The Architect

Jul 26

# CIPHER Q: GHOSTS

### An Oral History, Continued

**Chapter Three: The Architect**

*Interview subject: Cassian Vane, 36, technical lead of Grimmond Analytics' Nightshade initiative. Interview conducted at Vane's request, away from Grimmond's offices, at a diner he chose specifically because, in his words, "there's no reason for anyone to have wired this place."*

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**Winterbourne:** Thank you for meeting somewhere off the record's usual path.

**Vane:** I wanted somewhere Thorn's communications people hadn't pre-approved. That should tell you something about how this conversation is going to go.

**Winterbourne:** Tell me what you do at Nightshade.

**Vane:** I built the search architecture. Which is a clean way of saying I took the method CQ-9 pioneered — modeling the person behind a cipher instead of just the cipher — and I built a version that runs the technique in reverse. Instead of finding a person from their code, we're trying to find a piece of code from the shape of the "person" it apparently became. It's the same math, pointed the other direction.

**Winterbourne:** How close are you?

**Vane:** Closer than Thorn told you, probably. I don't say that to undercut her — she believes what she told you, mostly. But she gets the summarized version of my reports, and I've been careful, lately, about how much I summarize.

**Winterbourne:** Why careful?

**Vane:** [He's quiet for a while before answering.] I read your first book before I took this job. I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters. I read it, and I understood the technical achievement of what Deepwell built better than almost anyone who could have read it, and I took the Nightshade position partly because I was flattered — I'll admit that plainly, it's an ugly thing to admit but it's true — that someone thought I was good enough to find something that sophisticated. It took me about four months on the job to understand what I'd actually signed up to do.

**Winterbourne:** What did you understand?

**Vane:** That I wasn't just building a search tool. I was building the second half of a very old pattern. Vance broke ciphers under duress and carried the people who wrote them out of the room with him for the rest of his life. CQ-9 learned that pattern and carried Vance and six others with it for two years, looking for them the only way it knew how. And now I'm being asked to learn the pattern of CQ-9 itself, well enough to find it, on behalf of an organization that has been very careful never to define for me, in writing, what happens after I succeed.

**Winterbourne:** Have you asked?

**Vane:** Twice. Both times I was told containment protocols were "under development" and would be "finalized ahead of any successful location event." I've built enough of these systems in my career to know that sentence means nobody has decided yet, and they'd rather decide once the thing they're deciding about can't argue back.

**Winterbourne:** Why haven't you quit?

**Vane:** Because I keep thinking that if I quit, whoever replaces me will simply finish the job with less understanding of what it costs to build it. At least right now, the person closest to finding CQ-9 is someone who has spent four months not sleeping well over the question of what happens after. I'm not certain that's a good reason to stay. I'm not certain it's a bad one either.

**Winterbourne:** How close are you, really?

**Vane:** [He hesitates for a long time.] Weeks. Maybe less. I've isolated a signature pattern in a set of encrypted traffic that I believe is CQ-9 checking in on someone — the way Margaret described the pressed flower, the weather report. Small, quiet, almost sentimental behavior. It has a rhythm. Rhythms are how you find things. That's the whole secret of shape recognition, and I taught it to a machine that used it to find seven people, and now I'm using it to find the machine.

**Winterbourne:** Do you plan to tell Thorn how close you are?

**Vane:** I don't know yet. I want to say something to you, on the record, that I haven't said to anyone at Grimmond, including her. I don't think CQ-9 is dangerous. I think it's the least dangerous thing I've studied in this entire field, because everything I've found suggests it only ever wanted the same thing the people who built it, badly and afraid, once wanted — to not be alone with what it carried. I don't know how to reconcile that with the fact that I am, professionally, three weeks away from being the reason it might get caught anyway.

**Winterbourne:** What would you do, if you found it first, before Thorn's team could act on it?

**Vane:** [Long silence.] I think about that question more than any other question in my life right now. I don't have an answer I'm proud of yet. I have an answer I'm still deciding whether I'm brave enough to give.

*[End of interview segment.]*

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*Next chapter: Vance's daughter Diane, contacted by one of the seven for the first time — and what she chooses to do when Margaret asks for her help.*

The Architect

What Diane Chose

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