On the way into the café, I spot a couple of agents dragging another guy out of the building. I wonder to myself if it was related to the Wi-Fi problem. Maybe people are so upset and distracted by all the glitches that tensions are on the rise. Or maybe they all have a psycho ex-boyfriend to deal with.
That might be a metaphor. Everyone has a looming problem in their life, and a boneheaded heap of muscle makes a good archetype.
Amanda rushes back and forth behind the counter. She doesn’t even notice me walk in. I approach, and stare into the display cases for a moment, until I hear her say, “Same thing as the other day?”
“Sure. You were right about that bread. It’s the same price?”
“Promotion to get people hooked on it, I’m sure.”
“It’s working.”
She preps the sandwich at high speed. For a moment I consider that it’s cheaper to simply print food in my apartment. I know why I’m here, but I can’t figure out the rest of the customers. Maybe they don’t want to ride the lift.
She turns back to the machines, and I find a quiet corner to sit and fiddle with Tom’s device. The wall flickers by my table as I’m staring at the charts. The bar graph dances wildly, and then then settles into its normal shape.
I press random buttons to see what kind of effect they have on the displays, and through some miracle, find a help menu. It includes an introduction to the device and a walk-thru, which starts with a bunch of technical specs about the components. I don’t understand half of it, but push through to the next chapter, titled Basic Operation.
The tutorial is surprisingly helpful. I’m familiar with most of the concepts from classes at school, but seeing them in action on a live display is something totally different. There’s quite a bit to wrap my head around.
The sandwich disappears, and I realize that I’ve been in the restaurant for far too long. The robots I cleaned should be ready for reassembly. I take the tablet, and find my way back through the main floor without hardly looking up.
I walk straight into a soft wall that shouldn’t be in the way. It’s softer than steel or aluminum, but hard enough that I bounce off, and crash to the ground. The tablet hops across the hard tiles. When I look up, Mike is hovering over me.
“I told you to stay away from her. That includes when she’s at work.”
“I was just getting a sandwich.”
“Find another restaurant.”
“It’s not your business where I eat.”
His face flashes red, like some kind of color changing lizard. My arms brace for the worst as he rears back with a closed fist, and my eyes squeeze shut.
Tom’s voice interrupts. “We have a problem here?”
One eye opens, and I lower my arm. Tom has Mike by the scruff. Suddenly, he doesn’t look so tough.
“This is none of your business, mister.”
“That tablet on the ground?” Tom points with his free hand. “That belongs to me, and that makes it my business. I suggest you pick it up.”
Mike steps back, freeing himself from Tom’s iron grip. He kneels and lifts the tablet, never taking his eyes off of my new best friend. Tom snatches the device, and looks it over.
“You’re lucky this isn’t broken. You know how much these things cost? Get out of here before I report this incident.”
Mike nods, and leaves the scene in a hurry. Tom extends his hand to help me up, nearly crushing my wrist in the process. “What was that all about?”
“He doesn’t want me around his ex-girlfriend.”
“You’re messing with that guy’s ex?” He smiles sideways, and raises an eyebrow, even though his eyes are again fixed on the tablet. “You’re braver than I thought.”
“I don’t know about brave. Stupid maybe.”
“I was on my way to get food. Want to join?”
“I just finished eating. I need to get those bots back together.”
“Okay then, I’ll see you back in the maintenance room.”
“Okay.”
“Take this with you.”
He hands me the tablet, and I walk back to my desk, convinced that I need to put my assignments behind me as fast as possible, so I can work with the gadget. If none of them noticed the Wi-Fi problem until I pointed it out, then maybe there’s a chance that I can make a contribution after all. Once my school is done, I’ll be set for a high paying job at one of the biggest robotics companies in the world.
Not the most lucrative industry, it isn’t mining asteroids or bio-tech, but it’ll do.
I go to work, my torque driver buzzing as I slap each turtle back in its shell and turn it loose in the building. I fall into the zone, totally focused until the double doors swing open.
Tom walks straight past me into Paul’s office while I drop another stocker on the ground. It scurries away, ducking through the little opening in the wall for robot traffic. When I get the last shell back on, I send the bot into the market and pick up where I left off with the tablet.
The next section of the manual is titled Isolating Noise and Interference. I read through it carefully, digesting the information while thinking about the real problem at hand. I’m interrupted frequently by burps and buzzing noises from the desk at random intervals. Whatever is happening, it’s getting worse, and it’s invading the buildings sound components more frequently. This can’t be some hacker doing everything alone, it has to be a group of them, or some automated programming. The outdated concept of a computer virus comes to mind. But who the hell writes those anymore?
I play some Vivaldi to settle my mood. I download the entire track to the desk’s temporary memory, and switch off the Wi-Fi protocol, listening in peace without the network affecting my sound waves, but I swear certain tones don’t sound quite right.
The device is capable of analyzing audio as well as electrical signals, and I flick through the options to display a regular sound equalizer. It’s just like musical equalizers I’ve seen pictures of on the Global Network. As the wind instruments play from my desk, I watch the meters dance up and down in response.
I expand the view, showing every frequency, not just the audible spectrum, and the bar reads from zero to 100,000 hertz. Then something odd appears. A peak where there shouldn’t be one. It dances up and down slightly, but stays consistently strong. There is some kind of high pitched whine floating through the air, far outside of what the human ear can detect.
Another blast erupts from the walls, louder and more annoying than the last, and while much of the spectrum grows and fades across several frequencies, the high pitched tone only flutters. When the noise stops, the other frequencies carry on, dancing to the music.
I hear Tom’s voice. “Yeah. I’ll have to check in with the office. Wherever this thing is coming from isn’t local, which I didn’t expect, since it’s affecting several buildings.”
When my eyes lock on to him, his shoulders shrug, and he turns from the office toward me.
“Tom,” I say. “Got a minute?”
He approaches casually. “What do you got? Did you solve our big mystery?”
“Why would there be an audible tone in the building at sixty thousand hertz? Is that some kind of machinery, or computers, or maybe something inside my desk?”
“There shouldn’t be anything that high. Why are you looking at audio channels?”
“Just learning the device.”
“What’s that music?”
“Vivaldi.”
“Hmm.”
His eyes fall on the tablet, then twitch back and forth slightly. “That’s odd. Has it been staying there?”
“Yeah. It’s been pretty consistent. It even stayed during the last burp from the walls.”
He snags the tablet off the bench. There’s something off about his movements, but I can’t pinpoint what it is. The way he reaches for stuff doesn’t seem right. And when he walks, it appears that his arms are slightly out of tempo with the rest of his body. “Follow me.”
I jump off the stool
, and jog to catch up as he pushes through the double doors. A noise from the tablet stops him, and he stares at it as I skid to a stop.
“That’s different,” he says. “Did the building just sound off again, or was that from the analyzer?”
“I only heard the tablet.”
“Your spike is still there, just as loud as it was. It isn’t your desk. Let’s walk around and get some sample data.”
I follow him clockwise around the building. He walks to the corner of the market, then past the daycare, the lift, and finally the café at the forward wall, making stops along the way to show me the device, so that I can confirm the spike hasn’t shifted or changed in amplitude.
He continues along the forward wall, past the main entrance and the antique shop, to the far wall of the building where the shopping plaza is located.
“You have a nice gym here.”
“Thanks,” I squint. I check the device as he holds it out, and we continue past the long row of shops. There are two levels, and each store is like a tiny cubicle in the larger office of the main level. I look up at people leaning over the handrail of the promenade. The security station makes me nervous, and I glance away for a moment.
The building buzzes again, and I’m shaken, like I’ve set off some kind of alarm. Tom spins on his heel to face me.
“It’s a constant noise everywhere. That doesn’t make any sense. I keep expecting it to drop off, but it won’t, and the volume is consistent. It’s like. It’s as if there are microphone pickups all over the building, and the source of the noise is attenuating it to a steady volume everywhere. We need to call this in.”
“Can I see the tablet again?”
“Here.”
As we return to the maintenance area, I shuffle through more controls on the gadget, watching for changes in sound and electric signals. My desk has continued playing out the Four Seasons symphony, and I recognize the quick pacing of Winter. The completion of it will reset with Spring at any moment.
Tom projects an outgoing call on my desk, and a server error pops up. “What the crap?”
“I turned off the Wi-Fi.” I reset the desk, and reclaim my stool, tweaking little digital dials on the device while he tries the call again.
I tune the settings on the device to isolate some spikes that have appeared on the radio band, and compare them directly with the high frequency noise, looking for any kind of correlation.
“Sir,” says Tom. “I need you to check something at our building. Turn on your analyzers and look at the sound spectrum. There’s a noise over here at sixty kilohertz, and we can’t identify where it’s coming from, or what it’s doing there. I don’t think it’s coming from the device itself, but I want to check.”
“Okay, one minute,” says the voice on the other end.
Then I spot what I’m looking for. “Here you go,” I say, grabbing his attention. “This part of the signal, around 4.8 megahertz on the radio frequencies. I put it in this scope view thing. It’s scratchy compared to the audio, but look. They overlay exactly.”
“What the hell? That’s at 4.8 gig?”
“A touch below. Like four point seven something.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Tom,” barks the computer.
“I’m here Scott, chill your temper.”
“Okay, we’re seeing the same thing over here. I’ll send this data to the head office. This thing is spreading fast. It looks like it originated somewhere in the city, but now it’s going to neighboring towns. It’s gotta be a virus. Boss said things are failing everywhere. He’s talking about a joint collaboration with other corporations.”
“Oh, fun. That mess again.”
“Yeah. Anyway. I’m busy. I have to go.”
“Okay, bye.”
The display disappears, and Tom’s attention is squarely on me. “Okay Mr. Wizard. I want to hear what you think is happening.”
“How the crap would I know?”
“I’m not sure, but you are seeing every other thing happening around here. What’s your opinion? Maybe you can feed me another clue. Don’t quit on me now. You’re on a roll.”
“Like a bread roll?”
He shakes his head as his eyes float. “Just tell me what you think.”
The tablet rumbles on the desk, then lets out a slightly higher bass tone, then another. Each sound is a progressively higher pitched. I watch as the equalizer shifts from one sound to the next, causing a sudden burst at each frequency range. My music turns garbled.
“I think your tablet is infected.”
“If this takes too much longer, that virus could reach every device connected to the network.”
As the device moves through the mid-tones, part of my brain suggests that the tablet is alive, and further that it’s trying to communicate.
I can’t wrap my mind around the problem, and by the look on Tom’s face, he can’t either. After ascending the scale, the noise cuts out, and for the moment, things return to normal.
“That was weird,” says Tom. Immediately after, the tablet begins chirping.
I reach out and close the audio display on the device, and after two more chirps, the noises stop, and the building sounds off in another horrible blaring explosion of low frequencies.
“What the hell?”
I scan the tablet for a way to replay stored data. The signal is confusing. It’s a bunch of wavy lines, and difficult to draw any conclusions from. I compare it to the same time against the background noise I found earlier.
I swap the tablet to the previous display, with both sound and digital equalizers open, and place it on the bench. “Is there a way to scan the device for traces of the virus code?”
Tom slides it toward himself, and taps around on the display. “Everything looks fine. There really isn’t anywhere on here for a virus to plant itself, but I suppose the same could be said for Wi-Fi routers.”
The chirps come again. I shake my head and reach for the audio controls on the desk, turning the music down to a whisper. The moment my finger lifts from the screen, the volume turns itself back up. I try again, with the same results.
Then the tablet beings humming along.
My face chills, my chest turns numb, and I look up to see the color drain from Tom’s face.
“My analyzer sings.”
I close the music program on the desk, and the building erupts in the sound of grinding gears and boiling water, loud enough to trigger a defensive clasping of my hands over my ears.
The noise stops, the tablet goes quiet, and after a series of flickers, my desktop returns to normal.
“The virus likes your music,” says Tom.
“Seems like.”
“What did you say it was called? Viv––something?”
“Vivaldi, well, that’s the composer.”
TEN
A quick check of the time launches me to my feet.
“I have to go. I have one class left. I need to finish it before the virus crashes the school server.”
Tom chuckles. “Okay. Take the analyzer with you. See if you can get it to do any other tricks. I’ll get back with you tomorrow.”
I snatch the tablet, and rush toward the lift. It fits neatly into my smock pocket. I burst into the apartment and drop my smock on the kitchen island, forgetting momentarily that there’s an expensive device inside, which again starts to chirp.
Don’s smart about this stuff. Maybe I’ll ask him about it. After class.
As I’m leaving, I think about Amanda, and place a call on the wall near the exit.
“Amanda. Are we––why are you crying? What did he do?”
“Nothing. I––I just, um.”
“Nothing doesn’t make people cry. What’s going on?”
“I can’t really talk right now. I answered your call by accident. I have to go.”
Another voice thunders in from the background. “Who are you talking to?” The message ends.
I’m stunned. I stand staring at the
bare green wall. I consider calling the police, but wonder what will happen if I’m wrong. Meddling in the affairs of others isn’t polite, or legal. I hope that she has the sense to call them. Attacking Mike is an equally shortsighted thought. Nobody likes agents showing up and asking questions, and if I get caught fighting, they aren’t going to care why. Non-conformance is non-conformance, and I’ll spend some time in a cell. My blood runs hot, and it takes another loud chirp from the device to snap me out of the daze.
The negative mood follows me to school. I can’t escape from the image of him slapping her around. My gears toil away, searching for something I can do about him without getting myself into trouble. He’s always been a meat head, but his actions in the last couple of days are inexcusable. I sit at a random table, and try to push my mental anguish to the side. The fantasies of taking down the giant or watching him get zapped by agents refuse to die.
The final class is easy. I’ve designed my curriculum that way. My treat for getting this far. I pass with a ninety nine percent, learning nothing new in the process. I scan the study area, making sure that it’s clear of angry ex-boyfriends who might be out for blood, and shuffle quickly toward the lift. This was my moment of triumph, and I can’t even enjoy it amid the tempest of emotion.
The roof is always a good place to calm down and clear my head when things aren’t going right.
Up the lift, I emerge the garden of wonder, the perfect place for inward reflection and deep thought. The sun is low on the horizon, but light reflects off the shiny neighboring buildings, casting unnatural shades of green, white, and orange. As day turns to night, the world outside shifts hue, fading from the vibrant colors of daytime to grays and blacks of night. I follow my usual path, but with less time to enjoy the smells or examine the cattle, until I arrive at the service station and bee boxes. Don is inspecting one of the honeycombs.
“What’s up, Don?”
“Just checking on the health of these little guys. The brood looks happy. Have I showed you this yet?”
“I’ve seen you draining the honey out of them before.”
“No, not those. These ones.” He presents the comb, which looks not golden and yellow, but black and brown. The various shades form concentric rings around the center, and the slab is covered in busy honeybees, doing their thing.
Viral Spark Page 7