Proprietary Data

“Oh, Christ,” said Calvin. “They found us again.”

“Shit,” said Luther, “I guess it’s time to move.”

The two of them sat facing each other across a huge table in a smallish room with three hundred sixty degree windows. Both of them hunched over the keyboards of old-fashioned large-screened laptops, typing furiously.

The windows looked out through an embedded copper mesh at a dense landscape of suburban farm-collective: old tract homes grown up and connected to form larger hybrid structures, three and four stories high, the old back yard fences knocked out to create riotous multi-crop gardens dotted throughout with bee boxes, chicken coops, and vertically stacked pig and goat enclosures.

The two men’s aerie sat atop one of the tallest of these big compounds, with a view of blocks and blocks all around. At four o’clock on a winter afternoon, it was already dusk and everybody was basically done with farm work for the day, leaving the landscape eerily empty of people, except the bicycles of the commuters coming in from jobs that couldn’t be done remotely and didn’t lend themselves to communitarian enterprise.

“OK, George has a new server for us in Luxembourg, and Harry says he can have it up in time... I’m verifying the database dumps and...”

“We’ve got about twenty minutes before they’re through the firewalls.”

“Twenty minutes! That’s forever, we’ll be long gone.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t handle the rapid-rotation passwords as well as they think they do.”

“Just wait until they get the new gigaqubit machines online...”

“Yeah, I’ve been kicking around some ideas for that...”

“Okay, the dumps are good, transferring now...”

Below them, alarms began to sound, old-fashioned sounding claxons.

“Shit,” said Calvin, “The seed printers.”

“On it... Oh fuck, they’re already past the...”

Heavy footsteps pounded up the spiral staircase; a mop-like head appeared over the rail. “Guys, the seed printers...”

“Yeah,” said Luther, “Working on it.”

“Should we be calling the police?”

“What, so they can come write a report for the insurance? Sure, but there’s plenty of time for that after...”

“Goddamn it!” Calvin pounded the table with his fist. “They’re in the...”

The alarms cut off abruptly. Luther sat back, put his hands up in a gesture of frustrated futility.

The dreadlocks disappeared back down the stairs, framing an alarmed look behind round glasses.

“No, wait... wait...” Calvin pounded out a series of keystrokes. “OK, they’re not as far in as I was afraid of, they’re just...”

“No,” said Luther, “But they’ve got the alarm system, so any minute...”

“Maybe the police weren’t such a bad idea.”

There was a chattering downstairs, all fifteen printers coming online at the same time. “Okay,” said Calvin, “Seed printers are back up. Now to get the alarms...”

“Wait, you got them out of the...?” Luther poked at the keyboard a couple of times. “Are the Riaa bots finally getting weak...?”

“No,” said Calvin, “But the lockouts are actually working this time...”

“For now.”

“God, I hope someone gets Congress back online soon,” said Calvin. “With the the Proprietary Data Fingerprint Store back up, we can at least limit the damage these damned things can cause...”

“Yeah, have you heard Harry’s theory about that?”

“What?”

“He thinks the Riaa bots have decided that the last round of edits of the PDFS are themselves proprietary, some sort of hash collision, so they triggered a defensive override... or maybe just a bug... and the botswarms are just going after everything. Or maybe they’re following some sort of extrapolation algorithm, targeting hashes that look like they might have derived from previous proprietary matches...”

“Fuck. You know, that makes sense. I just wish we’d managed to put those fuckers up against the wall before they managed to release the swarms, and not waited until...”

“Yeah.” 

“Harry also thinks that the swarms are sentient, so...”

“Well, he’s not right about everything.” Luther didn’t sound as sure as Calvin might have liked.

“Okay, that’s the last of the databases... let’s go downstairs and see if we can’t get the fucking alarms to turn off.”