by Maia Ross
I pressed on the middle of the panel, just like I did with Irma’s coffee machine every morning. Nothing. I pressed the edges. Then the middle again. I almost gave up. Maybe the seam was just a manufacturing detail. Maybe I was being ridiculous. But machines talked to me, and I was sure this one was trying to tell me something.
I Goldilocksed the pressure; hard, medium, soft. And then I stopped and took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I tried to visualize the inner workings of the machine; if the panel was like the coffee maker, there would be a spring inside it that would release the latch. I thought about the massage Irma had taken me to last week. I’d thought it was going to be a nice, relaxing event. Instead, a portly Swedish lady had tortured me senseless. And I couldn’t even complain about it to Irma because I’d felt so much better afterwards. The masseuse’s technique had been barbaric but effective: she’d pressed on one of my knots with a grip of steel until it unfurled itself. Probably because it was too scared to maintain its structural integrity.
I opened my eyes and pressed on the panel on the bottom of the machine, right where the spring would be if there was one.
Nothing.
I sighed. Not only did I still not have coffee, I was still nowhere closer to figuring this puzzle out. It was possible the two problems were related.
I’d put the machine back together earlier, but got out my trusty screwdriver set and took it apart again. I turned on the flashlight app on my phone and examined the insides of the IV machine, slowly. Twice. It was neatly designed to snap together with a futuristic flair, but it was still the same old computer guts.
I found it beside the hard drive housing, a tiny opening in the motherboard. I’d been looking for a standard, half-inch wide USB port. But this port was USB-C, a smaller, ultra-compact interface. And I’d missed it because I’d been thinking old school, looking for something familiar.
But that disappointment gave way to a deep sense of satisfaction. Someone had uploaded the malicious code via a USB stick. Someone had come into the clinic, popped open that panel and uploaded their evil code.
I got myself a cup of coffee—using my newly-honed open sesame technique to liberate the coffee machine’s pod compartment—while glee swirled inside me. It was the heroin of the tech sector; solving a problem you’d been working on for a long time always brought a surge of endorphins. Fixing problems and making things work had always delivered a better high than any exercise I’d ever done.
I went and sat on the floor with my mug, surrounded by bits and pieces of the stand. Now I knew how the hack had been uploaded; I even knew how the hack worked. It was simple, elegant, and smart. I hated whoever did this.
“Hellloooo!”
“Hey, Irma.”
“Hey, yourself,” Irma said as she bounded up the stairs and into the apartment. She was wearing her usual: a crisp white shirt and pedal pushers. Mint green, today.
“You look pretty chipper this morning.”
“Why, thank you, dear. I slept excellently, and what on earth you are doing?”
“What?”
“You’re staring at that machine like you want to kill it.”
“I’m seriously considering it.”
“Make sure you have an alibi and don’t leave any DNA. Do you want to come and visit Charlotte with me? I wasn’t able to yesterday.”
“In a minute. I have news. And I texted you like eight times last night. Did you get any of my messages?”
“Er. No. My cellular is dead.”
I gave her a look. “Okay, well, get comfortable. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of the configuration of IV03—the unit at Stu’s—as well as all the other units at the clinic, and compared them. And you know what?”
Irma’s face brightened. “They’re different?”
“Bingo! Two of them were upgraded on May twenty-fourth.”
“That’s lovely, dear.”
“Then I configured a virtual machine in Medicil’s test environment with the same OS as the updated ones at the clinic. And they should be exactly the same. Exactly. But there’s an extra file on the updated units at the clinic in the run directory—that’s where most programs are installed—called maintenance.sh. Two out of the four machines there have it. And guess what it does?”
“I can’t even imagine.”
“It runs an if then statement when certain conditions are met. Remember how Scooter’s name was inputted to the IV machine?”
Irma nodded vaguely. “Did you just take this apart?” she asked, motioning at the parts scattered on the floor around me.
“Yeah, I took it apart once to verify how it worked. Then I put it back together.”
“Why is it apart again?”
“Oh, the second time was just for fun.”
Irma laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing. Please tell me more about this if then statement.” She cleared a spot and sat down beside me.
“It’s actually simple. If the patient name matches one from the list supplied by the script, and the drug matches one from a different list in the script, the program directs the machine to empty the entire IV bag into the patient an hour after the patient is hooked up. There a few medications listed specifically that were included in the script, and a few excluded. Any medication that isn’t in either list gets included.”
“What about Remicade?”
“Yeah, that was included. Why?”
I exhaled sharply. “Remicade is what Charlotte gets infused with every month.”
“What for?”
“Ankylosing spondylitis. It’s arthritis in your spine. It’s pretty rare.”
“So she was targeted in particular.”
Irma nodded, her lips pressed together.
“Does the rest of the family go to the clinic for medical care?”
“Pretty much everyone except Richard. He has a doctor on the mainland. He had some sort of falling out with the old clinic director and has refused to set foot inside there ever since.”
“I wonder if whoever wrote the hack knew that.”
“Indeed.”
“Anyway, after the overdose is executed, the script blocks the communication to the patient’s medical records so that the overdose is hidden. Then it overwrites the events that would be generated in the system logs on the IV stands as a result of the intentional overdose. They have a series of events that get appended to the log instead, with the current date. Any medical professional looking at their patient’s chart would see that they had been administered the medication and dosage that had been prescribed, even though they had been infused with an entire IV bag. Theoretically, the script should log into the patient records and sync up the fake data there as well. But Julian told me that Scooter’s medical records from the day he was shot had no information in them at all about his meds. And I know why now; the script has a minor syntax error that made that portion of the hack fail.”
“I’m not quite sure what all that means, but it sounds bad.”
“It sounds bad because it is. The hacker executes the hack in a way that’s less likely to be observed—”
“Because of the one-hour delay.”
“It’s actually one hour and thirteen minutes, which is oddly specific. But maybe staff normally look in on patients after an hour and the hacker wanted to make sure to miss that check? I dunno. The point, I think, is not to overdose the patient right when they’re hooked up initially, because that would be obvious to staff.”
“Didn’t Julian say Scooter had been there for about an hour?”
“Yeah.”
“So the patient is hooked up. How does the script know how to start?”
“Because of the patient’s name. That triggers the rest of the actions. I even simulated a few overdoses yesterday, using the contents of maintenance.sh,” I said, feeling excitement swirling inside me. “And do you know how the patient-name step works?”
Irma shook herself. “How?”
“Anyone with a Van Oot surname
is affected.”
“Anybody?”
“There’s a wildcard for the first name. Any Van Oot would be affected.”
“Good heavens.”
“Yup.”
“Well.” Irma looked impressed. “Thank you very much for your efforts, Violet. That’s excellent work. Julian is in the clear then, yes? Have you told him?”
“Yup. I sent him an email a while ago.”
“This is all rather exciting!”
I nodded modestly.
“Now we just need to know who did it.”
“Amen to that.”
“In the meantime, we need to go to town.”
“Sure. For cupcakes? Celebration cupcakes?”
“I am not going to lecture you about refined carbohydrates.”
“Thank you.”
“But I have to ask—what’s this obsession with cupcakes?”
I sat back on my heels. “Well, I don’t normally eat sweets. I mostly drink meal replacement shakes when I’m working.”
“Oh, dear. And you’re normally working.”
I nodded. I didn’t add that the cupcakes reminded me of the bakery that was near my nan’s when I was a kid. She’d always let me get three. I’d cut them into quarters and make them last for days.
“Well, after this is all over, I’d like to have a talk with you about your workaholicness.”
“Pretty sure that’s not a real word.”
“Well, it should be, young lady. In any case, right now I’d like to check in on Charlotte and give her an update. And you need some fresh air and sun. If you go home with rickets, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“What exactly are rickets?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“Okey dokey. How’s Scooter doing?”
“The same.” Irma grimaced. “Still in a coma, and he’s developed acute respiratory syndrome, unfortunately. I think Charlotte will probably need a pick-me-up. And your nerdy news is just the ticket.”
“She didn’t look so hot when I went to see her yesterday, eh?”
Concern flitted across Irma’s face. “What was going on?”
“She seemed a little…confused. I was worried about her.”
Irma squared her shoulders. “I see. Well, hopefully she’s doing better today. She’s a tough old bird.”
“Uh…yes.”
“I just need to run a quick errand before we pop in on Charlotte.”
Warning bells went off in my head. Irma’s errands were always…eventful. “Uh-huh. What kind of stop?”
“A fun one! I’m just doing a favour for a friend.” Irma practically skipped down the stairs, picking up an enormous bouquet in the vestibule that was almost as large as she was. She let me drive her car into town while she held them. As I drove—coming to a complete stop at all stop signs—I updated her about the false fire alarm at the clinic the day before. Irma was not impressed.
After being directed to park in front of Barre Buddies, I beelined across the street and picked up a coffee for myself, a tea for Irma and two cupcakes. I secreted one cupcake in my knapsack and ate the other while sitting on the patio at Luna’s Café, trying to ignore the fact that I’d somehow seated myself on the empty patio in the exact same chair Irma always used: back to the wall, everything in my eye line.
After savouring the cupcake—red velvet with a light but impactful cream cheese icing—and swilling my coffee, I headed over to the barre studio. I wasn’t exactly sure what favour Irma was granting, but if she wanted me to exercise, I was having none of it.
Reception was deserted. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Irma clear a room, so I didn’t let it bother me while I wandered further into the studio. My phone started beeping, and I pulled it out, paging through some personal emails before finding the source of the alert, which was going off like gangbusters.
It was Irma.
I frowned. Her wearable was lit up like a Christmas tree. Not because her heart rate had elevated, which was the main metric I’d been trying to track with her marathon training. No, it was 75, higher than her normal range of 52-58, but not excessively so. It was her body temperature, which had spiked by a full degree in the last three minutes. Was that even possible?
I stifled a groan. I’d finally convinced Irma to wear the thing, and now it seemed to be malfunctioning. According to the Brain’s app, Irma was practically on top of me.
I reached the back studio, which was full of women in designer leggings and colour-coordinated crop tops. They were all standing in a loose semi-circle, clustered near the front of the room.
Then I saw one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life: a tiny figure in a child-sized collared shirt and mint green pedal pushers fighting an enormous young man with shoulders the size of my car!
Irma whacked him on the side of his head with her purse, the clunk of it ringing out across the room. But she didn’t quite hit her mark, because he shrugged her off. Then he punched at her—right, left, then right again. His last jab connected to her shoulder—barely—and knocked her back into a corner full of bolsters. The pillowy yoga props rained down on her. But she recovered and charged him. Then she scrambled up his side, climbing him like he was a mountain. She settled herself on his neck, one mint green leg down his front, the other down his back, like a howler-monkey-chimpanzee-ninja.
I wasn’t quite sure what Irma did then, her hands were moving so fast—did she just stab him with her thumb?—but the man dropped like a stone. Irma landed on the floor before he did, which I was pretty sure violated the laws of physics.
I couldn’t breathe. A few more beeps escaped from my phone before it stopped. I walked as fast as I could toward her, pushing through the crowd. “Are you—” I wheezed “—okay?”
“Nice to see you, dear. And thank you for the tea.” Irma brushed a few wrinkles out of her white shirt. Her hair was elegantly windswept, but that was about it. She reached out and took the cup of tea I’d bought for her with a smile.
On the floor, the man groaned. Horizontally, he looked even more menacing. He had to be 250 pounds and well over six feet.
“Jacob, this is Violet. She’s staying with me for a while. Jacob, how are you doing down there? You okay, hon?”
He had his hand on his head and had curled into an almost fetal position. Good. “I hope you hurt,” I snarled at him. “What do you think you’re doing, hitting a little old lady! What is wrong with you?”
The man groaned again.
“Violet, I understand you’re upset, but everything is fine. This is Jacob Simpson. He works here.”
“What’s his job, punching old people?”
“It’s nice of you to worry about me, but seventy-one is not old. Honestly. Jacob is a friend of mine.”
Jacob raised a hand and waved it limply.
“Perhaps you want to save your strength, dear,” Irma said. Jacob made a tortured sound in response. “So, anyway, Jacob has a new girlfriend—and we’re so happy for him—but she’s quite petite, and he was worried about her being able to defend herself if she met a hooligan who was his size.”
“You have just got to be kidding me right now,” I said.
Irma looked perplexed. “No, not at all. I was just showing him a few moves he could teach her. And some of the ladies wanted a self-defence class, so I thought we could combine the two.” She turned to the crowd. “All right, ladies. I’d like you to please pick a partner and we’re going to go over the punch I taught you last week.”
The women started to pair off.
“How are you, Violet?” April said from behind me. “This is Geraldine.”
I turned to face her. A kindly older lady was standing beside April and nodded a greeting at me, smiling.
“I’m so sorry Charlotte couldn’t make it,” Irma said to Geraldine. “The two of you are such good sparring partners.”
“She tripped me last time.”
“Yes…” Irma said, like she was revisiting a fond memory.
“I’m not sure,” Irma said. “We’re going to visit her at the clinic after I’m done here. Violet, do you want to join the class?”
“Oh, I’d love to, but I can’t. I have a cupcake I need to eat immediately. And no desire to get punched in the head at exactly this minute. I’m just going to sit on Luna’s patio until I’m sure I’m not going to die of a heart attack.”
“Have you ever considered decaf, dear? Just a thought. In any case, I won’t be long.” She patted me on the back and turned to the class. “All right, everybody, while we’re punching, let’s practice our screaming. Some well-timed hollering and sensible shoes are all you need to get your attacker off his game and get away.”
I made my getaway when the shouting started, passing Emily on the way out of the studio. She didn’t see me; her head was down and she was puffing away on her vape pen. I decided I wasn’t in the mood to make polite conversation with her or anyone else and headed back to the patio at Luna’s. I ate the other cupcake—death by chocolate, which felt ominous—and went inside to get another coffee. I was just finishing up when Irma sprinted over the road to me, the enormous hydrangeas held in front of her. She poked her head around the side of it. “How are you doing, dear?”
I gave her a sour look.
“What?” She put the flowers on the chair beside me and sat.
“You know, next time you can just tell me what you’re doing. So I’m less likely to have a panic attack.”
Irma looked taken aback. “Oh…I’m sorry, Violet. I didn’t even think about it.”
“I can see that.”
“Huh. Well, I do see your point. I am sorry.” She smiled charmingly. And was she deepening her accent again?
I exhaled a huge breath. “So this is a self-defence class you teach?”
She eased the top off her tea and took a few swigs, nodding. “Mother always said that families with…military training should share their knowledge with others.”
“And you teach Charlotte how to—”
“To be honest—” Irma looked around, “—I had to sort of give up on Charlotte. She’s a bit too frail to run away from danger right now.”