Welcome to the penultimate chapter of “Root Two.” You’ve been waiting so patiently for answers, and now your wait is over.
If you need to catch up, find:
[Est. reading time: 8 minutes]
Certainty is a powerful lever. Without it, I wouldn't have dug deep enough to find what I was looking for.
Even before Jared floated the idea of a counterfeit, I had looked through the call log in my own system's memory, hunting for suspicious abnormalities.
The clue was in the timecode.
It was so subtle I had completely missed it the first time, and would have missed it again if I hadn’t decided to go back and check all the other entries in the log, and measure the time between the call and response. As expected, they were all very similar — within less than a single standard deviation of the mean. Which made sense. I had a gold cast connection in my apartment, so there should be very little fluctuation in bandwidth.
But the mean elapsed time between call and response was not a number that I had memorized. Why would I? Now that I had it in front of me, however, the anomaly was perfectly clear: the call that got me into that room to meet KrisLove took almost exactly twice as long as the mean. It was, within about a millionth of a percent, exactly double.
I formed a hypothesis: my system had made the call, gotten a denial response, and then immediately made the call again, which is when it made the connection that the log showed. That meant that somehow the denial response had been deleted.
The main problem with this theory was that it seemed impossible that my system could have been hacked with such depth and precision.
Thankfully, there was always a public log of these kinds of transactions somewhere, even if it had been taken out of my own system with a scalpel. All I had to do was track down that record and convince the AI security to let me have a fresh copy to examine, which wasn't hard since the question I had was about my own system.
A few minutes later, I was looking at a clone of the log I had just been pouring over.
Except, of course, for that missing entry. Clean as you please, there it was: the denial response.
Another machine had intercepted my system's call, basically said "Nope, try again," and then rerouted the next call to something that looked identical.
Which is how I wound up in a counterfeit CrossWorlds virtual restaurant, painstakingly tracking a sequence of 42 irrational digits deep inside the decimal of the square root of two, sitting across from a girl who may or may not have been scamming me.
To find out who exactly had rerouted me took more effort than examining public logs. The AI I had been working with denied my request on the grounds that I was trying to access someone else's personal log data. But I was good at driving AI's crazy, so eventually I got on a call with an actual technician.
"Why would someone do that?" he asked, mystified.
"I don't KNOW. That's what I'm trying to figure out. That's why I need access to the IP that phished me!"
"This seems like something you should take to the police."
I laughed at him. Despite enormous public investments in digital security, our best hope was still private, decentralized, self-correcting networks. Crime was relatively low, because those networks were really good at preventing malicious behavior outright, or pinging the police with relevant information in the cases that weren't preventable. If there was one thing police WERE good at, it was the punishment part.
But the police would never get pinged about this because as far as the AI was concerned, all the IPs were friends, and everybody involved trusted everybody else. Nothing to see here.
"Listen to me, let's just use some human logic here, OK? I'm looking for an entity that my own system trusted enough to follow down a rabbit hole. That alone should let me pierce the veil of anonymity, right?"
"I...guess so..."
"The person who did this has had ROOT ACCESS to all my personal data for DAYS. Do you understand what I'm saying? The only way I can figure out what else they've done is to find out who hacked my system and why. Just give me the other IP address, the one that rerouted me, and I'll do the rest. Please?"
I was impressed with myself. I managed not to sound like I wanted to tear his face off.
Probably because he was more sick of me than I was of him, he relented, and sent me the information I was looking for.
Can you guess who owned that mystery address?
Here's a hint: it wasn't KrisLove.
"Hey Cyn, lookin' fine!" Hemmy said with a big smile as soon as he saw me.
He didn't have time for more than a couple of protesting sounds before I was grabbing his shirt and using my entire body weight to lurch him off his chair.
"Whoah whoah whoah!" he cried.
I put a finger in his forehead. "Tell. Me."
Bert was watching now. Same expression as always.
Hemmy shrank under my finger, guilt furrowing his brow.
"What? What? I don't—"
"TELL ME!" I roared as my fingers went into his neck. Not to strangle so much as to claw at some soft piece of him. To hurt him.
"I'm sorry!" he shouted.
I had been in the grips of near total insanity, the victim of ruthless gaslighting, and with his admission of guilt, the madness popped like a balloon.
I let Hemmy go and stepped back. Bert was standing up, looking like he wanted to leave. "You stay here," I said.
"Bert wasn't part of it," Hemmy said.
"It." I repeated the word as a demand.
Hemmy stared at the floor for a good long stretch before he finally said, "It was a lot of money."
I leaned against the wall and sank to the floor. I don't think I could have stayed upright if I tried. My best friend. A lot of money.
"Just tell me what you did."
It didn't take long for Hemmy to get through the highlights, but they came with a dizzying volume of self-defensive tripe, so I'll summarize.
It was preFORMA. They had reached out to Hemmy before we even signed and offered him a truly remarkable sum of money (much, much more than they were paying us for the review) to help them phish-hook me using that counterfeit VR location.
While I was there with KrisLove (who wasn't involved, as far as he knew), he was able to use the baked-in malware preFORMA had provided to get root access to all my files. That's how he covered his tracks by juking the activity log, and yes, that's also how he went in and deleted the recording I had saved. He thought I might drop the whole thing if the video was gone. Conveniently for him, I had decided to blame myself for that.
And those 42 numbers coded into the flickering candle? A differentiating tag that was only supposed to be recognizable to someone who was looking for it. Any normal person never would have noticed.
OK, so why did preFORMA want access to my system? I could just as well have guessed that part. They planned to deploy a different contract into the CrossWorlds ecosystem than the one I actually got to review.
It was a scam. They were planning a scam. If they pulled it off, they would be able to siphon assets out of millions of wallets before anyone realized what was happening. Preventing this kind of thing was the whole reason companies like preFORMA had to use third-party validators.
Like us.
"But we're only one validator," I said. "Did they pay off all the others, too?"
Before I’d even gotten the question out, my mind was racing even further ahead. When the truth came out (which it inevitably would), the reputation of any validator who had taken a bribe would be completely nuked. I couldn't imagine many of them would be willing to accept that risk for any amount of money. And it would only take one whistleblower to blast the whole scheme apart.
"They didn't have to," Hemmy said. "They got phish-hooks into every validator's system but yours."
I allowed myself a private moment of self-congratulation that my security was apparently impregnable. Well, almost.
"Then why didn't they just move on without us?" I asked.
"Because you're the best."
I shouted a mirthless laugh.
"But it would have been all of us," Bert said. I had almost forgotten he was there. "It would have been PokkoDev's reputation, not just Cyn's."
"No," Hemmy said. "They told me it wouldn't come out. It's built to run like vaporware, like a ghost. No harm no foul."
Bert frowned at him, probably thinking what I said out loud, "You're an idiot."
Of course I'd said that a hundred times through the course of our friendship, but this was different. This time I meant it.
The words hung in the pained quiet for a while as we all processed Hemmy's personal and professional betrayal. The friendship was over. Rage competed with grief to overwhelm me. It was too much to absorb, too much to process.
"I'll terminate the agreement," Bert said. My senses were so choked I almost didn’t hear him. "And we should send a message to CrossWorlds,” he added, turning to his screen.
"No," I said. Bert turned back to look at me. "We're not gonna do that."
The blunt-force shock of emotional trauma would have to wait. Now that I finally knew the rules of this shitty game, I decided there was still time to win.
The next part is the end, so this is your last chance to bring someone along with you to avoid that sad moment when you finish a story and there’s no one around to talk about it with.
Wow. Wow. This is one of those where as soon as next week comes out I want to reread the whole thing knowing who knows what and who doesn't - feels kinda inception-y in that way.
Super pumped for the finale!