Pennsylvania Omnibus (29 page)

“And from that you conclude… what?”

“That you knew I’d be doing this. That you planned it.” He
pointed his finger at his younger brother. “This whole thing… all along. Your
plan, ever since I first came here, wherever
here
is, was to get me into
the system to help you. And you knew I’d never do it unless I decided to do so
on my own. Everyone kept telling me, ‘We can’t tell you anything’ and ‘Your
brother wants you to see it for yourself.’ And Dawn would say, ‘If you get
sterile information without the context you’ll make wrong decisions.’ What that
really meant was that you wanted me to be your puppet. You wanted me to hack
into Transport’s system, for some reason I don’t know yet. And I did exactly as
you planned.”

Amos waved his hand dismissively, as if to say
none of
that matters now
. “So you saw the code. How did you figure out that it was
me?”

Jed let out a derisive chuckle. “Changing the subject,
huh? Your code was AT10S? Amos Troyer, tenth seat. You don’t think I remember
school, Amos? It wasn’t that long ago for me. We Amish may only go through the
eighth grade, but I was only eighteen when I left home. In fact, as crazy as it
sounds to me now, I’m still only eighteen.”

Amos smiled, but there was pain in that smile. “And I’m
sixty-seven, brother. Sixty-seven
real
years old.”

Now it was Jed’s turn to wave off Amos. He wasn’t in the
mood to either embrace or sorrow over his brother’s troubles just yet. He put
up his hand and continued his explanation. “Mrs. Holtzclaw numbered the desks
in that one-room schoolhouse, and we had to file in and out of class by number.
Our personal number—in your case 10S—was on anything and everything that had to
do with school.  Mine was 15S. That little bit of information came in handy
just a short while ago when I needed to get into your files about me.”

“You’ve read your files, then?” Amos asked. His face was a
mask. Jed couldn’t really read what was going on in his brother’s mind, except
that none of this seemed to surprise him. It was almost as if Jed had completed
some farming task, and now his brother was just pressing him to find out
everything he’d done and in what order.

“None of this is that difficult, Amos,” Jed said. “You
planted the code so I could see it. The rest of it follows easily.”

Amos shook his head. “Easily for
you
, Jed. Because
of who you are and what you are.  It’s like when we used to line up dominoes in
patterns and we’d have so much fun watching them fall. The first one has to go,
brother. If the first one doesn’t go, the rest don’t fall. You found and
knocked over the first domino. It only seemed easy to you, well… because you’re
you.”

Jed crossed his arms and just stared at his brother. There
were so many things he wanted to say, but he didn’t want his emotions to take
over.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” Amos said. “You were saying
about the files?”

Jed uncrossed his arms and began to pace back and forth.
“Yes. First I had to hack into your files,” Jed said.

“I see.” Amos had the air of a teacher interrogating a
student. “And how did you manage that?”

“I used what I knew of you. I tried AT10S for your
password, but that didn’t work. So I tried ‘Zoe’ and that didn’t work either.
Then I tried ZOE10S. Still no luck. So then I took a wild shot at it.  When you
were twelve father bought you a cat. You called him Mr. Claws. So I typed in
MRCLAWS and I was in.”

“Not very clever of me,” Amos said. “I should have set a
better password.”

“Unless you
wanted
me following this trail,” Jed
said. “Unless you
wanted
me rummaging around in your files. Many of the
things I find seem to be placed there purposely for me. Like maybe the window
from our barn I found in Pook’s antique store. Maybe that was the first
domino.”

Just the hint of a smile touched Amos’s lips. “So what
happened next?”

“I was in the door, but I couldn’t get anything to work.
Your password had to be matched with data from your BICE, so next I had to look
for a back door.”

“And how did you locate it?”

“From your interface, and using your AT10S code, I went to
our old farm.” Jed noticed the smile start to spread across his brother’s face.
“And then I went to our bedroom. You kept a coffee can—identical to the one I’d
smashed flat to make the windowpane. You always stashed it under the bed, as if
you didn’t think anyone would ever think to look there. And you kept all your
secrets in it.”

“I was a simpler person back then,” Amos said, looking
down. “And what did you find there, brother?”

“When I opened the coffee can, your whole system just
opened up to me. I had free access.”

Amos was still smiling, and it irritated Jed to watch his
brother gloat. It was as if he was proud of Jed or something.

“You’re still my little brother, Amos,” Jed said. “Don’t
gloat.”

“I’m just very pleased with you,” Amos said. “You’re every
bit as smart as I remember. It’s like I’m back in our room, listening to you
explain how you solved a particularly perplexing puzzle.” Amos reached up and
dried a tear that had slipped from his eye. “You were my hero, Jed. You still
are.”

Jed didn’t reply. He just studied his brother. He still
wasn’t sure what to think about everything that was happening, so for a minute
he just stared… until his brother broke the silence.

“So then, you read my files?”

“Not a lot of them. I perused them. That was when I had
the idea that Transport might have someone looking for Dawn. I went back to
your files and started with every document that began with a ‘D’, and went
through until I found your personal file on her. Her last name is Beachy. She
was married. You presided at her wedding.”

Amos was silent now. His eyes scanned his older brother’s
face. Jed wondered if the system was properly rendering his own real
reactions—showing his brother something of what he was feeling.

Jed removed his hat and rubbed his head. “Once I found
Dawn’s personal code, I changed it just a bit to make it look suspicious—though
I’d stripped it of any real data—and then I took it back out of your BICE and I
planted it in some innocuous history files I’d found on Transport’s open
servers. Then I sat back and waited to see who would show up. When their
spiders appeared and gathered the new data, I followed them back to their
source. Something Dawn told me struck me then. She said, ‘Every system or
program has a back door.’ I’d found one into your BICE, and I figured that if
there was a back door into the TRACE Commander’s head, then there must be back
doors everywhere.”

“So you went searching for a way into their system?”

“Yes. It actually wasn’t that hard to figure out,” Jed
said.

Amos began to pace back and forth with his hands clasped
behind his back. Jed noticed that the old man’s jaw worked as he thought,
something he remembered young Amos doing when they were boys back on the farm.
“We’ve obviously been in and out of their system for decades,” Amos said, “but
I’m a little surprised to see you got in so easily. But maybe I shouldn’t be
surprised at all. How did you do it?”

“First, I stripped myself of all identifying information.
Then I started by going to TRACE’s hubs and looking at what information they
were getting when they interrogated their own spiders. I rightly guessed that
Transport’s spiders were probably programmed by the same people, so I knew what
type of information the portal would be looking for. Then I disguised myself as
one of their spiders and I walked right in.”

“The back door was the front door,” Amos said.

“Yes, but I found out later that Dawn had done some
hacking work on their system. She’s fundamentally rewired their security
infrastructure so that if her own scanners detect a break-in, the standard data
circles back around and obscures the breach. Basically she created a cloaking
device for anyone at all who wants to hack into Transport’s system.”

Amos shrugged. “Who else would want to do such a thing? I
mean… other than us?”

Jed put his hat back on and stuck his hands deep into the
pockets of his broadfall pants. “I don’t know. I’m not an expert on any of
this. I’m just pointing out that if
I
could get in there, then just
about anyone else could too.”

“Are you suggesting that there could be a third party
involved in our little war?” Amos asked.

Jed cocked his head to one side and then nodded. “I’d be
surprised if there wasn’t.”

Amos pulled up a white screen and then turned to face Jed.
“Tell me about the okcillium in the roads.”

Jed pulled up a document, and an embedded video began to
play. It showed Transport machines ripping up the highways after the law was
passed outlawing private transport. He muted the audio and spoke over the video
as it played.

“Okcillium—the very existence of it—had always been a very
closely held secret,” Jed said. “How you and your people in TRACE are getting
your okcillium, I haven’t discovered yet. But when I started really digging
into Transport’s
real
files—not just the ones they’ve sanitized and
altered for public consumption, but their internal files—I saw some things that
made me believe that recently—
very
recently—they’ve come upon a new
source of okcillium.”

“A new source?” Amos asked.

“Actually, a very old one. It turns out that America’s
earliest highways, including the interstate highway system, used a very
specific mineral aggregate in their road base. A substantial portion of that
mineral aggregate was mined in Oklahoma.”

“The only place in the old world where okcillium has been
found,” Amos added.

“Right,” Jed said. “Okcillium was first identified in
2005, but it was in such trace amounts that it was almost disregarded, except
as a scientific oddity. The U.S. government classified as Top Secret everything
to do with okcillium, and since there were no large deposits discovered, very
few people even cared about the discovery. Non-governmental scientists weren’t
even let in on the find.”

Amos rolled his hand to indicate that he knew all of this.
“Get to the part about the roads.”

“There isn’t much to figure out. Most of the okcillium in
Oklahoma was dug out prior to anyone knowing what it was or that it even
existed. It was in the mineral aggregate that went into the interstate
highways. And now Transport knows about it, and they’ve gone back to rip up the
roads and dig it out,” Jed said.

Amos nodded, but he didn’t speak.

“I guess I don’t see the point in sucking me into all of
this, Amos,” Jed said. “Dawn could have done everything I’ve done, and probably
faster.”

Amos smiled. “That’s where you’re wrong, brother. Dawn
would never have found out about the roads.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she would never have thought to look back in
2050,” Amos said.

There was silence again for the space of a few minutes,
and during that time a very rudimentary avatar appeared in the room. Amos
turned to the avatar and greeted it. The avatar had no identifying
characteristics—just a plain face and no expression.

“Ah… Mr. Rayburn,” Amos said.

“It’s Pook,” the avatar said, “or just Rayburn. I’m not an
officer, sir.”

Amos put his hands behind his back and approached Pook.
“Well, that is an oversight I intend to remedy, Mr. Rayburn.”

“Why does his avatar look that crude?” Jed asked.

“Mr. Rayburn?” Amos said. “I take it that you’ve met my
brother, Jed?”

“We’ve met,” Pook said without any emotion. Pook was all
business.

Amos turned back to Jed and explained. “Mr. Rayburn does
not have a BICE implant. The rendering you see here is done by a special
helmet. He is also wearing—temporarily, of course—an electronic bracelet I
invented that reads the movements of the ligaments in his hand. He can use his
hand to interact with the system.”

“Interesting,” Jed said. He nodded at Pook. “Well…
Mr.
Rayburn
…”

“Pook.”

“Okay, then. Pook. If you’ll just give me a moment with my
brother, I want to finish up and then I have to get back.”

“Yes,” Amos said. “Jed here has
farming
to do.”

It was a jab, but Jed ignored it. He actually wanted to
hurry and go look for Dawn, but he wasn’t going to let anyone know that. Pook’s
avatar nodded, and then went dormant. Once it was clear that Pook was no longer
there, Jed turned to his brother.

“TRACE,” Jed said.

Amos looked at Jed, but didn’t speak.

“The name of the resistance is ‘TRACE,’” Jed said. “I find
that fascinating. All the documents I read said that only
trace
amounts
of okcillium were found in 2005.”

“A coincidence.”

“Or maybe not. Maybe it’s like that window in the basement
of Pook’s shop.”

Amos shrugged. “And what else, brother?”

Jed fixed his gaze on his brother once again. “I also find
it interesting that Transport has suddenly come upon a source of okcillium, at
the same time that you seem to be flush with it.”

“The coincidences are unrelated,” Amos said. “Correlation
does not necessarily imply causation, and all that.”

“I have to go harrow Matthias’s new field,” Jed said.

“Send him my best.”

Matthias rubbed his head and sat
back in his chair. “This is a pretty fantastic story, Jed.”

“I know it is,” Jed said.

“And by ‘fantastic,’ I mean unbelievable.”

“I know.”

Matthias stood up and went to one of his kitchen cabinets.
He pulled out a bottle of some clear liquid and a glass, then sat back down at
the table.