Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(61)

Evan stood up. Laced his hands at the back of his neck and breathed. “All this…”

Joey completed the thought. “All this is because of you.”

He looked at her.

“Van Sciver’s killing his way to you right now,” she said. “All of us—these five names and however many more Van Sciver doesn’t have yet? We’re all on borrowed time.”

“How do we help that kid?” Evan said.

“We find him.”

“We can’t compete with Van Sciver’s resources. I have access to databases, but he’s at a whole other level.”

“You’re right.” Joey was chewing her thumb again, drifting behind the table, her eyes intense. “When it comes to David Smith we have an absence of data.”

“Right,” Evan said. “How do you look for an absence of data?”

“Deep-learning software,” she said. “Believe me, that’s what Van Sciver’s using.”

She looked over at Evan, saw that he wasn’t following.

“It’s machine learning using advanced mathematics,” she said.

“That doesn’t help.”

She leaned over the table, peering at him from above the laptop screen. “It finds patterns you don’t even know you’re looking for.” She took another turn around the table, passing behind Evan. “Between the name David Smith, potential fake names befitting a thirteen-year-old white kid, facial characteristics, his birth-certificate information, physical developmental changes, purchase patterns for foster kids fitting his analytics, past locations, receipts, meds, and thousands of other factors we’re not aware of but can be extrapolated from on the basis of that thin file”—she jabbed a finger at the screen—“let’s say that there are five billion combinations of data. Being conservative.”

“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.”