Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,124

should sit down with Letitia.” Letitia was the foundation’s public relations director.

Marcus nodded.

“But that’s not for you to worry about. That is my problem,” Zula said, turning back to Sophia. “Your problem is seeing how much of this you can actually pull off in two short months.”

21

It’s kind of amazing that after all this time we are still using passwords for anything,” Sophia exclaimed.

It was three hours later. She was sitting in a restaurant along Lake Union with the man she knew as Uncle C.

Corvallis Kawasaki was now in his late forties. Like a lot of men whose hairlines had simply gone wrong at a certain age, he had taken to shaving his head. As a result, he looked radically different from the mop-topped Asian-American kid visible in some of Richard’s old photographs from the Corporation 9592 days. He had also got in the habit of wearing suits. He had never quite resigned himself to neckties, though, and so he had his shirts tailored with stand-up collars meant to be worn unbuttoned. That, combined with his prominence in the tech world, had made him easily recognizable; when he’d walked into the restaurant, ten minutes late, the hostess had greeted him by name, and diners’ heads had turned, tracking his progress across the room to the private booth where Sophia had been waiting for him.

In this part of town, all lunches were business lunches, and all conversations over food and drink involved disclosures of sensitive IP. The restaurants had been designed accordingly; tables were widely spaced, sound barriers were inserted wherever possible, and when it got too quiet, randomized noise welled up from discreetly placed speakers and filled in awkward gaps. Private dining rooms of various sizes ringed the main floor. Some of these were mere booths, capable of seating two to four, with doors on them. In one of those, C-plus and Sophia had been able to get through the hugging and cheek-kissing part of the meeting without too many eyes on them. They had then enjoyed a light lunch together and spent a little while catching up. He was doing well. He and Maeve now had a brood of three kids, all indexing their way through school and soccer and robotics, exhaustively photo-documented in a way that had to be shared with Sophia.

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