The Oracle Year(57)

At each desk sat a technician, occupied with monitoring a different section of the world. Staffman eyed his crew suspiciously.

It was a solid group of coders, all handpicked, but that didn’t mean they could do as well as twenty copies of himself would have. This was delicate work, and if one of his subordinates screwed something up, the Coach sure as hell wouldn’t hold them responsible.

Staffman turned his attention back to his screens, flickering his eyes across them for anything out of the ordinary, until he was momentarily distracted by movement in his peripheral vision. He looked up and froze.

A large glass window took up most of the wall at the back of the room, where people could observe the goings-on in Staffman’s lab, if they were so inclined. On the other side of that window, smiling, stood the Coach.

Staffman froze, his hand halfway through its journey back to the peanut butter jar.

The woman made a motion toward the door with one hand, a sort of “mind if I join you?” gesture.

Staffman gave the Coach what he hoped was a genuine-seeming smile and waved for her to come in. She gave a hearty nod and disappeared from the window, entering the room a moment later and striding to Staffman’s desk. A few of the technicians glanced up as she passed, then returned to their work when they saw it was just an old woman, hardly worth their notice.

The Coach wore a simple gray dress with a navy cardigan. The expression on her face was the definition of nonthreatening. Staffman felt like he was going to throw up.

“Dr. Staffman,” the Coach said. “Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand. I’ve got a pretty good idea where it’s been.”

Her gaze shifted to the jar of Jif, and she chuckled. Jonathan smiled weakly.

“Tech team working out all right?” the Coach continued.

“Yes, they’re all good people. No worries there.”

“Good, good. Real glad to hear it. Now, Professor, tell me what it is you’re doing. Looks like you’ve got something up and running here,” the Coach said, turning the monitors on Staffman’s desk slightly to get a better view.

“Ah, yes,” Staffman said. “That is, I think I have a way we can access the Oracle’s systems.”

“Well, of course you do. Although I seem to recall you told me that was impossible when we first started discussing this project. And what did I say, Dr. Staffman? Nothing’s impossible. Not one thing.”

As always, whenever the Coach pulled out that little chestnut, Staffman was tempted to list any one of a hundred things that popped to mind immediately that were, in fact, scientifically impossible—surpassing the speed of light, a human mating with a crocodile, proving the existence of God—but he refrained.

“That may be true, Coach, but there are things that are so improbable that they might as well be impossible. That’s the real problem with the Oracle’s systems. They’re brilliantly organized. I can see the whole structure, but I can’t get into it. Not easily, anyway.”

He reached for a pad of paper and a pencil sitting to one side of the desk and drew two circles on it, of equal size. He labeled one with the word SITE and tapped it with his pencil.

“This is where everyone is focusing their attention—all the hackers around the world, big and small. Everyone wants to figure out the password to access the Site, to alter the text. Put up their own predictions, maybe. It’s the most visible part of the system, and anyone who breaks into it will have bragging rights like no operator ever has. It’s a big target. An obvious target, and it’s well protected. I’ve seen this type of system before. The password is generated by a code phrase, and without that code phrase . . . forget it.”

The Coach made a “get on with it” gesture, her eyes focused on the second, as-yet unlabeled circle. That’s how you could always tell what the Coach really was; what she wore, how she talked—none of that was her. Her eyes, though.

“But we don’t care about the Site,” Staffman said. “We don’t want bragging rights. We just want to see behind the curtain, to figure out who the Oracle is. That’s why I’m putting my efforts here.”

With that final word, Staffman moved the pencil tip to the second circle.

“You see,” he went on, “the Site comes from the Oracle. It leads away from him, out into the world. What we want is something that goes to him.”

He wrote the word E-MAIL inside the second circle and underlined it.

“Somehow, somewhere, the Oracle is receiving all those e-mails. Must be millions by now. Hundreds of millions. That’s an enormous amount of data traffic, which can be hard to hide. The e-mail address is the soft spot, and that’s where I’m hitting him.”

He outlined the E-MAIL circle several times, creating a thick, dark border around the word.

“His people know it, too. The security around that e-mail address is a big brick wall. Bricks made out of lead and steel, with big scary spikes on top. Much heavier than on the Site itself. Essentially unbreakable, at least in any reasonable amount of time.”

The Coach finally spoke.

“But you just told me you got around all that. How?”

Staffman laid down his pencil and looked up.

“I borrowed a concept from SETI—you know, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?”

“I’m familiar with it. They aim antennas at the sky, listen for messages from little green men.”