“My team’s been over that thing with a fine-tooth comb, Marty. We talked to Dresner and he says most are upgrade paths and a few relate to a power cell he’s developing. So thanks, but we’ve got it covered. Can we go now?”

“No. Because Dresner is lying. They don’t have anything to do with batteries or upgrades. They work together as a whole—kind of like a hardwired piece of software.”

“Hardwired software?” Randi said. “Isn’t that contradictory?”

“Not really. All software does is tell hardware what to do. It sends a little electric pulse that, say, turns on your computer’s speakers. Or causes your modem to upload something to the Internet. This is the same thing. If you send each of the twenty-eight components just the right signal, they launch all at once and act in unison.”

“It seems like if that was the case, my people would have triggered it by now.”

Zellerbach shook his head. “The problem is that each component needs a slightly different signal. Think of it this way: You’ve got a safe with twenty-eight keyholes. You need twenty-eight keys, right? But more than that, you need to know what order to turn them in and how far to turn each one down to the tenth of a millimeter.”

“There would be an almost infinite number of combinations,” Randi said.

“Tell me about it. Took me ten days to finally hit on it.”

“If there are really that many possibilities, ten days wouldn’t be anywhere near enough time. Even with your Cray.”

Zellerbach looked at the floor and chewed his lower lip for a moment. “I have to admit that I had to borrow some other people’s computer power.”

“Other people?”

“Well…I figure you don’t care about the Chinese government, but I did accidentally crash Amazon. Twice if you want to be technical about it. And you said you were in a hurry, so I maybe didn’t cover my tracks as well as I normally would…”

“Are you saying they could trace the crashes to you?” Smith said.

“Not if you were to smooth it over.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Randi said before Smith could find a blunt object to hit him with. “So what happens when you give it the right signals?”

“The twenty-eight individual components run for eighteen seconds and then it goes back to its normal mode.”

“Why? What’s it do?”

“Dunno. Without Dresner’s knowledge of how the Merge communicates with the brain, there’s no way to simulate the outcome. The only option would be to just stick it on your head and turn it on.”

63

63

Near Dupont Circle, Washington, DC
USA