But the limited numbers were also about the value of an idea, its yield as well as its transformative power. Aboye and his group couldn’t throw hundreds of thousands of programmers at the problem, as the Directorate had done before the war with its so-called human-flesh-search-machine censorship that had morphed into the massive hacker attack that opened the assault. Nor did they want to. They all knew that a great programmer was literally orders of magnitude better than a good one. And they also all knew from experience that the best way to accomplish something considered undoable was merely to bring the right minds together.
Some of the CTOs had sent their top executives, including a few billionaire founders who relished the chance to get their hands dirty again, while others sent the smelly, misanthropic coding beasts they usually hid away in the basement. The sum total, though, made Hangar One the greatest gathering of geniuses since the Manhattan Project.
The only other contribution each firm was asked to make was a single corporate jet. That was a key part of the cover. The volunteers would show up at Hangar One as if they were heading out of town, and then the jets would fly off from there to various business conferences and corporate offsite meetings. However, each jet would fly out just a few people short. It had been a perfect cover story, until the matter of pizza had come up. Daniel had solved that by creating another startup company located in an office complex just across the street. Although the business was supposedly an app maker for the health-care industry, its sole purpose was to serve as a destination for the pizza deliveries.
It had all worked so far. As Aboye waited for the test, he pinched the skin at the inside of his wrist, just as he had done as a boy when the hunger got so bad he would see double. How long had it been since he’d had to worry about his next meal? Thirty years? Forty? The familiar pain soothed his anxiety.
He had a lot to worry about at this moment. The bank of monitors along the wall in the southwest corner of the control room flashed and winked with a rainbow’s array of colors, each a hue hinting at failure.
“Here it goes,” he said to the engineers assembled in a circle at the center of the room. Together they stood, staring hard into the shifting light form in the middle of their grouping, moving their gloved hands in syncopated rhythms. They had depicted the Directorate data networks as a library. There were three levels to the holographic building, and a white-painted atrium let in an amber sunset that illuminated the central hall. The hologram rendered six of Aboye’s team in the middle of the atrium, each as a featureless black form that looked to be made of turbid smoke. The wraithlike bodies had no identifying features.
Aboye watched Taj maestroing his part, his fingers in the gloves dancing away like a conductor’s as he stood uneasily on a swiveling chair mounted on casters. It was something that he swore helped him focus, even if the risk of falling, and failure, was higher now than it ever had been. A few billion richer, he was still the same Taj that Aboye had met nine years ago during a job interview at which Aboye had told Taj he was so talented that he could not in good conscience hire him. They had been friends ever since, and Aboye now wondered if this was what he had actually wanted Taj to do all along.
“This is the jumping-off point,” said Arran Smythe, nominated by the group to be the program’s chief engineer, largely because of her comparatively calm demeanor. Outside the hangar, she worked on network design for Amazon. She was a tall, thin woman who moved with precise, choppy gestures whether or not she was working in a sim. Like the rest of the engineers and programmers, she wore the same kind of formfitting one-piece gray utility coveralls used by astronauts. That had been the Tesla team’s idea. At first it seemed to Aboye like they were playing dress-up, but over time he saw how they stood taller and spoke more plainly when they put on the suits.
“Wyc, you’re first.” Smythe’s voice almost bubbled with excitement. Aboye knew why she and the rest of them were happy. They were re-experiencing the joy of a startup, discovering what their unbound minds could accomplish.
In the holographic projection, one of the dark forms dashed from the library atrium into the shadows of the stacks. Then another.
“Taj, next,” said Smythe.
The casters on Taj’s chair began to creak and he twisted slightly back and forth as he manipulated the control rings on his fingers. What he saw on his goggles was only for him, but the jerky gestures attested to a problem.
On the holographic screen, the black forms ran in and out of the atrium, dropping off books in what was now a burning pyre in the middle of the room.
“Fudge!” shouted Taj, still the innocent little boy at heart. “Gosh-darn mother-fudging network!”
The library’s glass ceiling crashed in and water began to come through, the simulated network’s automated defenses now reacting. First came a heavy rain, which the wraiths tried to shoot fire back at, the visualization of their counterprograms, but then came a vast, unending deluge, as if a river had been diverted and was pouring into the atrium.
Taj’s chair toppled over and he tried to catch himself but landed hard on his tailbone. He rolled over onto his side, clutching his wrist.
The hologram’s library pyre was now extinguished and the black forms found themselves underwater. They flickered out one by one as the water rose quickly from floor to floor. Smythe turned off the hologram and looked at Aboye with something like shame. The automated defenses had detected and defeated them. The cone of light around them brightened slightly, indicating the test was over.
Aboye moved to help Taj up but then checked himself. Angrily, he thought that perhaps Taj needed to learn a lesson from the pain, and maybe grow up a bit. He turned his back on the group and made for the darkness across the hangar, walking past row after row of murmuring servers, the waves of warmth washing over him.
He reached the exit. He faintly heard Smythe issuing commands to the room, but the rushing of blood in his ears prevented him from understanding them.
As soon as he was outside, he sat down, closed his eyes, and covered his head with his arms. He sighed. What else could he do? This was not working out like it was supposed to.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. He sprang up and saw Taj, a white cryo-pack on his wrist.
“Is it all right?” asked Aboye.
“My wrist or the project?” said Taj. “Thanks for making sure I was okay.”
“My apologies. I didn’t handle that well,” said Aboye. “You know how I can be, and, well, this didn’t go as planned.”
“Look, there’s no sugarcoating it. We’re in trouble. Running out of time and money too,” said Taj.
“I will spend every last dollar I have,” Aboye said. “I started with nothing, so that is not my fear. I fear failure, and what it would mean for this country. We need to succeed because of the importance of our mission, yes. That is crucial. But there is something bigger on the line. Do you know what it is?”
“I’ve been going full tilt for three days. Stop with the riddles,” said Taj.
“We need to become again the country that breaks the hard problems, that sees the virtue in innovation and the reward in risk,” he said. “If we do not succeed, then I worry that all truly is lost.”
“Daniel, stop trying to put the weight of the world on our shoulders. We’ll never crack it if we think that way. We all joined for that stuff, but also for the challenge. That’s the fun part.”
Aboye could muster no reply. Instead he turned from Tai and walked slowly down the runway, gazing up at the starry sky.