It was only after the plates had been cleared away and coffee served that C-plus had buckled down to the serious business of making her a token holder—or, in the inevitable tech industry abbreviation, a toho—with access privileges to Dodge’s Brain.

In essence, this was no different from handing someone a key to an apartment or giving them the combination to a padlock. There was this entity in the cloud called Dodge’s Brain. It was mostly just a passive, inert repository of data. But it did include some executables—some actual running code—that were active all the time, like a sentry pacing back and forth in front of a locked library door. That code was as secure and unhackable as it was possible for anything to be in this world, and it would only open the door for entities that could prove—and keep proving—that they had been granted the requisite authority.

Corvallis Kawasaki had the power to confer those tokens on others. In the Meatspace world, “others” meant “human beings.” But the digital sentry in front of the door was just a computer program running on a server somewhere, or more likely distributed across a number of servers. It didn’t really have the ability to recognize humans, or to reliably tell one human from another.

“We could use biometrics,” C-plus admitted. Meaning, devices like fingerprint readers or iris scanners. “But that just moves the vulnerability elsewhere. Let’s say I had a gadget that could read your fingerprint with one hundred percent accuracy. Fine. The gadget knows it’s Sophia. But in order for that to be of any use, the gadget has to send a message to some other process, somewhere in the world, saying, ‘I checked her fingerprint and it’s definitely Sophia.’”

“And that could be hacked.”

“Yeah. Still, probably good enough. But I am trying to abide by the highest possible standards here.”

“To make a point. To set an example,” Sophia said.

“And to avoid looking like a fool,” he said. “If it came out that I had let standards slip, cut corners, and gotten burned, it would be embarrassing.”

“Fair enough.”

“Now, passwords are ridiculously old-school, but they work as a stopgap. I want you to make one up, right now. One that you’ve never used before and will never use for any other purpose. Take your time. When you’re ready, type it in.” Uncle C slid a tablet across the table to her, keyboard ready for text entry.

“Okay. Thinking,” Sophia said.

“Because this is your password to DB, you’re probably thinking about using a password or phrase that has some kind of sentimental connection to your uncle Richard. Some kind of personal meaning to you. Don’t. This isn’t magic. It’s not an opportunity for you to express your feelings.”