The Oracle Year(72)
Staffman’s mouth twisted. All this way, everything he’d done, everything he’d have to live with for the rest of his life—for a dead end.
“This is where the questions went when people sent them to the Site. They came to this printer—it must have an Internet connection—and then they were printed. The machine just went ahead and did that until it ran out of paper.”
“I understand that, Dr. Staffman. I would like to know why the Oracle did this.”
Staffman squatted down, inspecting the printer.
“I . . . don’t know, Coach. Maybe the e-mail address was a ruse of some kind. Or . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The Coach grunted, her disapproval clear. Staffman heard her speak quietly to one of her men.
Staffman focused, trying to think through the system, trying to understand why the Oracle would have set it up.
He moved laboriously to the back of the machine, shoving away drifts of Oracle questions in order to access the printer’s ports—and then he saw it.
Staffman reached down and plucked a thumb drive from a USB port on the back of the printer and held it up. He smiled.
The Coach’s man returned with the security guard. Staffman walked out of the unit, holding the flash drive carefully, cradling it like a robin’s egg, only dimly aware of what the guard was telling the Coach.
“I’m sorry,” he heard him say. “This tenant paid in cash for a year, up front. We take names and contact information, but I’ll be honest with you . . . we don’t verify any of that for cash transactions. We only do it if they’re paying with credit. You can have what I’ve got, but I wouldn’t expect it to pan out.”
“Security footage?” the Coach asked.
“We only keep it for two weeks,” the guard answered. “And I can tell you, no one’s been in this unit for a lot longer than that.”
“Well, that is not very helpful,” the Coach said, her tone dark. “Not very helpful at all.”
Staffman tuned out the rest of the conversation. He was sitting on the cold ground outside the storage unit, one of his notebook computers open on his lap, poking around inside the flash drive. It wasn’t even encrypted.
They probably couldn’t, he thought. The printer’s too dumb to deal with encryption.
The drive held just a few very simple lines of code—macros, operating instructions telling the machine how to manage its print buffer—its short-term memory.
The printer was set up to receive jobs via e-mail. Ordinarily, those tasks were stored in an onboard hard drive, which allowed for a great many options for the printer’s operators. Many jobs could be queued, or they could be retrieved and reprinted if an error occurred. The code on the flash drive told the printer to bypass that system entirely. All incoming e-mails were sent directly to the printer’s buffer where they were held only long enough for the job to be printed, then erased.
He had assumed something like this would be the case when he first cracked the Oracle’s e-mail address. He’d expected a massive storage system holding terabytes of data—all those e-mails, stored in a huge database. Instead, he’d seen something tiny—well under a hundred megabytes. That meant, probably, that the e-mails were being offloaded somewhere else, but the network trail had stopped dead. So the e-mails were either being deleted, which didn’t make sense, or they were being transitioned to hard copy . . . they were being printed.
Staffman didn’t know why the Oracle had chosen to set things up this way—he presumed that the Oracle, or his people, had intended to clear away the printed e-mails on a regular basis, but obviously that plan had faltered in some way.
Not that any of this was useful, nor would it help him locate the Oracle.
He looked up at the Coach, who was giving instructions to her men. The woman paused and looked at Staffman. Her gaze was cold, sharklike. She held Staffman’s eyes for a moment, freezing him down to his spine, then turned back and continued talking to her team.
He knew how the Coach worked. Do what she asked, and you would be rewarded, comfortable for the rest of your days. Fail her, and even if she let you live, she would use her apparently endless levels of influence to ruin your life, so that the next time she came calling, you’d be so desperate that you would do whatever she wanted, without question.
Staffman turned his eyes back to his laptop, scanning through the code on the flash drive for anything that could help him—any clue at all—but there was nothing. It was just two lines of incredibly simple programming.
But . . . no. There was more—a few lines of header text, the sort of thing many programmers inserted into their code as a sort of signature, the same way e-mails might have a generic sign-off at the end of the relevant text. Staffman hadn’t even registered it at first—it was so common that he skimmed over it without thinking, looking for the meat of the program, the lines that actually did something.
But he looked now, and he saw that the signature consisted of a single phrase. A very particular phrase:
WOMEN, BY THEIR NATURE, ARE NOT EXCEPTIONAL CHESS PLAYERS: THEY ARE NOT GREAT FIGHTERS.
His eyes widened.
He knew that quote—Garry Kasparov had said it. He also remembered the woman who’d placed these words up on a little sign over her desk, from twenty-five years earlier when they’d both been working at PARC. She’d put up the sign, and she always inserted the phrase into her code, too.