Chapter 8: Derek

Morgan had been very clear in her letter: “Her name is Edana Hart, pronounced Ee-Donna, but if you want to get on her good side, call her Ed. God help you if you try shortening it to Donna, Dana or mispronounce her name as Edna. Address Dan however you want, he won’t care.”

Contacting the Harts was a last-ditch attempt at resurrecting Derek’s investigation into how Morgan was framed. Kevin’s dead body meant he was at a dead end.

The insurance investigators refused to turn over their copy of the drive, which left Derek a non-functional copy bathed in eighty proof scotch for the better part of an hour. Derek tried identifying Kevin’s close friends and associates by perusing his social media accounts, but they had all been deleted soon after his death.

The next logical step, the only logical step, was to talk to someone who had more expertise with technology than he did. Even though he hadn’t gotten anywhere on the “who,” he might be able to follow-up on the “how.” Given how air-tight everything seemed, he needed to know how, even theoretically, someone might have gone about framing Morgan for this crime.

Morgan suggested he talk to the Harts.

She knew them from when she was in high school. They were a year older than her, in the class ahead of hers. According to Morgan, Ed and Dan were high school sweethearts, practically attached at the hip even back then. Both were remarkably proficient with technology and now ran a consulting firm together. If the problem was technical, they were the people to see in Columbus, Ohio.

Unfortunately, Derek ran into trouble when trying to make an appointment. He never had a chance to mispronounce Edana’s name, as he was stuck going around in circles with what was either a poorly-programmed artificial intelligence, or a mentally handicapped real one.

Morgan warned him that the Harts could be eccentric and employed AIs of their own creation. He strongly suspected the thing on the other end of the call, which identified itself as “Matthew,” was one of these. Sophisticated AIs for certain very specialized tasks like making appointments weren’t uncommon, though no one had yet built a true, fully sentient artificial intelligence.

This AI, however, was very odd. Despite the nonsense the AI was spouting, the tone of voice was right. It spoke quickly with a high-pitched male voice, not one of the common AI voice packs. The subtle changes in pitch that matched the words was a feature found only in the most advanced speech systems. It was as if someone had hooked up a high-end text-to-speech engine to a primitive chat-bot.

“No, no, no, sir. No time, you see! No time at all! Lunch time was the last bit of time we had, now it’s all gone. Not a single illusion left, all eaten up.”

“My schedule is very flexible, I have plenty of time, and I’m happy to pay.” Derek spoke into the phone slowly. These things were usually looking for key words, but he wasn’t quite sure how to handle this one. “If there’s an opening this week or next, a lunch appointment would be fine with me.”

“Ah-hah!” the A.I. exclaimed. “Lunch would be perfect, now wouldn’t it? I love pancakes. I’m writing it down now. Pancakes. Lots of pancakes for lunch at noon on January twenty-seventh, twenty-forty-six. Excellent, is that all?”

“That was two months ago,” said Derek. “That’s not going to work.”

“But you have time! You say you have time, plenty of time, so there you go. Do you have the time or don’t you? When I have time, I just eat it all up with lots maple syrup, did you do that?”

Around and around they went, as he found himself trying to articulate what he wanted in a fashion that might be interpreted correctly. When he asked to speak to an operator, that did not go well either.

“Operator? Operate her? I tried, believe me I tried, but when I looked for knobs and switches she got so upset! No operating necessary, just her daily dose of medicine, that’s what she said.”

After spending half an hour with “Matthew” and getting nowhere, he hung up. What the hell was that?

Five minutes later his mobile rang. He answered it: “Hello, this is Derek Simon.”

It was a woman with a rich, alto voice. “This is Ed Hart, with Hart Consulting. I believe you were trying to get in touch?”

“Yes! I understand that your firm has extensive expertise with information security. I have a sensitive situation that I need to discuss with an expert. This involves an old friend of yours, Morgan Heller.”

“We have some time available next Monday, the sixteenth, at four o’clock,” Ed informed him. “We can waive our fee for the consultation on Monday and discuss how to proceed then. Is that acceptable?”

“Yes, absolutely. Thank you.” That was significantly easier than expected, given his initial trouble with Matthew.

“One more thing,” Derek said. “You probably know this, since you called me right back, but I think there’s a problem with the AI you have screening your calls. I tried to make an appointment and it kept spouting nonsense.”

Ed laughed. “Oh, no. Matt was just doing his job. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about prospective clients listening to them argue with an idiot. We designed Matt to harass telemarketers, but we’ve found he’s remarkably effective at separating the serious clients from the ones who waste our time. You lasted thirty-four minutes and eight seconds, which, by the way, puts you on the leader-board this month. Most people hang up after two minutes.”

Eccentric. Right.

It wasn’t until the following week, while walking from the parking garage to the Harts’ office in downtown Columbus that another puzzling aspect of the conversation occurred to him: if the Harts evaluated potential clients by listening to their conversation with Matt, and Derek spent half an hour on the phone with the crazy AI, why did Ed call back right away? They wouldn’t have had time to review the entire conversation.

Derek wondered if they already knew about Morgan’s situation, knew who he was. Morgan hadn’t said anything about contacting the Harts herself, but it was possible they had been following recent events.

The building was only a two-minute walk from the parking garage, and it was impossible to miss. It was solid glass, but not one of the old twentieth century glass buildings, with each panel distinct. The edges between panes of glass were well hidden, the entire sky-scraper appearing as one solid piece. It was as if an enormous block of obsidian had been dropped into the middle of the city.

As the whisper-quiet elevator carried Derek up to the Hart’s offices on the top floor, he reflected that if his own elevator at home had been this quiet, it would have saved a lot of trouble. Kevin might still be alive and able to answer a few important questions.

The elevator was on the outside of the building and offered a dizzying perspective of the Columbus skyline. The ceiling and three of the four sides of the elevator were transparent. Upon reaching the top, a section of the mirrored back wall slid aside, revealing a doorway into the offices of Hart Consulting.

The only furniture in the atrium consisted of a few large, over-stuffed chairs. It was clearly intended as a waiting room. Two of the four walls were glass. The exterior wall provided a view of the city, while the second, interior wall provided a window into the bustling center of the office.

The interior glass wall effectively sound-proofed the waiting room from the inner office. Derek couldn’t hear the people on the other side even though it appeared to be a loud, active environment. There were a pair of doors in the wall with brass handles sticking out, but the sound didn’t seem to penetrate through the doors to the waiting area.

Three hearts were etched into the glass of each door, like on playing cards: One heart was right-side-up in the top left, another upside-down in the bottom right and a third larger one right-side-up in the middle of each door. The heart in the center of each door was etched with the business name as well: Hart Consulting, LLC.

Through the glass, Derek could see several rows of employees working on terminals, in cubicles. One man was obviously on a call. He wore a headset and was gesticulating wildly. A few cubes over two women, one of them an attractive blonde, the other an older overweight brunette, were engaged in a heated discussion. It looked as if the brunette was angry enough to throw a punch, barely holding back her temper.
There was also an enormous tabby cat wandering through the office. In fact, the cat seemed to be the only one that noticed Derek’s presence. It walked up to the glass wall and stared directly at him, unblinking with bright green eyes.

“Don’t mind Ché. He always takes an interest in visitors.” It was the same voice as on the phone. Derek spun around to see Ed enter the waiting room through a side door behind him, accompanied by a man he assumed was Dan.

Everything about Edana Hart was big. If she were shorter she might have been overweight, but at her height, barely an inch short of Derek’s six feet, she was an attractive, voluptuous woman.

Derek was reminded of the model in the paper magazine when he gave his sample for Morgan’s Complement. From the curve of Ed’s conservative, charcoal-gray sweater, it was obvious that what lay underneath was as impressively large as the rest of her. While Ed didn’t have the model’s unnaturally thin waistline, she too had a pale complexion with short, straight, red hair and blue-gray eyes.

Dan was the polar opposite of his wife. Ed, with her large frame and fiery hair, would stand out, even in a crowd. Dan, on the other hand, would easily blend into the background. He had brown hair and an entirely unremarkable face. The most memorable thing about Dan was that he was short. Ed was at least three or four inches taller than her husband.

“Ché is your cat?” Derek asked. Then, he held out his hand. “Derek Simon, nice to meet you in person.”

Ed took his hand and shook it firmly. “Ed Hart, likewise. This is Dan.” She nodded at the man beside her. “And that’s Ché. He’s smarter than the rest of them combined.” she waved towards the cat looking at them through the glass on the far side of the room, and then at the rest of the office staff.

Derek and Dan shook hands.Ed strode towards the glass doors with the brass handles. She and Dan led Derek through the doors.

Derek did a double-take. The doors led into a conference room that looked nothing like the bustling office visible through the glass in the waiting area.

“Wha—?” He stepped back out into the atrium. The people in the office were still clearly visible. The women continued to argue, and the man who had been on the phone was now talking with another coworker, still gesticulating as he spoke. The cat was licking his fur in a corner. Unlike a video, the scene had depth. His view shifted appropriately as he moved back, changing his viewing angle.

Dan gave him a small smile. “Parallax glass.”

“Impressive,” Derek commented. “I remember reading that displays like this weren’t practical due to cost and the difficulty of recording video for them, but you seem to have a real work of art here.”

“It’s a work in progress,” Ed said. “Cost is dropping fast, but capturing video is the big problem. Micro-drones small enough to saturate the capture volume aren’t stable enough to give a good, steady feed. That means you need an impractically large camera or need to find a reliable way to filter the jitter out of the drone feeds. Our approach is to ditch the cameras altogether and simulate everything.”

“That,” He gestured to the wall, “That’s a simulation?” It looked real.

“Yes, “Ed replied. “Though it took three quarters of our cluster several months to generate a few hours of video, which we play on a loop out here. It’s not being simulated in real-time. Well, most of it isn’t. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Ché was smarter than the rest of them combined. We have a couple hundred nodes dedicated to him at any given moment. You’ll notice he avoids people and does his own thing, which makes him computationally feasible. That’s the real point of this experiment — to design the algorithms that can generate parallax video fast and cheap enough to drive wider adoption of these displays. At least, that’s what Konnor Interactive is paying us for.”

If Derek had been drinking something he would have been in danger of doing a spit-take. He tried to conceal his surprise. “You’re working for Konnor Interactive?”

Ed nodded, while Dan averted his gaze and stared out the window on the far side of the waiting room. “They’re our best client. Who do you think got Morgan her original sales associate position over there? My husband has always had a blind spot where that woman is concerned.”

Derek felt like he’d wandered into an ambush. There was obviously history here he knew nothing about. Here he was again, unexpectedly floundering in uncharted waters. That pissed him off.

Also, there was something subtly aggressive about Ed’s tone and body language. Ed was beautiful, she obviously knew it, and she used that along with her large size to intimidate those around her.

“Okay, cards on the table.” He put a bit more venom into his voice than was probably necessary. “Your best client has a vendetta against Morgan. I mention her name, and you return my call in five minutes. Then you offer to waive your consultation fee before I even mention money, which, in my experience, doesn’t happen. Here I was, thinking I came here to ask for your help. Why don’t you go ahead and explain what I’m really doing here?”

Ed raised an eyebrow. She seemed amused. “Cards on the table? Come, sit down and let’s talk.”

The source of Ed’s amusement became obvious when he entered the room. The chairs as well as the legs and edges of the conference table were made of ornately carved wood. The table-top was glass, etched with the same pattern of hearts as the doors. It made the table-top look like a playing card, literally a card on the table.

As irritated as he was to find himself scrambling to stay on top of the situation, and as curious as he was to understand what was going on, an entirely separate line of thought kept nagging at him. A number of little things lined up in a certain pattern, too many to be a coincidence.

Sure, the heart pattern was a play on their last name, but it went beyond that, beyond their appearance and their logo too. The chairs and wooden decoration on the conference table were done in a Victorian style, surrounding that glass surface; glass that looked suspiciously like the parallax display of the trick wall, meant to create the illusion of reality. The cat that wasn’t there. The cat’s name. And even, yeah. That AI program. Matthew. Matt. Mad.

“Tell me,” he said, “When you shut down the rendering program for Ché, does he disappear all at once, or do his teeth vanish a few seconds after the rest of him?”

“Of course.” Ed smiled. They stared at each other for a few moments. “Wait, Morgan didn’t mention that? What did she tell you?”

“You know, before you explain why your entire office is an homage to Alice in Wonderland, I’d still like to discuss your conflict of interest.”

“Yes, let’s.” Ed said.

“So,” he said. “You’re looking for the money for Konnor, and you’d love my cooperation. What, the insurance investigator I talked to is doing the legwork, and you’re in charge? Is that it?”

Dan continued to stay silent, though he smiled ever so slightly, as if at some private joke. Ed snorted. “No,” she said. “We aren’t investigating any theft for anyone right now.”

“You know Morgan. Her ex-employer is your best client, you seem to know the details of what happened, and you’re trying to tell me you’re not already involved?”

“We know Morgan, yes. Dan helped get her started over at Konnor, so of course we heard what happened. Keep in mind, we’re not criminal investigators. Our specialty is computer graphics and computer security. We’ve already familiar with this case, and I don’t see a problem in sharing our expert opinion, though I don’t think you’ll like it. You were about to explain that you believe Morgan is innocent, and that you want us to help prove that.”

His eyes narrowed. “She’s innocent, but that’s not something Morgan is sharing. She didn’t even tell me. I had to figure it out for myself.”

Ed burst into laughter. “She’s really gotten good. Back in high school, her catch-phrase was ‘I didn’t do it.’ ‘I didn’t cheat on that test, never mind the answer sheet in my bag.’ ‘I didn’t steal that vodka, never mind that I can’t walk straight.’ Now she has you figuring it out for yourself, whatever that means. Not much of a guess that she’s still doing the same old song and dance. It isn’t a guess, though. Lorelei filled us in.”

If Ed and Dan went to school with Morgan, it made sense that they might know her sister as well. Derek hadn’t considered that possibility.

Morgan hadn’t told him much about Lorelei, other than that they had a “competitive” relationship. He got the impression they weren’t close, and that it was a sensitive subject.

“Morgan and her sister don’t really get along, do they?” he asked.

“No, they don’t,” Ed said, “But that isn’t exactly Lorelei’s fault. Every time she tries to reach out, it ends badly. You know about the pie?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve heard that story.”

“You make it sound like ancient history. This was two months ago.”

“Two months? But that was after...”

“Yes,” she cut him off. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell you any of this. Actually, no. Scratch that, this is Morgan. Why do you think her bail was revoked after her initial arrest? Lorelei went to see her sister after she was arrested. Five minutes after that, Morgan took a pie out of the oven and shoved it into her sister’s face. That’s why they revoked her bail.”

Derek couldn’t help but wonder if there was another side to that story but didn’t want to press the issue. He shrugged. “It sounds like this thing between them goes back a ways. Even so, that doesn’t mean she stole any money.”

Ed sighed. “Of course not, it’s just the icing on the cake. Lorelei already asked us to take a look at her sister’s case. They more-or-less caught her with a smoking gun.”

He took a deep breath, shutting his eyes for a few seconds to think. “Alright, why don’t I try to convince you she’s innocent. Then you try to convince me otherwise. Afterwards, we talk about it and figure out what’s really going on.”

He proceeded to relate his encounter with Kevin Rollins. As in his letter to Morgan, he didn’t mention the size of his property or the workshop, skipping the details of the ensuing chase. His aversion to sharing the details of his wealth had become almost instinctual. Morgan was obviously keeping some things from him, like what was going on with her sister. There was no reason he couldn’t have a secret too.

It felt good to talk about this with someone who was willing to listen. The cops immediately dismissed him as crazy, and the insurance people wouldn’t even let him finish his story. He could tell Ed and Dan were skeptical, but they listened intently.

“The problem,” he concluded as he finished his story, “is that I can’t prove any of it to the police. They think he attacked me because he wanted the key to Morgan’s Complement. That’s obviously wrong. Kevin took the time to dunk the drive in his scotch, giving me the chance to get away because he was so intent on destroying it. This wasn’t about jealousy. Oh, and, I was going to ask you, any chance you can recover a drive dipped in alcohol?”

It was Dan, not Ed, that spoke first. “I’m guessing the drive is fifth or sixth-gen solid state. They’re cheap and will preserve data for centuries. Unfortunately, unless they’re specially built to be waterproof any sort of exposure to water will completely destroy them. Alcohol would, if anything, be worse. But...”

Dan hesitated and appeared to consider the best way to phrase what he wanted to say next. “Have you considered the possibility that Morgan was involved in more than one scheme? Maybe she was involved in something else, and then her associates came looking for information after she was arrested for this entirely separate theft.”

That hadn’t crossed Derek’s mind. It was an explanation that fit the facts, and yet, it was so complicated. The simplest explanation was usually the right one, wasn’t it? On top of that, the way Morgan reacted when he explained the situation on the phone seemed genuine. Was she that good an actress?

Or was he letting himself be fooled? A sliver of doubt wormed its way into his thoughts.

“I admit I can’t entirely rule out that possibility,” said Derek. “However, that seems rather far-fetched. If there were a second plot, why didn’t Morgan rat out the other people involved? I bet they would have reduced her sentence if she did.”

“A second crime might have meant more charges for her, more prison time.” Ed pointed out. “She would have been digging herself deeper, not to mention angering people who are clearly willing to commit murder.”

“That’s speculation. There’s no evidence of that.”

Ed grinned. “Your words, not mine.”

Derek was getting angry again. “Maybe you’re right, maybe not, but someone tried to kill me, and it wasn’t out of jealousy. There’s something going on here, and I want to know what it is.”

“I believe you,” Ed said, “but that doesn’t mean Morgan isn’t guilty. Before I explain why I have such a hard time with that, would you like some tea or coffee? Forgive my manners, I should have offered before.”

“Coffee, thank you,” said Derek.

Ed glanced at Dan. Wordlessly, he got up, and exited out a door to the rear of the conference room. If the rest of the meeting hadn’t already made it clear, that little exchange would have been sufficient: Ed was the one in charge in that relationship. Dan might be her husband, but he acted like her subordinate.

Dan returned shortly, carrying a tray with three tea cups, a metal teapot, a matching taller coffee pot and a dish with small packets of sugar and cream. The tray itself was also made of metal, with odd “W” shaped handles on either side that vaguely resembled bats with their wings outstretched. All pieces were in a matching Victorian style, engraved with a detailed floral pattern.

Victorian again. “That reminds me,” Derek said. “What’s with the Wonderland theme?”

Ed shrugged. “Growing up, I was the tallest kid in my class. With the name and the hair, I was the ‘Queen of Hearts.’ I wasn’t exactly given a choice.”

As his wife spoke, Dan poured a cup of coffee for Derek, and tea for Ed and himself. He raised his tea cup with a smirk. “Off with his head!”

Ed glared at her husband briefly. She clearly hadn’t intended to elaborate further but continued after Dan’s comment. “I lived close enough to school that I walked home. While all the other parents were worried that their child might get hurt, mine were more concerned that I was always on my computer and never wanted to leave the house. They made me walk home every day, ‘to get some fresh air.’ One day, these three guys from my class started following me, screaming ‘off with her head!’ then laughing like it was the funniest thing they ever heard.”

Ed took a sip of her tea, then continued. “I was bigger, but there were three of them. They were just cracking jokes, but this wasn’t the first time these three clowns gave me trouble. This time no one was watching, and, of course, they didn’t expect a girl to start anything. I turned around and let them have it. They were all talk, no substance. I knocked two of them over with one punch a piece, and the third ran away. I like to think he peed his pants, but that’s probably wishful thinking.”

“Anyway, I was really angry at this point, so I kicked both assholes on the ground in the crotch and yelled ‘Off with his head!’ to throw their stupid joke back in their faces. I wasn’t even thinking about it at the time, the different meanings of ‘head.’ I never told anyone and I never got in trouble, but somehow the story got around. I had no choice but to own it.”

She gestured around the office. “Fifteen years later, I’m still owning it. In style.” She glanced at Dan. “Or rather, we’re owning it in style.”

“Sounds like the bullies had it coming,” said Derek. Ed’s initial reluctance to elaborate suggested that she didn’t like to share that story very often. That was probably why Morgan hadn’t mentioned Wonderland in the first place. Morgan probably assumed Ed would prefer to tell that story herself rather than have more people talking behind her back.

“Yes, but enough about me, though. Let’s talk about Morgan.”

Before they went any further he wanted to make it clear that he wasn’t going to accept Morgan’s rebellious childhood as a valid argument. That was circumstantial at best. “Do you have technical reasons for thinking she’s guilty? Whatever happened when she was young, people do change.”

“Most don’t,” Ed said. “But for now, as you say, let’s consider the technical problems with the idea that she didn’t steal the money. Even assuming someone got physical access to her mobile and managed to capture her password, they would have to fake the thumb-scan.”

“Kevin Rollins was her ex,” Derek reminded her. “Of course he could have gotten to her mobile.”

“Fine, Kevin got to her mobile. And we can be honest, password security is a joke for most apps. Everyone relies on the security of the thumb scans, so they half-ass the password protection. Password security matters when whatever you’re unlocking isn’t tied to your identity, because then you can’t rely on thumb scans and you have to do it right.”

“Anyway,” Ed went on, “Consider that thumb scan. You can hack into a mobile, plant a bug, monitor calls and communications, capture passwords no problem. Faking a thumb-scan is something else entirely. Further, when the forensic investigators dug into the details of that transaction it was obvious that Morgan tried to fake a thumb-scan and failed.”

“If she tried to fake it and failed, why did the transaction go through?” Derek asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Ed took another sip of tea. “The device Morgan used to try to fool the scanner was state-of-the art technology nine years ago. The latest mobiles aren’t fooled so easily, and correctly identified Morgan. Since she was authorized on the account, the transaction still went through. Great Lakes United, where Konnor does their banking, provides a direct cryptocurrency withdrawal service, so one transaction was all it took.”

Derek thought about that. “Is there any chance that what the investigators thought was her trying to fake the scan was really someone else faking it successfully? Would it be harder to completely fool the scanner, or to create a situation where it looks like someone was trying unsuccessfully fake it?”

“No.” Ed shook her head. “Compromising the latest scanners is hard. The forensic security people that testified in Morgan’s grand jury probably claimed it was mathematically impossible, most experts do. After security, our secondary specialty is graphics which ties in closely with the way the scan-pads work. We know these systems in and out. The final verdict is that it isn’t quite impossible, but it’s close.”

“How hard can it be?” Derek asked. “I’ve read murder mysteries where the murderer faked a fingerprint, and they were written last century. I admit, I’ve never understood exactly how the scan-pads can be so secure.”

“It’s not what you’re thinking of as a fingerprint, the ridges of skin,” Ed explained. “On top of that, there’s the network of capillaries within the thumb, and then on top of that it’s also a molecular fingerprint of the proteins in the skin cells of your thumb. Every person’s skin has a unique molecular composition which reflects certain wavelengths of light in a unique way.”

Ed held up her thumb, as a symbolic gesture of what she was talking about. “The scan-pad uses a challenge-response system. The pad shines a very complex pattern of light that’s different each time, then records how the light is reflected and absorbed by your thumb. It’s easy to check whether the reflection pattern is consistent with the set of patterns that has already been recorded. However, it is very difficult to quickly generate a valid pattern in response to the challenge without your actual finger.”
“How difficult?” Derek asked. “You said it wasn’t impossible.”

“Yes, but I didn’t mean it could be done that way. When I say producing a valid response from a new challenge is difficult given only a set of old, solved challenges, I mean it’s an NP-complete problem that grows in difficulty relative to the number of beams of light in the scan-pad.”

Derek stared blankly back at Ed. He vaguely remembered the term “NP-complete” from a course he’d taken back in college but didn’t remember what it meant. It wasn’t something he needed to design furniture.

Clearly sensing his confusion, Ed elaborated. “It’s mathematically provable that you can’t solve it without the key, which in this case is your thumb. At the same time, it is easy to verify that a solution is correct. There is no known quantum algorithm to solve it either. You can’t solve that problem. The reason I say it’s not quite impossible is that if you have the resources, and I mean serious resources, you might be able to copy the key itself.”