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He tipped his head toward Letty.
“Hope it was worth it,” Able said, giving Letty a long look.
“It sorta was,” Baxter said.
“Sorta my ass,” Letty said.
“Your ass was my original thought,” Baxter said.
Able laughed, which might have been predatory if it hadn’t been obviously good-humored. “That’s quite the nice tat you’ve got on your back,” he said to Letty. “Bald eagle or...”
“Raven,” Letty said.
“Pretty obvious, from the right perspective,” Baxter said, with a mock leer.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” Letty said. “You make me tired.”
“Easy... Okay. Can’t help you with the Bitcoin,” Able said. “I’m not Ordinary People. Assuming you check out, though, I know somebody who could have a reasonably lucrative job for you... and could help with OP.”
“I’ve got my CV out in the truck. Charlie doesn’t have a CV, so you’d have to do your own research,” Baxter said. “Give me a hint of what you want to know about. Don’t have to give away anything specific. Just so I can go back to the motel and start digging into background information?”
“We need the money quick,” Letty said. “We’re down to seven hundred bucks.”
Able thought about that for a moment, then asked, “What do you know about natural gas distribution systems?”
Baxter shrugged. “Nothing. But they gotta have machine controls, and I know everything about those.”
“Why would you want to know about natural gas?” Letty asked.
Able held up a finger. “What do you think about SlapBack?”
“SlapBack? Another super-greedy, conscienceless, unethical social media platform that makes big bucks stirring up hate,” Baxter said. “Just like the rest of them.”
“Took the words right outa my mouth,” Letty said.
“Notlike the rest of them. Facebook and Twitter stir up hate as an unintended by-product of what they do. Or so they say. With SlapBack, hate is the main product,” Able said. “That’s why they were created: to warehouse and distribute hate. They’re not that big, yet. After Microsoft and Amazon kicked them out of their clouds, they hooked into an old server farm right here in the Valley. We keep wondering what would happen if somebody killed the natural gas to the electric utilities that power the server farm.”
Letty and Baxter looked at each other, and simultaneously shrugged.
Able: “What? You don’t like the idea?”
“I like the idea—taking out SlapBack—but that’d be a backassward way to do it,” Baxter said. “You’d do a lot of collateraldamage—all the other places that use the gas-powered electric. And the electric companies could probably switch in power from other sources if they had to. Why not go after the electric substations? I’ve been to server clusters, server farms. They’ve all got substations, because they use so much power.”
“And they all have backup power packs under every rack, and diesel generators that will come on instantly,” Able said. “They’ll only run for a limited time, but if you take out gas, it’ll be out for longer than the backups will run.”
“Not if they can get diesel to the backup generators, and that just takes a truck,” Baxter said.
“So what would you do?”
“I’d be surprised if a good operator couldn’t get inside of the power companies, and from there, take out the substations. A day’s work, we could throw a switch and overload the substations, and there you are. No collateral damage. If you take out the gas, you not only get SlapBack, you get hospitals, schools, airports, and the FBI on your asses like flies on shit.”
“Like white on rice,” Letty added. “Like holy on the pope.”
“Good points,” Able said. “We were thinking...”
“Could we get some cash up front?” Letty asked.
They talked fortwo hours—some of it computer tech that Letty didn’t understand, some of it about their screwup with Bitcoin. “I did, like, five minutes of research and I thought,There it is, I got it,” Baxter confessed. “After the Bitcoin came in, we turned the hospital back on, and I saw somebody really good attacking the ISP we were using, and I thought,Get out of here. So I got out...”
