“No one’s patched this bug because up until now it wasn’t actually a bug. It was a benign quirk at best. Basically you would have to be a Lucas Hubbard to exploit this.”

“But Brenda Rees never integrated with Hubbard,” I said. “She integrated with Sam Schwartz.”

“Hubbard created the process and tools,” Tony said. “Once they existed, they could be used by someone else.”

“Sam Schwartz is Hubbard’s lawyer,” Vann said. “He’s in the perfect position to assist him.”

“Not a very ethical lawyer,” Tony said. “But, yeah. There’s no reason Hubbard couldn’t hook Schwartz up to his machine and let him have a go at it.”

“You seem pretty sure that it’s Hubbard,” I said.

“You seem pretty sure about it, too, Chris,” Tony said.

“I know, but what I want to know is whether you think that because I do, or whether you think it because you have another reason to.”

“I believe it because you believe it,” Tony said. “I also believe it because the scope of what we’re talking about here—both for this and for what happened with Johnny Sani—requires resources of either a small country or a very wealthy person. But most of all I believe it because of the code.”

“The code,” Vann said.

“Yes,” Tony said. The schematic disappeared, replaced by lines of code. “How much do you know about Chomsky?” he asked. “The programming language, not the man.”

“I don’t know anything about either,” Vann said.

“Chris?”

“I got nothing,” I said.

Tony nodded. “The programming language was called Chomsky because it was designed to talk to the deep structures in the brain. It’s a ‘deep language’ pun. The great thing about Chomsky as a programming language is that it’s amazingly flexible. Once you know it—once you really know it—you find out there are all sorts of ways to address any problem, or issue, or goal. This is essential for neural networks. They have to be flexible because every brain is different. So the language you program them in has to have the same sort of flexibility. You’re keeping up with me so far?”

“It’s a little esoteric,” I said.

“Which is my point,” Tony said. “Chomsky is a language that has to be esoteric, because it’s interfacing directly with the brain.

“Now, a side effect of this is, because Chomsky allows so many different ways to tackle any one specific problem, programmers who are truly fluent in Chomsky end up developing their own voice. By which I mean they address goals and parameters in a way that’s idiosyncratic to them. If you spend any real time looking at the code, eventually you can tell who wrote it.”

“Like someone who writes novels.”

“Yeah, precisely,” Tony said. “Like one novelist puts in a lot of description while another one is all dialogue. Same thing. And like novelists, some Chomsky programmers are good, some are competent, and some suck. And if you’ve seen their code before, you can tell which programmer it is from the first line of code.”

He pointed to the code on display. “This is the code in Brenda Rees’s brain that’s variant from the latest point release and patching for the Ovid 6.4,” he said. He pulled up some more code. “Here’s the code of the software in Johnny Sani’s head. It reads the same. Whoever wrote Sani’s code wrote Rees’s code.”

He pulled up a third column of code. “This is code Hubbard wrote back in the day, when he was still pushing out patches and updates at Hubbard Systems,” he said. “Believe me when I say that if you ran all of this through the Chomsky equivalent of a semantic and grammatical analyzer, it would light up across the board. All of this was written by the same person. All of it was written by Lucas Hubbard.”

“Is that something we can use in a court of law?” Vann asked.

“You’d need a lawyer to tell you that,” Tony said. “But if you put me on the stand I would tell you, hell yeah, this is all the same guy.”

“Is that enough?” I asked Vann.

“To bring him in?” Vann asked. I nodded. “For what?”

“For killing Brenda Rees, for one,” I said. “For Johnny Sani, for another.”

“We don’t think he killed Rees,” Vann said. “We think Schwartz did. We still don’t have anything court-worthy connecting him to Sani, either.”

“Come on, Vann,” I said. “We know this is our guy.”

“We go in with what we have and Hubbard’s lawyers from Schwartz on down are going to blow our heads off,” Vann said. “And I know you don’t really need this job, Shane, but I kind of do. So, yes. Hubbard’s our man. Let’s make absolutely sure we can get him.” She turned to Tony. “What else you got.”

“Two more things,” Tony said. “The first is about Rees’s code.”

“What about it?” Vann said.

“It doesn’t bypass her long-term memory,” Tony said. “Either Hubbard couldn’t find a way to make it work, which is possible because the neural network layout is non-trivially different, or he decided not to waste his time because—” He paused.

“Because he didn’t plan on keeping her after he or Schwartz was done using her,” I said.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “And now you know why she was carrying around a grenade.”

“So she was aware the whole time,” Vann said. “Aware and awake and unable to stop her body from doing anything.”

“That’s right,” Tony said. “And no way to get the client out of her head.”

“Fuck,” Vann said and turned away for a second. Tony looked over at me, confused. Later, I mouthed.

“You okay?” I asked Vann.

“If we go in to wheel out Hubbard’s body after all this is done, I’m going to need you to watch me very closely,” Vann said. “Otherwise I’m going to punt that asshole hard right in the balls.”

I grinned very widely. “That’s a promise,” I said.

Vann turned back to Tony. “What’s the second thing,” she said.

“Once I figured out how Hubbard hacked Rees’s brain I went back into Sani’s brain to see what things I missed before because I didn’t have context,” Tony said. “And I got this.” He scrolled very quickly through the code until he came up with a sizable chunk of it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I didn’t know at first,” Tony said. “Because it didn’t make any sense. What I think is that it repurposes part of the neural network into a relay.”

“A what?” Vann said.

“I know, right?” Tony said. “It’s a transmitter. It transmits the Integrator’s data signal, but not into the network. Instead it mimics the network.”

“Does it have to be the Integrator’s data signal?” Vann asked.

“What do you—” Tony stopped, apparently getting it. “Oooooooh,” he said.

“What?” I said. I was the only one in my own liminal space entirely left out.

“Fucking Hubbard,” Vann said. “We were asking why Johnny Sani was trying to integrate with Nicholas Bell. He wasn’t. He was acting as a goddamned relay station for Hubbard.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Then that means that when you were interrogating Bell—”

“It was never Bell,” Vann said. “It was Hubbard. It was always Hubbard. The bastard’s been playing us right from the start.”

“To get close to Cassandra Bell,” I said.

“Yes,” Vann said.

“For what purpose?” I asked.

“You’ve been following the news, right?” Vann snapped. “Rumor is, there’s a march on Sunday. Imagine what happens to that march when Cassandra Bell is killed by her own brother, who then spouts some sort of anti-Haden bullshit. D.C. is going to burn down to the ground.”

“Right, but what point does that serve?” I asked. “Why start a riot?”

“To tank the market,” Tony said.

We both turned to him again.

“I told you I follow the sector,” Tony said. “It’s how I stay employed. The Haden-related companies are already trying to merge or exit the sector because of Abrams-Kettering. Investors are already offloading their stocks. A full-scale riot in D.C. will scare the shit out of these companies and all their investors. They’ll flee the scene. And then Accelerant can pick and choose which companies to snap up and which to let die. It’ll be lauded for stabilizing the sector when what it’s really doing is sniping its competitors in the head. They’ll save billions on their merger with Sebring-Warner alone.”