Double Helix Ch. 19

"Okay," I said, "but we're still missing a few steps. How did you end up here, if you were living on the streets in Minneapolis?"

Gena sighed. "Totally by chance, really. I had to meet with a paralegal from the DOJ to verify my identity so they could pay me the reward money. I almost didn't make it. I had found out by then that Norm's name had come up in the investigation, and I was already sick, deep into withdrawal. I just wanted to die. My parole officer basically dragged me there, cleaned me up as best he could. The paralegal asked for my parents' address and I told her, figuring they needed it for the reward. Instead, she got me into her car, and I found myself standing at their front door."

"She held onto my arm when they answered, I guess to keep me from bolting, and explained to my parents how meth works, how it sinks its talons into you, how the withdrawal is like a screaming nightmare that goes on for days while you claw at your skin to try to get at the bugs underneath. She told them that, most likely, I would go right back to using, but that there was always a small chance that I would stay clean. They were understandably hesitant. I had shown up at their door a couple of times before, claiming to want to reconcile. Both times, I had stolen from them and disappeared as soon as they left me alone at home."

She stared at nothing for a minute, finally taking a deep breath and eating the last of the spinach she had collected. "So, at the woman's urging, my parents took me back. I went into rehab. I paid off my debt with the reward money and put the rest into investments. I figured I would give it to my parents once I figured out a way to tell them where it came from."

"Once I got clean, I got a job working as tier 1 desktop support for a software company. You should have seen their faces when they asked me why I wanted to work there. My resume had my two doctoral degrees from MIT, which made my look vastly overqualified, but somehow I got the job. After only a short time there, I came to realize that, even if my brain wasn't as lightning fast and intricately complex as before, I still had most of my knowledge and could even reach good insights if I thought very hard about them. I made tier 3 in less than a year. I was the youngest member of the team."

I raised my brows at her. "So are you saying that you actually can build this mesh network Stan's been talking about?"

She bit her bottom lip and nodded. "Probably. I think so. It's a little more complicated than solving break/fix tickets, but I think I can do it."

I grimaced at her. "That's not very convincing. We thought we were getting a Gena and a computer tech savant. What's going to happen if you can't handle the work?"

She drew herself up and met my gaze. "I can do it. I know what's at stake. I'll work as hard as I have to. I'll get it done."

"That's better," I said. "So let's get back to it. You made nice with the parents, you had a good job, got a boyfriend-"

"I didn't say I had a boyfriend," she said, her smile coming back briefly.

"There's always a boyfriend," I said.

"Okay, I was dating someone, but it wasn't very serious. Anyway, mom got an email from Norm in February. She showed it to me and asked me what I thought, but I was suspicious. I thought it was probably someone trying to hijack her computer, so I told her she'd better delete it. Then she got another one in March, and that one mentioned me. It said I was in danger from the government. I realized then that I had been wrong, and Mar-and Norm had been trying to get a warning to me. So I figured out how to contact the Agency, and they took me in."

"It's all starting to come together," I said.

"Right. So right away after arriving at the safe house, I found out about this darknet that was built for genemods to use. You guys are our heroes, seriously. All of these safe houses used to be just little islands all to themselves, with nothing but the lousy mainstream news to connect them to the outside. You gave us the ability to talk to each other, and with people all over the world. I read about how you had built a genetics lab and how Tilly was working on a cure for Rot. You built Agora, and that helped to protect the food sellers and smugglers, which is probably the only reason half of us didn't starve over the last year. The Farm sounded like heaven on Earth. When I saw that Stan was looking for people to work on his network, I jumped at the chance."

"And so here you are," I said.

She smiled wryly. "Here I am."

I thought over everything she had said. Objectively speaking, what she had done had been terrible. I could see Norm's side quite clearly. At current rates, she could collect a bounty of over nearly two million dollars She had sold out her brother for a reward that was likely only a fraction of that.

On the other hand, she had been trying to survive a desperate situation. One of her own making, true, but she had been short on alternatives. It sounded to me as though the consequences of her bad choices had finally shocked her back to sanity, but I also knew how bad the recidivism rate was for addicts. "Tell me the truth," I said. "Would you ever go back to using that stuff?"

She gulped. "I can't say I never think about it. You get these thoughts. Maybe if I just do it once, I can stop. But that's a lie. I tried that, over and over, when I was living on the streets. I'll just do it this once, just to get over the craving, and then I'll stop for good. It never works. I can never try it again, not even once." Her back straightened and she looked me in the eyes. "And I never will. I promise you that."

I nodded. "And I believe you. First thing is, I think we need to go have a talk with Norm before he goes off half-cocked and does something stupid. That's my job, and I won't let anyone else move in on my turf."

She laughed, but then shuddered. "I've wished for so long that I could just talk to him, to explain myself, but I don't know if I can face him right now."

I stood and took her hand, pulling her to her feet. "You just let me do the talking. I know how to piss Norm off better than anyone. If all else fails, I'll just rile him up to the point that he forgets all about you."

Gena giggled. "I think that might just be worth the price of admission."

It took some looking and asking to locate Norm. We found down in the lab, working on a terminal, chatting with what appeared to be an Agency representative over the darknet.

"Norm," I said, approaching him from behind. "We need to talk."

He turned to look and leapt to his feet, his eyes snapping to Gena and back to me. "Jesus, Nock, get her out of here! She can't see this place!"

"Norm!" I shouted. "Shut up and sit your ass down! And quit it with trying to convince the Agency to take her back. They won't go for it and you know it."

Stanley and Dawn had been at the next terminal chatting over a Rot sample, but their conversation had died and they both stared at me with shocked expressions. The same expression, mirrored on Norm's face, lasted only a moment, and his jaw set in anger. "It's my job to protect the people on this farm, Nock. And right now, she," he stabbed a finger at Gena, "is a threat. I don't blame you for that, but it's a mistake that needs to be rectified."

I crossed my arms, staring at him. "So what are you gonna do, huh? Are you going to march upstairs, grab your Colt, take her out into the field and shoot her? You gonna kill your own sister? Is that it?"

His eyes went wide in horror and he looked at Gena again, as if seeing her for the first time. "No, that's...I would never-"

"She's here, you moron! She knows...where...we...live. Even if you rip out the phone and lock down the computers, she can just walk a few miles to the highway and flag down a car. If you're sure she's going to betray us, then you'd better just put her down, because that's the only thing that's going to keep us safe. And deep down, you know it. So shut up about it or just man up and do it." If I had had a gun on me, I would have pulled it out and handed it to him, but real life is rarely as conveniently dramatic as the movies.

Norm's expression hardened again as he walked forward, putting himself just inside my personal space. I could hear his muscles tensing as his hands tightened into fists. I stood over him by six inches, but he tried to make up for that with sheer force of will. "You're right," he said. "We can't send her back, and we can't kill her. But since you've taken such an interest in her, you're going to be responsible for her. If she's not with someone else, you had better be there. You're going to watch her, twenty-four/seven. If she puts a toe out of line, I'm coming down on you."

He poked me in the shoulder as he said it, and the thought flashed through my mind that I could grab that finger before he could move a muscle and throw him on his ass if I wanted to. Instead I smiled and said, "That seems only fair. Besides, I'm the best man for the job."

Norm held his ground for a few seconds longer before backing off. "And I do not, under any circumstances, want to ever hear that she's been down here in the lab. Is that understood?"

"Yes," Gena and I said together.

Norm went back to his terminal and started closing windows. I turned back to Gena, who was watching her brother with a dejected expression. I leaned close to whisper to her. "Hang on, little tomato."

She suppressed a chuckle and nodded.

"Come on, we need to introduce you properly to the Stans."

I took her through the orchard to the new house. It had two large living areas, and Stan had taken one of them over to serve as his IT workspace. He had placed three terminals there, and rigged some kind of wireless antenna and signal booster to reach our CSP's network node at the main house.

Stan stood up from his terminal and approached us. He gave Gena a thin smile and addressed me. "She's going to work with us, then?"

"I talked to Norm. He doesn't like it, but he agreed. Gena stays."

"Great," Stan said brightly, and gestured to the open terminal. "Then this will be your workstation."

I gave Gena an encouraging pat on the shoulder and left her with them. "Go easy on her, Stan. She's had a rough day."

We all had dinner in the main house that night. Alice typically had meals with her kids in their house, but Stanley, Ed, and Dawn usually ate at the main house, so we had eleven people for dinner most nights. To accommodate this, Norm had acquired a folding table and chairs that could be put away when not in use. Stanford's presence brought us up to twelve, but Gena was curiously absent.

She found me later that night in the den, going through the day's email. Most of it was break/fix requests from nodes that had experienced problems with their darknet connections. Most of those were simple: the latest patch needed to be installed or some add-on in the terminal's OS was interfering with it. A few of them, I forwarded on to Stan to look at. Gena sat waiting until I was finished, and I turned to her expectantly. "What can I do for you, little tomato?"

She rolled her eyes, but seemed more amused than offended. "I wouldn't have told you about the song if I thought you would make it my nickname. I just wanted to tell you that I can't thank you enough for what you did. You were right. You knew exactly what to say to my brother to change his mind."

"Reverse psychology," I said, laughing. "That prick tried to use the same trick on me last year. I thought it was only fair to return the favor. Ol' Norm just wasn't thinking things through to their logical conclusion. He needed a kick in the ass."

"I'm sorry if he's mad at you."

I grinned. "That's nothing. What until you see him try to throw a drunken sucker punch."

She laughed. "I can't even picture that. Norm was never much of a drinker. Or a fighter either. What happened?"

"It was all over a girl, but we talked it out and both got over it." I realized I was fudging the story more than a bit, but Gena didn't need to know all the gory details.

"He's lucky to have a friend like you."

"Yeah, don't tell anyone else, but I do care about the guy."

Gena gestured at the terminal. "What were you working on?"

I told her and she laughed. "You've got my old job."

I thought about it and nodded. "I kind of do. We started doing mass deployments to safe houses around the end of last year and ended up with about twenty thousand new nodes, except for those hosts that refused to join. I spend a few hours each day looking at this stuff, and I pass the hard cases on to Stan."

"Twenty thousand? That's a huge number of clients. The software must be rock-solid if you can handle all of the help requests on your own."

"I don't sleep, remember?" I said with a smile. "Are you all set up in the new house?"

She grimaced. "Not yet. It feels wrong, making Stanford take the bunk, but Norm wants to keep me away from the lab."

"You feel like the low man on the totem pole, huh?"

She tipped her head with a rueful smile. "Yeah, I do. Stanford is an expert in emerging encryption technologies and digital signal encoding. I'm supposed to be the expert in mesh network topology and the physical layer of the network, but it was more a curiosity for me back at MIT, and I'm ten years out of date. Stanford and Stan both intimidate me already with their knowledge, but I'm taking copious notes and trying not to show it. I'm just going to have to try work through it. I'm a little scared that Stan's going to decide I'm not up to the task."

"What's the problem? Didn't you write that paper that he really liked?"

She nodded, frowning. "I wrote a lot of papers. Dozens and dozens of them. I dabbled in all kinds of tech, but back then, I just understood it intuitively. Ideally, a mesh network is just one big peer-to-peer network, where every node is its own bridge or switch and can connect with other nodes and route traffic dynamically. If you build it right, adding more nodes actually makes the network faster and more powerful. Contrast that with star topology, where several nodes in a local network connect to a central hub, which then connects to other hubs through backbones, forming an internetwork. Adding more nodes means more traffic through the hub, so you eventually have to upgrade your hub."

She gestured expansively. I had noticed that she was one of those types that used her hands to talk. "The hubs and backbone lines are big and expensive, but it fits the paradigm we've been on for the last forty years or so, centralized computing power and thin client terminals. Stan wants to create a highly distributed network with a large number of less powerful computing machines spread out across it, and bypass the computing service providers completely."

"Sounds like you have a decent grasp of it," I said. "Makes sense even to me."

"Oh, the idea is simple enough, but implementing it is going to be a huge challenge, and the problems start at the physical layer. Since our network isn't very dense, we need to find a way to either send high-power radio signals over large distances, maybe using microwaves, or get a lot of very small, cheap transceivers to relay weaker signals where there aren't fully functional nodes in range. And I mean a lot. Worse than that, we've got to be able to build and operate this infrastructure in secret. It's not as though we can just start throwing thousands of hundred-foot-tall microwave antenna towers up wherever we like in the landscape. I start thinking about the magnitude of the problem and my mind just loops around and around with no solution."

"Have you met Tilly yet?" I asked.

"Yeah, briefly. She and Stan built the darknet, right? But now she's busy with other projects."

I raised my voice a little. "Tilly, can you come here, please?"

"Sure, be right there," came the faint response, distorted by the distance and reflections off of irregular surfaces.

Gena tilted her body from one side to the other, as if searching my head for an earpiece. She looked at the open doorway, then back at me. "Um...'

I held up a finger to forestall her, enjoying teasing her. Apparently she wasn't yet up to speed on all of my abilities.

"Hey, Nock," Tilly said, arriving more than a full minute later, "Gena. I was down in the lab. What's up?" Gena's puzzlement continued a moment longer, but then I saw her eyes widen in realization.

I said, "Gena here has been trying to figure out how she's going to get this mesh network to operate, and she's having trouble imagining how we're going to make it work when we've got all these nodes that are so distant from each other."

Tilly nodded her head thoughtfully. "It's not an easy problem to overcome. I would focus on existing off-the-shelf technologies and build something that works on a smaller scale, get a proof of concept. For the next phase, you could deploy in a big city and link up a few hundred safe houses that way. After you've proven that it works, then we should be able to scale that up. We might use a hybrid approach, maybe go through an encrypted private WAN at first, like we do now. Then you need to solve the problem of making those long-haul jumps, but that's probably a few years off. We'll have time to work on it."

Gena stared at Tilly, wide-eyed. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"You won't mind giving Gena here a little mentoring from time to time, will you?" I said.

Tilly shook her head. "No." She paused. "I mean, no, I don't mind. I wanted to stay involved anyway, but I don't have time to put the work in. Just let me know what you need, okay?"

Gena smiled and nodded and got an answering smile from Tilly.

"She's great," Gena said to me after Tilly was gone. "That's my brother's girlfriend, right?"

"You know she can still hear you?" I said.

"Ugh. That must get awkward."

"You'll have the same problem with me," I warned. "Almost nothing goes on in this house that i don't know about. My parents were paranoid, though they had good reason to be. They made sure no one would ever sneak up on me, in the dark or while asleep, and that I could readily defend myself in a fight. Not having to sleep means I can get a lot done in a day, and the night vision can be useful, though I sometimes wish it wasn't so obvious." I waggled a finger at my eyes as I said it.

"I think your eyes make you look cool," she said. "You could be some kind of genetech ninja assassin."

I laughed. "No one's ever mistaken me for a ninja. The Stans have it pretty good, I think. Tall, strong, beautiful, capable, and nothing that makes people around them uncomfortable."

"I unnerved a lot of people in my time," she said. "People don't expect a ten-year old to be an expert in astrophysics. And that was just a hobby."

I looked at her and nodded. "I guess that made you a bit of an outsider too."

"Yeah," Gena said, and then hid a yawn behind her hand. "Sorry. It's been a long day. I guess I should go get my room set up. Today's the first time in a very long time I won't be going to bed hungry. It really is a privilege to be here."

She stood and came towards me. I watched her, sensing the tension in her posture. Anxiety? Fear? I couldn't read people like Tilly could. "Thanks again. For everything." She bent and pressed her lips to mine, her eyes closed. It lasted only a second or two, and wasn't the sensual kiss of a lover, but it affected me far more than it should have. She had taken me by surprise, and I had let my block slip. It had been years since I had kissed a woman, for any reason, but my body apparently remembered.

"Uh, you're welcome," I said with a shrug, hoping she didn't notice that anything was amiss.

She gave a little sigh that someone without enhanced hearing might have missed. "Good night, Nock."