements in vampire bootcamp. Claire read and announced the results in the middle of the voting period, then toggled thousands of votes like little switches, changing them from no to yes… and the measure, which was going to fail, passed with flying colors.
Timken had promised that the Fangbook election system was drum tight and unhackable. Reginald searched the internet and made phone calls and read everything he could about it. He even tried to hack it for hours on end, and got nowhere. After all of his research and investigation, Reginald was eventually able to determine two things: first, although Timken had commissioned the election-specific additions to the system as well as bankrolled and championed it, it seemed that he did not, in fact, have any sort of back door access to it. And second, the system was indeed impossible to hack… except, apparently, by a young girl who didn’t need a key to get through any electronic door.
The election security issue had been pored over from dozens of distinct and independent directions. Timken had rightly assumed that people would be suspicious about a system that wielded so much power and its ability to be influenced — either in software or via plain old corruption — by any person, and specifically by the person who had pushed and funded it. Timken had gone out of his way to provide everything that skeptics would need to assuage their doubts. The lengths to which Timken had gone to assure the public that the election would be fair was, in itself, suspicious to Reginald. It had the feel of a magician who draws attention with one hand so that the audience won’t watch the other hand working under the table. It led Reginald to believe that the Fangbook system was indeed straight and fair, because it was the shown hand. The decoy had to be imperturbable and unassailable. So where was the other hand — the one that was performing the tricks?
But of course, there was no hidden hand. Timken didn’t need an ace up his sleeve because he was playing fair. It was Reginald who was cheating.
Still, Reginald pursued every angle he could conceive of — every way that Timken might be able to influence the vote’s outcome. He’d determined that the system was fair, but what about access to the data? Were there vulnerabilities with Fangbook itself? Was it possible for a network of hackers to intervene between individual voters and the system, closer to their points of access, which were less secure? Could a virus be distributed in advance of the election that could act on an individual computer’s level, casting votes for Timken regardless of what the user entered or saw on her screen? What about the vampires that were involved? Did those higher up at Fangbook have sufficient access to cause problems, and could they be bought? Could the voters themselves be influenced or persuaded or threatened? Could a person other than a given voter cast a vote for that person?
But no matter how Reginald looked at it and no matter how paranoid he was and no matter how many permutations his super-brain ran through, he could find no weaknesses beyond infinitesimal issues that would never make more than infinitesimal differences in the outcome. The election would be fair. And that was, in one sense, good news. But in another sense, it was troubling news. If there was no known way to perturb the outcome of the election, how could one eleven-year-old girl do it?
“Magic fingers,” said Claire in a fuhgeddaboutit tone of voice when Reginald expressed his concerns. Then she wiggled her fingers in front of her camera and Reginald watched as blue arcs of electricity jumped between her fingers like sparks from a Van de Graaff generator.
“When did that start happening?” said Reginald, shocked. So far, he hadn’t even been thinking of what Claire could do as magic because there had been no visible phenomena. He realized he’d been thinking of it more like computer hacking, though it seemed far more creative and far more powerful.
“It didn’t,” said Claire. “I just made your video do it.”
Reginald sighed. “Could you not do that? I’m starting to doubt my reality. I kind of need to know that what I see is real. You’ve totally destroyed the truth of ‘seeing is believing’ for me.”
“Sorry. Sure.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I promise. I keep my promises.”
Then something occurred to him. Wasn’t she pushing electrons right now?
“Have you tried other stuff?” he asked. “Stuff that looks all…”
“Like stuff a wizard would do?” she said.
“I guess.”
“Like appearing on the side of a van beside a woman in a bikini and a tiger’s head, possibly holding a laser gun that goes ‘ZAP!’?”
“Um…”
“The answer is yes,” said Claire, laughing. “What little girl doesn’t want to be able to shoot lightning bolts and read crystal balls? But so far, zilch. But that would be bad ass.”
“Claire,” Reginald said in a scolding tone.
“Sorry. That would be awesome, I mean.”
Reginald thought to have her try a few things while he watched, but there would be time for that later, after the election. He bet himself a dozen donuts that she would eventually to be able to do things like her video image had just shown. She’d probably be able to control thoughts, too. It was all just energy. And as a plus, even if he was wrong, he’d win a dozen donuts.
“But to my original point,” he said. “The election software is different from what’s been used for the smaller Fangbook votes so far. It isn’t native to Fangbook. It’s open to scrutiny but is very black box once you’re under the hood. There will be no way to determine if you can hack it until it’s up and running. Without data in it, it’s just encryption.”
“Your silly encryption is nothing to one as powerful as me,” said Claire with a mad scientist’s laugh.
“You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do. Let me at it. Let me see right now if I can get inside it.”
“Getting inside doesn’t prove that you’ll be able to influence a live data set,” said Reginald. “It’s complicated.”
“You mean that you don’t think I’ll understand it.”
“I didn’t mean that. But also yes. I don’t think you’ll be able to understand it, because I don’t. It doesn’t use encryption keys. I don’t see how that’s possible, and I’m super awesome.”
“What are encryption keys?” said Claire.
“I told you that you wouldn’t be able to understand it,” said Reginald.
A spark jumped from Reginald’s keyboard to his finger, making him jump. It was a tiny thing, no more than a static shock.
“I don’t have to understand it to do it,” said Claire.
But despite Claire’s confidence, Reginald, Nikki, Maurice, and Karl remained skeptical and nervous. None of the rest of the EU Council knew of the plan because 1) it was highly, highly illegal, bordering on treason, and 2) it seemed prudent to minimize the potential security leaks behind the whole operation. Karl didn’t believe any of it was remotely possible. Nikki was guardedly optimistic but unconvinced. Maurice was mostly apathetic, and Reginald was a basket case.
Six days before the election, the impartial committee in charge of the election announced that all voters would be required to reconfirm their identity via a genetic scan. This introduced an entire new level of difficulty and set off alarm bells in Reginald’s head. Claire would no longer be required just to manipulate a simple pool of votes once past the security. The committee had distributed devices that took a finger-stick blood sample before opening a two-minute voting window for an individual voter. Reginald knew nothing about the technology. It must electronically assay for a genetic fingerprint that was unique from person to person, but which sequence did they use? There was no way that the system was storing each voter’s entire genetic sequence. That wasn’t possible… but then, neither was encryption that didn’t use encryption keys. And what, then, did the system do with that data? Did it store the sample data beside the vote… and if so, was it time-stamped? Would Claire’s manipulations change those timestamps? Would the addition of a whole new genetic sample table (or series of tables) affect her ability to change the votes? And if it did, how could she possibly manage that much interconnected data?
“Breathe,” Claire told Reginald. “I keep telling you, this isn’t about moving numbers around. This is magic.”
“What does that mean?” said Reginald, not at all mollified.
“It means that it’s like dreaming. Do you build every element of a dream? Or do you have a full, very-real-at-the-time dream experience that you don’t question because your subconscious mind knows what it’s doing?”
“This isn’t making me feel better.”
“Reginald, I can create a video right now of you skateboarding with Gerald Ford. Do you really think I’m such an excellent artist that I know where to put those billions of pixels? Or do you think that either my subconscious mind or something outside of me might be taking the spirit of my intention and handling the details for me?”
“Make your fingers spark,” said Reginald.
Onscreen, the small girl with the charming smile snapped her fingers and there was a bright white flash, like a photo strobe.
“Did you do that for real, or was it a video effect?”
“I keep my promises,” she said.
Reginald couldn’t quiet his gut, so he fed it. He couldn’t quiet his mind, so Nikki fed Reginald’s gut, this time with nourishing blood. And ultimately, Maurice’s apathy convinced both of them that there was no point in driving themselves insane with worry. It would either work or it wouldn’t, and if it didn’t work, that was no worse than having never tried. So with an attitude of que sera, sera (which Karl informed him wasn’t even correct syntax), Reginald sat down in front of his computer on election day and waited to watch the future of the world.
He didn’t need to worry. For most of the day, Claire did nothing and Reginald heard nothing from her. The polls closed at noon GMT, and until 11am GMT, Reginald simply watched election coverage and fretted with Nikki beside him. Then a little after eleven, Claire Skyped him and informed him that Charles Barkley was now leading the election by six percent — just enough to win without being obvious, as Reginald had requested. Reginald asked if she was sure. She rolled her eyes. Reginald asked if it had been difficult. Claire rolled her eyes again, and at the same time, a video appeared on Reginald’s computer screen beside the Skype window. It showed Reginald skateboarding with Gerald Ford.
Nikki’s face scrunched as she peered at the screen.
“I thought he was dead,” she said.
“Well, so am I,” said Reginald.
Reginald, assurances and skateboarding videos with Gerald Ford aside, was unconvinced. Claire had been projecting her interpretation of the aggregate data into his computer screen all day, and he said that he hadn’t seen it tick up in Barkley’s favor. Claire told him that he was looking at the wrong data set, and with that, the window showing the Fangbook data changed. And he saw that indeed, Barkley was leading. But only by five percent.
“They really like the other guy, so new votes have already closed the gap on what I just did,” said Claire. “I’ll tweak it again as it gets closer to ending.”
The next hour passed without incident. At midnight GMT, coverage announced that polls were closed and that the counting had begun. But Reginald already had the results in front of him. Former Councilman Charles Barkley had captured forty-seven percent of the vote. Nicholas Timken had fallen short, at forty-three percent.
Reginald had ten minutes to meditate on what he’d just done — what kind of a future the Vampire Nation and the world was in for under Barkley — before the door at the top of the cathedral room staircase exploded inward and a flood of Sedition Army troops rushed in with their Boom Sticks drawn.