MADRIGAL

PART 3 - MEMORIAL DAY

Jane looked to Sheshai. "What happened?"

Sheshai checked the temperatures on the refrigerators, lost to her work and the music in her earbuds while Graham scanned the Deepnet message boards. Ernest emerged from the back, waiting for his presence to earn their attention before speaking.

"I think it's time to go for the Monument."

"Really?" Graham lit up. "You serious?"

"Yeah. It's a month away, but I want to make sure that we have plenty of time." To Sheshai, "I slept over eight hours, and I feel good. This is what we're here for."

A silent sigh as she nodded, turning off the music, silencing Grace and Linda. "Fine, sit. We do this, we follow my rules."

Ernest knew the routine. He sat on the couch and extended his arm. To Graham, "While I am gone, we need details for tomorrow and the day after. Put everything else aside." Sheshai applied a blood pressure cuff. "I'm not going to be able to find this information myself."

Graham rubbed his hands together. "Does this mean I get to do some actual work?"

"You do actual work."

"Not my work. Not what I do. And the problem is, I won't even remember." The cuff was removed and Ernest stood. Sheshai opened the sofa bed and pulled new sheets out. "What is it you want me to do?"

"Get whatever information you can from either the FBI or the DHS."

"Yes. Hot damn, yes. Okay, give me a moment. The date?"

"May 26th," Sheshai said as she finished with the bed and went to the medical bay.

"All right, now. I'm making a note for myself to run my layered rainbow tables."

"Okay." Ernest nodded as if he knew Graham meant. "How long before you break in?"

"It depends; time is fluid," Graham said. "Don't give me that look. This is a brute force attack. You don't brute force the government and expect to get away with it. We're getting caught. Thing is, it don't matter if we're caught in the future, so as long as we ain't caught now. This is essentially cracking combined with time travel."

"It's not time travel."

"For you, it is." Graham directed his attention to Sheshai. "How long do we have?"

Sheshai moved medical monitors close to the bed. "Five minutes or so."

"Okay. This is kind of genius, so I want to explain it to you."

"Want to show off, you mean," she said.

"Okay, yeah. Show off my genius. The point is, there isn't enough time to run through every hash possible. Hashes are like passwords. I'm simplifying here."

"Please," Sheshai said, "Dumb it down as much as possible."

"Oh, I'll try, but I still don't know if you all will get it." He pointed to Sheshai. "I saw that. That was almost a smile."

Ernest lowered his head. "Graham..."

"Okay. Imagine there's only one hundred thousand passwords in the world. There's more than that; this is just an example. A collection of passwords is called a rainbow table. Now, imagine I've divided my rainbow table into one hundred layers, each layer having a thousand passwords, and it takes an hour to run each thousand. Good so far?"

"So far," Sheshai said.

"Okay, so to run the entire list would take one hundred hours, which we're not getting. This is brute force. We're not sneaking through an open window; we're using a battering ram on the front door. We'll probably set off alarms the first minute. From that point, it's about how long it takes them to find us and kick down our door. Let's say five and a half hours.