“Conservative.”
“Yes. Without a machine learning system, it would be impossible to correlate all that data, let alone zero in on David Smith under his new name in his new hiding place.”
“Okay,” Evan said. “So what’s the best way for us to do that?”
She paused long enough to flick a smile his way. “Someone who knows where he is—”
“—and a hammer,” Evan said. He stood up. “Seriously, Joey. Can we break into somewhere that has these capabilities and run the data?”
“No. This kind of processing takes time. Days even.”
“What equipment do we need?” he said.
“A pile of hardware,” she said. Mutual exasperation had given the discussion the tenor of an argument. “And like, say, a shit-ton of common graphics-processing unit chips. The mathematics involved in machine learning take advantage of the massive parallelism of the thousands of cores in those things. We’d need giant-ass GPU arrays, computer towers stuffed full of graphics cards, linked together with a high-speed InfiniBand network, running at eighty gigabits and—.” She stopped, looked at him. “More stuff I’d explain to you if I thought you could understand.”
“So how do we do that? Right now?”
“Raid the computer-graphics lab building at Pixar.” She studied his expression. “Joking.”
Frustration mounting, he drifted over and leaned against the couch. The cushions and pillows had been rearranged for her to sleep there, a T-shirt balled up for a pillow.
He stared across at an old-school photograph of David Smith on the screen. He wore a dated bowl cut and a collared three-button shirt with a frayed shoulder. Lank blond hair with a cowlick parting his bangs, hazel eyes, pleasingly even features. His gaze was lifted from the camera, as if the photographer’s last directive had caught him off guard. He looked lost. They always did.
“I’m not gonna let Van Sciver get to that kid,” Evan said. “So give me an answer for how to find you what you need to figure this out.”
“It’s complex shit, X,” she said. “It’s not like we can just drive through a Best Buy. Your average person doesn’t have—”
She stopped, mouth slightly ajar. She bowed her head, pinched her eyes at the bridge of her nose.
“Joey?”
“Don’t talk.”
“Joey—”
She held up a hand. He silenced. She stayed that way for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is longer than it sounds.
And then, with her face still buried in her hand, she said, “Bitcoin mining.”
“What?”
“You do bitcoin mining.” She lowered her hand, and her face held something more than joy. It held triumph. “No government regulation, no oversight.”
“Yes.”
“Which means you have a 2U rackmount computer bay.”
“Two of them.”
Her eyes were shining. “I could kiss you. Figuratively. Each rack has sixteen graphics cards. At four chips per card and 2,048 cores per chip, that gives us 8,192 graphics cores per card. We have thirty-two cards, which makes”—she closed her eyes again, her lips twitching—“262,144 graphics cores.” She looked up. “That’s a lotta horsepower.”
“So I can just use my bitcoin-mining setup?”
“No.” Her irritation flared again. “Everything has to be reconfigured.”
Evan looked at the Snickers wrapper on the kitchen counter, the T-shirt pillow on the couch. “Pack up your stuff,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“I just came up with a new Commandment.”
At this her eyebrows rose. “A new Commandment? What is it?”
“‘Don’t fall in love with Plan A.’”
42
Undone by Target
Joey stood in the great room of Evan’s penthouse in Castle Heights, staring at the tall ceiling, her mouth gaping. After the places she’d lived, it probably seemed like the Serengeti to her.
Watching her, Evan felt discomfort beneath his skin, an awareness of his posture, how he was holding his arms. He could count on his fingers the number of people who had been inside 21A, and not one of them had known Evan’s real identity.
“By bringing you here, I am giving you my absolute trust,” he said. “Trust I have given no one before. Ever.”
Joey was taking a pass through the kitchen, trickling a finger across the countertops, the island, the Sub-Zero, like a housewife at an open house. But at his words she paused and looked over at him. The weight of the moment was potent enough that it quieted the air between them.
“What if I don’t deserve it?” she said.
“If you didn’t deserve it, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“This place,” she said. “It’s like something made up.”
“What did you expect?”
“Judging by your taste in motels and your lovely safe-house decor, I thought you lived in… I don’t know, a shoe.”
“A shoe.”
“Yeah. But this? This is like a Louboutin.”
“What’s that?”
“A fancy shoe they talk about on TV.”
“Oh.”
“Where do I stay?” She looked around. “I guess I could sleep on the dumbbell rack.”
He hadn’t thought about it. “There’s a couch in the reading loft.”
“The reading loft. Of course.”
He pointed at the steel spiral staircase. “Full bathroom, too.”
She gestured tentatively. “May I?”
“Yes.”
She twisted up the stairs and disappeared.
Another human. Out of sight. Inside his place. Doing whatever humans did.
He looked over at the vertical garden. It looked back. He wondered if the plants were as uncomfortable as he was.
“This might be a very bad idea,” he told them.
He thought again of David Smith in his frayed school shirt and swallowed his own discomfort.
After a moment Joey came back downstairs, running a hand along the curved handrail as if she wasn’t sure it was real.
“Is it okay?” he asked.
“It is,” she said, “more than okay.”
“Let’s get to work.”
“Okay. Quick question: Where are the extra sheets? And pillows?”
He looked at her.
“Like for guests,” she said.
“Guests,” Evan repeated. He gave a nod. “We’ll figure that out later.”
Joey turned to the east-facing windows, gawking at downtown in the distance. The discreet armor sunshades were raised, the glass tinted. She took a step closer. The entire wall was transparent. At least in one direction.
She said, “You can see into so many apartments from here.”
Evan said, “Yes.”
She set her palms against the Lexan pane. He made a note to wipe off the smudges later.
“Did Jack teach you about the Mangoday?” she asked.
“Genghis Khan’s cavalrymen.”
“Yeah.” She laughed, her breath clouding the glass. “He said they were the first elite special-operations force. They fought without fear, beyond the limits of the human body. Know how Khan trained those warriors?”
“Built a regimen based on starving wolves.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The hungrier a wolf is, the braver and more ferocious he gets.”
“You’re saying that’s what we are.”