Instead of examining the metadata of the undeciphered messages, I decided to analyze the deciphered ones, those we had cracked and read. When I did so with Shaunessy’s comments in mind, the correlations practically fell into my lap. It was so obvious, I couldn’t believe no one had seen it before now. As soon as we cracked a code from a particular source, they either changed the code they were using, or else the information passed with that code stopped being useful. Or worse, the new information derived was misleading or false.
In any one instance, that behavior didn’t set off any alarms. Codes changed, the usefulness of intercepted data changed, nothing was completely predictable. It happened. In aggregate, however, looking across all the messages received and how they changed in response to our knowledge of them, the conclusion was irrefutable. As soon as we cracked any one of their messages, the Ligados knew it.
I showed Shaunessy what I’d found, hoping that she would point out a problem with my work, some kind of self-referential mathematical error that implied a conclusion that the data didn’t support. She couldn’t.
“We’ve been infiltrated,” she said. “There must be infected people who are working here, staying quiet, but passing the information out to a Ligados network of some kind.”
I shook my head. “It could be. But it seems too fast, too thorough. It’s more like…” I stopped, considering. An image flashed into my mind of Paul, visiting the NSA, standing in this very room, before we had any idea of what his infection could mean. Of me showing him the server room. Of Paul, dropping to the floor and gazing through the grates at the bundles of cables connecting the thousands of server racks to each other and to the rest of the world. “Oh, no,” I said.
“What?”
I jumped to my feet and strode toward the server room, my heart thundering and heat flooding my face. I stabbed my numeric code into the keypad at the door, but the light flashed red. I tried again, but my shaking fingers stumbled, and I hit the wrong sequence again. The lock beeped, warning me, and flashed red again.
“Let me,” Shaunessy said. She entered her own numbers in rapid succession and the light flicked to green. The door made a clunking sound as the electromagnetic bolts released, and Shaunessy pushed it open. A blast of cool, pressurized air ruffled our hair. I slipped past her and ran down the short flight of steps to the ground level of the vast room. I tried to picture where Paul and I had been standing. It couldn’t have been far.
Most of the squares that made up the flooring were a dingy white, opaque, but spaced at regular intervals were grates that allowed a dim view of the hundreds of cables snaking their way underneath the floor. I ran to one of these grates—the same one, I was pretty sure, that Paul had peered into on his visit, and yanked it up. The sections of floor were made to come away easily, allowing technicians access to the wires underneath when necessary.
I tossed it aside, where it clanged against the floor. The hole was unlit, giving me little clear view of what was down there. When Paul was here, he had dropped to the floor so quickly I thought he had fallen down. He could easily have used the motion to drop something—or many tiny somethings—into the hole.
I put my hand into the hole and used the leverage to pull away one of the white squares next to the grating, then another and another, widening the hole. Now the bright LEDs on the ceiling illuminated the space, and I could clearly see what I had feared. I didn’t stop. I pulled away section after section, hurling them to the side, exposing the depths of my folly and the degree to which my brother had manipulated me from the very beginning.
Thousands of tiny white mushrooms quilted the crawlspace like a dusting of sugar, stretching out under the floor as far as I could see. The crisscrossing cables were tightly spiraled with thin, translucent filaments, wrapping around the wires like vines around a tree. They were hopelessly tangled together, and in some cases it was difficult to distinguish the mycelium from the wires.
Shaunessy stopped at the edge of the hole I had made in the floor, her eyes wide. “What does this mean?”
I rocked back on my heels, breathing hard from the effort of tearing away the floor. “I think it means we’re in trouble.”
An alarm pierced the cavernous space. Shaunessy held her hands over her ears. “I think you’re right!” she shouted over the din.
The lights went out, leaving us momentarily in pitch darkness until the emergency lights switched on, bathing the room in an eerie, cave-like glow. “Time to go,” I said.
We ran for the door, careful not to fall in the hole I had opened in the floor. The distance wasn’t far, and the emergency lights, though dim, gave us enough illumination to see where we were going. On our way to the exit, I remembered the steel cage that Melody had told me was hidden in the wall above the doorway, designed to fall in the unlikely event of an assault on the building by external forces, protecting the information inside. No sooner had the thought entered my mind than a light bar over the door glared red.
“No!” I ran full out, but I had only reached the first step when the massive portcullis smashed into place with an impact that shook the floor. The sound repeated around the giant room as similar steel barriers fell, blocking all the entrances to the server room and its precious cache of data. And trapping us inside.
I took the stairs two at a time and yanked stupidly on the steel bars, but they didn’t budge. Melody and Andrew appeared on the other side, faces grim with concern. Melody started to speak, but I cut her off.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Don’t wait for us. Get everyone out while you still can.”
CHAPTER 26
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Shaunessy said. “A fungus may resemble a computer network, but it’s organic. It communicates through nutrients and enzymes and chemical neurotransmitters. It can’t interface with an Ethernet cable or make sense of network protocol.”
“It doesn’t need to,” I said. “This cable is unshielded. That means the hyphae wrapped around it are bathed in the electromagnetic radiation coming from those wires. It’s what we sometimes do to tap enemy networks.”
“But we know the protocols. We know how raw signal is converted into useful information. The fungus doesn’t.”
“Again, I don’t think it needs to. It’s a giant neural network. Data goes in, the network responds, and then it gets feedback. The feedback enables it to strengthen neural paths that give favorable results. It doesn’t need to understand the data in order to learn from it. It’s the same behavior it uses in a forest, only with a different kind of data. Paul talks about it ‘learning’ and making ‘coordinated responses’ and ‘collective decisions,’ but it’s not really deciding anything, not like we do. It’s just strengthening pathways that give it the best feedback and culling those that don’t.”
She thought for a minute. “I don’t buy it. The data running through these servers affects things far away. Equipment off site, communication with other agencies, the indirect effects of human decisions based on the data. I don’t see how just accessing the data would be enough, not without the intelligence to interpret it at some level.”
I looked around. “Where is everyone else?”
“Who?” she said.
“The server staff. There are always people in here, maintaining the racks. Where are they?”
“They must have gotten out.”
Understanding dawned in both of us at once. “They were infected,” I said. “That’s the other piece of the puzzle. The fungus did have intelligence to help it understand what it found.”