Johan Birch

"You've been too busy avoiding me," Petra responded.

Janine smacked her lips. "Right."

We reached the elevator doors, and I looked at the camera. "Akira, it's us, we're going to the cellar."

"What's the magic word?" Akira asked.

"We have no time for this shit," Petra grumbled. She hiked up her skirt and showed the camera some leg. "I've been working out."

The elevator doors opened with stripper music coming through the speakers.

"Really?" Janine asked after the doors closed.

"Don't even," Petra held up a hand. "The AI doesn't do anything if Johan is alone or has a male guest. I think she's jealous."

"Hmm," Janine nodded.

Aysun was vacating my chair when the elevator doors opened. "Hello, Miss Stone," she said to Janine.

"Miss Stonebrook," Janine nodded.

"Dad, the c0pperheadz are assembling, and the Birch VoIP exchange is back online," Aysun said.

"We use the same exchange as BSP," I did know that much. "Janine, try your hacker Heather."

Janine made the call, "Heather? I'm gonna put you on speaker. Johan, Petra, and Aysun," Janine replied. She listened, then set her phone down.

"Aysun, do you remember me?" Heather asked.

"No."

"You are Aysun Stonebook? Copper-color hair, hangs out in the Janut district in Turk-town?"

Petra explained in a whisper. "Best Turkish food in Los Angeles."

"That place, where you get all that luscious food that I eat off you?" I asked in a whisper. "The spicy stuff?"

"We can hear you," Aysun announced.

"I can too," Heather said.

"I know who you are now," Aysun said. "Can you patch into our video system?"

They went back and forth for a minute, talking protocols and ports. I understood some of their language, it was made of varied words in different languages, with seemingly no syntax, but it worked.

Another minute later, Aysun turned to me. "Akira is blocking Heather's connections to your backbone."

"Huh?" I asked.

"Heather wants to interface with Akira," Petra snickered. "No, that's not dirty."

"Akira?"

"Yes, Mister Birch?"

"Allow the connection, bring the c0pperheadz online as they appear," I ordered.

"Connections established."

Eleven of the screens to my left came to life, a moment later followed by a twelfth. The first eleven people were children of Jaci Stone; men and women, copper-coloured hair, all high-order mathematicians and computer programmers. The c0pperheadz: My hacker collective.

"Heather, meet my team. c0pperheadz, my friend Heather."

"Pleasure," the twelve of them said at the same time.

No, not creepy.

I sat in the so-called command chair, followed by Petra sitting in my lap. There was a lot of chatter between them, most of it in Technical Language, but from what I gathered, it was twelve against three.

Maybe.

There was a brief discussion between the twelve of them, Jaci's children and Hacker Heather, also known as n0nditz, about an intervention by a hacker known as doth_vodr.

Apparently Tara Knights' hacker handle was 'r3dgal,' and she and two other hackers named 'tra1nwr3ck' and 'b00n_kill' were the ones attacking my network. The 'doth_vodr' guy or gal was sitting on the edges of the battle, taking packet-based pot shots at both teams.

I had never been assaulted by so many english-based non-english words in my life. Petra helped keep me calm, because everything I saw on those screens made me think we were losing.

Years of research was under attack by Tara and her friends. I couldn't understand why she would try and destroy everything she said she stood for...unless...

"She's under thrall?" Petra took my thought and voiced it.

"It's been done before, Petra," I said. "It only has to be Tara, the others are just following her lead."

"Dad?" Aysun asked. "Do you think?"

"Miranda's still out there," Janine spoke up. "She's the only one who would stand to gain anything by our fall."

"What do we do?" Randy, one of Jaci's sons, asked. "I mean, r3dgal is holding up pretty good, but that's only because we're not trying to kill her."

"What?" I asked in surprise.

"We know where Tara is," Franklin said. "She's directing the attack from her home on The Coast. The array she commands is in the buildings that used to house Taylor-Wilcox. Her house itself is a hard target, protected by routers and switches connected to a fiber line and all designed to survive a nuclear blast."

"Her power supply is another story," Gerry added. "She's running 480 volt, three-phase to the house, and that system is vulnerable. If we black her out, her system switches over to the generator that is underneath her house. If we freeze her transfer switch and send a spike through the transformers powering her computers, there will be a big hole where her house used to be. The damage would be localized, but she would be very dead."

"Goddess," I muttered. "Is there any other way?"

"I've found out how she's been able to keep our AI's bottled into our arrays," Lily volunteered.

"Do tell," Darla said.

"She's using a hole in the routing system to flood our backbone switches with split packets." She must have seen me scowling at her screen. "Too much?"

"I've got this," Aysun said. "Find the holes and block them."

"Yes, ma'am," the twelve of the voices chorused.

That was creepy.

"Dad, you want the english version?" Aysun asked.

"Go ahead," Petra prompted.

"Where there are websites, there are servers. Where there are servers, there are switches. Tara is using those switches to swarm attack our servers."

"Lost me," I admitted.

"Think of the target of a swarm attack as the pitcher on a baseball field. Everyone in the stands has an unlimited supply of baseballs and they are throwing them at the pitcher. Now imagine a hundred baseball fields, our servers, being attacked by millions of people with billions of baseballs. The c0pperheadz are now working to cut off the supply of baseballs."

"Well, I never liked baseball," I muttered.

"How about a graphic?" Petra offered.

"I'll do it," Aysun said. "They're busy."

Aysun took a minute and did some typing on her keyboard. Another screen came to life, showing the analogy she had just ventured This looked precise, a map of LA, and little white balls moving up and down precise lines. The map expanded to a globe, little white balls moving up and down lines which corresponded to the cities where Birch Industries had offices.

"Tara's attacking us worldwide. She has that many... baseballs?"

"The analogy holds, dad," Aysun said. "It seems that some of these 'attendees' have been in place for five, maybe six, years."

"Liscon Switches," Darla announced. That caused a murmur from everyone else. "There was a rumor that their code was compromised by a prime number sifter that..."

"Go back to work, Darla," Aysun ordered. "I've got this. Dad?"

"Dazzle me," I chuckled.

Dazzle.I was seriously outclassed.

Petra gave me a thump on the shoulder. "You are chief, remember? You delegate. This is no different than Jason or Erin explaining motor things to you. Okay?"

She was right.How did I get here?

"Aysun?" Petra queried.

"You know what prime numbers are, you know what algorithms are, you know what encryption is."

"Yes," I replied. My daughter, Jaci's daughter, was sure to show me how they currently applied.

Another thump on my shoulder from Petra. Listen.Aysun is YOUR daughter.

Aysun shifted her look back and forth between me and Petra. "Some encryption algorithms use prime numbers at their bones. These are incredibly huge numbers... But they can be calculated."

"Like SSL?" I asked.

Aysun shrugged. "Think of SSL as a key that is two hundred and fifty-six tumblers long, and each tumbler is sixteen positions deep. That's in hex, where the numbers are not one to ten, but one to 'F.'"

"I got that," I nodded.

"Now multiply that by two hundred and fifty-six."

Shit.

"Now think of a key not two hundred and fifty-six positions long but one thousand twenty-four. Mind you, in hexadecimal."

Giga shit.

"Okay."

"Now, think of a prime number sifter as a key that can be used to take any of those locks to say...one." Aysun pulled out a lock of her hair, her copper-coloured hair.

I looked at Petra and Aysun, and all the faces on the screens around me. I understood, Jaci Stone had held the master key to a specific DNA trait. "Okay."

"Every switch made by this manufacturer, Liscon Switches, uses the same type of lock, but even with different keys Tara Knight can get into them because she has the Master Key. She must have slipped a firmware patch into those switches so she could take control of them. That is how she is using those switches against us. But now that we know how she is coordinating these attacks, we can use those same switches against her."

"But no explosions," I said.

"No explosions, I promise," Aysun nodded..

"Maybe a fire or two," Roderick allowed.

"Go," I ordered.

"Sir?" Akira asked. "She means to destroy you, this Tara Knight."

"Akira, do you know what a thrall is?" I asked.

A moment passed. Then another. "I know now."

"Put that into your pipe and smoke it. What is this building's power source?"

"I am currently powered by seventy percent solar power and thirty percent of electrical power generated by natural gas.*

"Akira, I want that second number to be as close to zero as possible. For that I need allies. Tara Knight should be one of those allies."

"I understand, Mister Birch,* Akira said.

"Good." I looked at the screens before me. Those eleven copper-haired men and women had created Akira, and she and her 'siblings' were learning.

Thirty minutes later, a white flag appeared on a smaller screen. Aysun told me that Tara was signalling her surrender. A date, time, and place appeared on the screen for a minute, then disappeared.

"It's a trap!" Janine shouted. I couldn't help but appreciate her words and the tone in which they were delivered. I was reminded of one of my favorite movies.

"We can spring the trap, to find her," I finally said.

"That's what you said the last time you went there, and you died," Petra growled. In a second she realized her mistake. Twelve faces were suddenly looking at us from the screens on the wall, another face in the room.

"Shit, Petra," I sighed.

"I'm sorry, Johan. I just don't want to lose you... Again."

"Set the meet," I ordered.

"You're not immortal, Johan," Petra whispered. "She can kill you now."

"Then let's not let her get the upper hand," I countered.

***

Against my better judgement, I met Tara at the same place where Jaci had died. "Hello, Johan," Tara said.

"No greeting can justify you," I said. "I thought you wanted the future!"

"No. Not anymore," Tara said.

"Then what do you want?" I asked.

A dilation wave went up. I looked for the source, and of course it was Harriet. "You know that she doesn't really want anything, Johan."

"And you know that I know that she doesn't want anything," I quipped.

"She's not here. Miranda, she's not here. All she wants is death and destruction, and one death compared to thousands isn't her style."

"Then where is she?" I demanded.

"Strangely enough, I do not know," Harriet admitted. "I only sensed that sphere in Australia because you were close to it. I had not known it was there before."

"Before?"

Harriet put up her hand. "Never mind that. You seem to be very good at getting secrets out of people, women especially, but what I know isn't important."

"Let me finish!"

"Tara is under thrall. She is a danger to you!"

"I know, and I need to break it," I countered.

"Johan...Thralls are deadly. Either the target or the thrall dies," Harriet warned.

"So say the old rules. Marci was broken free."

"Because Jaci was dead," Harriet said.

"Are you so sure?" I asked. "To read the books, thralls only keep the weak-minded enslaved."

"You make a lot of sense."

"Tara is smart, smart enough to be a ruler in her own right. If she can break the thrall, she will be immune to future attempts."

Harriet nodded. "It makes sense. But if you cannot break her thrall, if she kills you with that pistol tucked in the small of her back, I cannot help you. Your Revenger can only act after the fact."

"I understand."

"NO, YOU DON'T!!" Harriet shouted. "If you die here, now, humanity descends into chaos! There's no woman on Mars, no interstellar travel, nothing! We die here, humanity, twenty billion people, in less than a century! DEAD!"

I had never seen someone so rattled. Harriet was rattled enough to make my head hurt. My head had never hurt. Ever. "Let me go."

Harriet let the dilation wave go.

"So what do you want, Tara?" I asked. "Do you want the secret, the secret so that men can make war on other men and win? All the time? I am not willing to give it to you, because in doing so I will save billions of lives."

There was that pause, that same pause that Marci had right before Miranda put a gun to Francine's head and pulled the trigger.

"What makes you think I care?" Tara demanded.

"I don't know when or where Miranda got her mitts on you, but I also remember the light in your eyes when I showed you that complete solar was not only possible but sustainable. The other projects that my company has going on?"

"I know what your company is doing," Tara snapped.

"Why am I doing it?" I demanded. "Why!"

Tara put her hands to the sides of her head, "I don't know!"

"My projects are the same as your dreams, a cleaner planet, elimination of pollution, no more oil."

"You are doing it for money!"

"Tara, I am not doing it to stockpile money, I have more than enough of that. I am using the profits to develop more technology. You should know, you have spent enough of your own doing the exact same thing!"

"Stop talking!" Tara shouted.

"No. That's exactly what Miranda would want me to do," I said. "She doesn't believe in evolution, she believes in destruction. You and me, we want to make the earth a better place. For all!"

Tara dropped to her knees, hands still over her ears. I didn't move, she was going to have to break the thrall on her own. All of a sudden, Calleigh was there. She put a hand on Tara's shoulder and helped her stand.

Tara was fast, I barely even saw her pull the pistol from the small of her back. She lined it up with Calleigh's head and pulled the trigger, making my heart stop. There was no sound because there weren't any bullets in the gun. Someone, probably Aysun, had sneaked into the dilation wave while I was chatting with Harriet.

Tara dropped the pistol onto the concrete and screamed at the top of her lungs. Calleigh disappeared in a blink of an eye, evidently content that she had forced the issue.

I still didn't move. Tara had to figure it out for herself, which she would. "Wow. If I didn't know about magic, I would swear that I was in one of my movies for real."

"Well, it wasn't really magic."

"What was it then? The urge to pull the trigger on that woman?"

"It's called a thrall, Tara. And it's not magic, just magic converted to technology," I answered. "You know technology, correct?"

"Not brainwashing technology, no." Tara looked at the gun on the concrete. "I was supposed to kill you."

"I'm glad you didn't. Because I wouldn't be able to share the next phase of my projects."

"That monster probe you landed on Mars? I've seen that, you made sure that the telemetry is public."

"No," I smiled. "The one we landed on Ganymede last week."

"What the fuck?"

"I need to know how Miranda Olsen managed to snatch you from under the noses from your security. I mean to roast her, literally."

"I'll have to ask Lynn. She's not here, which means that I've given her the slip before."

Yes, that would be a problem.

***

My worst fear was the right one. Miranda had kidnapped Tara using a portal. Artemis' portal sensing device lit up the second we crossed onto Tara's property. Unfortunately, it couldn't tell us when the portal had been created. I asked Tara if we could station one of our guards with her, and she declined.

She did, however, ask us to place sensing spikes on her property. Said spikes would warn her security if any unauthorized persons crossed onto her property or into her house via portal. She asked for six, I gave her twenty.

After assuring her, which meant swearing to gaia that I wouldn't use the spikes to spy on her, Tara agreed to use them. My proviso was that if a portal was sensed, we would come in, literal guns blazing. She agreed, even giving an invitation for that specific event. I told her those terms were just fine.

Our personal paths diverged from there. Out of professional courtesy I gave her full access to the data my probes were collecting. I was already giving my friend Joseph Bruckberg and his friend Valus Scott access to the full live feeds from the Mars probes.

While NASA had landed a rover the size of an RC car on Mars, Birch Industries had landed a probe the size of a Fiat with oversized tires for a portion of the price.

While Jaci Stone would have paled, died, crossed over, came back and died again for that price tag, we had done it cheaper. The company, my company, was building on already proven technologies. We hadn't even mentioned the fact that a second probe had seeded another place on the surface, a thousand kilometers away from the primary probes landing site, with nanites.

Those little bugs, while called nanites, were actually one centimetre in size. We were hoping to build geodesic dome frames which wouldn't or couldn't be seen by Earth-based telescopes for a full orbit.

Mars has been referred to as the 'red planet' for as long as there have been astronomers. If those theories were correct, we could construct our domes with iron frames. Those frames would be just as strong as the ones we were building in the desert of Nevada.

If Erin's predictions were accurate, and they usually were, the surface was also rich in silicates which we could direct other nanites to convert to glass. The only thing that our little machines couldn't do was put the domes together.

Erin said that she had people working on that. She did give me an unusual question. When the confrontation had occurred at Taylor-Wilcox, Jaci's children had 'pushed' flares through linear folds to blind the guards. Was there any limit as to how far they could 'push' something?

I told her that I did not know. Usually when a fold was initiated, it had to be to a place or an object. Most of Jaci's children used unique pictures to guide them to their destinations, usually with an offset so that they didn't run into anything. Erin offered this: She had plenty of pictures of the Martian landscape.

My counter offer was that if it was even remotely possible, we should aim for something a little closer first. Erin agreed, saying that people had been taking pictures of the moon for as long as there had been cameras.

First, I would have to mend fences with Grace. While she spent plenty of time with Aysun, I had not seen her since our argument outside Jaci's house. Grace had been the first to venture that objects could be 'pushed' through a linear fold. As far as Aysun knew, nobody had been experimenting with that ability since the battle. Aysun offered to be the go-between, and as I couldn't fold to Grace, she could fold to me.

When Grace appeared in front of me, neither of us moved. I didn't know why, she was just standing there, studying me. She must have known about my soul, someone from the c0pperheadz had obviously passed along Petra's off-hand remark.

She closed the distance between us, never taking her eyes off mine. "I don't know whether to hug you or to slug you," she said.

"Do both," I shrugged.