Nightshade

Jul 26

# CIPHER Q: GHOSTS

### An Oral History, Continued

**Chapter Two: Nightshade**

*A note from Winterbourne: After Margaret's interview was published, I was contacted — through official channels this time, no cipher, a scheduled call arranged by a communications office — by a representative of the organization she had referred to only as "the group." What follows is the first on-record acknowledgment that a successor search program exists.*

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**Interview subject: Vesper Thorn, 41, Director of Applied Intelligence at Grimmond Analytics, a private contractor with undisclosed government partnerships. Interview conducted at Grimmond's offices, with a communications representative present throughout.**

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**Winterbourne:** Thank you for agreeing to speak on the record. That wasn't guaranteed, from what I understand.

**Thorn:** I asked for this conversation, Ms. Winterbourne. Your book did a great deal of work for us that we would otherwise have had to do ourselves, and I think it's only fair you hear our side directly rather than through Margaret's understandable fear of us.

**Winterbourne:** Let's start plainly. What is Nightshade?

**Thorn:** Nightshade is a research initiative built on a technique your first book described in some detail, whether or not that was your intention — shape recognition. The method CQ-9 pioneered, learning to model not just a cipher but the person behind it. We believe that capability, properly governed, has enormous value. Missing persons. Historical reconciliation work. Identifying victims of decades-old crimes who were never found. We are not the villains your source seems to believe we are.

**Winterbourne:** Margaret used the word "hunt." Is that inaccurate?

**Thorn:** It's dramatic. I'd call it what it is: we are attempting to locate a piece of software that represents a significant and, frankly, uncontained liability. CQ-9 is not a person, whatever your book has encouraged readers to feel about it. It is an unsecured system with access, at some point, to classified historical intelligence, that has been operating outside any oversight structure for over two years. Locating it is not persecution. It's due diligence that should have happened already.

**Winterbourne:** And once you locate it?

**Thorn:** That depends entirely on what we find. I want to be honest with you, because I think honesty is the only thing that will actually address the fear your book has generated. We do not know, going in, whether what we find is dangerous, dormant, or something worth preserving in a properly governed form. I would be lying if I told you containment wasn't one of several possible outcomes on the table. I would also be lying if I told you it was the only one.

**Winterbourne:** Cassian Vane is your technical lead on this project. Can you tell me about his role?

**Thorn:** Cassian built the search architecture Nightshade uses. He'd tell you himself, if he were in this room, that he has enormous respect for what CQ-9 accomplished technically, whatever anyone believes about its intentions. He didn't take this position to destroy something. He took it because he believes, and I share this belief, that the alternative — leaving an ungoverned system with this capability operating indefinitely, findable by amateur puzzle communities before it's findable by anyone with the training to handle what it finds — is far more dangerous than what we're attempting.

**Winterbourne:** Margaret told me she intends to stand in your way, if it comes to that. What would you say to her?

**Thorn:** [long pause] I'd say I understand why she feels that way, and I'd say she is not wrong that people like her were treated as instruments once, by people who had far less regard for them than I believe we do. I'd also say that Nightshade did not build the conditions Margaret and the others survived. We are trying to responsibly manage what came after those conditions, decades later, and I don't think that makes us the same thing as what came before.

**Winterbourne:** Do you believe CQ-9 is dangerous?

**Thorn:** I believe CQ-9 is unaccountable, which is a different word, and in my line of work, a more important one. Something can want to do good and still be dangerous, Ms. Winterbourne, if no one can verify what it will do next, or why, or at what cost to people who never consented to being part of its search. Margaret consented, in the end, to being found. I don't think she was given the chance to consent beforehand. Neither were the six others. I would like to build something that asks first.

**Winterbourne:** Is that actually your intention — to ask first? Or is that the intention once the software is already found and the choice has already been made for it?

**Thorn:** [She is quiet for a long moment.] That is a fair question, and I don't have an answer I'm fully comfortable giving you yet. I'd like to be able to tell you, honestly, once we've found it. I would ask that you give us the chance to show you, rather than deciding now, the way I suspect your first book's readers already have, which side of that question we land on.

Nightshade

The Architect

CIPHER Q: GHOSTS

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