The Road to Hell (18 page)

“
Look, I’m sorry,” said Harrison. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest. It’s just, when it’s all exposed, it’s like a black hole. It just sucks you right in.”

As hard as he tried to clear himself, Harrison simply sank further in the mire. Rosie had her hands settled on her weighty hips in defiance, ready to swat him again.

“
Come on, guys,” Harrison cried, appealing for some support from the men. “I’m only saying what you're all thinking.”

“
Now would be a good time to be quiet,” said Brains, breaking his silence.

Helen turned toward Harrison abruptly with a scow on her face. She was clearly offended.

“
Please,” Harrison implored. “You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t mean anything by it, honest. You’re a pretty girl.”

“
Harry,” added Brains. “You’re making things worse.”

“
If anything,” Harrison continued, “take this as some kind of compliment.”

“
Harry,” repeated Brains rather sternly.

“
Men,” Helen finally said, unable to find anything more appropriate than that one word disclaimer.

“
You should know better,” said Rosie, pointing her oversized fat forefinger at Harrison.

“
Don’t be too hard on Harry,” said Brains. “He thinks with his mouth. But I must agree. He’s only saying what we’re all thinking. As pretty and innocent as that top may seem to you, Helen, it’s like waving a red flag to a bull.”

“
But I’m not trying to be a-”

Brains cut her off gently, resting his hand on her forearm.

“
You’re not trying to be anything other than who you are,” he said softly. “And you’re a wonderful, beautiful person with a beautifully exquisite mind.”

“
Do be aware,” he added with the advice of a sage. “Not everyone sees the world in the same light. What’s innocent for a woman can be sensual for a man.”

“
Yeah, yeah,” said Harrison, getting excited, jumping down off the bench and pointing his finger at Brains. “That’s it. That’s what I meant. Exactly what he said. That’s exactly it.”

Harrison was never the most eloquent when he was flustered, Brains mused.

Rosie looked at Harrison out of the corner of her eye with displeasure and then turned back to the sizzling bacon. The fried eggs were over-cooked. They’d probably taste like rubber by now, which was just fine by her. With a vengeance, she flipped them over onto a plate, added the bacon and slid the plate across to Harrison.

“
You can get your own cutlery.”

Helen looked at Harrison with a sense of understanding while his eyes dropped to the floor in shame, not knowing where to look now. He fumbled with the kitchen draw as he grabbed a knife and fork. Helen reached over and picked up her jacket from off the bench. Although it was hot with the sunlight streaming in the window, she definitely felt more comfortable with her baggy jacket on.

“
I need some coffee,” said Harrison, resigning from the debate.

Rosie nudged him with her hips as she reached over for the coffee percolator.

“
Let me guess,” she said with a twinkle in her eye, already seeing the lighter side of things. “You’d like it white, sweet and weak, just like your women.”

Harrison smiled. It was difficult, but he managed a grin.

“
Nah,” he replied, catching on to the light-hearted lifeline Rosie was tossing him. “Not quite. But I do like my coffee like my women. Black and strong, and with a kick that keeps me going all… night… long...”

“
You wish,” said Rosie in her fiery southern accent. “There’s just too much loving here for a scrawny little white boy like you.”

Brains let out a deep, chesty laugh.

Even Helen smiled, which was a relief to Harrison.

Susan said, “You guys are so funny together, like a couple of old hens.”

Ramon and Philippe were back at it, analysing the traffic streaming in from the cube, bantering with each other about technical issues. Harrison sipped the coffee Rosie handed him. It was strong all right, but it tasted good. He took a bite of eggs and bacon before moving around the other side of the table, carrying his plate in one hand and his coffee mug in the other.

“
So what the hell is on there?” he asked with his mouth full, glad to have moved on, peering over Brains’ shoulder and looking at the data cube sitting on the quantum access tray attached to the computer. The chewing annoyed Brains, but he held his tongue, answering with a single word.

“
Nothing.”

“
Nothing?” asked Harrison.

“
Absolutely nothing,” said Helen, looking somewhat cross-eyed through her coke-bottle glasses and feeling a little more at ease now the conversation had moved back to the cube. Her jacket was zipped right up to the nape of her neck. She reached out and touched on a variety of three-dimensional objects in the hologram as she added, “that’s what makes it so interesting.”

“
It really is too early in the day for me,” said Harrison knowing he was going to regret the explanation that Brains was sure to follow with. He put his coffee mug on the table and took another bite of bacon. The eggs tasted like an old boot so he left them alone.

“
Six hundred twenty terra-bytes of blank space,” said Brains.

“
I’m guessing that’s a lot.”

“
It’s a lot,” said Ramon. “All the books in the Library of Congress only amount to about thirty terra-bytes of text.”

“
Ok, so it’s empty,” added Susan, somewhat intrigued by the discussion. “So what’s the big deal? Don’t they all come blank from the factory?”

Helen adjusted her glasses as she replied. “It’s interesting because even unformatted cubes have something on them. The process of nano-building a drive cube leaves background noise on the media, like static on a holovision set, random garbage. But this baby’s completely clean. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Even formatted cubes have some data anomalies on them, they’re just too big to be absolutely squeaky clean, but this one is.”

“
So if it’s got nothing on it,” asked Harrison. “Why did Artemis hide it?”

“
There,” said Philippe, pointing to a compressed block of zeros in the three-dimensional hologram streaming out of the computer.

“
Looks like a glitch in the header segment,” added Ramon.

“
But even that doesn’t make sense,” said Helen. “It’s a single byte, one byte. What can you encrypt in a single byte?”

“
Hmmm,” said Brains, lost deep in thought.

Harrison took another bite of bacon trying to remember what the hell a computer byte actually was.

“
Why would Artemis go to all this effort for a blank cube?” asked Brains rhetorically. “He's deflecting. I think he's using camouflage rather than security. Maybe it’s not encrypted. Maybe it's a ruse, and it's right there for all the world to see, but we, and everyone else, are looking for the wrong thing?”

“
What do you mean?” asked Philippe, intrigued by the thought.

“
I mean, we’re assuming it’s encrypted because that’s how you hide information, but what’s the greatest encryption.”

“
No encryption at all,” said Helen as the concept dawned upon her. “So you're thinking security by obscurity?”

“
Maybe,” replied Brains.

“
I don’t get it,” said Susan. “Why would you go to all this trouble and not encrypt your data?”

“
Because that’s what they’d expect,” said Brains. “Everything can be hacked. Given enough time and enough processing power, there’s nothing that can’t be broken because ultimately, everything has to be encoded according to some particular pattern to begin with. If one person can encode it someone else can decode it, it’s just a matter of time and resources.”

“
Right,” replied Ramon, picking up on the logic. “But every decryption routine you run on unencrypted data is bound to fail because there’s no encryption to start with.”

“
Now you’re getting warm,” said Brains. “It might just be a case of exploiting our awareness of the need for security to send us off on a wild goose chase, to blind us from what's right before us. It's not what you'd expect and that's what makes it so effective, so secure.”

“
Whoa, whoa,” said Harrison. “You’re saying there’s no encryption. Then why can’t we see anything?”

“
Yeah,” added Susan. “Didn’t you say there’s only one byte on there? Isn’t that like only one character, like the letter A or B or something like that? What is one letter going to tell you?”

“
Ah,” replied Brains, madly tapping on the keyboard, pulling up historical stats from the global library, “But that’s the beauty of it. The greatest ciphers are the simplest; the ones everyone else over looks.”

“
I see where you’re going with this,” added Helen. “You’re thinking there’s a different octal base.”

“
Precisely,” replied Brains. “We work on a 256 bit byte, so this looks like a single character to us, but data hasn’t always been represented that way.”

“
What?” asked Ramon. “Are you thinking of a 64 bit byte or something?”

“
You’re on the right track,” replied Brains. “But think smaller.”

Pages of information flashed before Brains as he searched the central computer looking for information on octal base types to analyse their single byte of information.

“
There,” he said, pointing at a holographic image. “The Eighty-Eighty-Eight.”

“
That’s the first processor to use a multi-thread pipeline architecture,” said Philippe. “But it’s ancient, a prehistoric dinosaur. They haven’t used those in over a hundred years.”

“
Exactly,” replied Brains. “It’s the first processor used by IBM in the personal computer. And it uses an eight bit character set, which means there is potentially thirty-two characters hidden in our one little two-hundred-and-fifty-six bit byte”

“
That is primitive,” cried Helen. “An eight-bit byte. How did they handle formatting and font types?”

“
They didn’t,” said Brains, “They didn’t have to or need to. All they needed was the raw data. Initially, everything used a DOS system default.”

“
Really?” replied Helen. “No embedded font sizes, no styling or weighting at all?”

“
Nope.”

“
No metadata?”

“
None.”

“
Damn,” said Helen. “That's actually quite clever when you think about it in this context.”

Harrison looked at Helen in awe. Not because of what she’d said but because she actually understood what Brains was going on about.

“
It makes sense to me,” he added, lying, still trying to figure out the relevance of an empty data cube.

Brains had his head down. His fingers flashed over the keyboard, typing in an algorithm to convert their single byte into eight bit blocks and then run that against the 8088 ASCII character set.

“
There,” he said triumphantly as the holo-screen changed before their eyes into the resulting characters. A single word and a set of numbers appeared on the screen.

No one said a thing.

After a few seconds, Harrison spoke.

“
How sure are you of this?”

“
100%”

“
What does it mean?” asked Susan staring at the word. It was a name, displayed on the hologram along with a handful of digits.