“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.”